Late last night I was heading to the shops. I asked one of my housemates:
“Do you need anything from the shops?”
“Could you get me a loaf of bread?”
“What type of bread?”
“White bread, Hovis preferably”
“What thickness? You might as well give me your full bread specification”
“Erm, probably just thick sliced. Actually: surprise me”
How exactly should I surprise him?
Perhaps just a simple change. Medium sliced Warburtons. Not what he expected, certainly a bit of a surprise.
Extra-thin sliced. I swear I’ve seen this before in shops, IMO almost useless in the category of supermarket breads. Near impossible to apply cold butter to.
A sourdough loaf from the bakery section: hand-torn by me, kneeling in a nearby lane.
Maybe just half a dozen rolls. A surprise for sure, while still remaining “bread”. I could probably make something interesting for him using a pack of ciabattas and a bottle of superglue.
Panko breadcrumbs. Perhaps the finest of bread specification.
Bread sauce.
A “more surprising category of surprise” would be something which isn’t bread. A bag of carrots. My housemate has a tendency of complaining that we have too many carrots, whenever two of us buy a 1kg bag concurrently. He bought carrots yesterday, so he likely wouldn’t be so pleased.
Maybe just getting him nothing. This would likely be a shock to him, or perhaps not. He may have the possibility in his mind that I’ll forget his request.
It could be that the most surprising thing for my housemate is if I get him exactly what he wants. He knows I’m a relatively creative person who enjoys playing into little jokes. It could be the case that – in asking for me to surprise him – he’s expecting something shocking: making the concept of surprise all the harder.
This reminds me of a logical conundrum:
A logician is told that, some day between Monday and Friday, an executioner is to come to his house to kill him; and the logician will be surprised when this happens.
The logician thinks about this. If the executioner arrives on Friday, the logician will have known since Thursday night that this is the only possibility remaining, so it won’t be much of a surprise. Since Friday is off limits, Thursday must be the last day he could be killed. This means by Wednesday night he will know that it is happening on Thursday, and therefore it won’t surprise him. This same logic can be extended to Wednesday; to Tuesday; to Monday.
The only reasonable conclusion – the logician reasoned – is that the executioner isn’t coming at all, and that he can rest easy.
The logician was very surprised when the executioner arrived on Wednesday.
I bought him a medium-sliced white loaf. They were out of thick-sliced.
“Surprise!”