Wednesday, 13 July 2016

Progress and Past Glories.

The young woman in the coffee shop who treats me like something-the-cat-brought-in-having-first-devoured-and-then-regurgitated-it offered a wholly new approach today. Today she treated me like something-the-cat-brought-in-but-hasn’t-yet-quite-despatched. There’s progress for you.

I asked: ‘Have you been on holiday? I haven’t seen you for some weeks.’ She replied: ‘No, it’s just that our paths haven’t crossed.’ Ah, but then I suspect she decided that the analogy of paths crossing was a little too intimate to be addressed to a man who is old enough to be an ancestor, and so she added: ‘What I mean is, I haven’t been on duty when you’ve been in the shop.’ That’s fine, and I’ll still regard it as progress.

So to celebrate this thawing of relations, I thought I’d post the picture to which I alluded when I first had my new toy, the scanner. (You might remember I mentioned two girls in cowboy hats.) I was a lot younger than the woman in the coffee shop etc-etc-etc when this was taken, by the way:

 
Notes

1. My hairstyle looks about ten years out of date, so I suspect it had been re-arranged by the keen onshore wind for which Blackpool is famous. The wind doesn’t trouble my hair too much these days.

2. As before, do excuse the poor quality of the picture. My friend Barry took it.

3. Colour film had been invented by then, but we hadn’t yet come to trust it. Besides, when you’ve only got a black and white camera…

4. The cowboy hats aren’t up to much, are they? Not exactly Deadwood Stage standard. More like the stage in St Winifred’s Church Hall, Ramsbottom Road, Wigan. The girls did come from Wigan as I recall, not Wyoming. (Nor even Wisconsin, more’s the pity.)

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