Coming back from Brisbane after such a brief visit feels really strange. For one, Brisbane is not my home. I don’t even know the name of the main street but hope for Brissake it’s not Adelaide. I used to like the way so many ordinary towns and street names in Australia were derived from grander English equivalents. Even the insubordinate spelling of Surry Hills had a certain charm. But not any more ... I submit the following examples as evidence:
a) I’m standing behind a 20-something English backpacker on the up escalator of Kings Cross station. Her pedigree is revealed via a cheap tangerine croptop stretched over a cheap bra. Her newly tanned hips are spilling out over her jeans and running into my line of sight. Coincidentally, her other hand is holding a muffin. She is boasting loudly on the phone (“I love the wevahh here in Sydney but everyfink else is 5 years behind London”).
b) I’m walking back home at 3am on a Friday morning after a very late Thursday night out. From a distance I see a 31-year-old Jordie in a suit, pissing on the stairs of my building. By the time I get to the stairs he is vomiting into his fresh puddle. I imagine that he works in a merchant bank and on Thursday night work drinks he is the first to declare loudly across the pool table that Australia has no fucking culture or history of its own.
This makes me ponder whether England is best experienced from within England.
Back to me.
I’m sitting here on the return flight and have come to a couple of conclusions:
a) I’m homeless.
3 months in Hanoi is too early to start calling Vietnam home. Home needs to contain an address, a community, a minimum time period … and I’ve only just ticked the first box.
b) I don’t miss people.
“Missing” is what happens to a ball or a flight. Sometimes it happens to the point. But for me, the feeling of being away from people is more corporeal. When I'm away from people who are important to me, it feels like a piece has been carved out of my body and replaced by something unfamiliar. I’m talking about a real piece, too. Give me a black marker, a Stilnox and 3 glasses of red wine and I would draw a little island just under my left rib cage. 2 Stilnox and I'll vacuum the furniture at the same time. Notwithstanding all that, I think this is the place where my sense of communion lives and I can feel when it's not right. It also looks like New Zealand and lurks near the spleen.
So I sit here for hours on the plane, thinking about all this and wondering at times wherethefuckamIgoing and whatthefuckamIdoing. This feeling is intensified when an ageing flight attendant presses his penis into my shoulder while trying to avoid an old lady who is bulldozing past him in a purple Magnetic Island t-shirt.
I shift my shoulder and the attendant moves on. I look around again and notice that this aircraft is being dominated by pensioners, frog marching along the aisles, waging war on thrombosis and leaving nothing in their wake. There are currently 7 tracksuits on aisle patrol so I decide to wait it out and hunt for a vacant toilet later ... when my captors are fatigued ... so I lay back and close my eyes ... and mutinously pray for turbulence.
I flick through the in-flight magazines and consider buying (yet) another $200 pair of Bang & Olufsen earphones from the duty free catalogue. They are advertised in Green and White, both of which look quite ugly. So I tell myself – and a flight attendant with very bad breath – that I will only buy them if black is available. He comes back, leans over at near-point-blank range and tells me that black is not available and white looks nice. I nearly pass out and whisper “ok” as I recoil weakly back in my seat. Surely this intimate sales technique is not legal.
I hold my breath while the earphones are handed over while promising myself to love, honour and protect these earphones from misadventure; but knowing deep down that their days are numbered.
So here I am, a dirty white potato with ugly white earphones held captive in my chair by veiny pensioners. I’m missing pieces under my ribs and getting peeled by flight attendants with bad breath. Trapped and cored and peeled. By November I can probably be painted and hung on a Christmas tree.
