meish dot org: life, unfolding

I was telling my current flatmate the other day about a girl I lived with in uni who was from Cornwall (“Oim fram snozzle,” she used to say. Took me forever to figure out she meant St Austell) and (how can I put this delicately?) a little, er, dumb. Not in an offensive way. She just had a habit of telling pointless stories – and some of them repeatedly. Like, if you wanted her to go on for a bit to let you concentrate on adding up the phone bill, or cooking dinner or whatever, all you had to do was mention honey, and she’d be off:

“Oi do loike a bit of ‘unny. Oi mean, it’s a bit loike sugar, but not quoite. You know? It’s kind of…sweet, but it’s loike naaatural, ennit? You can do laaats of things with ‘unny, caaan’t you? Oi mean, you can put it in cakes, and in puddings and…”

You get the picture.

So anyway, one day I was hard at work, writing an essay at my desk (I know, unthinkable) when she started hammering on my door, and then burst into the room.

“Meg! You’ll never guess what just ‘appened to me!” she gushed.

“What? Did you burn the kitchen down? Did you just get engaged? Have you just had a baby? Were you abducted by armed gunmen? What?” I enquired.

“Well,” she said, breathlessly and with all the excitement of a five year old “Oi just opened moi cupboard….and oi didn’t ‘ave any beans left!!!”

The door swung closed in her face.

Ever since then, that has become shorthand for someone telling a pointless story – you interrupt and say “what, and then you realised there were no beans?” – or something to say when you realise that you’ve completely lost the attention of your audience “so anyway, there we were in the middle of Ikea with fourteen of those stubby little pencils, when…er….oh *beans*. Okay, alright…I’ll shut up now.”