WHAT IS IT WITH THE ENGLISH AND FAKE PLANS?
We say one thing while actually thinking about how much we don’t mean it. Ever agreed to go to The Tate Modern at dawn or bicycle along the Serpentine with someone whilst feeling drunk or awkward and then ignored their calls the next day? (Unless that someone is English, in which case, they too were making a fake plan. I LOVE it when a fake plan comes together)
I am now being forced to face the repercussions of one HUMUNGOUS fake plan, offering up my parent’s house is not quite an ice cream on the Thames.
My gap yah was about 5 years ago now. I had the best time (yawn – would be quite great to say it was average) Of course we did the usual: went to Rio and snogged a Paulo, went to Bolivia and cycled down the world’s most dangerous road sending mum into melt down, went through the Amazon and got nailed by Malaria (well not quite but you know – some kind of Amazonian virus)
We (two girlfriends and I) OBVIOUSLY then went to the Thai islands, drunk buckets of speed disguised as red bull and danced on tables occasionally lifting our hippy attire to flash bits of sun burnt skin.
We would then walk back to our hut, passing the tattoo store where we would spend twenty minutes contemplating whether to get ‘Love’ or ‘Freedom’ tattooed on our midriffs. Deciding we would prefer something IN our midriffs we would head to the kebab store where we would stuff our faces and go home to sit for hours on a hammock feeling slightly sick and wait for the ’red bull’ to wear off.
Anyway you get the picture…but it now seems my Thai days are coming to haunt me (rather like the stripy pair of hippy trousers in my cupboard)
Pong wants to come and stay…. Who the hell is Pong? My thoughts exactly on receiving his phone call.
Then I remembered… one night we were out on the town when my girlfriend realised she wasn’t wearing any knickers. For some reason we decided she should borrow someone’s boxers….Off we went around the nightclub until we spotted a sweet boy who introduced himself as Pong, he happily gave us his boxers and wrote on the stretchy bit where it usually says Calvin Klein – Pong and whatever his number was.
Within minutes Pong was our new best friend and we did everything together. His older brother, who couldn’t speak a word of English, fell in love with my white skin and freckles (seriously, why? I would be orange for the rest of my life if I could) He used to call me his wifey and ask questions such as ‘where would you like to live wifey?’ – Questions which obviously had to be translated. I sort of laughed it off. Suddenly things weren’t so funny. We were sitting on the beach when an English friend of ours walked over, I was chatting to him when suddenly Pong’s brother pulled out a gun. It turned out he was a head of the mafia on Ko Phangan. Pong managed to calm him down. Luckily we left the island the next day.
ANYWAY… the relevance of all this is that Pong wants to come and stay. What to do? The amount of times the words ‘oh when you come to England you must come and stay’ have passed my lips. What if they all pitch up? Most of them are about as savoury as a haribo. Why, oh why, will people not understand the concept of a fake plan?
