The case of the Irish Neighbours fan...

I just met a Irish man who demanded I write about him in my blog. I told him that he would have to do something pretty exceptional for me to write about him, as if I wrote about every traveller I spoke to it would be a boring blog both to write and read. The fact that he was having a beer for breakfast at 8am in the morning did not make him unique enough to write about on his own. Nor was his incredibly strong Irish accent, that meant I had to ask him to repeat everything he said about three or four times.

He talked to me for a while, clearly trying to impress me, by telling me some of his experiences travelling, all of which sounded very ordinary. He seemed really quite simple actually, and I wondered whether he was under the influence of drugs. Finally, I had had enough of his conversation, and to shut him up I told him he had impressed me enough that I was going to write about him, but had no intention of actually doing so. He seemed to be satisfied with that. I hoped he would go away and leave me alone for a bit, but he really didn’t get the hint.

He kept nattering away about various inane topics, until something he said finally got my attention. After discovering I was from Melbourne he mumbled something that sounded to me like ‘Dyanoredafnisthen?’ After five or six times I finally worked out that he was asking me if I knew Daphne’s coffee shop. I told him that there were 1000’s of coffee shops in Melbourne and that I didn’t know all of them. He told me it was run by a couple called Des and Daphne.

‘I don’t know anyone by that name’, I replied. ‘Melbourne’s a big place.’

‘But you must know them,’ he assured me. ‘It’s near Ramsey Street’

I realise that he’s talking about NEIGBOURS, the television show, and laugh out loud, assuming he is joking. But he looks at me in earnest and asks if I’ve been there. Now I really don’t know if he is taking the piss or is seriously deluded, but I tell him,

‘You know it’s not a real place, right?’

He looks at me and either he doesn’t understand my Australian accent, or is just ignoring that I’ve even spoken.

‘But Daphne and Des, have you met them?’ He keeps asking.

‘No I haven’t met them,’ I say.

‘Well, Charlene, surely you’ve met her?’

I wish I could say that he is joking, but he seems totally serious… If he’s taking the piss, he deserves full credit for pulling it off without cracking a single smile. I, on the other hand, have a grin from ear to ear, and have to control myself not to laugh out loud.

‘No,’ I tell him, ‘I haven’t met her. I live in a different place in Melbourne, in a different suburb that’s a long way from Ramsey Street so I’ve never even been there.’

‘Oh,’ he said, apparently satisfied.

So the random Irishman appeared in my blog after all and I’m still not sure if I managed to meet the stupidest person on the planet, or he is sitting somewhere now chuckling and telling someone about how the stupid Australian actually believed that he thought Ramsey Street was a real place.