Overheard

Overheard
conversations from the buses, boardrooms and bars of Britain
Mark Love & Jacqui Saunders

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Introduction

Toy Story

Zip It

The Heroic Potato

The Speculators

The Grieving Process

The Fablus Flautist

The Ear Complaint

Yorkshire Watter

You can’t cheat yer Nan

Year Zero

The Dry-Cleaner

The Crunch

Would You?

The Communication Age

The School Trip

The Comedic Properties of Fruit

Winsor

The Chocolate Teapot

Why?

Reclassifying the Kids

The Art of Luvvy

Wolves

Telegraph Road

Stranger in Town

‘Spolicy

The Man Who Has Everything

Snappy Shopper

The Washing-line of Hope

Scusting

Memorable Elephants

The Endless Queue

Two Birds Having It Off

Multicultural, innit?

The Hot Date

S&M in the High Street

Romance

Rice

Taking Stock

Public Inconvenience

Controversy

Potty

Parenthood

Over-inflated

Not the Done Thing

Nah, Mate!

Mothers

The Celebrity and the Portaloo

Tourist Information

Jimmy Scumbag’s Report

Man’s Best Friend

Tea? Coffee?

Innocence

Maltesers

History Repeating Itself

Mad as a Bee

Goths

Arsebergers

It’s the Thought That Counts

Learning by Example

Fast Food

It Takes Me Back

Esmerelda

Good Genes ain’t Everything

A Building Term

Giving Direction

Battery-powered

Generation XXX

Balham?

Gazebo

Dullest Cat Food Story in the World

Front or Back Bottom?

Death of a Hamster

Finding Sense

Don’t Go There

Focking Americans!

Bounced

Conditioning

Cheese People

As if!

Chalk

Casanova on the 137

Biting Jelly

Dimensions

Cannon Balls-up

A Good Investment

No Great Shakes

Greek

Pity

Care in the Community

Where You Hide Yourself

Offender Profile

Unexpected Delivery

The Birthday Buddy

Undersize Me

Caffé Americano

Man’s Other Best Friends

Objects of Desire

Business

Scaring the Extras

A Mother’s Lament

A Really Swish Showhome

Glee Club

Brazil Nuts

Trouble with Snails

Tough Love

The Tourists

Boys Will Be…

The Naturalist’s Needs

A Higher Power

Boing!

Too Much Information

There!

Salt of the Earth to Planet Boyfriend

The Important Stuff

A Traveller’s Tale

Come Together

Catch 23

Andy’s Do

Another Woman

Memories

Americans in London

Meat

Bliss

Microcosm

Enough Underwear

Bad Medicine

Bacteria

Into the Wild

Guántanamo

The Stuff of Dreams

Guests

Cool

A Simple Truth

A Cracking Bit of Cheese

Haggling

The Inheritance

A Generous Helping

The Suspect

The Actor Who Couldn’t

Teutonic Plates

A Song for Pyewacket

Tara’s Terror

Snippets from a Six-Year-Old

School’s Out

Sculptures

Burning Bright

Not Being Minnie Driver

Expressing Creativity

The Alison Technique

The Grass Being Greener

Mixed Messages

Milk with Three

Bladdy Tourists!

Jeffrey & the Tramp

Jessica’s News

Royal Insecurity

The Lost Aisle

Stripping Off

So, Do You Know Liam?

Ageing Michelle

Fashionable

Culture

RSVP

Santi

Taking Direction from Stanley Kubrick

The Bottom Line

The Muralist’s Tales

The Phantom Pregnancy

Two Very Different Travellers

Mental Lentils

In a Hole

Fruit

Expectations

Everybody Loves Madeira

Ten Seconds of Fame

Rabbit

The Rastafarian Good Food Guide

Charity

Get a Job

Headucation

I Wanna be Adopted

Management Material

All Change

Blackies

A Missed Opportunity

The Gen on Jenna

The Pottery Shop part 1

The Pottery Shop part 2

Social Skills

The Art Lover

Coitus Infinitum

Fair Trade

Animal Trouble

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Neither of us is quite sure exactly when we each started making a note of other people’s conversations, foibles and quips, but it began a long time before we met.

The decision to turn our little hobby into a book itself probably started with a conversation with friends. Someone probably laughed out loud or put their hands over their mouth in delighted shock, then said something along the lines of, ‘You should write that down.’

So we did. We employed many techniques: eavesdropping, ear-wigging, a little lurking, nebbing, overhearing and snooping, to name but a few. Occasionally little nuggets have been passed down to us by conspiratorial friends who really should know better.

The result, we discovered, was a kind of kitchen sink snapshot of society caught resolutely off its guard, being real, being funny, occasionally sad—even terrifying. It spans every age, class and racial divide—a nation united in inanity.

It seems that the richest vault of human comedy and drama is around us all the time if we just stop, turn off our phones, MP3 players and laptops, and listen.

So why not just turn off, tune out and listen in? Who knows what you might be about to hear, and what you might do with it.

Mark Love & Jacqui Saunders

2008

Overheard something that you’d like to share? You can submit your own ear-wiggings at:

www.overheardconversations.com

PS Oh, just one more thing before we go…Just to make it very clear that the opinions and views expressed by the people in these conversations are absolutely NOT those of the authors or their publishers.

Toy Story

A town centre toy store, mid-December, and the manager and a Sales Assistant are staring intently at the stock on the shelves.

SALES ASSISTANT: Dunno what it is but Barbie’s just not going this year.

MANAGER: Hmmmm…What if we put Superman on top of Barbie? Do you think that’ll get her going?

SALES ASSISTANT: Nnnh, I don’t know…

MANAGER: No! I know! Put Barbie on top of Superman. Yeah, that should get her going!

Zip It

A shop owner has been questioning her male assistant over a prolonged absence from work.

SHOP OWNER: So you’re saying you were off for three weeks because you had an accident with your zip?

ASSISTANT: It’s not funny! Little accidents can turn into something very nasty. I could have died. I was very ill, you ask Frank.

SHOP OWNER: You could have died? What actually happened?

ASSISTANT: I told you, I had an accident with my zip.

SHOP OWNER: Can you be a bit more precise? This is three weeks, not three days.

ASSISTANT: Look, I got it stuck in my zipper.

SHOP OWNER: You got your thing stuck in your zip and it took you three weeks to get over it? Marge had triplets and she was back at work six days later.

ASSISTANT: I got blood poisoning. I’ve only just got over it.

SHOP OWNER: How do you get blood poisoning from getting your thing caught in your zip?

ASSISTANT: I don’t know! But I did! It was really serious at one point. I almost died.

SHOP OWNER: Well that would have meant for an interesting obituary, wouldn’t it?