Taxidermy

You have very little choice, on a busy commuter train, about where to sit, but you have absolutely no choice about who sits next to you, which is how I found myself sitting next to a couple of young chaps on the way home last night - one next to me, and one opposite. I never did get a good look at the one next to me, because it would be inexcusably rude to turn your head that far round to stare, but he and his friend were in their twenties, at a guess, clean and well-spoken, obviously well-off and, as it turned out from their conversation, on their way to spend the weekend together in St Albans. Whether they had been at school together, or at university together, or what, I don't know, but they had a large circle of mutual friends, plus families, and they were busy catching up on what they had all been doing.

Their conversation was the problem. It wasn't loud, or foul-mouthed, or anything like that, but it is quite unusual for people to have such long conversations and it is very difficult indeed not to listen when they do. Noone else was talking, there were no other distractions, I didn't have a book (I doubt if I could have concentrated on it if I had) - and the conversation became increasingly bizarre. It reached a culmination like this.

"So, is he still into that taxidermy thing, then?"

"Yes. He's just bought two golden eagles. Shot in 1910. And they're in these huge cases. Six foot square. He's had to have the doors taken off the house to get them in. One of them has got its claws in a badger."