2002. Part 1. Heaven. England

2002



PURPLE RAIN


It happened back in October of last year, 2002, one evening, early. I left the Royal Brisbane Hospital about the same time as I always did. I left the main building, and walked down through the gardens at the entrance, crossed the street and headed up the footpath towards the spot I’d parked the car. It was a route I had taken dozens of times before, and would take dozens of times to come. My legs walked as if on autopilot, they knew the drill so well. I wasn’t concentrating on my surroundings at all, my head and my heart were swirling around with their own unique introspective angst, as they tended to do at that time. But then…the external world knocked…and I slowly became aware of something…

It was raining.

Purple rain.

I stopped in my tracks, and for the first time in ages, my head lifted, my eyes focused, and I looked out at the world.

This street in Brisbane – Butterfield Street, for those of you who know it – was lined with Jacaranda trees. Jacaranda trees – for those of you who don’t know it – are beautiful. They blossom with bright purple flowers in the spring, and these flowers start to drop off in the early summer, usually when uni students start studying for finals. One old myth in Queensland is that uni students try to prevent the flowers from falling on their heads, otherwise they will be unlucky in exams.

Well, I wasn’t doing exams this year – for a change – and things didn’t seem as if they could get any more unlucky for me right then, so what happened didn’t faze me.

The tree was raining on me.

Hailing.

It seemed very unusual. I’d never seen a Jacaranda drop so many flowers at once like this before – maybe there was a freak windstorm - but I didn’t notice any wind. I just noticed the flowers falling around me, over me, on me…dozens of purple blossoms gently drifting down, catching the last rays of the sun as it set ahead of me.

I looked around, slowly coming out of myself and back into the outside world, after what had seemed like forever.

I spun around. I gazed up at the beautiful branches of the tree, silhouetted against the bright blue skies. Flowers drifted down, surfing the breeze, continuing to rain around me.

I was entranced. It was beautiful.

An off-duty nurse hurried past me, and she obviously didn’t agree. She was just eager to get home, looking suspiciously at the weirdo who had suddenly stopped in the centre of the footpath, enraptured by some falling flowers.

On any other day, I would have hurried on too - places to go, people to see.

But on this day…

I stood there for ages.

I needed this moment.

It was beautiful, sad, melancholy, poignant, pointless...

It was what my 2002 had become.

And it was maybe the first moment I realised that everything was going to be alright.


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2002 was one of those unique numerical events in time. I like to call them a mirror year. I’ve got no idea what the correct term is, I will leave that to the scientific nerds.

As a mere amateur nerd though, mirror years have always fascinated me. A mirror year is when the back half is exactly the same as the mirror image of the front half. Like 2002. Or 1991. You know - perfect symmetry. They only come once a century, which makes them pretty special. I’ve seen two mirror years in my lifetime. I’d like to say I will make it to 2112…hey, I’m gonna try. But some people never ever see one. I consider myself pretty lucky to have lived through two.

If you really want to get anal about it, try this on for mental size – where were you at two minutes past eight at night, on the twentieth of February last year? I’ve got no idea where I was. But lots of nerds were gazing at their chronometers. Because that moment works out as 20:02, 20/02, 2002.

What does that mean? Well I guess it technically means it’s a pretty momentous time. But ultimately it means nothing. I’ve never really thought mirror years worthy of digression before. So why here? I guess because I’m struggling to find some meaning, some purpose to 2002. Something worthwhile about it, something good.

As you can see, I’m grasping…

2002…for me…wasn’t that great. Sometimes I think this irrelevant, insignificant babble about “mirror years” is the only meaningful thing I can say about 2002. Sometimes I wish my 2002 had never happened.

Over time, I’ve become fond of saying that each year I live is better than the one before. I have really believed that. I generally seem to get happier and more fulfilled as each year passes. This was certainly true of 2001. The best year of my life. However, 2002 was undoubtedly my worst. I sunk lower than I’ve ever sunk before. I lost myself in the depths of despair. I struggled to stay afloat.

Somehow, I made it through.

Why write about 2002 here then, if it was such a crap year? Well, one reason is that I think the best way to let go of all that pain and bad times is to confront it directly. I am hoping that by looking my despair and hopelessness in the face, I will be able to finally let go of 2002 and the stigma it holds for me. Another reason is that, if I’m honest, my year wasn’t really all that bad. Yes, it was my worst year ever. Yes, I experienced more pain and grief than I have ever experienced before. But looking back, with perspective, my year was not that bad. Queen Elizabeth called 1992 her “annus horribilis”. Well, the Queen’s horrible anus aside, I really have to look at my own nasty year in perspective. I need to compare it not to the other years of my fortunate, blessed life, but to the years of other people’s lives. And in comparison with many people in the world, my 2002 was blessed. I had many, many good times. And, with a little perspective now, I really do believe – that despite the bad times of 2002 – I am very lucky to have enjoyed many, many good times last year.

Yes, there were bad times. But there were many more good times. For those of you dubious about reading countless pages of self-indulgent angst about my 2002 in this report, don’t worry too much. Oh yeah, the self-indulgent angst is there all right – hey, it’s me, after all. And like I said, it’s one way I could let go of it, by writing about it. But more than that, much more, this journal/saga/epic/e-mail is about the good times, the happy times, the laughter of 2002. And there is plenty of that. I think when I started writing this epic in January 2003, I still hadn’t really found myself. I still felt lost, adrift…I still hadn’t really reconnected with who I was. But writing about my 2002 had done wonders.

I have remembered who I am.

I am Dave.

And I am back.

And this was my 2002…


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Chapter 1: HEAVEN
Christmas 2001 - May 2002, England



Making Spirits Shine


My 2001 Odyssey epic e-mail finished on Christmas Eve of that wonderful, perfect year.

I just re-read it to myself.

And I just realised what a different person I am now, one year later. The conclusion of my 2001 epic was filled with joy and with hope.

I am so desperate to tap into those feelings that I had back then, and not just because I want to write about them here. But it’s tough. A lot of things have changed. I have changed. I have been on a rollercoaster ride, emotionally through 2002. Where there was joy there became sadness. Where there was hope there became despair. Where there was idealism there became cynicism. Where there was Dave there became…who did I become in late 2002? Certainly not “myself”, as whatever I had come to believe “myself” was. What had the year done to me?

Anyway, I am really gonna try. My heart may flinch at the memories, the perfect, happy memories of the first third of 2002, but my head can hopefully get around that. Because I want to remember. I need to…

I am going to start this saga where I left off in my 2001 Odyssey – Christmas Eve. I am going to start my 2002 adventures with definitely my favourite memories from 2001 – the final week. Forgive me for going on about those times, but they were…priceless.

Christmas Eve 2001 was perfect. I was in the United Kingdom, staying with my girlfriend Frances and her family in a little town not far from Cambridge, a town called Meldreth, but a place the locals all referred to as “The Village”.

The winter weather was stark and, by Australian standards, savagely cold. Nevertheless my English friends seemed to embrace Christmas as much as Aussies do, just in a different way – all their fun was had inside. And of course the first, best, and ever-always inside place in England is the pub.

The Queen’s Head at Newton was the Farbridge family’s favourite pub. It was about a million years old, or seemed it. It was built – like many structures in Europe – when people (even English people) were a lot shorter. Most of the doorways came up to my chin, and I had to stoop to enter. Entering the pub’s oldest room you never would have thought there was enough room to stand, let alone sit comfortably. It was pokey, cluttered, full of low rafters and wobbly wooden beams, crooked tables and dusty framed pictures on the walls. There were two fireplaces, and the largest usually accommodated not a fire, but a table and chair for patrons. The pub was always crowded with happy people. And yet we always found a space, not least because these happy people were so friendly.

And the place had never seemed so welcoming as it did on Christmas Eve. At lunch times, The Queen’s Head served thick yummy soups, homemade bread, and meat and cheese platters. But on Christmas Eve, there was no food. The Queen’s Head just served warm beer and good cheer - in equal quantities. We crowded around a table next to a roaring, smoky fire – which bought tears to our eyes but added to the ambience. The Farbridge family greeted many old friends. And, best of all: Christmas Carols!!! The whole pub was singing!!! OK, so maybe we weren’t exactly the Herald Angels. Maybe some of the words were a little off, some of the tunes not so melodic, some of the singing slightly slurred, but who cared? It was certainly not a silent night in The Queen’s Head at Newton.

Our next venue – indoor of course too – was a little more refined, a little more somber. We popped in for Midnight Mass to the local church. When I say local church, I mean, there seems to be a gorgeous mini-Cathedral on every street corner in the UK, every one high-ceilinged and with ornate gothic columns and gorgeous stained glass windows. In fact there’s so many of these beautiful churches that some have fallen into disrepair and been abandoned, I guess because of under use. It makes you realise what a massive business religion used to be in this country compared with today, when television, cinema, theatre and the media dominate our need for mass-moralising.

Thankfully there was minimal sermonising and maximum singing in the Royston church on Christmas Eve. The choir was wonderful, and compared to the drunken chanting of the pub patrons, infinitely preferable to the ear, if not the soul. The carols, the candlelight, the beautiful nature of the setting…it was a wonderful reflective moment, a chance to appreciate all that 2001 had meant to me, and my joy at sitting there with Frances, her lovely family, and my great friend AJ. In the words of “Come all ye faithful…”, I truly felt “joyful and triumphant”.

Then I had to ruin it all by trying to sing along with the choir and congregation, alternating between high-pitched soprano and very deep bass. I thought it sounded fine, but AJ, next to me, almost collapsed in a fit of giggles, not quite appropriate in God’s ‘hood. Two wise men, we were not.

Back at Farbridge manor, I called friends and family in Australia, where it was Christmas morning already. I heard my beautiful four-month old niece gurgle into the phone, and imagined her there, tiny and helpless in my sister’s arms. I spoke to my Mum, and she cried, because she missed me. And I made a silent vow that, next Christmas, I would be with all three generations of female relatives.

By then, it was very late, and Santa was busy. So was I. I was about as organised as ever for Christmas (meaning: not at all), so I sat up in the living room well past midnight, wrapping gifts, and writing cards. I wasn’t alone though, because I had the dying embers of the fire for company, and two snoozing cats on the couch with me, George and Murphy. I eventually put my meager gifts under a beautiful family Christmas tree – a real Christmas tree, and one bursting with more colourful presents than I had ever seen in one place before. I added a few of my furry clip-on Koalas to the tree to give it an Aussie flavour, bid those lucky cats goodnight, and went to bed.

On my way, with all the lights out, I gazed out the window, as I had many times that day. Was I looking for Santa? No, I was looking for snow. Looking, begging, pleading. A White Christmas, even just a fine spattering of snow, would make my Christmas perfect, complete.

Alas, there was no snow falling that night.

But then I crept into that warm bed alongside my sweetheart, and, still mostly asleep, she rolled over to cuddle me and share her warmth – as she always did – and as soon as she did that, I realised I didn’t need snow. It was a perfect Christmas already. And I was the luckiest man alive.


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Christmas Day 2001. I am woken with a stocking full of presents, a Farbridge Christmas tradition. The house is full of movement and relatives and cats and food and laughter.

It was my first Christmas with an open fire.

The Farbridge children – two of them professional women in their twenties you understand – seemed to regress into childhood. Frances chased me around the house, practicing her judo kicks on my bum. Katherine - Frances sister, and my best mate - lifted her seventeen year old brother Miles up on her feet and aeroplaned him around the lounge room. The energy in the house was infectious. The older Farbridge generations seemed to take it all in their stride. Sometimes they joined in.

Lunch time – and the dinner table was, if possible, an even greater explosion of colour than the Christmas tree. Bright tablecloths, bon-bons, napkins – and every conceivable food that you can roast, bake, boil or fry. Turkey, lamb, carrots, peas, sprouts, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, gravy. Not to mention all the wine, beer and other assorted booze bottles.

But the colour wasn’t just confined to the surface of the table. The best action was coming from the people sitting around it. Grandma nicked everyone’s shots of Chartreuse, but had a fight on her hands from young Miles who “just wanted to get pissed”, in his words. Frances told the corniest, sweetest, most terrible jokes out of the bon-bons, and laughed outrageously at her delivery. In a quiet moment, Grandma asked Frances “Do you ever have a joint?” which bought a round of guffaws, and even though Grandma soon specified a joint of meat, our assumptions weren’t that outrageous, because I’ve seen all three generations of Farbridge women share the odd spliff on occasion. Lesley (Frances’ Mum) constantly yelled at everyone very loudly, not in anger, just to be heard above the hub-ub. Whenever voices were raised (which was often) Katie chimed in with a constant bark: “ruff ruff!!!”. Frances persued an interesting debate with her Grandma about bisexuality (Grandma for it, Frances against it). Robin (Frances’ Dad) kept raving on about having “too much stuff”, and wanting to downsize his life, and auction off all his possessions – starting with a nearby vase which he proclaimed he acquired in a “Chinese brothel in Shanghai”. When Katie asked him the obvious question – “Dad, what were you doing in a Chinese brothel in Shanghai?”, his obvious answer “none of your business!” bought another ripple of laughter.

AJ and I, caught up helplessly in the family banter, did lots of laughing and lots of eating. It was a big day for both, and we did both with abandon, both in abundance.

After the lunch entertainment, the present presentation might have seemed anti-climatic, but it was wonderful fun. There were so many gifts though, and it seemed to go on forever. Luckily, I assumed my usual role of Santa to keep things moving briskly along. There’s an art to being Santa, you know…

Considering we were guests in Meldreth, AJ and I were extremely spoilt with presents. We even received lovely gifts from family friends of the Farbridge clan whom we hardly knew, just because we were there! It was overwhelming stuff, but most overwhelming of all was the extraordinary generosity of my girlfriend. Not just generosity of material gifts, but especially generosity of herself, generosity of spirit. After a wonderful year together, I shouldn’t have been surprised by Frances, but I constantly was.

Of all my wonderful gifts, the best present of all was from my sister – a videotape of my baby niece in her first few months of life. Although baby Sarah didn’t do much more than lie there and gurgle through the hour long video (what did we expect: tap-dancing?), Frances and I were entranced and watched it over and over, long past Christmas.

Christmas Day ended with a fun visit to the house of Peter and Rowena, the close family friends of the Farbridge’s I mentioned above. Now, their house is old, really old, I’m talking so old, it’s got it’s own ghost. But it’s a friendly ghost apparently, always up for a chat. There was no sign of the ghost when we arrived on Christmas night unfortunately, but some serious possessions had taken place throughout the day by the look of it, and we didn’t just need the dozens of empty bottles to tell us that. The Ghost of Christmas Booze had well and truly set up shop. There were lots of pissed people. There was dancing. There were charades. There was a guy doing spot-on Frank Spencer impersonations (“Mmm…Betty!”). And there was a weird violent game they’d invented, whereby two blindfolded people lay head to head on the floor and whacked each other with newspapers. AJ narrowly beat a bloke called Duncan, but Duncan had a good excuse – he was so drunk he could barely speak. Shortly afterwards, Duncan vomited all over the upstairs bedroom. If I was him, I would have blamed the ghost…

So, the family frivolity of Christmas Day came to an end. Exhausted from food, booze, and laughter, we headed back to Farbridge Manor.

But not before we had to pause and chip frost off the car windshield. That’s right! Frost!!! It was so cold that parking a car outside meant that the windscreen went white with frost. Frances had a special tool in the glove box, and I chopped the frost off with barely-concealed glee.

Hey, it wasn’t snow I told myself, but it was the next best thing…


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The Wondrous Winter Wind


If I thought it was cold around Cambridge at Christmas time, the family decided to test my limits by adding wind into the equation.

The fun continued with a three-day family excursion across East Anglia, and into the flat – and very windy expanses of Norfolk.

It was an extremely flat part of the country – and once, due to farming, and incredibly rich one, which explained all the magnificent churches everywhere. Perhaps the most magnificent – and certainly the tallest, was the Ely Cathedral. We didn’t drive that close to it, and we didn’t really need to, because it was so tall and massive it dominated the otherwise flat and featureless horizon like a shipwreck in the desert.

I realised how cold the human body could get when we reached the coast, at Hunstanton. The sky was clear and blue, the sun was shining, a few people were walking their dogs through the attractive coastal parks and along the pier. Ever eager for photos, especially of the gorgeous red and white beach cliffs, I jumped out of the warm car, and then promptly realised why Frances and Katherine - local girls from way back - had refused to come outside.

Within seconds, I couldn’t feel my nose. Not a problem I thought, I don’t need my nose to take photos…but it turned out I did need my hands. Using gloves didn’t work, cause I couldn’t feel the button through them. But then on the other hand (so to speak), after the first few snaps, using my hands ceased to work too –because they got so cold I couldn’t feel them. And I couldn’t hear if my usually noisy camera was clicking over because of the wind roaring through my puffy hood and my beanie and into my ears.

It was cold.

How cold?

Well, this cold: there was a nice ornamental water fountain near the cliffs, and as water came from the top it cascaded down the decorative multi-levels to the pool at the base. Only…it wasn’t making it!!! Most of the water was freezing into icicles right before our eyes, the drips and streams turning solid. All I could do was try to take a photo of that and then sprint for the warmth and sanity of the car.

A bit further on I risked frostbite and jumped outta the car again to take a snap of a windmill in a flat marsh, with a stunning orange-streaked sunset behind it. And I stepped into ice!!!! That’s right, the rain puddles on the roadside had turned into ice!

What were we doing here? Well, the area was beautiful. In a cold sorta way. A cold, stark, barren beauty. The trees were gnarled and naked and gorgeous against the sunsets, and some of them reminded me, strangely, of the majestic boabs in the Kimberley of Western Australia.

We stayed a couple a nights in a little place called Blakeney, a town which many years ago had been on the coast, but which was now separated from the sea by several square miles of man-made, reclaimed land, called “the broads”. The broads stretched for miles and miles up the coast. They were marshy, grassy, boggy, and – you guessed it! – very, very flat and windy. It was a strange landscape, unlike anything I’d ever seen before, oddly beautiful I guess. AJ and I ventured out onto the broads for a walk one morning, of course without the girls. We found an old shipwreck, and then, a little further on, an abandoned windsurfer – very weird, completely in the middle of nowhere, miles from the water. Closer to the actual ocean, the broads lost their grasses and turned into the last thing we expected – a desert!!! And I’m not talking about a sand-dune-type-beachy desert, that would have been OK, if a little strange in eastern England. No, this desert was a barren, rocky, hard sort of desolation, sort-of Mad Max apocalyptic style. It seemed quite idiosyncratic, but then, the whole place did.

Blakeney itself was a lovely little town, as many little towns in England are. It had narrow streets called things like “Little Lane” and “Shelia’s Way”, down which there was barely enough room for a few pedestrians, let alone the cars which somehow managed to navigate their way through without slowing down. It had locals - and tourist season regulars, it seemed – who knew each other by name, birthmark, and PIN number, and would always stop for a chat which involved all three. But I guess I’ve really just described any smallish English town right there. What made Blakeney really special was that it seemed to be completely constructed of little stones. OK, so they used a few bricks for the hard bits, and the roofs seemed normal, and they used glass for the windows thankfully. But the rest of the town was just made up of these fist-sized little grey seaside rocks stuck together. Every wall, every fence, even the odd pet was constructed from them. It was the cutest thing I’d ever seen – well, maybe not, but it was a town straight from fairytale.

Most unusual.

Another unusual thing was that the Farbridge family had picked this as their regular idyllic holiday spot only to stay inside the whole time. I think Robin may have gone for one short walk, but even he couldn’t face that bracing wind for too long. After our Aussie friend Jane joined us there, she convinced Katie to come outside for awhile one morning, and those two plus AJ and I walked to the end of the wind-sheltered street towards the broads. I’d already been out earlier that morning so I knew what to expect…around that first corner at the bottom of the hill…as soon as you left the shelter of the building…the wind from the north hit you with such ferocity it flung you backwards for a few steps, and the only way you could counter balance it was by leaning into it at a severe angle. We must have looked like a quartet of stupid street mimes, struggling in slow motion against that wind. Katie was brave, but didn’t last too long.

Which is more than can be said for Frances. The only times I saw her outside that entire break was when she dashed from the car to the hotel or to the pub. If there had been a cute animal or a raw pea salesmen on the broads, maybe we could have lured her outside, but failing those things…

Staying inside wasn’t a bad thing in Norfolk, anyway. The beer always warmed you up. And there was always a lot of fun to be had. Delicious seafood meals – I enjoyed mussel salad, grilled lemon sole and crusty crab pie – not all at once of course.

Then there were the games. Even enroute to Blakeney, driving there in the car, we played a game, with the silliest person allowed to wear my new fluffy ear-flap hat. Frances won by playing a little game on me, beckoning me over to whisper something in my ear. Each time she withdrew she would giggle cheekily. I was convinced she was saying something in English, and I just couldn’t work out what it was. It turned out she was whispering “Poobumwillypiddlefartshit!” really fast, but I never worked that out, because her giggles were so infectious that all of us in the car were soon guffawing in helpless, pointless laughter (the best type). By the way, you should try that “Poobumwillypiddlefartshit!” game (a Farbridge original) one day, it’s worth it.

Board games were the order of the day once we were out of the car and into the pubs. The first one we played was called Cranium, the highlight being Frances molding a martini glass out of plasticine to try to get her Dad to guess the word “cocktail”. It worked too!

Articulate is a similar game (minus the plasticine) where you win by getting your teammate to guess the most words from your descriptions. Katie had us in tears of laughter when she defined “Polar Bear” as “umm…umm…lives in a igloo!!!” Ahh, right Katie!!!…maybe in a Disney movie…

The final game we played was the ever popular Jenga. Let me set the scene here. We are having a pre-dinner drink in our lovely Bed & Breakfast, the White Horse in Blakeney. All of a sudden, a fight directly in front of us captures the attention of the entire pub. Glasses are put down, people start craning their necks to get a better view – without getting too involved of course. So what was the fight? A couple of young lads fighting over a lass’s honour with pool ques? A couple of one-eyed fishermen fighting over the catch of the day with fish hooks? Nah…the fight in front of us was just the Farbridge girls, sweet Frances and lovely Katherine, going at each other with raised voices and stamped feet. I guess spending a few days with the family over Christmas brings out the best in us. For Frances and Katherine it certainly bought back memories of Christmas past…way past, like twenty years past. Cause they were going at each other like petulant five-year olds, yelling and screaming, and certainly entertaining us, if not the entire pub. I’m not too sure what the fight was about. I think maybe it was about Frances resenting Katie’s attention-grabbing habit of organising three separate birthday parties for herself, or maybe Katie resenting Frances monopolising the car they were supposed to share. It didn’t matter what it seemed to be about. Because what it was really about was two sisters, who loved each other very much, letting of a bit of steam at the one person they knew would forgive and forget immediately, because that’s what sisters do.

Well, maybe not forgive immediately. The children had to be separated that night, put into different cars, and sat at different ends of the table when we arrived at The Red Lion pub in Stiffkey, where we enjoyed a lovely dinner and game of Jenga. There was little worry of a re-match between the girls that evening, but my concentration of the delicate Jenga balance was shot when Frances happily announced out-of-the-blue to her Mum that - “David and I are very much in love”. Woah!!! Very true comment of course, but not the sort of thing you expect to be announced at a family dinner. It was all I could do to keep toppling the Jenga tower over right then. Luckily I kept my Jenga focus until Katie, on my other side, accidentally knocked a glass of red wine all of my lap, and then proceeded to try to limit the stain by drenching me with the contents of several large salt shakers. When I stood up from the table, with a mass of white powder on my lap, it must have looked like the cocaine littered corner of a L.A. nightclub, and not a quiet little table in a charming little pub in a quaint little corner of England.

