The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Hmm …

I went to see this the other night and while the case may have been curious, Benjamin Button certainly wasn’t. About anything.

I should probably post a SPOILERS warning about here, but I genuinely don’t think it’s possible to spoil the story in this case. However, if you haven’t seen the film yet and think you might like to, look away now.

And keep looking away for the rest of the post.

Come back tomorrow. There might be some funny swearing by then.

I’m sure most of you know the film’s about Benjamin Button, a guy who’s born old and grows younger. Fair enough, sounds interesting. The story, on the other hand, is about a guy who’s born old and grows younger … for three fucking hours.

And that’s it.

For three hours, a man gets younger on screen.

He has no interests, no desires, no wants, no needs, no … curiosity about anything at all.

For me, a good film gets me asking questions – that’s how I engage with a movie. Who did it? Why did they do it? What’s going to happen when x meets y? And most importantly of all: how’s he going to achieve … whatever his goal is.

And there’s the problem (for me, anyway. I’m not saying it’s a bad film, just I didn’t care) – Benjamin Button has no goals. He just is.

There’s an inevitable comparison here with Forrest Gump – partly because it’s the same writer, but mostly because it has all the same components: a totally passive protagonist in the deep South to whom things just happen. A boat. A flighty girl who’s the focus of his obsession there sometimes. A long passage of time. War. Big house. Single mother who dies … it’s cut from the same cloth.

The difference is, interesting things happened to Forrest. He’s a passive guy who accidentally finds himself in some of the major events of the second half of the twentieth Century. He also has a goal – he loves … whatever Robin Wright-Penn’s character was called. Jenny? Yeah, Jenny.

I think.

So imagine Benjamin Button as a Forrest Gump if he never saw anything interesting and didn’t really care if he got the girl or not.

Sound interesting?

No?

Put it this way, I actually went to the toilet during the film – something I never do for fear of missing something. In this case I didn’t really think it would be a problem. When I returned I asked my mate just in case:

“What happened?”

“He got a bit younger.”

Oh. Thrilling.

The most telling line of the film for me came when the trawler tug Forrest Benjamin was working on got drafted into WWII – ooh! What’s going to happen now? How will war change him?

Then came the line. Something like:

“I didn’t really see much of the war.”

Oh. Brilliant. I’m glad they filmed that. Imagine if I’d gone the rest of my life not knowing Benjamin Button didn’t really see anything during the Second World War?

Okay, so shortly after that he does get shot at and everyone except him dies. Or maybe there was someone else who survived. It’s hard to say. There was a really interesting Captain, Brad Pitt in a lot of make up and then a load of nondescript people in jumpers. Most of the jumpers got killed. Maybe. The Captain definitely did, which was a shame because I liked him. He seemed like fun.

Tilda Swinton’s character – she seemed really interesting. I’d like to have known more about her – but didn’t get the chance.

Which is really what this film’s about. Benjamin Button meets some interesting people … and completely fails to be changed by them. He just meets them. They’re interesting. He’s not.

We meet his daughter in the first scene – but she doesn’t find out she’s his daughter for two and a half hours. What a revelation! A character discovers something we’ve known for hours.

Great.

Shortly after this she stops reading Benjamin’s journal (“That’s the last entry.”) and my mate started picking his coat up and checking he had everything. “That’s what I thought,” chimes in … whoever the love uninterest is “but then I got  a phone call.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” opined my mate as he settled back in for another thirty minutes or so of watching someone get younger.

I’m not saying it’s not well filmed or acted – just there’s nothing which held my interest.

No, that’s not true. There are plenty of good bits – the story about the clock, the lightning guy, the bits about whats-her-name getting run over – but none of them feature the protagonist. Can you even call him a protagonist if he doesn’t do any pro-ing? Is he just a tagonist? Or maybe just an ist?

Films with no unity of time are hard to pull off – part of the reason I don’t really like bio-pics is people rarely have one goal for their entire lives and the more you try to show, the less interesting it becomes. The more successful ones (for me) pick short periods of someone’s life and show them trying to achieve something.

Watching someone from birth to death without them ever really paying any interest in their own lives is … boring.

I like everything and everyone surrounding Benjamin, and if the intention was to show how people can live their whole lives without ever really getting involved in the world around them then … well done. It certainly achieved its goal. Because that’s the impression I got – there was probably a really interesting film happening just out of shot.

Still, other people seem to like it so I probably just missed the point.

Can someone explain it to me, please?

