I had an interesting experience today. I am selling a lot of furniture and various other household goods, and today I had a phone call from a heavily-accented foreigner who wanted one of my bookcases.

His accent was unknown to me, so I assumed he would be a product of the mysterious Orient. (This is the default ethnicity of unknown speakers of not-so-good English hereabouts.) He turned up punctually to claim one Tall, Good Condition But Slightly Bent bookcase as advertised.

This was just the beginning of what proved to be an hour-long conversation, or I should say "monologue", during which I learned many things and nodded and smiled and was extremely polite, because I wanted him to hurry up and give me some money and go away.

The man was from Macedonia, and after viewing the bookcase he launched without warning into the fascinating topic of how NASA faked the moon landings. From here we moved on to the equally fascinating subject of Eastern European history, going right back to the siege of Vienna in 13something, and eventually taking in the whole sweep of the modern Serbian separatist movement, the reasons for the death of the King of Bulgaria at the hands of Josef Stalin, expansionist imperatives in the Ottoman Empire, both World Wars, and the Kosovo conflict. I would swear there was nothing at all, either in the surroundings or the original conversation, which provoked any of this. He just came in, looked at the bookcase, said he would take it, and then started this totally random lecture for no apparent reason.

Once all this had been thoroughly explored, by way of some sidelights on Alexander the Great, modern American cultural imperialism, and his thoughts on Muslim fundamentalism (he is against it), we ended up in Iraq 15 years ago where he was helping build a nuclear power plant. I think. By this stage I had been gaping fishlike at the guy for about forty minutes and trying desperately not to either yawn or collapse in fits of laughter. Encouraged by my silence, he went on to tell me how he had been a captain in the Yugoslav navy and later in the merchant marine, and had taught himself 15 languages in his spare time from books while he was at sea.

It was all a most unexpected way to sell a bookcase. He was a very friendly, pleasant and well educated little man, probably a very recent immigrant with few friends here. He seemed glad to have the chance to talk to somebody, although with the ability to bore people solid in 15 languages he shouldn't have much trouble finding victims. If he phones again about any of the other furniture I think I'll pretend he has the wrong number.

Brunnen-"that was so cool"G