And how quaint it was. If “Stiffkey” as an unusual town name bought a smile to my lips, just a glance at the map revealed some classic monikers, just in the local Norfolk area. Try some of these on for size: Great Washingham, Fincham, Outwell, Holme-next-the-sea, Little Snoring, Great Snoring (named after AJ no doubt), South Pickenham, Cockley Cley, Rockland All Saints, Diss, Blofeld, Wells-next-the-sea, Fakenham, and of course, Little Fakenham. And, as usual, for each town we passed by I couldn’t resist my old game of “you know why it’s called that?”. For example, “You know why it’s called Fakenham? …because the guy that founded the town, he was convinced his wife was fakin’ ‘em…ha, ha!”. Sorry, spur of the moment stuff.

One of the prettiest towns in Norfolk we visited was called Holt (as in…the guy that founded it “did the Harold Holt” - did the bolt. Sorry, that one’s not mine. Oldie but goodie though.) Holt was a lovely little place rimmed with Christmas lights above antique stores, fish shops, and of course, pubs. Best thing though was the sunset at the western end of main street, a massive orange blaze in the sky which seemed to mimic the shapes of the church spire silhouette in the foreground.

Less inspiring was a town called Cromer we visited the next morning. As we approached Cromer, I kept gazing ahead at the horizon, as always wanting to be the first to see the ocean. All I kept seeing were the winter fields, empty and barren and brown. Then I realised that the most distant field, the one that looked really dirty, really brown, was actually the North Sea. It certainly didn’t look much like the Mediterranean Sea. It was a light poo-brown colour, dappled with white wave-crest caps. Maybe the sea was just having a bad day, a little off-colour spell. But it didn’t look too inviting.

Swimming was obviously not an option, but AJ, Jane and I felt pretty damn brave anyway, when we ventured out along the Cromer pier. The wind was, in a word, intense. It was stronger than it had been at Blakeney. It was stronger than I remembered it on the top of the Twin Towers, or during Hurricane George in Miami. In fact, it was so strong, I would hesitate to call it “wind” at all. It was more like a perpetual gale. I took a photo of AJ leaning into it, at least at a 45 degree angle, and the wind was totally holding him up, no worries. But actually I was a little worried that the skinny little bugger would be blown away as easily as a kite – because he wouldn’t weigh much more.

Despite this gale force wind, there were still lots of people out on the pier, enjoying the fresh air (!!!) and the bright sunshine as it hit the tiny portions of their faces exposed to the elements. There were even a few hardy fishermen out there, legs planted wide against the wind, fishing poles tied up against the railings. It’s amazing what the English will put up when they are on holiday and the sun comes out. And not just the English I guess. Just look at the three crazy Aussies staggering down that pier, trying not to fly off…

Our last few hours in Norfolk were spent out of the wind, either in the car, in the pub (where I sampled a beer called “Bog” – seriously!), or inside Norwich cathedral, one of the largest in the country – no town corner cathedral this one. It was vast, with a magnificent vaulted ceiling and gorgeously styled cloisters. The best part was the gigantic Christmas tree inside the door, which caught the reflected colours through the stained glass window perfectly. Any reverent, reflective mood however was shattered by the familiar club-beat ring tones of AJ’s mobile phone echoing through the building. An officious and religious lady looked like she was going to chastise AJ for this breach of etiquette, but as soon as she got a glimpse of my attire - my funny woolen hat and daggy tracky daks - she forgot AJ and started laughing at me.


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There was more laughter the next day when we entered Cambridge. Katie excitedly answered her mobile – a phone call from Australia she was expecting – and struggled to hear the other person for awhile. “Hello…hello…you’re very faint…hello…can you hear me?…” She then realised that she had the mobile turned the wrong way round, and was speaking into the earpiece. Easily done. Especially by sweet Katie.

Cambridge, I think is maybe my favourite English town (apart from Meldreth of course). In winter it looked so different from my spring and autumn visits. That’s the thing about England. They have seasons. Coming from Australia, I just wasn’t used to it, but after a few years in the UK I began to appreciate the huge differences that climate caused throughout the year. Cambridge in early autumn I think was my favourite season, with the trees still rich with growth but rapidly changing colour, and starting to fill up the pathways with thick papery leaves which crunched deliciously under my feet.

Cambridge in winter was so very different, but no less beautiful. The sky was crisp and clear. The air had a bite to it – but not an unpleasant one, and it seemed to keep me awake, alive. The trees were naked, stark, barren, and kinda spooky, kinda foreboding. Never had they seemed more anthropomorphic. The town, the colleges themselves seemed barren too, empty of all those bustling students and tourists that crowded the streets in summer. It was peaceful and welcoming. After so many visits, it felt like home, in a way.

It was in Cambridge, in The Anchor pub on the bank of the river Cam, over a pint and a laugh, that Frances pulled out yet another surprise, and presented me with an early (six weeks early!) birthday present. It was a secondhand – but completely perfect - Olympus SLR camera, fully manual, one of those solid, sturdy cameras that the old pros go ga-ga over, and the phrase “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” seemed invented for. It was beautiful. Frances was beautiful. I was torn between playing with my wonderful new toy, and gazing at my overly generous girlfriend, who just sat there sipping her beer, looking mightily pleased with herself and a fair bit naughty. Frances had bought me the camera to accompany me on my planned five month European trip that summer. I had exactly four months before my planned departure. So I had four months to make it up to her. And I had four months to work out what all the dials and switches and meters and readings on my new camera meant. It was going to be a close call.


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Party Time. Excellent.


2002 started in style.

My previous two New Year Eves had been unique. I had welcomed 2000 in hedonistic fashion, right next to Big Ben, as part of the largest Guinness-record breaking party ever, for the Thames Millenium fireworks. I had greeted 2001 in a complete contrast: completely sober, standing with my Mother on a quiet coastal lookout, watching distant, silent fireworks from Noosa to Caloundra on the south Queensland coast.

2002’s heralding moment was somewhere in between these extremes. No fireworks, but certainly no sobriety. A house party at Katherine Farbridge’s rarely has sobriety.

Back in London, AJ and I traveled on the tube and bus out to Katie’s posh estate, carrying our party contribution between us. Crisps?, I hear you ask? Dip? After dinner mints? Half a kilo of coke? Nah, none of those easy things. AJ and I journeyed out to Katie’s place lugging a kissing booth between us.

It wasn’t our idea, but somehow we had volunteered for kissing booth duty. Maybe because of that prophetic line from Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come…”

Thankfully, we didn’t start decorating the kissing booth until we arrived at Katie’s place, because this seemed to involve primarily applying lipstick (to our lips, yes!), and kissing the cardboard booth all over, especially around the kissing holes. I can’t actually say that I enjoyed wearing lipstick too much that evening, but I have to say, I was a little worried about the ease with which AJ took to its application. The kissing booth was soon complete. We had three holes for kissing, two at head height, and one just below waist height – in case any kissing midgets showed up, of course...

The booth was not the big success that Katie planned it to be, mainly because most of the guys at the party were too introverted. In fact the only guys who readily volunteered for kissing booth duty were me and AJ, neither a great idea. Because I obviously, had a girlfriend, and AJ obviously, had lipstick on.

Nevertheless, the party itself was a big success.

Katherine and Frances fought over control of the stereo like it was their car, with hip-hop dance and Britney cheese songs (Katie) competing with contemp-mellow dance grooves (Frances).

I eagerly participated in a game of Twister, but was out in the first round, my antiquated limbs no match for the supreme flexibility of the incredible Farbridge sisters, even in their high heel shoes and spangly tops.

Dirty dancing ensued well into the evening. Neighbours complained about the music, always the sign of a good party.

Katie’s emotional state seemed to echo that of the bottle she had in her hand. Empty bottle = tears, get consoling best friend, stat! Full bottle = joy, renew drinking games immediately.

Mild debauchery was the name of the game. Pretty close to midnight, Frances snuck into the bathroom behind me, and the highlight of my evening came shortly thereafter, during which Katie banged on the door yelling “Frances!!! I know what you’re doing in there!!!”

HELLO 2002!!! Happy New Year.

The bathrooms actually turned out to be pretty popular when the party wound down and people started to crash. One of AJ’s mates somehow locked himself in the tiny toilet cubicle downstairs and passed out. Another bloke passed out with his body half in the upstairs toilet, and half out. Actually sorry, let me amend that, his body was half in the toilet room, not the toilet itself.

I guess it’s not a good party unless you’ve got unconscious people lying on dirty tiles in the morning.


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The celebrations continued throughout the year.

One house party we attended early in 2002 – a good one – was not your typical drunken antipodean bash. This party was mostly filled with London locals, and, from the looks of their attire, dancing styles and choice of intoxicant, they were all affluent, trendy, cutting edge types.

And they cut with the edge of their credit cards that night, all right. Any time I walked into the bathroom or passed the bedroom (or even the kitchen!), a bunch of people would straighten up and wipe their noses guiltily. The place was drowning in coke, and I’m not talking about “–a-cola”. The ironic thing was, there only seemed to be three people at the party not indulging – Frances, Katherine and myself, and there we were sitting in the largest room in the house while the rest of the party kept disappearing into the other tiny rooms in large groups. I felt like saying, “listen guys, you all stay here in the lounge room, and we will go into the bedroom”. But I guess that might have defeated half the pleasure – the guilty, childish buzz from sneaking off into a corner to do something you knew was naughty. It probably would have seemed seedier and sadder to these guys if they had just sat around openly snorting, Trainspotting style.

Before the party degenerated into Mt Whistler after a fresh dump of powder, it was lots of fun. The music was good, the socialising was amiable, everyone was happy. Except Katie, who was getting frustrated. After a while, we worked out why. Katie spent the first hour of the party sitting on the edge of the couch and working her best flirtatious moves towards any obviously girlfriend-less guys at the party. You know the drill – extended eye contact, lips pursed together, eyelash fluttering, circling the top of your wine glass with one finger, flick of the hair, arch of the back. Take my word for it - Katie was a master, she could have taught classes. But this particular night, no matter how hard she tried, nothing was working. Guys would acknowledge her eye contact with a smile, then move along. They would chat to Katie briefly before making their excuses to grab a drink. Katie was bamboozled!!! Usually at this stage of the night she had them drooling, on their knees, and lined up by desirability quotients. And then, about an hour after we arrived at the party, the light bulb in Katie’s head flickered slowly to life, things finally clicked, and she stormed over to us, and with her petulant little girl voice she said, “I get it!!! They’re gay!!!! Why did you bring me to a gay party, Frances???”

So, despite our multi-leveled amusement…she ended up having a great time anyway. With her hormones in check and her flirting moves turned off, Katie was free to dance with all the boys she wanted, not to mention talk fashion for the rest of the evening.

The next big house party of 2002 was actually another one at Katie’s place. She was quite the hostess with the mostess. This time there was no kissing booth, instead – costumes!!! A “P-Party” theme. Katie was dressed as a pussycat – Michelle Pfeiffer, eat your heart out! Frances was a princess, well, she always was, always will be, but she also dressed up as one for the party. Dionne was the cutest pirate you’ll ever see, Sam was a peace-loving person, and Kerrie was a punk. AJ and I dressed up as the two “P” words we each associate with the most. I was a pizza, and AJ was a pervert (well, he always was, always will be, but he also dressed up as one for the party). My pizza costume was a touch impractical, I had real pieces of pineapple and pepperoni stuck all over me, but they kept falling off, leaving a pizza trail through out house. Luckily Katie didn’t have a dog, or I would have been dinner.

AJ’s costume was, not surprisingly, even more provocative. He had the pervert – flashing overcoat (which I’d found on the street and was almost brand new Saville Row style!). He had a pair of pervy binoculars. And, worst of all, he had a carrot. You might ask, “what does a carrot have to do with a pervert?” Well, AJ wasn’t using the carrot as a carrot, he was using it to represent a certain part of his pervert’s anatomy. Shameless. Hilarious. Bugs Bunny would have been repulsed. The rest of us were mightily amused.

Carrots weren’t on the menu every night though. And not all of our alcohol fuelled social adventures in 2002 took place within the safe confines of a friend’s home. Sometimes we even ventured OUT! Into Big Bad London.

Car Wash was a seventies nightclub in the West End. It was hip-hop, happening, extremely popular and very fashionable. Unfortunately though, the rise in the club’s popularity had led to a rise in it’s pretension, and snob value, so much so, that when we organised for a group to boogie on in one night, we were told – no wigs, no funny costumes, no fun!

Out went the Austin Powers teeth, but we all still dressed up as outrageously as we could. Wigs were a no-no, but that didn’t stop me from jelling my hair as far forward as I could, a Beatles-look so ridiculous that my best friend Katie first didn’t recognise me, and then mistook my hair for a wig anyway for most of the night.

The most outstanding fashion item of the evening however were the shoes of my ex-flatmate David. David had scored these shoes in a charity shop and they were fantabulabous. They had thick, course hair growing out of them!!! Once David borrowed AJ’s Elvis glasses and exposed the gold medallions hanging halfway down his chest – he really looked the part. He shimmied and boogied up on stage with the best of them.

One of the best of them was this poor guy was dancing up on stage by himself. Every sexy girl he shimmed stylishly up to danced pointedly away. Maybe it was the outfit he had on – a dull brown business suit which probably dated from the seventies, but which would not have been the fashion even back then. The poor soul looked like he had been spat out of the ‘70’s as a fashion reject into the modern era – but he wasn’t having anymore luck here. So we ended up dancing with him.

The music in Car Wash was…OK. Katherine loved it, grooving and gyrating up on the highest stage like the cage-dancer she once was. But it really wasn’t seventies music. It was self-important new millenium music which was copied off classic seventies music. But we really just wanted the real thing. We wanted total cheese factor. Cheese Factor 10!!! However the DJ was not impressed with our requests, barely even looking down his nose to respond, “We do not play ABBA here!” We didn’t even ask for the Village People or Wham after that.

There are many venues in London that thrive on pretence. They charge top dollar for drinks/entry/toilet soap because there are so many silly people willing to pay it. In fact, many of these people, given the choice of two places with exactly the same ambience, but with one twice as expensive as the other, would automatically opt for the pricey one!!! Why? Because, well, if a night out there costs a small fortune, it’s gotta be the place to be seen right?

This description perfectly categorises a place we attended in the West End for one of Katie’s three birthday gatherings (settle down Frances). The bar was called DENIM, but it was anything but jeans-style laidback. The décor was great (sixties mod), the atmosphere was bearable (lots of sweaty designer label clothes pressed up against each other), the scenery was spectacular (lots of sweaty designer clothes pressed up against each other) but the price of a mere pint was at least triple what you would pay in a humble pub. One shout for a few friends took care of my budget for the evening nicely.

Yo Below was the venue for Katie’s 2nd birthday party of the year. This place was more like it!!!! The dining set-up was interesting. We sat on the floor and put our legs into ditches in the floor. The table was knee height, and had beer taps on the top from which you could serve yourself whenever required. The table also featured bell-lights with which you could call over the karaoke waiters, who were obviously frustrated West End stage dropouts. Katie enjoyed my company that evening so much she came hunting for me in the male toilets after she deemed I had been missing for too long. Maybe her expedition was inspired by the birthday gift I gave her that night – a bright red lipstick shaped like one of Katie’s favourite pieces of the male anatomy (see also: AJ, carrot).

Speaking of AJ and vegetables, AJ was felt very pleased with himself another night when we were enjoying a lovely curry meal in our local Indian restaurant, not least because he had entertained the table with a repertoire of his best jokes, including the topper, “Would you like me to ask for the bill in Indian?” Cue impressed hush for the audience “yeah, yeah AJ, go ahead…”. AJ then beckons the waiter over, does his best “Goodness, Gracious Me” impression, and with the requisite circular head motion says in English “Can I have the bill please?”

But the next time AJ visited the same restaurant with Frances and I, he wasn’t quite so cocky at bill time. Towards the end of the dinner, Frances passed her unfinished meal across to AJ, who wolfed it down quickly. He was particularly enticed by three green beans which Frances had pushed to the side of her plate, untouched, and AJ popped all three beans in his mouth, chewed them up and swallowed them. Only…

They weren’t beans.

They were chillis…

Now, AJ has been compared to cartoon characters several times before. Various people have mistaken him for Timon the meerkat from The Lion King, or Sid the sloth from Ice Age. But AJ had never looked so animated as he did right then.
The transformation that came across his face was totally cartoonish in it’s intensity and instantaneousness. The skin all over his face and neck started pouring out sweat. His eyes and his nose started watering profusely. It was like every bit of moisture in his head had suddenly screamed “Abandon ship!!!”

There was nothing Frances and I could do but sympathetically offer AJ water, milk, bread…but nothing really helped AJ. Especially our echoing, infinite laughter…

Indian restaurants are massive in England. In fact the gourmet curry has replaced the humble fish and chips as the national meal of the United Kingdom. And the English have an interesting way of referring to the dining experience. Instead of saying, “We went out and got an Indian meal last night”, they drop what I would think to be fairly important word and say “Yeah, we went out and got an Indian last night”.

And these Indians are invariably very tasty.

Not all restaurants in London serve Indian, and for a chili-free experience, one evening Frances introduced AJ and I to a quaint little cafe in our local Kensington area. Called The Troubadour Coffee House, this place was as unusual as its name suggests. The roof was filled with dozens of hanging fiddles, and the entire joint was a bohemian antique hunters paradise. We drank European specialty beers and enjoyed crusty steak and kidney pie. Frances flirted amiably with the waiter, a charming student and illegal immigrant from the Eastern Bloc, a bloke gamely struggling to survive in a place which probably seemed like paradise compared with his home town.

London is brimming with more unique restaurants than you could ever visit in a lifetime. Despite this, I chose as the venue for my birthday in 2002, a restaurant that is pretty much the same where ever you go on the planet. That’s not necessarily a good thing I know, but it hasn’t stopped it from becoming my favourite restaurant in the world. So, for my special day, Frances organised a McDonalds birthday party for me. Ronald ™ himself couldn’t make it unfortunately, but otherwise it was great fun. We had “pass-the-parcel” games. We had party balloons (which kids from other parties started stealing). We had a birthday cake (courtesy of Katie) with the number “34” represented by Smarties.

It was a very sophisticated affair.

At Frances request, some of my friends had contributed embarrassing photographs of myself for a birthday card she made for me. I would like to categorically state here and now that I do not dress up in drag as a common experience, no matter how many photos of me seem to be out there in circulation. My old friend Stephen Cowell rocked up to the party not only with his lovely wife Siobhan and gorgeous baby son Nicholas, but also with a pile of photos of me back in the eighties. Despite my Millennium mates’ tactful assurances that I’ve barely changed in appearance since then…well, about the only thing that looked the same to me was my hair. Pasty, tubby millenium Dave barely recognised skinny, tanned eighties Dave. George Michael had become Elton John.

But some things never change. Even maturity levels. I entertained baby Nicolas with one of my coolest birthday gifts – a fluffy purple ostrich puppet, but I soon relented when I realised that I’d been so busy playing that I’d forgotten to eat. Now I know a lot of you are saying that forgetting to eat is probably a good thing in McDonalds, but…well, for me at least, it’s one of the primary attractions.

Keeping with the theme of the party, a children’s Happy Meal ™ seemed to be the best choice. And collecting the happy meal toys at that time was one of my favourite quests all year, featuring the colourful characters from the movie Monsters Inc..

Which coincidentally, was the second part of Dave’s birthday experience, a viewing of that sensational movie.

AJ unfortunately, does not share my taste in family flicks, and would rather have stayed in the pub. His cinematic tastes only run to three types of movies: gross-out comedies, Arnie bloodletting-fests, and…those movies that have a special shelf in the video store. So within minutes of Monsters Inc. starting, he was snoring soundly at the end of our row.

I appreciated the effort he’d gone to coming along though, to attend a movie he wouldn’t normally choose to see, just because it was his best friend’s choice. And besides, AJ loves McDonalds almost as much as me.

Another special occasion in 2002 was marked with a visit to restaurant that could not have been more different from the Golden Arches.

On the first anniversary of the day Frances and I met, I surprised her with a dinner at the Oxo Tower – a lovely, exclusive restaurant on the Southbank of the Thames, with – as its name suggests – fantastic views of the river and the City opposite. For once ignoring the prices on the menu, Frances and I luxuriated in the cocktail bar with lime and strawberry colada cocktails, before repairing to our table and celebrating the wonderful year we had enjoyed together with a superb meal. Frances ordered crabmeat for entrée followed by chicken with Parma ham, and I had boned sea bass after a chili-basted duck entrée. It all when down smoothly with a Chilean white wine. The views were spectacular as the sun set behind St Paul’s Cathedral and the City blocks came alive with electricity, but really, I only had eyes for my girlfriend. (Sorry, sick bags at the ready). But it was hard to appreciate the view through the windows when compared with the vision across the table from me. (There you go…hurl!!!). Nothing really comes close. (OK, that’s enough, sorry).

After our anniversary dinner, I put my view of Frances on hold for awhile. Because, after a romantic stroll down Southbank, I then whisked her off on a surprise flight which put the views from the Oxo Tower to shame. Frances and I boarded one of the panoramic glass capsules of the London Eye, also know as the “Millennium Wheel” – a gi-normous Ferris Wheel that is the tallest structure in central London, just across the river from Big Ben. I had taken a “flight” - as the promoters call it – on the London Eye a couple of years before with my American buddy Catherine, but that was during the day, and while awesome, really just gave the impression of London as a massive grey sprawl, with ground based landmarks hardly distinguishable. But this time, it was a different story. London was gorgeous by night, at 135 meters, the greyness and filth hidden by darkness and glittering lights, like the stars had abandoned the sky for the city. The Houses of Parliament were the jewel in the crown – lit up golden yellow from below, reflecting beautifully off the Thames.

It was not the first time, nor the last, that I actually had to pinch myself and remind myself that yes, I actually did live in this city, that I actually did live in London. And no matter how much I pinched myself I don’t think I even realised just how lucky I was to be doing just that.


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Out and About


London is a great town.

Like every place in the world, it’s got pros and its got cons.

When I first arrived in London, about four years before, I concentrated on the cons. I was broke, unemployed, knew hardly anyone. Times were tough. All I focused on was the bad stuff. It was freezing cold. It was dirty. It was crowded. It was impersonal. It was exhausting. I hacked up gobbies that were black from the filth in the air. It was not boring. But I hated it.

I was living on the last of my savings, living on noodles every day, staying in a filthy hostel, when I got a job. I survived. I made friends. More friends visited, came to live. I got better jobs. I came and went and came again. I settled for longer periods. I moved into houses with more and more comforts. I met more people, English people. I got to know the town. I became familiar with places, favourite places, like parks, bookstores, pubs. I became familiar with the tidal wave of opportunities for excitement that London had to offer. It was not boring. And I loved it.

By the time 2002 came around, London felt like home to me. It wasn’t paradise. But it was comfortable, familiar. I knew what I liked about it and focused on that. And I knew that London had a depth of experiences – social, cultural – that I would never come close to plunging in a hundred years.

As May 2002 and the departure date for our Euro trip approached, I started to realise that there was a strong chance that these last few months were quite possibly the last time that London would be home to me, the last time I would enjoy the luxury of having such an incredible, infinite, diverse city at my fingertips.

I know a lot of Australians who have done their time in London that have never thought this way. They come to London, spend a few weeks taking a few tourist photos, and then, for the next year or two of their visas…it’s like they slip back to Australia. They work to save to travel, like me. But otherwise, they seem to lose all appreciation for the town they live in. They spend all their free time with Australians. They spend all their free time in Australian themed bars, drinking Australian beer, dancing to Australian songs, watching Australian sporting matches on big screen TV’s.

Which is all good stuff, don’t get me wrong. But for many London based Aussies, it’s all they do. Every weekend. Which begs the question – why bother leaving home?

I’m not judging – these guys all had fun, good on them – I just could never understand it. I’m just asking? Our times in London pass so quickly. So why waste them doing exactly the same stuff you had done at home, and would do again when you went home?

