Sven's life in Oz

In exactly two weeks I will be checking in at the airport for my flight to New York and a fabulous eleven days of American summeriness which should help (a) beat the winter blues and (b) top up the tan. Time seems to be flying and I haven’t even thought about packing yet, which is quite out of character for me. Perhaps I am becoming a well-adjusted individual after all this time. One swallow does not a summer make, so let’s reserve judgment on that for now.

This will be my first time flying over the Pacific and, as a Brit, it feels like I’m about to go the wrong way around the world. Living in England, you get used to thinking that London is the centre of the world (it is zero longitude, after all) and everywhere rotates around the flight paths out of Heathrow. Despite living in Australia now I still think of it as a country on the very edge of the world, as though we are clinging onto the map and just beyond the shores there be monsters. New Zealand is literally dangling over the abyss. I’m a secret flat-earther and I never even knew it.

Three things excite me about my upcoming flight. First, I will cross the international date line. I’m going to try and stay awake as we go over it: I know it will pass completely without event it will still be a little thrill for me. The second thing is linked to the first, in that I will get to see the same sunrise twice. I leave Sydney at 10am, so I will see the sun come up as I head to the airport to check in. As the sun travels through the sky in one direction, my flight will go the other way around the planet and catch up with the same day as we approach LA. I know that it’s just a flight and it happens every day, but it still blows my mind to think of it like that. Living in the twenty-first century is just great. Finally, and perhaps most stupidly, my return to New York means that I will have gone completely around the world once. I left New York after my last holiday there in 2004, and although it has taken me six years with lots of stops, side-trips and doubling back, it marks the end of one complete circuit. I don’t care what you say: I think it’s pretty awesome.

Of course, all of of this is merely the beginning: I haven’t even started on the holiday itself! Not only am I hoping to meet the fabulous New Yorkers from my circle of bloggery, but Emma Blonde – beloved friend and university housemate extraordinare – will be in town; New York Gay Pride kicks off on the second weekend; and the rugby team will all be flying in after their Bingham Cup tour concludes. It’s just too exciting, so to ease myself into the fun we’re having an afternoon in the Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park on 19 June. If you’re in the city, come join me – I’ll be the one drinking champagne and exuding fabulousness.

See you there!

Since the show itself is delayed in Australia, so are my thoughts. The time difference is not your friend when the event takes place on a Saturday night in Europe; and Facebook and Twitter are your mortal enemies when you’re trying to spend the day NOT finding out who won. I only had to open my eyes and some clown had bemoaned it on his Facebook status. I actually quite liked the winning entry, even if she was singing in a cockney accent despite hailing from Hanover.

The show was one of the best ones I’ve seen in recent years, where “best” means “thankfully the novelty entries have been kept to a minimum and the cheese factor is high.” Sarah and I enjoyed two bottles of wine and a healthy serving of fattoush and dukkah (traditional Eurovision party fare if ever there was some) while we mocked the entries mercilessly and wondered aloud at the sexuality of most of the performers.

Since I already knew the winner the only mystery for me was where the UK would end up. Britain put in a sterling performance, of course. So great was our entry that we finished 25th out of 25 entrants. What a success! For a nation that simply doesn’t take this show seriously I can only assume that was the plan all along. Of course we all moan about it and decry the political voting, but next year we’ll send in another Ten Good Reasons-reject song from the Mike Waterman Hall of Forgettable Pop Mediocrity and repeat the cycle. We’re nothing if not consistent.

And so that’s it for another year. I shall be humming the Romanian entry for the next week, and no doubt when I get to Stonewall on the weekend the drag routine will be set to Albania’s rousing number. Enjoy!

In my never-ending quest for random crazy shit to fill my time before I die, I have accrued a highly skilled team of like-minded weirdos who are always up for the same kind of antics as me. (By ‘random crazy shit’, I mean legal random crazy shit, of course: the kind where people say “how did you find out about that?” with mouths agog, as opposed to “what the fuck where you thinking?” with eyes rolling.) One of these side-kicks of fun is my good friend and colleague, Sarah, who seems eerily on my level when it comes to almost anything, including my theories on humans as giant walking tubes, cheap gin, and why lesbians hate everyone. Picture my face when she strolled into my office and told me that she had bumped into two guys who had convinced her that roller derby was the greatest show on Earth and she should book tickets now or just kill herself.

I have known that roller derby is the hottest shit around since I saw Whip It one Saturday night when I was sofa-bound with a hangover. I immediately googled my local roller derby league and liked them on Facebook, followed them on Twitter and subscribed to their RSS feed. I was actively searching for people who would come with me to the first interstate roller derby showdown right here in Sydney not two weeks later. You’re excited now and you’re just reading it: imagine how I felt! We were agreed: it was on.

