Nothing deep or meaningful really in this post - but a little incident I found funny, sweet if not a little bit cheeky

Yesterday I took an hour to go and visit a friend at the Kantonspital in Basel. I walked through the main entrance hall minding my own business - there were not many people around. Suddenly an old (ish) - late 60's? man wheeled over to me in his wheel chair. He was quite charming and asked if I could help him. I stopped and listened to what he had to say.


He then produced a scribbled note name and telephone number on it and proceeded to tell me an extremely complicated story. In short, he'd met a women at the hospital and really hit it off with her. She'd gone home but he'd seen her friend and asked for this woman's phone number. The woman's friend had given him a number that didn't work - but he did have the number of the woman's friend. As you can imagine - this took some time for me to understand - not a straightforward story at all.

He then wanted me to phone up the woman's friend - and pretend that I'd met her friend (the one who he'd met) so to get the real phone number off her.

I looked him in the eye and said in German - but I couldn't possibly do that Sir - I mean you're asking me to tell a lie! (He smiled and had a twinkle in his eye and really tried to convince me saying her friend would never give it to him as he was a man) In the end I said - you can use my mobile - you call her. Or I call her and tell the truth - but I'm not lying for you.

He was actually a lovely man - and I would have happily tried to help him locate his lost love, but drew the line at lying. I wished him luck and left him in the entrance hall.

This is not the first occasion that an old (ish) gentleman has told me details of his private life! So much for the Swiss keeping themselves to themselves!!

Arghh lovely story. So what did he do- did he phone himself or not?

Some people just can't take a hint, can they?

He didn't take up my offer and use my phone. Whether he managed to convince someone else or not I don't know. He was quite a handsome chap - I could see how the older ladies would fall for him.

Trust me older swiss people hide nothing, i was just at my grandparents in Birsfelden where every old person with in 50 meters wanted to tell me all about their lives. It can get quite annoying

I find some of the old stories to be quite fascinating. Start writing the down - you could end up with a book on the social history of Birsfelden.

Hhhhmmm, the first thing he should have done was to doublecheck that phone number with the friend - it could have accidently have ben written down wrongly. Are you sure he wasn't actually trying to chat you up?

Who says there's no advantage to not knowing the local lingo? My MiL speaks too fast and in a bit of a dialect which, when she's prattling on to my husband, I can easily tune out which my husband envies. It's like we age backwards at a certain point in life to where we wear diapers and our favorite topic is our bodily functions all over again.