Under The Clock At Waterloo

It was reminiscent of a 1940s film. A rendezvous had been made to meet under the clock at Waterloo at 10am this morning. The station was filled with people searching the boards to find out which platform their train was leaving from. There were greetings between those who had not seen each other for some time; there were partings as some set off on adventures or off to some far away place.

I was there, standing under the clock, waiting for someone who I had never met before. Someone with whom I had never spoken. Yet I did not feel as though I was meeting a stranger. I was meeting someone who over the last few months I had come to look upon as a friend. There was no newspaper under my arm, nor a carnation in my buttonhole. I had told the person that I was meeting that I would be wearing my new blue jumper; I hoped that they would recognize it.

This was going to be a first for me. I had never made such an assignation before, I was suddenly a little apprehensive and yet I was looking forward to this encounter. Thoughts went through my mind. Would we get on together? Would we find anything to talk about? We both had mental scars, yet this was perhaps what had drawn us together in the first place.

Today was the big day. Today, I was meeting There and Back.

I have to admit that we have been corresponding by email for some weeks now, and as she was making a visit to London we decided to meet and chose under the clock at Waterloo as our meeting place as so many must have done before us. We walked from the station to get away from the crowds and went to Starbucks for a mug of hot chocolate. And we talked, and talked and talked. For two hours we talked and covered a wide range of subjects, but the thing that we talked about most was our addiction. Yes, we are both addicted to studying with the Open University. We talked about courses we had done, and courses we were yet to take. We talked about families, and about other bloggers.

It is a strange thing, this blogging world. We often comment to each other about how we will never meet and yet we seem to have so many things in common. But for There and Back and I, we shall no longer wonder about the person whose blog we read, for we have met and we enjoyed each other's company. In fact, we enjoyed it so much we have already agreed to do it again some time. What was important about this meeting is that both of us find it difficult to meet new people and we are often uncomfortable in crowded places. Today, I think we both went some way to beating this fear and we have lived to tell the tale.

Just in case you may think I am speaking out of turn, one of the first things I asked There and Back was whether she would mind if I wrote about our meeting in a post. She said 'No', and that she had thought of doing the same thing. So look out for a post on her blog in the days to come.

A Sad Person

I guess I'm a bit of a sad person. I have just taken delivery of a new ...

DICTIONARY

... and I'm really excited about it.

I've owned a number of dictionaries during my lifetime. I can remember the excitement of getting my first dictionary when I was about 10. I think it was a Collins Dictionary, but I'm not exactly sure now because being 10 was a long time ago. I later received an English-French dictionary, followed a year later by an English-Latin dictionary, and then by an English-German dictionary. Studying foreign languages up to GCE 'O'-level was compulsory when I was at school. When I was in the Sixth Form, I was given the opportunity to study Russian in some of my spare periods, so an English-Russian dictionary was added to the bookcase in my bedroom.

Fortunately I was taught spelling when I was at primary school; every Friday morning for all the years that I was at the school, there was a spelling test. It taught me to love the English language, and it also taught me that it had a lot of tricks that it could play in order to catch the unwary. When I started working, I didn't need to use my knowledge of English to begin with, but as I moved up the ladder, the type of work that I did changed, and the use of English became all important. At work I had to use the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as the arbiter for spelling and definition. Each time a new edition came out, our library staff had to order a number of copies so that the editors all had their own copy for reference. However, at home for help with crosswords, I had a copy of Chambers 20th Century Dictionary.

I haven't bothered to get a new dictionary because I didn't think I would need one. I can always use the spellchecking facility in the various applications that I use on the computer, so I have stuck with the dictionaries I already had. But I am doing the last two modules for my second degree, and for one of them The Chambers Dictionary is a set book, and a brand new edition has just been published. So for the first time in about 20 years, I personally own a brand new dictionary, and it is full of lovely words like blog, blogger, and blogosphere.

You can hardly blame me for getting excited, can you?