Oddities

Sometimes there are just a few too many odd occurrences for one person to keep to themselves. The first was more unusual than truly odd, but noteworthy all the same. I live not too far away from the main train line between Newcastle and Edinburgh, and although I don't hear the trains everyday, I do sometimes hear them hoot their horn. On Monday I had the back door open, and was standing at the kitchen sink doing the washing up when I heard a train hoot its horn as it passed nearby ... except that it wasn't a horn being hooted; it was a whistle being whooted - a steam train.

Later that day I went for a trundle in Taz to make the most of the sunshine. While I was out I saw a couple of people walking two very small dogs, that turned out not to be dogs at all. Nope, what I was seeing was a couple of people taking two ferrets for a walk. Of course I've heard of this before, but it's not something I've ever seen and it was a little surprising, although smilesome :o)

You may have missed this news story yesterday, but it is truly odd. It is the story of a Russian man who went to see the doctor because he had a bad cough, was coughing up blood and had chest pain. An x-ray showed a shadow on his lung and he underwent immediate surgery to remove the tumour. However, the tumour turned out not to be what anyone was expecting, but rather a 5cm fir tree growing in the man's lung! It's thought that maybe he'd breathed in a seed while walking in the woods, and had somehow found conditions good enough for germination. Ya know, this is one thing that my asthma consultant hasn't considered as the possible cause of all my problems, so maybe next time I'm at clinic I should ask to have my lungs checked for rogue fir trees.

Several years ago I had a friend, C, who I came to realise was actually detrimental to my mental health. I won't go into details, other than to say that at the time I was very depressed, C had her own mental health problems, and she was the kind of person who needed to be needy and needed to be needed. It took a lot for me to end this 'friendship', but I knew that it was what I needed to do, and after doing so I felt huge relief. For some strange reason, on Monday I found myself thinking about C about that time of my life. Even weirder was that on Tuesday I had a phone call from C. She said she was phoning to ask about a chair she'd bought off me after my business had closed, and she then went into some long and protracted explanation of how this chair had now broken and how she was 'in consultation' with Ikea, where the chair had originally come from. It was all rather boring, to be honest, and yet (and as ever) she tried to make it sound like it was the most disastrous thing to happen in all the world, and what terrible repercussions the event had ... which as far as I could tell were that she had a broken chair and a sore bum. It was a very odd phone call, but really I think it was an excuse for C to get back in touch with me. It's not going to happen. Thinking about C fills me with a depressed frustration and I know that she's still no good for me. We were both ill when we met, and the one thing that she couldn't cope with was me getting better from depression - she wanted me to be ill. During the strange call from her on Tuesday it became evident that she's still ill; apparently hasn't made any progress; and she sounded hugely disappointed when I said that although my lungs are rubbish my mental health is great. I don't need that. I don't want that. She was odd then. She's still odd. The phone call was odd. The fact that I'd found myself thinking about C the day before the call was odd.

Some odd things are good, others are just ... odd.