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beccatoriaSo, tomorrow evening I get on a plane to move to South Korea and hope to high hell that I don't turn out to be a crappy teacher. I am horribly unprepared. o.O
I also have no idea how long it'll be before I get the internet hooked up in my apartment, so while I'm sure I'll be able to check in via net cafes, etc., please don't take it personally if I fall off the face of the net for a while and fail to comment on important posts, etc. Also, if I miss something important, leave me a comment on one of my posts and I'll hop on over. I don't want to miss things!
Anyway, that said, to entertain you all in my absence, here is the most awfularious true story that ever happened to anyone I know.
Okay, first a note on WHY I'm sharing this story. Basically because my friends and I, upon hearing the first part of this story, decided it could NEVER DIE. And thus began a campaign of telling everyone else we knew about it. And then, over the course of the years, MORE STUFF just kept getting tacked onto the end of it as these crazy kids continued their insane escapades. And I realised yesterday, when I got the latest update, that I'd never released it into the wilds of the internet.
So. I swear, with not one bit of exaggeration, this is the tale as told to me by Saul:
Saul and Alistair are a little bit like Han Solo and Chewbacca. If Han Solo were impossibly laid back and prone to letting Chewie's impulsive problems combined with an inability to visualise consequences related to an autistic spectrum disorder get him into INSANE SITUATIONS.
So how it all started was: Alistair failed his first year of university. Upset by this, Alistair decided he didn't need a degree, he would embark on a life of crime. But not before going home to Bath to visit some friends.
So Alistair, Saul and a guy named Jono are hanging out when Jono decides he wants to learn how to drive. That's fine, Alistair says, he can teach him. But first they need another car because Alistair doesn't trust Jono not to crash his car. So he steals one.
We now get to probably the most awful part of the tale, but stick with me, it does get better. Between Bath and a tiny little town called Frome, Alistair discovers a guy sleeping in the back of his vehicle. It later transpires that he's been kicked out by his girlfriend. His night is about to get worse.
Alistair smashes the window, hauls the guy out of the car, PEPPER SPRAYS him (which is, for those keeping track of the criminal offences in this story, aggravated assault), throws him his sleeping bag - "You'll be needing this!" - and makes off with the car.
So now Alistair is sitting in the passenger seat, Jono is driving and Saul is sitting in the backseat. Saul sitting in cars (or boats) while Alistair does insanely illegal things and not stopping him is a bit of a recurring pattern in this tale. It's hard to convey this accurately if you don't know him, but Saul is so laid back he's horizontal and I honestly believe if great big chunks of the sky were falling down, he'd probably shrug and start strumming his guitar. But I digress.
Jono, we're pretty sure high on something, parks the car in someone's living room.
Jono panicks, disappears and the last we heard was living with some friends in a bedsit somewhere in the depths of Bath.
Alistair, however, declares that he's not going down for a car someone else parked in a living room and decides to flee the country.
Saul, having nothing better to do and being mildly panicked, decides to go with him. Saul takes a bag of clothes and his guitar. Alistair dresses in combat fatigues and takes his air-rifle wrapped in a towel.
They manage to make it Folkstone where Alistair's extremely rich doctor parents keep a boat. Except for some reason - I presume because it wouldn't be in keeping with a Life of Crime - Alistair doesn't want to take that boat.
So they steal a boat.
They steal a £30,000 yacht.
Crossing the channel from the point they left, usually takes less than a day.
It took them three days.
This is because they happily motored along all day, then at night, turned off the motor, went to sleep and woke up not realising that all night the wind had been blowing them BACK TOWARD BRITAIN.
On the third day, their fuel ran out. They got caught in some storm. The sails they didn't know how to use got horribly tangled. Alistair threatened to throw Saul's guitar overboard until Saul climbed out onto the prow, in the middle of ten foot tall waves, and somehow jury rigged the sails into something usable. This entire time, they have no food, just the contents of the yacht's mini bar.
Upon approaching the French coastline, Alistair declares that they should land in "that patch of seaweed over there!"
