Something for everyone in the small ads

You don’t want to know the mucky process in which many engaged to get a ticket. Each one will have a tale of how they got there come Sunday.

HAVE you ever browsed through the wanted section of the local newspaper, the small ads in the back of a magazine or clicked through pages of auction websites and thought: who the hell is selling that? Well I have — and this week I tried to get to the bottom of a few of those little human mini-stories which are camouflaged in prosaic vocabulary and practical information like contact details and measurements and framed in a certain acronym-heavy language: think c/h, GSOH, NCT, WLTB.

As Raymond Chandler — the writer not the bookie — said: “They write them long because they can’t write them short. Well, crowbar open these tightly-crafted pay-by-the-word lids and you’ll plunge into a drama as dense as any of America’s great novels. That was the theory.