Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

by Adam Fletcher

You don’t see the people doing the bad things out chanting: “What do we want? MORE TYRANNY! When do we want it? Well, that’s up to us really, isn’t it?” No, you don’t see those people because those people have already won.

People always say comfort zone like it’s a bad thing, a thing from which one should endeavour to escape. I’ve never understood this. Sure, zone is ambiguous: time zone, war zone, primary erogenous zone. Zone can go both ways. But comfort? Just try and make that negative. Not possible. Even “comfort tyranny” just sounds like a promising new folk band.

That’s another one for the list. Why is being in the house always considered a bad thing? Houses are a comfort zone of Internet, sofas, cushions, toast. They’re really an embarrassment of riches in a cruel, indifferent, and largely toast-less world.

She’d nailed adulthood and its responsibilities. I ignored it and hoped it would go away.

It’s like bumping into Hannibal Lecter in a newsagent buying Haribo. Were Oded a casserole, the ingredients would have been: 1x Eeyore Half a cup of manically depressed Woody Allen 250g of David Foster Wallace The hair of Robert Smith (from The Cure) All cooked in deadpan, until lightly disorientated. I fell quickly into deep, platonic love with him.

Oded was the blackest of black comics. Someone so fused to his trauma, so honest and self-deprecating with it, that he wore it like a bow tie. This was not a man you wanted good things to happen to; he’d have no idea what to do with them. If he found a one-hundred-shekel bill on the floor, he’d bend down to pick it up, put his back out, and run up a five-hundred-shekel medical bill.

One group of them had even broken out into an impromptu prayer circle one wine ago. Yes, it is perfectly okay to measure time in wines. I’m pretty sure that’s what the Greeks did.

It had usurped all our normal couple glances: you know I hate it when you do that; oh, it’s you again; get me something from the kitchen that is made out of chocolate—for example, chocolate.