Fuddland

Ask them seemingly random personal questions when they least expect it.

“Are you on holiday?” the woman asked me as I crossed the road from the University, on my way home for a spot of lunch.

It’s perhaps a telling sign of my own sense of guilt that my first thought was that this woman was a spy for my supervisors, and had caught me red-handed, slacking off instead of working day and night towards my PhD. “Excuse me?”
“Are you on holiday right now?” she repeated.
Umm, no, I’m not on holiday, I thought, I live here.

What transpired is a lovely example of how something that’s perfectly clear to one person can completely mystify another until they explain their logic.

She wanted to know if I was on holiday — that is, if the semester was over — because she was waiting for a bus; apparently the timetables vary according to whether it’s term time or vacation, and she had assumed I was an undergraduate student. Hence her question was really, “Has term ended?”, but the way she has posed it, I was baffled. It wasn’t until she eventually explained about the bus timetables that I understood; up to that moment, our wires were well and truly crossed.

I think I need a holiday.