But that’s just me.

And wasting time – especially in what were possibly my last few months in London – was not for me.

So I tried to make the most of my weekends…


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The Victoria and Albert Museum is a doozy. The British Museum may have Egypt covered and the Natural History Museum might be king of the dinosaurs, but when it comes to a gargantuan collection of the world’s art, from pre-history till tomorrow, the V&A wins hands down. It’s the most eclectic yet comprehensive, provocative yet popular, exotic yet accessible array of art through the ages I have ever seen. All in one massive building.

When I say “art”, that’s a pretty broad term. It includes furniture – from Dali’s famous Lips Couch to Jetson’s type chairs and classic little handmade writing desks. It includes musical instruments – from curvacously erotic Stradivarius violins to an elaborate hanging artwork made up of dozens of flattened tubas. It includes an entire wing devoted to glass, and what you can make from it, with a bit of creativity. It includes – or included, cause this was a special exhibition – something called “Men in Skirts” which traced the development of the skirt as a male garment through different periods and cultures (hey, it works for me, but then – I’ve got the legs for it).

Yeah, the V&A includes more modern and classic art – in hundreds of evocative forms – than I could appreciate in a lifetime, let alone summarise in a paragraph.

But I have to mention my favourites – the sculptures. There was a sculpture there that made me realise that men had a thing for seeing women getting in on together long before the Playboy channel aired. There was a sculpture there that made me realise that Harry Hamlin in Clash of the Titans really did look a lot like Perseus, my favourite Greek hero (he’s the dude who slew Medusa – the chick with the serpentine hairdo). Best of all, there was a sculpture in the V&A that made me realise I didn’t need to go to Florence to see Michelangelo’s sculpture of David, because here was a perfect, full-size replica, to appreciate in all his glory.

Or should I say…lack of glory. Because…well, how do I put this… You know what they say about the size of a guy’s feet? Well it ain’t always true, at least for ancient Roman sculptors, because Mick bestowed upon Dave the biggest feet I have ever seen, and yet…

Of course size doesn’t matter. Appropriately, the most interesting thing about the meat and two vege of ole’ Dave was hidden far from sight, around the back of the podium on which he stood – a fig leaf, specially constructed by the Poms to cover David’s modesty during visits by Royal ladies like Queen Vic.

Only the English!!!

To think that these worldly women would actually be offended by the sight of a naked statue’s…erm…nakedness…

I think it’s more likely that Dave requested the fig leaf himself, to save the reputation of Italian men everywhere.


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The Tate Britain art gallery in London has sculptures too, but they are pretty modest when compared to David, in height if not otherwise. This art gallery features British art from guys like Turner and Constable, and is filled with exquisite landscapes and expansive seascapes. It is a little sedate compared with the V & A, but much more relaxing and contemplative.

The contemporary cousin of the Tate Britain in the Tate Modern, and it is anything but relaxing, especially on weekends, when this huge converted power station bursts with art lovers - and with tourists who just want to tick it off their guide book listing.

Like the V&A, there is too much to encapsulate here, all I can suggest is GO GO GO if you get a chance. Frances’ favourite sculpture – Rodin’s The Kiss - graces the foyer of the Tate Modern, not far from an elaborate illusionary masterpiece of form which spans all seven floors of the building. In another room, one of Monet’s waterlillies paintings hangs beside a floor-bound artwork that looks more like an abandoned quarry of jagged red rocks. If you can divorce the crowds from your awareness, there are hundreds of things to catch your eye, invite your interpretation, and brush away the cobwebs that the working week builds up in your mind. There is a telephone which looks like a lobster (one of Dali’s nightmares I think). There is an artfully mutilated grand piano hanging upside down from the roof which periodically drops a few feet closer to the floor and plays a tune. Imagination runs riot in the Tate Modern. And it’s good to let yours off the leash sometimes too.

Southbank - where the Tate Modern lives - is a great place. It’s not Brisbane’s Southbank mind you – no lovely beaches and gardens and cafes and lifesavers in DT’s and Gondwanaland rainforests. But London’s Southbank has the edge on diversity.

Between my two favourite London landmarks - Big Ben opposite and Tower Bridge miles down the winding tidal river - there is lots to catch your eye and your mind on an afternoon stroll. Between the London Eye and the Tate Modern there in the London Aquarium, the Arts Centre, the Hays Galleria, Dali sculptures of spindly-legged elephants, and a plethora of riverside pubs and restaurants.

And just outside the Tate Modern and connecting it elegantly with St Paul’s Cathedral across the Thames, is the Millennium Bridge – a silver-plated steel web of beams and girders, designed purely for pedestrians by an architect called Norman Foster, who has some pretty famous erections in Londontown. Lots of older locals, ever resistant to change, complained about the cost and appearance and necessity of the bridge when it was proposed and built for the turn of the century unveiling. Their arguments were helped by the fact that immediately after opening for a day, the bridge was closed down for a year because it wobbled when too many people hopped on it. Not good.

But now, after two years of reinforcement, the bridge is back in business, and all arguments appear to have been forgotten. It is always packed with tourists gawking and locals bustling. Some people hate the way it looks, but I love it, it’s like a spunky modern hairpin giving contrast to the massive majesty of London greying hairdo.

And no matter how much I jumped on it, it didn’t wobble at all.

Not far from the Millennium Bridge is the Globe Theatre – an exact replica of the original 17th century structure where many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed. Anyone who has seen Shakespeare in Love will recognise this open timber arena with thatched roof and elaborate stage. But the theatre tour was filled with lots of fascinating – and generally gross - bits of info that the movie never touched on. For example: the audience entrance to the theatre was called the ”vomitus”, bringing about the origin of the word “vomit” (Webster’s Dict: to spew, hurl, chuck, chunder, blow chunks, throw up, welcome dinner back, etc, etc, etc). Another English word origin – “eavesdropping” – derived apparently from the habit of the cheaper paying patrons who stood on the open floor area, sheltering from weather underneath the roof eves protecting the first rows of higher class patrons, and hence listening in surreptitiously to all the weekly gossip.

But sitting under cover on the ground floor level was not all it was cracked up to be. There are three levels of audience seating within the circular arena. And, because the plays were generally long, and because copious amount of booze was consumed during the show, and the toilet options limited, well…apparently the audience just relieved their bladders wherever they were sitting. And if you weren’t sitting on the top level and didn’t bring an umbrella, well…there’s just some things I wouldn’t even put up with for a Shakespeare show. Our guide told us that the more polite urinators announced for the poor souls below that they were about to initiate a golden shower, but really…I mean, what did they say? “Ahoy below, wee-wee coming through!!!”.

Shakespeare has this imagine of high-class culture, of pompous-suited aristocracy and fancy-pants snobbery. But he wasn’t like that. Shakespeare prospered with the common folk. The Bankside area back in those Tudor times was rough and disreputable, full of bars and brothels and bums. Plays by Shakespeare and his drinking buddies gave these people an escape, a look into another world. In a way, Shakespeare was the Spielberg of his time – a master of popularist entertainment. And like Spielberg, by the time he was adopted as the snob-critics darling, he wasn’t as appealing to the masses anymore. But look deep into his plays and you will see genius – universal truths and eternal questions wrapped up in exquisite humor and tragedy. Some things stay classics forever. Especially things like Hamlet, or Othello, or Romeo and Juliet. Or Jaws or E.T., or Raiders of the Lost Ark…

There’s one more story I picked up from the Globe Theatre tour about Shakespearian times around Southbank. But if you cringed at the levels-leaking-piss anecdote above, then please look away for the next three paragraphs…NOW!!!

Because our tour guide told us an even grosser story than that. About the guy with the worst job in London. Now many of you may think you have (or have had) the worst job in London ever. Not even close.

Because this poor guy - just a kid really - he had the topper. Or the stinker I guess.

OK, let me set the scene. Back when the Globe was in full swing, toilet options were limited, as I mentioned. In fact the best option was the Thames itself –natural plumbing you see. But because of the tides, it was difficult and inconvenient to walk right down to the edge and unzip. So a little wooden pier had been constructed from the muddy river bank to terminate over the water. Gentlemen, and ladies too, would walk to the end of the pier, and through a hole in the pier, empty their bladders or bowels. But what about toilet paper? No handy roll dispensers back then, you see. Well, this is where the guy with the worst job in London comes in. He sat on a plank just below the hole in the pier. He had a long stick with a big bit of cloth on the end that he periodically washed in the water running just below his feet. He would wait patiently for a visitor to his pier to do their business, and their business soon became his business, as it zoomed straight past his face. And – whenever his visitor above requested it and threw him a penny farthing, he got his long stick and cloth, shoved it up through the hole, and wiped their arse.

So there you go. Sorry, but I did warn you. But does he take the booby prize for job fulfillment, or what?


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OK, no more gross stuff, I promise, for a while, at least. Lemme see, what else does Southbank offer that doesn’t involve bodily functions…

OK, books! There is a massive secondhand bookstore along Southbank every Sunday, sheltered by a bridge – Hungerford Bridge. Right near here kids play on skateboards. Right near here, outside the Arts Centre, Hugh Grant stammered his way charmingly through that classic speech to Andie McDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral (“…and…well, um…in the words of David Cassidy…while he was still with the Partridge Family I believe…I think I love you…”).

Another movie reference a bit further along the south bank of the Thames: M16. Well, I’m sure this chunky new structure serves a lot more important purposes than providing establishing shots for Moneypenny’s office or Q’s laboratory in the James Bond movies, but I can’t think one. What’s more important: saving the world, or entertaining it? And who says they have to be mutually exclusive?

A look into more serious espionage was just one component of the massive, fascinating, sobering, Imperial War Museum, not far from Southbank. Now everyone that knows me knows that I’m a lover (at any opportunity), not a fighter. They know that if anyone if going to be leading a chorus of “War…hmmfff…What is it good for?…Absolutely nothing!!!...say it again…”, it’s me. I hate war. But that’s not a reason to shy away from the study of war, in fact it’s an excellent reason to embrace that history. Because only then can we truly appreciate the best and the worst that the human race is capable of.

And the best and the worst are well represented in the Imperial War Museum in London. You know, I’m often wary of National War Museums, often worried that they will celebrate the bloodletting of the country involved with unchecked patriotic fervour. But England’s war museum, despite its scary name, wasn’t like that. It presented a balanced and mostly impartial view of war through the ages.

It had everything, from original tanks and planes and submarines you could climb on, to modern art depicting the horrors of war. It had an espionage wing, a terrorism gallery, lifesize WW1 trenches and replicas of WW2 homes under fire. It had a wooden plane that British Prisoner’s of War had handmade (practically whittled!) in secret to fly off the top of a German concentration camp in the Austrian mountains. The museum had more fascinating history than I could appreciate in a week, let alone a few hours. Skimming the surface did it little justice, and yet I was emotionally exhausted after just doing that.

One gallery was probably to blame for the bulk of my emotional exhaustion, but I refused to skim this one, and lingered over each display, trying to take it all in. It was difficult. This was the Holocaust Exhibition, which was the most memorable part of the war museum, for me – for better or worse. Quite rightly, the Holocaust Gallery did not allow children inside. It was very moving. Schindler’s List is a very powerful and illuminating movie, but that single story (which basically has one of the few “happier” endings from that time) gives no real concept of the scale of the genocide that the Nazi’s fostered and festered across Europe. The exhibition here did just that, starting with the rise of Nazism, and the way it used people’s fears and doubts to create prejudice and hatred. Later parts of the exhibition – such as an Auschwitz model, pictures of the mass graves of the Jews and descriptions of their murders – were very shocking, often nauseating. However, this earlier section – about the way the free world allowed the rise of this New World order, only reacting when it was way too late to save millions of people…this stuff seemed the most prescient, the most relevant, to me and to the world today. It was a warning which terrified me, humbled me, and opened my eyes to the possibilities of the human race. And I think everyone on Earth should visit that Holocaust Exhibition, or one like it. I think we all should be reminded what we, the human race, are capable of, at our darkest. I think we should never forget.

Obviously the Holocaust Exhibition was the gallery which featured the worst that mankind is capable of. So where was “the best” that I mentioned earlier? How could “the best” be present in a war museum. Well, the best was everywhere too.

The best showed the genius, the creativity, the organisation, the unity, and the determination that man is capable of when his home and his freedom are threatened, and he is forced to rise up and defend it. The pressure of losing your home, your family, your life obviously brings out the best in many, many people. But the best of the best, were those people whose own homes and families were not at immediate risk, yet who still risked everything themselves to save and defend the lives of others.

The best of the best was humanity. The history of war is dripping with it.

The Imperial War Museum may have been sobering, but it was also truly inspiring. It might not have had the trendiness and the crowds and the possibilities for interpretation and imagination that the Tate Modern had, but when it came to examining the extremes of the human condition, the War Museum won hands down.


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But…enough about the human condition. Let’s talk about something a little less complicated, a little more fun. Let’s talk about the animal condition. Let’s talk about the London Zoo.

Let me specify something up front here: Frances loves animals, I mean really loves them – especially if they are of the cuddly or vulnerable variety. And being Frances’ partner meant having being prepared to love animals too. Luckily, being an animal lover from way-back, I fitted in well. We were on a perpetual quest to connect with every animal in Britain. I took the photos while Frances supplied the “oohs” and the “ahhs” and the cuddles.

At the London Zoo there were no cuddles available, but there were plenty of “oohs” and “ahhs” forthcoming. There were all the usual suspects – giraffes, elephants, lions, but Frances favourites were the “ickle” little otters – we watched them chase one another all around their enclosure, up and down the waterslides and waterfalls, it seemed that no other animal had as much pure and simple fun as the otter. All they needed was a few buddies to hang with and a bit of food and water…loving it! Animals seem pretty smart sometimes. They can teach us silly humans a lot.

One smart – yet unhappy – animal at the London Zoo was the beautiful Bengal Tiger – the biggest pussycat in the world. This guy we saw was magnificent, his fantastic muscles rippling under his beautiful dappled coat as he paced his cage. And here’s the conundrum with zoos, which I love and I hate. On the one hand – Zoos = good = education, conservation, ultimately happier animals. On the other hand – Zoos = bad = cages, unnatural, immediately sad animals. I don’t think the end justifies the means. But I guess that makes me a hypocrite, cause I usually love watching animals up close in zoos.

However, on this particular day, I wasn’t too happy to be watching this poor Bengal tiger. He just paced relentlessly along the front glass wall of his enclosure, less than a metre away from his fans, staring impassively at all these people like he way perusing a menu. So yeah, his face was impassive, but he just didn’t seem happy. His pacing was manic, repetitive, unnaturally forced, very uncomfortable. He was – no pun intended – extremely cagey. Poor guy. It just hit home what was wrong with this set up. Tigers aren’t meant to be caged. They need to roam, to hunt, to be free. A cage only a dozen square meters might contain the tiger’s body but doesn’t really contain his spirit.

This tiger was probably fed more than enough raw meat everyday, but it could not quell his need to hunt. We watched him stalk and hunt and launch himself at a stray pigeon that has somehow become trapped in his cage. It reminded me of Sam Neill’s speech about the Tyrannosaur in Jurassic Park: “T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed! He wants to hunt. You can’t just suppress 65 million years of gut instinct.” The movie – just in case there is one person in the world who hasn’t seen it - is about the arrogance of man thinking he can tame and control nature, and what happens when that arrogance comes undone.

This point was hammered home when we came back later to revisit the tiger. The pigeon was lying dead on the ground, ignored. The tiger wasn’t hungry. He just wanted, needed to hunt. And he continued with his manic, unsettled pacing, staring out through the glass at the humans. It just didn’t feel right…

On the way out of the zoo was the chimpanzee enclosure. Their misery was even more obvious than the tiger’s, they were just lying around, motionless, unmotivated. I had to laugh though, when a large chimp near the edge of the cage – female I think - stuck her finger fully into a lower body orifice, then removed it, raised it up to her face, and had a nice long sniff. Despite the gawking zoo-goers, she has absolutely no sense of self-consciousness or embarrassment. Like I said, animals seem pretty smart sometimes. They can teach us silly humans a lot.

Which reminds me of some anthropomorphising I saw on stage in London in 2002. The Lion King is a stage show that I‘d seen on Broadway in New York, for it’s inaugural season back in 1998. And it’s one of my all time favourites. I can’t say the Disney cartoon film it’s based on is as close to my heart as Toy Story or Aladdin – from a story perspective that is. I mean, all the animal bowing and scraping before the king in the opening scene is a dictator’s – or at the very least a monarchist’s – metaphoric wet dream. I loved the animation in that scene but hated the idea behind it. Even worse is the main theme of the story – that Simba has no choices whatsoever about his destiny – he has the birthright to be king, so he will be king. He is not entitled to have “no worries”, because it’s not in the stars, not in his blood. I’m sure poor Prince Charles can sympathise with him.

But anyway, forget all that. Forget the story, because the animation and the characters and the humour and the song Hakuna Mattada all made The Lion King movie special for me. But once I saw the stage show, I could never go back to the movie. That’s why I saw it for a second time four years later on the London West End with four Farbridge women (Frances, Katie, Lesley and Grandma Ruth). Despite my hot dates that evening, I can’t say the show had the same effect the second time around. I still loved it, a lot, but the shock value of my initial experience wasn’t there. My first time - my jaw dropped and my eyes welled with tears. And no I’m not talking about sex (for once), I’m talking about The Lion King. I’m talking about the realisation hitting me – the wonder and the awe washing over me – at the exquisite creativity I saw on stage. I saw this culmination of the best creative collaboration in theatre – design meeting costume meeting performance. I appreciated this artistry just as much the second time – the way the costumes are designed and moulded to the performers in a way which highlights the animal’s nature and look without disguising the performance within – or sometimes without. The staging took my breath away too – perfectly simple yet incredibly evocative and all African. I could just sit back, ignore the parts of the story that made me cringe, and soak up the visual perfection of this marvelous menagerie. Hakuna Mattada!!! (It means no worries…).

More animals - of a non-dancing but sort-of-singing variety - also featured on a trip Frances and I made to Kew to check out the Royal Botanic Gardens. It was here, alongside a stunningly beautiful lake, that we were assaulted by a gaggle of friendly geese after Frances decided to share our lunch with them. While I love animals, I’m not so big on birds, especially big birds stealing my food, so I headed off with my fancy camera to photograph a fraction of the 300-acre site, leaving Frances to play with the geese. Two hours, five camera rolls, and 50,000 species of outstanding flora later, I staggered back to the lake to find Frances has awoken from a nap to enjoy a lakeside spliff as she watched the sun setting. A dose of fairy floss (they call it “candy floss”) boosted Frances’ energy levels and silliness quotient, and I spent the rest of the afternoon chasing her around the gardens snapping lots of funny-facial-Frances-photos, with the exquisite bonus of the immaculate floral gardens in the background. I’m even less big on plants and flowers than I am on birds, so I can’t tell you what even one example of the many species in the gardens was called. The only way I can think to describe the place is…well imagine a rainbow sculptured by a magician in an enchanted land, and then…nah...I can’t do it justice. Just check it out if you get the chance.

The gardens of Hampton Court Palace, not far away from Kew, are actually more impressively manicured and styled than those in the Botanical Gardens. The palace itself, on the bank of the Thames, is a glorious hotchpotch of random architectural styles and regal history. Henry VIII saw some action in here, but then, where didn’t the Big Fella see action?

On a glorious sunny day, it was tough to stay inside the palace and bypass the awesome lawns and sculptured trees and floral extravaganzas outside. I loved the hedgework maze too, but I was disappointed it wasn’t vaster, and I was so annoyed that I found the exit within five minutes that I went round again, this time getting lost for ages.

Hampton Court – both the Palace and gardens - seemed to me like a small scale, much humbler version of the Palace of Versailles outside Paris (which Frances and I visited in 2001). Of course if you’d never been to Versailles you might say there is nothing small scale about Hampton Court, but it was tough for me not to compare. And for royal hangouts from those lavish, decadent times, I’ve never seen anything comparable to Versailles. Those French. They certainly do have style, if not restraint.

But, I’m not taking about the French, I’m talking about London.

But what more can I say? I’ve waffled on for pages and ages about my excursions in 2002, waffled on about art galleries and museums and bridges and ferris wheels and theatres and zoos and gardens and palaces…

I guess I should stop. There’s just so much. There’s so much I’ve done and so much I’ll never get a chance to do. You know, after three years of living in London, I still haven’t been inside Westminster Abbey. Shameful. One day. But…who cares if I miss out? I’ve had a pretty good run. I’ve tasted a few flavours of this wild and crazy place. And sometimes the best flavours aren’t the big neapolitan ones, they’re not the visits to the major galleries and museums and tourist traps. Sometimes the yummiest flavours are more obscure, like macadamia mint. Sometimes those flavours are the little things.

Because for a local like me, London is not really the guide book. It’s the little memories that make it.

Like wandering randomly through Westminster and just happening upon that perpetually turning grey sign that reads “New Scotland Yard” – which I remember so fondly from all those cheesy ‘80’s cop dramas.

Or walking up The Strand past an outdoor ice-skating rink at Somerset House, packed with happy kids.

Or watching Frances sip Starbucks’ coffee every Sunday morning like it was an orgasmic delight.

Or Frances convincing me to hang-the-expense (one of her favourite philosophies) and buy a gorgeous suede coat in a London tailor.

Or visiting the northern district of Golders Green and feeling like I’d wandered onto the set of Fiddler on the Roof or Yentl – more little yarmulka hats and curly peyot sideburns than you could poke the Koran at – it is heavily populated, obviously, with Jewish immigrants.

Or Frances and AJ calling me separately but within seconds of each other to tell me that they have seen a pissed, stoned guy dancing precariously on top of the Eros Statue – which rests right the middle of Piccadilly Circus.

Or visiting Frances at her work (a PR company almost in the middle of Piccadilly Circus), and finding a life size cow in the middle of the staff room.

Or getting free gourmet meals while visiting AJ at his work - while getting in free to boat shows, horse shows, travel shows, gaming shows…at this last one I watched AJ (supposedly working) get his head photographed and superimposed onto postcards featuring the bodies of babies, tribesmen, tribeswomen…the guy is insane!

Or wandering through Leicester Square and seeing the ubiquitous star-studded movie premieres – one fairly chilly night I was strolling through and spied a dozen high-heeled, majorly-sexy, oiled-up babes on a red carpet each wearing less material over their entire bodies than a normal sized handkerchief – this was the dignified Ali G movie premiere.

Or maybe even just a memory like Frances phoning me from Kings Cross train station - on one of the few evenings I didn’t accompany her back to Meldreth for a weekend – to tell me that she had just seen them filming a scene from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets…doh…!!!

That’s London I guess.

Sometimes you’re in the right spot. Sometimes you’re not. But if you’re not, you can be pretty sure you will be soon…


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Domestic Bliss


Domestically, in our home life in London in early 2002, Frances and I found that, often, unfortunately, we were not in the right spot.

And unless you make ten times my salary and can afford a massive penthouse apartment in Chelsea, then it is pretty difficult to find the right spot.

Under the circumstances, we were pretty lucky. For some true nightmare-London-accommodation-stories, see my earlier reports. Compared to previous years, 2002 London home life was bliss. For me anyway – but poor Frances didn’t draw the best hand.

In 2001, Frances and I moved in with some old friends of hers - Ellie and Dave - in an area called Chiswick, into a lovely little flat. When Frances and I first got together and she introduced Ellie to me as her “best friend”, I kept a straight face, but was a little bemused. Because they are complete opposites. I don’t mean physically, because they are both gorgeous-looking. I mean in character and personality. Frances is the nicest person you will ever meet. (OK, I’m biased, but it’s all true). She is instantly open and friendly and welcoming to all, charming and interesting and very easy to talk to.

