Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: AWwrgwy on May 10, 2011, 12:35:29 AM
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Douglas Adams:
This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person was me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong.
I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table.
I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind.
Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase.
It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.
Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.
You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know. . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?
In the end I thought, nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie.
Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice . . .” I mean, it doesn’t really work.
We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away.
Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.
The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.
:rofl
So, are you really that non-confrontational?
wrongway
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Cookies isn't really a Brittish word they would call them biscuits especially in 1976. Cookies were fancy American biscuits.
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Cookies isn't really a Brittish word they would call them biscuits especially in 1976. Cookies were fancy American biscuits.
Is it possible that he changed the term so an American audience wouldn't think he was toting around a package of hockey puck sized and shaped pastries?
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Douglas Adams:
:rofl
So, are you really that non-confrontational?
wrongway
I'm sure some of us are, but many aren't. Epic story, though! :D
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I highly doubt that if you did that to your average football hooligan's cookies he'd be at a loss as to what to do.
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I love that book <3
The attitude described is mostly a thing of the past though, embodied by older generations of Brits - Yarbles for example would have certainly have ignored the issue, except possibly to suggest the mutual enjoyment of a traditional multiplayer game involving biscuits that was apparently very popular when he was at school
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soggy_biscuit
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I am not a Brit, but trained/served with a few. I guarantee if that had been a pint instead of cookies,
well the outcome would have been a bit different,lol
<S> Oz
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Douglas Adams:
:rofl
So, are you really that non-confrontational?
wrongway
In 2006 David Gilmour released the CD "On an Island". One of the three people it was "about", was Douglas Adams (long time PF Manager Steve O' Rourke and Michael Kamen were the other two). Douglas was a very good friend of Gilmour's, so I could see that scenario going on like Adams said. But if two people get into a scrum over a cookie, there are other forces at work. He also chose the name "The Division Bell" for Pink Floyd's record in 1994.
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Funny, im sure I read that in Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy...
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it's in the forward of HHGTG.
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So, are you really that non-confrontational?
eeerr.. have you seen nothing of my behaviour in the last 8 or so years??