As the dreaded holiday season approacheth, more and more of us will be taking to the skies in a desperate attempt to put in brownie point-garnering facetime with relatives whose very existence is the bane of ours. Just die already and leave me the pearls and the cottage, dammit!
Naturally, airplanes stuffed with hundreds of passengers with nothing in their future but a potentially-fatal planeride and said facetime with relatives are going to be tense environments, places where we should all be a little more considerate and take a little extra care not to offend. Especially the rentacops.
Rakish Hollywood idol Alan Cumming offers a handy tip to ensure your trip is as smooth and un-cringifying as humanly possible; as a recovering Englishman, Cumming is somewhat of an expert on the subject of embarrassment, so his wisdom is to be treasured and passed on from generation to generation, at least until men start wearing kilts again.
“I always think the pressure on planes gives you a hard-on,” he mused. “My friend I was just working with said that when he goes to sleep, he always puts the table out in case he gets a hard-on whilst he’s asleep. That’s a very good tip for your readers if they want to avoid embarrassment on a plane.”
So Stephen (you remember Stephen?) he was once even younger, and when he was younger he was, as is the way, more junior, and he wasn’t a restaurant manager at all but instead a busboy on the Princess Something, a Canadian Pacific cruise ship/ferry crossbreed cruising between Victoria and Seattle.
And CP, they had standards. In fact, they could be said to have standards the way the SS could be said to have been strict-ish. And one of their standards was that, by the time they docked in Seattle, every piece of cutlery and every piece of china aboard would have been washed and dried to perfection, regardless of time pressures, or staff would be fired.
And it always was.
And many were the evenings, pulling into port, that Stephen spent at the stern of the ship, gleefully tossing aft the plates that they didn’t have the extra 15 minutes to wash. Puget Sound is lined with CP china and silver flatware, should you ever feel like taking a diving vacation.
I have previously annointed Pat and Mick‘s YouTube masterpiece as the most Eighties music video of all time but, having now seen what you are about to see, I must reconsider. This has everything, including Giant Squid, a midnight zoo jailbreak, skydiving, a luau, flaming tiki torches, an octopus drummer, and a David Hasselhoff cameo. What more could you possibly want?
“They had the original bus that Rosa Parks sat in, the one that sparked off the civil rights protests. It’s beautifully preserved. I was going to sit in her seat but there was a black woman sitting there at the time. I thought better of asking her to move.”
An anonymous but sensible Detroit conference-goer quoted in the Guardian
So Judy was here visiting. It was easy to tell it was Judy when she walked into the train station, because there is, in my wide experience (and surely, few experiencers can have had a wider one, what with me having met in meatspace something over 100 people whom I first met online) a certain expression that people have when they’re away from home and meeting up for the first time with some other cybernaut who, come to think of it and they do and BOY do they look worried when they realize this, they haven’t the faintest idea what they look like. And likewise.
So, I was looking for a tall American brunette, and she was looking for a short Canadian blonde with a Moosehat sticker from the Northern Voice blogging conference, and although we are not exactly a dime a dozen, even in the train station, nevertheless the situation is enough to give one pause.
She paused.
With that certain look on her face. That alright now I can figure this out. I can handle this. If she turns out to be a freak there are plenty of people around who can call the cops, and I can always get another train back home look.
And I tried not to have my oh, I’ve seen that look before, newbie look on my face although it must be said that of all the emotions, smugness comes perhaps most easily to me, even when it’s not appropriate, but then when has the fear of looking like a idjut ever stopped me, eh? I ask yez.
And we had a lovely time. I made sure to take her by the library and Canada Place and the Marine building and other suchlike architectural wonders, of which it must be said that Vancouver has very few but as long as nobody tells her different and who’s to do that, she’ll never know the place isn’t larded with gems, eh?
And we went patio-ing. Yes, it’s a verb here. We do a lot of patioing in BC, although we also do a lot of other social things, too, which you can tell from the fact that Whistler has its own strain of genital warts, but we didn’t do any of that.
Especially not on the patio. Hell, it wasn’t the Cambie!
But as we were on the patio, enjoying our refreshing beverages and making amusing comments about some kind of corporate teambuilding exercise which apparently involved vast herds of nerdy-looking men in matching t-shirts running at speed back and forth through the restaurant, it became apparent that Judy was working up her courage. Finally, after an internal struggle and a moment of distracted yet anticipatory silence, it came out.
raincoaster 