The art of talking to strangers

About halfway round the park, by the last spindly remnants of the Festival of Britain, I bumped into my Scandinavian acquaintance.

‘Beautiful day,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be in Sweden by now.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not quite. My daughter’s going for midsummer – it’s her first time on her own. We’re going a little later but I thought she’d like a treat for having finished her GCSEs.’ ‘How gorgeous!’ I said. Around our feet our dogs greeted each other in a stately way – two schnauzers, hers a beautifully groomed gentleman called Prince with a gravity-defying moustache like a Wilhelmine Feldmarschall; mine a plump and rumpled small person, like the White Queen.

I am one of those people who strikes up conversations with anyone in the vicinity; also someone, for some reason, that people strike up conversations with.