"I’ve been let outside to meet new people."
Dear Donna,
Whilst I spend the majority of my days inside speaking to myself, I have, on occasion, been let outside to meet new people. Making friends when you’ve already decided you quite like the ones back home is hard, especially when you say ‘back home’ every other sentence. So, here are some accounts of recent trips when Alex and I have tried to speak to people other than ourselves.
First up is our Airbnb host, Angela, who we met on our most recent trip to the Missouri wilderness for our birthday weekend. She ticked every wholesome American ‘mom’ box, laying out freshly baked muffins when we arrived and making us breakfast the next morning. One question remains, however: why are Americans obsessed with pumpkin spice? Her place was full of pumpkin spice candles, pumpkin spice room fresheners and pumpkin spice cupcake soap. There was no warning of this when we booked. Only that there would be weapons on the traditional Christian premises. Naturally.
We also found these on our bed.
Birthday girl avoiding birthday bites.
On the same trip to rural Missouri, there were the baseball-cap-wearing, bar-owning brothers who insisted on giving us free gumbo, chilli and pizza. We didn’t have the heart to say we were going to dinner afterwards, so out of self-destructive British politeness, we had two dinners back to back.
They also served us the local specialty, ‘Black and Blue’ aka a layer of Blue Moon topped with a layer of Guinness. Alex drank the whole disgusting thing with the unflinching good manners we Brits are incapable of abandoning. Which meant that on MY birthday, it was Alex who was hammered and I was designated driver. Obviously I drank red wine by myself in bed that night.
Always room for BBQ.
The culprit.
Then there was the bar in Nashville, where Alex and his friend Will got chatting to a couple of fishing buddies in trout skin t-shirts who kindly invited them on their next trip. As if the sartorial choice of this double act wasn’t memorable enough, they introduced themselves as Pumpkin and Buckley. Didn’t I say pumpkin was everywhere?
Lastly, back in St Louis, we met Black David and White David (their words) in the gay piano bar, Keypers. Whilst the bartender noted the best jazz nights in town on a napkin, they told us that one David was a former attorney and the other David was from a family of cotton pickers. And it’s not the way round you’d expect. The interracial best friends were still raring for a good time in their late sixties (“honey, in ma youth I was WAIIIIILD. Jus’ WAILD.”) and they’d be damned if Black David’s emphysema and White David’s DUI were going to stop them.
‘Fly fishing’
