Haven't I seen you somewhere before?

It’s always awkward when you see someone you haven’t seen for years.  It’s normally someone from school or somewhere you used to work and you see them sitting on the bus or shopping in town.  It’s a situation you can’t escape – you've seen them and you realise that they've seen you too.  You could be brave and acknowledge them, hoping to recount tales of yore. Stories such as the time the chemistry teacher left the teaching lab for five minutes, returning to find the room stinking of gas and a first year on fire in the corner or the time your boss fell down the stairs and both her shoes flew off.

            The conversation invariably starts with a nervous, ‘So, what have you been up to?’, answered with either an indifferent, ‘Nothing much’ or an in depth account of the three divorces, five kids and eight jobs they've had in the 2 years since they last saw you.  Even more uncomfortable however, is the meeting in the shopping centre.  You’re power-walking to your favourite fast food outlet when out of the corner of your eye you see an ex-‘colleague’.  You have to stop, raise your eyebrows and look genuinely pleased to see them, though you made no effort to stay in touch after they were made redundant and you kept your job.  “Where are you working now?”, the conversation starts, “I’m not”, comes the inevitable reply followed by the tale of depravity.  The conversation also includes lots of fake smiling and nods of false surprise at the current situation they find themselves in.

"Who is he again? Oh, it's that boring idiot that used to... Hey! Lovely to see you again!"

            The worst of these meetings comes in the supermarket.  You’re sauntering up the poultry and game aisle, checking the sell-by dates and that ‘corn-fed’ actually means that the animal in question has been fed on cereal and not on bits that fell off the farmer’s feet, when the ghost from your past floats up the aisle towards you.  Much as you’d love to chat, you make the excuse that there are other trolleys trying to get past and you must move on, but it was wonderful to see them anyway.  You reach the end of the aisle and turn into the Oriental and Mediterranean sauces aisle, forgetting that the person you just exchanged pleasantries with would also be turning into this aisle from the other end. You stoop to study the Ragu until they pass, hoping they wouldn't try and speak to you again.  You then formulate a plan; you must either miss an aisle to ensure your respective journeys are out of kilter and so avoid another uncomfortable moment or hang back and hope people think you are health conscious, studying the nutritional value of the jar of Dolmio you've been staring at for the last five minutes.

"You're buying a Baguette, ey? Well, see you later!"

            Lastly you have that chance meeting with a person you only ever had one thing in common with, like the love of a sitcom which finished years ago but fails to go away due to the 'Gold' channel on Sky.  I knew such a person and the only thing we had in common was an English teacher at school with a strange accent.  Whenever we saw each other we’d go ‘You’re not allowed to do that’ in a Cornish-cum-Scottish accent and then giggle like twelve-year-olds; only because we were actually 12 at the time.  Six years later I saw him approaching from the opposite end of a corridor in a library.  Horrifically, we made eye contact at twenty metres.  We couldn’t maintain that eye contact for the full fifteen seconds until we met in the middle.  I had to feign interest in passing posters and missives pinned to the wall, my shoes, the ceiling tiles, the exquisite view of a brick wall out of the window, my shoes and the posters once more until we meet, grin, raise our eyebrows and say, “So, what have you been up to?”.