The Most British Letter Ever

(from "Motoring With Mohammed" )


Dear Eric, 


Many thanks for your letter. I was away in Spain for a few weeks.  I visited Galicia where people are so melancholy...then on to Leon where they are also melancholy.  I traveled to Portugal and found the people there even more melancholy. The friend I was with thought he was going to die so we left the day before the Great Fire of Lisbon- having eaten and drunk far more than was good for us. I spent a few days in Cairo, where people thought my Arabic hilarious.  I found the Egyptians anything but melancholy. The cafes there serve a milky drink with nuts in, which is ambrosial. I rowed around the Nile in the sunset, and listened to a tape of readings by Benjamin Zephaniah, an English Rastafarian poet, in the City of the Dead under the shadow of the Qait Bey mosque. It's beginning to get cold in San'a, which always makes me want to go on walks. PM is right in recommending Jabal Bura. I once went walking there, climbing the last part of the mountain with my nose on a level with a donkey's farting fundament. A Bura burro. There's a strange bit of forest along the way- loud with the cries of baboons.  What I'm trying to say is I should love to go on a trip with you. You asked what you could bring.  A piece of cheese would be nice, and a supply of cigarette bangers. The sort that you put in a cigarette and blow up the end.  
Hope to see you soon, 
                                                        
                                                                                                                        Martin

If you read this letter and it doesn't make you happy, try reading it in a jaunty british accent.  If that still doesn't make you happy, you are most likely dead inside and thus very melancholy and I pity you.