No more

Right, that’s it. No more procrastinating, no more dithering, no more picking aimlessly at bits of script.

In short, no more fannying around.

It seems to me I’ve achieved nothing particularly useful (writing wise) in the last half a year or so and have spent far too long not doing it. So no more.

From now on I’m back to just knuckling down and getting on with … oh look, Stargate’s on.

No, God damn it! No more Stargate. No more Simpsons. No more Battlestar Galactica … well, maybe I’ll just finish season 2 and then … definitely no more.

Except maybe season 3.

But after that, back to work baby.

With a vengeance.

Is there a season 4?

No, fuck season 4.

Work!

The script I’ve been picking randomly at since September – that’s going to be finished by March the 4th at the latest. No, shut up, no excuses. It’s going to be finished by March the 4th. Do you hear me, me? Am I listening to myself?

Why March the 4th? Because that’s when the meeting for the final(ish) set of notes for the final(ish) draft of  ’til Death is. And after March the 4th, I’m going to be busy with the final(ish) draft, obviously.

After that I’m working on a new script based on an old idea which has once again reared its malformed and, frankly, just plain weird head. It’s got everything – sex, death and … um … fish.

Actually, not so much fish. Mostly just sex and death.

Without the sex.

Okay, it’s just a lot of death.

But it’s got the whiff of sex all the way through it (which I’ve always thought smells a bit like telephones – you know, the old dial up ones). The treatment feels like the characters might spontaneously burst into sex at any minute … but probably won’t.

In fact they don’t. I know they don’t. I wrote the treatment. Four fucking years ago.

So no sex.

Just death.

And Nazis.

But not real ones.

Maybe in Jersey.

The country, not a pullover. That would be weird.

Although probably quite warm.

And that script WILL be done by Easter.

Why Easter?

Why fucking not?

When is Easter?

I don’t care. It will be done by Easter, whenever it fucking is, or there’ll be hell to pay.

If it existed.

Which it doesn’t.

Seriously, when is Easter?

Why did I agree to this?

CS Podcasts

I’m sure everyone already is; but if you aren’t, you should be.

Wait, sorry – that sentence makes no sense.

Are you listening to the Creative Screenwriting Podcasts? I’m sure you already are; but if you aren’t, you should be.

Hmm …

Maybe that should be:

Do you listen to the Creative Screenwriting Podcasts? I’m sure you already do; but if you don’t, you should.

No, still not happy with that.

If you’re not listening to the Creative Screenwriting Podcasts, you fucking should be. They’re great and have been consistently great for a long time now.

Damn it, still not quite right.

Creative Screenwriting Podcasts. Listen to them. Don’t fucking argue, just do it. Unless you already are. Or have been for a while. In which case, good. Carry on.

Oh fuck it, I give up. Is it bedtime yet?

The podcasts are great, lots of really interesting information provided in humorous anecdote form by the writers of some awesome films. And a few shit ones.

Mostly good though.

In fact, I now decide which films I want to watch based purely on how interesting the writer sounds during the podcast.

I like them, you might too.

Take my advice, go on, have a listen.

Unless you’re already listening to them and have been for a long time – in which case you don’t need the recommendation and have wasted your time reading this post.

You fucking idiot.

Who do you want to be?

Just be aware, it’s going to take me a long time to get to the point.

When I was a kid we had two main types of play: games which involved pretending some lump of plastic was real (Star Wars figures, Lego, Action Man – although Action Man always had to fight invisible enemies because no one I knew had more than one figure and he was too big to fight anything else); and ‘games when we’re the people’.

‘Games when we’re the people’ would involve me, my brother and our friends pretending to be people from whatever was the favourite movie or TV show of the week. Obviously, favour would always go to a show or movie which had more than one main character – there’s no point playing Indiana Jones or James Bond because once you get past casting someone as the titular character … there’s not a whole lot left.

Unless Indy and Bond team up. Which they probably did in our world.

The best TV shows, the ones we used to play at most, were the ones with a few good characters so everyone got to be someone they liked.

Doctor Who was great because everyone could pretend to be the Doctor at the same time. Better than that, you could pretend to be your own Doctor since we were only on number four at the time. I think I was always the 11th so I might get a bit upset next year when the new guy utterly fails to be me.

For the other shows there was usually a hierarchy, an order of preference for who we wanted to be. No one always agreed, but for me they went something like this:

Blake’s Seven: Blake, Avon, Villa. No one ever wanted to be Tarrant .

