The oddities of man

Everyone is a little eccentric – myself, you, all of us – in some way of the other. But there are people you meet, or hear about, who take the proverbial cake where being ‘different’ is concerned. In my life I have come across an awful lot of these, with some ‘met’ by proxy, through what other people have told me about their own lives and experiences.

Most recently, I temporarily employed a driver while my own was away getting married. I had this new chappie, an elderly gentleman, for a month or so, and first believed that he was staid, unexciting, really pretty normal. It was only after a week or so had passed that I found that he was anything but, in a very human way, of course. For one, he insisted that he would drive the way and the route that he would drive, never mind that I actually wanted to go somewhere and somehow else, so I could do whatever it is I wanted to do, wherever I wanted to do it. So when I had an appointment one morning, he decided that we would take a shortcut and wandered all over parts of the city that I had never been to, leave alone heard of. I was sorely tempted to throw him out of the car and proceed, which I have done to a former driver, but I could not, since I had no clue how to get to where I needed to get without the old man to get me out of wherever we had got to! That incident, along with the gent’s alarming tendency to go in and out and over every pothole and bump that he possibly could find on any road made me infinitely glad when, a couple of days ago, my own driver came back, happily married, and a far more dodgy character – at least where the road and its faults were concerned.

A friend told me about a character that he had known for years. The venerable old gentleman was, in many aspects, a charmer, which they do tend to be, but with a most interesting and individual way of looking at life. According to my friend, the man insisted on doing a lot of research into everything that he acquired before he acquired it, sometimes with a passion and dedication that was, to the rest of the more mundanely-inclined population, very strange indeed. You see, the gentleman wanted to buy a toaster. So, instead of just going out and looking at what was available, asking a few people and then deciding what colour he wanted of what size of what brand, he did a little more probing than you or I would have done. He discovered that the toaster made toast that was, unfortunately, slightly better done in one corner than the rest of the slice of bread. This discovery did not come easy to him. He went through 20 pounds of sliced bread, said my friend, already in giggles before he finished the story, and toasted his way doggedly through all of them. And doggedly was the bon mot – since he could not possibly eat all that toast, not in one go and not without suffering the consequences, it is sure, he threw it out. Every dog in the area and a few from elsewhere who had heard about the offer of free toast turned up for the picnic. And left the neighbours and the neighbourhood not just rather crowded with the canine presence and its leftovers, but also with the sound and fury of a whole herd – or should it be pack? – of hungry dogs clamouring for more even as the winners took all the best of the toast and crunched their happy way through a breakfast that lasted long into supper.

Eccentricity is the spice, literally, of life, and so many people have so many idiosyncrasies that keep me wondering what will come my way next. There is the man who covers all the gutters around his house with mosquito nets so that his own space will not be infested. There is the lady who buys a fixed 20 packets of sweet biscuits every morning to feed the stray dogs in the area. There is the girl who insists on closing every window and door in her home tightly, each sealed with strips of newspaper, so that no lizard can possible even breathe into her apartment. And there is me – and you, I bet – who has more oddities than I can possible even think up. All of which makes all of us, and life, far more fun than it would be otherwise!