Oh yeah. The whole Mark and Mary thing.
I was interrupted this morning by the need to catch the SnowBus (highly recommended - 30 Canadian dollars for a return to Whistler from Vancouver is not to be sniffed at) and had planned to finish retelling the story on the bus (I have a tiny, tiny laptop and so can do such things.) Unfortunately, the host put a breathtakingly bad film called "Hellboy" onto the bus's video which distracted me for the whole journey in much the same way that a car crash tends to draw one's eyes whether one wants to look or not.
But I digress.
I was aware that following a naked man through the corridors of the hotel was not something I'd normally do but I figured - heck - whats the worst that could happen? Luckily my imagination had not had the time to provide options when we arrived at another door. The man (who I later learned was called Mark) thumped on the door.
"Mary!" he called "This the right room?"
"Ya" came the reply, and the door was opened. I peered inside. Including the one I assumed was Mary, I could see 3 more women and another man.
"I found my beer!" said Mark, holding the can up for the doubters in the room, "Left it in the hot tub. Hey, this is - what was your name?"
I said my name. Eveyone laughed. They normally do. The ski instructors loved my name, as do traffic police.
"Hey, cool name dude. Which part of Australia are you from, man?"
"I'm not Australian," I said, my fingernails digging into my palms, and adopted the clipped BBC accent reserved for such occasions, "I'm English"
"Oh man. Awesome. Let me fetch you a drink, man. You wanna beer?"
"Sure, beer is good"
Judging by the smell of the room, beer hadn't been the only thing taken that night. I sat on the sofa between 2 of the women and they explained the rules of the game they were playing: "Ya - see, we're watching Rocky Horror, and whenever you don't get the line right you got to lose some clothes, ya? And when you do, you got to take a shot, ya?"
They giggled: "Mark's not very good" - they clearly weren't much better.
"I see" I replied, wondering what had possessed these people to invite a total stranger in to play 'strip Rocky Horror'. Certainly not my physical appearance. I learnt later that the only people who'd known each other for longer than that evening were Mark and Mary.
And with that, I'll draw a veil over my last night in Whistler aside to say that the list of things below that I did is still correct and I wish I wasn't so British as to be practically handicapped.
