Tuesday 8 April 2014

Souvenirs

Last week I came back from a holiday in Seattle, and I brought various souvenirs with me including biscuits, a coffee maker, light green cotton-paper bookmarks (with pictures of presidents on them), and an expensive pocket knife. My least favourite were sleep deprivation, jet-lag, and a laundry-and-ironing backlog the like of which I haven't seen since the great washing machine failure of 2012.

My favourite three souvenirs all weigh less than a gram, they are two business cards and a tiny quantity of gold. The gold was mined in the Klondike using traditional methods. I didn't know it but Seattle was a travel and supply hub during the gold rush. There was probably nowhere better to be if you were a turn of the century husky-dog-chandler or mining-equipment-baron.

Every tourist attraction and waiting room that we stepped into had a little rack of leaflets and business cards advertising other tourist attractions. In one of these racks my friend found for me a card that didn't advertise an attraction, but the business that supplies the racks and leaflets.

The other business card belongs to a pretty harpist with whom I went out on a couple of dates. No I didn't get to pluck her strings. Yes we are keeping in contact - by letter. Yes she reads this blog. No it doesn't seem to have put her off.


Richard "pen-friends-without-benefits" B

2 comments:

  1. Actually, that's not STRICTLY accurate about the strings... (House of the Rising Sun). ;)

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  2. "Anonymous" above seems to know a lot about our first date. I assume it is the harpist's cat. I ended up back at her apartment and tried to work out how to play "House of the Rising Sun" on a lever harp. Things went no further than that.

    In the article "pluck her strings" was supposed to be a euphemism. To be clear: I did finger her instrument, I didn't finger her .....instrument.

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