I find life to be bizarre and inexplicable on a pretty much daily basis, and I’d like to share with you the tale of one recent misunderstanding. I should warn you up front, it’s a baffling and nerve-shredding tale of tension and terror, and you will need all your deductive powers to help decipher it. Join me, if you dare, for…

So there I was the other day, on my way to an important and serious meeting about pirates and  dinosaurs and robots and such.  I was a little early so was killing a bit of time in the Oxford city centre branch of a Well-Known Coffee Shop Chain. At this point, I feel it will be useful to include a couple of diagrams to help establish key aspects of the scene:

Exhibit A: The Immediate Environs

And, as this was quite early in the morning, the rest of the place was pretty quiet:

Exhibit B: The Wider Locale

So I was a little surprised when a large middle-aged gentleman dropped heavily into the seat opposite me. I looked up and my innocent gaze was confronted with the following spectacle:

Exhibit C: The Offending Behaviour

This curious fellow kept up the evil eye and theatrical huff-and-rustle act for about five minutes and then, with a final passive aggressive flourish of the newspaper but without even finishing his tiny coffee, he departed as abruptly as he’d arrived.  I was left alone in – and let me restate this for emphasis – a TOTALLY EMPTY COFFEE SHOP.

Now, review Exhibits A-C and you will agree with me that this singular incident raises several profound and searching questions, principally:

1. Why MY table?
2. Why not even an ‘excuse me, is anyone sitting here?’ before sitting down? Isn’t that mandatory?  Why wouldn’t anyone say that? That’s JUST WEIRD.
3. Why did he leave in such a rush? Coffee in those places is terribly expensive.

I feel like I was on the wrong end of a genuine misunderstanding here, but unfortunately for the sake of a satisfying conclusion to this story, I  have absolutely no idea what it was. What was really going on in the huffing fellow’s mind? What was the missing piece of information that could have unravelled this tangled web of intrigue?

After subjecting the matter to a rigorous and exhaustive process of deduction and analysis, I have formulated the following three HIGHLY PLAUSIBLE scenarios:

1)      He was a SPY, and had mistaken me for a FELLOW SPY.

2)      He was an OLDER VERSION OF ME, time-travelling from the future to warn me of some impending catastrophe but FORBIDDEN BY THE LAWS OF TIME TRAVEL from making direct contact.

3)      He was just a bit of a jerk, with an inappropriate sense of entitlement.

That’s it, I’m out of theories. If any of you reading this have any other suggestions of hypotheses that could help shed light on this dark and inscrutable mystery, please post them in the comments here. Until then I shall remain, as ever, mildly baffled.

Neill’s website: www.neillcameron.com

Neill’s blog: neillcameron.blogspot.com