Standing There Like Cheese At Fourpence

It has been dark all day here – I get into work before it starts to get light and so I notice what time full daylight arrives. Today it stayed just pre-dawn for ages. And it rained. And I am obviously boring you with stuff about the weather. However, weather talk, according to Kate Fox, is a simple means of determining the willingness of someone to talk to you – a sort of pre-conversation control question like those innocuous things that get asked of people about to take a lie detector test – is your name Gary, do you drink liquids, are you human? Etc. I can’t remember it being mentioned in the book, but there is another palate-cleanser topic for office-bound bods which is traffic conditions. A colleague of mine used to commute from York to Liverpool twice a week and his Monday morning conversation would be a description of the traffic conditions including road numbers rather than places which meant nothing to me – I can just about work out where the M6, the M62 and the M1 are. My route to work was four miles at the time.