There are stories everywhere
Stories are there for the finding all the time, wherever you are. There are far too many in one person's life for them to use in their own writing, and sometimes I find there are too many in one day even to write them all down, but it keeps me entertained and it keeps my brain ticking over. Take today, for instance. On the way to work I saw a man emerge from an expensive-looking hotel, and at first glance mistook him for an unmarried colleague. Although it was immediately clear it wasn't him, I started piecing together what he'd be doing there an hour before work (he starts later than I do), beginning with the obvious but not necessarily interesting view that he'd spent the night with someone there and was going home to change. Perhaps a rich relation was staying in that hotel because she considered my colleague's house beneath her, but the purpose of this pre-breakfast visit was just the first of many questions that were sparked off - this is how stories are born.
On the way home, I passed a glossy black Range Rover with a personalised numberplate, and two dents in the bonnet of about the right size and spacing to have been caused by fists brought down in anger. Now I could be wrong but I imagine you'd have to be uncommonly strong to thump a Range Rover and leave a big dent but it didn't stop me wondering who had done such a thing and why. Had it happened too recently to have been fixed, or were they left there as a reminder (to whom?) or maybe a badge of honour? Then came two more cars with personalised numberplates, one spelling a word that looked like it could be a nickname (certainly not a real name), the other spelling two words that were more like a philosophical statement. Who did they belong to, why had they got them (and why those particular words), what made them buy them at the time they did?
A recent family history magazine contained an article about someone finding a box of postcards received over the years by a long-dead relative. She knew who the senders of some of the postcards were, and mostly they were standard holiday fare, but the odd few were more intriguing - oblique references to shared experiences, in-jokes meaningless to those coming after, sent presumably by close friends in high-spirited youth. To a teller of stories these are great treats - the two-line silliness a coded message, 'Richard' the pseudonym of a secret lover; I can build whole pictures of sender, recipient and their adventures without ever knowing anything about them but the hastily-written lines on a card. Of course, it won't bear any resemblance to reality, but that's not the point. It reminded me that when my parents moved further south for a while during my childhood, Big Brother (then in his early twenties and firmly planted in the north) would sometimes go for day-trips on his bike and send me postcards. Whether anyone in the future would guess the real situation from the pictures of Yorkshire seaside with a knock-knock joke or funny story on the back (not always signed) I don't know, but they could have a lot of fun coming up with plausible alternatives.