I hate to admit it, but I have something of a soft spot for the free Aussie/Kiwi/SA travellers’ magazine, TNT, and I always pick it up when I notice a spare copy in one of those red bins around town. It’s not, you understand, because I need to keep up with the latest developments in Aussie Rules, or see which more important international leader John Howard has been bending over for this week, but because some of the features are surprisingly good, and because of the entertainment value of a number of the regular sections. It’s always worth looking, for example, at the Spotted feature, where they send some hapless photographer to some traveller-filled bar in South West London (perhaps a Puzzle, or a Walkabout), and take photos of drunken antipodean youngsters. In a stroke of (no doubt unintentional) genius, the photos are always terrible, making it seem like you’re flicking through someone else’s photographs from a drunken night out, rather than something you might find in a professional magazine.
My favourite feature, however, without a shadow of a doubt, is Desperately Seeking, the personal ad/message board page at the back. Personal ads are grimly entertaining at the best of times, and I’ve always enjoyed things like the “behind the classifieds” feature in the Observer magazine, but for sheer entertainment value, it’s hard to beat Desperately Seeking. Perhaps it’s just the stories that these ads unwittingly tell about the people involved. In this week’s issue, for example, I couldn’t help but notice this item:
Shy S seeking Mark at the Bok Bar (TNT May 31): This “sexy barman” shouldn’t be saying he’d do anything for you and taking your number because he’s not single. He is, in fact, my boyfriend.
Further down the page, I noticed two adjacent ads linked to the same email address. Not only has KatwomanC @ AOL been losing her mobile phone at the Redback, but she’s also been meeting a “cute kiwi” at the Shepherd’s Bush Walkabout a few days earlier. One can only imagine the meeting of minds evident from her description of the encounter: “we talked about growing up on a farm and made a joke about sheep.” Hopefully the “cute kiwi”, if he is reading, isn’t reading the rest of the ads, however, or else he might find the one that the same katwoman has placed in the column to the side asking after a “nice SA guy” she’d “met at the Walkabout” (not the same night she talked about to a cute kiwi about sheep, surely?). She got his number, the brazen hussey, but of course she can’t call him because of the lost phone. Ah! The tragedy.
Another wonderful feature of the ads, is the way the people posting them (apart from the ubiqutous KatwomanC) create their own email addresses at hotmail or yahoo for the occasion, which is understandable if you don’t want to give out your real email address. But you do have to pity the chap has to plump for AussieRedback3@hotmail.com. Presumably AussieRedback1 and AussieRedback2 were already taken.