Category Archives: between books

For whom the Bell Rings – –

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Jack’s guest post is very late this week and Wendy is off-line on a writing retreat for a few days  – – –

When I was a small child we didn’t have a phone. Thinking back I remember that later I just knew where my friends were likely to be on a particular night and just went there.

Then we did get one, but it had a number very similar to a local wholesale grocery outlet and I had great fun waiting until a long list of vegetables had been listed before saying ‘wrong number’!

Many years later cell phones arrived and Wendy and I got one each. These were just basic phones and we only got them so we could contact each other in an emergency. But then I retired from my college job and was contracted as a consultant by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and my boss there, a lovely guy called Paul, was a cell phone freak.

Wendy and I just picked up whichever phone was handiest as we traveled around, so whenever Paul phoned me he almost always got Wendy instead of me. This drove him nuts, but being a nice guy he continued to employ me!

Then more recently a good friend upgraded her smart phone and gave me her old one. It seems as if she had also inherited it from someone called George because I get lots of texts of a fairly explicit nature for him. I ignore them of course, but I’m having fun conjuring up his imagined persona – – –

So here I am – moved from having no phone at all of any kind, to checking my emails and messages, the news, my Facebook and all the other stuff each morning, while also using it to direct me to various destinations.

But George – George – – –

Divided by a Common Language – –

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Jack sprints over the line with his Wednesday guest post – –

It may have been when we were traveling all over the country promoting Wendy’s book about our bookstore that we drove up through Ohio and decided to visit her aunt. We knew that we needed to turn left off the main road just after a railroad crossing but didn’t realize that were two of these fairly close. We took the wrong one and got lost!

Shortly after that a police car drew up and Wendy sent me over to talk to him. As soon as he heard my voice he said his name was Livingston and I said that’s a town in Scotland. We got into a conversation about where his folks might have originated. He got on the phone to his office and quickly established where Wendy’s aunt Lelah’s house was. Then he put his flashing lights on and conducted us right to her door.

A couple of years later we were booked for a festival in West Virginia but I didn’t realize as we left early in the morning to head into Kentucky for another gig that the speed limits were different. I was driving and Wendy was dozing as I noticed flashing lights behind. Should I stop, I asked her? We were driving the car we owned and left for us to use when in the US that was legally registered by her parents, but my driver license was British.

At that time a British driver license was a very large piece of pink paper folded up into a small space.

I’m sure you can imagine the conversation that started with – keep your hands on the wheel – –

As I moved from keeping my hands on the wheel to gripping it ever more tightly he was trying to make sense of someone with a British license driving a car with Tennessee plates speeding in Kentucky and with no photo ID! Wendy eventually had to start interpreting and translating. The cop headed back to his car shaking his head.

After quite a long time he came back, carefully folded my license and said this is far too much trouble, but remember it’s 65 in Kentucky!

It can sometimes be helpful to have a Scottish accent and other times not so much.