Too friendly

 If you click on the photo, you’ll go to the website that sells ‘fun’ T-shirts.

This is a long story, but please bear with me. I usually try to keep things as short as possible, to give you the chance to visit other bloggers and read their stuff too without having to sit in front of your computer all night long, all night. All night lohong, all night… Oops, Lionel Richie popped into my head and distracted me. Sorry. I just wanted to share a personal problem with you. So here it goes….

My problem is that I have too friendly a face. I have one of those faces that invites people to pour their hearts out. Absolute strangers tell me their life’s story. Although I’ve never asked them to do that. I don’t even want them to tell me everything that’s wrong or right with their lives, or the lives of their children, acquaintances or neighbours, but still I have to listen to total strangers telling me all sorts of things I really don’t want to know. WHY? I ask you in despair, WHY OH WHY?

For instance; I once watched a friend of mine having a horse riding lesson. I had never been to the place where this happened, nor did I know any of the people there, except for my friend. There were a couple of other people watching their friends or family members happily trotting along. They obviously all knew each other, so I was a stranger amongst them. I nodded friendly to show them I meant no harm. You never know with strangers, so I wanted to make that clear to them.
HUGE MISTAKE!
The woman who stood closest to me, shuffled sideways to get within hearing distance. “Hello”, she said. “Are you new here?” “I’m just here to support my friend over there”, I said, nodding towards that friend. “Ah! That is my daughter”, she nodded towards her daughter just riding past us. “Hmm”, I smiled. And then she started telling me all sorts of things about her daughter, her daughter’s horse, her daughter’s boyfriend, her daughter’s work, the horses of their neighbours (why on earth would I want to know anything about the horses of neighbours of people who(m?) I don’t even know?). And so forth. An hour later she was still talking to me. So help me Elvis, I wanted to hit her over the head with a lead pipe just to shut her up. I didn’t. It would have made things a little bit difficult for my friend who really liked riding there I think. And I couldn’t find a lead pipe. So I counted to 1,000,000,000 and smiled.

Another example. I love to walk the dogs in the woods. Alone. Just me and the dogs. Contemplating life, thinking about the Higgs-boson particle and if we will get sucked into a black hole if they get the Hadron Collider to work properly, will Scotty ever be able to beam us up, you know, just stuff your mind can get lost in sometimes (okay, now I’m just pretending. My mind is usually blank.).

The house we lived in before was the best base-camp for that sort of long walks. I could walk for hours without ever seeing another human being. Pure bliss!
The house we live in now is situated ideally for long walks with the dogs too, woods and fields on all sides. But every time I go walking I encounter people who want to talk to me. Neighbours, people I vaguely know, people I don’t know at all. Everybody wants to talk to me. But I don’t want to talk. I want to be left alone! I need a T-shirt with an appropriate text printed on it. A text that will explain to people that just a simple ‘hello’ will do. Suggestions for appropriate texts are welcome. I could wear such a T-shirt on my desperately needed walks.

I don’t go walking anymore. I’m too scared. You see, one evening I took one of the dogs for a long walk in the woods opposite our house. There is a small track along some fields that starts right opposite our house and ends up on a very muddy path that leads to the woods. Holle (the dog) and I followed the track to the muddy path and I saw that quite a long way away from me one of our neighbours was coming towards me. I decided to take a detour and walk in the opposite direction from her. Just didn’t want to get engaged in any conversation. She’s nice enough, but she’s so terribly uninteresting. Not that I’m that interesting, but you can choose to read what I write. If I’d be speaking to you, it would be much harder for you to shut me up politely. Now you can just press the little white cross in the top of this screen and off I am. None the wiser and not offended. Just wondering why you didn’t leave a comment to tell how incredibly fun it was to read this post. Having sleepless nights, because you obviously didn’t visit me and why not… So if you want to be kind to me, just skip to the comments-thingy below and pretend you’ve read the entire post and leave me a nice comment. Thén click on the white cross. Everybody happy!

Ah, I see you are still here. That’s nice. Where was I. Oh yes, managed to escape the friendly neighbour with the boring stories. So Holle and I enjoyed our walk through the woods. There was a woman holding a bike trying to get her little dog back that had escaped into the woods. We could see the little dog and it didn’t show any intention of returning towards the woman with the bike.
I stopped walking towards the woman and called Holle to come to me. I didn’t want the little dog to follow us, because I was walking towards the fringe of the woods, where I could follow the cycle path next to the sometimes very busy road towards home.

The woman understood why Holle and I had come to a standstill and gestured that it was alright for us to walk on. So we did. When we approached the woman with the bicycle, she thanked us for being so considerate, but that it wasn’t necessary, because the dog would eventually come to her. The dog had issues, because it was a rescue dog that came all the way from friends of them in the USA who took in rescue dogs to re-home them and yap yap yap… She didn’t shut up anymore. I mean, I didn’t mind her telling me about the little dog. It was a cute little dog and I think people who take in animals in need, have the potential to be nice people (I might add that we have rescued two pigs ourselves and I almost always like us). But then she started telling me about the American friends and how they met them and how many dogs they had and where they lived and what the house looked like and that she had just been to her horse, that she kept in the field over there (with directions how to get there) and why she had been to her horse and…. It slowly dawned on me that this woman would never stop talking. Meanwhile, the little dog had befriended Holle, so the woman was able to pick it up and put it in the basket on her bike. Which was my cue to wish her a nice evening and get the hell away from there.
No such luck. She started walking with me. Still holding the bike.
So I quickly thought of another route to get home. The cycle path wasn’t an option anymore. Far too convenient for the yapping woman.
“Which way are you going?”, she asked when we neared the busy road.
I thought I had a clever idea, assuming she wanted to cycle home, and said: “I’m going to take the path through the fields” (which would mean we would be struggling through knee deep mud tracks, but I’d do anything to get away from her and she wouldn’t be mad enough to wrestle her bike through the mud).

She obviously was mad enough, because she said: “Oh, that’s okay, I will walk with you.”
And she yapped and yapped and yapped some more. And then she asked where I lived. But I didn’t want to tell her, so I nodded sort of sideways towards the road where our house is. We had almost reached the track the leads from the muddy path towards our house and I really, really wanted to take that track. Because she had already told me, of course, where she lived. Somewhere on the other side of the village, so she wouldn’t be following me along the little track. I desperately hoped she wouldn’t.

“Oh?”, she said. “Then you must know (and she mentioned a name I can’t remember, so we’ll say it was Dotty) Dotty, because she lives there too.”
”I don’t know Dotty”, I said truthfully.
”She lives in the house with the yap yap yap and the yap yap yap.”
I knew the house, but I still didn’t know Dotty.
”If you ask me”, she said, “Dotty has some serious mental health issues!”, and she started explaining how she had come to that conclusion. Point of the story was that Dotty didn’t want to have anything to do with yapping woman anymore. Which to me proves that Dotty is totally sane.

I stayed polite and said “bye” and almost ran with Holle down the track towards our home. And at the end of the track stood the boring neighbour who said: “I thought it was you I saw when I was walking the dog. but you went the other way. We should go walking together. I don’t like walking alone in the woods. You never know. It could be dangerous.”

Yeah, next time I’ll bring a roll of duct tape. Or a lead pipe and hit everyone who says more than ‘hello’ over the head. Very dangerous indeed!