Open letter to the someone who sold me an Amy Winehouse record on eBay

Dear eBay seller,

Thanks very much for the fun times you’ve added to my online experience for the past seven weeks.  It seems like only yesterday I was paying you €13.50 for my Amy Winehouse record, a disc I was really looking forward to playing.

But hey, I guess you’re a busy guy at that advertising and marketing firm you work for.  I can understand if your answer to my quick payment was a 48-day wait for the record.

It also didn’t bother me when you told me after 10 days that your first try at shipping the record came back undeliverable.  So I re-copied you the address you must have already had from eBay, then sat back in glorious anticipation of that happy day I’d be listening Amy Winehouse.

I love vinyl, you see.  I’ve been collecting for a little while now, and really enjoy it.

That’s why I emailed you a second and third time asking why my shipment hadn’t arrive.   In Zen-like contemplation I gazed upon the empty in-box which was your reply.

Riding my bike through a flash thunderstorm to go pick it up at the post office didn’t dampen my feelings of anticipation a few short weeks later when I found the notice of delivery in my mailbox.

And seeing how you’d most carefully wapped that fragile slice of vinyl in a thin coating of paper and fastened it all together with packing tape, I figured gee, what a sweet fellow you must be.  Who needs a real cardboard package in which other eBay sellers usually mail record albums?

Besides, the album cover’s trashed-out, beaten-up look is a perfect match for Amy Winehouse herself at her most famous.

You also failed to mention that you’re deaf and blind.   I mean, you must be, poor thing.   How else could you have failed to notice, and therefore fail to indicate in your eBay offer, that the record you’d put up for sale was severely defective right out of the factory and therefore completely unplayable on any turntable worth more than €20?

But then again, even a deaf and blind person could have run his fingers along the record and felt all those -what the fuck are they anyway, blisters? –  on the vinyl.

Oh no – I just realised that if you couldn’t even feel the vinyl’s pimply surface, that must mean you were born without arms!  Life must be so difficult for you. What an inspiration you are to us all.

I was tempted to phone you up to discuss this with you personally one day, because it was really easy to find you on the Internet.  I know where you went to high school, where you live, where you bank, where you work, your office extension number, and I even know what you look like.  I just love the Internet that way, don’t you?  And gosh, we’d have been able to have such a nice, long chat now that I have a flat-rate within Germany.

But why bother?  Not only is it more fun to passive-aggressively lambaste your character in this post for all eternity, why on earth should I waste any more time on a shit-stain like you?  I’ve already given you the most scathingly negative feedback I could jam into 80 characters.  If I could have added “should be stabbed, stuffed head-first in a pickle barrel, laden with weights and dumped in the Danube” I would have.

Not that a negative reputation will keep you from ripping off people in the future.  People like you just open a new account when the negs start adding up.

Thanks for reminding me not to trust anyone on eBay with fewer than 10,000 sales to his name.

Yours sincerely,

One very pissed off eBay user.

PS: Actually, we do have a record player I might consider spinning this disc on, but unfortunately, it doesn’t fit on a Fisher-Price:

Travelling to Egypt? Always pack your patience

While taking a break in last-minute packing before heading to Egypt, I told my two ladies that the most important thing they’ll have to bring won’t fit in a suitcase.

Patience.

Because along with everything else you might come across in that country – the delays, the diarrhea -  some things are dead certain: you WILL be hassled, people WILL try to con you, and touts and pitchmen WILL pester you, sometimes with exactly the same patter, one day the same as the next, over and over again.  They’ve been doing it for centuries.  Don’t let it get to you, I told them.  Like the Penguins in Madagascar, just smile and wave, boys. Just smile and wave.

We’d picked Sunday, our second morning in Cairo, to go see the Pyramids.  Lonely Planet told us where the stop was for the big, white, air-conditioned bus that was to take us most of the way there – close to the Egyptian Museum and across only four lanes of traffic -  and of course it was nowhere near where they said.

But after getting pointed in the wrong direction twice we finally found the bus and hopped on, headed to the back, and sat back for a good hour of traffic jam chaos on the road west to Giza.  With air-con only wishful thinking, just as I thought I was going to get woozy from the fumes and heat as we lurched slowly forward, the bus conductor was suddenly asking for 90 cents for the three of us and we were out the door.

