Optically |
1. adverb: relating to, or producing, light. |
|
2. adverb: relating to the eye or sense of sight. |
Scriveners |
noun: plural of scrivener; archaic term for one who writes out deeds and letters etc. |
This is a list of the things I knew about Seattle before I went there. It is the home of:
You can’t say I wasn’t learning.
*
Far from being sleepless in Seattle, I was sleepful. I slept solidly for sixteen hours – twice as long as popular opinion recommends – and woke to feel groggy, confused and, confusingly, sleepier than I was before I slept.
I don’t understand how too much sleep does that to you. It’s not like it’s possible to eat a meal that makes you feel hungrier or drink so much water your thirst is aggravated not quenched, but somehow a sleep-overdose can make you sleepy.
I contemplated going back to sleep but managed to talk myself out of it. After all, I’d established that sleep made me feel sleepier so surely getting some more sleep would only make matters worse and the mattress more attractive. Using that logic I tricked myself into getting up. Forgetting my room was on the ground floor I pulled back the curtains to see a bright but crisp afternoon in progress and a very surprised gardener looking back at a naked Englishman pulling back his curtains, if you’ll pardon the expression. I immediately whipped the curtains shut again. My brain clearly wasn’t up to thinking speed yet. Sleep really did seem like an attractive option but I fought the urge and decided a shot of caffeine was what I needed.
I looked around the room for the obligatory tea and coffee making facilities but they didn’t appear to be there. To begin with I was convinced I must be mistaken – surely tea and coffee are a given in every hotel – but when I opened up a drawer to find a note saying, ‘Guests wishing to read a Bible should please contact reception who will be happy to lend you a copy kindly donated by the Gideon organisation’, I knew I was in a hotel that was extraordinarily sparing with ‘extras’.
Reluctantly I got dressed and went out in search of the caffeine my system craved. It wasn’t hard to find. In fact, it’s entirely possible that my hotel room was the only decaffeinated 100 square feet in all of Seattle. Immediately next door to the hotel I found a Starbucks, so I ordered myself a double espresso and settled into a comfy armchair in the window from where I could see another branch of Starbucks directly opposite and a third branch a few hundred yards to my right, which was itself just next door to a Seattle Coffee Company outlet, who also had a second branch two hundred yards to my left.
‘Why are there so many coffee places?’ I asked the young guy who came by collecting empty cups and wiping down tables.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked, clearly completely nonplussed by my question.
‘Is this like … the coffee district or something?’ I asked. He looked back at me, even more confused than before, ‘you know, like Chinatown, only … for coffee?’
‘Dude, this is Seattle,’ he said, tossing his long blond locks back over his shoulders; ‘we drink coffee in Seattle. It’s what we do.’
‘Yes,’ I said, as undudely as I could, ‘I drink coffee too. It just seems odd to me that I’m sitting in a Starbucks and I can see two other Starbucks and two Seattle Coffee Companies. That’s a lot of coffee for a small stretch of street.’
He put his tray of dirty cups down on the table with an angry clank and pulled his hands up to his hips. I’d obviously said something to upset him. His nostrils flared.
‘It’s called choice, dude,’ he snapped defensively. ‘It’s how we do things in America. If you don’t like it you can always leave.’
Whoa. There was me having what I thought was an idle chat about the extravagant number of coffee shops in one street and somehow he thought I was taking a vicious sideswipe at him, his lifestyle, his country, his flag and, who knows, his mother. The sheer absurdity of his overreaction meant an involuntary chuckle slipped past my lips but that made his nostrils flare again, so I bit my lip instead.
‘I’m not having a go at anything or anyone,’ I said, containing my smile. ‘I’ve just never seen three Starbucks so close to each other before. It seems odd, that’s all.’
‘Like I say,’ he said, ‘this is Seattle.’
‘Yes. I get that now,’ I said, although I still didn’t really ‘get’ the logic at all. ‘I didn’t mean any offence. It just seems to me that five coffee shops offers less choice than, say, one coffee shop and four … other things.’
‘Dude,’ he said, the word sounding like fingernails on a blackboard to me now, ‘choice is choice. Someone can choose to drink coffee in this Starbucks or in that Starbucks …’
‘Or,’ I said helpfully indicating number three, ‘in that one.’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Choice.’ And with that, he picked up his tray and went back to his duties.
Moments later he pulled the apron from around his waist and with a high five to one of his colleagues, signed off work for the day. I watched in amazement as he walked out of the shop, crossed the road, entered a different Starbucks and ordered himself a coffee. I strongly suspected there was a bit too much caffeine coursing through that young man’s veins. I looked at my double espresso and, concerned about taking a similar overdose, I decided to leave what was left and be on my way.
