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Iain M Banks defines an Outside Context Problem as the kind of problem "most civilisations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." This, while a fascinating definition (and a rather good book) is not the kind of OCP I intend to talk about (briefly) tonight.
Mine's more mundane, but similar in the way it causes the brain to briefly stop processing while it figures out what's going on, and why it's wrong. It's meeting a celebrity at the supermarket checkout, it's taking a holiday to LongWayAwayLand and ending up going to the same bar as your neighbour. It's doing something in one place, setting and headspace, and having someone or something from quite another suddenly turn up. In this case, it was getting on the bus while decaffeinated and having a brief, somewhat strange conversation with a perfectly nice young woman you later (quite a lot later) recognise as someone who works in the Engineering cafe, and with whom you're perfectly comfortable chatting when you (a) are in the right place and (b) remember who she is.
I have no idea how universal these experiences are, so I figured I'd write about it and see if anyone has anything to say.
So, the Sussex Uni fencing club is at the Invicta, an open competition in Kent.
We turned up late on Friday, slept at Aoife's house and headed out for the first day at WTF in the morning on Saturday (0730). Get to the Invicta, register, stand in far too long a line at the Leon Paul stand to get a second epee so I wouldn't get carded if my first weapon glitched, go on piste.
In a pool of six people, I scored pretty low (5-3, 0-5, 0-5, 0-5, 0-5), and wasn't really too impressed with my performance. I was fully expecting to be cut after the pools (depending on numbers, the bottom few fencers will be cut out of a competition so that the rest can be arranged into a tree for direct elimination bouts), so I didn't really bother doing anything about the state of my kit: repairing damage, re-seating components and adding identifying badges so it's a touch clearer to which club I belong, and so on. Naturally, a few minutes later I get called to DE, having missed the cut by about ten people. I went out in the first round of DEs, to one of the people in my pool, but I'm not too concerned. 85th out of 109. I can live with that.
The entire club went out to the "Twin Dragons" Chinese restaurant in the evening (excellent all-you-can-eat, but fresh-cooked, not a greasy buffet under heat lamps), then repaired to bed(s) after a certain amount of alcohol.
Sunday, well, Sunday was a foil tournament, so I didn't compete. Instead, I was sat in the armoury, helping Janet to repair equipment and generally discussing, sitting, etc. However, I've missed a step. The trip to the venue.
A little before a town called Upstreet, on the way to Kent Uni, the window fell out of the minibus. No fanfare, nothing, it just toppled out of the frame and exploded into tiny glass shards, leaving a nice big hole in the 'bus. So we spent most of the damn day trying to figure out if we were insured, and for how much, and with who. Originally, we thought we were with Endsleigh, so we asked them to get us a glazier. They denied all knowledge of us. Panic.
Despite the minibus officer not doing his job, and not including the up-to-date paperwork in our bus, it turned out that it didn't matter too much: we still have insurance, with Co-Op, thanks to the efforts of other people. By the end of the day, we were fairly sure we could legally drive the bus on British roads again, and we have a glazier coming to fit ... something ... in the mean-time. Meanwhile, we have a bin-bag duct-taped over the hole in the bus, to join the dinged-in roof and the dangling indicator, and all the other crap that's wrong with the thing.
Oh well. We're still alive, and so on (we don't really feel fantastic, since we're all dog-tired, but we'll do). Tomorrow, we go back to Brighton, since we can't do motorway speeds till we've a new window. See y'all on the flip side.