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Minor Strangeness (IHTM)

Parabanal,

Did you take the picture in post# 5392 above ?

INT21
 
I was out with the dog this morning, heading back up the bridleway when I saw a flash of fluorescent orange up by the hedge in the sheep field. It looked as though someone in a hi-viz jacket had dodged down when they saw me coming. There was a 4 x4 parked at the top so I assumed someone was doing some fencing in the field, although couldn't fathom why they'd wear hi-viz for that.

When I got to the top, the 4 x 4 turned out to belong to a landscaper working in the nearby garden. And there was no sign of anyone in the sheep field. I stared at the hedge for a while, in case there was a bit of fabric caught, but no sign of anything fluorescent or orange. Then I wondered if one of the landscapers had popped into the field for an outdoor wee, but they weren't wearing hi viz. So it remains one of those pointless little mysteries that enliven life.
 
catseye said:
I was out with the dog this morning, heading back up the bridleway when I saw a flash of fluorescent orange up by the hedge in the sheep field. It looked as though someone in a hi-viz jacket had dodged down when they saw me coming. There was a 4 x4 parked at the top so I assumed someone was doing some fencing in the field, although couldn't fathom why they'd wear hi-viz for that.

When I got to the top, the 4 x 4 turned out to belong to a landscaper working in the nearby garden. And there was no sign of anyone in the sheep field. I stared at the hedge for a while, in case there was a bit of fabric caught, but no sign of anything fluorescent or orange. Then I wondered if one of the landscapers had popped into the field for an outdoor wee, but they weren't wearing hi viz. So it remains one of those pointless little mysteries that enliven life.
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A friend of mine, an agricultural worker, had a workmate who was always going on about council workmen wandering around the farm.

Back then the only people who wore hi-viz were blokes who worked on the road, not farm workers, so it was a mystery.

Turned out he was extremely shortsighted and was spotting orange feed buckets left hanging on posts and fences.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
Didn't get around to posting this.

Cycling home from work I saw the body of King Hare, a truly magnificent beast that lived up near the cemetery. I often spotted him at night and he'd like to sit in the little slip road where I discovered his body.

The weird thing is that this road has very little traffic, it's serpentine so cars can't get up any speed and he would have had plenty of notice of a car approaching. He could shift when he wanted to and I never got close to him on my bike as he struck me as quite intelligent.

I guess he was startled and ran under the wheels of a car.

I'm sad about this. I really hate f*cking cars.
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This is very, very strange and is related to my old post from 2015.

I was cycling home from work coming up to the corner where I used to see King Hare. There I spotted a huge Hare, as magnificent as old King Hare himself sitting in the same old spot I used to see King Hare before he died. We looked at each other and the next thing is I'm in a heap having gone over the handle bars. The Hare had vanished.

My eye looks like a horror film special effect. I have cuts everywhere and bruised ribs. I went to E&A and luckily I've not fractured my eye socket. I'm a mess. I almost lost an eye from the helmet mirror - luckily it cut into my nose.


I'm thinking the front wheel detached itself from the fork.

Now I altered the front wheel quick release before leaving work and the drop outs don't have "lawyer tabs" (a curve in the drop out that prevents the wheel coming away from the front fork). This is what likely caused the wheel to detach.

I'd tightened the quick release but obviously not enough in my fatigued state. The reason I altered it was the wheel was out of true and the disc brake pad was rubbing against the disc making it tough to cycle. I thought "just get home and fix it properly there".

Why though it decided to detach just as I'd spotted the Huge animal where King Hare used to live I've no idea.

My ancestors would have said I was bewitched by a witch taking Hare form. Or maybe King Hare was stopping me from really hurting myself in a collision or something?

I was pretty shocked to see the animal sitting in that same spot.

Fairly mind blowing.
 
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escargot said:
A friend of mine, an agricultural worker, had a workmate who was always going on about council workmen wandering around the farm.

Back then the only people who wore hi-viz were blokes who worked on the road, not farm workers, so it was a mystery.

Turned out he was extremely shortsighted and was spotting orange feed buckets left hanging on posts and fences.
Click to expand...

