Into the fire...

Well, it has been a while. Time is really flying by at the moment. settling in to new job fine but seems to have taken up a bit of time. So much to learn, taking it all in baby steps etc. Moving on to the more meaty stuff...

Last weekend, was my final 'real weekend' for the next year. I started work on Saturday and my weekend becomes Thursday and Friday. The timetable God has been smiling upon me and I only work from 9-12 on Sat/Sun and only have one late evening finish so I can't complain.

Back to last weekend, I went to Koh Samet. Maria and I were so excited at 4pm at the end of class we were running around the office like a couple of schoolgirls, changing and dashing out of the door, someone even told me that I simply wasn't allowed to have fun in the office, hmmm chortle, chortle, whatever.

Fun was most certainly the name of the day. Along with Maria, I was joined by my recently acquired German friend, well, you know, I really like one, thought I'd branch out a little. The rest of the 'Bell crew' were already on the island eagerly awaiting our arrival as they had Fri off and were also ahead on the general imbibing so speed was of importance and we splashed out so to speak on a speed boat to get us over to the beach upon which friends, a bungalow and a tent were waiting.

This is the moment when someone on a loud speaker booms "let the games begin".

We trudged over a hill to arrive at the bungalow and dump our stuff and returned to join the others. All was going quite well, after a couple we made our usual trip to Silver Sands resort which has a disco and hooked up with other friends of ours. The buckets (literally buckets) of cocktails were flowing and all were having fun. A while later, I was chatting to a mate and spotted M crawling across the sand towards the sea and thought I ought to check out what was going on. She wasn't feeling too good so I sat with her and fed her some water etc. Upon getting her to return to join the group Joe joined me and said that Meine 'friend' was having a bit of an episode and claimed to have tried to throw himself into a fire!

I turned round to see him bawling with Hannah attempting to comfort him. Everybody got their turn but there was nothing doing. Jo tried the hard approach "noone cares you tried to throw yourslef into a fire, get over it", I tried to be understanding "it's ok, you didn't burn yourself everthing is fine" but nothing was doing. Meanwhile, Maria had decided that the only thing that would make her feel better was to head home. I caught her about ten metres up the beach wobbling along. We heaved everyone into a Song Taew (kind of truck transport thing), M was sat there shouting "if this thing doesn't move now I am going to puke" and D was still bawling. Turns out the truck wasn't going anywhere and we had to get out and get onto another one! Anyway, we finally fond oen that was going where we wanted and as we were buping along Tara said I should swap places with D on the edge because we were concerned he might try and lob himself off. As I got up there was an almighty pothole and I went flying into a bunch of legs and spent the rest of the trip trying tofind my flip-flops.

Just to be clear, at this point we had no idea whether we were dealing with a metaphorical fire, a bonfire or what quite frankly. It was hard to get to the bottom of the story.

By the time we got off the Song Taew and walked over the hill D seemed to be in a much better mood - if somewhat embarrassed and worried he had humiliated me - moi? so I thought we were on the home run. I left him to his tent and went for a walk along the pier with Jo and Jme.

Upon our return I heard some rather loud droning sounds and discovered it was D leaning out of the tent making these noises. There was a bunch of Thai revellers a little further down the beach from him trying to party and were looking at him a lot. Then came the blood-curdling screams across the bay. J, J and I looked at each other and clearly had decided he was best left alone! After about ten minutes the Thais had had enough and just went up to him and said "what are you doing?" seeming a little bemused.

We all went to bed and thought things would look better in the morning. At breakfast d joined us looking rather worse for wear. Let's face it a tent in this heat isn't comfortable and you get woken up at sunrise. Nothing much was said. The girls and I went for a swim, Monika and I went for a much needed massage afterwards and most of us convened for a hike to the next beach for a spot of lunch. D spent most of his time recovering. There was still the mystery about the fire.

Upon our return Hannah had been talking to him and had solved the mystery. It was not a metaphorical fire nor was it a bonfire, it was in fact, and I'm not sure how you call it, one of those fire dancer people. You know those people that have strings alight and twiddle them round a lot? One of them. clearly, the poor guy had a bit of a schock to be bulldozed mid-performance.

It appears we have photographic evidence. Monika remembered being about to take a photo of the guy when suddnely he stopped performing and put the flames out. Indeed she had pressed the button but it is all bit dark. We are working on it.

Anyway, strange things will happen. It certainly added a little spice to our weekend, although really there is quite enough in the food here. There are still patchy explanations as to why this happened, Jo is under the impression that he was trying to throw himself into a vortex to get to the other side, but that's Jo.

The question is, how on earth do you ever top that?