My next googlewhacks, John and Chris, were going to pick me up at the hotel around seven o’clock which meant I still had a couple of hours to kill. I decided I’d do so by visiting the Space Needle because that seemed to be the iconic Seattle landmark. Not visiting it would be like not visiting Graceland in Memphis and only an idiot would let that happen.
*
In 1980, I was a nine-year-old schoolboy at Berkswich Primary School, Walton on the Hill, Stafford. One day our teacher, Mrs Lowndes, asked the class to write about what they imagined the year 2000 would be like.
I distinctly remember drawing a spacecraft-cum-hovercar and writing a few words about not needing a key to get through the front door (of my pod) because instead it would recognise my palm print. As far as I can recall, no-one in the class was remotely accurate with their predictions. No-one came close to describing the phenomenal explosion in home computing and the internet, no-one predicted cheese in the crust of a pizza and no-one predicted the amazing fabric refreshing powers of Febreze. Instead we all predicted massively different homes and modes of transport. Of course we did; we were children. The idea that it was only 20 years away didn’t make sense to us because when you’re nine there’s no such thing as ‘only’ 20 years away. We didn’t understand that we wouldn’t yet be 30 when the new millennium rolled round because when you’re 9 being nearly 30 seems like being very, very old. Of course the houses we lived in then are still standing and in many cases our parents are still living in them. And cars aren’t that much different either. We’re certainly not whizzing around the skies in hovercars anyway.
If those exercise books could be found today they would inevitably tell us absolutely nothing about the twenty-first century but plenty about what it was like to be 9 years of age in Britain in 1980. My hovercar, for example, was decorated with logos for the band Madness because while I could imagine a radical change in personal transportation, I couldn’t imagine a world without them in the hit parade. (The fact that I was wrong on this count still hurts.) But this is always the way with predictions. The 2015 depicted in Back to the Future could only have been created in the 1980s and the twenty-third century of Captain James T. Kirk and his crew is unmistakably a vision of the Sixties – just look at Uhura’s miniskirt.
Well, the same is true of Seattle’s Space Needle. It must have felt like a futuristic vision when it was built in 1962. Man was in space but not yet on the moon and so the space race was on. The Space Needle is basically a flying saucer placed on top of a 605-foot tower. At the time, people must have gasped in amazement and wondered how long it would be before flying saucers were commonplace. Nowadays, twenty-first-century visitors like myself come along and find it mildly entertaining in a kitsch, isn’t-it-very-Sixties way. I suppose it’s the architectural equivalent of a lava lamp.
Having looked up at the needle for a few minutes and enjoyed its retro appeal I bought a ticket and rode the elevator to the observation deck up top, where incidentally, they serve Starbucks coffee. By all accounts the Space Needle affords a spectacular view of Mount Rainier, the majestic snowy peak that overlooks Seattle, but sadly not in this account because clouds had come to take the afternoon’s brightness away and the view just didn’t carry that far. It was an impressive view of the city skyline, mind you, and Seattle is an insistently modern city with glass skyscrapers lining up along the bay. But something was missing. I couldn’t work out what it was but somehow the experience felt incomplete. It came to me later when I was back at the hotel waiting for Optically Scriveners to come by. The problem was that while it had been an impressive view, it hadn’t been very identifiable; it hadn’t felt uniquely Seattle which is what the tourist in me really wanted. There was only one building that screamed Seattle and that was the Space Needle itself. By standing at the top of it, I had automatically removed from view the one part of Seattle I really wanted to look at.
*
I’ve never been very interested in cars. I have friends who get an almost sexual kick out of the sound of an engine revving. ‘Listen to that,’ they’ll say, ‘hear it purr, isn’t it a beauty?’ I’ve tried joining in, but my ears just aren’t attuned to it. To me, engines don’t purr or roar or throb or any of the other words petrol heads use to describe them; they just make a sort of engine-y sound and I can’t tell a healthy, well-tuned V8 from a rusty old knacker.
But there is one sound a car can make that I like and recognise as a sign of superiority and that’s the satisfying sound of a quality car door shutting. Not all car doors make a nice sound but when they do it says more to me than any engine ever can. The sound I mean is difficult to describe and certainly difficult to transcribe but my best attempt would probably be something like ‘schwwmb’. Yes, a good car has doors that schwwmb. (Incidentally, that’s a silent ‘b’.) It’s a soft sound and it should be pretty much the same whether you’re pulling the door gently to or slamming it with great force because a good car pays no attention to your mood.
