Look Up

It’s surprising what happens when you venture outside on foot with no techno gadgets attached to your ears or flickering in front of your eyes. A few days ago I was walking along the canal path and a man asked me to take his photo. He did laughingly say that he was trusting me not to run off with his phone and a very small part of me was quite thrilled that he thought a woman of my vintage might grab his phone and make a break for it. I didn’t. Instead, I took a rather artistic shot of him (if I do say so myself) in front of the canal and the picturesque medieval houses. And then he told me why he was visiting Newbury.

Much as I like our town, I don’t think of it as a travel destination. We won’t be imposing a tourist tax any time soon. But he had a medical appointment here and thought he’d spend a few days looking around. He’d come all the way from Crawley, which is south of London and can’t be much more than 50 miles away. He was very enthusiastic about Newbury and said how lucky I was to live here rather than his home town. I don’t think the Crawley tourist board will be offering him a job and it hasn’t been added to my travel wish list based on his review.

I returned his phone (tempted as I was) and then ran into a friend who was about to water her wedding tree. She and her husband had planted an apple tree near the lock to commemorate their marriage. So naturally I went to admire their tree and plan to look in on it from time to time to follow its progress. Then I went on my way, thinking about the random encounters you’re lucky enough to have when you look up rather than down.

Like the discussion that began when we were waiting in the queue at the olive stall on the market. This is always the most popular stall there, easily beating the greengrocer, the butcher, the baker and, yes, the candlestick maker – the bee people were there selling honey and candles. Not only do the olive people sell all sorts of other lovely things like sun-dried tomatoes, stuffed grape leaves, feta cheese and baklava, they’re also a fascinating pair.

I’m thinking they’re probably former hippies. One of them is German and we started talking about Berlin and how different it is now compared with pre-1990. Then the conversation moved on to whether the east and west should have reunited, how new a country Germany really is and before we knew it the woman behind us had joined in and somehow the conversation had moved onto Queen Victoria and whether the haemophiliac gene really had come from her. At this point I was tempted to ask for everyone’s phone numbers so I could set up a discussion group on 19^th and 20^th century European history. But I thought I might be pushing my luck, so we made our uneventful way home to research Queen Victoria’s family or maybe just to eat our olives.