You've reminded me of a story a colleague in a previous job told me, must be 11 or 12 years ago now.
He spotted an unmarked van at the bottom of his road, containing what looked like a driver wearing high-vis gear, accompanied by someone in the passenger seat, wearing a pale-coloured "Noddy Suit" (haz-chem or nuclear protective gear).
Thinking this was a bit suspicious, he kept an eye on them and, when the van and its rather strange looking occupants hadn't moved after an hour, my colleague called the police. They agreed to send a squad car to investigate and, sure enough, some 20 minutes later, my colleague saw a police car pull up alongside the van. Following a short conversation between the policeman and the van's occupants, the policeman walked up to my colleague's house and reported ....


..... the van contained a council worker, eating his sandwiches during his lunch break, accompanied by his Golden Retriever.

A classic "should have gone to Specsavers" moment!
 
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I've had a few moments of minor strangeness, including a couple of classics. A school journal vanished once, only to magically appear in a spot, under a desk, I'd checked two or three times before. A friend (yep, that one again :p ) and I once smelt cigar smoke in his house, despite no-one living there having smoked for years. However, his long-deceased grandfather, who'd lived in the house decades before, had been known to light up the odd stogie...

I think the most curious one relates to a house in Appledore, North Devon. My father was working there a couple of years back, staying in unused holiday lets, and I went to join him for a week. His accomodation then was a large Georgian building in the middle of the tightly-packed village. It's interior, however, was mostly Victorian in style, if a little awkwardly imposed - the place was wider at the back than the front, so the clean 1800s lines didn't quite fit. It also had a large, more modern extension grafted onto the rear.

The strangeness? The atmosphere. The house had a subtly uncomfortable feeling, a faint but persistent sense of tension, or unease. I was never truly settled, there. The day I was due to leave I noticed something especially curious - this disquieting aura didn't extend to the newer parts of the house, the loft conversion and the extension.

I actually spent a good hour tracking around and around the place, checking and checking again, trying to build a picture. The most curious detail related to the extension. The ground floor of the latter was one huge room, that actually ran into the older house, taking up what I'm guessing had been a passage along the back of it. Stepping over the line of the original wall from new build to old, the atmosphere distinctly changed.

I was rather glad to leave, if I'm honest...
 
Naughty_Felid said:
This is very, very strange and is related to my old post from 2015.

I was cycling home from work coming up to the corner where I used to see King Hare. There I spotted a huge Hare, as magnificent as old King Hare himself sitting in the same old spot I used to see King Hare before he died. We looked at each other and the next thing is I'm in a heap having gone over the handle bars. The Hare had vanished.

My eye looks like a horror film special effect. I have cuts everywhere and bruised ribs. I went to E&A and luckily I've not fractured my eye socket. I'm a mess. I almost lost an eye from the helmet mirror - luckily it cut into my nose.
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Glad you are (reasonably) okay after that Naughty_Felid. What a strange story regarding the Hare, I wonder if he could have been an apparition.
Get well soon.
 
I have a (very) minor strangeness that occurred back when I was young(er), I would have been maybe 12 or 13 at the time give or take a year or so.

Anyway. One day after getting home from school I found, stuffed in my slippers which were on the floor beside my bed (as they always were), some coloured tissues (the type for blowing one's snout, as opposed to tissue paper, just to be clear). From memory I believe there was one tissue in each shoe; one blue, one pink, and they had the distinct odour that coloured tissues had back then.

Problem was, we didn't have any coloured tissues in the house and my family were most certainly not the type to play practical jokes. I mean really, really not the type. I cannot stress this point enough. No. Practical. Jokes. And we didn't have visitors either.

So I never knew where they came from or who put them there or why. I think it only happened that one time.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
This is very, very strange and is related to my old post from 2015.

I was cycling home from work coming up to the corner where I used to see King Hare. There I spotted a huge Hare, as magnificent as old King Hare himself sitting in the same old spot I used to see King Hare before he died. We looked at each other and the next thing is I'm in a heap having gone over the handle bars. The Hare had vanished.

