I have a new friend. She can be seen on the photo here and I picked her up in a shop the other day. A few days earlier I had no idea that I would feel the need to pick her up, but there you go, that’s life I guess.
On Monday I went to work as usual, went to a few meetings in the morning, more or less ‘business as usual’. For lunch, I thought I’d show my two colleagues the brand new auditorium and the lunch restaurant there, so we took a short walk and went into the building that looks like a giant glass bowl. Of course, if you give three engineers the choice of three different dishes for lunch, they will pick one each. We went looking for a table, sat down with salmon on a bed of fennel, a giant ball of mince of lamb with mash and a Swedish quiche on a bed of greens, and no, the woman in the party (me) did not have the quiche…
Having finished both the food and the mandatory Swedish ‘fika’ (coffee or tea plus something sweet, like a cookie or cake or similar), we took our trays and made our way through the spacious restaurant towards the place for dirty dishes and I found myself thinking: “hmmmm, if I were to see someone I recognise sitting at those tables, I would probably find myself freezing…”. For those of you readers lucky enough to not understand the meaning of that sentence, here is a brief video from youtube (for the extra interested, look here). There is a lot to be said about this mysterious speciality of a fascinating disease, but that’s for another day, back to the restaurant…
You will probably find this just as hard to believe as my brain did, but exactly as that thought (“hmmmm, if I were to see someone I recognise sitting at those tables, I would probably find myself freezing…”) had flickered through my brain, I actually did see someone I recognised, and even before I had consciously noted that the pattern recognition system of my defective brain had identified a match with the increasing numbers of posts in the “database”, my knees had stopped working… As an immediate result, my feet were completely stuck to the brand new floor. Unfortunately, the rest of my body hadn’t been made aware of this sudden change of priorities, and therefore continued in the previously agreed direction. Before I knew it, my knees were hitting the aforementioned floor (ouch!) and my adrenaline levels skyrocketed. The most unexpected thing is, would you believe it, that I didn’t drop my tray!!!! The other guests in the restaurant applauded as I got back up on my feet, with the tray still intact. I made a sort of curtsey and handed over the tray to the man who completely unknowingly put me in this awkward position by being someone I knew; one of my PhD supervisors as well as a neurologist. He completely understood why I was looking like I was glued to the floor, as did the person he was having lunch with; a professor in neuroscience, and the former came to help me. I have no idea how, but I made my way towards my surprised colleagues and we left the restaurant full of people with an interesting story to share at the dinner table. My knees were tender from the impact, but more than that, my ego was badly bruised…
When the shock had settled slightly, I decided that I would do my best not to let this limit my life any more than absolutely necessary so after some Facebook facilitated advising with a few people around the world, I decided that I needed a new friend. The decision did not come easily and using it still takes a lot of “pride swallowing”…
Would you help me choosing a name for her?
To be continued…
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