“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” – Andre Gide
Music from Foojitsu, Kleg, Faust, Trumans Water, Devo, Lightning Bolt, Good Boy, Unsane, Bill Laswell, Charming Hostess, Grim Clone Band and Sly and the Revolutionaries.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful to meet with Tok at Utopia, who made my first coffees for the day. I am also happy and grateful to meet a couple of teachers at my new school who were helpful towards me on my first day.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful today to be able to spend a few minutes with a cup of coffee and contemplate where I am in the world and what I have accomplished. It’s amazing to watch the little plants we put around our house growing into full bloom.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful to be able to sit outside my house as the sun rises, enjoying the cool air and drinking a cup of coffee. Grateful to be able to spend this time freely.
Two minds. Thinking mind and observing mind. Separate them, recognise negative emotions, own them and let them go!
My situation: about to start a new job which may have some of the problems of the previous ones. What advice would you give to someone in this situation?
Even as I write this I can see that my worry is about something that hasn’t happened. I don’t need to think about things in this way. I think I understand how I could have coped better in my previous situation so I should be able to deal with them in the event that they do happen again. Prepare and plan carefully to do the job as best you can but do not invest so much time and effort that it completely overrides everything else.
Balance!
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful this morning for having this space to sit in, the coffee I am drinking and the sun and rain for making our trees grow. I will grow with them.
Gratitude Journal
The best part of today was being able to snooze my alarm and then when I did get up I sat with my coffee on the terrace, calm and relaxed. I’m so happy and grateful to have these opportunities.
We’re taking an overnight flight to the UK and of course, I slept a lot already. It’s only in more recent years that I’ve been able to even sleep a little bit on planes. Except for that one time out of Guangzhou, I was lucky enough to start talking to a girl as we were waiting for departure. Just by chance, she knew the staff working the counter and wrangled an upgrade to business class for herself. She was kind enough to come back down to cattle and tell me to follow her back to business class, where there was a spare seat. Best sleep on a plane ever, and probably the last time I’ll enjoy that too.
Our plane in and out of London is the new A380 and it is huge. Even for the likes of us paupers, it feels like there is a little more room to breathe at least. I barely manage to sleep though.
We arrive in London around 6am and the weather has me instantly cold and chilled (not in the relaxed sense at all). We pick up a hire car, which is amazing but I keep forgetting that it is manual and stall it at every roundabout. Then we take the wrong lane and exit off the motorway and the sky is grey and the rain is drizzling just that annoying amount to make the wipers screech. I am thoroughly depressed already.
Somehow the shitty English coffee manages to take off the edge at least for a while. Just remember not to watch what the barista actually does and just go by taste. I think I had one half-decent coffee this trip – which is one more than last time I visited the UK.
As we arrive in Brighton the sun very occasionally decides to show itself. We’re staying at Amy’s university friend’s house and she just happens to live herself on Brighton Marina. Sometimes I feel especially lucky to find myself in such beautiful places just through the people that I know.
It’s a great little house, and when I say little, I always forget just how tiny and compact English houses are. And doors – always doors. Gotta keep that heat in.
Amy has decided that we must eat Indian food on this trip and, as they are everywhere, it’s only a short walk to our lunch. It’s cold and even the slightest breeze is enough to make us shudder. We have prepared appropriate coats but there’s still the other bits turning blue. Luckily the sun decides to stay for a long while and the sky turns blue. Wait, are we still in England, in February?
Amy’s friend, Bookie, speaks with the typical American accent of her tutors from years ago. Something that I (or Australia) have managed to change with Amy over the years. She doesn’t sound English and not really Aussie but at least it’s not American.
Bookie is married to an airline pilot and he is away 20 days a month and he’s away now, arriving back in the following couple of days for his birthday. They have a five-year-old son called Kyle and when he comes home from school I’m tasked with keeping him entertained whilst food is prepared. We have fun playing Star Wars action figures and making up stories.
Later, Amy and I enjoy the comforts of a nice soft bed and perfect pillows. Back at Amy’s parent’s house, the bed we are sleeping on may as well be a block of concrete – it’s good for learning to sleep on a tiled floor though. The only downside of the night is I wake up having a coughing fit and end up in the living room for a spell. Amy is starting to catch it too and her voice is starting to crack.
