Living an average dream

There is at least one cockroach in my room.

I am not living with the abusive French lady. I am instead living with a very nice Sri Lankan lady. But one thing she didn't warn me about before I moved in a few days ago was that the suburb - Balmain - attracts cockroaches, and even though she keeps the house very clean, they have a tendency to get in and around the place. I know that cockroaches aren't dangerous, and I know that they, like most creepy crawlies, don't really bother people - but they are gross, and I don't really know what to do about them. There was a big one in my room earlier and I asked my landlady what to do, and she marched around with some spray before asking me "are you afraid of them?" I said I wasn't, because I didn't want to look like a wuss, but she just laughed and left the spray with me. "The big ones, they fly."

It is a nice house. And my landlady is nice, although she's one of those people who talks and talks and talks while somehow leaving nothing much to respond to. You're sitting there listening to her, nodding, feeling like you should add something, but there's really not much to add, so you end up saying inane rather than insightful things. "Yeah, you don't want to be like your parents, but then inevitably, you are!" I interject, nervously, and unnecessarily. The reason that came up is because the other tenant here is an alcoholic who is failing to deal with a recent breakup. He apparently blames his drinking in part on his mother, because she always drank a lot.

My landlady told me that this other tenant has been falling over a great deal because he always drinks to excess - and that a week or two ago he got clipped by a bus when he was trying to cross the road. Still, he went to Bali yesterday because it's his fiftieth birthday and it had been organised for months, despite the fact he is obviously quite bruised, and did I mention that he's going with a few friends as well as the ex-wife? Yeah, well, they'd organised it BEFORE the breakup, so of course she's still going. Sometimes he spends the night at her house and apparently she sometimes comes here, so it sounds more like one of those breakups that isn't really a breakup to me. I am assured that he is very nice - "harmless", even - and I'm sure he is. He seemed pleasant enough the one time I met him when he came back from a night of heavy drinking. He had, naturally, just fallen over, so I left him to "take some Valium and have an early night". (Landlady and I discussed the whole "mixing alcohol and Valium" thing and concluded it's not really something we can stop a fifty-year-old man we don't know especially well from doing.)

Rachael's flat is in Freshwater, which takes about an hour and a half for me to get to on various buses. I went there today, and we went to the beach, which is only a few minutes' walk from hers. I saw lifeguards shouting at swimmers, but Rachael said that when she saw them before they were just talking to sexy ladies in bikinis. Perhaps saving their lives by stopping them from going in the water in the first place.

Freshwater is close to the hilariously-named suburb of Manly. You may have seen a couple of Manly photos if you follow me on Instagram. Unfortunately, though, two of my favourite Manly things that I have read about - namely Manly Fun Pier and Manly Dance - have proved impossible to find. Still, whenever I trek to Rachael's flat I have to stop at "Manly Services" - small mercies.

As for what I'm doing with my time at the moment: I'm applying for jobs. It's even more soul-destroying than it would usually be at home because a lot of adverts stipulate "no working holiday visas" or "Australian locals only" or, in one case, "Asians preferred" - but I imagine something will come my way in the end. I really hope it does, not least because it will allow me to live on a diet that doesn't consist almost exclusively of Weet-Bix (yes, no "a" in Australia), fruit, and pasta. (I say "almost" exclusively because I did buy some Coke the other day.)

I could just stay in the house with the cockroaches and the drunk and the loquacious landlady, and watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch on YouTube.

...I'm already on season 2.

Harvey: Lots of famous people were editors of their school newspaper!
Sabrina: Really? Like who?
Harvey: I dunno... Charlemagne?

Shining tumbling water

I saw another huntsman spider. It was hiding in between the cushion and the frame of the sofa, and although it clearly just wanted to stay in that space and not bother anyone, that is obviously not allowed because big spiders do not have that kind of freedom. Big spiders should be outside. I’m all for human/spider segregation. I don’t want them in my schools or my swimming pools. I want them out.

I saw this spider in Katoomba, a picturesque town in the Blue Mountains. It’s probably the most touristy one because it’s the one closest to the Three Sisters, three towers of rock - they probably have a grander geological term - that are known to the layman as “pretty rad”. 

It’s about two hours west of central Sydney by train, and is usually not as hot as central Sydney. Of course, when we went, it was as hot as central Sydney. This mini heatwave meant we hiked around in temperatures in the high thirties and although I know I will garner no sympathy from those of you in the northern hemisphere, I did get my comeuppance.

