The How to Guide For the Socially Awkward Part 4

           We all enjoy the exciting feeling that travelling brings right? Well some of us do, sometimes when you look back on your relaxing holiday you quietly reminisce about laying on a beach or that couple who were your holiday pals. If you really stop and think though. It wasn't all that relaxing was it.

            If you are lucky enough to have found a holiday that hasn't required the remortgage of your house and the sale of your least favourite child, you eventually find yourselves ready to take flight. Now initially you will have passport panic about 50 times on the way to the airport and you've had the taxi driver reassuring you that not all planes crash, you will eventually be checked in and awaiting take off. The flight can be a traumatic experience for some. for example, smokers and people who get hungry but have left their wallet in their case. You then become the most irritating other half on the planet. I myself have found that I have moaned for 4 hours on a flight that I am hungry, so much so the person in front gave me a sandwich to shut me up and for those adventurous flyers out there who think it's a good idea to join the mile high club! Why on earth would you do this? You are 'doing it" in one of the most confined used toilet cubicles on earth. I mean have you seen Slumdog Millionaire? Those toilets are more hygienic!  

         So you are lucky enough to have landed safely and providing you haven't flown with monarch, you probably have your luggage too. You are in new uncomfortably hot county where nobody understands a word you are saying. So you now adopt the local dialect, this being English but said.........very............very............slowly. My dad once asked me to order him a coffee when we were away in Rome. so I put on a really bad super Mario style Italian voice and asked.

"Heya, Escuse... you giva me da cafe eh?"

turns out the barista was fully fluent in English and just thought I was a head mental child. She even gave me free Biscotti. You also as an adult maybe faced with my problem. Now I absolutely do not have a body to be seen topless, yet my girlfriend is one of those head turners. So I just kind of sit around in a t-shirt and shorts afraid of the beachy judgement.

         Whilst in a new country every day poses new challenge, The food being one i mean go to Poland look at a menu and think I will try the local cuisine. Once I thought I was getting experimental and ordered 'Kurtka sera ziemniaków i fasoli' when a cheese and bean jacket potato arrived I was pretty disappointed to say the least. 

Then you are struck with the thought of maybe I should embrace a little of the local culture. This in many places is an amateur mistake!

Once I was in Morocco and went into a shop to buy a fez, Do not judge I was young! Also I have a good egg shaped head which suits the shape of a fez. My first mistake was trying it on. I was forced to buy this fez as apparently in some places in Morocco, If you try, you buy. If you don't by I hold you hostage until you do buy. I'll be honest, I brought it. This is all part of the holiday experience which in my view is the least relaxing thing to do. Just go to Devon! It's the riviera of England and everybody kind of understand what you are saying.

      

My Fifteen Minutes

The year was 1995. I was a young, boisterous and In no way a charming young man. I was still developing my humour and was at this point just edging into wanting some of that sought after limelight every class clown desires.

One fine, beautiful Monday.  I define it as a fine and beautiful day as on that day we were allowed to play on the grass. Nothing worse than a wet playtime! Back then,  receiving news it was raining when you had been plotting your best hiding spaces for the last hour was tantamount to hearing your dog had died.
Now after this very successful playtime,  it was announced to the class that some people would be monitoring the class. The people would be looking for people to feature on a CBBC television show and the would pick some of us at the end of the day and interview us. Well this was it! My time to shine. I held my head so high and gave beautiful answers with vigour and confidence.

Would you believe it, two days later my parents got got a phone call asking me to do a phone interview so I could give answers to question they would be asking about me for the show. I stood, raised my pointy chin and held out my hand as if I were a king summoning maids to my chamber. Everything about my stance yelled.
"Hand me the telephonic device father.  My people need me."
Now the question they asked me apart from the obvious was this. "So, Rob what is your favourite animal?"
To this I responded honestly
"My favourite animal is a tiger"
Oh, why do you love tigers they asked, obviously looking for a quick answer whilst trying to stump me.
"Well, I think tigers are amazing predators, the way they use there surroundings and manage to camouflage so well to hunt is such a clever thing."
WHAM!  Take that CBBC.  Impressed they were either that or left thinking. . Do tigers actually camouflage or do they just make and kill whatever near?