My eye looks like a horror film special effect. I have cuts everywhere and bruised ribs. I went to E&A and luckily I've not fractured my eye socket. I'm a mess. I almost lost an eye from the helmet mirror - luckily it cut into my nose.


I'm thinking the front wheel detached itself from the fork.

Now I altered the front wheel quick release before leaving work and the drop outs don't have "lawyer tabs" (a curve in the drop out that prevents the wheel coming away from the front fork). This is what likely caused the wheel to detach.

I'd tightened the quick release but obviously not enough in my fatigued state. The reason I altered it was the wheel was out of true and the disc brake pad was rubbing against the disc making it tough to cycle. I thought "just get home and fix it properly there".

Why though it decided to detach just as I'd spotted the Huge animal where King Hare used to live I've no idea.

My ancestors would have said I was bewitched by a witch taking Hare form. Or maybe King Hare was stopping me from really hurting myself in a collision or something?

I was pretty shocked to see the animal sitting in that same spot.

Fairly mind blowing.
Click to expand...

Sorry to hear about the accident, NF. That's a very interesting (and very Fortean) story. Get well soon!
 
This was yesterday, and don't worry, it's extremely minor...

I was driving down a lane that I travel regularly. There are some nice barn conversions there, one of which abuts the road, so that one long wall is right next to the tarmac. There's a vent in this wall at waist level, which is often venting lazy curls of steam toward the road.

Yesterday, as I passed, it was venting as usual, but just for a second, the steam seemed to flow backwards, back into the building, like a film shown in reverse, before resuming its normal state.

Almost certainly a trick of the light, of course, but curious, and not something I'd seen (or thought I'd seen) before.


And yes, I know that, strictly speaking, steam is invisible, and what you can see is condensate, thank you...
 
Peripart said:
the steam seemed to flow backwards,
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Perspective change as you moved, resulting in a parallax-illusory backtrack?

Extractor fan momentarily stopping via a thermostat, and hence acting briefly as an intake resuck?

Localised headwind draught doing a providential veer/tack pushback upon an optically-evident ground-level condensate vapour trail?

I favour my extractor-fan-reversal theory. I would put this way ahead of any localised time portal abberations, glitches in the space:time continuum or timeline reversals. But I'd leave no option unconsidered.

ps ooh, I see what you mean about a trick of the light. PIR detector falses on an eg pigeon (or indeed, car). Apparent boundary line of emitted steam seems to roll-back, but it's just a lighting effect...as seen on waterfall/water-feature optical projection effects
 
Ermintruder said:
ps ooh, I see what you mean about a trick of the light. PIR detector falses on an eg pigeon (or indeed, car). Apparent boundary line of emitted steam seems to roll-back, but it's just a lighting effect...as seen on waterfall/water-feature optical projection effects
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I think you gave me too much credit for deep thought there, but yeah, I'll go with that!

Weirder still - having driven past the same house again since typing that last post, I see that the waist-height vent is now at eye level, and the wall and road are separated by a flat verge at least 8 feet wide. It's a wonder I even made it to work, if I can't correctly spot details like that. The apparently-reversing steam was odd, though, and no repeat today.
 
Peripart said:
It's a wonder I even made it to work, if I can't correctly spot details like that
Click to expand...

Perhaps it's an omen. Take the rest of the day off.

I'll send an email to HR, or a paper 'air memo' attached to an eagle by an elastic band. I'm good with memos. And eagles. And elastic bands.

Now that'd make a change from a bored DPD driver wandering through the mailroom like a zombie....they need more elastic bands. Though probably not consumed in frenzied handfuls..
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
You've reminded me of a story a colleague in a previous job told me, must be 11 or 12 years ago now.
He spotted an unmarked van at the bottom of his road, containing what looked like a driver wearing high-vis gear, accompanied by someone in the passenger seat, wearing a pale-coloured "Noddy Suit" (haz-chem or nuclear protective gear).
Thinking this was a bit suspicious, he kept an eye on them and, when the van and its rather strange looking occupants hadn't moved after an hour, my colleague called the police. They agreed to send a squad car to investigate and, sure enough, some 20 minutes later, my colleague saw a police car pull up alongside the van. Following a short conversation between the policeman and the van's occupants, the policeman walked up to my colleague's house and reported ....


