With no prospect, but a horrible death

I've always been fascinated by the notion of idiocy - is there an absolute scale, he's thick and she's enlightened or is it like everything in this crazy old world, it's all relative. I was standing behind some woman and her man at a sandwich bar as she was mole-faced, interrogating the sandwich selection. The fact they were blocking my access to the sandwich I wanted, didn't bother me as I wasn't in a rush and quite happy to allow her time to reach her decision, but she kept picking them up and putting them down again perhaps to check they were real, moving from one to the next as if the packaging information wouldn't compute without the affirmation of touch. The Chicken Jafrezi seemed to be warranting several repeats of this curious inspection procedure. I could see she was processing the fact that she liked chicken, but was unsure about the other bit. She then turned to her mate and, still mole-faced and confused, asked "I'll try this, but wot's jalfreezie?" to which her companion shrugged and just as I was about to burst out with, "it's Jalfrezi, you stupid woman, it's a curry - you'd probably know it as a chicken tikka but more tomatoey!" When he responds with "P'rhaps its frozen chicken" and proceeds to laugh heartily.

This confused me as either he knew what it was, but was just playing along with her ignorance by making fun of her, or he was as ignorant as she was and was amusing himself with the idea that it didn't really matter whether he knew what it was or not. My immediate rage at their stupidity subsided at this, as I thought how little it did matter whether this woman knew the difference between a Jalfrezi and a Biriani. People seem obsessed with cramming their head with essentially meaningless facts and being outraged if others haven't taken the time or had the inclination to learn them too.

I speak to academics quite frequently - now these are people who have devoted large portion of their lives to gaining an in-depth knowledge of very narrow area and if you engage them on their chosen subject you can quite quickly feel like the woman at the sandwich counter and they probably view me in the same dim light, but when it comes down to it, it doesn't mean he/she is going to enjoy their life any more or less than I might, living in ignorance of their Jalfrezi knowledge as long as I'm willing, like that woman, to experience the unfamiliar.

Looking back, this has ended up almost being one of those horrible radio 4 Thought for the Day programmes - oh well, it's too late to change it now.