2008

I’m going to start 2008 with an apology. If been taught by many argumentation teachers and other figures who try to teach you how to be persuasive and convincing that this is exactly what you shouldn’t do, as it makes your case weaker, but sometimes you should throw the experts out of the window, along with their ideas.

I’d like to apologise for my long silence. A week has now gone by and I haven’t told a thing, that while my life was wildly exciting. I’ll try to do it some justice in this first post of 2008, but I don’t know if I can.

I’ll start with the dead body.

Some poor bloke didn’t make it past 2007. We know because we nearly stumbled over his dead body on the beach. We had been warned that there was a dead body somewhere on the beach, but with us all being used to western ways and western practices we hadn’t expected quite what we found.

In the west they would have covered the body cordoned off the area, closed the nearby restaurants, had police all over the beach and checked from commutable diseases; but of course we aren’t in the west, we’re in India which means that all that had been done was to put a young excitable bloke with a flashlight, to watch over the body. The problem was that he was far more interested in freaking people out than actually protecting their fragile sensibilities, so he’d let you almost stumble onto the body, then come out the darkness and made sure you got a really good look at the ghastly sight by shining his flash light all over it.

Some of our company didn’t take too well to that.

Then there was the lap dog.

We were sitting in a little restaurant, as you tend to do a great deal of the time while you’re on the beach, when we heard a huge commotion. We ran over to the side of the restaurant and found two dogs that had apparently taken a disliking to each other. The problem was their size. One was a little fluffy critter that I always refer to as ‘please kick me’ dogs, while the other was one of those dogs who could easily chew through a grown man’s arm, even while it was still attached to a struggling man’s body.

The big one had the little one’s head in it’s mouth and was being pounded over the head with a stick by the little one’s owner. It was the look of absolute and complete surprise on the little mongrel’s face that really turned the situation from ghastly into wildly hilarious.

We were actually disappointed to find the little mongrel scampering over the beach the next day, none the worse for wear. Not that we’re sadistic and cruel, but it just seems a bit of an anti-climax after such a wild scene.

The Russian mob boss was also interesting.

We met them at club. It was a very beautiful Russian girl, who was attached to a group of Russian men. One was paralysed from the neck down. We never asked why, but we assume it was violence. The girl was his wife and the other Russian men his body guards. We originally thought that she was completely off her trolley (aka high, for those not into drug speak) as her eyes were huge and she was hugging herself.

We soon found out that she was completely terrified. Her eyes were that big because she wasn’t off her head, but because she was like a doe in the headlights; realising the destiny was coming but too paralysed by fear to do anything about it. We talked to them for a while and discovered that the girl didn’t even know the body guard’s names, only their nick names. That way she obviously wouldn’t be able to harm them even if she was caught by the police.

That bothered some of our group as well, but what were we to do? C’est La Vie. That does sound terribly blasé, I admit. I guess I have become pretty insulated over the years. Sometimes that seems like the only way to survive in a semi-happy state.

Don’t hate me because I’ve learned not to care. Happy 2008.