Ellie, on the other hand, makes the Wicked Witch of the West look like a big-nosed girl guide at the wrong time of the month. A smile from Ellie is about as rare as a total eclipse of the sun, and even more newsworthy.

OK, I’m exaggerating. A smidgen. Seriously, she is a total cow. She didn’t converse with you. She didn’t chat. She sneered. I was totally perplexed by how this character had come to be bestowed such an honourary title as Frances’ best friend. But I slowly worked it out. They were close friends in their teens. Then apparently Ellie decided she was too good for Frances one day and cut off contact without a word. Frances was devastated. Several years later, after meeting up, Frances was determined to mend bridges and repair the friendship. I think she was holding onto the past and saw it as a challenge. It turned out to be a mistake.

You see – Frances is a goddess. She is very considerate and loving to helpless creatures, and loves caring for them (just look at her boyfriend!). She is very kind and compassionate. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. I mean it. Literally, Frances wouldn’t hurt a fly. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called in on insect rescue and removal duties. She’s a sweetheart. Not a nasty bone in her body. And I think Frances’ compassionate side thought she could “care” Ellie back into normalcy. Big Mistake!!!

It turns out all of Frances family saw the same side of Ellie that I did – from way back. I mean, I have never heard any of them say a nasty word about anyone – it's just not the sort of people they are. But when Ellie’s name came up...hmm…I think one of Robin’s favourite ways of referring to her was “that rat-faced cretin”…

Am I painting a picture here, huh?

OK.

So against all parental and sisterly advice, Frances moves in with Ellie. I move in for a while too – short term only, a few months, but as a full rent and bill payer. Initially, I make a huge effort to defrost Ellie. I guess I am pretty arrogant about my ability to charm people, given enough time. I figure, there has to be a soft spot somewhere. I work it slowly, gently, for months. But the iceberg doesn’t even begin to melt. So eventually, I give up for myself. But I still keep trying for sweet Frances’ sake, who is valiantly plugging away as much as she can.

She assures me countless times – “You know, Ellie really lightens up when she’s drunk. She evens chats a bit”. Unfortunately, Ellie does not develop a severe drinking problem while we live with her.

So we found the going tough, to say the least. Actually Frances found it a lot more frustrating than me – because I basically can take a fair bit of offensive treatment with barely a shrug, whereas sweet Frances was a lot more indignant and rattled by Ellie’s behaviour.

So where was Ellie’s partner David during all this? Well, the poor bloke was really struggling. David is an amiable, friendly, accommodating bloke, always up for a chat and a laugh. Frances actually found him a little too garrulous – and it’s true, David was often so desperate for attention that he would never let us relax, and would find if necessary to expose his opinion at length – on everything. Watching a movie with him was like getting an extra DVD special feature. Forget commentary by Steven Spielberg, Director. We got commentary by David Hipkin, World Expert.

But I felt truly sorry for the guy. I think his overwhelming need for validation was related to the pitiful treatment Ellie doled out on him. The more she sneered down her nose up at him, the harder he panted around her feet like a puppy dog, so eager to please her, he was.

Truly a match made in hell.

One of the most frustrating thing about living with Ellie and Dave was that they never went out. I mean, that’s their right of course, but geez…I mean these are two trendy Londonites in their twenties – and they were home almost every Friday and Saturday night.

We invariably would come home early, late - or anytime! - on the weekend to discover Ellie curled up on the couch, huddled under her protective duvet, with David serving her cups of tea or red wine like an over-solicitous waiter. It became so bad that Frances actually started to feel like an unwelcome intruder in her own house.

Which was a shame, because the house was great. Cosy and comfy – and very welcoming on the rare weekends we were alone there. We would take advantage of these Ellie-and-Dave-less weekend moments, and truly, truly appreciate them.

At these rare times we occasionally would hire videos we could watch without David’s constant parroting or Ellie’s frosty disapproval. But mostly we loved the fact that we could give the box a rest for a change. We would put chillout music on. We would savor Frances’ wonderful home cooked meals. We would sit on large cushions on the floor and enjoy dinner and conversation by candlelight.

And sometimes – taking our lives into our own hands – we would sneak onto Ellie’s sacred spot on the couch and snuggle under Ellie’s sacred doona.

Most Saturday nights of course Ellie and Dave were home and curled up on that couch. And a TV show they watched religiously - while also constantly disparagingly it – was called Pop Idol. Pop Idol was like a star search type show, but one which showed the complete process of whittling the pubescent contestants down from hundreds of unknown auditioners to the lucky winner, often done by audience phone vote polls. The early shows were the funniest because of the outrageously wide spectrum of untalented – but fascinating – contestants. The only real attraction of the later shows was the slandering doled out by the four judges – ironically all frustrated, bitter people who had failed as performers themselves, but who had excelled in auxiliary fields like producing. The judges dropped the axe on the brave kids with harsh, cruel, bitter advice – but it was difficult to feel sorry for the kids because an “anything-to-be-famous” philosophy seeped out of their every pore, it seemed.

Ellie and Dave were transfixed by the show, and given the media saturation across England on Pop Idol, it was difficult for Frances and I not to be swept up in the fever as well. The grand final came down to a stand off between two squeaky clean boys, both with great voices and hints of something approaching charisma. Gareth Gates was the audience favourite because he stuttered uncontrollably and charmingly when he was nervous. Although some cynics implied with a wink the stuttering was very controlled and calculating. He was a classic baby faced pin-up boy that all the little girls loved. His rival for the Pop Idol crown was Will Young, who had a slightly more unconventional look, including a freakish smile so wide it met around the back of his head like the Joker from Batman. Will’s unusual vocal range gave him a slight edge on the seemingly invincible born-to-be-a-poster-boy Gareth, and Will won the competition, with the largest ever phone-in vote in the history of phone-in votes. A month later, the requisite single from Will was released - mass-produced, mass-marketed, and massively bought (because the papers said everyone else was going to buy it). The single was listened to once or twice by the country then thrown away. Shortly after this, Will, sick of the intense media scrutiny, came out and announced he was gay. His promoters hung their heads in fiscal grief and wished they could have rigged the phone vote in favour of the clean-cut Gareth. Will Young is now “Will who?”. But Gareth probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer. The whole phenomenon was an exercise in marketing, which had very little to do with talent or hard work. But despite all this, I would bet that as I write this now, the second series of Pop Idol is now running strong, and Ellie and Dave and millions more are curled up on their couches rooting for pre-packaged faces and voices whose names will mean nothing to them in a year or so. And why not?

Anyway back to evil Ellie. Incidentally, her real name is Lesley Pugsley, which probably explains a lot. A name like that must leave deep scars. And Ellie seemed determined to share those scars with us. For example, one night when I was still a full rent payer I had a small dinner party, with three friends over. David was very friendly and welcoming, whereas Ellie left us all in no doubt of her disapproval by turning her nose up in the air, ignoring us all, then leaving the room without a word. The girl was almost a sitcom caricature – if I hadn’t lived with her I never would have believed it.

I moved out officially in November ‘01, but through early 2002, I still spent at least four nights a week over there, especially on weekends. This was because – despite the ice queen – Frances’ place was a lot more comfortable than mine, especially in light of the fact that at Frances’ flat, we didn’t need to share a bedroom with AJ.

Unfortunately, after I stopped paying rent, Ellie upped the ante on rudeness. It bounced off my thick skin as usual, but poor Frances found it completely unbearable and was in left in tears many times by Ellie’s snide comments and perpetual stench of ill feeling. Eventually, after Ellie made a particularly scathing comment to Frances about my frequency of visits – “doesn’t David like his own place?”, Frances could tolerate no more and moved out one morning without telling Ellie and David. Frances paid all bills and rent for the next two months of the lease when she wasn’t even to be there, so we were surprised when her move still left Ellie unhappy. Poor David was just bamboozled, but the Ruling Domestic Witch of London went in to a rage, leaving abusive messages on Frances’ phone saying that she hoped Frances and I would “rot in hell”. I guess when you are told to rot in hell from a person like Ellie though, it is almost encouraging, when you think about it. It means you must be doing something right.

After Frances left her domestic nightmare, she split her evenings over the next few months between her family home in Meldreth, Katie’s place on London’s outskirts, and my humble abode in West Kensington, an arrangement which certainly worked for me. In fact between January and April I think Frances and I probably averaged no more than one night a week apart.

And, given the state of my own domestic situation, this is probably yet another testimony to the tolerance and understanding that Frances Farbridge is capable of.


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My address for six months was a basement flat in West Kensington. I lived near the place that Renton shacked up at in Trainspotting, but the area was much nicer than that might suggest. In was very inner city, filled with restaurants, cafes, shops, cinemas. It was convenient to transport, and, best of all for me, convenient to work, only a two minute walk. Best of all for AJ though, it was convenient to a pub, only a one minute walk.

On Talgarth Road, opposite Renton’s unit block, was a share price board which also showed the time and the temperature. I never saw it drop into the negative, but it certainly read a chilly 1 degree once or twice.

But our flat itself was very warm. We lived in the central heated basement flat of an old converted Victorian 4-storey terrace house, which – from the outside - looked just like every other Victorian 4-storey terrace house in the street.

Our flat was great, very cosy and very comfortable. It was perfect for two people, but maybe a little too social for the four of us on the lease. But compared to the domestic insanity of Leigh Gardens (where up to ten people lived at a time), it was peaceful and idyllic.

AJ and I shared a smallish room leading out to the extremely seasonal backyard. One of the boys in the larger bedroom was Adam, a top young Aussie bloke from Perth whose interests were simple – army stuff, boat stuff, beer, sport and Rodney Rude. Adam and AJ bonded quite well over these last three.

Adam initially shared his room with Emmit, a huge, dumb Irish thug who used to either bring home random women or bloody scars on his face from fights. I’m glad to report he never bought home both simultaneously! When he brought home the former, poor Adam used to have to sleep out on the couch.

Thankfully Emmit only lasted a month, because – this being his first domestic experience away from Mummy – he couldn’t really get the concept of “rent” into his thick skull. He took offence at our landlord yelling about him and left in a huff – and the rest of us breathed a massive sigh of relief.

Before he left though, he and I watched about half of I Know What You Did Last Summer one night on tele. I’d never seen the movie, and love a good slasher flick – and while I don’t know if this one qualifies as “good”, it certainly has its moments, and not just those from Jennifer Love-Hewitt’s cleavage. But I was actually getting more entertainment out of watching Emmit. Because whenever a mildly suspenseful or vaguely scary bit came on, Emmit – this huge, burly, bar- fighting thug, remember - would curl up in his seat and put his hands over his face, simpering “I can’t watch!!! I can’t watch!!!”.

I guess Emmit had a thing about scary movies. Just imagine the brutal “Jake the Muss” from Once Were Warriors running terrified through the streets at the sight of some kids dressed for Halloween. That’s how amusing Emmit was.

Alas, the poor guy moved out. We knew his replacement couldn’t be any worse. We were wrong.

Emmit was replaced by Kim, Adam’s ex-girlfriend from Perth. If you look up “took advantage of” in the dictionary, there’s a picture of Kim. The girl was a master of that expression. You see, Kim did not move in to our flat in an official capacity of new flatmate/rent payer. Kim moved in to our flat in the capacity of “friend of flatmate who is going to doss for a few days/weeks till she gets herself sorted”.

Three months later, Kim was still there.

AJ and I were pretty understanding for the first month or so, but after three months, we were pulling our hair out -not to mention the predicament of poor Mansuer – the official new flatmate/rent payer who soon moved into Adam’s room only to find he was sharing it with not one but two people.

Kim was perhaps the worst person I’ve ever shared a house with. I mean, at least Ellie’s evil was apparent, honest, in your face, like Darth Vader’s. Kim, perversely, pretended everything was fine, putting on a bright and happy face and acting like our best friend while taking advantage of Adam’s hospitality and AJ, Mansuer, and my good natures. Another term for good natured is unassertive.

But – for awhile at least – we continued to be polite and civil to the infestation that had moulded itself to the couch in the best TV viewing spot. But Kim was the sort of person where the simple question “How was your day?”, was fraught with danger. Asking her that was like stepping into a conversational minefield – you never knew if you’d survive or where the talk would leave you. Because asking an question of Kim like that left it wide open. One day she responded with all manner of gibberish, not taking a break (or a breath, it seemed!) for twenty minutes. At the end I found myself in bombarded shock, eyes glazed over, looking at photos of her dog on Christmas day back in Australia. I hadn’t said a word since “How was your day?”

I only ever said “Hi” to her after that, but AJ was either much nicer a guy, or just too slow on the uptake. When we entered the house together, I would say “Hi Kim” and quickly dive for the safety of my room, whereas AJ, a braver soul than I would always breach the open question and inquire as to Kim’s day. I would spend the next half an hour relaxing in bed and giggling at his misfortune as I listened to Kim’s inane chatter on the other side of our door. Eventually poor AJ he would stumble in our bedroom - sweating, head spinning, eyes unfocused – looking like he’s just run the gauntlet of a D-Day landing at Omaha Beach.

It was her or us. Kim had to go.

We spoke to Adam several times about the length of Kim’s stay, and he just looked at us blankly, said “OK, not a problem”, then went and seemingly told Kim she could stay as long as she liked. It was a bizarre situation.

Eventually Kim left – in her own time. She left without a “thank you”, or even a token contribution to the rent. During her stay, Kim and Adam had somewhat re-kindled there relationship, but I cynically though it was more out of convenience than love on her part. Shortly after she left she dumped Adam, and he spiraled around in suicidal depression for awhile. Mansuer found him lying face down on the bedroom floor once, repeatedly whacking his forehead full force into the floor. The poor bloke was bled dry and used up even more than the rest of us.

Blood sucking leeches like Kim are common in London – all round the world I guess - but I have met a lot in London, mostly at Leigh Gardens. They move into places and eat the food and enjoy the comfort and suck all the marrow out of the residents’ goodwill until…they leave and move onto the next place. That they do this doesn’t surprise me that much. What baffles me is how they manage to keep a straight face when they do it.

Mansuer – our official replacement for Emmit – was – apart from his perpetual spot in front of the TV – the complete opposite of Kim, thankfully. He was softly-spoken and, while never rude, quite difficult to engage in extended conversation. He paid his rent on time, and was always quick and generous when contributing to bills. He looked like Will Smith. He was a really nice guy. More importantly, he arrived with a big screen TV!

Mansuer was a bit of a mystery man though. He worked long hours with AJ in hospitality but he always seemed to have lot more money than his career indicated. He had lots of designer clothes and executive toys. He bought the aforementioned big screen TV without blinking. He bought lots of pirate videos of movies that were still on at the cinema. AJ suspected initially he was a drug dealer, but I think he was too quiet and introverted for that. And why share a bedroom with a stranger if he had so much money?

And we never really worked out where Mansuer was from. Initially AJ told me he was a Swedish-Ethiopian blend (sounds like an exotic coffee doesn’t it?), but it turned out he had only studied for a few years in Sweden. And I’m not sure about the Ethiopian thing either – his origin was vague and seemed to change every time he was asked. I think Mauritius was mentioned a few times. Maybe even he had forgotten where he was from – he smoked so much pot I would not have been surprised.

Yes, Mansuer did like his ganga. It was a rare night that we would not find Mansuer on the couch, his long legs curled under him African style, watching TV and puffing away for hours on end. He was often up there till the early hours of the morning. He didn’t drink – for religious reasons – but boy did he make up for that with another addiction.

While not much of a party-goer, Mansuer did have a best mate – a very friendly older bloke called Abraham. However, it was ages before we could understand his name when he pronounced it with his strong Arabic accent, so AJ christened him “Bupta”. Bupta was the virtual opposite of Mansuer – he used to visit in tracksuit pants and business shoes – no designer style for him. But Bupta drove a Porsche!!! Very surreal. No wonder AJ hypothesised a drug network connection. But these two boys seemed the definition of laid back, just chilling out on the couches, smoking copious amounts of grass, and watching home-made belly-dancing videos from their home country – wherever that might have been.

Mansuer also showed us another video one night – of his wedding. That’s right, he was married. Apparently his wife was back in their home country waiting for the thumbs up to come over. It was all very vague and mysterious. That’s until Frances and Katie got involved of course. Because whereas AJ, Adam and I treated Mansuer with a sort of friendly yet blokey distance, never asking a question more personal than the footy score, Frances and Katie had no such inhibitions and got right in there. To us guys Mansuer had always seemed shy and reserved, always friendly but unwilling to chat too much about himself. But to the girls, it was a different story. Maybe it was the shine he took to the Farbridge sisters – it’s pretty hard not to. Maybe it was their feminine charm. All I know is that within twenty minutes of chatting, Frances and Katie had found out more about the mystery man than us guys have determined in a month. Before the night was through he was happily showing them his wedding photos and video. What an interesting character.

Ah, flat sharing and the people you meet. You gotta love it.

As for room sharing though, I’m not so sure…

For those of you that haven’t lived or traveled through London, yes, the concept of non-coupled adults sharing a room was alien to me too when I first arrived there. Unfortunately for many of us needing to save money, it was a perpetual reality. It had its good points – it felt like those sleepovers you used to have at friends places when you were a kid. I used to love chatting with AJ about his crazy days and most recent female obsessions before going to sleep. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t have taken a room of my own in a second if I’d had the cash. Especially on nights when Frances stayed over. And especially on nights when I lost my earplugs.

You see, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing it for yourself, AJ snores. I mean, a lot of guys (and a few gals too) snore. I snore. But AJ really snores. Try to imagine what it would sound like if a tidal wave crashed onto the side of Mount Krakatoa as it erupted. That is how AJ starts his snores, long before he builds up to his crescendo at about 3am.

Actually, after two or three years room sharing with AJ, I’ve learned to deal with it – with the help of Boots chemists and their earplugs. I always buy a reserve pair of earplugs though, in case the original set falls out during the night and escapes under my pillow. When sleeping in a room with AJ – be prepared!

Unfortunately for Claudia – an old friend of AJ’s who dossed in our room for awhile – she was unprepared. Claudia was – unlike Kim – a perfect dosser. She only stayed a week or two. She always expressed her appreciation. And she offered some money to help with the rent. She was a lovely girl, and – it not having escaped our notice – a gorgeous blonde Brazilian bombshell. Naturally enough, AJ found it extremely difficult to settle down and fall asleep the first few nights of Claudia’s stay. The sexual innuendo bounced off the walls like it hadn’t since the glory days of Brit and Trudy and Tamara’s dossing days.

But eventually, he fell asleep. And he snored. Claudia was in shock for awhile, I think she thought AJ was joking. I offered her my reserve pair of earplugs but she declined. I awoke a little later to find Claudia watching AJ in a panic. You see, AJ had worked his way through a few of his favourite renditions, and was doing one of his chart-toppers – a snortling, snuffling outtake followed by about 30 seconds of dead silence and then a quick restart intake. I was used to this track and wasn’t worried – in fact I had often used that 30 second respite to try and get to sleep. But Claudia was freaking out. She thought AJ was dying. She stared at him in panic for a few breaths until she could take it no more, and then shook him awake “AJ!!! AJ!!!, Are you OK???”. The more cynical among you might suggest the whole thing was just a ploy by AJ to get Claudia to touch him, but no, that’s AJ. That’s his snoring. That’s what I lived with.

Obviously neither Frances situation nor mine was ideal, but it worked out OK. After leaving Ellie and Dave, Frances spent most weeknights around at mine. Initially we cuddled up together in my single bed – until she found me late one night on sleeping on the couch, I’d unable to sleep in my cramped cot with her. She was mortified at the thought that her presence had driven me out of my own bed and demanded I return: “Come!!! Come now!!!” It was very cute and lovely. And how could I ever knock a sleep-ruffled Frances back? Back in bed with her, she whispered to me, “OK, we are going to try a relaxation technique that really works. OK, concentrate on you toenails and feel them slowing relaxing, slowly dropping off to sleep…OK…now concentrate on your toes themselves…” And so on. The relaxation technique certainly didn’t work for me that night, but I lay still and pretended it had until sweet Frances had fallen asleep herself.

Then I heard AJ softly chortling under his covers and I knew I should to prepare myself for some teasing from him about the relaxation technique the next day…

Another night I took myself out of the bedroom for a different reason. You see, AJ and I had this “odd couple” bickering thing down pat. (Or at least “old married couple”). Now, I love reading, and used to read by bed lamp almost every night before going to sleep. AJ had no problem with this, and could fall asleep with my light on no problem. On the other side of the coin was the TV. AJ liked to watch sport on TV before he went to sleep. No problem for me – except when I wanted to go to sleep. And I could not sleep with the TV volume on and insisted he turned it off. AJ refused, his argument was “Well, you leave your light on all the time when I want to sleep”. My well thought out rebuttal: “Aw, CRAP!!! It’s not the same thing!!! My light doesn’t come with sports commentary”. You see I didn’t object to the light from the TV screen, just the noise. Frances unfortunately, was sleeping soundly in my bed, oblivious to the TV and not providing much support for my argument.

After ten minutes of bickering, AJ refused to see reason, so I decided on the mature approach – sulking!!!! I grabbed a spare doona (“duvet”) and pillow and went and slept out on the hard cold floor of the hall. (The lounge room was not an option because Mansuer, shrouded in a cloud of smoke, was watching the soccer matches himself).

I was prepared to prove my point by sleeping the night away on that floor, but AJ relented after a few minutes and turned the TV off. He was far from apologetic though, I think his comment was, “There you go, it’s off. Are you happy now??? You big sook!!!”

Ah, yes…domestic bliss.

But truthfully, honestly, we were pretty lucky with the set up. AJ was the ideal roommate. Yes, he snored, yes he was as messy as hell, but overall he was very considerate and incredibly understanding about the frequency of Frances staying over. He scored pretty well from that deal though. As I have possibly mentioned, Frances is an exceptional cook, very creative and gifted in all manner of cuisine. She would invariably arrive for the evening with her arms full of shopping bags, ready to whip up an exquisite meal for whoever might be home that night. Mansuer and Adam as well gratefully benefited from Frances generosity and cooking skills. It was a very cosy set up and felt very familiar – in both senses of that word.

I think my favourite times in London from that period were in that flat. Whether it was a dinner party with all our best friends like Katie and Jane and Sam, or just a few of us chilling in front of silly TV shows, it was always relaxed, always a laugh. We had many nights like that.

One of the best was the night I got stoned. Now you all should know that while I have never let my disgust for cigarettes temper my friendships with those of you that smoke, I still despise cigarette smoking with a vengeance. So I guess it seems a little hypocritical that I enjoy the odd spliff or joint. And it probably is. But I believed those to be very different from cigarettes, and hash or weed was so prevalent and available in my life at that time, the odd puff never worried me – in fact it did quite the opposite. Anyway, what was I to do? Frances smoked a little bit several times a week. Her Mum enjoyed the odd toke or two. Even her Grandma’s eyes lit up whenever Frances bought the bag and rolling gear out – Frances often rolled a few for Grandma to take home!

Marijuana was so popular and common in London that in 2002 a law was introduced to make possession for one’s own use legal. The pleading of the police that they were fighting an impossible fight against the drug finally reached the government, and they reacted, freeing the police for more important duties.

Whatever the reasoning, their was never a lack of the popular relaxant in the basement flat of 69 Edith Road, West Kensington. But apart from Mansuer, we were all were all just casual smokers. In fact I was so bad at toking on a spliff that my repeated coughing fits whenever I tried to take a decent drag provided much amusement for my friends. And, funnily enough, the more they’d smoked the more amusing they seemed to find me. One particular night I decided to learn how to smoke properly – not part of a career ambition you understand, just a challenge for that evening. Unfortunately my class – tutored by Frances, cheered on by AJ, Jane, Katie and Mansuer – continued well into the evening, so much so that the slightest variation from the perfect toke bought outrageous laughter from the crowd, who, need it be said, were providing me with plenty of examples of how do it right. The amusement reached a peak when I attempted something I’d watched with jealousy many times – breathing smoke through the nose. Eventually – with much coaching and even more destruction of brain cells - I achieved my aim amidst lots of cheering and laughing. Even the normally reserved Mansuer found it so hilarious he went and grabbed his tiny video recorder and taped the proceedings – right over the top of his wedding video. Some times are even more special than your own wedding I guess.

