Send the bones to Woking

Badly overheard remarks, phrases without context, muffled words: these are the stuff of bad dreams. For example, I was standing in a crowded Tube train and I heard a seated woman say to her companion: "Send the bones to Woking." Of course she didn't say that, but to this day I have not been able to figure out what she did say.
Once on a crowded bus, I was sitting behind two women. There was such a hubbub of voices that the only phrase of their conversation that I heard clearly was: "So, it wasn't much use to him after that. Not as a leg, that is." No context.. Did she really say that? And if so, what on earth did she mean? And if not, what on earth did she really say?
Many years ago, I was teaching a Proficiency class when my Tunisian student, a serious and well-dressed man called Max Maarek, who had a voice like a cement mixer, stood up and growled: "I must go and change my shirt", and walked out of the classroom without another word. Who knows?
Once, a very attractive Swiss student, Marianne LeCoultre, sashayed up to me like a fullrigged galleon, and asked: "Sir, do you have the fire for me?" Hey, I'm only human! In that case, however, the fact that she was holding an unlighted cigarette in her fingers gave me a clue. Sometimes I can be real smart. Duh.
A colleague told me how he was walking along the street in Edinburgh when a bell began to ring in the distance. A woman passing by said: "It's the University, there'll be rain." Explanations on a postcard, please.
When I first started teaching adult foreign students, I was sitting with a group in a pub one evening and the German girl next to me asked me "Do you have a fairy?" You can write your answer on the same postcard....
I won't go on. All I will say is that, down the long arches of the years, this kind of thing has happened to me too many times. It's enough seriously to disturb a person's poise. I swear my REM sleep these days is just rapid eye movement. No sleep, just rapid eye movement.