There they were.  For the past few stops we’d glimpsed them through the window, and now we were staring at them over the tops of buildings.  The Pyramids.  They were still only a few blocks away, maybe 10 minutes to walk, but a man who’d left the bus with us, a 40-ish fellow in a nice blue dress shirt smiled at us shyly and said he could help us get there, because that’s where he was going.  He worked at a hospital nearby and was just getting off the night shift, and this was the last leg of his journey before heading off to bed for the day.

We all piled in to an empty mini-bus with him and roared off.  He spoke with a thick accent but he could tell us everything about himself, pulling out some photos of his wife of 12 years – an Australian lady! – and his three children aged 7, 5 and 4 months, how his wife spoke good Arabic now, how she was now teaching English every day, how he’d fallen into nursing after being assigned near a hospital during his mandatory military service, how he hated the night shift…

“My mother worked the night shift on and off as a nurse for 23 years,” I told him. “She hated it too.”

I liked this guy.  It’s a failing of mine, I suppose, because even if my intuition tells me that something is not quite right and that I’m dealing with someone who is either lying or setting me up for a con, I put those thoughts out of my head, tuck them away until the proof I’ve been looking for finally reveals itself.  These people are so likeable, I almost want to help them keep up the pretense.

“Sami,” I asked him, hoping to change the subject.  “May I please ask you a question?  How old are you?”

“How old you think?”

“Well, I would say about 42,” I said.  “I’m going to be 50 in a couple of weeks.”

“No!” he said. “My friend, you look like you are 35.”

“That’s nice of you to say Sami,” I told him.  “But you are much too kind.”

We were rolling along a wide street southbound parallel to the Pyramids marvelling when Sami switched the conversation to our plans for the day.  We told him we were of course there to see the Pyramids and he started talking all about what there was to see there.

“You can go inside all three of them, you can walk around, you can see the Solar Boat Museum, you can ride a horse or a camel, you can take tea,” he told us, getting a bit excited and talking faster.  To make sure we wouldn’t get lost, he had me hand over my notebook and pen so he could draw an outline of the entire site:

“I have to get home to bed, I am very tired” he said, “but I will do something for you, Canada and Germany, my friends.   I have some information that you need.  This is very serious.  You know, there are bad people at the Pyramids.  There are people who will want to be their guide, who will take your money and show you nothing, but they are bad people.  I can tell you something that will make it better for you at the Pyramids.  I am telling you this and I know you think that I might want some money from you but I tell you this with no asking for money.  You are my friends and I am happy to have been able to meet such nice people as you.  You can come with me just up the street and you will find the police, my friends are with the Tourism Police and they are good people, if you go with them they will make sure that these bad people will not come close to you, they will make sure that you will see all the Pyramids…

By then we’d turned the corner and were squeezing past donkey carts and kids playing ball in a narrow, garbage-clogged alley heading west toward the Pyramids again.

We came to a stop in a small backyard square behind the street a stone’s throw from the main entrance to the Pyramids site.

“Here you are, my friends,” he said.

We all piled out and a couple of men rushed out to greet us, and it was then I saw what had confirmed my growing suspicions: they weren’t that discreet about slipping Sami a few pounds into his hand.

“Thanks, but we’re leaving,” I said.

“No, you must stay here!” he said.  “These police people, they can help you!”

“Sorry,” I said, turning my back and walking off.  “Let’s go!” I called over to my two ladies.  They didn’t put up any resistance.

Later, over lunch at the over-priced and over-rated restaurant at the Mena House Oberoi Hotel, we hashed out what happened.

“I could tell he was just a tout,” said K.  “Why did he take all that time for us if he was just coming off the night shift and so tired he just wanted to go to bed?”

“I know,” I said.  “The photos were a good tip-off, too.  No group photo, just some head shots.  They could have been of anyone.  But I really wanted to believe him.”

This story smells like the south end of a bull facing north

When someone tells a story that just reeks of urban legend, I want to call bullshit.  Problem is, it was a colleague, and she told it as an aside in front of a half-dozen people at a meeting, so I didn’t want to put her on the spot.  She swears it’s true, though like all urban legends, it sounds vaguely familiar.

A man and a woman are at a party in Winterhude, a wealthy area of Hamburg.

They get up to leave and the woman notices that her purse has been stolen.

