MEATLOAF

Another music-related title stretch.

The optimists of the world say that you can take something from every failure.. even relational ones. Well, I do.. but not in the hippy everything-has-a-reason sense. More the enraged everything-is-f*cked sense.

Not so with Luis (Dec-Jan). While his ideal girlfriend would probably have been a cadavar, judging by the amount of effort he wanted to put in, we had one good conversation. I took it with me.

It's like food. If your life is filled with amazing meals, you don't notice the exquisite mocha baked cheesecake you scoff unthinkingly whilst chatting about the new rockclimbing instructor the gym.

But if you've been living on rice and beans for three weeks, you do.

Same with conversation. And given that Luis and my time together was characterised by long silences, which seemed impossible to fill, that one great conversation we had stuck out like a mocha baked cheesecake among rice and beans.

It was the meat in the oven convo. The general gist is this: once in your life, you have to take all your meat, and put it in the oven. Kind of the non-vegetarian version of eggs-in-one-basket.

It means you're risking everything, and you have to stick by that decision to make it worth that decision.

On the strength of that conversation, I didn't just take off to India to explore new, undiscovered diving sites. I stayed here to run against the strong wind of resistance that is freelance journalism.

I'm glad I did, so then why turn around and take a job in PR, no matter how well paid? I know where my passion is: it's the off-the-meter stress, it's the robberies, the assaults, the police incidents and chats with transexuals, priests, dissidents, femimists, poets, taxi drivers... and then pasting them together into something that's mine.

Anyway, so I left my meat in the oven.