Recently I have been hearing more and more (mostly negative) about “woo girls”. What is a “woo girl”?

A woo girl is very easily spotted. She generally travels in packs and is usually drunk or wanting to get drunk. Even if you don’t know exactly where the woo pack is, you will know the general direction by the very loud and regular out bursts of “WOOOO”. For a more complete definition check out the Urban Dictionary.

Now the big question is, “Is being a woo girl a bad thing?”

Well… since every single person I know has woo-ed at least once in their life time and not a single one them spontaneously combusted from the act of woo-ing, it can’t be that bad a thing. In fact in the last week I have done a quite a lot of woo-ing.

I won tickets to a great show – I woo-ed and so did my friend, Robyn

People were dancing in the streets before the 2010 World Cup Opening Ceremony – I woo-ed at them and then danced a bit too

Bafana goal keeper, Itumeleng Khune, made some amazing saves during the opening game – I woo-ed at each one and so did the 100 odd people around me.

Siphiwe Tshabalala scored the opening goal for Bafana – I woo-ed and so did the entire country (I think also I cried a bit)

I went to closing night of a play that friends were in and as they took their final bow – I woo-ed!

What I don’t do is woo constantly.

It was put best, I think, in an episode of How I Met Your Mother that a Woo Girl only Woo-s to cover up the fact that they hate their lives. At one point in the episode, when the girls are woo-ing, there are subtitles given: “I cry in the shower”, “I’ve never been on a second date”, “What if I never get to be a mom?!”

These girls woo-ed just for the sake of woo-ing, maybe a new song started playing or there were shots being drunk or they opened their mouths and that sound just came out from habit… What ever the reason, it wasn’t very pretty.

So, it would seem that woo-ing is not always a bad thing. It’s the constant and incessant woo for no real reason that is the problem.

Um... That's not what I meant

Don’t be afraid to woo… just make sure it’s for a good cause

So after school I did what I think everyone should do, I took a gap year. This was possibly the most intriguing year I will ever have in my life!

The gap year is so often confused as being the refuge of those who have no idea what to do with their future and are terrified of committing to studying more. It is also often considered by those who never took one as an excuse to not get on with your life and just party for a year straight before getting on with a degree or tertiary studying. So often both of these reasons are true, but with me it was anything but.

I am not a party animal and I never will be (I just spent the entire weekend recovering from Friday night’s head banging affair)! I also knew exactly what I wanted to study and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So why did I take a gap year? Well if I look back now, I know it was because I wasn’t ready for university and I wasn’t ready to be as strong as I needed to be to succeed with what I wanted to do. But if I’m honest, when I took the gap year, I wanted to be in the UK and be discovered and made famous over night.

So… it took me almost half the year to pluck up the courage to go overseas. Then one day I said to my parents “please can I use a credit card? I want to book my tickets now.” And I did. Two weeks later I was on a plane to the UK, terrified out of my wits! I am a British citizen and have one of those lovely little maroon books, so I didn’t need to organise visas or have so many thousands in my bank account before they would let me into the country. I arrived at the airport, pulled out the maroon passport and was told “welcome home, Miss Wheeler”. (Dear Parentals, thanks for being British!)

So I was there… now what?! I was staying with family friends, for whom I will always be thankful, who lived just outside of London. I spent my days looking on the internet for jobs, terrified to commit to anything because this was not how I imagined my trip to the UK would go. I was supposed to land a job immediately that was flexible and then somehow land an acting job next to someone famous and be discovered. That wasn’t going to happen working and living in a pokey little pub outside of London. After many tearful conversations on the phone to my mom I took a job. It was a live-in job in a pokey little pub outside London, somewhere between London and Oxford.

I stayed one night, made up a family emergency and fled up to Liverpool to my loving and dear Aunt and Uncle. They took me in with big hugs and told me how brave I was to be in a foreign country on the other side of the world to my home and be there all by myself. I stayed with them a week and then knew I had to make a decision. There was a potential job in London which I could go and interview for or I could just fly straight home…

I took a deep breath and went to London. I stayed in a backpackers by myself and went to the interview. After all, I told myself, I could always just fly home after the interview if it didn’t work out. I got the job! It was a live-in pub job but it was in the heart of London. I hated the work but the people I lived with took me in and looked after me like a baby sister.

True to form, there wasn’t a single person native to London working at the pub. Four of us were South African, the assistant manager actually being someone I am sure I met during high school. The manager was Irish and the girl I became closest to was from Jersey, but had lived in Cape Town for years with her ex-fiancé.

During my time at The Barley Mow I met very interesting people and some not very interesting people, I learnt how to pull a pint, I didn’t get discovered and I found my inner courage. It was the quintessential life lesson scenario and I got as much out of it as I could. I didn’t get what I expected out of the trip but I got what I needed. It’s much like Dirk Gently’s (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency) theory on navigation: follow a car that looks like it knows where it is going… you may not get where you want to go but you get to where you are meant to be.