Another story from the archives

[pinkfish]

Back in 1987, I made a bicycle trip across northern Italy and into Yugoslavia. At a village called Montagnola, I met an Englishman and his wife ("Mike" and "Mel") who were bicycling from London to Peking. They were writing short articles for a magazine in the UK about their trip, in a way that would have been done by blog nowadays

Comments

[animator]

I enjoyed that.

[leafshimmer]

I love British trash tabloids--they're so skanky yet there's a certain style about them.

Thanks for sharing these. What an odd story. Lovely to see you posting again.

cheers, Shimmer

[rsc]

I would not have expressed the sentiment, "Rather them than me!"

Among other things, you wouldn't have used this Briticism; you might have said "Better them than me".

[pinkfish]

Actually, I probably would have done. I did craft my letter to be full of Briticisms (modeled after all the correspondence I had had with the Home Office, the Ambassador, the various Consuls, etc., back in my Marshall Scholarship days). Of course, they re-wrote the letter from whole cloth, so there's no way to tell nowadays just how successful I was.

[rsc]

I probably would have done.

OK, you win.

[badgerpdx]

Gosh... I was in England the year before that and I was AMAZED at their trashy tabloids...Their totally make our National Enquirer look completely respectable. It's the literary equivalent of a deep-fried Mars Bar.

[keyne]

What made you think of them now?

[pinkfish]

Oh, that's easy. Steve asked me if I spoke Italian. I answered by telling a story, and that led to another story, etc. . . .