There, I said it.

So now I’m just going to up and tell you about the time my mother was offered a quarter of a million for me.

Shoot. There goes the punchline.

So…previously on the ol’ raincoaster blog…my mother used to live in Riyadh with a CIA agent. Her job was at the King Fahd Hospital (I think every Saudi city has a King Fahd Hospital) in medical records, and, as one does, she had pictures of her children on and around her desk.

The Saudis, being relatively new to the modern world, had imported vast numbers of support and technical staff from the West, yea even unto Canuckistan, and occasionally ther would be slight episodes of culture shock in one or more directions.

This was one of those times.

The Saudis, being relatively new to the modern world but nobody’s fools, their Gucci tabs notwithstanding, had sent entire generations of young men to be trained in the West, choosing top of the totem pole jobs like doctor, dentist, etc. You won’t find many Saudis abroad studying to be lab technicians: that’s what Americans are for, duh. Support staff is imported, bosses are homegrown but schooled abroad.

And one of these Saudi doctors was in my mother’s office, no doubt complaining, as they all did, that the medical transcriptionist (who hailed from, if memory serves, Tennessee and had, consequently, great difficulties with English) had mistaken his Oxonian vowels, not to mention his Etonian (or at least Harrovian) consonants, and typed that the pregnant woman was dilated to “twenty-five hundred meters” rather than the “twenty-five sontemeters that he’d actually said.

And his glance happened to fall on a portrait of yours truly. And it is a fact universally acknowledged that a young Saudi doctor possessed of a secure job at the King Fahd Hospital must be in want of wife #1.

So he made an offer.

A quarter mil.

I should be honoured: Brooke Shields‘ mother was only offered forty racing camels. I did the exchange at the time and figured out I was worth about fifteen thou more than she was. Obviously the economies of Riyadh and Milan operate on completely different principles, if not planets.

Mother was nobody’s fool, and also possessed of the same demented and twisted DNA as I, myself: the family anything-for-a-story trait surfaced and she decided to bicker with him.

Fifteen minutes passed and she got the price up by forty k and a couple of pedigreed camels, but he wouldn’t go to three hundred thou, for very good reason.

As he pointed out, there’s got to be something wrong with a girl who’s 23 and not married yet. Smart cookie: it took my boyfriend of the time simply months to figure that out.

Yes, I was marked down because I was past my Best Before date.

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