They go home.  Two days later, they get a phone call from a man who introduces himself as Dr. So-and-so, who apologises profusely for his wife.  “She’s a kleptomaniac, you see.  This has happened before, and she’s getting psychiatric treatment, but sometimes she falls back.”

He then invites the man and his wife to come pick up the handbag and have a glass or two of champagne with him at a restaurant as a small gesture of goodwill.

The couple accept the invitation, but upon returning home with the handbag discover that in their absence, their house has been robbed clean.

Maybe it IS true.   Con artists are pretty good at what they do, and even the police have tricked fugitive criminals into showing up to receive contest prizes, but you can pick so many holes in this story.

A case for snopes.com?

three drabbles

A while back I started going to an informal writers’ group here in Hamburg.

One evening someone mentioned the drabble, a story form I’d never heard of.

The word itself at first glance seems too close to dabble to take very seriously, though once you start on one you’ll see how difficult it is to do.

A drabble is supposed to test the writer’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.  These ones are all true stories on the same theme, each as close as possible to 100 words long.

Con artist escape

He approached me at my table, sat down, and soon was calling me friend.

We will have a good time at the party tomorrow night, he said.

Just let me call my mechanic to see if my car is ready.

Bad news, he said. It needs a new clutch, and I’m short of cash. Will you lend me $80 until tomorrow?

It sounds like a great time, I said, but I have to go back to my hotel to get the money.  Will you wait for me?

It would have been fun to go that party, had there been one.

Lies at the office

We don’t pay overtime here, the boss said.

Little did he know I knew where they kept the bills.

Sure enough, he’d sent the client an invoice for overtime he didn’t pay us.

He was lying to us, lying to the client, and pocketing the difference.

I was so pissed off, I gave notice the next day.

Telling colleagues the score gave mixed results.

Two more quit like I did, but others resented me.

I guess some would prefer not to know.

Lies all the time

I asked my married friend why she never wore a wedding ring.

Because I lost it, can’t find it, and my flute playing! It gets in the way.

She went rigid telling me, eyes fixed, voice robotic.

This from someone who’d told me she was a good liar.

The ride back was filled with meaningless words.

When she left I said: I don’t know when I’ll see you again.

I did my best to make sure I never did, and it worked.

Do I miss her? In the way a recovered cancer patient misses his tumour.

Ninety days later, her new bike gets stolen

The little red-haired girl’s bike, that is.

Ridden with such pride and joy to and from school, horse-riding practise, around town and just recently on holiday, her new bike disappeared sometime between 1500 Wednesday afternoon and 0720 Thursday morning.

At least that’s what I wrote on the police report before sending it off to the insurance company. A €50 cable lock lay where her bike should have been, sliced through with bolt-cutters. A neighbour’s was also ripped off, their lock lying on the cobblestones right beside ours.

I suppose with bicycle thieves no longer in it for the joy-riding, her bike is already packed in some truck somewhere on its way to a fence in eastern Europe or Russia, where it will be sold off as brand new in some town or other. Since there’s a chance it might turn up on eBay I’ll be checking there, though I doubt they’d be that stupid.

Just like habitual liars and sociopaths, thieves have no empathy. If they have any feelings at all for the harm they do other people, it’s scorn. That’s why it’s pointless to get angry at people like that when they do you wrong.

Still, I’d like to be able to print onto paper the image I have in my mind of my daughter’s tear-filled eyes that morning as she held up the sliced-through lock, then find the thief and shove the paper, the lock and the bike down his throat.

Slowly, with a reverse twisting motion.

Didn’t I mention stress and entertain revenge fantasies in my previous post? It’s turning out to be a great week.

Obama smear campaigner Larry Sinclair arrested after press conference

My first plunge into the frothy cesspool of US politics the other day resulted in a rude reminder of just what lurks out there, so at the risk of once again having my entire post swallowed up and regurgitated with my name changed on the right-wing drivel and splog site Free Republic, it’s time to take a look at what happened yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

That’s where Larry Sinclair, perpetrator of one of the most vile smear campaigns ever thrown at a US presidential candidate, got his chance to blow 3000 bucks and state his case before an invited press.

Well, turns out the man with the long criminal record and outstanding warrant was arrested shortly after and is now in custody.

So far the mainstream press has ignored his claims, including this recent development.  Even Fox Spews – Fare for the Unbalanced – has ignored the guy.