The A-Team: Face, Murdoch, Hannibal, BA – all of them were good though, so it didn’t really matter; but Face was by far the coolest one of the bunch. Feel free to disagree – you’re wrong, but feel free to be wrong.

Star Wars: Han, Lando … maybe Chewie at a push. There were no girls in our group so no one wanted to be Luke.

Star Trek: Kirk (who wouldn’t want to be Captain Kirk?), Spock, Bones, Scotty. Chekov and Sulu … if we really had to, but personally I’d rather be an anonymous red shirt.

This isn’t to say other characters in these shows weren’t interesting, dramatic, well written or good actors – it’s just they weren’t … cool. They didn’t have any attributes I aspired to, I didn’t want to be them or be like them in some small way.

And that to me is really important in a TV show (or movie) even now I still want to see characters I want to be like. That’s were things like Life on Mars went right for me: I would like to be Gene Hunt. Just for a day. I’d like to be that sure of myself, that masculine, to drive fast, shoot first, punch people for being annoying and still be an all round nice bloke. Sam Tyler … well he whinges a bit. Nah, not really interested.

But that’s fine. One character I’d like to be per show keeps me interested. More than one is just a massive bonus.

And this is where Star Trek went wrong for me:

Star Trek: Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty – they all have elements of their personality I admire.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Picard, I’d love to have that much natural authority. Who else though? Riker?No, his attributes seem to include growing a beard and walking sideways. Data, he wants to be more like me – I don’t respect that. Geordi … did he have a personality? Worf is always wrong and very angry about it:

Picard: “We must do something before that alien eats our faces. Suggestions?”

Worf: “Captain, may I suggest–”

Picard: “No. Shut the fuck up, anyone else?”

I suppose O’Brien was quite cool. In a bluff, say what you mean kind of way. Two people, okay – not bad.

Deep Space Nine: Hmm … O’Brien again. Sisko … maybe?

Voyager: If I woke up and found I shared any personality traits at all withany of the characters … I’d shoot myself. And Alice too in case she’d inherited them. I can’t imagine sitting around with a bunch of five year olds going:

“Let’s play Star Trek Voyager – you can be Ensign Kim.”

“Which one’s he?”

“The real dull one who has nothing interesting to say.”

“Can you be more specific?”

Which brings me onto Battlestar Galactica. Until recently I’d never seen any of the new series. Not because I didn’t want to, but because  by the time I found out it was on I’d missed a year and a half and wanted to watch it from the beginning.

Luckily, I got the first three seasons on DVD for Christmas.

Now, I loved the original series because it was just so damned cool – Starbuck, Boomer, their costumes, the Vipers, the Cylons, those big fucking guns … all so cool. Yes the stories weren’t always up to scratch but as far as I can remember from watching it when I was (however old I was – eight? Six? Don’t know.) it was one of those shows like Blake’s Seven or Buck Rogers which starts off witha fantastic premise, four or five amazing episodes and then runs out of steam. They literally had no idea what they wanted to do with it.

Buck Rogers was so poorly thought out the second season had absolutely no relation to the first apart from three of the characters.

So a re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica should be so fucking amazing it’s untrue. And that’s exactly what everyone else keeps telling me.

Well, I’ve watched the first season now and the stories are great, the characters are interesting and it’s well made but … there’s no one I want to be.

Starbuck (the coolest character around – Faceman, in space! With a cool uniform and a big fucking hand cannon in a low slung holster!) is now a girl. Interesting choice, interesting character … but I have never, ever wanted to be a girl. Well, maybe for half an hour or so; but not as an aspirational choice.

Which is not an insult to women by the way. I’m sure most women don’t want to be men – at least not in a watching TV kind of way. Even though being a guy is a fuck load easier – the shoes fit, we have pockets and we can go to the toilet anywhere we like.

So Starbuck is a girl now. Fine. That means any girl who wants to play ‘games when we’re the people: BSG’ can be Starbuck. Who’s left?

Boomer was always a super cool character. A smaller role but … man he was cool.

Oh wait, he’s a girl now too. And a Cylon. Nope, don’t want to be him. Her.

Apollo is pretty much the same as he was back then: wet and conflicted. Don’t want to be him.

Adama? Too old, too grumpy. Tigh? A grumpy, alcoholic, cuckold? Nope, don’t want to be him either.

The deck chief? Can’t even remember his name. Does he have a name? He’s alright in a solid dependable way. Not exactly the stuff of fantasies is it?

