Welcome to 'Introducing', where we get acquainted with Britain's weird and wonderful new subcultures.
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The whole plan was to sack off the email job, yet here they are, down the email mine once more. “I could be doing this from Bermuda or somewhere,” they say, although somehow the thought depresses them and you. But there seems to be no viable alternative. “It’s too late to change careers now,” they declare, aged 30. They deliver another peroration about how travel newsletters are the future, and you say you have to leave. You sense they feel so profoundly trapped that discussion of Big Trips is their only spiritual release. Some things have changed, though. You notice a new, cryptic, possibly culturally insensitive tattoo next to a burn mark on their torso. They’re quick to drink their spirits out of buckets, Valium is their new Smarties, and Imodium their go-to salve for all issues. Scandis in their DMs refer to them as The Warrior. “They are like brothers to me,” the backpacker says, glassy-eyed, though the fateful event that forever changed their bond and the trajectory of their lives remains elusive. They drive a moped now.What you’re left with, depending on how you look at it, is either an alarmingly evolved person or a spiralling friend in need of a subtle intervention. On a night out, you watch as they descend into their new debauched factory setting, chaining foreign cigs as they wind up to retell the by-now extremely well-honed “gun story” about the weed deal gone wrong. “He was upstairs in the hostel all along,” they reveal, about the friend they searched for through the 3 AM Hanoi streets after he appeared to run away from henchmen. You’ve heard this one seven times, but it is good, you concede.“I could be doing this from Bermuda or somewhere.”
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