It was the hair conversation which I remember, still. It was that which set my black and shrivelled heart so firmly against gap years.
'You don't wash your hair for six months,' he said, 'and it starts to clean itself!' You'll understand this statement took far longer in its original version, coming peppered with the words 'like', 'apparently', 'amazing', 'right?' and 'humnph'. This last was my own and only contribution, a portmanteau grunt which means: 'Shut up, you vapid privileged snot sock. Please finish your overpriced lager now and take your gangly neck and Uruguayan hemp bangle and horrible hair, which even from here I can tell smells like damp underlay left composting for two years in a Hull underpass, out of here so I can get on with chatting up your girlfriend. And if you pass a Boots, see if they've got a product called Go and Wash.' I like to think he inferred most of this from my clever little 'humnph'. And I did bag the girlfriend.
A gap year - as opposed to a Gap year, the one that comes when you're about 38 and realise the mirror doesn't want you to spend much more time buying tight white T-shirts and sloppy khakis from rude children with nose rings - has always seemed grand proof that the class system is as alive and unfair as ever, half of trust-funded Kensington decamping to Bhutan every July to meet the other half and have terrible pink-limbed sex with it, and patronise the duskies. Now this is official: the latest guide for British gap-year travellers, the Rough Guide to a Better World, has quite a go at the young things, describing them in the main as arrogant, inappropriately dressed and obsessed with haggling to get money out of very poor people.
Well, of course they are. That's why they went abroad in the first place, wasn't it, to learn all these things? We used to pack them off (the children who will run the country) abroad to learn these things but with commendably more honesty: it was called the army, but we can't do that that any more as the armed forces are seen, these days, as a touch, well, dangerous, really. So it's the gap year.
And, please, please, don't give me the stuff about valuable life experiences, lessons learnt forever: the touching little tales of inner peace found atop vine-strewn pillars with loin-skinned dwarves are so much eyewash, forgotten within three months of the return to W8 because it's suddenly become fantastically more important to possess a plasma-screen TV. (It's a marketing company which he runs now, dirty-headed boy, something whose title rejoices in aberrant punctuation. Yes, he's washed his hair.)
And so off they'll continue to go, to learn how to shout at and interrupt the lower orders, take their money and confuse emotion with sentimentality. And we'll get away with it because no matter what we do, no matter how awful Brits are abroad, everybody everywhere now hates the Americans even more.
