The habit of collecting (1)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 December

Other than being a writer by profession (i.e. I profess to be a writer, but who am I to judge!), I am a collector.

Apart from whisky, which makes me laugh in a more earthy way that's in touch with the beat of the universe (or some other such flannel as is to be found on many a whisky tube, e.g. the assertion that the Old Pulteney distillery at Wick was, when it was founded, accessible only by sea (well, why found it there?)), I tend to collect things that make me laugh (or that have some other human worth).

This is one, from the title of an e-mail purporting to come from Georgina Dejesus:

our pills has merci for your penis


It's not really the pidgin English that's funny, although 'merci' is quaint, it's this silly attempt to get me to open it - either because of the lurking virus, or because I might be drawn into ordering something that will never arrive or, if it did, would do me, at best, no good, and, at worst, more harm than good.

I've been collecting such e-mails in a folder called 'Crubb' in the account where they tend to reach me, and have more than five hundred, just saved when they take my fancy over the years, and intended to drip-feed into the lives of characters in a novel that I'll probably never write, so maybe I'll share them here with whomever's looking...


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