Trip 1 of 2

26 December 2010

Leaving Southern Hemisphere in 6 days. Problem is, I’m not at home, so it feels like I’ve ‘begun’ already, even though all I’ve got with me is thongs, boardies and the thinnest, lightest t-shirts I own. Why? It’s sticky & hot, however, completely leisurely here in Yeppoon. Most days & nights have been defined by what game we were playing.

  1. Scrabble

The 1st day was pure lethargy. It’s always awkward at first with cousins. As we have all gotten older, that awkward period of time has decreased to almost none.

Out of the incessant yawning around the table and struggles to find stories of reminiscence, came the question of whether to do a quick game of Scrabble. From the old, and what I think was the very 1st edition of Scrabble, I learnt how to win it. Some advice:

  1. Always try to work out how to do 2 or 3 words at once.

  2. Do tip 1 on a double word score and scores often get quadrupled. 3.???

  3. Win.

  4. Winning 2nd prize in a beauty contest

This game of Monopoly, also on the 1st day, went on for approx. 1.5 hours through to 1AM. The game started with 8 capitalists and dwindled down to 2 after 1 hour - my uncle & I. Tips: 1. Get the blue & orange properties (only £50 & £100 respectively) 2. Ruthlessness

We, my uncle & I, felt like those people who worked on the floor at Wall St. in the 80’s from standing, sweating and waving money at each other.

3.’TP’ aka Trivial Pursuit

Following picking up 10 relatives from the airport, all 20 of us decided at midnight that the long-awaited game of Trivial Pursuit should be played. Interestingly, we could not find any Trivial Pursuits in at least the 5 shops we initially looked in. Everyone was buying the damn game because of the board game weather (rain) and time of year (time with family).

We found your typical “shite-spin-off edition” hence after spending some time making a traditional board from the internet, the game was underway, with 3 teams of 6. Tips: 1. As with anything nowadays, the focus of the questions was more towards entertainment and pop culture. Buy an older edition. 2. Age. Older team members were much more valuable due to the amount of general knowledge they’ve gained over the years.

The winning team, of course, won by good luck, but with my uncle’s quote in mind,

It always takes some form of luck to succeed.

I don’t feel too bad.

  1. Hardest game in the world

Early wake-up for a game of golf. Apparently a relatively easy course. Not so much for me; I got 117 for 18 holes albeit my very first 18-hole round.

All 10 boys and men played. The fact that the family mostly has darker skin helped; the only 2 without completely beetroot-ed. Playing with 2 of your own age and similar skill-level makes all the difference; my team mates and I laughed for bad shots and celebrated for good shots. It’s a great sport because one can experience extreme frustration and satisfaction within no time at all. Advice, from an unknown source:

Drive for show, putt for the dough.

Moving sadly away from games

This Christmas marked my last, proper Christmas in the young person’s sense of the holiday. Thankfully I’m not just talking about gift-giving and receiving, but about the whole… jolliness and euphoria of it all coming well before the actual day and having no sense of the next Christmas whatsoever. This is not to say that adults don’t experience the same feelings nor that those feelings are wrong. I feel that they know why they would be feeling joyous, whereas kids just don’t give a stuff. I want to not give a stuff a bit longer, because you’ve got a long time as an adult.

As an 18-year-old, you constantly hear all this bollocks of wanting to be mature and to frequent university and to drink wine with cheese and to be’alternative’. I wonder how many people still wanted that on the 25th. Then, I wonder how many reverted to wanting to be’unique’ the following day.

Hence you see before you another reason why I’m taking a year off; at this point in life there is no point in rushing off to be older. I may sound like an old fart pining for the return of a child’s Christmas, but at this point in life, I feel I’ve got a unique, young-person’s-only chance to experience some cool stuff giving the next best feelings of excitement and carelessness, if not better.