The Lair

For the moment, at least. I’m heading southward in a while to start the first leg of what will be an enjoyable holiday.

This is usually how my trips to Sri Lanka work. The first day I land, I love it. I like the heat, I don’t mind the humidity. I get called a freak by many for this. The fact that I’m running away from -10c temperatures means that I will probably get a cold the first day. I will have all the fruit and food I like to eat within reasonable distance. All those things will be good. My first couple of days at home will be blissful.

Then the angst will set in. No decent internet connectivity. Nightmare traffic conditions (although I may avoid it this time). And you know, extended family. I think my extended family is reasonably cool, sure - but you know, too much of a good thing. By the end of week 1 - I expect I will be wishing very hard that I was in another country. And then things will calm down and settle into an ordered pattern. Some additional chaos in the offing this time around as I ponder that age old question “what happens next?” and deal with the blunt force trauma of getting new travel documents and stuff.

And on a slightly related note. Meetup! I probably haven’t mailed or gotten in touch with most of you lot (except the folks I see on IRC). Send me email. Actually, that’s possibly a bad idea. A call is probably more reliable.

I know, I know - I’m a few days late with this. I blame the personal drama that engulfed my life since Friday. Some positive personal drama mixed in all of it, but you know … drama. Must deal with before doing stuff online etc.

The thing is - the whole deal with St. Valentine’s day eludes me. But any day of the year is good for the quirky (or grand) gesture of romance. I may mock the person doing it mercilessly, but you know - having the big brass ones to do something spectacular just has to be appreciated.

Which is why I stopped and gawked like a bumpkin at the person playing a guitar in the quadrangle of Alcuin College. This enterprising young chap had plugged in his guitar to a power socket in a ground floor kitchen and was busy serenading someone under their first floor window. Needless to state, he had quite an audience of people pointing and laughing. He carried on regardless.

Gawk I did. Yet, I realized I was probably adding to his discomfiture (if he felt any, I doubt it) so I moved on. Only to scamper back moments later because I had the brilliant idea of getting a few pictures of our young Josh-Groban-with-a-guitar. Some innate sense of decency kicked in, however, and I refrained - even though the urge to take a photograph and caption it refused to go away.

Serenade someone on campus with an electric guitar? Sing (I couldn’t pick out the song) under their bedroom window? Now that’s a gesture that Hallmark would find difficult to replicate. A pity then that the big brass balls that this bloke carried around was clearly interfering somewhat with his singing voice. It sounded like two cats stowed in a barrel and tossed into the river Ouse.

Oh well, I sighed as the discordant notes rose up and bounced off the firmly closed first floor window. It’s the thought that counts, right?

People generally like mementoes of places that they visit. It’s true. A generation earlier, this memento would have taken the form of some ghastly ceramic ornament to adorn some glass walled cabinet. Someone I know swears by fridge magnets. Me? I just buy tshirts. Not to pack them up in a drawer and keep them around, of course. I generally buy them and wear them. No, not the drawers, the tshirts. Ostensibly, by the time the tshirt is hacked up and ready to throw away (so my optimistic reasoning goes), it’s time to visit that place again. No, I haven’t revisited most of the places I’ve been, but I can always hope, right?

But I have this friend, whom I shall name Fred. Fred has an even odder idea of mementoes. When he visits these fair shores, our boy Fred buys himself a copy of the Playboy magazine and takes it home. What he does with those magazines once he reaches home is unknown, but I’m desperately trying to dispell the mental imagery of mattresses, hand lotion and tissues from my mind as I type this.

Not that there’s anything wrong with secreting Playboy mags under mattresses and indeed err.. secreting things into tissues, of course. I’m just not sure I want to imagine Fred doing any of that. No offense, Frederick old chap.

The problem with Fred’s most recent visit, however, is that he forgot to buy his Playboy mag. This is (unsurprisingly, perhaps) where I come into the picture. I’d say centerfold but the thoughts of myself in any centerfold isn’t an image I particularly want to imagine either, so I presume this goes in triplicate for the rest of you lot. Right, so picture. Me. Playboy.

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