Seaweed grows on rock.
Crunch.
So, having swum from their stolen yacht that was worth £30,000 until they put a huge hole in the hull, they're at least relieved to discover they've made it to France. So relieved that Alistair decides to shoot a few victory rounds from his air rifle on the beach. Saul questions whether or not this is a good idea. Alistair tells him not to worry because, "the gun laws are really lax in France."
The gun laws aren't really lax in France.
Some French woman, seeing a man, dressed in a bizarre immitation of army gear and a towel, shooting what looks like a rifle on the beach, next to a trashed boat, calls the police.
So now Saul and Alistair are on the run again. Eventually they get caught a few towns over trying to sell the air rifle because they have no money. They get deported.
The French police put them on a ferry to Britain. The British police are waiting at the other end. I guess they figure, it's a boat. Where the hell could they go? And in Saul's case, it works. Having gotten this far, he tells Alistair, the game is up, he's handing himself it.
Alistair informs Saul that they'll never take him alive, and runs off into the ferry.
The police search the ferry and are puzzled when they cannot find Alistair. This is because Alistair has used his belt to strap himself to the underside of a heavy goods vehicle headed north to Scotland.
Saul is arrested and given a suspended sentence with community service because it's a first offence and because he mostly...sat around while Alistair broke laws.
Alistair is arrested about three weeks later trying to jump the fence at Heathrow to get onto a plane. He has to appear at his own trial via videolink because he is a flight risk.
He ends up going to prison. I'm not sure what his original sentence was but he ends up getting released with one of those ankle tags on parole after, like, eighteen months or two years or something. I do feel quite bad for him actually because in prison he pissed off the wrong people because...he's like that partially because he has Asperger's and he ended up getting beat up so badly he had his jaw wired. He also leared a lot more about Crime.
We (Me, Kev and Addy) all move to Plymouth so we don't see Saul for ages, and Alistair's in prison and we sort of assume that's the end of the story. Until Addy heads up to visit Saul in Bath and finds out what happened next.
Alistair, a freed man, starts up a business fixing computers for cheap and rents out some warehouse space. He is also trying to make extra cash by growing weed. But he decides that fertilizer and all the other stuff he'll need to keep his extra-curricular activities going on will cost far too much and it'd be far easier to resort to THIEVERY.
So, once again, Alistair, Saul and Jono are in the car, and Alistair decides to break into some farm/farmshop thing. Where they steal a bunch of gardening equipment and, because they're hungry, some cider and a leg of pork. Jono manages to leave a huge, muddy handprint on the window.
The police are all over it and the next day Jono and Saul get arrested. Jono is very cross when Saul tells the police what happened because apparently he had a PERFECTLY REASONABLE explanation for why his muddy handprint was inside a building that got burgled. Upshot is, Saul goes to jail for three months, I think. It's one of those low-security jails where you get your own room and go to work in some factory across the road for fifty pence a day or something and they feed you and clothe you. Saul said it was much like he imagined it would be living in a totalitarian communist state and that parts of it were oddly comforting, like never having to think.
Alistair, on the other hand, went to his warehouse to discover the police had a warrant to search it, realised they'd find/had found the weed he was growing, once again declared they'd never take him alive and left the country. We think he went to visit his family who were on holiday somewhere in Europe.
Wherever he went, he managed to get from there to India, and Saul was sporadically in touch with him via cryptic emails that said he was a) living in some tiny village somewhere on a mountain in India and b) that he'd flushed his passport down the toilet.
And again, that was all we heard from him for...about a year? In which time, Kev and I moved to Cardiff to do a TEFL course to go to South Korea, Saul's dad won Who Wants to be a Millionaire (no, really), and then Saul moved in with Addy because we'd moved out.
Until yesterday, when Addy called me to say that Saul was going up to see Alistair who was back in the country (and oddly unarrested so god knows if he came in legally), and that he really wasn't sure what the hell had happened to him in India, but at some point he'd ended up in Tibet and had shaken hands with the Dalai Lama.
For serious. The Dalai Lama.
