I think this is my first obituary blogtoon. Today I read that Tony Soper had died and vaguely remembered that I knew the guy. As I read his obituary, I realised that I'd spent 3 weeks in his company in a kind of Big Brother environment at around the time that Big Brother was taking off as a thing. Only Big Brother, the tv show, wasn't set on a rickety boat being thrust back and forth on the massive waves of the Southern Ocean.
So any perceptions of Tony I might reveal need to be considered in the context that everyone in his company felt permanently sea-sick. Who was he? The cartoon gives the picture.
Tony seemed to be a personification of envy to me. His life was a tale of what might have been, if David Attenborough hadn't existed.
We didn't really hit it off. He seemed to have two things on his mind. One was birds, of the feathered type, and the other was what a prick David Attenborough was.
But fair play to him. Crossing the Drake's Passage 100 times is the sort of thing interrogators should explore as a means to gaining confessions quicker. It's a bloody horrible experience and at the end of it, you're in the middle of nowhere.
A bit like a long haul flight to Brisbane.
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