My blood is incredibly delicious. This isn’t the kind of thing they tell you when you give blood (the only thing I learned the one time I did that several years ago is that they ask women “have you ever had sex with a man who’s had sex with another man?” which they presumably usually have to answer with “I don’t think so…?”). I realised that my blood was delicious when I went to California in 2011, and went hiking with a Californian. She didn’t know that mosquitoes came out at that time of year – they’d never bothered her when she’d hiked there before – but I came out with 55 bites on my left leg alone. My curse has not lifted since. I have bites on my legs and feet and arms and neck and elbows and wrists. (Thankfully – though somewhat backhanded-complimentedly – insects don’t seem to like my face.) So we hiked and I got bitten and I sweated out most of the water in my body and I saw a big spider. Great fun, but I am currently very itchy; that kind of directionless itchiness that you know you shouldn’t solve with scratching, so you rub your bites against the duvet or something because at least you’re not scratching the bites with your fingernails that way. That kind of directionless itchiness that, if I were a dog, I’d solve by dragging my bum across the floor.

On the way back from Katoomba I ended up sitting opposite a nice Australian lady on the train who lived in Lithgow, further out in the bush, who regaled me with tales of how she has to check the kids’ beds and sandpit for the presence of redback spiders, stupid spiders that, of course, are very poisonous. (Michaela, one of the Aussie contingent at my Christmas job, said that they used to get them on the tables and chairs in her primary school, and they just had to tell the teacher so that they’d get rid of them. The most dangerous thing I remember seeing at primary school was a battery that had been sitting in the sun which we all dared each other to touch. It was hot, but I don’t think it bit any of us.)

(Incidentally, I’ve got the TV on. In award-nominated Puberty Blues, one girl said to her mum “I do hate you! And I’ll hate you forever!” Later one of her friends ate a guy’s pie and he got angry and kicked her but she didn’t defend her. Right now her dad appears to have grounded her – at least I think that’s what he means when he says she’s “gated” for a month.)

Now I’m in Sydney I am back to seeing the kinds of people that only big cities have to offer. I was at the bus stop earlier, on the phone to Rachael, when some frantic vagabond yelled at me “WHEN IS THE NEXT 144?!”. I said I didn’t know, but he said “BUT THE TIMETABLE IS RIGHT THERE SO TELL ME, WHEN IS THE NEXT 144?!”. I told him but Rachael thought I was talking to her, but I couldn’t really explain that I was next to a mental who was getting steadily more angry at me for not being able to read a type of timetable that I’ve never had to read before.

In addition to the classic “unhinged man on the street” kind of mental, I also met a mental at a viewing of a house. Rachael couldn’t come because she was caught up at a different one, so I had the pleasure of doing this one on my own. I said to the French lady who owned it that I said I’d take some pictures for Rachael, but she said there was no point because all the photos were on the advert and she was renovating anyway. She then told me that she didn’t really want two friends moving in because they’d probably just hang out with each other rather than her. When she asked what work we wanted to pursue, I said rather vaguely that I wanted to pursue something in education and she took this to mean that the area was probably inconvenient for me, I think based purely on the fact that she couldn’t think of a place nearby where I might want to work. “Obviously that doesn’t mean that I’d say no if you were interested in living here…” she said, convincingly. She recommended I live in Redfern which, from what I can tell from what every single person in Sydney thinks, is perhaps the worst suburb in Sydney. I’m not sure I was her kind of person.

Then we went downstairs and we saw the cat that sometimes comes and eats food in her kitchen, but it was on the table so she whacked it with an empty water bottle.

Fuck her.

Emu jerky

I’ve been reading Down Under by Bill Bryson, in which he talks about how ridiculous Australia is. Did you know they had a prime minister who was walking along the beach one day and got swallowed up by the waves, and was never heard from again? That happened to their head of state, and yet nobody – outwith Australia, at least – seems to really know about it.

Nobody seems to really know anything about Australia. Or at least not as much as I feel like we should, considering it’s really not that different from the UK in many ways. It’s like a weird parallel dimension. A lot of the TV broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is just BBC stuff (Midsomer Murders seems to be on most hours of the day), but it’s good to know that the TV we always knew Australians really watched – Neighbours and Home and Away – is also on all the time.

Other classic Australian telly includes the heavily trailed “Puberty Blues”, in which a teenager appears to be troubled by things, and one breakfast show which breaks up all that tiring sad news stuff with clips of cute animals from a vault apparently unknown to the newscasters. It adds an unsettling air of mystery to proceedings, like they’re being forced to improvise by some deus ex machina character for absolutely no reason other than to test their ability to cope under pressure. They never do very well. “I’m not sure whose golden retriever puppies these are,” muses the anchor, “but they sure do love playing with ice blocks.”

