And Now for Something Different...

Bored and a bit miserable with a flatmate I wasn't getting on with and drowning under a theatre company I was too young and inexperienced to handle, I got into an odd and admittedly drunken argument at a party with a girl I had never met before, over where the actor Jason Priestley comes from. We agreed that he was Canadian, but she claimed Toronto while I knew perfectly well it was Vancouver. On and on we argued in that peculiarly drunken way in which every pointless argument assumes life or death significance, and the following say, somewhat more sober but still determined to be right I sneakily surfed the internet (while simultaneously hiding my hangover from my boss - who says I can't multitask?) to settle the score. I never saw her again, most likely couldn't pick her out of a line up now, so I was denied the satisfaction of crowing over being right, but in the midst of my research I fell in love with Vancouver and found myself on a plane headed for a new life in a country I'd never so much as visited nor knew anything about.

Ever since I spent an entire year at primary school carefully escorting an imaginary lion to class with me everyday and solemnly promising all my friends that I wouldn't let her eat them, I have lived with a constant compulsion to be different, to do things more exciting, to live beyond the norm. Throughout my teenage years, when most of my friends were happily hanging round pubs in Guildford and snogging blokes from the local boys' school I was sneaking up to London in search of glamour and excitement, sometimes I found it, sometimes I didn't, but the need to do something other than hang around pubs in Guildford snogging blokes from the local boys' school was too tempting to resist. Who knows: I might have thoroughly enjoyed hanging around pubs in Guildford, I might have even fallen, in the midst of all that snogging, for one of those blokes from the local boys' school - I'll never know, because I never gave myself the chance to find out.

I don't regret the choices I have made, I love maybe 90% of my life which I think isn't bad going, but I am aware that it inevitably goes in fits and starts. For ever weekend I spent flying off to go to parties or concerts on the other side of the world, that I paraglide or kayak (or at least think very hard about doing so) or spend a Sunday afternoon on the rides at Brighton Pier, there is another I spent cuddled up with a book or indulgently in front of trashy tv, on my own. I suppose it's just the way things go really, action and reaction and all that, but sometimes I wonder if, maybe, normalcy might be worth checking out?

I'll see you down the pub...