Monday, June 22, 2009
Has Old No. 36 found a way out of the recession?
Ben Beagle
The aging, semi-hysterical retired reporter rides shotgun with the greatest station wagon driver of them all down the rocky road of life. Mondays and Wednesdays, steady as she goes.
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Boy, it's so wonderful to have your own computer.
That is unless your machine goes bad and you pay $89.95 to have something called Spyware taken out of it and you haven't the slightest notion of what Spyware is.
When the machine is working properly, you can get all the e-mail messages that are out there waiting for you. Maybe from some foreign sultan who has left you 800 million euros.
Well, they can't fool Old No. 36 with stuff like that, but I got this recent e-mail that may be our way out of the recession.
Honeymooners haven?
It seems -- stay with me now -- that a certain British travel consultant (who will remain anonymous) sought to enquire (sic) if I could put up four honeymooning couples between 20 July and 20 August of this year.
Well, let's see. We have one full-size bed in the guest room, plus the antique hired hand's bed, which is kind of short and pretty hard but strikingly antique.
The room is quite charming. The large window looks out on Happy Highfields Road and gives an excellent view of certain delivery trucks. A simply ravishing event occurs when the heating oil truck comes. And the dog barks a lot.
The room across the hall can be charming once we get all those quilts and comforters off the lovely spool bed, and you get the same view if you'll overlook a crack in one of the window panes.
The crack has been there since 1977, and we have come to regard it as a part of our history. That and the fact that we don't know how to putty in new window panes and are too old to climb ladders anymore.
The spool bed is quite comfortable, but there is a family legend that it is haunted. We can offer the master bedroom that has a bathroom and shower the Seven Dwarfs would love.
This room has a view of a holly tree in which one can often see a king snake.
We also have the computer room that is furnished with a twin-sized bed, but guests might complain about the computer coming on all by itself at 4 a.m.
Actually, old chap, although we need the money, I strongly suggest that you try elsewhere. Find a nice Best Western, for example.
Aside from our stunning room accommodations, we have no facilities to feed that many happy people.
They could go down the hill to the Burger King, but that's no way to start a marriage.
Ben Beagle's column runs
in Monday's Extra.
