He kept up his tour-guide patter in the museum, sweeping past large caches of strange specimens floating in jars, and then some greatly magnified photographs of insects.
By the end of it, McQueen is ferrying French tourists around, not just bossing the streets but giving it a bit of tour-guide patter as well.
Even families who can afford to visit lots of colleges and endure the backwards-walking tour guides' patter find that campus personalities soon blur in their memory.
If the guide's patter is a bit over-rehearsed, we don't mind.
Wiener's accounts of his trips to nuclear test sites, missile-launching control centers and fallout shelter exhibits contrast the guides' cheerful patter with the prospect of Armageddon, and his visit to a former plutonium processing plant serves as a reminder of the environmental costs of the arms race.
Especially in the first quarter of the book, the reader has the same sensation of glut -- cathedrals, dates, rulers, isms -- that comes from a tour guide's breathless patter.
The up-close-and-personal Schama of his study of Rembrandt is almost totally absent here: the Schama of The Face of Britain is a garrulous tour guide, seemingly more interested in patter than portrait.
The technician kept up a reassuring patter while she guided the wand across my daughter's rash-scarred chest.
On any given day, chants in ancient liturgical languages mingle with the patter of tour guides and the hushed prayers of pilgrims in dark grottos, though the foreigners are few these days.
Both, though, are present on Found's urbane second album, on which lead singer Ziggy Campbell's introspective patter and crisp tone guide you through the musical undergrowth.