So none of the characters are cool. I don’t want to be any of them.

The Vipers are still super cool though – I could be a previously unseen Viper pilot. Yeah!

Except, no.

They no longer dress like heroes – they now wear Lurex uniforms with their muscle vests on backwards – and their awesome sidearms have become crappy little popguns. When they’re not being pilots they seem to dress up as the guys from Babylon 5.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not disparaging the writing, the acting, the direction … I’m just struggling to care about any of the characters because I don’t want to be them. This makes me an outsider watching stuff happen to other people instead of imagining it happening to me.

Incidentally, I think this may be why I’m not that fond of soaps – they have no aspirational (to me) characters. Instead they’re populated with people I fear I’m already like and wish I wasn’t.

Okay, so BSG obviously isn’t for kids. It’s got a lot of sex in it and adult themes and complex plots … although, is it me or did a lot of plot points in the first series just get ignored? Gaius invents a Cylondetector – he has 60 years worth work ahead of him. Next episode, apparently he’s given up on that and is now vice-president. No one’s interested in Cylons any more, they’re so last week.

He finds out Boomer is a Cylon … then doesn’t tell anyone. Why? Where’s his self-preservation?

Is Adama a Cylon? Test him, don’t test him, test him, don’t … is he or isn’t he? By the end of the episode it seems like the Pres don’t care no more. And never mentions it again.

Did I enjoy this first series? Yeah, sort of. I watched it all and only complained to the TV occasionally (“Oh now the Cylons attack? How convenient. What were they doing? Waiting until the episode was nearly over so they could be more dramatic?” … “Why the hell does this Cylonraider have handy control wires built into it? I’m fairly certain if someone scooped out my brain and sat in my skull they wouldn’t be able to control my legs by pulling nerve endings.” … “Can you really plug a hole in a spaceship with your jacket and then fly it into space?”).

Did I love it?

No, not really. It’s okay. It certainly passes the time.

Do I want to be anyone in the show?

No.

And that’s really important for me. It’s something I’m going to make damn sure I include in every script from now on … at least one character the five year old me would want to be.

Although, since my next project’s a porn film … hmm.

Excruciating

I’m just plodding along at the moment, trying to get a re-write finished. It’s bloody painful, nothing’s flowing and nothing I’m writing is actually any good – I really am just stumbling towards the end with the intention of making it sing the next time through.

The problem is it’s a complete re-write which still has to have all the elements people loved about the last draft. Basically I’m dropping a different version of the story around the same characters and a lot of the same dialogue, which is a bit weird.

It’s not like taking the same characters and putting them in a new story (almost like a sequel or a different episode) and it’s not like keeping the story the same and replacing the characters with better ones – it’s keeping all the scenes with the heroes interacting with themselves and changing all the ones where they meet the villains.

The villains have changed characters and swapped motivations and gained new backstories – the heroes have always been spot on from the beginning and the way the talk and the things they say are crucial to the script’s appeal.

It’s a bit like taking Star Wars, keeping all the Farm, Cantina, Millenium Falcon and Rebel Base sequences, throwing out everything else and trying to weave a new story around what’s left.

In my head, it should be easy – I have these shining jewels of scenes which I just need to get to – as soon as I get to the next scene I can skip on five or ten pages without re-writing a word …

But it doesn’t actually work like that. Instead I’m finding the ‘fixed’ scenes need tweaking to fit. The plot’s coming into them from the wrong angle. It’s like threading beads onto a piece of string – you have to make sure the holes all line up and at the moment they just don’t.

On top of that, it turns out the perfect, saved scenes are actually chock full of exposition I no longer need. The budget’s been greatly expanded and it’s now possible to show all the expensive stuff instead of starting the film just after it finishes – so there’s absolutely no need for the characters to talk about it.

Except the bits that still aren’t clear – so I’m combing through each scene, extracting the best lines and the needed exposition and trying to build new scenes around those fragments.

Even the fight sequences can’t stand as they were – sometimes there are extra characters in the room, sometimes one or two might be missing – so everything has to change.

It would be easier to junk the whole script and start from scratch but that’s not the brief – it has to feel like it’s the same script only much, much better.

And it’s driving me fucking nuts.

I’ve been working on this on and off since September.

September!

That was last fucking year!

I haven’t been doing it continuously, of course. The problem is people keep waving money (or at least more inevitable money) at me so I get sidetracked onto other projects. This particular project will (theoretically) pay me more than everything else I’ve written in my entire career combined … which is exactly the reason why it’s the least likely to happen.