There’s a lot that I don’t understand about Australia, but is familiar enough to be comforting. “Bam! And the dirt is gone.” Almost. “How you going?” the Australians say. (I’m used to this, as I worked with a massive Australian contingent at my last job, but it’s still novel. I’m going… well?) I’m even confused by the book I’m reading, the one I said was called Down Under. After discussing it with Rachael we realised that we’re reading the same thing, but her book is called In a Sunburned Country. Why?!

There are some things about Australia that were pleasant surprises for me when I got here, like how Sydney has the largest IMAX cinema in the world. It doesn’t seem the obvious place, because it’s not even a particularly densely populated city, but I enjoyed watching Catching Fire in a half empty cinema. Most surprising, though, is probably the fact that there is a Spiegeltent in Hyde Park in central Sydney – I worked in one almost identical to it in Edinburgh a number of weeks ago, and one of the shows I staffed is performing here too. “Give me work!” I’ll say. “I’m pretty sure we know the same people! Do you want to see how good I am at holding a fire blanket?”

And then I won’t be jobless and homeless any longer.

Poison and spiders

I had to fill out one of those cards declaring why you were visiting Australia, how long you were there for, where you were staying, and whether you’d brought lots of food and soil and wood with you. I had muddy boots and a small wooden tortoise with me (because I packed the essentials), but when customs asked me about it they thought on it for all of a second before deciding that “it’s fine mate”, and sent me on my merry way.

I had intended to meet Ronan when I arrived, but because I unexpectedly ended up arriving from Melbourne rather than Delhi, I came in through a domestic arrivals gate, which is not where he expected me to arrive. My first twenty minutes or so in Sydney were therefore made up of aimlessly wandering around a terminal in a tired, manic frame of mind completely inadequate to my goal of finding another tired, manic foreigner. (For those who don’t know, I’ve moved to Australia with Rachael, but our friend Ronan is holidaying with us for the first few weeks, as is Henry, Rachael’s boyfriend.)

Ronan was there somewhere, though, which was a good start, as we were – and are – sharing a hostel room. (Rachael and Henry are in a different part of town because they hate us.*) We got a bus into the city, but we didn’t know where we were getting off, so we had a stab in the dark. We got off in the right area, but then duly failed to read any maps correctly (despite the fact we are both able to use compasses and hike without getting lost and, usually, can read maps). We got lost. By this point I was feeling exceptionally unwell and was very grateful when a passing taxi driver revelled in our idiocy and gave us a lift.

Turns out the hostel was only a kilometre away from where we’d ended up and, had we taken a different turn earlier, we would have gotten there in mere minutes. Ha ha ha! Fuck off.

I passed out almost immediately, although Ronan found it in himself to sleep for an hour and then go for a walk to try and get familiar with the area. When I woke up, he was back in the room, and said “you didn’t tell me there was a massive spider in the bathroom”. I laughed, because he was being ridiculous. “No, seriously.” I frowned, and interrogated him because he was probably being a dirty liar, but then I looked in the bathroom and saw that there was indeed a big fuckoff spider curled up over the door. I speculated that it was a huntsman, based only on YouTube videos I’d watched to terrify myself before I came here. I didn’t really want to rely on that expertise when assessing how dangerous it was. (Huntsman bites aren’t dangerous, but they hurt. Huntsmen also run incredibly quickly because they don’t spin webs, instead chasing their prey down.) It could have been a huntsman, or it could have been a more dangerous spider, or a snake, or a shark (which it probably was because it was in the bathroom, where the water is). I’m a foreigner and I don’t want to take any chances.

The worst thing about this bathroom shark was that it didn’t really do anything when you were using the toilet or the sink, but as soon as you showered it started extending its legs and wiggling its mandibles. If it WAS a huntsman, then the one thing I knew for sure was that it could run over to me so quickly that there would be nothing I could do. (The layout of the bathroom is such that the shower takes up one side of the room. You are shut in at that end, but there is a gap of about a foot above the door where deadly creatures could easily run in and join you.) Ronan helpfully informed me that when he clapped, the spider stopped moving, but that wasn’t especially comforting because both of us know that clapping is not a widely used defence in the animal kingdom – for good reason. Our studies of biology have not gone completely to waste. But, we did both leave the hostel later that day, both having successfully (and independently) showered, albeit in abject fear a couple of metres away from the huntsman bathroom shark.

We attempted to meet up with Rachael and Henry, but because of internet access proving to be frequently costly and difficult to access, by the time we got to where they said they were, they’d gone. We caught a bus home, weighing up the pros and cons of the spider still being where we’d left it. As I’m a rational human being, I didn’t ever want to be near it, especially not when I was asleep. On the flipside, if it had disappeared, I was going to assume it was burrowed under my duvet and was going to bite me on the bum because spiders are creeps.

