Friday April 25 2008

The night after excessive drinking and casual violence. Everyone was feeling awful. I felt like I had been repeatedly savaged by a dog during the night, after which the creature had gone to the toilet first inside my mouth and then inside my brain. I looked suspiciously at Mingla. No, it couldn’t have been. The bite wounds under my arm were too small. As a matter of fact, they looked almost… human. Strange.

I wish I could remember more of this day. My overriding feeling is one of wanting the hurt to go away. It was a triple-threat kind of pain, physical from the fighting, internal from the hangover and also emotional - for this was to be the day on which we would bid goodbye to our hosts and relocate to our third stop. We gathered our possessions, nursed our various wounds and said the fondest of goodbyes to Morani, Maddok and Mingla, before climbing aboard a bus for town and finally setting ourselves down on a train seat, en route to Lund with our capable and equally hungover guide, Aakarp.

The journey was punctuated by rounds of musical chairs played with commuting passengers who, unlike us, had taken the trouble to reserve their seats. We hated them all. A few hours later we pulled into Lund, a town so crawling with students that their sheer weight of numbers surely qualifies them as a race. Their bikes thronged the station.

Heading back to Aakarp’s student flat, we took a picture of the building in which Morani and Maddok had lived when she met them. The sight penetrated my befuddled head with something oddly poignant. It was a tangible reminder that these funny little internet people existed outside of my world, that they had real lives beyond what I knew of them.

I remember having a similar feeling once when working in incredibly small newspaper office. Like any parochial workplace with a door leading onto the high street, we had a broad range of unusual repeat visitors. One, a troubled youth who sometimes worked in the neighbouring shop owned by his parents, would often pop in to ask if we had anything that we wanted him to put in the postbox. “Do you want anything posting?” That was all he’d say. We’d say no, and he’d clench his fist and say “damn”, visibly disappointed. We found out later he only went to school twice a week because he had “anger issues” and sometimes “threw things”. If we’d have known this, we would have found him something to post.

Meanwhile, our regular delivery of letters came at the hands of one of the grumpiest postmen in the world. This isn’t an exaggeration. One notch higher on the grump scale and going to work would be impossible - you'd just stay in bed all day, sleeping until you died. This postman would shoulder our door open, grumble “morning” - in the morose manner of somebody who’s just resignedly watched their relatives eat each other - fling a bunch of envelopes on the table and leave. Sometimes we’d watch him after he had departed, trundling down the street with his oversized trolley of mail and a chip on his shoulder the size of a shed.

Then one day, I was gazing out of the window avoiding work and I saw these two people together. The weird boy with his post fetish and the sad postman who resented his life. They were both chatting away gleefully as if they had known each other forever. That man must have been like a hero to the youngster, every day touching more letters and parcels than his teenage mind could imagine. The boy, in turn, must have been a breath of fresh air for our depressed delivery man, genuinely excited and enthralled by the postie’s mere existence. They should probably have got married.

And I realised, gazing out at this unlikely scene, that these were real people. Not, as we viewed them, bizarre two dimensional cutouts who existed purely for our own amusement. They had lives, genuine existences which mattered beyond our bubble, as important to them as ours were to us.

I’m not saying Morani, Maddok or Aakarp are like the angry postman or the weird boy. But online, they don’t exist outside of my experience. I chat to them, and if I’m tired or I want to do something else, I can stop. I can flick on my whole internet social circle with a few button presses, immerse myself as deeply as I like, then shut my laptop whenever I’ve had enough and they all disappear as magically and as conveniently as they arrived.

But they’re real. World of Warcraft, endlessly geeky and social unacceptable as it is, it isn’t what they are. It’s just how I met them. How the various atoms and thoughts that make up me came to collide, at random, with the ones that made up them, as we went about staring at our feet, plodding our respective, tangential paths.

These people. They are proper. Whether you realise it or not, they are your friends.

I’d never had friends from Sweden before. Given this, we ought to have made the most of Aakarp’s Swedishness while we were staying at her flat, perhaps by browsing the IKEA catalogue, indulging in meatballs or eating salmon. As it happened, we felt so rough that we just sat on the sofa, watched films on her laptop and eventually went to sleep. With such an action packed week behind us, it was exactly what we needed.

Next week: Brodos and Pixelsmith explore the picture-perfect Swedish town of Lund.

Read from the start:
A Geek Adventure

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