A low budget film is one investor who fancies financing a film so he can boast about it to his mates.

A higher budget film needs a lot of people digging deep and expecting a return. The bigger the outlay, the more nervous people get and the less likely it is they’ll actually hand over the money. Since the majority of the money comes on the first day of principal photography I have to work on the projects most likely to go into production.

And even they’re not guaranteed.

So although I’ve been picking at this since September – I probably haven’t managed more than a week or two’s work in that time.

Which causes another problem – expectation.

If I knock something out in a week, I can claim I rushed it. That’s why it’s crap, not because I can’t do better – I just didn’t have time.

Six months down the line? It’s got to be a work of fucking genius … and it’s not. At the moment it’s extremely pedestrian and just … wrong.

I just need to get to the end, just keep plodding on – get it all down and then tidy it up later. And I am getting there, but fuck me am I not enjoying this?

And the less fun something is, the harder it is to concentrate.

I just spent the afternoon naming my T-shirts and arranging them in alphabetical order.

Anyone need any hoovering doing?

No?

Fuck it. Back to work then.

Three little words …

There are three words I dread. Three little words which strike terror into my heart and make my mouth run dry with fear …

I. Read. Your. Blog.

Those three words …

Shit.

That’s four words, isn’t it? Damn my poor counting skills. Although, I suppose ‘I’ isn’t really a word, it’s more of a letter. Yes, technically I’ve decided I’m right. Even if I’m wrong. Which I’m not. Ever.

“I read your blog.”

“Oh!” (Pleasantly surprised)

“Oh.” (Reality dawns)

“Oh dear.” (Fear sets in)

If it’s someone I’ve never met before it’s a bit unsettling – they know more about me than I know about them and instantly puts me on the back foot.

Why this is a problem is beyond me since, due to my appallingly bad memory for faces and general lack of interest in people who aren’t me, I rarely remember anyone I’ve met. I’ve given up introducing myself to people since I frequently find the conversation running thus:

“Hi, I’m Phill Barron.”

“I know, we used to live together.”

“Ah.”

Or in extreme cases:

“Oh for God’s sake, I’m your mother.”

“Right. Sorry.”

This happens so often I’ve taken to preemptive relationship acknowledgement:

“Hey, good to see you again!”

“Have we met?”

Shit. Panic.

“For fuck’s sake, we used to sit together in school. I can’t believe you forgot me. Do they still call you stinky balls?”

What the hell was I talking about?

Oh yes:

“I read your blog.”

Sometimes it’ll be a friend I haven’t seen for years (and can’t remember if I pissed them off or not. Probably safe to assume I have) and as soon as they utter those three words (four, I know. Leave me alone) it instantly negates anything I have to talk about.

And this then is the problem – if someone’s already read what I’m up to I have nothing else to say. Every joke, every anecdote, every little step forward in my career – it’s all here and therefore unusable in real life. If you add Facebook into the mix with its status updates and photo albums – it’s perfectly feasible for someone I haven’t seen in two years to be completely up to date with my life.

Disaster.

I may have to ask them about their life which involves dredging up all sorts of information I didn’t listen to in the first place. I don’t want to talk about them, I’m far more interesting.

No, I don’t believe that either – but one day I hope it’s true.

It’s worse when it’s another blogger because, although everyone reads everyone else’s blog – most of us can only remember the big details. It’s a bit like being a really minor celebrity – you’re vaguely aware some people might know things about you but it’s arrogant to assume they’ve committed every detail of your life to memory.

On the other hand, it’s boring to reiterate things the other person already knows.

So to my mind (and without giving it any thought whatsoever) there are only two solutions.

As an aside, I’ve been watching a lot of Stargate SG1 recently and I love it when Sam Carter says “It’s the only possible explanation.” after delivering a load of exposition. Frequently it isn’t the only possible explanation and is merely the one the writers need you to accept to move the story on. I can often think of at least seven other explanations. Three of them usually feature blamanche.

Anyway. There are only two solutions:

1. Stop blogging.
2. Avoid all conversation until the day I die.

Obviously 1 is out of the question because then I may have to do some real work, so 2 it is. I’m still planning on probably going to the scribomeet on Tuesday but I won’t be speaking. I may point occasionally but that’s about your lot. In most people, an absence of speech would resist in an increase in listening … so to avoid that I’ll probably sit at a different table and read a book.

One with pictures.

