Verbal Cricket.

Repartee was never my forte. I can talk long enough to worry any donkey which feels emotionally attached to its hind legs; it’s just that I don’t have the sort of mind which is ever ready with the quick fire, witty retort. My brain works too slowly to be a Groucho Marx or a Gregory House. And that’s why I was thrown into difficulty today by the woman who served my coffee in Costa, and who pitched me a vicious, dipping curve ball just I was engrossed in wondering how the hell young women manage to be so tall these days.

Curve ball? Why am I using an expression derived from baseball? Why don’t I play the proper Englishman and say that she bowled me a googly? (For those who don’t know, a googly is a leg spinning ball bowled with an off spin action to fool the batsman – this is cricket we’re talking about, you understand – into thinking that the ball is going to bounce in a different direction than it actually does. A Chinaman, on the other hand, is the opposite. So if ever you hear a sport commentator say ‘that was the best disguised Chinaman I’ve ever seen’, he isn’t referring to Chow Yun Fat in drag.

‘Do you have a busy afternoon planned?’ asked the wench, almost appearing to be genuinely interested.

It threw me. It’s a bit of an advance on ‘are you having a good day?’ and it’s one I’d never heard before so I didn’t have a stock reply on the shelf. Panic began to nudge me gently in the ribs, encouraged no doubt by the growing conviction that, since I’m getting old and ugly, I no longer have the right to expect anybody to even talk to me, much less take an interest in my immediate prospects. I assumed a nonchalant air by way of appearing to prepare a slog over midwicket for six, and then managed a reply of sorts in the three seconds allotted to a person in such circumstances in order to avoid looking stupid and speechless.

‘Nope,’ I replied to give time for the rest to formulate itself. ‘I don’t do busy. Life’s too short to waste on being busy. The busier you are, the faster it goes.’

It was the best I could manage, but she didn’t speak to me after that. Then again, since her hair colour didn’t match the colour of her eyebrows, I decided it didn’t matter. I drank my coffee and then bought four geranium plants to give vent to blessed relief.