The big day finally arrived. I was ready. Proud dad in the audience. Nervous children all around. For some reason not me. The lights, the cameras. It was my time to shine,  I just had to pick my moment perfectly.  If I could just make one person see. Then maybe, just maybe I'd make it big. I could do Home and Away. I loved that show!
Filming began and we gone through all the testers and sound checks and we had come to filming the tell us about you segment of the show. This was where I was going to take my moment. With honour with pride, with all my work on speaking colloquial English I waited and it came.
"So Rob, your favourite animal. It's actually my favourite animal too. Tell us what is it? Say a young innocent Mark Evans
"Well Mark, I love tigers" I say. looking for my dad in the audience I notice a nervous man and then the second part of that question arrives..
"So why do you like tigers?"
I thought to myself, original answer? or do I go a little drama on this? so naturally I chose this.
"Well Mark, I love tigers basically because they eat people. You know they tear apart the flesh in seconds and just devour whatever they want. My dad says my mom had this ability too"
His face dropped. My dad's jaw widened the room went silent for what was a very long moment until all of a sudden, being the professional he was.
"And on with the show"
Now to my ultimate disappointment.  They cut my reason down but I still won. As when the question, why do you like tigers came the answer they managed to cut to was.
"They eat people"
Cut to shocked father. Angry teacher and therapy for a year because everybody things I'm obsessed with death.

It's all about education right?

So on initial glimpse some of you may recognize the image above, some may not. I have included this image for the purposes of going back to where It all began, the realization that the things I said not only sometimes caused shock but could make a select few people laugh. The image above was a still from a sketch from a British TV show called Brass Eye. Now I used to love this show and at the tender age of 12, being fresh faced and newly inserted into high school, accompanied by a somewhat sick if not a slightly more open sense of humour than most of my student counterparts. I chose to repeat at school phrase by phrase what I found so amusing. Here was that scene that tickled my twisted funny bone.

Even now Just posting the video I still cry laughing. Upon retorting what I had heard. I found myself staring into a sea of blank dead eyed stares from students who had no idea what the hell I was talking about and teachers who stood upright, mouths open and shocked as if I had just urinated on their parents. I was quickly taken to one side by a few teachers one of which my P.E teacher. Now I am not being funny but this guy could not lecture me on using the word Paedophile. I am pretty sure he was one, please before you jump up and hang him. He wasn't a dangerous one. He was a 90's Paedo. I think all P.E teachers were. he just used to stand on the benches and have a look. He wasn't a 'Toucher' after they asked me what i though a paedophile was, in quite a patronizing way if I may add I chose my response very carefully and decided to throw back at them and said very slowly.
"A paedophile..is...a...grown....up...that..puts...things...inside..somebody..that...is...not...grown...up"
Apparently this was far too cheeky and deserved a day at home thinking about what I had done, they sent me home with a letter for my father to sign. Which he did, only using my hand.

I think that this was all where it began. I mean we all have a class clown but I was not the class clown. I used to work, complete the work and then go off on a complete tangent drawing whatever attention to myself I could. A few weeks later I had a quiet period as I had been arrested as you read about in the cream mile but that's besides the point. By now I was starting to gather an audience, I had a good group of friends and they were usually mightily impressed by my ability to do voices and accents but I always knew I had to step up the stakes and make things more risque. Trouble was this wasn't a conscious decision it was more a natural progression. I was to find that this progression would only cause further issues.

Shortly after I discovered that I was a slightly inappropriate teen, I found that the teachers were starting to clamp down on my outbursts especially after the riots of 99. Just to add I instigated the riots, I cleverly was not involved and then porn saga. Porn saga was and still is quite amusing. I was approached by the IT teacher and told that I had pornography on my computer, I asked him to prove it. He subsequently showed me a topless model, I offered response.
"That is not porn, if you want to see porn. I can get you porn but it's 5 quid a disc"
I also sold erotica movies to my friends, we all have an entrepreneur in us somewhere and I had found a gap in the market.
I was sent home again! This time my dad had to come and get me. He was furious, apparently if I had cut him in on the movie selling we could have made twice as much! oh and I wasn't to tell my step mom.

I had to stop getting myself removed from school, I loved the learning. I just felt like I was misunderstood so I discovered the charity concert! That's right. Inspired by Geldof himself I knew what I had to do. So every year I organised and hosted a charity even which I knew people would pay for (because 50p for a ticket that gets you out of class for an hour! what student wouldn't buy that?) So began Cherry Aid! every year I would save up and write down every insult I could muster up and unleash them on the teachers. One year in fact my history teacher had made my life hell so I mentioned his divorce and how I thought he was possibly sleeping with the head of year, turns out he was but couldn't really stop a charity concert now could he?

So I believe the education system taught me a lot. Mainly if you're going to say inappropriate things, people will get upset. Just make sure you do it in a wide enough audience that the ones who don't like it are drowned out by the laughter of those that do.