..... the van contained a council worker, eating his sandwiches during his lunch break, accompanied by his Golden Retriever.

A classic "should have gone to Specsavers" moment!
Click to expand...

A council worker on a lunchbreak that lasts over an hour and twenty minutes?

Never...
 
Naughty_Felid said:
This is very, very strange and is related to my old post from 2015.

I was cycling home from work coming up to the corner where I used to see King Hare. There I spotted a huge Hare, as magnificent as old King Hare himself sitting in the same old spot I used to see King Hare before he died. We looked at each other and the next thing is I'm in a heap having gone over the handle bars. The Hare had vanished.

My eye looks like a horror film special effect. I have cuts everywhere and bruised ribs. I went to E&A and luckily I've not fractured my eye socket. I'm a mess. I almost lost an eye from the helmet mirror - luckily it cut into my nose.


I'm thinking the front wheel detached itself from the fork.

Now I altered the front wheel quick release before leaving work and the drop outs don't have "lawyer tabs" (a curve in the drop out that prevents the wheel coming away from the front fork). This is what likely caused the wheel to detach.

I'd tightened the quick release but obviously not enough in my fatigued state. The reason I altered it was the wheel was out of true and the disc brake pad was rubbing against the disc making it tough to cycle. I thought "just get home and fix it properly there".

Why though it decided to detach just as I'd spotted the Huge animal where King Hare used to live I've no idea.

My ancestors would have said I was bewitched by a witch taking Hare form. Or maybe King Hare was stopping me from really hurting myself in a collision or something?

I was pretty shocked to see the animal sitting in that same spot.

Fairly mind blowing.
Click to expand...

That sounds a horrible freakish accident - hope you have a speedy recovery.

Re the hare, animals often have favourite spots they haunt which maybe are handed on to later generations. Could be for concealment or high spots for observation. Maybe that place is one of them. How do you know King Hare died?
 
Very minor strangeness. I have a pair of red kitchen scissors that I mainly use in the kitchen but they occasionally migrate to the lounge if I'm opening a parcel, but they usually live by the bread in the kitchen. Last night I saw them in the kitchen by the sink so I moved them back to by the bread .. where I found an identical pair of red kitchen scissors. All this time I've had two pairs of red scissors and not known. OR they multiplied recently, which seems unlikely, but it was odd.
 
Moth_in_relay said:
Very minor strangeness. I have a pair of red kitchen scissors that I mainly use in the kitchen but they occasionally migrate to the lounge if I'm opening a parcel, but they usually live by the bread in the kitchen. Last night I saw them in the kitchen by the sink so I moved them back to by the bread .. where I found an identical pair of red kitchen scissors. All this time I've had two pairs of red scissors and not known. OR they multiplied recently, which seems unlikely, but it was odd.
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Somewhere in the multiverse another you is wondering why their only pair of red kitchen scissors have suddenly vanished. They swear they left them by the sink. :nods:
 
One of my friends rang today. She's the one where odd things seem to happen on and off.
Anyway she said she'd gone to her spare room to get something and noticed a plastic bag hanging on a cupboard handle.
When she looked inside there was a small tin inside, and as she'd never seen it before took it to show her partner.
He said that his mother, who has been dead for many years used to have one the same.
When she opened it there were a number of shiny looking needles inside which may have been useful if she still used that kind as I had given her the self threading ones a few years back.
Neither of them have any idea where the tin came from and it's not as though it's a crowded room where she found it.
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
I have a (very) minor strangeness that occurred back when I was young(er), I would have been maybe 12 or 13 at the time give or take a year or so.

Anyway. One day after getting home from school I found, stuffed in my slippers which were on the floor beside my bed (as they always were), some coloured tissues (the type for blowing one's snout, as opposed to tissue paper, just to be clear). From memory I believe there was one tissue in each shoe; one blue, one pink, and they had the distinct odour that coloured tissues had back then.

