For many years I have collected snippets of conversation accidentally overheard or one side of a phone call that sounded comic, menacing or just plain mysterious. My collection is small because most of what is garnered through unintentional eavesdropping is dull and long-winded, but I occasionally hear something which is rivetingly interesting or bizarre.
I was travelling on a train between St Pancras and Canterbury West just before Christmas a year ago, when I became conscious of a middle-aged man making a phone call a few seats away who was raising his voice in irritation. As he kept repeating himself, the reason for this soon became clear, as did the identity of the person to whom he was speaking.
He was complaining vigorously and at length to his mother about the behaviour of his sister whom he said had invited herself to stay for Christmas, though that was not the main reason why he was so upset. She was not only staying in his house, but she was demanding that he put a Christmas stocking at the end of her bed on Christmas morning. “I’ll do that for my nine-year-daughter but not for a 40-year-old-woman,” the man kept telling his mother, who was presumably trying to calm him down, in tones of increasing outrage.
My father Claud Cockburn, from whom I got the habit, would collect chunks of conversation that he found particularly intriguing. Once in New York he had heard one person saying to another as they walked past the open window of his apartment: “Yes, I…