We wake up again to brilliant sunshine and coffee’d up (instant) we hit the road, passing Arundel castle and some other Olde Worlde buildings. The history and mystery of England is a little bit magical for me if only the temperature was more appealing.
Heading along the coast we get back into very familiar territory for me, with roads I travelled repeatedly in other glory days. We soon arrive at my cousin’s house and are treated to a warm welcome of food and central heating, along with discussions about details for my mother’s funeral and some other minor details that need to be sorted whilst I’m here.
My cousin, Sharon and her husband Ken have been doing all the hard graft for my mother and for me, of course, over the last 18 months or so. I’m so lucky that she has been here and willing to assist with everything.
It still doesn’t seem real that my mother isn’t here to talk to, to show pictures and to keep updated on the minutiae of everyday life. I feel sad about that but not overly emotional. I keep wondering if I’m going to sit down one day and have a big cry. Maybe. I’ve upped my dose of antidepressants recently, in preparation for my big life move and it’s likely they are helping keep things smooth for me emotionally.
Another coughing fit just after going to bed sees me again relocating to the living room until I’m on the verge of sleep when I return to bed and later Amy wakes me with coughing of her own.
The weather is excellent again and even though it’s cold there’s little wind to bring in the chill. We drive back to my hometown and go to the bank where my mum and I have a joint account and sort out access for Sharon to deal with expenses etc. Amy and I spend a little more time walking around, returning again for pizza at Piccolo Mondo, once my favourite pizza ever, not so much these days though, it’s still good though.
We take ourselves on a country drive as I search out Bulbarrow Hill. I love this place. It sparks that mystical quality of olden days more than some of the other places scattered around the south, even more than Stonehenge. It’s a fabulous view and the sun’s rays break through the scattering of clouds.
I have time to scoff down some more home cooked food, that Sharon says isn’t to her usual quality but it tastes great to me. Bring on the cheese, potato, garlic and butter anytime!
I’m off for a quick catch-up with old school friends Rupert and Murray, though we barely have time with our busy schedules. A quick couple of pints and it’s time to head off on our merry ways, and I am feeling quite tipsy. That is until I open the pub door and the cold wind blast instantly sobers me. This forces me to reminisce quite clearly the many many nights spent walking home from the pub, or the local football club, or the school field where we huddled around a couple of cans of beer and maybe a fire. Those days were either hell fun or hell shit depending on my mood and what was going on around me. I miss the good bits. A lot.
Edit: Could not stop humming this tune during these few days – https://youtu.be/xk2QbCDRP0U
A fond farewell to Hayden in Brisbane as we lugged luggage again, two coffees down before boarding the plane. It was nice to fly in over Sydney (yet again) and if Brisbane was 10 times busier than Adelaide then Sydney repeated the feat over Brisbane especially as I struggled with my bags at two stations that didn’t have lifts. My dodgy elbows are extremely upset with me but what can a poor boy do.
Tonight I would stay with my friend Billie, her husband Jade and their daughter, Nexis, in the upmarket suburb of Killara on the North Shore of Sydney. They live in a house far too big for them, boxes still not unpacked from moving in 9 months ago. It did mean they could offer a spare room for this temporarily homeless wanderer for which I was grateful.
I met Billie about 10 or 11 years ago when I was part of a dragon boat racing team, representing Australia (somehow!), in a dirty bay on Hong Kong Island. Billie’s family head the institute of dragon boat racing in HK and Billie and her sister, Mandy, were the compere’s for the races. Both girls were and are extremely attractive and, Billie especially, bright and outgoing positive personalities.
Needless to say, they attracted the attention of the white boys at the races and at the drunken awards dinner on our last night there. Myself and another racer went out later for supper with Billie and we decided to stay in touch through email just in case our paths crossed again, under the pretence of sharing our photos of the week’s events with one another.
A few years later our paths did cross again as Billie became an air hostess with Cathay Pacific airlines. This, of course, took her all over the world, and eventually to Sydney. She got in touch and we met up one night for dinner. At the end of that night, she quietly invited me up to her room for coffee. I didn’t want to presume anything and I have no idea of her intention at the time but something in me decided not to take her up on the offer.
