What? You want to know more about me? But… but… I just told you!

You want EVEN MORE? Really?

Well, okay then. Here goes:

I’m huge. Enormous! Especially when compared to people smaller than me. I trained as an actor before realizing that acting, like cooking, is something I’m destined to be really, really bad at. In fact my acting is worse than my cooking – and I can’t cook beans on toast without burning something.

So with my dreams of international super-stardom going up in flames (or was that just my dinner? SHIT!)  I had to pick myself up, dust myself off and find something that I was good at.

Now, if I’d been good at working incredibly hard for years at a time, sacrificing everyone and everything I love to complete the biggest, most thankless task known to mankind – then I’d have become an author. But I wasn’t, so I didn’t.

What I had been doing, was a whole lot of nothing. Small, dead-end jobs which had been slowly sucking the life out of me while I strove in vain to make my Big Break. It occurred to me, quite out of the blue, that if I carried on doing those little jobs – but abroad – then they would transform into something so much more exciting! Imagine working in Starbucks. Not a bad job, right? Now imagine working in Starbucks on Bondi Beach. Nip out for a quick surf on your lunch-break… NOW we’re talking!

So I packed my bags and left.

I wish I could say that it was everything I’d hoped for. But that would be a lie. Because I soon discovered that, if something is going to go wrong, then it’s going to go wrong to me. At me. All over me. While I’m inside it – or trying desperately not to be… Yes, I am a magnet for trouble. So if you see me when you’re on holiday, run. Seriously. Unless you like being shot at, attacked by the local wildlife or falling off cliffs.

On the upside, only so much weirdness can happen to a person before he just has to write a book about it. This I have now done. And yet there seems to be no sign of it abating. So I’ve decided to resign myself to living a life of bizarre, accidental, uncomfortable and often embarrassing events. And I guess you’d better get used to reading about them…

Tony James Slater, 2017