My mother is a bore magnet. They travel from miles around to sit in the chair opposite hers and tell her every last detail of their lives in a protracted monologue and then they leave. It’s like a surgery. One after another they appear at the door, bursting with a narrative of their incredible lives. If they can’t get there in person, they ring her up and talk about themselves on the phone for hours on end. I suppose it must be a kind of innocence to find the minutiae of your daily life so consistently remarkable that you simply must tell it to a third party. Perhaps I should envy them.
I walked in the open front door the other day to find my mother and one of her client bores standing in the hallway. They had gone into the kitchen to make a pot of tea, found there a female pheasant and two adolescent chicks, and retreated to the hall.
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