No-one cares about your gap-year

A gap year is just a twelve month course in being a prick, writes STEVE WRIGHT


Some people who took a gap year will have good anecdotes; that’s just probability. So if you got mauled by a bull in Spain, or got kidnapped by pirates in Somalia then congratulations on a fruitful year of formative experience. However, if, like the rest of us, your anecdotes are about as edifying as listening to traffic. Please stop repeating them.

And that is the issue. I am ambivalent about Gap Years. But, like the rest of the population, I can’t stand hearing about the same year of mediocrity day after day after day. And repetitive anecdotes and tenuously tangential statements that start, ‘this reminds me of this one time, on my gap year’ are annoying; but they are the tip of the gappy iceberg.

It only tastes authentic with an Instagram filter.

There’s also the obsession with gap year stash. I don’t care if you have a ring from a mountain temple in the middle of god knows where in Tibet. I do care if you mention it every time I see you. And you don’t need to wear that Himalya 2013 Trecking T-Shirt every other evening either. Another symptom of post-gapyear-verbal diarrhoea is a whimsical staring into the distance or stamping of a foot followed by ‘I just wish I was back on my Gap Year.’ You wish you weren’t in a place where you had to work everyday and could mess about with time on your hands and probably get a sun tan. Congratulations, you are on a par with the rest of sane humanity.

Then there’s the most irritating. The post gap year culinary conversion. This generally manifests itself in one of two ways. The ‘I just suddenly saw everything again for the first time so I became a vegan/vegetarian/pescetarian/frutarian/etc/’ This is harmless enough. Unless, as discussed above, they insist on brining it up every time they cram their mouth with cous-cous or stare dolefully at a bacon sandwich.

Phallus wielding Buddhas. An essential gap year component.

The second culinary conversion is what I shall term the ‘meh attitude’. There is nothing more irritating than going for a curry or chinese (insert any other foreign food stuff here for the sake of political correctness) and hearing, ‘this is pretty good; but you should try these when are they made properly- on my gap year they were amazing, and they were so cheap, and..’ At this point I politely excuse myself and go to vomit in the toilet. A toilet that was no doubt infinitely more interesting on your Gap Year.