And those times were very special times. For me, that’s what London in 2002 was mostly about. Not about the house parties and clubs and museums and fancy restaurants…and certainly not about work. For me, 2002 in London was about those nights in our lounge room - eating, chatting, laughing. AJ making jokes and Jane laughing at them. Frances chasing me around trying to judo kick my bum. Katie slurping every last bit of sauce off her plate with her tongue.

And then our little slumber-party bedroom, with AJ, Frances and I throwing a ball back and forth between the three of us. Or Frances doing her flexible yoga moves on the floor, or posing for funny face photos, or presiding over AJ and my good natured bickering like a den mother. And then, best of all, cuddling up with Frances in my tiny single bed, where the best way to sleep was spoon style. Those were some of my happiest times in London. I will never forget them.


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The Shire


My happiest times in 2002 weren’t just at my West Kensington home though. My happiest times were those I spent with Frances. Some of these I spent with her in her flat in Chiswick, before Ellie drove her away. But many of them – particularly on weekends – were spent with her when I returned with Frances to her family home in Meldreth, up in Cambridgeshire.

I won’t go on too much about Meldreth again. I think it’s obvious from my 2001 epic and from my effuse comments in the Christmas section above that I love “The Village” like it is my second home. But…it’s great.

Where else in the world could I feel so at home watching a cat get totally psyched out by a fake fish mounted on a board but dancing around singing “don’t worry, be happy”?

Only in Meldreth. It’s a place where roast dinners, with lashing of gravy and veges from the garden, are the norm. It’s a place where you get served fresh, warm, homemade bread, and cold, tasty Holland-made beer. It’s a place where Mrs Meldreth (AJ’s nickname for Frances’ mum) dances around the kitchen to Queen songs, and falls asleep on the couch because she hates going to bed early when she gets the rare chance to sit up late with her “babies”. It’s a place where Mr Meldreth sits on his toilet reading thick historical tomes, and sits quietly in the corner of the lounge room with his newspaper during social gatherings and says things like, “No I’m fine back here, I will just sit and observe human behaviour”. It’s a place where little brother Miles dashes in and out with the frantic social calendar of an eighteen year old, and who we surprised once by returning early from one weekend away to find he was hosting a house party that Caligula would have been proud of – with evidence of teenage coupling in every bed and shower room.

It’s a place with warm fires and cosy couches and rumpled newspapers and contented cats. It’s place where Frances, my babe, my baby, called home. And it’s place that I was genuinely made to feel at home.

One weekend Frances returned to Meldreth without me. She was a little grumpy with me because I’d stayed behind to hunt out some prospective vans in London. But my search ended early that weekend and I hopped the hour long train into Meldreth, and knocked on the door to greet my baby. She was pleasantly surprised to see me but a little shocked at first. I was amazed when she said, “Oh, I must look a fright!” – she was actually worried about her disheveled hair and all-day pyjamas. I mean – (a) Frances always looked good, (b) I actually thought she looked better the more natural she appeared, and (c) After a year together, if I hadn’t see Frances at her worst, then I never would.

Frances and I enjoyed many a relaxing weekend away from London. Sometimes other friends would join us up at Meldreth, and Frances would organise her beloved board game competitions and then invariably get exasperated whenever newcomers would refuse to concentrate on the explanation of the rules (“Now it’s very important that you put the used cards in at the back – Mum!! Are you listening!!!”)

But usually Frances and I would escape to Meldreth together, just the two of us, and these weekends were my favourites. These days were spent with morning sleeps-ins and evening videos and afternoon walks through the village by myself, and more sleeping by Frances.

Sometimes we would test my fancy camera with long drives in Cambridgeshire or Suffolk, and sometimes we would visit animal parks and shelters to extend our quest to photograph or coo over every animal alive.

Frances took me to a “bunny refuge” once – only in England I thought. Little hutches containing every size, colour and breed of bunny you could imagine. Except of course for the dirty, skinny little creatures you see on Aussie roadsides, or worse, as Aussie roadkill. These guys all looked fat and exceedingly happy with their refuge. Frances “oohed” and “aahed” and spouted her adoring, adorable “Oh, look!” expression en masse.

Surprisingly, Frances didn’t come along one day when Katie introduced me – along with the sister of her ex-boyfriend and some of her friends - to Whipsnade Safari park, which unfortunately wasn’t like nearby Woven Safari Park, in that in Whipsnade, the animals were best appreciated by foot, not in a car. I abandoned the others shortly after I realised what sort of a visit they were going to have. Constant whingeing appeared to be the order of the day from Katie’s Aussie guests, and it was embarrassing. Here’s some examples: “Oh my God, I can’t believe it costs so much, this country is so expensive. Australia is so much better!”, or “We aren’t going to see animals in cages are we? I hate seeing animals in cages!”, or “I can’t believe we paid so much to get into this place, the animals are so sad”, or “There has to be more to it than this, with what we paid there has to be another park around here somewhere!” You get the idea. I couldn’t bare it. Sure, the place wasn’t perfect and I wouldn’t return in a hurry, but I was of the slightly more positive opinion that if we’d paid the money to get in, we should make the best of it. I really enjoyed walking around on my own and checking out the baby rhino and the huge brown bears having a wrestle-play and the penguins who had a panoramic view over an English country valley that I doubted any other penguin in the world enjoyed. The other Aussies present though, seemed determined not to enjoy the experience, and bitched their way through it. Although I guess – and like many, many tourists I’ve encountered – they enjoyed it in their own way – by coming up with various creative complaints and bitchy reasons not to enjoy it. Some people only seem to be happy if they aren’t happy.

The four of us – Frances, AJ, Jane and myself – who visited Shepreth Wildlife Park on another day were very happy – and amused. I was expecting this tiny place, just round the corner from Meldreth, to be filled with chickens and pigs. Instead it had much more exotic animals. It was like a local farmer had decided to fill his humble backyard with the most marvelous menagerie possible. Watching Frances at play in the park was like watching Dr Dolittle at his peak. She cooed at raccoons. She ahhed at llamas. She awwed at macaws. It was adorable.

The first animal we saw at the park was the arctic fox. Now any other representatives of this animal that I have seen on documentaries have been, lithe, nimble little creatures, darting back and forth across the arctic plain like Wile E. Coyote on steroids. But the guy we saw at Shepreth was so well loved and well fed his legs had disappeared into the fat below his body, he moved with the agility of Porky Pig after Christmas dinner, and…well, the best way to describe him is that if you shoved a stick up his ass he would have made a perfect toilet brush.

Near the arctic fox was a fenced area with a couple of gorgeous ponies – which took the bolt big time as soon as we approached them. We didn’t take that personally for long though, because we realised that right next door to the ponies’ field was the tiger enclosure. And one of these ferocious stripy pussies had started stalking the ponies, eyeing them up as he paced up and down the fence, saliva dripping off his fangs.

It seemed a little silly to fence the panicking ponies right next to tenacious tigers. I mean, imagine filling a windowed bar with virginal teen supermodels and dumping a pack of horny footy players outside and telling them no entry. But I guess it gave both parties a lot of excitement – and exercise.

The next animal of note was a monkey. I’m not sure what species, but he was average size, with a furry grey face framed in white. He was sitting on the far side of a pane of glass with a completely impassive look on his face watching the world go by. Jane and Frances went and checked him out and he stared blankly back. It was only when I approached that we realised the monkey’s body was not matching the disinterest on his face. His balls had swollen to huge proportions and turned the brightest shade of electric blue. In perfect colour contrast, his little red willy saluted us proudly.

The girls might have been used to the effect they had on the monkey’s libido (if not the colour scheme), but I was in awe of the little fella’. I’d heard of blue balls before but this was ridiculous.

No more genitalia surprises that day, but still lots of fun. We watched a zookeeper walk straight into a wolves' den and cuddle them bravely. We watched a raccoon act like it was a person and walk on its hind legs straight up to Frances and graciously accept the little tidbit snack she’d offered. And we watched a little chirruping gopher display more personality than even the movie Caddyshack had suggested was possible.

We left shortly after I squatted down and tried to take a photo of Frances hugging a goat – before promptly getting nervous at my proximity to the goats’ horns, losing my balance, and falling straight on my butt.

On the way out, I noticed something very incongruous in a wildlife zoo: a little stall selling specialty scented soaps. But after I thought about that – and about the number of strange animals Frances had patted, rubbed, fondled and hugged that day – it didn’t seem that weird at all.


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One rare expedition from Meldreth did not involve animals, but provided an interesting insight in the human species. I joined the Farbridge family one day when they when to visit Frances’ Grandmother. This is not the Grandma who smokes pot mind you, but rather Frances’ maternal Grandma, who is unfortunately rather infirm, and confined largely to a wheelchair within a nursing home. Also visiting Grandma that day was Hayley, Frances’ cousin, and Hayley’s adorable baby daughter Katie.

As the only non-family member present, I just sat back for our three hour visit and took in the proceedings, very subdued yet very fascinated. Because as I watched, I realised that two individuals were getting all the attention and interest – Grandma and Katie. And I realised that they – and by extension many elderly people and babies in this world – are treated in very similar ways by the rest of society, despite being from opposite ends of the age spectrum.

Both need a fair bit of care.

Both need help to survive.

Both need assistance to eat, to bathe, to dress.

Both are pampered and fussed over.

Both are talked about by others as if they are not there.

Both are talked to with a raised, slow voice, as if they are stupid.

Both are talked to in that sort of condescending tone, which infers that the speaker knows best.

Both have their destiny and choices taken largely out of their hands.

Yeah, it just kinda clicked for me, watching the interaction in that nursing home room that day. I’d never before realised that towards the end of your life, you pretty much end up the same way you start, drooling and helpless.

And it was a realisation that would hit home later in the year with a particularly savage impact.


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One of the last day trips Frances and I took from Meldreth through the shire was actually an overnight trip as well. I was conscious of the fact that Frances was becoming increasingly stressed about the nearing departure date for my Euro-trip, and also disappointed with the increasing amount of time I was spending away from her with trip organisation. So one weekend I booked a Bed and Breakfast so just the two of us could get away from it all, for a short time at least.

I hoped she would get a kick out of the place I chose – not so much for the B&B itself, but for the animals that were featured on the internet ad: donkeys, sheep and the all important pussy cat. Well the sheep turned out to be wild and were a little too shy for Frances’ taste, but she loved the donkeys. These two blokes were extremely sociable and friendly: so friendly in fact that I’ve got a photo of one of them with his face buried in Frances crotch.

The B&B itself however, was unfortunately, not quite so welcoming.

In fact, it was the very Scooby-Doo.

For starters, the B&B - called “The Old Rectory” - was situated right next to an old derelict church. Built over the B&B’s front fence was one of those authentic wooden beamed structures that the hangman used to hang his noose from. There was an abandoned old Austin Healy in the front yard, suggesting its owner had entered the mansion forty years ago and never returned. Also in the front yard, the wild sheep seemed possessed by a single mind, moving as one mass, turning their black heads and dark eyes towards us, no matter where we stood.

Inside it got worse. Quirky became spooky.

The proprietor greeted us at the door. He was old and dignified and amiable and welcoming. He was also completely blind.

We watched him sort out the register and the bill using Braille. In the nearby kitchen, a woman stirred broths and stews in a large number of pots. She seemed to be fully sighted but did not even look at us, apparently oblivious to our presence.

The manager led us through the B&B, through a serious of dark, dusty and draughty rooms. The main living room had a dead, empty fireplace. It had an antique couch with the stuffing falling out of it. On the couch was a scrawny old cat, squinting helplessly in our direction. The cat was blind too.

This was getting too weird.

I’ve never before seen Frances walk past a cat without picking it up and cuddling it, but she did it now.

We followed the proprietor through the mansion. There were lots of antique bookshelves and desks – and even more pianos. I counted at least nine grand pianos on the ground floor. Many of these were covered in ghostly white sheets.

As we ascended the large, creaky stairwell, I noticed the biblical mural on the surrounding walls. It was titled “City of the Dead”, and featured more death scenes than the Halloween movies, all fifteen of them. Frances must have been wondering what I’d been thinking bringing her to this place.

Our blind guide led us assuredly down winding passageways on the top floor. There seemed to be hallways that ended nowhere, and doors in the most unusual places. I envisaged secret passageways and hidden spy holes behind the scenes. We walked past a dusty bookshelf and Frances grabbed a paperback titled Bondage and showed it to me, eyebrows raised.

When we reached the room at the end of the hall – our room – it was like we’d run the gauntlet through a haunted house. But was it to our salvation, or our doom? Well, the room was OK. The bathroom was a little weird – painted entirely in bright red and illuminated by a red light bulb – it would not have looked out of place in a brothel. Maybe the blind guy had painted the walls and changed the bulb himself without any concept of the garish colour scheme.

But the bedroom was tidy and relatively cosy, even though the bed was a little soft. I scanned the walls for peep holes. I had melodramatic visions of the blind manager actually not being blind, and of him creeping around in the middle of the night, playing his pianos, spying at us through his secret passageways, plotting our demise. The “romantic” getaway I’d envisaged was looking less romantic by the second. It seemed less a matter of romance, and more a matter of survival. When we looked out the bedroom window and saw our view, we decided to pass on the “breakfast” part of Bed and Breakfast the next morning and get out of there as soon as possible. Our window looked right out onto a cemetery.


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Psyching Up…


I have dreamed about traveling the world since…well, since I could dream. As I kid I used to pour through my Mum’s National Geographics – and no, it wasn’t just for the photos of topless African women. The pictures of incredible natural scenery and manmade wonders on the earth fascinated me, thrilled me, inspired me. I lapped all that stuff up. Sitting in school, or reading my parents books at home, I never dreamed that one day I actually might be in those places. They seemed as fantastic, as unbelievable, as impossible, as the alien vistas in my favourite movie, Star Wars – and just as far away, just as unattainable. I was drawn to places like the Roman Coliseum, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon. Ancient History and Geography were my favourite subjects at school, after English of course.

I don’t know why. Maybe it was because Brisbane – or my small sphere of it – was so small, and I’d exhausted everything it had to offer by the time I was ten. Maybe it was because my imagination, and my dreams, were a little more grandiose than most of the neighbourhood kids.

Maybe it was just the way I’ve always been. If I see a hill, I immediately want to climb to the top and see what’s on the other side.

People might tell me there’s just more of the same, more hills. That’s OK. I still wanna climb it. Sometimes the trip up the hill itself is more satisfying than the view from the top anyway.

That’s travel. And that’s me. That’s the way I’ve always been.

Oh, my itchy feet were manacled by childhood for awhile, and then by the confusion of adolescence when I dealt with the pressures of parental expectations, brand label clothing, and girls. But my passion was always there. My around Australia adventure with Stephen in 1990 was like a release value. My enthusiasm and energy of that trip were excessive. Stephen had the patience of a saint. I had the trip of a lifetime. I had found my muse. Since then, I’ve traveled. But it’s never been enough.

I’ve become fond of telling people that travel is my heroin. The more I do, the more I wanna do. It’s highly addictive. It can suck you up. It can make you lose all perspective. But unlike heroin, travel can also give you the best perspective of all.

When I die, I will die still wanting to go “somewhere”. That’s OK. I’d rather die with dreams than without them. I’ll never be bored. If I’m not traveling in my life, I’m always getting excited by thinking about “the next place”. And when I get to that “next place”, I will invariably meet lots of cool people that will tell me about “another place”. The more you travel, the more you want to travel. You might cross a few places off the top of you list, but visiting those places you’ll find out about a dozen other places which you add to the bottom of your list. Soon your list is running over the page.

This is all just the way I feel personally. Thankfully not everyone is infected with my wanderlust. Sometimes I think it’s a less a drug, like heroin, and more a disease. Something I can never shake. But that’s OK. I don’t really wanna shake it. That’s just me. Some people travel, or dream about it. The rest just sit on their arses and watch TV.

People don’t travel to see places like their own. They travel to see someplace different. People that live by the beach don’t often take holidays at the seaside. People that live in the mountains usually try to escape the high peaks on their breaks. Big city dwellers often want some space on their time off. Country folk get a kick outta visiting the big smoke.

Cause it’s all about “different”.

As Bill Murray says at the denoument of one of my favourite flicks, Groundhog Day: “It’s different. Anything different is good…”

And Europe – if not the cradle of mankind then certainly its playroom – is filled with “different”. More history than a million classes could cover in school. More geographical terrains than my teachers could probably pronounce. Dozens of different countries, regions, cultures, languages. All in this amazingly accessible, relatively small continent.

Europe was born to be traveled. Literally and metaphorically, of course. It is dripping with variety. A different town around each corner, possibly a different country. So much to experience, see, learn, laugh at, love. I was gagging to get there.

Traveling Europe had been a dream of mine for decades. In fact, it was the main reason I left Australia in 1998. Yes, I went to Summer Camp USA first and covered a big chunk of North America – but this was just a “why not, seemed like a good idea at the time” notion that I could accomplish enroute to Europe. And yes, I’d settled in London on and off for three years – but the whole idea behind this was to fund my European excursion - I wasn’t originally in London to live in London, just to bleed it dry and use it as a base for Europe (this all changed when I fell in love with (and in) London of course). Yes, I’d done a few trips through Africa and Asia, but again, these were spontaneous options that’s were too good to resist and had little to do with lifelong aspirations. Yes, in many ways I was more passionate about re-visiting Asia or exploring Africa or South America in depth, but those dreams didn’t have priority in 2002.

Europe did. Europe had priority.

When I left Australia in 98, I told my family and friends I was leaving to “travel Europe”. There was little mention of seeing America or settling in London. A Euro trip was it. The rest was incidental. Europe was the ultimate dream. I had a lot riding on this. I wanted to do it right. I wanted to do it soon. I wanted to make it happen.

So I did.

My first visit to Europe was with my buddy Brit in the Easter of 2000. We just went for a sunny beach-based getaway to Valencia off the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Brit will tell you how excitable I was, to lose my Euro-virginity. Gaping jaw at everything. The crumbling architecture, the exotic food, the gorgeous women. Loved it all.

Then in 2001, I returned to Europe twice with Frances, with romantic and very scenic excursions to Paris and Venice. Excitable is not the word. I was thrilled to the center of my being.

But these were just a few short trips. What I really wanted to do was an extended long term trip, getting a large chunk of Europe outta my system in one go. Based on my savings, my visa’s expiry date, and my decision to return to Oz with Frances in late 2002, this was the year. It was now or never. The time was right.

Two very important things to consider before I left though:

(1) How to travel
(2) Who to travel with

“How to travel” really only came down to two options: backpacking and getting trains, busses and footwear everywhere, or buying a van and traveling in that.

Extensive research ascertained that we could expect to spend roughly the same amount each way, with the van option possibly a bit cheaper. So here’s how I ultimately weighed up the advantages of each:

Backpacking/Train Advantages: Don’t deal with car problems, save on fuel and tolls, maybe meet more fellow travelers, closer contact with locals.

Van Advantages: Freedom to go wherever a car could, and lots of places a train or bus couldn’t, flexibility to choose times in each place and not be constrained by timetables, sleep and cook in van so save on hostel and food expenses, avoid meeting fellow travelers, reduced contact with locals.

There was never a doubt. It was a no-brainer. The van option was it.

The freedom of choice really sold it for me, the fact that we could go wherever, whenever we wanted with a van. I can – and have – willingly traveled by bus, train, whatever – but the possibilities of van travel thrilled me. I hadn’t traveled like this since AGY had shipped Stephen and I around Australia twelve years before. I loved the idea of just us, the vehicle, the open road, and a million glorious possibilities…

Get your motor running…

The choice of who to invite on my Euro trip was even more of a no-brainer.
I had talked about Europe and my travel dreams with AJ since I had met him. He had never had the same intensity of travel dreams (who has?) but he had always seemed keen to join me. We had often talked about touring Europe in a van – AJ was more than happy to come along. Like me, he had no sense of social shame and was up for anything. Unlike me, his sum total of knowledge of Europe was derived from watching National Lampoon’s European Vacation, so I knew that traveling with him would be a laugh riot. Being with AJ was usually a laugh riot. Traveling with him I expected to be nothing less – through our US trip AJ often had Adam and I on the floor in fits of hilarity with his unorthodox travel commentary. It usually ran along the lines of “Holy shit! Check that guy out? It looks like he’s eaten that baby…”. That was just an example of how he would start his routines. With AJ by my side as my co-pilot in Europe, I had no doubt there would be many tears of laughter spilled.

There would probably be other tears spilled as well, because after four years of on and off co-habiting and co-traveling, AJ and I were destined to go our separate ways. I was going to return to Australia to be with Frances and be closer to my Mum, and AJ…well, AJ never made plans, but his work visa had long expired so who knew where he’d end up? AJ seemed to think it would be always alongside me, but over the last year or two I’d noticed his growing dependency on me with some discomfort, and gradually tried to extricate myself. But very gradually, cause I loved AJ a load, and always would.

One of the sweetest things AJ ever said to me was just after I told him, “You know AJ, we won’t be able to share a bedroom together forever. One day hopefully we will both get married - not to each other you understand, to women - and have families and kids and houses of our own.”

AJ replied: “Yeah, yeah, I know that Big Fella’ but me and my family will be living across the street from you”

How sweet is that? Or maybe I should say: how bizarre?

I knew that after the van trip, that was pretty much it for AJ and I. We would be living in different cities after that, with a good chance that our paths might never cross again. So I wanted to go out in style. I mean - I knew, I hoped that we’d be friends forever - but this van trip was going to be the last time we’d actually spend significant time together. So it was going to be great. Charles and Grizzle on the road. The last hurrah. The road movie comedy that would put all road movies comedies to shame. Forget Chevy Chase and his retarded clan. Forget Midnight Run. Forget Dumb and Dumber. There would be more laughs and pathos and male bonding our trip than any of those.

That was my hope anyway.

As it turned out, that was an even bigger pipe dream than seeing Europe in five months.


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AJ was of course not the only travel partner I invited along. All my friends were welcome in fact. Jane and Sam had accepted for Iberian portions of our trip, which excited us no end.

And of course, I invited Frances. Frances planned to visit me at least once, maybe twice on my Euro trip before she left England and we had our rendezvous in Australia in October. We hoped she would meet me in Tuscany and maybe the South of France, depending on the timing. But why didn’t she come along for the whole five months?

Well, a few reasons. Firstly, Frances isn’t a big travel dreamer like me. She loves new places, but she could take them or leave them, particularly on a long term trip. Frances is more the sort of traveler who leaves her home for another place for a break, for relaxation, for a holiday. Not for an adventure. She certainly has a deep appreciation for the beauty of the world, but we both knew that on a long term trip with completely different routines each day, she would find it a struggle.

I was pretty certain that a van lifestyle was not for her. We’d sometimes be going a few days without a shower. Sleeping rough on the floor of the van or in a tent. Living very basically. Stuff which we knew Frances would welcome – even enjoy – on a short term basis. But for five months? We didn’t want to be too optimistic.

My first away-from-home experience with Frances was in early 2001, when thirteen of us stayed in one big dorm room in a Brighton hostel. Most of us were delighted with the sociable, slumber party setup, but Frances was less than impressed, chiding her sister, who has organized the room, “Katherine, this is intolerable! And there is not even a lock on the door!”

Frances loved her comforts and her privacies. I would have hated to have deprived her of those on a five month trip around Europe. I accepted that she preferred to travel a certain way. She accepted that for this trip, the only way I could travel was with minimal comforts. She also accepted that this was my dream, and resolved to never stand in my way. So she declined my invitation to come along, while at the same time providing me with more emotional and practical support than any other person did for the entire trip, including those people on it.

