ChatterBank1 min ago
MM Links October 2010 [Week 4]
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I apologise if I seem, unintentionally, to have been rather mean last week for using words that did not easily give you all points. This week I will endeavour to redress the balance (maybe!). So let us return briefly to my years on the south coast and it wasn't all poverty and hypothermia!
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In one of my earlier attempts (not this month) at setting these links I have written of, through a stroke of fortune, during this time disappearing from these shores on a yacht for about three months. This voyage ended in the West Indies. From there I went to Chile where I spent some months designing a few buildings and sailing down the Patagonian archipelago. After returning from working there and taking up my architectural career back here I also became the Clerk of Works of a building site. The building, an old people's home, was constructed on behalf of a semi-charitable organisation. So as not to identify which one, let's call it the Rotating Cat's Table Organisation.
A little time after the building was finished I was approached by a member of this organisation. Every year they exchange a group of 5 "deserving/worthy" young people to another area in the world belonging to the same R.C.T. Organisation. After a fairly lengthy selection process I was chosen and found myself flying off to California for about two months in the south San Francisco Bay area.
Each of the five of us, on arrival in San Francisco, were split up and sent to a different family who would host each of us for four days. After which we would move onto another family in a different part of the Bay area. Each day we would be toured around up to five local places of interest. These could range from a top security military facility, a factory, a hospital, an art gallery, a boat builder's yard, etc additionally we also visited 5 different prisons ranging from one for juveniles through to a very hard-line establishment. All fascinating and in the case of that last prison, truly horrific, almost bestial and very frightening!
The families I stayed with were equally fascinating. All sorts of backgrounds and degrees of wealth or lack thereof. Some quite old, some young (with very pretty, but off-limits, daughters!). One family were reborn-Christian fundamentalist Baptist teetotallers who forbade all caffeine etc and any other similar form of self-indulgence and who attended church daily plus twice on Sundays. Another was a Mormon, very successful, lawyer who part-timed as a professional singer in Las Vegas. He entertained all five of us to dinner and bought alcohol specially for us with the proviso that we had to finish all of it so as not to leave any temptations for his servants. The resulting decay of his Brit guests confirmed all too clearly, to the Mormons present, the perils of alcohol! But all our hosts, by and large, were extremely kind, extremely generous in their hospitality and went out of their way to make us all feel at home.
That is apart from one couple I stayed with who were straight out of "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?". Wealthy upper-middle class professionals. The wife, who had had made a bad attempt at smearing on some make-up on, was half-drunk when she collected me . Her husband when he came home a little later, had all too obviously just finished a very long "business" lunch! As neither were up to cooking dinner, more drinks were shared, and they then proceeded to have an increasingly heated alcohol-fuelled argument over where to take the Brit for dinner. This ended in a shouting match with all sorts of recriminations, references to previous misdemeanours being exchanged and me escaping to my room to write up my journal.
Dinner was eventually taken, in near total silence, in a local Pizza joint!
But, all in all, my time in California was a most interesting one. And if anyone wants a guide to all the facilities and places of interest in the south San Francisco Bay area - I'm your man!
That is apart from one couple I stayed with who were straight out of "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?". Wealthy upper-middle class professionals. The wife, who had had made a bad attempt at smearing on some make-up on, was half-drunk when she collected me . Her husband when he came home a little later, had all too obviously just finished a very long "business" lunch! As neither were up to cooking dinner, more drinks were shared, and they then proceeded to have an increasingly heated alcohol-fuelled argument over where to take the Brit for dinner. This ended in a shouting match with all sorts of recriminations, references to previous misdemeanours being exchanged and me escaping to my room to write up my journal.
Dinner was eventually taken, in near total silence, in a local Pizza joint!
But, all in all, my time in California was a most interesting one. And if anyone wants a guide to all the facilities and places of interest in the south San Francisco Bay area - I'm your man!
As always, for the every day running of MM, I will follow the same rule as introduced by crofter on word length. Each of my chosen link words contains at least four letters and at most eight. Stray outside this range and you will be wasting one of your attempts!
Please REMEMBER, I do NOT use the names of people or of places.
Each of my selected words may go in front of or after my challenge words. The competition will officially close at 7.00pm on Sunday evening when crofter will declare my selected words and the same rules for awarding points will be applied as have been applied during all MM Link Games in the past.
My fourth set of four words to have their links predicted will appear below at 9.00am.
So, find your passport, pack your bags and let's head for the departure lounge.
Please REMEMBER, I do NOT use the names of people or of places.
Each of my selected words may go in front of or after my challenge words. The competition will officially close at 7.00pm on Sunday evening when crofter will declare my selected words and the same rules for awarding points will be applied as have been applied during all MM Link Games in the past.
My fourth set of four words to have their links predicted will appear below at 9.00am.
So, find your passport, pack your bags and let's head for the departure lounge.
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