I'm kinda shitting myself about travelling. Well not so much the travelling part. It's India that scares me. The heat, the roads, the snakes, Australian travellers. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited. But shitting myself.
The guy is only 19, likes to write and has been given the best head start any young journo wanna-be can possibly imagine. He's going to spend his spring travelling in India and Thailand and will be reporting on his experiences for Guardian's website - in form of a blog that has just become hugely popular. That he is blogging in the first place, most obviously owes to the fact that his dad is a well-known travel journalist, whereas for the publicity he can thank his active little readers. The original entry was posted on Thursday, and together with his editor's explanatory response yesterday it has generated several hundreds of comments, most of them critical. In the world of online advertising, all that traffic means quite a bit of extra revenue for his employer.
The main point with that criticism is very much on the spot - boosting the career of someone whose father is a well-established journalist is cheeky and unfair, given that either his theme or style of writing don't really seem to stand out from the young crowd with similar aspirations. It tells of insularity and nepotism, which are hardly a trivial matter. National-level journalists are a powerful trade, and I for one would be more interested in knowing more of they are recruited and connected to each other. That'd be a worthy topic for the good people of Private Eye or MOT to investigate, assuming it's not against their own self-interest.
The complaints about Max himself and his post, then, don't seem too clever to me. Putting the British class obsession aside, when an anonymous 30-something office smartarse slags off a 19-year old debutant merely on the basis of his prelude and somehow manages to fit the concepts "self-absorbed", "pseudo-intellectual", "middle-class", "uninteresting" and "poorly written" within one same textual achievement, it is indeed a pot so full of originality and thought provocation that this blogger would be more than pleased to introduce him to his Comrade Kettle. "Cultural snipers", as some other comment dubbed them, themselves aren't usually the hottest hobs of the cooker.
Who could possibly be interested in reading Max's musings, ask they - and I am, answer I. Gap years (in their Anglo-Saxon form) aren't really common in Finland, and I'm genuinely curious to study which kind of phenomena they actually are. If I were Max and wanted to "find myself", I would have chosen a cheaper and more exotic destination, such as Belarus or Transnistria, but am not entitled to complain, since my own gap jaunt was to somewhere even tamer. See, I and my two mates spent ours in Holland. It was only two months, but felt substantially longer.
Initially, we had got ourselves a job at a Zeelandese apple farm, via Eures and a couple of phone calls, yet fell ill on our second day there, contracting a mass diarrhea. We spent the days three, four and five in the farm's loos. The loos, that were next to our shabby and leaking caravan, looked like huge coke vending machines and were only two. They were supposed to be emptied once in two weeks, yet we three young Finnish male persons manage to fill them up in two days. It was the farmer's son's duty to empty them with his tractor and I remember that he didn't seem very happy while doing it.
In the evening of the day four we felt better, and I went to tell the farmer that we can possibly start picking apples again in the morning. Three days in a loo had taken their toll, though, and my walking pattern was, say, somewhat inordinary. The farmer's wife asked whether I had hurt myself, and I replied that no, I had not, that it's just my knee, an old sport injury, reminding me of its existence, oh nothing serious. At this point these good Calvinists probably concluded that their newly acquired northern drones were chronically unfit, and before an hour had passed, came the farmer's wife to our caravan and told us that her husband was not satisfied with our work and we were thereby fired.
The Dutch job market is pretty flexible, and it was the harvest season in Zeeland anyway, so we were re-employed relatively easily. We were hired to wash barrels in a factory exporting vegetables, and rented a nice and big holiday home together with one Swedish couple, more or less of our age, who had also been picking apples for Calvinists but (having left voluntarily) were now working through the same temp agency as we. It turned out that the house was was far too nice and big for our income level, and every time we had paid our share of the weekly rent there wasn't any money left for food. Which meant that we turned to our employer's products, ending up eating enough cauliflower to last three lifetimes through, but also that we had to borrow money from the Swedes, who somehow...well, just happened to have money. Then we had to work overtime and some Saturdays in order to pay them back.
There is no denying, that for me this financial relationship between us and our Swedish co-dwellers - in its own symbolic way - was always a source of great discomfort, even humiliation.
2 comments:
There's quite a big gulf between spending your gap year getting ripped off by calvinists and living in extreme poverty while doing heavy manual labour, ann Max's two month romp round Goa and Thailand.
The course of a British gap year goes something like this:
18 year old decides he's done enough studying for a bit, wants a holiday before university. Asks parents for money.
Negotiations ensue. Parents try to ensure the youth does 'something worthwhile', youth tries to make sure he gets as much partying as possible out of it.
Of course if the parents are too poor the negotiations are very short indeed, likewise if the youth has been given financial independence already. Prince Harry's gap year, for instance, involved 15 months of heavy drinking in the southern hemisphere with little work of any kind taking place.
Then the youth usually has to do some work to fund the trip, while living with his parents. Then off he goes, to Thailand or even Australia, and has a great time.
I heartily agree that shitting first your guts out at a Calvinist apple farm, and then living two autumn months on Swedish benevolence and your employer's cauliflowers, may well be form an experience more profound than southern hemisphere of any standard.
I forgot to mention, that in that factory I got to known a guy who's at the very top of my People I Should Drink With Again list. He was a short, about 40-year old Chilean, been in Netherlands since the 1973 coup. He was the fourth member of our barrel washing task force, stoned in some mornings and always entertaining us by singing some Latino evergreens. A very, very funny man, and I would love to meet him again.
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