If anyone’s still reading, you’re probably wondering what the point of this post is.

If it helps, I’m not sure either.

Probably best to ignore it and maybe it will go away.

From script to treatment

Sometime in the near past (I lose track of days. I know it wasn’t yesterday or the day before but beyond that escapes me) I re-wrote the treatment for ’til Death to match the script.

A bit cock about face, I know; but since the latest draft bears very little resemblance to the original treatment and the treatment is sometimes part of the sales pack, amendments were needed.

As it turns out it’s quite a useful technique. By going through the script and summarising each scene – what happens and why – you  get a better insight into your story. Instead of reading each scene and then summarising it, I just glanced at it briefly and then wrote down what I thought it was about, how it moves the story on and what the characters were doing and why.

Only after I’d written the scene in the treatment do I go back and compare it to the script. Occasionally I find information I’d intended to be in the scene was missing, or obscure, or the characters’ motivations just weren’t clear enough. Often I’d be convinced a certain line of dialogue was in the scene only to find out it wasn’t but bloody well should be.

For one scene I couldn’t remember for the life of me what it was meant to be about or why the characters were doing the things they were. Closer examination failed to reveal any hints so the whole scene got cut and no one will ever miss it.

It’s a pretty valuable exercise – comparing what you’ve written with what you think you’ve written and one I would recommend to absolutely no one; because, although it is useful and does reveal a fair amount of interesting things about your script … Christ, it’s fucking boring.

So boring in fact I can’t remember when I did it or how long it took. That mind-numbing process robbed me of a day. Take my advice, don’t do it unless you’re having problems sleeping. Or you’re absolutely positive all the paint in your house is dry and there’s nothing else to watch. I tried to liven things up by jabbing myself in the leg with a compass but even that failed to break the monotony.

Next time I’m defintely, definitely just getting the treatment right in the first place.

Pointless conversation

The other day I was driving through a forest.

An inherently odd sentence which manages to be simultaneously misleading and inaccurate:

1. It wasn’t ‘the other day’ since that implies there are only two days and this happened on the one which isn’t this one.
2. I was on a road which went through a forest – not crashing through the bracken, dodging trees.
3. I was only driving if you define driving as sitting stationary in a car for hours on end.

Not a good start to a post.

Anyway, the other day I was driving through this forest and became stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam.

“Why are all these fucking cars in this forest?” I remember asking, but I never got an answer. Up ahead, a Virgin Air Hostess (and by that I mean she worked for Virgin Atlantic and am in no way making any snap judgements about her level sexual experience) got out of her car and went to talk to the people in the car behind.

She must know them, I thought.

Then she went to the car behind, then the one behind that and the one behind that. Maybe there are multiple air hostesses in convoy who happen to be stuck in the same traffic jam? Or maybe she’s trying to find out why the road’s blocked? Or maybe she’s just touting for business? Who knows?

Before she got to me and revealed her motives, the traffic started moving and she darted back to her car.

After a brief period of driving at fairly high speeds, during which I never quite found out what we’d all been stuck behind, I lost sight of all cars – driven by air hostesses or otherwise.

Until I rounded a corner (for they have them in forests) and came to another screeching halt in another tedious traffic jam. This time the cars were moving slightly and gradually, over the course of another hour, I inched my way along the road. Presently the air hostess came back into view: parked at the side of the road, making a phone call. As I crawled level with her, she beeped her horn and motioned for me to wind down my window.

Which I did.

“I think the road’s blocked.” She offers.

“Yes.”

I probably could have thought of something better to say at that point, but the fact I was sitting in a big fucking traffic jam made the road being blocked seem a bit fucking obvious. She might have well as told me water was wet or the sky was blue (which it wasn’t, it was mostly grey); but I’m a polite soul on occasion and didn’t feel like shouting at her, so ‘yes’ had to do.

She thought about this for a while and then followed it up with:

“I don’t normally drive this car. I crashed my BMW last week, that’s why I’m driving this.”

“Oh. Right.”

And that seemed to be the end of the conversation.

There is no point to this post, it just struck me as a little odd and now I wonder: was she walking the line of traffic telling everyone the same thing?

“See that car there? That’s not my car, I normally drive a BMW.”

It’s an interesting strategy and one I may adopt in future. I plan to spend most of tomorrow wandering up to random strangers and telling them: “See these trainers? These aren’t my trainers. I usually wear more expensive ones” and then seeing how long it takes to get arrested and/or sectioned.