I’ve not really been one for one-night stands and I definitely didn’t want to do that with someone I felt that if I had then that might just be all our relationship might have been. I liked Billie, a lot, not because she was pretty but because we got on so well and had a lot of fun together. A friendship was more fulfilling than the possibility of brief exciting encounter and that’s the way I wanted to keep it.
We met a couple more times when she flew to Sydney. The final time with another of her crew, Kit, also a beautifully attractive girl. By then I had already met Amy and it was with some pride that we all headed to Amy’s favourite nightclub after dinner, I got to walk up to the dance floor with three amazingly attractive women.
Of course, I didn’t want to embarrass myself by actually dancing so I left them to it. Immediately they were swamped with guys wanting to dance with them, to which Billie and Amy crossed their arms in big X’s indicating for the guys to go away. After 15 minutes of this though they became exasperated and we decided to leave. On our way out a guy near the stairs grabbed Kit’s arm and yanked her towards him at which point I had to intervene and got to tell him that these three girls were all with me. It made me chuckle to bruise the poor guy’s ego (and radically inflate my own, briefly) as we left the club.
A few more years of staying in touch and Billie told she had met someone from Australia, Adelaide, in fact. I knew she met a million guys around the world and that she could pick anyone she wanted but this one she met in a bar in Hong Kong. She said he was not handsome, a bit fat even but had a generous and family-oriented personality. This was what she was looking for in her ideal partner more than a troublesome good looker.
Then a couple of years later they decided to relocate from Hong Kong to Sydney and ended up living a couple of blocks away from Amy and myself in Chatswood. We got to hang out a bit more but also were leading busy lives. A case of when living near the beach you never go for a swim.
Billie and Jade now had a baby on their hands and Billie could become the dragon mum she always dreamed of. I caught up with her sister Mandy during this time too and she soon was married with a couple of kids of her own.
Anyways, Billie rushed to pick up from the station in her new 4WD, on the phone to her friend, as we rushed to pick up Nexis from school, now in Year One. Nexis and I always get on like a house on fire, like I do with most kids, and we were soon making fun of her mum and I was getting her into trouble so we were both getting told off.
Nexis and I played some more, with their water hose – more trouble – and with their French Bulldog Dunstan, short name Dunny. Billie cooked up a nice veggie dinner for us all, Nexis went to bed and Jade overruled Billie to watch a movie instead of Billie’s favourite Aussie trash TV, Married at First Sight, thank heavens!
Next morning, Billie dropped me in Chatswood, with all my bags and we wished each other well, hoping they can come and visit Amy and me in Thailand sometime in the future. I spent the morning running around getting coffees and trying to arrange to meet people but everyone was busy. Never mind – I know you’ll always be there, somewhere.
A train to the city and more coffee as I met up with one of Amy’s best friends Jess as I was staying at her place right in the centre of the city. We went out for a big seafood dinner to celebrate another friend’s, Grace, birthday, joined by Muoy and Hakan. Amy had already prepped me to pay for the meal tonight as her gift to everyone and for Grace’s celebration. Grace kindly reciprocated by offering to take me to the airport a couple of days later.
Next day was a big run around and I’d been hitting my ten thousand steps easily for a few days now. In the morning I met Jess at the cafe where she works and got my first free coffee. We were heading to Chippendale to meet one of my friends who had opened her own cafe recently. Jess is thinking to do the same in Adelaide sometime in the future so Amy thought it would be a good idea to introduce them and for Jess to get some tips.
On the way there I ducked into another small cafe another Chatswood friend was working at and was offered another free coffee, gladly accepted as always.
In Chippendale, we found my friend’s cafe, the Bean Brewers. Jenny runs it with her husband and has managed to build up a good little business. They spent a long time looking for this place and are working hard, seven days a week, to make it a success. I met Jenny when she was just 16, ten years before, when she was working at my favourite cafe in Chatswood. She had moved to Australia from Vietnam to study and wanted to stay. Similar to my own story with Amy, a customer had taken a fancy to her and eventually they got married.
