The Jeffrey Box3. On Space and N America.

The trouble with the Jeffrey Box is that it’s easy enough to get everything out, but the devil’s own job to replace it in such a way that the lid fits. If my mother had one skill, it was being able to fit a month’s provisions into a shoe box. She had an abiding distrust of space, and refused to countenance a mere cubic centimetre of the stuff in anything she packed. It’s a trait I failed to inherit.

Tonight’s Good Reads were some of the letters and postcards I sent home from the North American cruise when I was in the navy. What a tedious little Victor Meldrew I was. Anything I could find to complain about, I complained about. The Captain promised this, and now he’s saying that. The price of beer in Quebec is exorbitant (They only sell it in bottles, you know!!) I didn’t get any mail in either Sydney, St. Pierre or from HMS Torquay this morning.

(Sydney?! Where the blip did I get Sydney from? The only Sydney I know of is, well, rather more than a day’s cruise from Canada. I swear I wasn’t on anything. There was nothing to be on.)

The postcard from New York was more upbeat, though:

NEW YORK HARBOUR LOOKING NORTH

(…and then some damn Yankee waffle about the Hudson River being the gateway to the world. It isn’t even the gateway to freggin’ Sydney.)

My mate and I visited the Empire State Building, Times Square, Broadway, Central Park, Wall Street, Washington Square and Greenwich Village. New York is a really great place. 2 weeks to go to Portsmouth.

It seems they didn’t teach me about the Oxford comma while I was in New York. And it couldn’t have been the day I walked back to the docks at around midnight and was later told that I shouldn’t still be breathing, because I was alone that night. And if NY was such a great place, why enthuse about Portsmouth?

The letter I sent from St Johns, Newfoundland was quite upbeat too, because it was all about the reception we were invited to (beer on the town. Yippee! I seem to have had a minor beer fixation.)

…I was rather lucky to meet a young lady with a car. I know how to pick ’em. And then lots about how I spent the whole weekend with her and her family, and how they had a dishwasher, and four cars, and a summer house on the other side of the peninsula… It finished with:

p.s. I’m thinking of getting engaged.

I only added that to put the wind up my mother. Like many people I’ve known in my life, she never knew when I was being serious and when I was joking. On that occasion, I was being serious.

But mostly the letters moaned about anything I could find to moan about.

(I’m looking at the open box right now. I don’t think the lid is going to fit.)