I was so grateful I promised her that after those five months had flown by, I was all hers, and I would settle with her wherever and whenever she chose.

It was not really a compromise. It just seemed like the best thing for both of us at the time…

…at the time…hmm…


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There were three components which my dream trip relied on, and in the months leading up to our departure, I concentrated much of my energies on each of them.

The first of these was AJ.

I met AJ at Summer Camp in the US is 1998. I convinced him to return in 1999. After both camp seasons we did a far bit of travelling together, through the States and Canada. As I said above, I found him a fantastic travel companion. While he had zero interest in planning or guide books, he always got a kick out of everywhere we visited, always finding new places worthy of hilarious AJ commentary or excitement. So while he happily passed the organisation and the planning and the decisions for our travels onto me, he still seemed to enjoy the process of travelling and new discovery.

But 2002 was a few years on, I realised, as we started talking about Europe. Things may have been different for AJ.

After our 1999 summer camp and travel stint, I convinced AJ – with lots of arm-twisting - into applying for his work visa and joining me in London. When he first arrived he was a very different person to the way he is now. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be there, he didn’t think he’s last a month without his Mum. Back then he was very shy. He could barely meet a pretty girl without stuttering and stammering and running away. On visits to the pub or a party he would often sit meekly in a corner.

Then, over time, things changed for AJ. He became much more confident, assertive, garrulous, flirtatious, and sociable. Something bought him out of his shell.

And that something was alcohol.

Now, I know it wasn’t just alcohol. I know it was also the intense proximity that London forces you to live and work alongside others, and the multiple opportunities for non-solitary leisure time. I know it was also the Buddy Love inside the old Sherman Klumpp of AJ itching to escape. But largely, it was booze. AJ worked in hospitality, at some very understanding venues. He invariably came home from work either tipsy, drunk, or comatose. When he wasn’t working, he spent a lot of times in pubs – or sometimes clubs, with variations of chemical addiction. It was tough to judge AJ’s drinking because he was such a good-natured drunk. He was flirtatious but funny, high-spirited but harmless.

And as well as booze, AJ had one other major addiction: his mobile phone. It was rare to see AJ in his waking hours without his phone right next to him. He was like a western gunslinger, always ready to draw whenever the phone beeped at him. He was constantly texting or calling various women. He loved the adrenalin rush of all the attention for immediacy that he’d created.

After alcohol and his phone, AJ’s addictions were comparatively minor – but still massive. These including television – specifically any sport and gross-out shows like Jackass, and newspapers, specifically anything with page three girls and with a quality of journalism comparable to a snigger behind the school toilets.

So you can see my worry. While AJ had loved travelling North America with me a few years before, he was a different person now. Less laidback, very hyper, and very caught up in the lifestyle of London that he’d built for himself. I was a little concerned that he might find it difficult to disassociate himself from London when we started traveling. I was very concerned that – despite his assurances otherwise - he seemed to have no interest in travelling Europe, leaving me alone to plan the trip, read the guide books, buy the van, organise everything, and get excited on behalf of both of us.

So I sat AJ down on a few times to try and work out if we were doing the right thing for both of us. On the last occasion, before we made the ultimate commitment to the trip, I knew we needed a serious talk. I mulled over my options for the best place to talk to AJ seriously. I tried to think of a place where AJ could relax which didn’t feature the distractions of alcohol or television. There aren’t many. I took him to McDonalds.

Over our Quarter-Pounders ™ I spelled out what a big deal the forthcoming trip was – at least to me.

“Now Charles, you know this trip is going to cost a lot of our time and a lot of our money?” (Charles was my nickname for him at the time).

‘Yeah, yeah Griz, I know that.” (Griz (or Grizzle) was one of his nicknames for me back then).

“It five months out of our lives, that’s a long time.”

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

“And we have to buy a van – that’s maybe 1500 pounds each, and then we will probably spend maybe another 3 or 4 thousand each travelling around. I’m talking 5000 pounds each – that’s a lot of money. Money we’ve earned. You have to be sure it’s what you want to do, what you want to spend it on.”

“Yeah that’s fine.”

“Do you have that much money?”

“Uhh…yeah, yeah, yeah. No problem. If I don’t, if I run out, I can get it off Dad back home”.

“OK then. We’ll do it. But only if you are sure it’s what you want to do??? This is my dream Charles, I don’t want to force you into it if you aren’t sure. There will probably be some tough times on the trip which we will only get through if we are both fully committed. I’ll be disappointed if you change your mind now about coming, but I will totally understand if you do. I’d rather you said now if you weren’t sure. You have to decide if it’s right for you, not just me.”

“No Griz, it’s fine.”

“Are you sure? Cause you aren’t helping me with any planning or reading or van hunting – you just don’t seem that interested.”

“Yeah, that’s because you have more time than me. I’m really busy at work right now. Trust me Dave, once we leave London I will be totally there with you, I’m just distracted right now. But I want to go Dave.”

This was about the longest serious conversation you could have with AJ. I knew when he called me “Dave” twice in consecutive sentences, he was both uncomfortable with the depth of our talk, and being as serious as he possibly could. If you talked seriously to AJ, particularly about his own thoughts and feelings, he always squirmed uncomfortably. I knew AJ loved me and was incredibly loyal to me and would follow me to the ends of the Earth if I asked him to – but I didn’t want those reasons conflicting with any doubts he might have had about going on the trip. I wanted him to do what was best for him, not what he thought was best for me. He was such an agreeable, kind person he would never argue about anything of consequence. I just knew the guy so well that I had a funny feeling he hadn’t really thought that much about what a commitment of time and money a five month trip was. But I had to take him at his word. I had to trust him. I realised later that I should have trusted my own feelings instead. But my desire to accomplish a lifelong dream with a best friend by my side blinded me to those feelings. But I should have picked it up early. I should have worked it out. I should have taken it as a sign as I sat there staring at AJ trying to work out if he really wanted to see Europe, when he finished off his burger and said blithely, “OK, let’s go to the pub”.


---------------


The second component my dream trip relied on was research. Now, I am a flexible guy. I generally live my life day-to-day. I am pretty happy to go where the wind takes me.

But I realised that five months in Europe was no time at all – you could take five years and still only see appreciate a fraction of what the continent had to offer. Which is why I did a lot of research. I’ve always been like this. Some might call it anal. I call it prepared. If I only have a limited time in a place, I want to know exactly what that place has to offer. Chances are I will never go back. So I want to do it right the first time.

Like I said, I’m flexible. If I miss something I was keen on seeing – c’est la vie, no biggie. But I want to know what my options are. I want to know that if I am missing something, that there is something just as cool round the corner. Because, the world is filled with cool stuff. I will never be bored. But I’d rather be as far from bored as possible. I’d rather pick the places I want to see the most. Yes, sometimes is great to let the places pick you. Sometimes the most special memories in the world are of places that you’d never planned to visit, just sorta stumbled upon or passed through by accident. But if the whole journey is an accident then those special places don’t seem so special.

Anyway, like I said, the world is filled with cool stuff. And from what I’d seen, the history of mankind meant that Europe had more than its far share. Every square mile seemed brimming with something unusual or different.

By the time we left on our trip, I think I knew more about Europe and what it had to offer than most of the locals. I mean, I’ve always soaked up everything I could about the continent, but in the few months before D-Day, I really became a sponge. I made a pest of myself in all the local bookstores on weekends. Next to a very patient Frances and her ubiquitous cup of coffee, I would curl up on the comfy couches in these bookstores for hours on end with dozens of travel books, leafing through them and jotting down in a notepad every place of interest. I visited friends who had been to Europe and went through their photos and itineraries with a fine tooth comb. Sometimes when they couldn’t remember the name of a place I would tell them what it was. I mean, I hadn’t been there, they had. Yet after all my dreams and research, I often felt I knew the place better than them.

Soon my notepad was bulging with a massive amount of guide book pilfering (like “****Don’t miss, looks gorgeous!!!”) and opinions from my friends (like “Dallas says 2 days max”). Was all this overkill? Maybe. Did it take away from the spontaneity of discovering a place you’d never been before by making you felt like you had? Possibly. On the other hand, sometimes the anticipation is the best bit anyway.

Like I said, I felt my research was necessary. We only had five months. The more research I did on Europe the more I realised there was just too much to choose from. So I realised that without narrowing it down a little in advance and picking the cream of the crop, and planning a route through this cream – well, without that, we could have driven around happily for five months without seeing Rome on Barcelona or Monaco or Munich. It seemed better for us to make plans beforehand instead of just getting there and choosing a turnoff.

So on the huge map of Europe on my bedroom wall, I worked out a route. We
Would see as many highlights as possible on a circuitous yet optimum route through the Netherlands, Belgium, north-west then central France, a large circumnavigation of Spain and Portugal, then through the south of France and the French alps to Austria, then Italy (my number one target). If we had time we would then hop across and do Greece, then head north through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Then finish off with Germany, and in the unlikely event of having extra time, possibly a quick look at Scandinavia.

But I was extremely conscious of our time restraints, because Frances had made me swear I would not be out of her sight for more than five months exactly, and I had booked a non-refundable flight to meet her in Sydney after exactly that amount of time. So our timetable was pretty strict. And while I was dubious about getting to Scandinavia, and not hugely hopeful of spending much time in the Eastern European countries, I was very confident that within five months we would experience the best of what Western Europe had to offer. I was most excited about visiting – in this order – Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, several areas in France, and bits of Portugal. But I really wanted to see it all. I knew I was aiming high. But if could circumnavigate Australia in six months in a tiny Fiat Bambino, then any travel ambition was possible.

As it turned out, my plans and dreams were not the problem. Reality was.


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The final component of my pre-trip organisation which took a lot of energy was finding a van. As most of you who know me would realise, appearances aren’t that important to me. I didn’t give a toss what the van looked like. It could be any colour, style or shape. The only important thing to be was that didn’t cost a fortune and got us around Europe within five months. Mechanically and structurally sound where the only things I cared about. Not much to ask you might say. Hmm…

Despite not being fussy, I’d always had a thing for the VW Kombi. They were classic yet humble. They seemed to have been going for millennia and defined reliability, yet conversely they had oodles of personality. And they were the perfect size for two or three of us. Finding a decent one in our price range however was not so easy.

I scoured the secondhand-for-sale websites. I made dozens of phone calls. I checked out several vans, all over London. It was stressful leg work, particularly when AJ had left the decision making ball completely in my court. “I don’t care Big ‘Fella, I trust ya, you pick one, I’ll go you halves”, he would say to me, as casually as if we were buying a 20 pound pizza instead of a 2000 pound vehicle.

But, lacking AJ’s support, I brought in a consultant. Julio Perez was a good mate of mine from work. He was young, of Spanish ancestry, and bursting with testosterone and personality. He used to leave lengthy messages on my voicemail at work, where he would act like a delirious eighties DJ, playing cheesy Lionel Ritchie songs and serenading me. He used to follow me around like a puppy dog. I think he had a non-sexual crush on me for a while, but maybe his own accountancy-based job was just so boring he was looking for an escape. His hot Latin blood was proof that any crush he had on me was non-sexual, because he constantly raved on about women, all women, every women, any woman. He flirted outrageously with any female who came close, and chased anyone who wouldn’t. He often arrived at work in the same clothes he’d worn the day before with stories of spontaneous champagne dinners and hotel rooms. He was the epitome of charm. He was definitely a Spaniard. He was definitely one of a kind. And, most importantly to our travel plans, he was the son of a motor mechanic.

There were many times on our subsequent trip that AJ and I wished with a vengeance that we’d never met Julio or his father. But those were wishes borne out of frustration or exhaustion or anger. Ultimately the involvement of Julio and “Mr Julio” (as AJ christened his dad), made our trip a lot different that it would have been. There’s no point in having regrets. Things worked out the way they worked out. And Julio and his Dad were good, well-meaning people. And it was impossible to not be swayed by Julio’s charm. Of course, now, I know better, and I could resist it. But back in early 2002, I was so desperate for some help on the van issue that when Julio, with his typical enthusiasm, offered to help, I could not say no. In fact I was very grateful.

The first time Julio came with to me to approve of a Kombi van that we were on the verge of buying, he didn’t even need to look inside, check out the engine, or drive it. He gave it the big thumbs down within seconds, pointing out rust and dodgy structural work that I hadn’t even noticed. Our next Kombi viewing lasted a little longer, but within seconds of looking at the sludge around the oil pipe he shook his head. I was more than gratified by his obvious expertise, but I stated to realise that this van hunt might take longer than I’d hoped.

One van hunting expedition was very demoralising. Julio wasn’t there that day, but for a change this time I had insisted AJ join me. We went to an unofficial van market road in Camden which was supposed to be chock-a-block with secondhand vehicles ready for a quick and cheap sale. Unfortunately our timing was off and there were only two vans up for sale that day, neither of them suitable. I sat down with AJ and bought out my list of other possibilities and started phoning them. Many options were already sold. Other sellers didn’t answer the phone at all. Some were too far away for us to get there on the tube that day. Our dream van, or our van dream, seemed a long way away.

We eventually looked up from our van ads and phones and realised we were sitting next to a sports oval filled with little kids playing soccer. Two guys in big jackets and sunglasses watching children in a park and making notes and phone calls. It didn’t look good. Before we could be arrested as pedophiles we moved on, giving up on finding another van to view that day. We tried to find Camden tube station but we got lost. Then it started to snow. Not gentle, joyful snow. Sleeting, wet, freezing snow. Life wasn’t meant to be easy. Neither was finding a van.

By the time we saw the next van, we probably would have agreed to buy a couple of motorised skateboards attached to a couch. We were becoming desperate. The next van we saw didn’t impress me initially. It wasn’t a Kombi but a newer model VW – a converted transporter van. (For the girls reading this, it was green). It looked really ungainly. It was big and comfortable inside, but outside the van seemed a little too big to me, too unnecessarily high and cumbersome. But AJ took it for a test drive and seemed pretty comfortable in it. My test drive was not quite so successful – on my first corner I completely underestimated the girth of the van and clipped the kerb, causing the van the fly up in the air on its starboard wheels, practically rolling it over onto its side. When all four wheels miraculously returned to earth, the van’s owner - sitting in the back seat in shock – just started numbly at me in shock. “Ah, sorry”, I said meekly. “Yeah, you have to remember to take the corners pretty wide”, he replied numbly.

I should have taken that crash as an omen never to sit in the driver’s seat of that van again.

But when Julio saw the van he practically fell in love with it, meeting his approval, and getting the big thumbs up. In fact, his first words after his thorough inspection were: “You are buying that van”. I wasn’t convinced – but I trusted Julio, particularly after his previous vehicular rejections. This time he had great faith in the van’s basic mechanical condition and structural integrity. And if we believed the owners then it was more than capable of doing multiple laps of Europe, based on its history and the photos they had showed us. And the price was right. In fact it seemed a bargain, if all that the owners and Julio were telling us was true.

Many times after that day, I found myself doubting the conviction Julio had shown when he insisted we buy that van. I found myself suspecting that he had told us to buy it because he himself was sick of his consultancy role, and just gave up. But that’s a cynical point-of-view, and I believe now, not entirely accurate. I really think – and thought then – that Julio believed he’d found us our dream van. So we trusted him.

And we bought it. The van advertised for sale at 2100 pounds. I offered the owner 1800. He came back with a counter offer of 1700. Now you might be impressed with my awesome negotiating skills, but actually he accepted my offer and told me he’d take another 100 off because he’d initially told me – in error – that the rego would be free.

Julio and I picked the van up one evening after work. I thought it was better that he drove. True to form, things stated to go wrong the second we swapped the cash for the keys. The bad omens were heavy that night. They continued well through our preparation period before we left England. How’s this for starters:

(1) The van wouldn’t start. Seconds after we bought it, it wouldn’t start. If that’s not a sign then what is? The battery was dead because the alternator wasn’t charging it properly.
(2) After jump start to get going, we stopped at a petrol station to fill up. Julio went to get out of the driver’s door. It was the first time we’d used the door – till then we’d jumped in through the back or passenger side. When we opened the door that night, the door made the most horrible screeching noise and almost fell off. It was buggered.
(3) Julio drove the van to his place that night – he was going to leave it at his Dad’s mechanic shop the next day for various roadworthy stuff we needed. He left the van on the street. He didn’t lock the back door properly. The face of the CD stereo was stolen –which meant the entire stereo might as well have been stolen. This was on the first night we owned the van.

From there on things just got worse.

The van was in “Mr Julio’s” workshop for the next two months. This was no problem really, because we bought the van two months before D-Day. But it was almost impossible to get an answer about when it was going to be ready, when we could take it for some test drives, and what exactly was being fixed. But Julio’s charm – and his Dad’s - smoothed over our stresses.

Mr Julio was an older, more rumpled and humble version of his son. He was a kind man, always shuffling around in his cardigan, scratching his head in perplexion at our mystical machine. He looked like the guy who played Carla’s hairy ex-husband from Cheers, the same guy that was Better Midler ex in The First Wives Club and a dopey cop in The Usual Suspects. Dan Hedaya, I think. Great actor. Anyway, Mr Julio seemed to mean well, he seemed genuine, so it was difficult to get too frustrated with his many failures. It was also difficult to understand him, because he spoke a very stilted, broken form of English. I think this might have been one of the main problem with the nightmare of a workshop he ran –no one really understood his directions –and he was too sweet to get angry with anyone.

His crew were an odd mix. The A-Team they weren’t. Phil was OK, he just laughed whenever he saw us bring the van back in. There was also a Scottish guy whose only vocabulary seemed to be four letter words, at least when he was dealing with our van. Then there was this too-cool-for-school black dude, an apprentice I think, who…well, one day we were waiting around for hours in the workshop, and AJ watched this black guy remove one part of an engine, put it back, remove it again, put it back, remove it again…he wasn’t testing anything, he just seemed to be killing time with a whimsical smile on his face that said, “Who cares, I’m getting paid.”

There were a couple of young apprentice kids no more than 15, who ran around in their baggy overalls pushing tyres back and forth and laughing and doing nothing of note. A dim-witted secretary was hired while we were there to answer phones, but all she did was repeatedly bring coffee out to Mr Julio, pointedly ignoring AJ and I, who were the ones actually paying her salary. Not a single worker seemed to have anything approaching direction or supervision. I’m guessing they were to smart to ask Mr Julio for fear that he’d answer them.

One day in the mechanic shop, we watched a lady come in and ask a few random mechanics if she could take her car. They all waved carelessly back at her and said, “sure go ahead”. They should have checked with the actual mechanic that was working on her car. Because when the woman jumped in the driver’s seat and started to reverse, the car fell awkwardly and expensively off the jack it was still sitting up on. Mr Julio’s solution was then to get as many of us strong lads as possible to try and lift the car off the jack which had become jammed wedged underneath it. Very safe. All I could do was pray that we wouldn’t break down in Spain and have to experience this exceptional level of Latin service again.

It turned out that the initial repairs cost 400 pounds. This was a great
”stupid-friends-of-my-son” discount deal, and included fixing the dodgy alternator and replacing the rear suspension bracket. Another 100 pounds went towards a secondhand stereo that had fallen off the back of a truck and been found by Julio’s brother. The first time I went to pick the van up and take it for a drive I recoiled in shock. The work on the rear suspension had vaulted the rear of the card up so excessively that the body angled sharply towards the front. Julio’s soothing, smoothing charm came out again. We drove the van to Katie’s house that night. This is when we first realised another coupla “issues”.

(4) The first problem became apparent when Julio took a sharp right turn and the passenger door suddenly flew open. The only reason I stayed in the car was my seatbelt – but it was a pretty close call. It turned out that the passenger door wouldn’t shut properly, and even when the little lock knob was pressed down, it still had a tendency to fly open at the most inappropriate times.
(5) The only good thing about this was that it wasn’t happening to the driver’s side door. This was because the driver’s seat belt wouldn’t attach properly.
(6) The large sliding side door of the van had issues too. It turned out that once opened, it almost took a degree in theoretical physics to actually get it shut. AJ proposed only entering through the front doors – which seemed a little silly for a five month trip. Fortunately – because we didn’t have time to do the physics degree - we worked out the magic touch (slide, and….shove!) after many abortive slams.
(7) The van was slow. Real slow. We never noticed it in the city, but out on the motorways, our first few test drives revealed a top speed of only 50mph. That’s about 80kph. Pedal to the metal. Foot to the floor. Only 50mph. This was slower than a two-cylinder Fiat Bambino. This was ridiculous.

Oh yeah, the hits just kept on coming. Eventually the driver’s seatbelt was fixed by cobbling bits of seatbelt together from a wrecked Mercedes. And I think Mr Julio took a hammer to the passenger door to help it shut, and this miraculously worked…for awhile at least.

But every time we picked the van up from the auto mechanics for “the final time”, well it turned out not to be the final time. Our friends in that workshop must have loved us. Every time we picked her up – she just came straight back. We should have named her ”Boomerang”.

One day, when the van was supposed to be completely finished, Frances and I picked her up for a drive up to Meldreth. An hour later, we were still only one borough (suburb) away, the van having conked out in peak hour traffic on Fulham High Street and refused to restart at all. I assumed the alternator hadn’t been repaired properly, but no…

(8) This time is was different problem. The fuel gauge had somehow become buggered. When it read half full it actually meant empty. So I spent a good portion of my valuable weekend-with-Frances time sitting in my van next to a Scottish guy screaming profanities at the guy towing us. It probably a good thing his accent was so thick.

Eventually this problem was fixed. Like a lot of the problems with the van, they were only corrected days before we left on the trip. In fact we ended up putting the trip back a week and a bit because of all the holdups. I have a vague memory of some necessary reconditioning of the gearbox, plus there was definite problem with the brakes (i.e.: they didn’t work). I began to suspect that Julio, Julio’s Dad, and the guy that had sold us the van were all in league to milk as much cash out of us as we could. Frances and Katherine lost patience with the whole thing, telling me I had been stupid to trust Julio, that I should just cut my losses and find another van without his help. But as I tried to explain to them through clenched teeth, it wasn’t that easy. As well as the initial van cost and the first repairs, AJ and I had spent maybe another seven hundred pounds on spare parts and tools, registration, tax, insurance, and breakdown cover. To give up on the VW Transporter and search for another van would mean losing much of that investment, not to mention all the dozens of man hours I had put into organising the extensive paperwork for the beast. I just kept telling myself – all this hard work here, and getting all these teething problems out of the way early, means a smooth run through Europe. It was like a mantra for me –“bad van now, good van later…bad van now, good van later”. Not for the first time, I should have listened to the Farbridge sisters, my guardian angels, right from the get-go.

The teething problems I mentioned – well they weren’t just the odd molar or incisors. We had front teeth problems. We had back teeth problems. We even had wisdom teeth issues. We had a whole mouthful of teething problems. I’ve actually lost track of the multitude of latter problems, but three that spring to mind were…

(9) The windscreen wipers suddenly failed to work. The wiper motor apparently blew up. At this stage I was prepared to leave England without functional wipers, just to get away from Mr Julio’s shop while we still had locomotion, but Frances put her foot down and insisted we get them repaired. Foul-Mouthed-Scottish-Dude fixed them for us by stealing some parts from another car in the lot, but he cut his hand when he did it, which meant lots more swearing when he explained the procedure to us.

(10) Scottish guy also fixed the radio for us, which had stopped working. I think this was connected to additional problems with the fuses.

(11) The gears. I couldn’t work them. I didn’t have the knack. Not a major problem, because AJ, our number one driver, definitely had the knack. Then even he lost it. The gears stopped clicking in altogether. Some linkage had become loose, causing them to slip in all over the place. We would slow down at traffic lights, whip the van into first, let out the clutch and fly backwards. The van was always confusing reverse for first, and vice versa. Mr Julio fixed the gears slightly by whacking some lever under the van with a hammer, his preferred tool of trade.

