Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Well, it's been some time since I last put finger to keyboard in anger and now it's time for that to change. For one reason or another, I haven't seen some of you in a long, long while. Maybe it's because we live on different continents or we've inexplicably lost touch in this modern communication age. Maybe it's because we've changed addresses, lifestyles, phones and friends. Maybe we've just changed?

Anyway, here's an almost chronological update of what's gone on in the previous sixteen months since I returned from my Latin American adventure...

I arrived back at Heathrow - that giant shopping mall/high security prison with an airport attached - tired of international travel and still quite ill from the mysterious Guatemalan/Colombian stomach bug that had did for my insides what Chernobyl Power Plant had did for its locals.

Jessica, my Chilean girlfriend, came over to visit Belgium, France, Spain and Italy for a few weeks in the summer of 2006 to attend a wedding of an old friend. Her first real big trip abroad, the change in culture from South America was minimal: the cuisine was still superb, the sun shone like Inca gold, the language was still entirely romantic and bus drivers still had little or no respect for theirs or their passengers' lives.

Not caring that I was still jobless, I joined her in Madrid where we ate paella, walked the old cobbled streets and, one Friday night, attended a huge outdoor party, for Madrid policemen, in the countryside; a kind of Policemen's Ball if you like. I'd rather have gone on the lash with a group of childless, thirty-something Take That fans, but we went anyway. The policemen in question were all drunk as a brewery by midnight and proceeded to weave their cars along the hundred-mile-an-hour motorways back to Madrid with the intention of falling into nightspots around the city. And this they did; doing it without the slightest allusion to their incredible corruption and hypocrisy that would put the L.A.P.D and the South Wales Constabulary to shame.

We went on to visit Rome, Florence, Venice, and Barcelona where we witnessed a man, fantastically enough, emerging from the underground metro - strolling on to Las Ramblas chin up like a good Englishman would - wearing nothing but a watch, hiking boots and a backpack. I covered Jessica's eyes and averted my own from his undercarriage that looked like the leftovers of a buffet at a rugby club xmas disco.

On returning in July, I found a job as a Bench Fitter with a small engineering firm in Swansea.

It went quite well, mostly.

My questionable football services were tended to Seren Goch Community Football Club in the August. I scored a volley from twenty five yards out in the very first game, and then - job being done - failed to trouble the scorers for the following twenty seven matches. Come the end of the season we narrowly missed out on winning the championship by about four places and thirteen points, but the thought was there and we bonded well by being naked together in the showers every Saturday afternoon for eight months straight.


The year 2007 started and the party hangovers were finally wearing off. My stomach was still no better and I was forced to have a colonoscopy - a word that every man fears more than commitment - which left me feeling very humble indeed; but still no clearer as to what that Colombian stomach bug had did to me all those months before.

As the February drizzle settled on Swansea, Jessica made the lengthy journey across the Atlantic once more and paid her first visit to Britain, and probably her last to Swansea and Port Tennant. We passed the precious days dazzled by the bright lights of London town, we were breathing-in the history of Edinburgh and its majestic castles, marvelling at the Beatles' birthplace in Liverpool, gazing at the iron heights of old Blackpool Tower, burning the Pembrokeshire coastline into our young minds and, finally, goose-stepping over the chewing gum and dog turds on Swansea's slab-cracked pavements...

She went home in early March, laden with English tea, bagfuls of Welsh souvenirs, chocolates, clothes, hundreds of photographs, lucid memories, and, four jars of Sainsbury's mayonaise (''Our's is terrible'', she told me in earnest) which the Uber-Neo-Nazis at Heathrow removed from her hand luggage and threw in the bin. You couldn't bring down a Sinclair C5 with that stuff, let alone an Airbus A380; but 'Zey are zee rools!' they barked at us.

I couldn't tempt Jessica to take any laver bread or cockles to Chile - for obvious reasons of course. I mean, who'd eat that stuff apart from us?

I, begrudgingly, returned back to my daily routine of work, shower, eat and sleep; my weekly routine of football, drink and laugh-a-while; and my monthly routine of getting paid for covering myself in oil and grease. Throughout the last twelve months I have watched Swansea City play football in their new stadium, amongst a baying crowd of blood-thirsty grown men and women screaming vile, hateful and murderous abuse at their own players for misplacing a pass by a few centimetres, whilst their young offspring looked and learned and wondered why the opposition weren't getting it. Soon they'd grow up to learn that the crowd do it differently in Swansea and it usually involves ten pints of Dutch lager, a Taiwanese Burberry cap, a gram of Colombia's finest, a pair of white socks and a stone-washed denim jacket.

All the while I was studying for an A-Level in Spanish at Swansea College; but the grammar was proving difficult. I couldn't tell an imperfect subjunctive tense from a stolen set of alloy wheels. Luckily, I wasn't the only one. But, only two weeks ago, I recieved confirmation of my final results. I got an 'A'. But the tabloids reckon they're giving them away.

The months in between rolled by as they always do. And somewhere along the line I lost a few more percent of my hearing, without actually doing anything to warrant it.

Then something important happened.
One bright July day, I finally, really woke up and stopped dreaming. I could hear the dew falling; time was passing.

I made my mind up that very day: I was going to Chile to start a new life.

To live life, with Jessica.

I do like Swansea and Wales, but it really is time to go.

Technically, or, loosely, it's emigration; however, I like to think of it as emancipation.

I'll let you know how it went next time...

Jamie

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