My daughter has been doing her end-of-high-school Matura exams. This week, she called me to tell her about her English listening exam that she had just completed. What she told me was a pleasant surprise. The listening text was about my home town in the UK. Maybe that wouldn’t be too surprising if I came from London, Birmingham or Liverpool, but our town has a population of about 5,000 people.
The listening exam (check the third page) talked about the heritage steam train that travels about 15 kilometres to a station that links to the national rail network and also about the history of watercress, which is grown around our town.
That would be the end of my story and it would be a fun coincidence if it finished there, but it doesn’t. About an hour after I heard from my daughter, I was taking the dogs for a walk. There a light rain, so I put on my wax jacket which I inherited from my father, which I guess he bought some time on the 1980s. It’s pretty good jacket, but I wouldn’t wear it in town as it’s starting to show its age!
As I was preparing for the inevitable result of our dog walk by looking for the dog poo bags, I put my hand in one of the many pockets of the jacket trying to locate the bags, I found some but I also discovered something else. What I pulled out was the icing on the cake to this short tale. It was a ticket for the train that my daughter had been listening about a few hours earlier. The ticket was for all-day travel on the train and had been issued in 1990. That year was the year after I’d finished my end-of-high-school A-level exams and, incredibly when I was the same age as my daughter is now.
This serendipitous event could be interpreted in many different ways, I think it means that it’s high time for me to buy myself a new jacket!
Andy Highton Language Training 