The doors on my Vauxhall Corsa don’t schwwmb, they kerlonk. But John and Chris Metcalfe had a car that schwwmbed with the best of them. I sat in the back and pulled the door to; schwwmb. The three of us respectfully let the silence settle before anyone spoke.
‘OK,’ said John. ‘We’ve booked a table at a place called Etta’s. I hope you like seafood.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said and off we went.
I’d arranged the meeting by swapping emails with John and while he’d mentioned that he and Chris would pick me up I hadn’t known whether to expect a Chris of the male or female variety. As it was, they were a married couple in their early fifties. I’d seen lots of couples like John and Chris before, but only on American TV and, even then, only in commercials. They were the epitome of the happy, successful, affluent couple that America’s corporate giants wanted the rest of us to aspire to be. Couples just like them (usually seen walking together through autumnal scenes or staring wistfully at an ocean) could be found advertising food, clothes, cars, insurance, medicines and who knows what else. But John and Chris had the edge on all that lot because they actually existed. If their life could have made a noise it would have been schwwmb.
John had an almost military crop of grey hair. Chris was blonde, her hair cut short in a style that was both gamine and glamorous. They both wore tight black sweaters that people of their age shouldn’t be able to get away with but which they carried off with style.
I felt distinctly scruffy sitting on the leather-upholstered back seat of their car in my shabby cords and a shirt that badly needed an iron (no chance of that in a hotel that didn’t even provide a kettle), but John and Chris didn’t seem remotely troubled by my unkempt appearance so I decided not to trouble myself with it either.
Unsurprisingly, Etta’s turned out to be a rather splendid restaurant. I think a good guide to a restaurant’s poshness is the number of words on the menu that you don’t understand. If it’s every other word then that’s too posh for you and you’re clearly out of your depth, but if there’s nothing you don’t get, you could definitely go a bit posher. At Etta’s I found I could order things while failing to understand approximately one word in four, which put it easily within my comfort zone but ensured it was posh enough to feel like an occasion. I ordered a ‘tasty tuna something salad’ followed by an ‘Alaskan halibut with oojit onions and a whatsit vinaigrette’ with a side order of ‘thingummy green beans and stuff.’ And very nice it was too. Whatever it was.
Over dinner I explained my adventure so far and they explained the story behind their website, deregulation-global.com. I’m not sure if they understood why I was doing what I was doing, but I am sure that I didn’t understand deregulation-global.com.
As far as I could tell, they were involved in a network marketing business in which they sold utility services – gas, electricity, telecoms and so on – on to consumers, taking advantage of the increased competition fostered by the international trend for privatisation and deregulation in those industries. I think. How it works, why it works and whether or not it works for anyone who tries it, I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that it’s worked for John and Chris Metcalfe, two former teachers who no longer find themselves struggling to make ends meet.
‘We’re like you, Dave,’ said Chris. ‘You obviously like meeting people and so do we.’
‘And this business has given us a new lease of life,’ said John, taking the reins. ‘We’re empty-nesters, our kids have left home, but we don’t sit in and watch TV. We’re out enjoying ourselves.’
‘And just like your googlewhacking,’ said Chris, ‘the internet has led us to meet people we never would have met. People from all backgrounds.’
‘We have a friend called Barbara,’ said John. ‘She’s in the same business. She’s a Military Mom out in Memphis …’
‘She’s one of the most beautiful people you have ever seen,’ said Chris.
‘These aren’t just colleagues,’ said John, ‘these are the people we’d give kidneys too. Really.’
‘Really,’ agreed Chris.
There was a pause while they both thought about things and I watched as a thought landed behind Chris’s eyes.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘one of the guys, Geoff; he did just that.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked, confused.
‘He gave up his kidney. Literally,’ said Chris.
‘That’s the kind of person we’re talking about,’ said John.
Just then a waiter approached our table.
‘Would you like to see the dessert menu?’ he asked.
‘Actually I know what I’m going to have,’ said John with a big grin. ‘I’ll have the Bulletproofing Trifle please?’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, trying to appear more polite than bemused, ‘we don’t serve anything of that name.’
‘And I’ll have the Baptise Slurry,’ said Chris, and the two of them could barely contain their glee.
The waiter’s brow furrowed, bemusement was winning over. ‘I’m sorry, madam, sir, these are not desserts. If you would like to see the menu …?’
As I observed his confusion and their pleasure, I suddenly worked out what they were laughing at, what Mr and Mrs Optically Scriveners were laughing at. Bulletproofing Trifle? Baptise Slurry? Presumably the words weren’t as random as they seemed.
‘I’ll have what they’re having,’ I said.