(diaryland) August 23, 2001 - 1:10 p.m.

I got Roland the best birthday present ever! And I don�t mind saying. It even surpasses the Easter present I gave to him, which was a book with pictures of hundreds of rubbish bins from all over the world.

I went to the bookshop determined to get him a nifty art book of some sort. I pottered around and after ten minutes, nothing had yet grabbed my attention. But then, I saw it. A dull, grey hardcover book. I pulled it out, and giggled. Yes, I�d struck gold. Indeed. The book was entitled �Boring Postcards� in sober black writing. I opened it up. Yep, that�s what they were. Zillions of boring postcards from all over England. Pictures of caravan parks, pictures of suburbs, pictures of shopping centres. Pictures of people checking into daggy hotels. Pictures of carparks. These were all used postcards.

A lot of the postcards of caravan parks had �X� on one of the caravans in biro and one of them elaborated a little bit by saying �our caravan� and pointing to one of them with a shaky biro arrow.

One of the postcards says, �View from something-or-other hotel� and it�s a picture of a window facing a large expanse of grass. The last postcard in the book says, �Rainclouds at bla-bla pier� and it�s a picture of just that. Clouds and sea. In black-and-white, no less. Compelling viewing.

But my favourite two postcards are on facing pages. The first postcard shows views of some town�s local post office. Its caption says something about the architecture of the post office and how the building materials relate to the town, and then goes on to say, �The town itself is represented by two red brick panels.� YAY! Now I know why I wanted to be an architect.

The best postcard of the whole lot comes from Basingstoke. It says that on it. And it also has three alternate views of scaffolding and traffic cones on it. WOAH! Basingstoke, you rock!

I don�t know about you, but if I were thinking of going on holiday to Basingstoke, I�d be pretty disappointed to discover the town thinks its best features are scaffolding, traffic cones and the people who step over them with their shopping.

Anyway, I took the book to the counter and the guy who served me laughed and said, �Wow. I didn�t even know we had books like this in our shop.�

I said, �It�s a birthday present.�

He said, �Really? I�d hate to get a birthday present like this. I�d take it as a some kind of comment on my personality.�

I did not mention to him that the last present I bought for this person was a book about rubbish bins.