Another Encounter from the New World.

Having made the acquaintance of the girl from Brazil yesterday, today I encountered another woman from the New World. New York this time. She’s a volunteer in one of Ashbourne’s charity shops, and ingratiated herself into my presence by extolling the virtues of one of a range of appointment calendars which charity shops routinely sell at this time of year. All the monthly pictures are line drawings, you see, which are meant to be coloured in when the recipient is bored in January after the light and glitter of Christmas has passed.

And so we chatted about America and New York for a while, but I forgot to mention that I don’t really see NYC as part of America. It’s always seemed to me that it has the air of an independent city state about it. But I did manage to squeeze in my theory that the USA might benefit from splitting into several separate countries. The clued-up north east could become the first, everything south of the Mason-Dixon line would be the second, the Midwest could be third, California would be a state in its own right because it’s a bit odd, and that just leaves Oregon and Washing State stuck up there in the north-west. I suggested that Canada might be prevailed upon to accept the two orphans as a new province.

Oddly, she didn’t disagree, and that was the end of the conversation. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask her whether she knew Zoe Mintz.