Unfortunately like the credit card bill, the Real World has a way of forcing itself into your consciousness. In this case it was in the form of phone calls and text messages from home checking to see I was ok. It was July 7 2005, when suicide bombers detonated three bombs on the London Underground and one on a bus in Tavistock Square. I wasn't in London at the time, but would see the wreckage of the bus a few days later when checking into the Generator Hostel around the corner. A few days later London came to a stand-still in a moving memorial to those who died in the attacks.
I ended up spending a few weeks at the Generator with Jason, where we took full advantage of the £1 pints before 9pm. Jason managed to win the infamous Hardman competition, which at a place with cheap drinks and backpackers from around the world was as shenanigan-based as it sounds. We had to leave eventually though - if only to give our livers a chance to recover. Jason went to the USA and I went to Cheltenham to catch up with Hamish and Leanne. I ended up using their place as a base to explore more of the British Isles, catching the Megabus up to Edinburgh before ending up in Inverness drinking with people who'd just come back from living a year in the same suburb Mum lived in before heading across to Ireland to jump on a three-day tour around the southern part of the country.
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| Leanne and Hamish at Chepstow Castle, Wales. |
That trip around Ireland had plenty of highlights. To start with I'd struggled to find the hostel I'd booked, trudging around for a couple of hours before finally finding the place. When I got there I discovered they'd cancelled the booking after a John Stuart had arrived to check in - they thought he'd made a double-booking with the wrong name! Luckily they still had a spare bed...
The trip was a lot of fun - I'd gained a lot of self-confidence after travelling with Jason and was happy cracking jokes and being ever-so-hyperactive. This trip was also the time when I managed the second-worst effort with a member of the opposite sex. We were at a bar in Galway and was about to go home when the most attractive girl on tour came up to me, put her hand on my chest and said that she and her friend were grabbing a drink then going back on the dancefloor and I was very welcome to join them. Not thinking anything of it I grabbed a drink (where she put her hand on my chest again and invited me back to the dancefloor) and joined them on the dancefloor, soon after which the friend went to the loo. She then went up to me and said "it's just you and me now".
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I kept dancing and thought nothing of it.
Soon afterwards the friend came back, gave me a strange look and kept dancing. The locals kept trying it on with both girls, something I mentioned to them as we walked back to the hostel. The girl looked at me and simply said "I was waiting for you to save me Stuart".
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Shit.
* I would like to point out for the record that the only effort that has ever beat this was the man who left a girl at the steps of a pub on the Gold Coast and told her to "wait here, I'm just going in for a drink" after she'd picked him up on the beach and said she lived locally and her parents were away.
That trip around Ireland was the last part of my trip. It had been an amazing experience - I'd gone from being very unsure of myself in a small country town to being able to start talking with strangers (albeit only in certain situations, but still, it was a start) and even having the personality to attract members of the opposite sex.
Even if I didn't have a clue until well after the event.
I had so many things to ponder on the bus back to London. I had resigned from the newspaper partway through the trip after realising that I couldn't just return back to Cooma. I didn't want to go back to Brisbane either - there was this whole wide world worth exploring! What I really wanted to do was become a guide for Busabout; unfortunately this dream job wouldn't start again until May 2006 and it was August 2005 when I was pondering all this. I could always get my UK Working Holiday visa straight away, but then I'd miss the Australian summer for a UK winter, which quite frankly sounded awful.
And more to the point, would that girl stay in contact?