(12) The most foreboding problem before we left was, typically, the least obvious to identify. Occasionally, when driving along, the car “hiccupped”, for want of a better term. We’d be driving along and the car just seemed to jump within itself, ever so slightly, like it was suppressing a mild burp. “Ever so slightly” became a lot less slight, and a lot more frequent, and Mr Julio surmised an electrical problem, and did a little remodeling of the distributor.

Every time we took the van out of the shop, Mr Julio switched on his rumpled nice guy charm, “Ah, should be OK now, should be good”. But we’d heard that so many times from him before that it was tough to have complete faith.

Every time we took the van into Mr Julio’s shop, it came out with more problems than when it went in. It was like we were entrusting the keys to our van – and the keys to the next five months of our lives – to the Keystone Cops. It would have been laughable if it wasn’t so depressing.

The shop seemed cursed. I imagined the mechanics sitting around our van in a circle at night, chanting demonic rites, possessing our poor vehicle with the spirit of the Anti-Christ. But what could we do? It was far too late to turn back now. When we finally collected the van from the workshop on Day 1 of our actual journey, we prayed it would be for the last time. We crossed every metaphoric extremity.

And we just held our breath and waited.


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Another mechanical component of our forthcoming travels, which in many ways was just as crucial as the van, was my camera. I spent the months leading up to D-Day experimenting with the wonderful manual Olympus SLR camera Frances had given me for my birthday. I loved the camera. I took many rolls of film, varying exposure grades, film speeds, depth of field, aperture width and light meter readings. I did most of this without really knowing a thing about them. Technically speaking, I just “dicked around”. I had the luxury of getting my films processed before D-Day, so I could see my mistakes and try to vary my camera fiddlings. But no matter how good I became with the camera, I became aware of one thing. I was too slow to take snapshots with it. And I love taking snapshots. Many of my photos aren’t snapshots. They are carefully planned, consciously framed and deliberately shot photographs. But many – if not most of my photographs – are snapshots. They are very quick, point and shoot photos. Many of my friends have compared me to a western gunslinger. When in full travel mode, I always wear my little automatic compact camera on my hip. Whenever my friends hear the telltale sound of my camera case Velcro coming unripped, they know I will be quick-drawing my camera for a speedy shot or two.

Sometimes snapshots are the only way to go. People and animals and traffic seldom slow down for you to get that perfect SLR shot. And often you are moving yourself, in a bus or a car, so you gotta get that photo quick before you go round the next corner.

So yes, I could appreciate the artistry and technique which went into taking photos will an SLR manual camera, but I also realized that I could never cope without my trusty little compact camera sidearm. So I knew I would be traveling Europe with two cameras. My Olympus SLR for all the exquisite shots I had five minutes to get right. And my old Canon Compact for the rest, for the bulk of my photos maybe.

How many photos? Well, in preparation for Europe, and knowing that it would be cheaper if I bought my film in advance, I sat down and worked how many photos I would be likely to take.

Now, here’s a news flash: I take a lot of photos.

I always have. But when I’m traveling, and seeing new stuff every second, I can be a little excessive. Yes, I know I have a problem. Yes, I can admit I have a serious addiction (that’s the first step right?).

I can understand the argument – in fact I’ve argued it myself, on occasion - that someone who is perpetually seeing their travels through a camera lens never really takes the time to put the camera down and appreciate their surroundings properly – for themselves, not for the camera film.

Yeah, I agree with that totally, I can see that. But…you know, I think, generally, I have such an enormous capacity for appreciating the wonders of this world, I can do both. I can take my photos. And then I can put the camera aside, sit back and look around properly without framing possibilities in my head, and go “WOW”. Maybe I just do the former a bit more than the latter. Trust me, I’m working on it.

I’m not sure what it is about me that makes me want to photograph everything different I see. Maybe my youth was so humdrum and familiar that anything unusual still strikes a massive chord with me. Maybe I love the world’s variety so much that I just need to capture some of it, hold onto it, remind myself that yes, I was there once.

I know it’s not so much for other people. I mean I love sharing my photos (and stories, obviously) with my friends, impressing them and inspiring them with the places I’ve been and the lucky shots I’ve fluked. I love showing off. But much more than that, I know the photos are primarily for me. If I was to never show another person my photos, I still think I’d take just as many. (Just like if no one else was ever the read this Dave Report, still I think I’d write just as much). Because my photos are for me. They are memories captured forever. They are the history of my life.

I think part of the reason I love photography so much is that - photos stop time. For an instant, within my little magical device, I have stopped the inexorable flow of time. Maybe it’s related to my Peter Pan complex, and my seemingly innate desire to never grow up, to stop time. Maybe if I take enough of them I think, I will never have to grow up. I will always be the big kid in those photos, taking those photos. Maybe…

Well, that theory seems to be working fine so far.

So…how many photos do I actually take? The precise number is lots. But preparing my trip to Europe I was forced to try to work out a less vague amount. So I sat down with a calculator and tried to work it out. I based it on my past travels, and the number of films I’d processed since 1998 - the cost of which could have funded the dictatorship of a small Central American country. I probably should have just bought a photo shop myself.

Anyway, here’s what I worked out. Based on my past exploits, over my five months Euro-trip, I would take more than 400 rolls of film, all 36 exposures each. We’re talking 15000 photos right there. Which is 3000 photos per month. 100 photos a day.

ONE HUNDRED PHOTOS A DAY!!!

Yeah that seems like a lot when you say it like that. But when I thought about it, that’s only three rolls of film. Sometimes I take five rolls of film a day. Sometimes I take less than one. But I guess in travel mode, three rolls of film was about average. A hundred photos a day might seem a lot. But thinking back, I haven’t regretted taking a single photo on my travels.

So I decided to buy 400 rolls of film.

I wanted to get the film in advance, because purchasing film at tourist traps around Europe would be outrageously expensive. So I got a few quotes from some photo shops in Earls Court. They averaged about 3.00 pounds a film, even for a bulk purchase. But after flirting with one of the camera shop girls – also a traveling Aussie – she told me of an internet site based in Guernsey, where you could purchase film tax free, and very cheaply. So I ended up buying over 400 rolls of film – many different grades and qualities – for an average price of maybe 1.50 pound each. That’s a lot of film. That’s also quite a big bargain.

My cost-saving bubble was burst though when Jason, a work colleague, came into my office and discovered me opening my mass deliveries of 400 rolls of film. After I told him what I’d saved on purchasing them, he said, “Yeah, but what about processing costs? Your first born kid won’t be out of college before you can afford to get this lot processed!”

Yeah, thanks Jason. Till then I’d never thought of that.

Oh well, that was the future. And right then, the only photographic future I was concerned about was the next five months.


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… & Signing Off


With my last month or two before D-Day (departure day) filled with film shipments, van issues, Europe research and motivational seminars for AJ, my days passed in a blur. It was my busiest time of the year. I found the trip took upon a life and a natural momentum of its own, snowballing into this attention-screaming juggernaut. I was no longer acting proactively, I was just reacting instinctively, just swinging helplessly at all these baseball ball like necessities which came flying my way. I was not only organising a five month trip, I was also shutting down a four year life in London. In a last minute flail of panic, I packed bags, shipped stuff home, stored stuff elsewhere, caught up with friends, and tried to exchange our room and our bond on our flat. During these hectic times, I realised (later) that I was horribly neglecting sweet Frances and her wishes to maximise her time with me during those last precious weeks, something I will always regret. Ah, retrospect…

Apart from my sweet girlfriend, another thing which fell by the wayside in those last days was my job. And my job, unlike Frances, was something I have no regrets neglecting.

Not that anyone noticed. In fact, no one really gave a crap. Work – and Orchestream, the company I worked for – had changed a lot. When I started they were on top of the specialty IT product food chain, a boutique company that was a media darling, destined for greatness, growing by a staff member a day, it seemed. When I left they were struggling. Lots of people had a lot of reasons for the change – the recession, September 11, poor management. But they were all wrong. The real reason Orchestream was struggling was me. You see, I am a bit of a jinx for any company I ever work for. Check out this pattern: Shortly after I left MYER it was swallowed up by Coles. When I left Touche Ross they got taken over by two other Big 8 Accountancy firms. When I left the Keg it disappeared. When I left Books Etc they became part of Borders. As I write this, Orchestream is no more. So forget industrial espionage if you want to destroy a company. Just send in Dave Holmes with a resume and a smile.

Of course, none of it’s intentional on my part. I honestly try to do the best job I can. Well, I do initially. When I started at Orchestream I had a mess of a job, a huge task-juggling nightmare of gotta-by-done-NOW stuff. By I loved my job. This was largely due to the best boss in the world, Dallas Hartland, a perfect communicator and motivator. Plenty of support and interest. Then, Dallas left (she read the writing on the wall). And two things changed. One: they did not replace her – I took her job as well as mine. Two: for anyone above me I ceased to exist. I had zero support and even less interest. Supposedly I had a new boss – the financial controller – but he not only had the social skills of a retarded camel, he also had his head so far up his arse stressing over money that I was lucky if I got one grunt a week from his direction.

This was OK though. Despite the fact that I was doing two jobs for the bargain price of one (they refused to offer me more money), I was just biding my time till D-Day. And because Orchestream had turned its back on me, I pretty much did the same to it. Oh, I still did my job adequately. I just didn’t go above and beyond the call like I might have done. And I milked Orchestream for all it was worth. I did lots of my trip organisation on their phones and on their internet. I posted lots of my stuff home in their mailbag. There were lots of benefits to being Operations Manager. I used Orchestream. But I think they used me a lot worse. So I never shed a tear when the company disappeared.

My work attitude through those last weeks might sound pathetic, but compared to Thomas J Hall, I was still a workaholic. Tom was one of a kind. He was a classic. He came in - and was paid for - about one day a week. He actually worked about ten minutes a week. And that was on a good day. That was when he had a boss. After Dallas left sometimes he wouldn’t work at all. But that was OK. Because Tom was Orchestream’s court jester. He was the entertainment.
Tom would spend several hours a workday meandering his way through the company divisions, entertaining everyone with stories of his week. And Tom had lots of stories. Although Tom was a grungy, unshaven student, and an extremely intelligent, down to earth guy, Tom also mixed in the most high-faulting social circles in London. He went to the most exclusive clubs. He socialised with the biggest stars. He drank the most expensive champagne. He did the most expensive drugs.

And he always came in on Friday with the best stories. One of Tom’s best mates was Orlando Bloom, who is a pretty big star these days after playing Legolas in Lord of the Rings. But Tom never name dropped for the sake of it, like I just did. Tom just told us his stories. Tabloids would have paid a fortune for some of Tom’s stories, but he just shared them with us. And we loved them. We loved Tom. Despite the fact that Tom did no work, and spent hours each Friday surfing porn on the internet, we loved him. We loved his not just for his links with fame though. We loved him for his extreme wit and his who-cares attitude. We all wished we could come into work an hour late with three-day beard growth, socialise half the day, take three hour lunches, and surf lots of porn websites – and get paid for it. We all wished that, like Tom, we had been best friends at school with the millionaire boy-wonder owner of Orchestream.

After I left Orchestream, I missed my friends like Tom. I missed Dallas and her inspirational energy and her photo shows and her Wall of Shame. I missed talking in faux-Chinese with Oyinda and Julio. I missed playing Connect 4 at lunchtime with “Prissy (Elouise) Peach”. I missed Anthony Reeves coming in and mincing around so much that his name shoulda been Prissy Peach. I missed Karen and Damon coming down with more uproarious stories of Anthony’s camp prissiness. I missed Burls coming in all sweaty after the gym. I missed Steve and his free shiatsu sessions. I missed coping a huge blast of “don’t-go-there-sista!” attitude from Oyinda whenever I asked if I could borrow Orchestream’s heater back from her. I missed organising Sundowners (translation: work piss ups), like the one when Karen and I stuffed our mouths with as many marshmellows as possible and tryed to say “Chubby Bunny”. I missed Julio dashing into my office and raising the blinds to the walkway outside and exclaiming “There she is Big Fella, that’s her - the brunette in the tight jeans, whaddya think???”. I missed Jana and Karin going “Grrrrr!!!” at each other every day with frosty ice queen bitchiness. I missed Oyinda – definitely the most physically sexy friend I have ever had – staggering in drunk after a three-hour lunch and passing out on my lap when I sat professionally behind the main reception desk. I missed stories like the time Julio screamed at Adrian Upton “If you don’t get your fingers out of Katherine’s boots I will punch you in the face!!!”.

And of course I missed my best mate Katherine Farbridge. I missed her style and sexiness. I missed her laugh and her dorkiness. I missed her Wall of Shame Farbridge-isms and convoluted relationship dramas and her on-the-inside work secrets (“you know I’m not supposed to tell you this, but…”). I missed her coming into work drooling after dental work with half her face and all her tongue numb – “Dathh!!! Stotthh lauthhing athhh mthh!!!”

Some people come back from their lunch breaks with their hair shorter, after a cut. Never one to follow the crowd, Katie did the opposite one day, and returned with her hair longer – she had spontaneously bought an elaborate hair-piece extension thingy. I missed stuff like that.

Yeah I really missed my mates. If you think Ally McBeal was worked in a weird and wonderful workplace, you should have tried Orchestream at the turn of the century. It was seldom dull.

What I didn’t miss was the work.

When I stated at Orchestream I had no idea what I as doing. This was part of the reason I enjoyed my job. Another was that there was so much stuff I didn’t know what I was doing. I was always busy. After a year, I knew what I was doing, so I got a little bored. And with half the company made redundant, there were less people throwing disasters at me, hence more time to get bored. Taking on Dallas’s job made me perk up for a month, I was in charge of thousand pound painting contracts and security and exciting stuff like office plants. But then I realised that I had done a lot of Dallas’s job anyway, before she left. So it was time. I was ready to leave. The company was in a nosedive. Time to reach for the trusty parachute that had got me out of nose-diving companies before.

Some might have said that – like Dallas’s departure – the writing was on the wall. But in my case, it was more like the shit was on the wall. And the floor, and the ceiling, and…

Let me explain.

I was nominally in charge of our company’s building and facilities and maintenance issues. This included problems with the plumbing. And boy, did our company have problems with the plumbing!!! Our plumbing had more waste management issues going on than my entire digestive system did throughout Morocco and India.

One weekend Tom was using my office to “do an assignment” (translation: using the phones to make drug deals). Suddenly he looked up to see the ceiling in one corner of the Operations Room collapse and release a pile of raw sewage from the overhead pipes into the room, right onto the spot where the aforementioned Financial Controller-Retarded Camel used to sit before moving offices. Lousy timing I know.

The room stank pretty bad for awhile, but I managed to clean it up fairly well after donning one on those toxic suits and drowning the place in disinfectant.

But that first attack sewage attack was a mere warning.

Because a couple of weeks later, one Monday morning I entered the firm’s conference room and was flung backwards several feet by the stench inside. Sometime over the weekend, the sewage pipes has split above the ceiling of the conference room and given the room a unique new colour scheme, or perhaps I should say “odor scheme”. The conference room was this plush, executive dream venue where the fate of millions of pounds and hundreds of people was tossed around casually every month by directors who didn’t really care about employees or integrity, but just sought to protect their own positions and salaries, and did so by talking a lot of shit.

So perversely, I thought the new decorative scheme was quite appropriate. The conference room was no longer just a conference room. It was also now, a sewer.

There was shit everywhere. Literally.

If this wasn’t a sign from above for the directors about the future of Orchestream, I don’t know what was. It this wasn’t a sign for them to stop talking through their arses, I don’t know what was.

Dried crusty poo all over the boardroom table and plush leather couches. Wet squelching poo taking up stench residency in the carpet. And all my responsibility.

And you thought that poor bloke that sat next to the Thames in Shakespeare’s day had a shit job…

I left a few weeks later. On my last day I sent an e-mail to the entire company thanking them for all their support, and telling them that the thing I would miss most about Orchestream was the friends I had made there. I said the thing I would miss least started with “sh-” and finished with “-it ain’t funny went it comes outta the ceiling and drowns the conference room”. Goodbye Orchestream.


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One of the few things I would not miss about my time in London was my poor health. While my emotional health in early 2002 was soaring, my physical health was struggling a little bit. Firstly, I was a little tubby. I mean, it’s hard anyway not to put on weight in London over winter, but combine that with Frances’ generous servings of hone cooked meals, a sedentary lifestyle between desk and pub and bed, and my chocolate fixation…well, I went up a few notches on my belt.

Being overweight didn’t help my other health issues much – my lower back broke down more times that the Millennium Falcon. Sometimes I couldn’t even move, or I moved very slowly and crookedly. My friends – specifically AJ and Jane - found it hilarious to watch me hobble around in intense pain, so I did my best to amuse them.

As well as this I copped more colds and fevers that winter than I’ve seen George Clooney diagnose.

And the worst aliment of all…well I won’t go on about my acid reflux problem – I sort of hinted at in a bit in my 2001 Odyssey – but let me just say this condition is something I would not wish upon my worst enemy, if I ever had an enemy to wish against anyway, that is. I didn’t hit me as severely in 2002 as it had previously, when whenever it raised its ugly head of acid up my esophagus, well…it was a very nasty experience.

I really shouldn’t get too descriptive about acid reflux. Suffice to say, you don’t want know. But my endoscopy was a relative way in the park. I think I was referred to get my endoscopy in October of 2001. But the public hospital system in England creaks more slowly than Queen Lizzy’s bones, and I wasn’t scheduled to get mine until late in 2057. I did a bit of smooth talking though and got it moved up to the week before we left. The procedure itself was extremely weird. They sprayed my throat with numbing spray. They levered my mouth open wide with rubber mouth guards like I was a dog. Then they shoved a couple of tubes down my throat into my stomach. The first tube pumped air into my gut to expand it and give them a good view. The second tube gave them that view – it had a tiny camera on the end which showed all the action on a couple of TV screens, one conveniently located for my viewing pleasure.

I couldn’t really follow what was going on down in my belly – not just because I’m not a doctor – but also because my eyes were watering uncontrollably. In fact, “uncontrollable” was the best way to describe what a lot of my body was doing right then. Because I was in spasms.

Having tubes down my throat and esophagus was not a natural experience. And no matter how many times my brain told my body to relax and deal with it, my body refused. As soon as the tubes were inserted, my entire esophagus went into a convulsions, trying to push the tubes back out. My esophagus just kept grabbing the pipes and squeezing them, trying to push them back up my throat. It felt was like my whole being was devoted to vomiting the alien matter back out. My eyes teared not in pain, but in sympathy. I think my eyes were saying to my throat, ”OK, you might not be able to get anything out, but we’ll get rid of anything we can through our tear ducts anyway”.

The doctors only kept the tubes down in my stomach for a minute, but it felt like forever. My body refused to relax, and continued to pseudo-vomit uncontrollably the whole time. In addition to the alien tubes in my body, all the air they kept pumping into my stomach desperately kept trying to escape, so when my body wasn’t in vomit spasms, it was hiccupping uncontrollably. It was intense. It wasn’t at all painful. It was just exceedingly uncomfortable.

That what an endoscopy felt like to me.

And no matter how weird or horrible it felt, I would have a million endoscopies again before one single bout of acid reflux.

I knew that my problems with acid reflux and my back and my weight and my colds where all related to lifestyle. They were probably also related to age, and the fact that I couldn’t eat, drink, run or play like I used to without consequences. I guess it was all a wake up call in a way.

I adjusted my lifestyle a little. Since acid reflux had burned itself into my soul, I’d cut out booze and fatty foods in a big way. But it was tough to change who I was altogether. It was particularly difficult in my last few weeks, when everyone I knew in London wanted to buy me a farewell drink. Who was I to say no?


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In my last weeks at work I was taken out to lunch and drinks everyday and everynight. On my last day at work I started drinking at 2pm and didn’t stop for nine hours.

My work buddies and I found ourselves in the “Curtains Up”, a cute little pub near where Mahatma Gandhi used to live when he was a law student. But I doubt Gandhi ever experienced debauchery on the scale of that evening, which included lots of unprofessional intra-office bonding and lots of multi-coloured shooters of dubious origin. By 11pm I doubt that even a shot of mentholated spirits would have touched the sides.

The next day, on the very eve of our departure, we hosted a bon voyage party at our house. We parked our van out the front and ran regular tours through it’s interior, and ran a competition to give her a name other than “that piece of crap”. We set up a coupla barbeques right next to the van, something which I assumed must have been quite an unusual sight in West Kensington in April – a bunch of daggy Aussies barbequing right next to the footpath. You see, we had a large backyard, but most of our party was in the living room, which opened straight out onto the front steps, so we decided to barbie out there.

Now this might come as a surprise to some of you (right!), but I am not the typical Aussie male. I must have somehow missed that Aussie DNA gene that makes Aussie blokes born to stand around the barbie prodding burnt meat while the womenfolk natter away over the salads and fruit punch. Instead I got an errant gene which usually causes me to chat up those womenfolk while the other guys are out of the picture.

Anyway, at our leaving-do, I was determined to be the host with the most and master the art of barbequing. In fact, it’s more difficult than it looks. Within minutes of cranking up the coals and lighter fluid, I neglected one of the vital rules of BBQ cooking: don’t put the meat on until the big flames have died down. Soon the juices from sausages and chicken wings were aggravating the flames up into a towering inferno which threatened to set fire to the neighbour’s basement garden.

Luckily, it was Aussie Blokes to the Rescue!! Several masculine antipodeans helped me move the barbies (we had two small ones outta control at once) away from the neighbour’s garden and up onto the footpath next to the van’s fuel tank.

Then Colin Hendry, better known as Captain BBQ, stepped in after a ceremonial exchange of tongs to quell the flames and get the food under control.

Meanwhile, Frances was showing her artistry inside the house. She had not only made kebabs and marinated chicken pieces for the BBQ, but inside she also whipped up half a dozen salads, coleslaws, condiments and associated other food groups. Without her the culinary side of the party would have been a complete bust. She prepared, presented and organised the smorgasbord of food within minutes. She accomplished more in an hour that I could have done in a day. It was awe-inspiring to watch.

So…were there enough people at our party to warrant all these food-based maelstroms? Well, yeah!!!! Our party was massive. At least sixty people rocked through from lunchtime till late. Our lounge room unfortunately was only of average size – so even though sardines weren’t on Frances’ menu they were well represented anyway. The party was squishy yet cosy, crowded yet social. It certainly made it easier to meet people. No wallflowers here. No matter where you put your face, it was within centimetres of at least four other faces. People were sitting on the floor, in the fireplace, under the dining table, on top of the fridge. Sometimes it was hours before I realised that some friends where in the same tiny room with me.

The bathroom was very popular. There was a massive line outside, but I never worked out if more people wanted to use the loo or get booze outta the bathtub. Incidentally, booze in the bathtub with block ice is apparently as Aussie thing, the Poms had never seen it before and thought it was genius.

It was a great night. The flat teemed with friends young and old. It’s amazing how many people you can get together in one space when you tell them you are leaving the country. It’s funny, that’s the only time in my life when I feel popular, when I’m saying goodbye. Connection there perhaps?

AJ was milking the farewell component on the party too, for all it was worth. He finally cornered a girl he’d been trying to kiss all year in one of the bedrooms, until Jane walked in obliviously and whacked him on the back of the head with the door, disrupting both his consciousness and his chances.

The party was a laugh, although early on in the evening there was a little stress. This was because, even though we were theoretically moving out and leaving London the next day, AJ and I still hadn’t found anyone to fill our room, or, more importantly, pay us the 500 pound bond that was required. This was despite two months of placing ads, answering calls, and taking tours through the place – all done by me, I hesitate to bitch. Anyway, after showing countless people through the flat in March and April, and refining a beautiful sales spiel, I was at the end of my tether. We needed that 500 pounds for our trip. We couldn’t afford breakdown cover without it.