Granted, the Globe – no not the Boston Globe, the Alien Headhunters Kidnapped Pam Anderson’s Unborn Teenage Love Child supermarket checkout Globe – ran something on him a few months back, but from the wires, the mainstream newspapers, tv stations, websites?  Nada.

Given that there is nothing to substantiate his claims, is there any other reaction more appropriate?

I think there is.  Publish!  Get him on Larry King!  Get him on Jon Stewart!  Tell the world!  Let everyone get a good, long look at the level to which the enemies of a good man are willing to sink in order to draw attention to themselves and maybe even make a few bucks in the process.

It’s like Scientology.  The more you read about it, the more you realise not only how crazy the inventor must have been, but how deluded his followers are.

 

Too bad we can’t just ignore the Larry Sinclair smear campaign against Barack Obama

Mark June 18th on your calendar.
That’s the day the National Press Club in Washington, DC will give centre stage to the man behind one of the sleaziest smear campaigns ever perpetrated against a US presidential candidate.
Larry Sinclair has for months been blathering on his blog and in a YouTube video that Barack Obama has a dark secret his supporters wish would just go away. He says Obama likes to sleep with men.
Difficult to do, but in case you missed it, here’s a little rundown of his claims:

• Barack Obama and Larry Sinclair had sex in a Chicago hotel room in late 1999 while Sinclair was on parole.
• Barack Obama supplied the cocaine and crack cocaine he smoked while Sinclair performed oral sex on Obama
• Donald Young, the gay choir director at Obama’s former church, contacted Sinclair in December, 2007 shortly before Young was murdered. Sinclair says Young told him he had a similar relationship with Obama.
• Sinclair now claims to be getting death threats; cancel the press conference or get shot.

With the possible exception of The Cleveland Leader which points out Sinclair failed a polygraph test, the mainstream press has completely ignored him. So has Barack Obama, but leading up to Wednesday’s presser and beyond, you have to wonder for how long he can hold off.

There have been so many rumours circulating about Obama and his wife – Obama’s a Muslim, Obama’s book contains racist remarks, Obama’s hiding his birth certificate, Obama’s wife has been seen on video calling people “whitey” from a church pulpit, and other trash – they’ve set up a website to fight the smears. They even ask readers to send in new rumours they’ve heard so they can address them.

What’s notable is they still have yet to mention Sinclair. But with more than 1.25 million hits on the Sinclair blog and hundreds of thousands having seen the YouTube video, they can’t deny nobody’s heard of it.

A number of prominent liberal blogs have said the National Press Club is simply feeding the troll by taking Sinclair’s 3000 bucks and booking his room. Thousands have already signed a petition asking the NPC to cancel the event.

I hope the press conference is held and I hope Obama does get around to Sinclair. There’s a risk that the ranks of Sinclair’s deluded fans and followers will grow in giving this guy the limelight, but if you’ve set up a website to counter rumours and allegations only to ignore the worst, it will be viewed as running away from the issue or pretending it doesn’t exist. Obama has to defend himself.

Besides, Sinclair may be renting a pulpit and floor space and hoping the cameras and scribblers show up, but he must know that going to the press is a double-edged sword. If they do decide to run with this story, playing up Sinclair’s dubious past is the most likely angle they’ll take. Sinclair’s police wanted poster on charges of theft and forgery will surely be included.

But if the world does turn out to be flat and Sinclair’s allegations somehow prove to be true, Obama should be shunned and banished from the stage forever, but not for taking drugs and having gay sex. What country on earth would want to have as its leader someone with such horrible taste? Have you watched that video? Surely if Obama was bent in that direction and could have his pick of lovers and rent boys, he could do one hell of a lot better than Larry Sinclair.

Talking with an 11-year-old about insurance fraud

We finally broke down and bought the little red-haired girl a new bicycle last week. Summer’s already here and besides, pretty soon I’m going to have to drop the little.

We’d been holding off because it’s just so difficult to find a decent bike for a growing kid in Germany. You either find junk at the bottom end of the scale – expensive junk to boot – or top-flight bikes that will get ripped off the moment you leave it outside, which she is forced to do because there is no other place to lock them up where we live.

Then at one shop where we’d finally found one that was right for her, I told the guy that we wanted a really good lock, mentioning also that I’d had parts ripped off from my own bike after leaving it outside for only one night.

