from the Sloop Inn

This post comes to you from the only place in St Ives with a public internet connection, aside from the library, which doesn't open again till Tuesday. It's a very old, black-beamed and black-panelled pub called the Sloop Inn, just on the waterfront and thus very crowded, with execrable music.* I have had to sit six feet away from a very noisy and cretinous group of drunken louts - and that's not name-calling. Speaking of the bliss that is Anywhere Outside London, when I sat down and opened my iBook the louts had a loutish conversation of grunts, laughter and pointing, all about its pristine beauty and how much fun it would be to "get it."

In other news, I know it's bad form, but I do eke hours of enjoyment from the senders' names in my spam box. The days are gone when people could get a chuckle from the punning or symbolic names of fictional characters: it's all realism now. So my innocent little game has an almost illicit feel, as I imagine what someone like Dickens or Henry James would do with some of these names.

Here is a list of some of the best names I have received spam from in the last two days alone! So sue me.

Hangnail F Bumbled
Banefuller L Impeccable
Cabinet B Upstart
Farmer Q Shick
Leslie Friedman
Ebony Goins
Lucien L Hickok

Now, that is a book I'd love to write! Or to read. Maybe I should put Chip Dale onto it.

(n.b. two days later. Today's spam names are: Venally U. Shuttlecock, Krikorian M. Dement, Goodwater Blandville and Pollack P. Rhein. Any of these would do a novel proud.)

* edited in to say that that next time I went into the Sloop they were playing Amy Winehouse. So it was fine.