Plane Turner

Plane Turner

Are you off on a gap year? If so, you'll probably need a soundtrack to your African adventure. A collection of songs that sum up your whole gap year experience and that listening to later on in life will instantly bring you back to that special time. Here are five songs that we feel fit the bill perfectly:

I Really Don't Care What You Did On Your Gap Year - Frank Turner

Once you return home from your gap, you'll probably find that most of your sentences for the next month or so begin with the immortal words "When I was on my gap year..." Sure you probably had an absolutely amazing time, but your jealous friends might be a little fed up of hearing about that time that you darted a lion for the 37th time. Frank sings his song from the point of view of a man who is sick of going to bars and listening to what various girls have been up to on their gap before taking them home and bedding them. So if both your friends and that lone musician in the bar are fed up of hearing about your gap year, who are you going to talk to about your incredible, political, ethereal experiences in Africa? We recommend staying in touch with your gap year friends, who will no doubt be extremely happy to recall that incident with the dart gun for the 38th time.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight - The Tokens

So you're in South Africa in a game reserve, if there's one song that's guaranteed to get all your fellow conservation volunteers singing along, it's this one. After countless renditions around the camp fire, in the taxi to the local bar and as you drunkenly stumble back to your room at the reserve, you'll probably be fed up with this song by the time you catch the plane home. However, when it crops up on the radio years after your experience, you'll instantly be transported back to the time on your gap year when you had too many Springbok shots and incurred the wrath of all your fellow volunteers when you woke them up with your loud "wim-om-bom-awah".

Circle of Life - The Lion King

This might sound terribly uncultured, but if there's one film that will remind you of your wildlife conservation experience it has to be The Lion King. The film has all the animals that featured on your gap year from the lions to the oxpeckers - like Mufasa's secretary Zazu. You may even catch a glimpse of a warthog, like Pumba, on your travels. Someone is guaranteed to stick this song on at some point on your gap year, and it might be cheesy but it will instantly bring home the fact that you are in Africa, which will make you appreciate the experience even more. Plus on the way to the bar everyone will pretend that they're far too cool to know the words to a Disney song; but on the way back to the reserve there won't be a single person on the bus who isn't singing along.

Mark Bottell is the General Manager for Worldwide Experience, an online tour operator offering extended breaks on gap year and other adventurous holidays for adults.

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Turner $15.99 J.M.W. Turner was a painter whose treatment of light put him squarely in the pantheon of the world’s preeminent artists, but his character was a tangle of fascinating contradictions. While he could be coarse and rude, manipulative, ill-mannered, and inarticulate, he was also generous, questioning, and humane, and he displayed through his work a hitherto unrecognized optimism about the course of human progress. With two illegitimate daughters and several mistresses whom Turner made a career of not including in his public life, the painter was also known for his entrepreneurial cunning, demanding and receiving the highest prices for his work. Over the course of sixty years, Turner traveled thousands of miles to seek out the landscapes of England and Europe. He was drawn overwhelmingly to coasts, to the electrifying rub of the land with the sea, and he regularly observed their union from the cliff, the beach, the pier, or from a small boat. Fueled by his prodigious talent, Turner revealed to himself and others the personality of the British and European landscapes and the moods of the surrounding seas. He kept no diary, but his many sketchbooks are intensely autobiographical, giving clues to his techniques, his itineraries, his income and expenditures, and his struggle to master the theories of perspective. In Turner, James Hamilton takes advantage of new material discovered since the 1975 bicentennial celebration of the artist’s birth, paying particular attention to the diary of sketches with which Turner narrated his life. Hamilton’s textured portrait is fully complemented by a sixteen-page illustrations insert, including many color reproductions of Turner’s most famous landscape paintings. Seamlessly blending vibrant biography with astute art criticism, Hamilton writes with energy, style, and erudition to address the contradictions of this great artist. From the Hardcover edition.

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