The Return of the Killer Diary!

Many things have fallen by the wayside here at NNM over the past month. The end of the year wasn’t the best of times for many reasons, which I have hinted at here, obtusely or otherwise, while 2006 was whipping its tail.

Now that 2006 is dead and buried, it is time to lace up our Speedos and dive, bollocks and all, into 2007.

First up on the repatriation line of wayward features is the dusty diary. What better way to start the new year than with the gestation of my Melbournian friendship group.

18 April 1999

Well, I am writing again on the changes in my life, and not as anticipated in the previous entry on the other teachers in Jigalong (as you can imagine that slipped from my mind or I decided to put it off for just a little while too long). And so, I will start with an excerpt from a message I wrote to Becky in Bristol...

Anyway, back to my life. I can't remember what I wrote to you about last but I think that you hadn't been able to read it anyway. So I will try to keep to the things that happened in the last few days since I left Melbourne, a sordid description of my drinking habits over the last three nights (alright it isn't sordid, or even interesting but you are going to hear it anyway). Well it all started on Thursday when we (my sister and I) went to the Cirque du Soleil for my sister's birthday. Have you heard of them before? Well basically a circus with no animals and plenty of absolutely mindblowing acts. Unfortunately the only tickets we could get were VIP tickets and to our dismay they included in the cost all the wine you could ever want so we ended up spending the hour before we got inside drinking like fish and had to keep leaving the tent to go to the toilet. Of course we left the show absolutely plied and my sister had a minor break down so after calming her down we popped into a taxi and went home.

Not content at finishing up so early I kept the taxi around and went right back into Melbourne and to go to a pub to continue my alcohol poisoning. Switching effortlessly from red wine to bourbon I sat listening to the music in this pub come dance bar. As you can imagine I was an absolute barrel of laughs after all the shit that my sister had just planted. I must have been looking like a fucking undertaker because from out of nowhere this guy buys me a beer and disappears... BEER urghhh!!! But never fear your good natured hero was so absolutely far gone that he happily downed the middy (about two thirds of a pint I think) in two gulps. Luckily then a song that I like started up (Tender by Blur) so I hit the dance floor and proceeded to treat it more like a stumble floor. Then the bastards turned the music off and the lights on because it was closing time.

... and it was only 1 a.m.

Luckily, as I stand looking lost under the fluro lights, some complete and utter stranger comes up to me and says, "Hey, my mate bought you a drink earlier... Blah blah Blah (or at least that is how I understood it) so they ended up taking me out to some other clubs where I did such excellent acts as kicking over peoples glasses and not even bothering to say sorry and singing loudly to songs I knew well but with the wrong lyrics. But the most thrilling example of my sobriety was when I tried to run up the stairs in one club and ended up tripping up and running into a gate, now I am sporting a huge gash in my shoulder (and that why did I do it feeling in my gut!) but it was all worth it, unfortunately I was too far gone to get his number before he dropped me off (the friend of the guy who bought me the beer that is), its a small world though so I may see him again (recognising him may be a problem though - I should buy some beer goggles before I go back to Melbourne).

So that was Thursday night, and I flew out of Melbourne the next day, feeling fantastic as you might imagine. But not to be deterred I rang up a good friend and we went out for dinner that night. Starting of course with the wine we polished off a bottle at the cafe and then proceeded to a bar to start on the vodka and listen to this band which was pretty cool. Taking it to the next level we stepped into a nightclub to dance our little souls away, feeling fine in a new (and fucking awsome) shirt bought just that morning in Melbourne, and feeling invincible after taking about four shots of Sambucca, we went at it for about three hours.

Well, that is a sort of half version of what happened, the version which omits all of the things I was feeling and have been feeling since. The fact is I would really like to meet up with Byron again and I don’t have any way of getting in contact with him excepting writing into one of Melbourne’s gay newspapers and hoping that one of the guys sees it and writes back (or of course hanging at the Builder’s Arms in the vain hope that I would recognise him). It is not so much that I was smashed just that I cannot remember the whole night and I have not been that wiped out on just booze before. I think that I remember all those bad things because they seem to stick in your mind more.

I don’t know why I would go to such lengths to find Byron anyway, I don’t want to sleep with him (he was gorgeous but I didn’t go out to pull that night so it didn’t enter my mind- well not that much anyway) but he was so real and down to Earth that I have not stopped thinking about him since. Perhaps it is because meeting him has let me know that there are guys out there who are not just raving queens or purely focussed on Diva songs (I know what I mean). And he loved films, foreign films, I was such an idiot not to get his address.

Stay tuned for the next gripping episode…

Previous diary entries:
I Wanna Play
Confessions of an Amateur Melodramatist
Before I Sleep a.k.a. Diary Drowsiness
Goodbye 1996!!!
Back To The Bush
How Time Flies
End Of An Era
Kissy Kissy
Diary Tonic
Diary: Losing My Religion Virginity
Diary: May Burst
Travel Fallout