Old Boy

This might just be the most self indulgent post I’ve made yet. Apologies to those for whom that which follows will make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Get over it.

For all my university years, my life centred largely around St. John’s College, St. Lucia, where I lived for all my undergraduate years, and through which I’ve made friendships that will last for the rest of my life. Many of you may understand the unique culture and social conventions that accompany college life, and no-where in the world is this truer than at St. John’s. But however determined my singing, chanting, posturing, roaching, drinking, chirping, disk hurling, and out-whipping may have been in years gone by, I’d recently started to feel the effects of getting older, living somewhere else and with different people. To be blunt, I’d started to feel like I was getting over it. Normal people would accept that that is probably fair enough.

Then the other night, as autumn started to show its true colours (brown and gold, funnily enough), I got cold enough to dig my jersey out to wear to church. At the risk of sounding (and indeed, potentially being) idolatrous, I’m afraid I can’t come up with a better description for the feeling that came over me when I put the thing on than to say it was like a religious experience. A stranger and stupider religion would be hard to find (except maybe Scientology), but that’s really what it felt like. When I slipped that jersey on, all of a sudden I felt like “ah… yes. This makes sense.” Like all of a sudden I stopped being a project manager and I was once again Garry with 2 Rs, chirpiest jabba this side of the Buttery. I accidentally dropped a “you won’t” at bible study (“you won’t burst into song in the middle of a prayer session”) the other night. They all looked at me as if to say “that doesn’t make sense”. And objectively speaking, they were right, of course.

It was just a feeling, but then the weirdest thing happened. The college started to stalk me.

It started out simply enough. I was watching an episode of Doctor Who, when Donna Noble looked straight at the Doctor and said “She’s engaged, you prawn”. I laughed pretty hard at that, but I didn’t really make that much of it. And then as I sat down in the café the other night there was a busker playing the flute outside and what does he chirp up with but “when the saints go marching in”. That was awesome.

The kicker came just this evening. I was at the movies, and I got a trailer for Will Smith’s next film. It was all about this superhero with an attitude problem. The whole trailer was a sequence of shots of Will Smith crashing into things: cars, busses, buildings, trains; you name it, he was crashing into it. The name of the film? I kid you not. “Hancock”. I almost fell off my seat I was laughing that hard. Hancock. You’ve got to be kidding me.

So to hell with getting over it. I may be constantly on the move, but this is where I am now, and this, apparently, is still who I am. Garry with 2 Rs, chirpiest old jabba this side of the Harbour Bridge. Now what did I do with that packet of frozen s.s?

Far from home



Garry with 2 Rs