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Hey, Jeff! Jeff! Oh God... hello Stefan. I knew it was you. I wasn't sure at first but here you are... here... at CenterParcs. I know, incredible isn't it? Now look I'm off to the aquarobics class. So am I! I'll walk with you... I think there might be two... No, not according to my Parc activities guidebook. Anyway, solve me one riddle, me old mucker. What brings you to a hermetically sealed pleasure dome decreed in the middle of Wiltshire when, according to the email you sent round the company, you were going backpacking in Mongolia for a month to, and I quote 'get away from the 21st century'. Ah well, there were visa problems. So you went somewhere else? Well, yeah, I got to Thailand and I hung about on the beach for a bit in the hope that Virginie Levoye might turn up. But I couldn't hack it. The heat? The drugs? No, the people in the hut next to me were from Cabbage - you know, the big design agency - and they were downloading trance MP3s on their iBooks from a satellite link and discussing fonthaus loudly. Oh, icky. Exactly. It was just like working with you. Not really the wilderness I was looking for. So I headed down to India hoping to lose my working stiff blues in the crush of humanity. India. The colour! The flavour! The water-borne bacteria! Yeah, it was great, until I got sick and checked into the Bangalore Hilton for some rest. So... Except it was hosting the LinuxIndia expo. Every available surface was covered in Indian hackers installing the latest version of Gnome. Once I'd recovered I got on a plane to Botswana: the Kalahari desert had to be empty of this sort of thing. So what happened? The guy driving the cab wanted to know whether he should buy the Nokia 7110 or the Ericsson R320, and whether he should start a WAP-based courier company for uranium prospectors out in the desert. I mean, they haven't even put the aerials up yet and you see people carrying mobile phones they can't use. I just turned the car around. Then I had a stroke of luck. I was waiting for my transfer to London at Durban when I saw that the weekly supply plane to the Antarctic research mission was in. I blagged my way on and 12 hours later I was staring at the emptiest landscape I'd ever seen out of the plane window. I emptied my mind completely for all of 30 seconds. And then... Someone asked me whether I could configure their Web server for Flash while I was there. I didn't even get off the plane. Which doesn't really explain what you're doing here. I think it explains it perfectly well: after Antarctica I flew back to London and drove straight out here without sleeping. Underneath this geodesic dome, surrounded by dental clinicians and management accountants I really have escaped the 21st century. These people here think computers are for playing FreeCell and surfing the Microsoft Internet for cheap holidays. The 21st century is outside, teeming and evolving, and it's going to be extremely loud. Unlike the modernist ideal of middle-class leisure that the dome signifies. I might never leave... Ah, poor Jeff. Fancy a game of volleyball? You bet. Hey, are those new Nikes? | ||||||
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