On the Wall

I had an eerie experience yesterday. A crossover from all this virtual blogging nonsense into the real world that was totally unexpected and somewhat weird.

I have become used to people copying and reproducing material from my blog. There are all those annoying websites that just "scrape" content from my blog for god knows what purpose. Then there are sites like Scuttlebutt and Destination One Design that occasionally repost my nonsense. I'm always happy when they do that, not least because they always include a link back to the original blog post which generates gazillions of hits to my blog for a day or two... and maybe even one or two new regular readers.

This weekend both my sons and their families came over to our house on the Rhode Island Riviera. Son #2 is very partial to English pork pies - well, we all are to be honest. So before son #2 arrived on Saturday morning, Tillerwoman and I headed up to Hartley's in Fall River to buy some genuine English pork pies (or at least as close to genuine as you can find over here in the colonies.) Thomas Hartley opened his first shop in Fall River back in the early 1900's. His pies were a familiar comfort food to the many English who worked in the mills of Fall River back in those days, and they quickly gained popularity with other mill workers because English pork pies are the best food in the world for hungry mill workers.

When you walk into Hartley's it's easy to believe that the shop hasn't changed much since the early 1900's. It's a pie shop, for Pete's sake. It's not a fashionable cyber cafe. We are not in Starbucks any more, Toto. As Tillerwoman ordered the pies I casually perused the various magazine clippings and newspaper stories that were on the walls (all singing the praises of Hartley's Pork Pies, of course.)

I looked at a long piece of text in the middle of one frame on the wall. I blinked. Wait! I've seen that before. Hold on! I've not only seen it before; I wrote it.

I looked up and down the text. It was a list of 50 items. I remembered it then. It was the complete text of my 2009 blog post 50 Great Things To Do In And Around Tiverton Rhode Island. And #41 on the list was Go to Hartley's Original Pork Pies in Fall River to buy the best English-style pork pies in America. And someone had highlighted that item.

I had written the post in response to a challenge from Carol Anne of Five O'Clock Somewhere to write a post to persuade a sailing buddy to bring his non-sailing wife along when visiting our area to sail. She wanted us to write about activities in our area, especially ones that might not be on the radar of the average tourist.

For some reason, the fact that an old-fashioned pie shop in Fall River had stuck on their wall one of my blog posts just seemed totally bizarre to me. There was an old guy (presumably the owner of the shop) chatting up Tillerwoman and doing the familiar, "Are you from Britain. So am I. Which part are you from?" patter. I went over to him excitedly and burbled something about, "Do you know who wrote that? It was ME!!!" He didn't seem at all interested and just changed the subject to the story of how Manchester United visited New England in 1955 and he and a bunch of buddies put together a New England team to play them and how they lost 11-0. I told him I thought United probably went easy on him. I showed my superficial knowledge of (real) football by muttering the hallowed words "Matt Busby." Then the pies arrived and we paid for them and left.

How strange is that, possum?