During our party we were still desperately showing people through the house. My sales spiel varied a little then, as in, “oh, those twenty people don’t come with the place they are just visiting. It’s not always like this, I swear, usually it’s really quiet and comfy.” When I say we were showing people through the house, I don’t mean me and AJ, the two people who actually needed to fill the room and grab that money. I mean me and Frances. Frances was a total wonder woman, because in addition to her chef duties, she volunteered to take room-seeker tours through the flat when I was socialising or engaged in a tour of my own. Frances knew my sales spiel so well, she had heard it dozens of times.

Where was young AJ during all this I hear you ask? The actual guy who was half responsible for what Frances and I were doing? Well, he was just sitting on his butt chatting to house guests, looking really guilty. By the last weeks, I had given up asking AJ to help conduct tours – actually I had given up asking him to help with anything to do with the trip or our responsibilities with the house or the party. I was disappointed with AJ to be sure, but I figured I would be more disappointed if I asked for help and was turned down, as had become common with him. In fact one night earlier in the week, I had some friends over for dinner. I cooked everyone – including AJ – a nice meal, and was relaxing and chatting to my mates afterward. Then the phone rang, AJ took the call and told us someone was coming to see the room. I was exhausted - from just everything that week – and asked AJ to take this tour…just one tour, please! He refused. My friends were in shock at his attitude. AJ shrugged and said he just wasn’t any good at talking to strangers, that I was a much better salesman than he, that we had more chance of filling the room if I did the tour, yada, yada, yada, the usual crap. The door bell rang. I sighed and got up and answered the door. I conducted the tour that night.

I was becoming very disheartened by the whole bond issue. Frances tried to help by tacking a note on the tree outside the house advertising the room. One night a laidback Aussie dude strolled in for a look. He seemed more interested in staying for dessert and flirting with Katie than the actual room, so we gave up on him.

But during the night off the party, he squeezed through the people clustered around our front door, weaved his way through the obstacle course of bodies in the kitchen to me, and passed me 500 pounds. At the very last minute, a day before we moved out, we were saved. Things were finally coming together.

They always seem to. Eventually...


---------------


Eventually…we arose the next morning. Our last day in 69 Edith Road. Frances and I had cleaned much of the house the night before, so that wasn’t a problem.

But something weird was going on.

There was lots of movement out in the lounge. Lots of unfamiliar voices. AJ came back to our room after a look. Then he told us. He’d previously promised a friend from work who was doing a film course that they could film in our house that day. He’d expected the guy and maybe one other. But there was almost a Spielberg sized crew present: actors, directors, sound guys, camera guys, best boys, dolly grips. Well, maybe not the last two, but the scene they were shooting was on a fairly large scale for our humble abode. In fact they were shooting our house from the outside as well as the inside. And outside our flat, all over the street-facing windows and walls, they had hung huge sheets painted with provocative slogans like “You will never evict freedom!!!” & “We hate yuppies!!!”.

In a street and an area filled with ultra-conservative millenium versions of yuppies, we thought that the fourth word in the former sheet statement above: “evict” may have been appropriate. If our footpath barbeques and fire hazard of a party weren’t gonna get us evicted, maybe these signs would.

I guess it was good then that it was time to leave.


---------------


Choices


Early 2002 was the best part of the year for me. Yes it was busy, yes it was occasionally stressful. Yes I was occasionally overwhelmed with it all, with shutting down my London life, and organising a whole new one, with sorting bond deposits and party farewells and endoscopies and van problems and AJ motivation and trip research…it was a crazy time, but it was good crazy, it was fun crazy. The one thing that occupied my swirling thoughts most however - above the van and the research and AJ and friends and all the other little details – the one thing that I thought about, stressed about, worried about - more than any of those things…was Frances.

Sometimes dreams can conflict. The Euro van trip, as I said, was something I had dreamed about, planned, wished for, since I understood the concept of countries. Frances, on the other hand, was a much more unexpected dream. She was every fantasy I’d ever had, dropped right into my lap. She was too good to be true, and yet, she was so real I felt like we’d been soulmates forever. The year or so we’d been together was the best of my life, by a factor of several million. I stopped pinching myself eventually – about mid-way through 2001 – but there were still moments when I stopped in my tracks, and wondered in shock…what happened? What did I do to deserve this? I was blessed with the love and partnership of the best person I had ever known, and could ever imagine. Somehow, from the moment we had met, we clicked. There was no early relationship angst. There was no mid-relationship confusion. There were never any power games, never any doubts or worries or practical realization of psycho-babble theories like: “the person who cares about the other the least has all the power in the relationship”. There was none of that bullshit, that stuff that is usually so prevalent. We were incredibly lucky. From day one, there was simply complete communication and a total embrace of everything the other person offered. We often disagreed. We never fought. We often laughed. We never cried…about us, that is. We helped each other through a few rough times and loved each other though a lot more wonderful times.

As her sister kept reminding us, Frances and I were as different as chalk and cheese. She was dark haired. I was blonde. She was short(ish). I was tall (more than “ish”). She was stunningly elegant. I was casually scruffy looking. She had the looks of a model. I had the looks of modeling clay. She was English and refined. I was Australian and uncouth. She preferred the finer things in life. I preferred all the things in life. She could walk into a room and instantly lit it up with her smile. I could walk into a room and instantly lit it up with a lightbulb. She preferred cats. I preferred dogs. She was easily stressed at times. I was so laidback most of the time I could have been dead. She hated change. I embraced change. She dreamed of stability and security and home. I dreamed of freedom and travel and the world. She was perfect. I was not.

And yet…from the moment we met, all these differences seemed OK, ideal, pre-destined as well. As the Frenchies say “Viva la Difference!!!”. It means, I think, “celebrate the differences”. And never more so used than referring to the differences between a man and a women, two people in love. I loved the aspects of Frances that were different from me. There was nothing really different at a core, basic level, our philosophies on life and humanity were very similar. I’m talking about the differences I mentioned above – surface stuff, the decorative icing on our personalities. And I loved the different things about Frances. They made things interesting. Who wants to go out with a mirror image of themselves. I mean, if she had loved Star Wars and McDonalds and Disneyland and backpacking and body surfing and everything else I loved…well, things might have got pretty boring after a while. As it was, she introduced me to stuff I never thought I’d get into but eventually fell in love with, by experiencing her joy with her. Stuff like cats and pot and English pubs. In a way I’d like to think I’ve broadened her horizons a little too. My incessant obsession with travel and photography and embracing anything new…I think in some ways Frances may have picked up some of that from me. She certainly seemed to have more of an interest in travel after a year with me than she did before. Of course, I can’t speak for her. But for myself, on the other side of the coin…being with Frances certainly affected my fancy-free ideologies. I started feeling a pull away from “travel” and towards “home”. In a good way though. And if I’d been asked where I defined “home” as in 2002, I wouldn’t have said Brisbane. I wouldn’t have said London. If I’d been asked in 2002 “where do you call home?”, I would have said without a pause – “wherever Frances is”. I had begun to think of anywhere my sweetheart was as my home.

So the differences in our make-ups were actually complementary. We seemed to balance each other out. We challenged each other. We saw something different in each other that we wanted to attain and reach for. Our differences rubbed off a little on each other. They were good. But these surface differences, these decorative flairs, weren’t really that relevant when compared with a deeper connection that Frances and I forged. The surface stuff, our outward appearance and personalities, well, that was all fun and interesting stuff, it made for some amusing and interesting chats (and disagreements), but in the end they didn’t seem important. Because deep down we seemed the same. Beyond the conflicting dreams or stability vs. travel, we shared deeper, more permanent aspirations for our lives, then and forever, whether we spent them together or not.

But it seemed like, right then, we were destined to spend them together. We were deeply in love, and neither of us was shy in telling anyone. And, like I said, finding each other was like finding ourselves. Everything made sense. Deep down, like I said, we seemed the same. We wanted the same future. We treated people in the same ways. We valued our family and our friends above all else. We loved life. We loved laughing at the little things. We loved all creatures great and small. We were silly. We matched…and not just that, we complemented. We bought out the best in each other. We balanced each other out. And, for maybe the first time in my life, everything became clear, everything made sense.

Finding Frances was like finding the missing half of myself.

Like finding a piece I’d been looking for all my life.

To paraphrase, to plagiarise Mr Maguire: she completed me.

Focused through Frances, I changed. I was always a happy person, always positive, always moving forward. But being with Frances, I changed. She made me want more. Simply by being Frances, she challenged me to be the best person I possibly could. She was my inspiration. My love. My partner. My best friend.

My soulmate.

I was the happiest man on earth. I had complete confidence in her, in me, in us. Total faith. Our love was strong, unbreakable.

And I had complete faith that it would always stay that way.


---------------


As D-Day approached however, I was very concerned about Frances. Not about our relationship really, like I said, our love was rock solid, and I had utmost faith that nothing - especially something as relatively fleeting as five months apart – could change that.

No, I wasn’t really worried about Frances and I, or our relationship, our future. We had made plans to meet in Australia after my five month trek and settle in the summer sun for awhile Downunder together, well into 2003. Frances was so keen on joining me she had spontaneously e-mailed my family, telling them she was thrilled she would soon be part of their lives.

So no, it wasn’t Frances and I that I was stressed about. It was Frances herself. Not only was the departure date for my own five-month absence from her life coming up, but…Frances was also shutting down her own life in London. She was preparing, in July, to leave her family, her friends, her career job, her desperately hard won security and stability, to go to Australia and have no stability at all.

As I have might have mentioned about Frances, she’s not a big fan of change. So all this upheaval wasn’t going down too well. She became very stressed and worried about her future, which rubbed off on me. She kept see-sawing about whether she would be able to leave or not. She craved the knowledge that things would be OK once she got there. I told her that not knowing what was gonna happen was one of the primary pleasures in life. She didn’t think she could bare to be away from her family and friends in England for too long. I told her she would be able to appreciate them so much more with a bit of time and a lot a space between her and them. Poor Frances. I felt guilty, like she might have only agreed to go to Australia because of me, that she didn’t really want to go. A lot of other people – including her family, definitely thought she never would have booked a flight to Australia if I hadn’t been the reason. But she kept insisting that Australia had always been a dream of hers, that me and the timing had just been the perfect catalyst to motivate her in 2002. I was grateful for that perfect timing. I wanted to be with Frances. But I also wanted to be in Australia, for the last bit of 2002 – for my Mum’s sake, mostly. So I was glad she wanted to go anyway. I wanted to be with her, but I didn’t want to be the reason she went. As I had told Frances since we had met – she could not miss the opportunity to live and work in Australia. Whether she was with me or not was irrelevant, she had to try Oz out, she would never regret it, I was sure.

Frances felt the same way of course – when she was rational – but, there were a few time-offs from rationality as both of our D-Days loomed. It wasn’t just her trip that was causing all her stress, my trip was a big culprit too. I gotta say, from the get-go, Frances had been nothing but supportive of me and my Euro-plans. She had made it pretty clear she wasn’t crazy about me leaving her for five months, and suggested she’d prefer I didn’t extend Europe with possible trips on the Trans-Siberian Express through China (so I ditched that idea and kept it to five months exactly). One thing I didn’t back down on though was the mobile phone issue. Frances insisted that I should take a mobile phone with me on my trip around Europe so that we could be in touch everyday, or whenever we felt like calling one another. I resisted – for starters I couldn’t afford it – but more importantly I thought that traveling with a mobile phone really didn’t interpret the phrase “getting away from it all” in the best possible way. I also didn’t want a phone on the trip because I knew AJ would be more easily tempted back into his harem-hailing habits. Frances wasn’t crazy about my reasonings, but I assured her I would be calling her so regularly she’d get sick of her ring tone in no time. She wasn’t happy, but she understood, and like everything to do with the trip, she supported me. Because honestly, Frances was the very epitome of support. She helped me research. She helped with the van. She encouraged me use her family’s house in Meldreth as a pit stop. She was amazing.

But…she wasn’t too happy about it. I think I was a little too insensitive to realise back then, but…Frances, usually a talkative and social person, would always clam up and sit silently when I talked to people about my travel plans. Often, if she could, she would excuse herself and leave the room. I think, in her way, she had fully accepted I was leaving her for five months and decided to be as supportive to me as possible. But the best way for her to deal with it was accept I was going, lock that away, and then go into a sort of denial that it was actually gonna happen.

When I actually lifted my head out of my normal cloud of insensitivity and noticed these reserved or sad moods of hers and tried to talk about it, Frances became more unhappy. The last thing she would ever have done was try to stop me. She would never have said “It’s the trip or me”, which made me love her a million times more. She knew how precious this dream was to me. She was determined to help me as much as she could in attaining it. But that didn’t mean she had to like it.

Frances and I had a few teary sessions before I left. They were very frustrating for me. I knew that I would return after five months with my love for Frances renewed, multiplied by my time away. But Frances – who had never been left by – of left herself – loved ones for significant amounts of time before, she was very confused. I was leaving her, and then, two months later, she was leaving everything else she loved and feel secure with. She was never vague about us, about her and I and our love, but she was increasingly vague about herself, about where she was going, where she would be, what she would want.

I was extremely worried about her. She meant the world to me. She was my life. I had many, many second thoughts about leaving.

I wanted to be there for her the way she had been there for me. I wanted to help her leave her life in England and set one up in Australia. But Frances would never have let me give up my Euro-dream for her. And a big part of me didn’t want to give it up either. It was something I’d aspired to for decades. It was at the top of my to-do list. It was my ultimate dream.

Or so I thought.

I realise now that the van trip was never my ultimate dream. Frances Farbridge was my ultimate dream. She was everything I’d wanted, looked for, dreamed about all my life. She was worth a million van trips, a million travel dreams. I could never see Europe or Asia or South America again in my life, and I would be OK, I would still be me, still be happy. But never seeing Frances Farbridge again…the thought was too heart-wrenching to contemplate. Agonising.

Frances knew how I felt. She knew that she and her needs were much more important to me than a trip. But she wanted me to go. She would not let me not go. I was the one that was always encouraging her to think about change, to challenge the status quo, to see where new paths might lead her. To turn around and suggest to her now that all that stuff I had told her about how she should go see Australia and broaden her horizons and meet new people and try new things…well, to tell her that that stuff was still relevant to Frances Farbridge, but it didn’t apply to David Holmes right then because he was too comfortable and secure with her… I couldn’t really say all that without sounding hypocritical. It was a complicated issue. There were factors of compromise and timing and mutual respect that I won’t even go into.

It was a difficult time for me, and as I mentioned, I thought about this issue a lot before I left.

Was I risking the best thing that had ever happened to me, would ever happen to me? Was I risking my soulmate, my soul, for this travel dream?…

Tough call.

I thought about Europe, about all the incredible vistas I’d seen in books, places where I’d never actually planted my feet down for real and taken a deep breath, and smelt the air. I thought about AJ, my closest mate for several years, and this trip, out last chance to have a laugh and be silly before finally going our separate ways.

And I thought about Frances. I thought about a random Friday evening in April when I had met her in a bookstore. I’d been researching Italy and she had walked in all late and tipsy from work drinks and given me a big hug and kiss. We had only been apart for two days but I realised in that moment how much I had missed her, and how tough five months apart would be.

I thought about Frances and her cats, and the pure, simple, adoring joy she gets on her face when she cuddles them. I thought about how watching her at these simple moments had bought me more happiness than any other times of my life.

I thought about all this stuff. My mind swirled and my heart ached.

And I made my decision.

I went to Europe. I left Frances behind.

I don’t have any regrets.

But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do things differently if I got a chance to do them all again.


---------------


Shirley you can’t be serious…


I finished work at the end of April. We moved out of West Kensington three days later. We were supposed to leave England the same day.

Unfortunately, there were problems with the van. Mr Julio would mumble vague promises to us every time we saw him, and Julio worked us with his big, fake, everything’s-gonna-be-alright smile. We had no choice but to wait. The van took another week or two to be ready. In the meantime AJ and I managed to “borrow” our van from the workshop one weekend to take it up to Meldreth.

During this time we took the Farbridge family to their favourite Chinese restaurant, as a thank you for all they had done for us as ground crew. With a full complement of Farbridges in the back, the van struggled gamely on her test drive. Normally it was slow. But seven people inside, the van could have been outpaced by a tortoise on steroids. However, the van got us to the restaurant and back, with only a hiccup or two from the engine, and with many laughs and jokes from the Farbridge clan. Despite their jokes, they continued to be incredibly supportive that weekend.

Inside the dining room of their house, it looked as if a bomb had hit. But this bomb was worse that anything Saddam Hussein had ever conceived. Instead of chemical or biological bombardment, this bomb made the entire dining room unrecognizable by covering every square foot with Australiarna – Aussie clothes, Aussie books, Aussie paraphernalia, Aussie crap. Because it was here in the dining room that AJ and I sorted through and repacked our multiple bags of stuff. Most bags got stored in the Farbridge attic. The others got wedged into the van, ready for our adventure.

If the Farbridge dining room looked like a war zone, then their driveway was ground zero. Here, AJ and I stripped everything outta the van which wasn’t nailed down, and, using a plethora of cleaning products courtesy of Orchestream, we scrubbed every single inch of both them and the inside and outside of the vehicle. We discovered that the surface of the fiberglass roof extension was actually white underneath the brown. We got the gas stove going. We couldn’t get the little fridge running but we decided it would have used too much gas to run anyway. We removed the indoor chemical toilet (sort of a glorified potty), and cleaned it like it carried nuclear waste. We then returned it into the van, before making a vow never to use the toilet unless there was a life or death emergency.

We stocked every cupboard on board the van with supplies (nuts, breakfast bars, soups, tinned food, candy, dried fruit), all courtesy of Orchestream’s grocery order. We filled the compartments under the bed with dozens of spare parts and tools and oil and camping equipment. We filled the compartment above our driver’s cabin with maps and guidebooks and sleeping bags and our tent. Every square centimetre was taken up. We squeezed our 400 films into the cupboard at the rear. We squeezed our backpacks into the toilet cubicle. We mopped and vacuumed that van with a passion our mother’s would never have recognized.

The cats just watched all this mess and motion with bemusement. Murphy used to sneak into the van and curl up on the green cushions and watch us idly, wondering what these two nutters were doing. India stormed out of the dining room in a grump, resenting our temporary occupation. George looked like he wanted to come with us, but he had too good a set-up in Meldreth to ever seriously contemplate leaving.

The whole family was very supportive. Robin (Mr Meldreth) helped us move things around in the garage, loaned us tools and vacuum cleaners and patience. Lesley (Mrs Meldreth), kept up a constant stream of refueling material - if not for the van - then certainly for the two hapless workers on her. Frances took us to the Queens Head pub for refueling breaks of another kind. As a final flourish, Frances and Lesley somehow managed to laminate my massive map on Europe onto the dining room table of the van. We could now map our route (or guess our location) every night on the road when we had dinner. Soon our stuff was tidied and the van was as prepared as we could get her.

We dropped her back to Mr Julio’s for what we hoped was the final flight of the boomerang. We were promised it would be ready within a day. Time was so short we were leaving the day we picked the van up. After that there was nothing to do. Except one thing. Stop calling it “the van”. Stop calling it “it”. We had to name it.

I’d sent out an e-mail when we bought the van asking for name suggestions, and been bombarded with ideas. Here’s a few of the more creative (and PG-rated) ones:

Lamborgreenie, The Shaggin Wagon, Fartsky and Crutch, Spartacus, SPLAT-Was-That-A-Cat?, Kermit, Booger, The Turtle, Dragonfly, A-Cane-Toad-Puked-Over-My-Van-Mobile, Wheredafukarwe, Jihad General, Dead Frog, Hulk, Hope, Van Solo, Sputnik.

All wonderful ideas, and very difficult to reject. Many thanks to all of you who participated. But we soon eliminated the above options and narrowed it down to four finalists. The name I liked the most was probably “Oscar”. Suggested by my mate Melanie, this name connoted “Oscar the Grouch” from Sesame Street – our van was the same colour as Oscar and was certainly looking to have the capacity for grouchiness. I wanted to slap a fake rubbish bin lid on the front of the van and paint “Oscar” on it. (Oscar the Grouch lived in a trash can). Frances was a big fan of Oscar as a name as well.

Another option was “Vanessa”, suggested by Lesley. At first I just assumed this was a random idea snatched straight outta the baby book, but when the penny finally dropped and I realized – “Oh, VAN-essa”, I kinda liked the vaguely existential suggestion of it. But AJ had been obsessed with a girl called Vanessa for a good year, and not that long ago, so I though it wise to steer away from that course.

AJ did like this name my friend Victoria had put forward when I asked for suggestions: “I-didn’t-turn-up-to-my-friend-Victoria’s-27th-birthday-drinks-even-though-I-promised-I-would,-and-even-sounded-convincing.-Therefore-I-am-a-bad-and-slovenly-human-being-who-didn’t-even-bother-to-apologise-for-said-poor-behaviour.”

Hmm, not bad, but maybe just a bit too much of a mouthful.

One name I did approve of was “Shirley”. Unlike Oscar, or Vanessa, this name had nothing to connote it with the van itself. It actually came from one of AJ and my favourite movies: Airplane! or Flying High. For the two of you who haven’t seen it, our favourite scene featured an exchange between Leslie Nielsen and the guy that played Ted Striker:

Leslie: Can you fly this plane?
Striker: Surely you can’t be serious!
Leslie: I am serious, and don’t call me “Shirley”.

One of the finer comedic moments in cinema history, I’m shirl you’ll agree.

Jane – not the sharpest pencil in the box – had to have that joke (among others) explained to when we played her the video, but once she got it, she loved it. So both Jane and AJ were pushing for the moniker “Shirley”.

Even though I preferred Oscar, I quite liked it too. I also wanted to give AJ some input into the van, to feel he’d contributed in some way. After all, I’d sought it and bought it, and dealt primarily with all the paperwork and mechanic liaisons – I felt I already had a massive emotional (as well as financial) investment in the machine. I wanted AJ to connect with it as well, so I agreed to run with his suggestion.

Our van was no longer an “it”. Our van was now a “she”.

Our van was no longer “that piece of crap”. She was now “Shirley”.

Now, when we introduced people to the van and to our plans to spend five months driving her around Europe, they wouldn’t just be able to say – as some had in the past, and I quote: “Are you guys nuts??? You think you are going to make it around Europe??? In that thing????”

Now they could express their incredulity with one simple line:

“Shirley you can’t be serious!!!”.

We were finally ready to roll.


---------------


I never thought the day would come, but it did.

Picking a name for the van was just the final piece in a long, arduous process of organisation. But just in time, everything fell perfectly into place. And I can’t remember ever feeling so good.

I was off again to see the world. I was off on one of the biggest trips of my life. Finally I was going to see Europe.

My life in London had been neatly shutdown and compartmentalised. Work and routine had been flushed down the toilet. I had farewelled all of my good friends with a serious of celebrations.

The gremlins had finally been chased out of the van, it seemed. AJ was finally letting go of his London lifestyle and his actions were finally seeming to match his promised commitment to our trip. He had dedicatedly helped me clean and ready Shirley, and he seemed vaguely interested in our initial traveling route. His spirits were high as well.

Within six months I would be back in Brisbane with my family, meeting my gorgeous niece Sarah for the first time, and deciding how best I could help my Mum with her future plans. Wherever I lived in Australia for the subsequent year, I knew it would be with Frances, my love, my life. Even if she never joined me in Europe before she left for Australia, I was looking forward to introducing her to my favourite parts and people of Australia - perhaps looking forward to this even more than my Euro-trip.

My future for the next year or two seemed pre-destined. And my future for the next year or two seemed blessed.

Things were perfect.

I was on top of the world.

I knew that absolutely nothing could go wrong.

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