Problem was, we didn't have any coloured tissues in the house and my family were most certainly not the type to play practical jokes. I mean really, really not the type. I cannot stress this point enough. No. Practical. Jokes. And we didn't have visitors either.

So I never knew where they came from or who put them there or why. I think it only happened that one time.
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Aw I missed coloured tissues.
 
escargot said:
:rollingw: Makes you wonder! Do we have a 'Mr Magoo' thread?
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this reminds me of my mate (unfortunately no longer with us RIP) who followed a car for some distance - on his way to work- watching intently the "blonde girl" sitting in the back seat. he imagined her to be beautiful etc with hair so lovely kept.... only to realise when he drew up alongside her car that the beautiful blonde was actually a football on the parcel shelf!
LEE i miss you pal!!
 
MorningAngel said:
I haven’t seen them for years or coloured loo roll either.
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Odd....I suppose there's been a diversification of suppliers (and types) at expense of colours. And just as @Mythopoeika says, perhaps there was a cost differential.

Aha....I've got a theory. Perhaps coloured toilet rolls disappeared around the time that recycled paper toilet rolls became available. Unbleached wrinkly pulped paperback books converted into off-white bum fodder.

Another theory: that toilet roll (and tissue) colours match the predominant colours of buyers' bathrooms and houses. And back in the 80s and 90s, that colour-scheme was a post-1960s paint-box of pink and blue and yellow, instead of the 50 shades of pseudo-sophisticated beige and white we all tend to live under, in this millennium.
 
MorningAngel said:
Aw I missed coloured tissues.
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Me too, they were nice sort of pastel-y colours as far as I remember. Do you (or does anyone else) also remember that they had that distinctive odour I mentioned earlier? I want to say it was a perfume-y smell but I don't think that's quite right (I guess it would have had something to do with the colouring used?) White tissues didn't have it.

I remember it was a nice smell though.



Ermintruder said:
Another theory: that toilet roll (and tissue) colours match the predominant colours of buyers' bathrooms and houses. And back in the 80s and 90s, that colour-scheme was a post-1960s paint-box of pink and blue and yellow, instead of the 50 shades of pseudo-sophisticated beige and white we all tend to live under, in this millennium.
Click to expand...

I like your theory. :nods:
 
Peripart said:
Weirder still - having driven past the same house again since typing that last post, I see that the waist-height vent is now at eye level, and the wall and road are separated by a flat verge at least 8 feet wide. It's a wonder I even made it to work, if I can't correctly spot details like that. The apparently-reversing steam was odd, though, and no repeat today.
Click to expand...

I think you experienced a glitch.
Yes definitely.
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
Me too, they were nice sort of pastel-y colours as far as I remember. Do you (or does anyone else) also remember that they had that distinctive odour I mentioned earlier? I want to say it was a perfume-y smell but I don't think that's quite right (I guess it would have had something to do with the colouring used?) White tissues didn't have it.

I remember it was a nice smell though.





I like your theory. :nods:
Click to expand...

It looks like it’s mainly tastes changing (people getting boring) and some people were sensitive to it.

I remember toilet roll that had a scented middle.

http://historysdumpster.blogspot.com/2012/08/coloured-toilet-paper.html
 
Ermintruder said:
Odd....I suppose there's been a diversification of suppliers (and types) at expense of colours. And just as @Mythopoeika says, perhaps there was a cost differential.

Aha....I've got a theory. Perhaps coloured toilet rolls disappeared around the time that recycled paper toilet rolls became available. Unbleached wrinkly pulped paperback books converted into off-white bum fodder.

Another theory: that toilet roll (and tissue) colours match the predominant colours of buyers' bathrooms and houses. And back in the 80s and 90s, that colour-scheme was a post-1960s paint-box of pink and blue and yellow, instead of the 50 shades of pseudo-sophisticated beige and white we all tend to live under, in this millennium.
Click to expand...

I think we need the colours do make up for the boring deco.

Have you noticed how the white bathroom suite is almost always ripped out and replaced with identical white items when someone moves house? Why not just clean it? No wonder than planet is suffering.
 
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