Ah Robert, you've given me the vapors! You are surely toying with me...is it even within the realms of possibility our time so long ago had been so vacuous?
Patricia, it's entirely possible: my life has been a sentence of varnishing, and lived almost entirely within its heady vapours - so yeah, perhaps yours come from within the same pot? I always knew there was a sound, explosive reason that I gave up cigarettes. I used to like hunting out suppliers of
Chesterfield... they had nice packs. I didn't sniff at
Luck Strike, either, because I knew that "Lucky Strike means Fine Tobacco".
P. Morris also smelled delightful consumed with panache within the darkness of a cinema's back row. They were all a bit difficult to find in a deprived city, which gave them that added je ne sais quoi. Who says design in advertising doesn't pay? Funny thing: I had more friends when I smoked them. In Britain there ran a campaign illustrated by some Sinatra look-alive standing under a lamp post, lighting up a cigarette. The slogan read along the lines of 'you're never alone with a
Strand' but I don't think that worked very well or even for long. Perhaps it worked in Liverpool. There, they have an obsessive fear of being alone. How many people does anyone need?
Why is it, or how can it be that shutters that have had at least thirty-plus years of coats of the stuff applied to them - marine varnish, I'll remind you, not cheap domestic trash - still manage to lose their virginity and harbour the seeds of black rottenness underneath some of those multiple layers of protective skin? It's not like they are even dipped in the ocean, which is what marine varnish is designed (it says on the tin) to withstand. Flash thought: perhaps they
need the sea to cure them! After all, people do season timbers by sticking them into the sea for months at a time.
Clearly, I'm a fish out of water.
Rob