So yeah. There's that. I hope it entertained you. ;)
I also have no idea how long it'll be before I get the internet hooked up in my apartment, so while I'm sure I'll be able to check in via net cafes, etc., please don't take it personally if I fall off the face of the net for a while and fail to comment on important posts, etc. Also, if I miss something important, leave me a comment on one of my posts and I'll hop on over. I don't want to miss things!
Anyway, that said, to entertain you all in my absence, here is the most awfularious true story that ever happened to anyone I know.
Okay, first a note on WHY I'm sharing this story. Basically because my friends and I, upon hearing the first part of this story, decided it could NEVER DIE. And thus began a campaign of telling everyone else we knew about it. And then, over the course of the years, MORE STUFF just kept getting tacked onto the end of it as these crazy kids continued their insane escapades. And I realised yesterday, when I got the latest update, that I'd never released it into the wilds of the internet.
So. I swear, with not one bit of exaggeration, this is the tale as told to me by Saul:
Saul and Alistair are a little bit like Han Solo and Chewbacca. If Han Solo were impossibly laid back and prone to letting Chewie's impulsive problems combined with an inability to visualise consequences related to an autistic spectrum disorder get him into INSANE SITUATIONS.
So how it all started was: Alistair failed his first year of university. Upset by this, Alistair decided he didn't need a degree, he would embark on a life of crime. But not before going home to Bath to visit some friends.
So Alistair, Saul and a guy named Jono are hanging out when Jono decides he wants to learn how to drive. That's fine, Alistair says, he can teach him. But first they need another car because Alistair doesn't trust Jono not to crash his car. So he steals one.
We now get to probably the most awful part of the tale, but stick with me, it does get better. Between Bath and a tiny little town called Frome, Alistair discovers a guy sleeping in the back of his vehicle. It later transpires that he's been kicked out by his girlfriend. His night is about to get worse.
Alistair smashes the window, hauls the guy out of the car, PEPPER SPRAYS him (which is, for those keeping track of the criminal offences in this story, aggravated assault), throws him his sleeping bag - "You'll be needing this!" - and makes off with the car.
So now Alistair is sitting in the passenger seat, Jono is driving and Saul is sitting in the backseat. Saul sitting in cars (or boats) while Alistair does insanely illegal things and not stopping him is a bit of a recurring pattern in this tale. It's hard to convey this accurately if you don't know him, but Saul is so laid back he's horizontal and I honestly believe if great big chunks of the sky were falling down, he'd probably shrug and start strumming his guitar. But I digress.
Jono, we're pretty sure high on something, parks the car in someone's living room.
Jono panicks, disappears and the last we heard was living with some friends in a bedsit somewhere in the depths of Bath.
Alistair, however, declares that he's not going down for a car someone else parked in a living room and decides to flee the country.
Saul, having nothing better to do and being mildly panicked, decides to go with him. Saul takes a bag of clothes and his guitar. Alistair dresses in combat fatigues and takes his air-rifle wrapped in a towel.
They manage to make it Folkstone where Alistair's extremely rich doctor parents keep a boat. Except for some reason - I presume because it wouldn't be in keeping with a Life of Crime - Alistair doesn't want to take that boat.
So they steal a boat.
They steal a £30,000 yacht.
Crossing the channel from the point they left, usually takes less than a day.
It took them three days.
This is because they happily motored along all day, then at night, turned off the motor, went to sleep and woke up not realising that all night the wind had been blowing them BACK TOWARD BRITAIN.
On the third day, their fuel ran out. They got caught in some storm. The sails they didn't know how to use got horribly tangled. Alistair threatened to throw Saul's guitar overboard until Saul climbed out onto the prow, in the middle of ten foot tall waves, and somehow jury rigged the sails into something usable. This entire time, they have no food, just the contents of the yacht's mini bar.
Upon approaching the French coastline, Alistair declares that they should land in "that patch of seaweed over there!"
Seaweed grows on rock.
Crunch.
