Odd characters

Yup it is indeed another Friday.

This morning I was sitting in my usual Starbucks café tap tapping away on my computer, as I am want to do, before heading to work.

Nothing unusual in that I hear you say... or I would if I could actually hear you. Never mind I’m rambling

So sitting next to me is a young Asian woman also engaged in tap tapping away on her computer. Nothing unusual in that either.

Wait for it…

All of a sudden she ups and walks out of the store and across the mall and out of sight. Leaving behind her laptop, still open and working and her pretty red backpack.

Hmm I thought, she’ll be back shortly.

Well the minutes ticked by and she was still absent.

The longer she was gone the more anxious I felt.

‘Tell the staff’ my son back home in New Zealand advised me. He was the one I was skype chatting to at the time.

The store was pretty busy and I couldn’t catch the eye of any of the staff, so I began to sign off and say goodbye to my son.

Just as I was about to get up she returns and sits down as if nothing has happened. She was gone for all of ten minutes.

I turned to her and asked her if she was new in London.

At first didn’t understand me…language difficulty.

Then when she did understand I told her she was very silly to have left her things unattended. She just looked at me as if I was mad.

So I repeated myself and told that her that she risked having them stolen by leaving the alone in public place for so long.

Then the penny seemed to drop and she at least had the decency to look a bit ashamed of herself.

I overheard part of an odd conversation on the train this evening one the way home.

The bloke was talking about travelling faster than the speed of light to get to other worlds.  The other chap he was with must have commented about nothing travelling fast than that, when bloke one began to explain how it was done.

As best as I can remember it had something to do with shrinking the space in front of you and expanding the space behind you before moving forward, possibly through a wormhole.

He then went on to expound his own theory of travelling with the following analogy.

Imagine you are walking down a hallway with a carpet runner down it. The carpet represents the distance travelled. Now ruck up the carpet so that it concertinas up, remembering that the carpet represents the distance, now simply step over the carpet and voila, you have travelled a long way in a much shorter length of time.

What he failed to say before he got off the train was how in reality you ruck up the actual distance.

I watched the expression on the faces of the couple he had been talking to and they were giving each other the look. You know the one, the one that says what on earth he was on about.