feeling listless

Life Lately I've enjoyed the intrusion of random phrases.

Last night talking to Chris over coffee in the Albert on Lark Lane (and there's a whole other post to be written about how you can get a coffee in pretty much every pub these days, especially since the the smoking ban) I was momentarily distracted by the name "Zefram Cochrane" piercing the through the din of voices and the sound of Germany harassing Portugal on the television. Luckily, said voice (predictably male) quickly followed it with a biography -- "Inventor of the warp drive" -- as though the StarTrekiverse or Roddenberryverse (or whatever it's called these days) was real. Suddenly, I was sixteen years old again, reading excepts from the Star Trek Technical Manual to my school friends.

Today, I was eating lunch in a leafy courtyard in the city centre when the kind of hearty loud sneeze I usually reserve for situations when I think I'm alone. Moments later, from what I realised was an open upstairs window I heard a woman's voice shout "But I'm your life partner!" Then silence apart from a few sniffles from my direction. I thought about it for a minute and wondered if I'd misheard a criticism of my mucosa technique but on reflection I think it was a real argument and like the discussion from last night, just a couple of words had been caught suspended in the air. I love this.

They're like isolated moments of drama open for you to fill in the gaps either side, sometimes when you know who the players are but more often not. But unlike the late lamented website In Passing and its cousin Overheard In New York, there's not enough context to understand the source story. So, life partner?