Overhearing

It’s all very well overhearing an interesting conversation or catching a remark from people passing in the street but I know from bitter experience that I will have forgotten it within milliseconds. So I have carried a notebook in my pocket for years now just so I can jot down things like this from one woman to another on a train somewhere: 
"He’s the type to go as a banana."

But choosing that notebook is not a simple matter. It has to be slim, small enough for the pocket but not so small that it can’t be used to write complete lines. Or lost. It needs to be hard backed, there’s nothing worse in a notebook than creases on a page. Definitely not one with a spiral metal spine that catches on everything else in your pocket when you need it quickly for a comment like this from two people passing in me in a street. I’ve no idea when or where: 

"She was like a radioactive cucumber."

The colour of the notebook is totally irrelevant as to whether it is fit for purpose. I’ve had blue, green, black. If it glowed in the dark, I wouldn’t care.

 

These are my requirements in a pocket notebook:

- The size is about 7 cm by 11 cms

- About 50 pages

- The quality of the paper used is 90 gsm or more (but I’m guessing at that)

- It has to have a robust, hard cover

- It has to have a space in the spine for a small pen or pencil*

- I would like an integrated elastic band to wrap round the notebook

- Ideally it would have a ribbon to mark my place

* Note the point about space for a pen. There’s no point in having a notebook and no pen.

One of my favourite overheard snippets was one that, maybe, doesn’t sound so good now but I heard it in my local newsagents when the Lottery had been going for a while and scratch cards became more popular. It was from a woman in her 60’s to her friend: 

"You can’t go into the shops these days without winning a million."

I’m restricting these comments to stuff that I may be able to use in my poetry. I don’t want to start thinking about times when I’ve heard something about a friend and having the moral dilemma of whether to tell them or not. Or on a more light-hearted note (just) when, a bit like an episode of The Likely Lads, I’ve almost made it to Match of the Day without knowing the scores, when someone sits next to me on the train and his radio leaks into my ear.

I have to tell you this one from two women passing me and a friend on the Bristol Road in Birmingham: 

"But why does John keep a corpse in his flat?" Oh how we wanted to chase them and find out.

 
But sometimes you just have to give yourself up to the moment. I was on a train to Carlisle and a very ordinary young man got on with a very beautiful girlfriend. I thought he’s punching above his weight. They sat down opposite two older men who they both knew as they all worked on the railway. After a while the young man started on a hugely complex tale about how his best mate was trying to hide from his mate’s mother the fact that he had blown up her gateau. I had to hide behind my seat as tears of laughter streamed down my face. Not such an ordinary young man.

Terry Quinn