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Listen, You’d Ditch Your Britishness Too If It Meant Meeting Rob Lowe

Reader, I queue jumped. But let’s be honest, so would you.

Claire Handscombe
2 min readMay 29, 2020
Photo belongs to the author

I’m not proud of it, but I should probably feel worse about it than I do. Which is, let’s face it, not even a little bit. Although I do feel a little bad about not feeling bad, if that means anything at all.

Yes. I queue jumped.

It was 28th May 2011. Rob Lowe’s talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales had just ended; I had been one of the lucky few endowed with a microphone and had asked him a relatively coherent question, without breaking into a fake American accent. Then, like all the other hundreds of people, I pegged it to the bookshop to get his autobiography signed. I snaked in and out of courtyards, though I don’t think I elbowed or pushed anyone. In the meantime, I made a new friend, who was doing the same.

But oh, the size of the queue.

You have to understand, I had come all the way from Belgium for this.

I had also almost lost my chance to seize the microphone, out of uncharacteristic graciousness, when I let someone else go first, and then it was taken from me and I had to fight to get it back.

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Claire Handscombe
Claire Handscombe

Written by Claire Handscombe

Editor of WALK WITH US: How the West Wing Changed Our Lives; author of the novel UNSCRIPTED and of CONQUERING BABEL: a Practical Guide to Learning a Language.

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