It's great when you hear a snatch of conversation from some passing strangers. You can learn so much about someone you don't know in so few words.
I was in Oxford Street, killing time before the annual meet up of my University friends (once again, as if to make me look stupid, no-one had fulfilled my prediction and died and as with last year on man could not make it as his girlfriend was in hospital about to have a child. I'll show them next year, by both failing to procreate and dying during my Marathon training. Ha ha ha). I was queuing up to get a coffee when two people, in mid conversation, passed the open cafe door. I had my back to the door so I didn't even see them, but I didn't need to.
I heard a woman's voice saying "However good it is it can't be as good as seeing Freddie himself, up there, performing." He male companion agreed. I was able to tell in an instant that they were discussing the popular musical (and favourite of comedian Stewart Lee), "We Will Rock You" and that they were both fans of the pop band "The Queen" (I know).
They clearly both loved The Queen's (I know) music and felt that We Will Rock You was an acceptable substitute for the band now that Freddie was gone. But clearly the received opinion was that they'd rather be seeing the actual band.
Then the girl said, with some degree of glum self pity, "You know, he died on my birthday." It wasn't the fact that Freddie had died that was causing her grief. The emphasis was very much on the fact that hso death had coincided with her own special day. That this made the whole thing much more tragic... for her.
She wanted her companion to feel sorry for her. Because her favourite pop star had spoiled her birthday celebrations by dying. This made me laugh to myself. How could Freddie Mercury have had the affrontary to expire on a day that was so special to someone who really liked him? Could he have not held on til the next day and let her enjoy the anniversary of her birth without having to feel depressed about his passing? There are a lot of days in the year, there must be at least one which would hold no significance to anyone who really liked his music. And let's just say that there were more than 366 people who classed themselves as fans of "The Queen" (I know), wouldn't it have been less selfish of him to either a) never die or b) die on February 29th, when statistically less fans would be celebrating important personal events that would be marred by the ceasation of his life.
I wanted to say to her, "Yeah, that must have been a pretty bad day for you then, though possibly comparatively a slightly worse one for Freddie." But she had gone and I could hear no more of her lament for herself and her terrible luck.
Yet I didn't need to know any more about her. She likes "The Queen" (I know) and to a lesser extent the musical "We Will Rock You"- if she isn't one of the people in the audience on the poster then I will make a guess that there is a woman in that audience who looks pretty much identical to her-and she's a bit self-obsessed; the kind of person who manages to see the bad side of things from her point of view and try to elicit sympathy for the terrible blows that she has received in life (such as her hero having the audacity to die on her birthday). The kind of person who appears in the audience of Kilroy.
Perhaps someone would like to use a computer programme to morph the faces of all the women from the audience of the "We Will Rock You" poster with a selection of faces of moaning women who can only appreciate their own suffering in the Kilroy audience to create an average face of this kind of person.
Then someone else could use the internet to find the date of Freddie Mercury's death and then discover all the women who had that day as their birthday, then possibly using CCTV footage from Oxford St at around 5.30 of this evening work out which of these women it was who said the things above.
I bet if you compared the image from the CCTV with the image from the computer you would be looking at exactly the same face.
I hope a couple of you will take up this project to prove me right.
