Once more into the breach
I have to go to Scotland with work tomorrow, this is indeed a terrifying prospect. Scottish Mike comes from Scotland and he manages to cause enough chaos all by himself, I can't imagine how I will survive for three days surrounded by an entire country full of his sort. Mike came to visit a while back and I am glad to say that behaviour was restrained and that at no point did we get involved with a gorilla theatre group, annex an empty drama studio having gained entrance to the university by the simple expedient of saying hello to the security guards, assist with their rehearsals by reading lines or going on regular beer runs. What we did do though was happen upon a cafe we had visited once when he came to visit the first time I lived in London. I suppose it is a bit rich to say that we happened upon the cafe, I live right next door to it and I said something along the lines of
"Let’s go to that cafe where we came up with THE plan". There was a fair amount of intention in the going to cafe and not a lot of happening across. In fact in the end we didn't even go to the cafe as it seemed a bit silly to pay for a cup of tea when I could just make some for free using all this running water and electricity that I have nowadays. We did lean out of the window as far as possible so that we could gain a glimpse of the cafe past the crepe stall. The cafe you see, has great significance for that is the cafe where we came up with the plan to travel all the way around the world without any money and it was there that Mike bought a bike from an Italian, for the purpose of travelling around the world on, and then we somehow ended up sharing an apartment in what turned out to be a brothel with a chap who turned out to be a drug smuggler. When we escaped that situation Mike ended up surprising the Italian by leaving the bike chained to a railing in the main square of the Italians home town and then phoning him to tell him to come and fetch it. If one measures success in terms of achieving targets then that trip wasn't hugely successful, we failed to travel around the world for free, we did manage to get to Greece and spend a lot of money. After that the idea of living in the woods for a year seemed positively sensible and indeed it was around that time that the idea of spending time living in a jungle came up, originally it was going to be in the north of Thailand, then it was going to be Costa Rica because the surfing is good there and now somehow the plan has morphed into it's current incarnation; walk across South America. I think I preferred the Costa Rica plan; that involved living on the beach and surfing. Not, I hasten to add that living on the beach is all that comfortable, I tried that in the Caribbean once and it didn't all go entirely to plan.
So through these various misadventures and excitements I have ended up sitting here in a comfortable flat in a fashionable are of London plotting the next trip and questioning the wisdom of moving out of said nice flat in order to pursue a hair brained scheme to try to help save the rainforest. I had come up with a genius plan to raise money for the trip but, there is always a but, having had a bit of experience of using ebay now, ebay was central to the plan, I have decided against that plan as ebay have managed to instill in me not one jot of confidence in their abilities. So I have now moved from plan A (find a backer to pay for the expedition), through plan B (make a fortune on ebay) and end up with plan C which as I mentioned the other day is to earn loads of money and fund the trip myself. Possibly the idea of putting in an honest days toil in order to gain financial remuneration is not the most original idea I have ever come up with but it is an idea that seems to work. I have found a reasonably well paying job that should allow me to save the required amount of cash in a few months time, the only problem is that the work is relatively seasonal so it won't start until the spring; this of course means that there will be yet more delays to the off date. However it does give me the winter months with which to do something productive.
For the next two months I will be living in Spain, learning to fish and hopefully learning some Spanish that kind of sounds productive to me.
Jam
2 Comments
Reader Comments (2)
go on, make me a million