I used to think guided tours were for tourists who didn’t know how to use Google, and wore trousers with knee zips. I then became a tour guide in Oxford and realised that it wasn’t just lame people who went on tours, but cool-hot-young people too.
In Amsterdam I dragged my friends on one– but it didn’t go to plan. Last week I had a day to kill in Washington D.C., so booked myself onto a four-hour tour.
It was the kind where you hop on and off a bus at each site. Our guide was a woman called Joey. She was in her mid-fifties and was armed with a few scripted jokes. I knew scripted jokes all too well from my tour guiding days. If you were lucky, most of your group would laugh, but occasionally I did a whole two-hour tour and there wasn’t even a hint of a giggle, even my Boris Johnson impression couldn’t tug a lip. It was these tours that made me question my existence. I would hate for Joey to feel like this, so I made a real effort to laugh at every single one-liner she had.
“Our first stop is The Capitol. Biden hasn’t texted me so I’m not sure if he’s working today. Byyy Gawd that man is bad at communicating.”
Bus was silent, but I had Joey covered.
Me, “HAHAHAHAHAHA.”
The man sitting next to me on the bus was an Aussie named Mark. Aussie Mark worked in pest control and was on a business trip. I had assumed pest control guys only deal with the pests within their borders, but you learn something new every day.
Aussie Mark told me about all his holidays. He told me about how he drove through Oxford when he went to pick up his vintage sports car from the Cotswolds. He showed me a photo of it in his driveway in Perth. He also showed me a photo of his beautifully lit swimming pool that overlooked the beach…it was all very luxurious, too luxurious.
I had to ask. “Is ‘pest’ slang for something?”
“Loiiike whaht?” Aussie Mark said.
“A bad human…like, are you a hitman?”
“Naaaooo!” he said quickly, too quickly.
“Now who here thinks the White House looks small?” Joey asked the group.
I shot up my hand. Joey gave me daggers. She told the story of how the Brits torched the original White House in 1814 when they raided Washington. I decided then it was best not to comment too much on this tour.
“Now we’re off to the Jefferson Memorial. Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. This is when we won our freedom after beating the British in the great Revolutionary War,” Joey said, whilst glaring at me.
After my fingers nearly froze and dropped off at the Jefferson Memo rial (It was -5 degrees), we were taken to the Lincoln one. I had visited the Lincoln Memorial a year before, but was too occupied trying to capture a photo of Sausage in mid-air to learn about it.
Joey showed us the spelling error on the wall, (some guy used the wrong stencil and spent ‘Eutre’ instead of ‘Future’ – it’s been corrected but you can still see the mistake.
“Oh men,” said one of women in our group, a middle aged lady who had bickered with husband for the duration of the tour.
Joey also explained how Lincoln’s left hand represents his determination to see the war through, and his right-hand shows his compassion.
“And guys,” Joey said. “The reason why Abraham Lincoln was never put in jail was because he was in-a-cent…”
Group, silence.
Me, “HAHAHAHAHAHA!”
After seeing the war memorials, we got dropped back at the start. I told Aussie Mark I was off to a museum. The bad-Britain tour must have rubbed off on him, because then he said, “Museum? Hahven’t yah guys stolen the baest beets?”
….Sure Aussie Mark, good luck with your ‘pest’ control.
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