There's That Word Again

Thursday I phoned the dentist to book a checkup for Friday. That afternoon a filling fell out. Prescience is not the word I was thinking of, but it fits. Also that morning, I continued a strain of increasingly silly emails with one which contained the lines:

Ahoy me hearties. Yo ho ho and batten down the cabinboy. Death to the French!

which of course sounds more like Jabberwockian than English if you're not party to the the preceding year or two's correspondence and even then would be difficult to fathom and possibly lead you to believe that you were reading the ravings of segregated madmen. You'd be part right on that, too. My point is that I almost never speak of sailing so the word batten rarely gets a mention. Today's A-Word-A-Day word is Batten. (and yes DD if you're reading this, hang-gliders do have them too as you pointed out to me sometime in the recent past.)

Two days later, in a similar vein...
I phoned a friend in Canberra to inform her that our meeting in late July would have to be changed. Another voice came on the speaker phone - it was a mutual friend who was also my list to phone about another meeting in Qld and whose cellphone number I didn't have - he was there for one night only, his first trip to Canberra in years, and this was my first phonecall to our friend in ages.

Synchronicity.

A couple of months back, it had been on my mind for some weeks to phone a friend who I thought must be back from Africa by now, so I did. There was silence for a moment on the other end, then a puzzled response, something like "why are you phoning me now", or somesuch. And then a shriek - I don't believe it, she said, I've just walked in the door a few minutes ago. She had been away for two months, and our communication during that time had been limited to a postcard.