So, having swum from their stolen yacht that was worth £30,000 until they put a huge hole in the hull, they're at least relieved to discover they've made it to France. So relieved that Alistair decides to shoot a few victory rounds from his air rifle on the beach. Saul questions whether or not this is a good idea. Alistair tells him not to worry because, "the gun laws are really lax in France."
The gun laws aren't really lax in France.
Some French woman, seeing a man, dressed in a bizarre immitation of army gear and a towel, shooting what looks like a rifle on the beach, next to a trashed boat, calls the police.
So now Saul and Alistair are on the run again. Eventually they get caught a few towns over trying to sell the air rifle because they have no money. They get deported.
The French police put them on a ferry to Britain. The British police are waiting at the other end. I guess they figure, it's a boat. Where the hell could they go? And in Saul's case, it works. Having gotten this far, he tells Alistair, the game is up, he's handing himself it.
Alistair informs Saul that they'll never take him alive, and runs off into the ferry.
The police search the ferry and are puzzled when they cannot find Alistair. This is because Alistair has used his belt to strap himself to the underside of a heavy goods vehicle headed north to Scotland.
Saul is arrested and given a suspended sentence with community service because it's a first offence and because he mostly...sat around while Alistair broke laws.
Alistair is arrested about three weeks later trying to jump the fence at Heathrow to get onto a plane. He has to appear at his own trial via videolink because he is a flight risk.
He ends up going to prison. I'm not sure what his original sentence was but he ends up getting released with one of those ankle tags on parole after, like, eighteen months or two years or something. I do feel quite bad for him actually because in prison he pissed off the wrong people because...he's like that partially because he has Asperger's and he ended up getting beat up so badly he had his jaw wired. He also leared a lot more about Crime.
We (Me, Kev and Addy) all move to Plymouth so we don't see Saul for ages, and Alistair's in prison and we sort of assume that's the end of the story. Until Addy heads up to visit Saul in Bath and finds out what happened next.
Alistair, a freed man, starts up a business fixing computers for cheap and rents out some warehouse space. He is also trying to make extra cash by growing weed. But he decides that fertilizer and all the other stuff he'll need to keep his extra-curricular activities going on will cost far too much and it'd be far easier to resort to THIEVERY.
So, once again, Alistair, Saul and Jono are in the car, and Alistair decides to break into some farm/farmshop thing. Where they steal a bunch of gardening equipment and, because they're hungry, some cider and a leg of pork. Jono manages to leave a huge, muddy handprint on the window.
The police are all over it and the next day Jono and Saul get arrested. Jono is very cross when Saul tells the police what happened because apparently he had a PERFECTLY REASONABLE explanation for why his muddy handprint was inside a building that got burgled. Upshot is, Saul goes to jail for three months, I think. It's one of those low-security jails where you get your own room and go to work in some factory across the road for fifty pence a day or something and they feed you and clothe you. Saul said it was much like he imagined it would be living in a totalitarian communist state and that parts of it were oddly comforting, like never having to think.
Alistair, on the other hand, went to his warehouse to discover the police had a warrant to search it, realised they'd find/had found the weed he was growing, once again declared they'd never take him alive and left the country. We think he went to visit his family who were on holiday somewhere in Europe.
Wherever he went, he managed to get from there to India, and Saul was sporadically in touch with him via cryptic emails that said he was a) living in some tiny village somewhere on a mountain in India and b) that he'd flushed his passport down the toilet.
And again, that was all we heard from him for...about a year? In which time, Kev and I moved to Cardiff to do a TEFL course to go to South Korea, Saul's dad won Who Wants to be a Millionaire (no, really), and then Saul moved in with Addy because we'd moved out.
Until yesterday, when Addy called me to say that Saul was going up to see Alistair who was back in the country (and oddly unarrested so god knows if he came in legally), and that he really wasn't sure what the hell had happened to him in India, but at some point he'd ended up in Tibet and had shaken hands with the Dalai Lama.
For serious. The Dalai Lama.
So yeah. There's that. I hope it entertained you. ;)
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Date: 2008-07-31 09:20 am (UTC)