Naturally, the spider was nowhere to be seen. We went round hitting everything to see if a spider emerged, but ultimately forced ourselves to conclude that it had gone out of the window. I was horrified because I didn’t know the window had been open. Ronan explained that it was open before we checked in, which is probably why there was a spider inside.** I have henceforth decreed that no window is ever opened because I know I don’t have a deathwish.

It was that night that my stomach decided that it was especially unhappy, I think due to one of the in-flight meals. I soldiered on, because I’m in Australia, and this would be a really inconvenient time to be ill, so I logically decided not to be ill. The next day we tried to find Rachael and Henry – unfortunately wandering into the wrong hotel, leading to a comedic thread of messages (“we’re in the lobby but we can’t see you…?”; “oh, no, please don’t go to that room, we’re not in there!”). A couple of train rides later we found the two of them, Rachael being ill too, Australia presumably trying to reject us both. This was the first time I’d seen the person I’d be living in Australia with since November, so it was comforting to know she still existed and that Ronan hadn’t been keeping up an elaborate ruse to protect my feelings/destroy me out of hatred.

Rachael being a broken shell of a woman, Ronan and I cheerfully left the responsibility of dealing with her to Henry, and went to Darling Harbour on the ferry. We met up with Ronan’s holidaying cousin, and later Rachael and Henry mustered up the wellness to join us. I then spent my time watching them eat dinner while my self-important innards loudly asserted themselves as unhappy, regularly rearranging themselves for no obvious reason.

My innards’ game of squelchy Tetris continued the day after, the day that Ronan and I wandered around outside the Opera House and the botanic gardens. Again, we met up with Rachael and Henry, but I died at about half three and went back to the hostel. Determined to absorb Aussie culture, I watched Horrible Histories, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, flushing myself with water and Powerade because I guess I was probably losing electrolytes because food poisoning is kind of like a sport.

I think I’m better today.

*Neither of them provided this as the reason, but as a reader of MY blog, you are subject to MY whims.

**Rachael later said that she asked Henry what he would do if there was a spider in their room. Henry said “well, I would complain to reception”, like the hotel had ignored their booking for a spider-free room.

In which I recount how Air India failed to do any good for my emotional wellbeing

The first leg in my vile journey to Australia was a flight from Edinburgh to Heathrow. The flight was at 9:10am, but of course because Blairgowrie isn't conveniently close to anything much it meant that I got up at 5am to do the last of my packing before leaving at 6 to check in in plenty of time. That was probably the last time I'd ever be in that house. The last time I would be in that house would be when I was sleep deprived, terrified and sad. Bye house!

So I went to Edinburgh airport with Mum and Dad, and I met Ali there, and we all had some coffee, and then we all said our goodbyes and I went through security but I was suspicious so they frisked me (but any frisking I undergo could never be as uncomfortable as the time I was frisked in California and halfway through the guy went "wait, how old are you?" and I said "nineteen..." and he said "oh good!" and continued). And then I met Bee at Heathrow, and we had breakfast and hot chocolates that were made by a trainee so were basically mugs of cream and then I said my goodbyes and went through security and my bags were suspicious so they used that security wand on my stuff and my stuff was fine and at least I wasn't frisked by a paedophile.

My flight from Heathrow had a stopover at Delhi, and the first flight was full of terrifying idiots. For one thing, who smokes in the aeroplane toilet? I always thought that the whole "don't smoke on an aeroplane" thing went without saying, but when a man smoked in the toilet and all the stewards told him off he was all "hey what, why is it a problem, back off". But at least he didn't have to get carried to the back of the plane by two stewards like some other guy, and I'm happy he didn't come and sit next to me like this other drunken maniac who kept telling me "I'm a lyrical terrorist! I'm going to kill you! Hahaha! I'm joking! But I'm not. Sheeeiit!"

That guy left in due course, but immediately forgot where he was and where he'd put any of his stuff so when a guy pointed to his bag in the seat next to me he was elated and gave me a hug. "Thanks man! You're such a good guy!" I am a good guy. Please leave me alone. He did, but the toddler in front of me started standing on the armrest and staring at me and shouting nonsense because if there's anything my past work with kids has told me it's that they don't tend to make any sense until the age of about 9 or 10. Coincidentally I was trying to read The Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris at the time, in which Sedaris reminisces about being an elf, and how kids are enthusiastic and parents are annoying, and I was relating to it because I was an elf, and wishing I was more like Sedaris because I'd clearly made a start (except I'll try not to do that thing he did of becoming a meth addict) and why wouldn't this child leave me alone and just keep giving his toys to the other alcoholic, the one sitting across the aisle from me? He had already accepted the toddler's offering of his tractor-covered wellies. They sat poking out of the pocket in front of him for the rest of the flight.

