Indulging a Healthy Imagination.

It all began when I was in an art gallery perusing a portrait of JS Bach. I turned to the young Chinese woman with the Tiger Lily haircut who had been standing at my shoulder staring quietly but intensely into my face for the past ten minutes, and said…

Ah, but first a picture I took of her using my imaginary iPhone:

 

… I said:

‘It must have taken hours every morning to style his hair like that.’

‘That’s not his hair,’ she replied earnestly. ‘It’s a wig.’

‘A wig?’

‘Yes. A powdered wig.’

‘A powdered wig? Good heavens. Whoever would have thought it? Thank you for telling me.’

She tilted her head slightly to indicate grateful humility for my kindness, as young Chinese women do in such circumstances, and then continued to look into my eyes. At no point did she smile or betray any hint of emotion; it seemed she just wanted to look at me, and did so with a level of unwavering calmness that was a little unnerving.

I felt the most urgent need to breach this shell of inscrutability and engaged her in conversation, during which I discovered that her name was Wei Pong, that she came from somewhere in America, and that she worked for NASA as a rocket scientist.

Questions about her name provided the most fertile ground for my enquiry, as you might imagine. I asked her, for example, whether she was one of the Pennsylvania Pongs, but she didn’t get that joke either. Eventually I grew tired of using humour – and at her expense, I’m sorry to say – to break the ice between us and invited her for coffee.

She consented, but then caused me some minor discomfort by pouring the whole of the small pot of cream into her coffee, leaving me with a cup of black stuff which needed lightening up a bit. Not wishing to cause her any embarrassment which might have shattered her immaculate inscrutability, I decided to fetch another pot. But when I looked at the counter and saw the queue extending through the door and beyond, I changed my mind. My coffee would have been cold by the time I achieved my objective, and so I decided to let the reverie fade and watch an episode of The IT Crowd instead.

So now you know how I occupy my mind when the world is dark, the curtains are drawn, company is notable by its absence, and the tea bag is brewing in my trusty mug with a picture of an Indian elephant on the side.

And this post is made in lieu of a more serious one about why my posts are more than a little self-obsessed lately. I did think of another one earlier, but try as I might I can’t remember what it was about. Later, maybe.