{part 14}

{parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,  10,  11, 12, & 13}

"hi, i'm nancy. you two look very interesting--"

i looked up from my laptop and stopped chewing my croissant. because what did that mean?

it was the very beginning of day eight. we were in the hotel restaurant eating brekkie and discussing what might possibly be in this thing the scottish call "black pudding" while i tapped out a little blog post and uploaded a few pictures. then all of a sudden, there was this woman towering over our table and telling us we looked interesting. for some reason, it rubbed me the wrong way.

"beautiful" is a nice thing to be called. or "lovely." "interesting" feels more like a reference to my clear eyebrows and big ears.

as soon as i was done thinking about how i didn't like to be called "interesting", i thought to think about how i had no idea who this woman was. she smiled too much. she stood a little closer to barclay than to me. she was holding a clipboard. who even uses those anymore?

it's amazing to me how quickly you can think things, considering all of this passed through my mind before nancy could finish her sentence, which ended this way:

"would you like to be in an advert? it's for walker's crisps."

oh. tv interesting. that's maybe better than just plain interesting. better than a kick in the pants.
{cultural clarification: advert=commercial, walker's crisps=lay's chips}

i looked at barclay first, because i'm more likely to throw yeses at people while he's more likely to think something's a scam and politely tuck his yes away into his coat pocket as though it were a wad of hundred dollar bills. but he was already looking at me waiting for me to look at him, and when i caught his eye he smiled and nodded in this way that he does when he knows i want to say yes to something and he might think it's silly but he's ok with it all at the same time.

so the yes was said and we gave the lady our number and she told us more details and then she said something polite about how she should let us finish our breakfast. which, you know, that was nice. i didn't dislike her anymore.



so we finished up, ran to our room to drop our stuff off, and met the crew outside of the hotel. the director, who we met right off the bat, was a short and fat yet stylish man with large sunglasses who talked exactly the way you're imagining he talked. he was surrounded by about a million, or 30, bustling men and women with mics and cameras and walkie talkies and other miscellaneous equipment and clipboards and game faces. they whisked us away to a lighthouse by the sea and took funny footage of us saying ridiculous scottish phrases in our clumsy canadian accents, laughing too much and {me} saying too often, "oh crap, i think i wrecked the commercial."



the director asked us if we didn't mind "acting romantic with each other" and we said we didn't mind it very much at all, which delighted him. so, if you're in scotland, you might soon happen to turn on the tv and see barclay awkwardly biting a single chip out of my mouth and then saying some funny little scottish thing, and me doubling over laughing, covering my mouth so that this beautiful country isn't subjected to my uvula.

we did a bunch of different takes, and then the director put his hand up and said, "we got it!" and everyone clapped and shook our hands and thanked us and made us sign stuff and one guy gave us money and we felt like movie stars even though all we really are are a couple of chip eaters.



we finished off the bag of chips that had been our prop and said goodbye to the director and his scurrying crew, saying that we'd had a great time but we had a train to catch.

because we had and we did.

{part 15>>>}