“Feckin’ eejots”, exclaimed Ciaron. “They clearly don’t understand anything about staging.”
My alcoholic Irish chum was referring to the groups of Americans wandering up and down the beaches of Thailand strapped to their backpacks as they searched for a place for their group to stay.
“What they need to do is leave a few fellas with the backpacks, and send another fella to find a place to stay. Then when they’ve got a place, they can come back and haul them all to it. That way…”
He sipped on his Singha beer for dramatic effect as he patted the backpack below his barstool.
“…that way they don’t have to cart their fecking backpacks up and down the beach to every hostel in the stinking heat.”
I like to imagine in my memory that he added a few expletives or maybe just, “Arse!” to underline his point.
The principal of staging has stayed with me on every trip since – whether to the grocery store or to the steamy jungle. Leave the heavy stuff still until you know where it’s going.
The problem of moving heavy stuff around becomes more complex when you add foxes and chickens to the mix. You know, the farmer has to get a fox a chicken and some corn across a river and can only fit one item in his boat. If he leaves the fox on the shore with the chicken then the chicken gets proper fecked, and if you leave the corn with the chicken it gets proper pecked. What is old McDonald to do to move all three in the least number of moves possible?
So you find this theme all over, especially if you’ve got two children and food and bags to move and not enough hands to do it. Personally, I still emerge from daycare every day carrying both children and all the bags and food just to be on the safe side.
Otherwise you’d be moving a kid here, a bag there, trying to avoid leaving two kids alone, or one kid in the car or one kid with the food. It becomes incredibly complicated quite quickly unless you are prepared to leave your car running to keep it hot / cold.
Anyway, if you ever end up with the farmer’s dilemma, this is my advice:
Chicken over, come back. Fox over, chicken back. Corn over, come back. Chicken over. Something like that. In the words of Cibo Mato, I know my chicken. You’ve got to know your chicken. Or you could get a bigger boat.
Or let the fox go free. Or put it in a box with some bricks and throw it in the river. When did you ever hear of a fox farmer? That’s fecking ridiculous.