Three anecdotes of Newton’s absent-mindedness:

• His maid one day found him in his kitchen, holding an egg and boiling his watch.
• His nephew noted, “At some seldom times when he designed to dine in the hall, would turn to the left hand [rather than going straight], and go out into the street, where making a stop, when he found his mistake, he would hastily turn back & and then sometimes instead of going into hall, return to his chamber again.”
• From Thomas Moore’s diary: “Anecdote of Newton, showing his extreme absence–inviting a friend to dinner, & forgetting it–the friend arriving, & finding the philosopher in a fit of abstraction–Dinner brought up for one–the friend (without disturbing Newton) sitting down & dispatching it, and Newton, after recovering from his reverie, looking at the empty dishes & saying, ‘Well really, if it wasn’t for the proof before my eyes, I could have sworn that I had not yet dined.'”

English minister George Harvest was notoriously inattentive. On one occasion he accompanied Lord Onslow to Calais, awoke from an abstraction, and found that the two had become separated.

He could not speak a word of French, but recollecting that Lord Onslow was at the Silver Lion, he put a shilling in his mouth, and set himself in the attitude of a lion rampant. After exciting much wonder among the town’s people, a soldier guessing what he meant by this curious hieroglyphical exhibition, led him back to the Silver Lion, not sure at the same time whether he was restoring a maniac to his keepers, or a droll to his friends.

— The Percy Anecdotes, 1823

William Archibald Spooner never (or rarely) uttered the verbal train wrecks that were attributed to him (“Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?”). But he seemed strangely prone to similar gaffes in daily life:

• He told a student, “I thought you read the lesson badly today.” When the student protested that he hadn’t read it, “Ah,” said Spooner, “I thought you didn’t.”
• He told a fellow don at Oxford, “Do come to dinner tonight to meet our new fellow, Casson.” When the man explained, “But, warden, I am Casson,” Spooner returned, “Never mind, come all the same.”
• To another student: “Let me see. Was it your or your brother that was killed in the war?”
• An Oxford colleague once received a note asking him to come to Spooner’s office the following morning. At the bottom was a postscript saying that the matter had been resolved and that he needn’t come.
• A dining companion once saw Spooner spill a small amount of salt on the table. Apparently reversing the technique for removing a stain, he poured wine on it.

Professor Edward Morris Hugh-Jones recounted a dinner in North Oxford: “It came on to rain quite heavily, and [Spooner’s] host and hostess pressed him to stay. It was far too cold and wet for Spooner to traipse all the way back to college, they said, and they would gladly make up a bed for him. They were as good as their word and briefly departed upstairs to see to the arrangements. When they came down again, their guest had disappeared. Suddenly there was a knock at the house door, and there was Spooner, totally wet through, with a little bundle in his hands. ‘My nightshirt,’ he explained. ‘I went back to college for it.'”