And isn't it polite etiquette to not speak to someone when they've got headphones in? That's not to say that I don't want to speak to anyone when I've got headphones in - but I'd want to be friends with the person who spoke to me. If sleep deprived me is on the verge of tears watching Pacific Rim (Maoko's flashback is emotional) then leave me alone yeah? If sleep deprived me is on the verge of tears watching Elysium, or I Am Sam, or Hugo, or Home Alone 2 (they forgot about him AGAIN?) then LEAVE ME ALONE YEAH?

And furthermore, Air India, people joke that you would serve curry for every meal. With that ridiculous stereotype in mind, the one I tried to defend you from, why do you serve curry for every meal? Curry for breakfast is sick. (It also made me sick, but I'll regale you with my food poisoning diaries later.)

I eventually got to Delhi and had an 8 hour layover, so I found a corner where I could sort of fall asleep but at the cost of doing my neck in, and then when it actually got to boarding, my flight number was due to go to Melbourne, not Sydney, and whenever I asked anyone about it they said vaguely "just wait 5 minutes" or "yeah it goes to Sydney" without explaining why it said Melbourne, not Sydney (they are two different cities). Eventually when I got on the plane one of the stewards said that it would go to Sydney afterwards, but I only really felt comfortable when I heard a girl sitting behind me talking about how she was going to Sydney and why was she on this flight? She duly became my Plane Friend because WHERE THE FUCK ARE WE GOING?

The 11 and a half hour flight to Melbourne was a pain because we got too much curry and the girl sitting next to me put our shared armrest up and kept jabbing me with her elbows. The only communication between us was when she pointed at something on my meal and declared it "Swedish!" (even though it definitely wasn't) and when I asked her if she'd let me out so I could go to the toilet and she didn't get out of her seat so I ended up towering over her in my efforts to get past her, which was surely exceedingly uncomfortable for the both of us. She left at Melbourne though, whereas I got off the plane with Plane Friend, went through security, and then got back on exactly the same seat on the same plane for our hour-long trip to Sydney. And by this point, I didn't really want a fourth flight because I wanted to die.

But I got to Sydney, life intact, bowels struggling. Look forward to food poisoning tales in the next post. (To avoid disappointment, I don't have any major insights into food poisoning. It will be more about the shitting huge huntsman spider we had in our bathroom, and stuff about Australia and that.)

12 hours, 12 degrees

3:15pm in Blairgowrie and it's 8ºC. 3:15am in Sydney and it's 20ºC. I still don't own any shorts.

I do now own a suitcase, though. But I haven't put anything in it yet because I've just been spending my time alerting my bank, arguably at the latest possible moment, that I'm off to the other side of the world. I also tried to apply for a new kind of bank account but apparently that's the kind of thing that takes a couple of days to process or something and I probably shouldn't have left it to the day before leaving to try and do that or some shit? Bankers eh, am I right? #brokenbritain

For those of you who might want to maintain some kind of reasonably consistent contact with me, I'm keeping my phone, and so I'll be keeping all the apps I have on it. In other words, I probably don't like you enough to text or phone you from Australia because that will cost a lot of money, but if I'm in a place with wi-fi then you might be lucky enough to get a message or photo or something. At risk of being inundated with adoring internet fans, my username on Twitter and Snapchat is rumrapture, and my username on Instagram is cwwg. (The former is one I made on a gaming forum when I was 14. The latter is a product of latent po-facedness that hit me at 21.)

But whatever I don't care if you add me because I'm going to have loads of amazing fun in Oz yeah?

(Please add me. I want to preempt the inevitable homesickness.)

WHAT WAS THAT I COULDN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE FUN IN THE SUN

The last supper

I just had what is probably going to be my last meal with my family in the house I grew up in. (Parents want to sell it. Blairgowrie just isn't cutting it any more.)

It is Saturday night and I leave for Australia on Tuesday morning. Tomorrow I will hopefully be buying a suitcase to put my things in for the trip. I don't own any shorts.

I lost my car keys earlier so I almost didn't even manage to travel from Edinburgh to Blairgowrie (59 miles), never mind Blairgowrie to Sydney (10,473 miles).

I have made my peace with the fact that Australia is a death trap. I simply hope that when sharks try to eat me, my hands remain intact so I can blog about the fact that I've got no legs.

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