Alistair Cooke, who, I hear, also does "Letters from America", once called Seattle "a rain-soaked fishing village midway between San Francisco and Alaska". Seattle has got its own back by describing him as "the late journalist and broadcaster" whereas he is still hale and hearty.
In spite of the rain - and it is less annually than that in New York and even Miami - Seattle has been voted several times as "the most livable" city in the US. Maybe this is the secret of the city's ongoing attraction for film-makers. The list of films set there keeps growing, from Tugboat Annie with Wallace Beery back in 1933 to Sleepless in Seattle, the weepie with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, 60 years later.
Flying into Seattle on a clear day you can marvel at its fantastic setting. The city which grew out of the fishing village on Puget Sound is bounded to the east by the Cascades mountain range and to the west by the Olympic mountains. The snow-capped volcanic cone of Mount Rainier to the south makes you feel good just to look at it.
Puget Sound is littered with inviting islands but the city also has two lakes on its doorstep. Lake Washington and the smaller Lake Union almost make Seattle an island.
But in November, the visitor looks for fun on the Seattle streets rather than on the water. Last week the city's ageing rockers were thrilled by the Rolling Stones concert in the Kingdome stadium where they relived their past and dragged along their children to show them what real rock is like.
Mick Jagger didn't disappoint and the local pop music critic raved about being "pumped up by a show that rattles your chest, injects adrenalin into your arteries and pushes all the nostalgic buttons in your noise-addled brain."
You are supposed to get the same kind of kick if you do a coffee shop crawl in Seattle. It is the home of the Starbucks chain, which has now enveloped the US with its aromas.
Starbucks was founded back in 1971: I never knew that the name came from "the java-dependent first mate in Melville's novel Moby Dick". Seattle, of course, is an old Indian word for "latte".
That's a joke. Seattle is actually called after Sealth, the chief of the local Suquamish and Duwamish Indian tribes. The first white settlers got on well with Sealth but as the Indians found their hunting lands being seized a war broke out and guess who won.
When the settlers lynched two Indians in 1882, the coroner smoothed things over by describing cause of death as "irate citizens".
Seattle today is famous for being home to both the Microsoft empire and Boeing. Boeing over the years has raised Seattle up or plunged it into depression, depending on the fortunes of the aircraft industry.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, is nothing as big an employer as Boeing but his workforce is growing fast as Microsoft prepares to launch Windows 98 and develops Windows NT.
The Microsoft headquarters is called a "campus". It does indeed resemble one, and this is what it looks like, with dozens of medium-sized brick buildings spread over acres of the Redmond suburb west of Seattle.
Bill Gates, possibly the wealthiest man in the world, worth $40 billion, is spreading himself over a steep hillside on Lake Washington in the exclusive Medina district where he is building his futuristic $100 million home.
The steward in the plane leaned over me to point out proudly the marvel which is part-building site and partXanadu splendour. Those favoured with an invitation can read the words inscribed around the dome of the library which come from The Great Gatsby - "He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it."
Gates has also bought the Leonardo da Vinci notebooks for $31 million. They are on show in the Seattle Art Museum but in near darkness because of their fragility.
Yes, the man was right. The rich are very different from us. They also don't have to walk up the steep hills on which Seattle is built. They are so steep that someone has worked out how you can walk up them painlessly by hopping in and out of hotels and office buildings taking lifts to certain floors and emerging on the street at ever higher levels.
Some of the hills were even steeper until they had their tops sheared off and the muck sluiced downhill to ease the gradients. Beneath Pioneer Square with its totem pole are the remains of an underground Seattle which you can tour and which has been used as a setting for horror films with mad killers on the loose.
More pleasant is the Pike Place Market, the oldest continuously operating farmers' market in the country. If it's fresh fish or fruit and vegetables you want this is your place, but you can also buy nearly anything else in the narrow lanes and galleries spread over seven acres. It can be like going down Henry Street on Christmas Eve.
Chief Seath wouldn't recognise the place.