S03E13
It’s with some considerable fanfare (sitting in a pair of Canterbury trackies with half a Pepsi-max and a piece of toast) that I bring you.. SEASON 3 of Interconnector!
I know the suspense kept you up at night..
So why exactly was there such a big gap between season’s 2 and 3?
Well, if I had to put a ring around it, it’d be because all my stuff was stolen.
I had been cat sitting for a couple of weeks and agreed to meet a friend at a pub to watch the All Blacks on the way home.
We set up at a table in front of the big screen and were immediately joined by a man bleeding from his forehead. He slammed down a bottle of whiskey he had in an unmarked bag and proceeded to pour us all one.
He introduced himself as Johnny Fenton, “a right proper geezer” and eventually explained his head had gone through a window after being arrested getting off the plane from Norway and was just released from Scotland Yard.
He hadn’t intended to come to this bar, but because of *language redacted* protests by those *language redacted*, he’d wandered across the bridge to the first one he could find.
He then proceeded to slam down four double vodkas in front of us and explain that he’d earned his place at our table.
Who could argue with that?
While he may have been one of the more intimidating gentlemen I’ve ever had the good company to keep, trying to start fights with most everyone who wasn’t at our table, I can’t help but feel in hindsight that choosing to leave at this juncture was a mistake.
Because this man had our backs, and with charisma literally bleeding from his forehead, I don’t think thieves would have messed with “a right proper geezer” like Johnny Fenton.
On to the next pub, bags in tow.
I’m brushing over the details (cause you’ve got a podcast to listen to), but I’d been beavering away on various projects while keeping two cats alive and appropriately cuddled.
One had activated a robot laser pointer in the room the night before, which if you wake up to half asleep IS, I can assure you, the stuff of nightmares.
Having not been abducted, I neatly split my belongings into two backpacks, clothes in one, kit in the other. The OCD of backpack packing. Real World Tetris Champion 2023.
Oh how different things might have turned out had I been relieved of my ‘Steamed Hams’ shirt rather than all the tech and tools of my trade used to make the previous five years worth of work.
If only I’d thought to separate the hard-drive in with my laundry, the magnitude of this loss might have been mitigated.
But instead of the disappointment of my dirty undies, the thieves hit the jackpot. The backpack placed between my legs as we ordered drinks at the bar, is the same backpack that wasn’t there a second later.
A frantic search of the pub and the street proved fruitless and CCTV later showed why - two men simply picked it up and put it straight under a coat. The only thing missing from their magic act was the white tiger.
Oh the high fives they must have thrown as my laptop, ipad, mics, headphones and wallet spilled out of it. You couldn’t have wiped the smiles off their bastard little faces.
I put signs up all around Waterloo hoping to appeal to their love of wordplay
A picture of what happened began to emerge. ‘The Bastards’ had left the pub, gone up the street and emptied my belongings onto the ground in the park by Waterloo station.
Despite having a clear shot of ‘The Bastards’ on CCTV with fingerprints and all, the police claimed there wasn’t enough evidence.
What they really meant was they couldn’t be arsed.
Had my bag been stuffed with cocaine or a human head, or ideally a human head stuffed with cocaine, they might have bothered.
I felt like a tiny speck in the biggest of cities and began to liberally add to my list of ‘Bastards’.
Which brings us to Steve.
The one person who called the number on my sign and not only tipped me off to what had happened to my belongings, but selflessly got down and dirty with me in a dumpster to find what was left.
Which wasn’t much, but at least I could take ‘identity theft’ of my list of worries. No shame at all in using the world’s smelliest passport to travel half way round the world.
After being so burned by the big smoke, to have a stranger go out of their way to help me in my lowest of moments was incredibly meaningful.
So I bought him a Kiwi’s jersey off e-bay to say thanks..
..and then he sent me this letter.
After I mopped myself up off the floor, I learned the day wasn’t yet over..
The podcast won one of these..
So what I thought was the end of the show, turned out to be a new beginning.
Once I got over the shock.
But that’s why it’s taken so long to get here.
I lost everything, even the theme music. So I started from scratch, built from the ground up, got fucked over by Spotify.. oh yeah, that also happened.. but after over a year of painstaking editing and re-recording can finally say.. welcome to Jurassic Interconnector - Season 3.
And it’s all thanks to this guy.