No problem, he said. If you’re worrried about security, you can get a complete insurance package for only eight euros a month. It includes replacement for theft and new parts if they’re stolen or the bike vandalised. Even if she has a fall, they’ll fix it for her.

So I signed up for the deal, thinking that it’s cheap at twice the price if I don’t have to worry about replacing a stolen bike a week after buying it.

After explaining to her that the insurance only works if she locks the bike around a bike stand or pole so that it can’t be carried away, she asked me:

How does the insurance work? What if you had two kids who needed bikes, but only enough money for one? Couldn’t you just hide the bike and tell the insurance company that the bike was stolen? Then you’d get another one for the other kid for free.

Sure, you could do that. I’m sure there are people who have done that. Would you like to be one of them?

No.

Well, I’m glad to hear that. Did you know there are people who try to get out of working by pretending they’re sick, saying things like their back hurts all the time, or that they can’t get out of bed?

No…

They get to go on disability pension, which means they get money every month without having to work anymore, even though they’re not sick. But there’s a catch. The insurance companies have people who check up on them. If they see them carrying around a pair of skis, riding their bikes, whatever, they get cut off their money, they don’t get to go back to their old jobs… they end up with nothing.

Oh…

Trying my best not to sound preachy, but probably failing because I’m doing all the talking, I add:

It just makes more sense to be honest and tell people the truth. That way, you don’t have to remember what you said to anybody, because it will always be the same thing.  You won’t always have to be looking over your shoulder, either.

This site may harm your computer

Waiting for a flight at Hamburg airport early last week I sat down at an internet terminal and was about to drop a coin in before the nice man sitting next to me said, “take mine, I have to go and there are about 25 minutes left on it.”

I thanked him warmly and sat down in his place, immediately typing lettershometoyou into Google to see if I could find Adsense ads on my blog. You’ve probably heard that they’re out there, lurking on every wordpress.com blog. It’s the price you pay for free hosting, and no amount of whining is going to get wordpress to take them off short of your paying them to do so.

Problem is, if you’re logged in to wordpress.com you never get to see them.

So every once in a while I slip into the skin of Joe Regular Blog Lurker to try to find out how Google is making an even greater mess of my blog. Do they stick ads for jock itch powder next to posts about my mother-in-law? Blurbs for psychiatrists next to write-ups about psychos? Tart up my skiing posts with pitches for helmets and handbaskets and other crap I have no use for?

The list of hits Google chucked up had me scrambling for my camera. Not for what they said, but for the public terminal’s net-nanny warning label:

At first I thought they were referring to my blog. After all, even if there are no trojans waiting to ambush the unsuspecting visitor, there is a ton of stuff here people might find harmful. Fake news, accounts of deception and outright lies, denunciations of crap, transcripts of discussions with an underage female child concerning condoms, naked girls in newspapers, death and more death. I don’t know why I haven’t already been hauled before a judge as a menace to society.

Then I realised the warning was all about WordPress.com. How could it not be? The link is to wordpress, not lettershometoyou, which only appears in the description.

Maybe it was just a forewarning, because a few days later I and millions of other unsuspecting WordPress.com bloggers logged on to find our blogging universe turned inside out without so much as a ‘”hey guys, guess what? Big changes coming up tomorrow at 4pm Pacific Daylight Saving Time.”

Did someone at WP central hit publish instead of save by mistake before turning out the lights for the weekend?

I’m sure after a few months this will all die down and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about, but in the meantime wordpress.com probably is harmful to your computer. Judging by the number of pissed-off entries on the forums, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a youtube video posted of someone throwing a laptop out the window frisbee-style in frustration. I don’t care what it looks like, merely uploading an image, for example, has become a mind-numbing chore, a multi-stepped process where once a couple of clicks sufficed.

This in an upgrade? Sure the savvy bloggers using wp.org had a go at it for a while, but given the huge drop in skill level between those bloggers and duffers like me using wp.com, didn’t they think to test it on a few hundred of us wp.com users who’d never seen it before? They could have run a little sneak-preview contest, choosing a hundred or so bloggers to run it through it paces for a month just to iron the kinks out.

