Lets Play a Game
Let's arrive at Paddington railway station, needing to go to the toilet. Let's pretend we have no money in our pockets at all, due to the wonders of bank cards. Let's then suppose the only way you can access the toilets at Paddington railway station are if you have 30 pence upon your person.How best to acquire 30 pence without begging?My chosen solution was to go off in search of the cash machines, which are in a dark corridor next to a building site in the back of the stationa perfect place for muggings to happen. After acquiring money (the hole in the wall spat out two 20 notes), I realised that was more than you can put in the machine outside the toilets to acquire the requisite coins to enter said toilets, so thought “I'll go and buy something!“It's a very strange thinggoing shopping in a railway stationwhen the ultimate aim of going shopping is to break a bank note into suitable coinage to gain access to toilets.
I wandered around WHSmithsthe book seller, stationers, and purveyor of ridiculously expensive sandwiches, and found myself looking at the “recommended new authors” sectiona present for my other half, perhaps?After a few moments reading synopsi (is that the collective noun for them?), I picked out the book pictured above”The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet”, by Becky Chambers.
Quite apart from it being raved about on GoodReads and Amazon (I checked), the synopsis reads as follows:When Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, she isn't expecting much. The Wayfarer, a patched-up ship that's seen better days, offers her everything she could possibly want: a small, quiet spot to call home for a while, adventure in far-off corners of the galaxy, and distance from her troubled past.
But Rosemary gets more than she bargained for with the Wayfarer. The crew is a mishmash of species and personalities, from Sissix, the friendly reptillian pilot, to Kizzy and Jenks, the constantly sparring engineers who keep the ship running. Life on board is chaotic, but more or less peacefulexactly what Rosemary wants.
Until the crew are offered the job of a lifetime: the chance to build a hyperspace tunnel to a distant planet. They'll earn enough money to live comfortably for years if they survive the long trip through war-torn interstellar space without endangering any of the fragile alliances that keep the galaxy peaceful.
But Rosemary isn't the only person on board with secrets to hide, and the crew will soon discover that space may be vast, but spaceships are very small indeed.
It seems like a great bookso much so that I might have to steal it from my other half when she's done with it. AnywayI didn't set out to write about the book. The book was a means to spend some money such that I would end up with some change.
I got in the queue, book in hand, waiting to be served. After a few moments a self-service till became available, and the floor staff beckoned me towards it. I really wanted a human to deal with my order so I could ensure I got some small change, but now I found myself doing as suggested (like an idiot), and wondering if everything was going to go disastrously wrong.
I scanned the book. I pressed the “pay” button on the flat screen. I fed a bank note into the slot. The machine thought about it for a few moments, and then spat out my changeincluding a pound coin!Two minutes later I was stood outside the toilets at the change machine, turning the pound coin into a collection of smaller changesome of which would be spent immediately to get through the turnstyles to go have a pee.
It probably says a lot about “being English” that we are SUCH sticklers for doing things the way we are expected to. I could have jumped the barrier to the toilets. I could have done lots of things. I didn't. I went out of my way to “fit in”to “not make waves”.
We're a strange race.