Counting The Cars...

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The is the first in an occasional series based on the "Boring Postcards" book I mentioned the other week. Pictured - well I think it's probably self-explanatory - the New Jersey Turnpike around sixty years ago. Now, disclaimer: I've never been to the States in my life, and whilst like most of my generation I grew up on a diet of Americana - movies, comics, music and garish commercial graphics - I've never really wanted to go over the pond to see it first hand. Given my age now, and the current febrile state of the USA's politics under Trump, I'm as unlikely now to go there as I was when I was an impecunious youth back in the era this postcard was first published. However, as the title of this post alludes, this particular bit of US freeway holds a semi-mythical place in my heart, in that as a young teenager I listened to Simon and Garfunkel's album "Bookends" almost daily; usually just side one, with a very occasional foray into the flipside. The song "America" was I guess the teenage me, living in my parent's little Winson Green terraced house, inhabiting a much larger world of an imagined beyond in my head...

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