When two worlds collide

Sometimes my brain doesn’t join the dots. Context in particular can throw me.

I’ve had numerous emails over the years contributing to my Weird News page, most of them from a fairly small number of dedicated contributors.

A few weeks ago at the Walk Against Warming, one of those contributors came up and said hello, and explained who she was (“I send you lots of those News emails”).

But her appearance was totally out of context. My brain had been concentrating for several hours on carbon emissions, holding a large heavy banner (navigating it through a crowd with a colleague, and making sure some of the makeshift letters on the back didn’t fall off), green issues, marching, and public transport — I had been talking with a few people in the crowd about it all.

So we chatted briefly about the march. But the cogs in my head took so long to process what she’d said about News emails that I didn’t fully comprehend until about two minutes later who she was — long after the conversation had stalled and finished.

I probably came across as rather standoffish actually, not very talkative at all. Which is what I can be like when I’m not really sure who someone is. Whoops.

Sorry Amanda. (It was Amanda, wasn’t it? Not Michelle? Oh bugger.)