Hell, maybe they did test it out on no-brain bloggers like me, I don’t know, but the way it was released reminds me of the time I bought a new desktop from Dell a few years back. The monitor was a new flat-screen model from the Korean firm LG, back when flat screen meant the surface was flat. The rest looked like an old-style monitor.

Anyway, the first one they sent didn’t work, so I sent it back.

The second one arrived three days later. It didn’t work properly either, so I sent it back, too.

The third one arrived a few days after that, and it didn’t work either.

So I phoned up Dell to complain – not for the first time – and asked them why they couldn’t ship me a monitor that worked. Their response? We can’t test the monitors as they come in, we just ship them along.

Fair enough, I said, but can’t they at least have someone switch it on at the factory? Twist a knob? Tweak a button?

Nööö, too expensive. It’s cheaper to ship them halfway around the world and have the consumer do the testing.

Happy blogging.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Bombing raids, POW camps and the true nature of truth

Dear all,

My recent posts about lying to get what you want and the lies I’ve been told throughout the years got me thinking about The Truth and what it really means. Does it really only boil down to what we believe and are prepared to pass on to others? Let me pass on to you a story I’ve told many times over the years about someone in my family.

It goes something like this.

Back in the days when my age could be counted in single digits, Germany used to be this great, brooding, amorphous blob stuck in the middle of Europe. Everyone had a job and was fat and happy, but not long before it had been a place where a war had raged during which people had done extremely horrible things to one another.

Concerned as my parents were to give their kids the best upbringing possible, and mindful of the corrosive effects of jingoistic war films and Hogan’s Heroes, they fed us a stream of stories about their time in the Second World War, why we fought it and where it was bringing us.

Chief among them was how my uncle had been shot down while on a bombing mission over Germany, in an area which is now Poland.

Uncle V. bailed out in time and was carted off to a POW camp. He was a prisoner for nearly three years, finally breaking out just weeks before the camp would have been liberated anyway.

When he came home, people say he was never the same again. He had been this happy-go-lucky prankster, the life of the party. After the war, that part of him was gone forever. Today they’d call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

They say it came about this way:

All the prisoners were grouped according to nationality when they were brought into camp. He was hauled in along with a mish-mash of Brits, Yanks, Kiwis, Aussies, what have you. As the line of Canadians he was standing in watched those in the next line have their identities checked, one fellow who the moment before had been carrying on a bit to try to lighten up the situation for his buddies was being told, “you’re not from Australia, you’re from New Zealand.” The German then took out a pistol and shot him in the head. Killed as an example to the rest of them not to play games and to do what they were told.

My uncle saw it all at close range and they say he was so shocked, he didn’t utter a word for two years after.

I always wanted to ask him about his time during the war, but was admonished early on not to. Don’t drag it up, they told me. It’s not something he likes to talk about. As if it were something shameful, something he himself had perpetrated.

But I wanted all the details. I wanted to know the scene, I wanted to know what he was wearing, I wanted to know whether it was blasting cold or blistering hot or raining like hell, I wanted to know how the others reacted, I wanted to know how he escaped, everything. I wanted to know as if I had been there myself or seen it in a film.

By the time I’d grown up and might have mustered the courage to broach the subject, I’d grown apart from the extended family as is often the case in North American life. In 1983 he fell ill, and was dead within months.

Only one problem with the story about his seeing at close range someone getting shot in the head. It never happened. On a visit near Vancouver a couple of weeks ago to my aunt – his widow – I drew a blank stare and a shake of the head.

He was part of a raid on Nuremberg on March 30 – 31, 1944, and his plane was one of the 93 shot down that night, and he was in a prisoner of war camp, but it was only for a year or so, and he didn’t escape. He was liberated.

I have absolutely no idea where I got that story from. Did I dream it? See it in a movie or read about it? Somehow I believed it really happened. It was bullshit, but it was truth to me.

Footnote: One day in 1985 – a couple of years after my uncle’s death – a construction crew digging for the foundation of a building in Poland struck a large metal object. It turned out to be the wingtip of the plane he had been flying in that night, verified by the serial number against wartime records. Its furthest point extended 40 feet into the ground. Parts of it can be found in a reconstructed Lancashire bomber on display in a museum in Yorkshire, England. One day, I’m going to go there and kick its tires.

For now, this is all I’ve seen to let me know it’s real. A section of the prop given to my aunt at the plane’s unveiling.

© 2007 lettershometoyou