Once again, we all wished each other well and went on our way. Jess went back home whilst I went to my next appointment, this time at UTS, to see Bronwyn, Hayden’s mum, my ex-wife, the partner of all the 1994 diary entries you can find here. Twenty four years is a long time and things change and things stay the same. Bronwyn told me of some photos she had found of our time back in the UK and when I saw them later it was odd to look at the person in the photo that was me. I didn’t recognise them as me, though I knew it was obviously me.
After lunch and during another coffee stop my 3pm appointment cancelled which I was actually a little grateful for as the temperature was soaring and I was starting to get sweaty. I headed back to Jess’ for a quick shower and recovery before heading out again to meet Jochen, at a pub just down the street.
Jochen arrived with his friend, from a meeting that they had just attended. Jochen works for the Goethe Institute and moved to Sydney with his wife, Sabina and kids, both of whom are a similar age to Hayden. They actually moved back and forth a couple of times before finally settling on Australia as the place to stay.
I first met Jochen, about 15 years ago I’m guessing, through a band he was playing in with a mutual friend. Although being from different countries within Europe, which becomes a little competitive, here we were suddenly comrades on foreign turf. I’m over dramatising but in some ways bonds are made through mutual conditions such as these.
The other thing that drew us together though was our musical interests and our roles within our own DIY music scenes. The connection was instant, an unspoken understanding of the way things had been, the way we were doing things now and the way we wanted to continue doing those things. I value Jochen’s friendship above most others – one of those friendships where you may not see each other for a couple of years and you can sit down and continue the conversation as if only a day had passed.
And of course, this was pretty much the situation we were in, having not been in much contact for the previous six months since leaving Sydney. I expected to be out for a couple of hours, perhaps drop by another friend working in a shop that night too.
Kicked off with interesting conversations with Jochen’s friend, a filmmaker, again about mutual musical interests, particularly the Dutch band The Ex (crazy thoughts arising about how to tour them through South East Asia and Australia), moving on to discussions about working with Japanese musicians for live film scores.
After he left we decided on another beer, and another, conversation free flowing, about our lives, our kids, our futures, about continuing to work together in one way or another and just about generally staying connected. Something that is so much easier to do now than it was in 1994.
All these thoughts could lead to longer stories that I will have to leave for now. But that night, my last in Sydney, the beers continued along with the stories and topics and we eventually stumbled out around 1.30am, I think, and on our respective ways.
In a blink, I was asleep and awake again, still drunk and almost voiceless as Grace whisked me to the airport and I jumped on the plane, last time for a while in Australia, hoping for more sleep, which didn’t come. But I was too drunk to care, too drunk to think. The perfect exit.
Hoo-ee! I woke up yesterday morning after 16-20 hours of restless sleep, through 42-degree heat, though a cool change was in the air, it hadn’t quite made it to the upstairs in our new house. I was totally betwattled.
Even the first coffee was no cure and I lurched around the supermarket uncertain why exactly I was there. I figured it out in the end and shopping done I contemplated going back to sleep again. The second coffee finally kicked me into gear but I had nothing to do except some reading and waiting for the man to come and give us internet again. I stayed awake with both fans blasting and kids shouting in their backyard, perhaps hunting the floppy-eared white rabbit I saw hopping down the street earlier.
In fact, by the time evening came round I was no longer sleepy, contemplating security in our new house and a message I got from my cousin Sharon, that my mother was sick again and back in the hospital. I got to sleep what felt like just a couple of minutes before my alarm went off and here I am back at work again, dopey-eyed with spinning stars.
My mother suffers from COPD, basically what emphysema develops into. She needs oxygen all the time now and gets chest infections very easily which knock her down. The infections are usually fixed with a course of antibiotics but consistently return when they are finished. It’s been like this for the last 12 months or so.
She finally had to leave her home and now lives in a nice care home. She was sad to leave and lose the independence she loved but she understands she couldn’t go on there anymore as she needs fairly constant monitoring. The sale of the house should cover her care home expenses for a few years.
Being a practical sort, my mother often told me not to return to the UK for her funeral as it is a waste of money. Amy and Sharon have both asked me if I want to go and visit but, practically, there isn’t much I can do for her, she will feel upset that I spent a lot of money to visit and I think she doesn’t want me to see her so invalid. She has always been so strong.
