📙 Part 2: Describe a time when you forgot or missed an appointment

This episode's vocabulary

Disorganized (adj.) - badly planned and without order.

Time flies (idiom) - used to mean that time passes surprisingly quickly.

To match up (phrasal verb) - if two pieces of information match up, they are the same.

Schedule (noun) - a list of planned activities or things to be done showing the times or dates when they are intended to happen or be done.

To materialize (verb) - if an idea or hope materializes, it becomes real.

Slip someone's memory/mind (idiom) - to be forgotten

Relief  (noun) - a feeling of happiness that something unpleasant has not happened or has ended.

Off the hook (idiom) - if you are off the hook, you have escaped from a difficult situation.

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Questions and Answers

M: Could you start speaking now, please?

R: Well, I missed a meeting with my friends for coffee last week, because it was a bit disorganized, which was a bit disappointing. In greater depth, it was the first week of my holidays, and I really wanted to see as much of my friends as possible before I got back to work. Time tends to fly when you have to take two weeks to have a holiday. So it's important to make the most of it. I'd already seen them one evening, but it was so short that I thought another round was necessary. To describe who I made the arrangements with in more detail, it was supposed to be with one of my best friends from my childhood, and his husband, who I'm also good friends with, plus two other friends, who I know through the first pair, the five of us are all radically different people, but it's always hilarious when we are together. To describe why I missed it further, I think it's because, in addition to having wildly different lives, we also have wildly busy lives. So matching up schedules is always hard. In this case, I thought we had a plan together. But on the day, the whole thing just failed to materialize and totally slipped my mind since I had a lot of other things going on. Well, in terms of how I felt about it, I was a bit annoyed with myself, actually, that I forgot. But there was some sense of relief as well, because it turned out that everyone else let the whole thing slip too. So I was off the hook as well as they were. Hopefully, we'll get something together again in the future because it's nice when we're all together. However, at least this time we all seem to have, well, just collectively failed to remember it.

M: And do you often forget things?

R: Oh, no, not often. My diary helps me remember.

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