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Dreadful Nonsense

"I've read your blog. it's really funny. you should write a column." - Jon Ronson

We were walking home from the cinema, having had an adventure that involved two buses and the spurious use of travel cards – I did the same thing at the weekend, needlessly getting three different tubes when one would have sufficed just because I could.

We were cruising along and discussing the Jewish use of mobile phones, and other mod cons, and opining to each other that smoking looks just wrong somehow, when accompanied by a top hat, long black jacket and ringlets. We hushed our tones as we walked past the larger gatherings of Hasidic Jewish gentlemen leaving whatever it is they leave late at night to walk up and down the streets surrounding my house. As we passed him, one gentleman seemed to be having a particularly animated conversation with someone on his phone, waving his arms about like a Woody Allen parody. We stepped around him to continue on our way and as we did so, out of the (to my ears at least) impenetrable Yiddish he was speaking came the following phrase in English “…but if someone finds all the boxes…”

The mind boggles as to what he may have been discussing, and why that sentence of all sentences in the world had to be translated for the person on the other side of the conversation.

It occurred to me when I’d stopped giggling and started to try to find my keys to open the front door that he may have been going over the finer plot points of the new Harry Potter book.

This entry was posted on 10 August 2005 at 5:19 pm. 0 comments

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