She has a Do Not Resuscitate order in place, saying she doesn’t want to hang around suffering and just being kept alive for the sake of it. She saw that happen with her sister. I hope she’s not suffering.
I did go and visit her about 18 months ago after she was taken to hospital for the first time. She was still able to do things to take care of herself at that time and it was really nice to be able to sit back and relax in my old family home, just chat and watch TV. I actually enjoyed being back in the UK, it was the tail end of summer so some days were comfortably warm but it was also nice to feel that clean English chill in the air some nights. These are memories I would like to keep of the last time to see my mother. Somewhat selfish I know.
My mother’s sickness it most likely smoking-related, though she quit about 20 years ago already, she had smoked for about 20 years before that. With cigarettes always around I soon started pinching some and the few times she caught me smoking she couldn’t really say anything to deter me. I finally stopped smoking myself when my son was born. My own father died of smoking-related lung cancer before I was two years old.
Each night shift I usually head out for my second coffee at around 10.30pm. Obviously, there’s no coffee shops open but luckily the OTR service stations are 24/7 – their catchphrase is ‘We never close’. Their coffee is not great but the caffeine quota is perfect.
There is an OTR about 15 minutes walk from the office so I can get a little exercise for bonus points too. The first time I went there I just followed the main road which was a little dull and unexciting, as trucks roared past on their night runs from warehouses to stores and others returned home from their evening adventures.
I looked at the map and found a parallel back street that is a million miles away from the dull orangey-yellow flourescence of the main road. The street lighting here is whiter and paler and mostly blocked out by trees. Some places are pitch black underfoot and you have to step heavily to avoid tripping on pavers raised by the roots of the trees. The other thing you notice is the quiet. No one is around, not even cats seem to bother with this street. You get a nervous excitement when someone else is walking on the street, will I get stabbed or punched or who knows. I generally call out a ‘hey’ as I pass and usually just receive a surprised grunt in return. Oh well.
Halfway down is one the opposite side I usually walk, there is a graveyard. I didn’t think too much about it until one night I decided to take some pictures. Some folks had decorated their relatives graves in Christmas lights which offers a jolly juxtaposition. I considered how some people find graveyards spooky but I think that is a result of the gothic architecture of some of the memorial stones. I mean what could happen here – everyone is dead already.
There’s a nice graveyard near where I live. Actually, Adelaide seems to be full of graveyards when I think about it. Anyway, this one is almost like a landscaped park, sectioned off to cater to different ethnicities, cultures and religions. Not so much of the olde Euro-gothic stonework. I had a nice walk around there one evening, only saddened when I came across a marker for someone who had died young. I thought about the lives these people lived, what they may have seen, which parts of the world they came from to get to Australia. I used to look at people in random non-descript places, walking the street or wandering the shops, and zap myself into their heads and try to look through their eyes and take on their entire histories that brought them to this place, right here, right now. A momentary flash of an existence that someone else lived, though nothing you can hold on to and maintain. Now I mostly just ponder my own existence and how someone I never met or knew might browse my death mark one day and wonder about my life. Round and round we go.
I was reminded of the times a few of us used to hang out drinking in a graveyard in Bournemouth before we would head to see a show at Capone’s just across the street. The time when we had finished school forever and took our old textbooks there, burned them on an old grave and then got drunk to celebrate our freedom.
But down this street there is little sign of life and to me, it is the perfect playground for childish mischief. But no kids are about, no underage drinkers in the park or graveyard, barely a barking dog or passing car. Is everyone tucked up nice and early in their neat clean houses, living the dream? Will I be doing that in my little piece of paradise being built in Thailand?
Talking of which, Amy was overrun with paint charts today, having to decide tonight the colours that would be in and outside our house. She asked my opinion, and I’m pretty easy, so I just said paint everything inside white. This is far too boring for her but she can’t tell if any colours that she does choose will work because it’s just too hard to imagine right now. Again, as a typical man looking for a quick solution, I told her to choose what she wants and if it doesn’t work out we can just repaint it later, no problem. I think by the time she went to bed she still hadn’t picked anything for the indoor colours.
Come visit me at the Glebe record fair today. Bring me coffee!
1994ever 