Enter the third member of the cast of madness: my partner in dog bites and pyjama-clad dining, Nicholas. Back from Atlanta for a limited time only, he was excited long-distance at the prospect of watching teams of butch women race around a track in roller skates and try to beat each other up. Who wouldn’t be? Sarah roped in a couple of her friends, Adrian and Ivana, and the five of us rocked up last Saturday to watch Brisbane eat Sydney’s wheels.

The derby was like an awesome instruction manual in what-the-fuck: no one under 18 could sit trackside in case a skater broke loose and charged into the crowd, I read the programme and the rules were still a complete mystery, and the fans came from every walk and stage of life imaginable. To my left a bunch of skinny emo girls sat patiently watching the action; to my right a group of middle-aged housewife-types were out of their seats and screaming like banshees. There was a Mexican band playing on stage. The half-time entertainment was a pole-dancer. Adrian had been drinking since lunch, Ivana and Nick were conversing in Serbian (what are the chances?) and Sarah and I were getting slowly addled on Bundaberg rum-and-coke out of a can. It was trippy.

After the match (Sydney 106: Brisbane 86. Sucks to be you, Queensland!) we all bundled into cabs and made for the nearest (only?) Baltic restaurant in town. Nick and Ivana could barely contain themselves as they explained to us just how much meat we would be eating. They failed to fully explain the amount of onion that we would be eating with the meat: enough to give you breath that could give a man a stroke from twenty paces. Nonetheless, the prospect of working our way through the equivalent of an abattoir’s daily output was too good to refuse; and, I might add, utterly delicious.

As we sped our way towards our impending meat feast, Sarah suggested that we do something completely out of character every month. I’m buggered if I can think what could possibly beat this, but if I find out, I’ll let you know.

I think I’m going crazy. I mean: crazier. Ever since I locked myself out twice in as many weeks I have been on a slow decline into abject madness and it ain’t pretty. In my defence, the first time wasn’t my fault, but I let it happen again a fortnight later and I don’t have anyone else to blame.

To get into my flat, you need a swipe card and two keys. The swipe will open the communal door to the building and the keys will admit you to my humble yet fabulous abode. The first time around Nick locked the keys in the flat, but the second time, after a night at a Drag Queen competition, I discovered I had forgotten to take the swipe card. There are places I would choose to be at 2am; locked out on the street in the drizzle is not one of them. I investigated all the options available: jumping into the car park to see if the back door was open (it wasn’t), trying to work out the numbers of the flats with lights on so I could ring their bells (I got it wrong), and trying to reach through the gate to open it from the other side (I couldn’t). I had resigned myself to ringing James and telling him I was on my way over because I was an idiot, when a miracle appeared. When I say miracle, I mean little Asian lady with a swipe card.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when I began to approach her. I think I was at my least threatening wearing my $10 Cotton On scarf wrapped around me like an old woman’s shawl for warmth, but when you’re a 5ft-nothing single female and a 6′4″ man lurches out of a doorway towards you at 2am their wardrobe choices are probably your last concern. My story about being locked out seemed as preposterous as it was, but after I produced my driving licence and proved I was as big a clown as I appeared, she happily let me in and laughed at my stupidity as we climbed the stairs together.

The very next day I resolved to get a spare set of everything, but that was more difficult than it seems. First: one of the door keys is a security key and cannot be cut. I have to travel to Bondi to get a duplicate, but only between the hours of 9am – 5pm and not on a weekend. Taking the morning off work to get a spare key seems a tad excessive, don’t you think? Second: getting a duplicate card requires a trip to Annandale (the opposite direction to Bondi), an application form and a $100 deposit. In short, a spare set of keys will cost me about $175 when cutting and travel expenses are all included. Not to mention a day’s holiday from work. Does all this seem like a waste of time and money to you, too?

Enter the craziness. Since I am clearly too tight busy to get a spare set of keys together, my latent OCD is making a comeback. Whenever I am in a hotel I only ever close the door with one hand when I can see the room key in the other. It’s learned behaviour I now apply to my daily routine: I only shut the front door after I have physically seen that the swipe card and both keys are OUTSIDE the apartment. Even then I dither in the doorway, mentally running through the unlocking process before committing and pulling the door shut. It can take me a good few minutes to cross the threshold on the way out these days. I just don’t trust myself.

On the face of it, that’s not so bad, but it’s not just the front door. OCD function creep is starting to ruin my life. This morning I noticed that I count the train stops on the way to work, and check the station names as we approach to make sure that I don’t miss my stop. Then I check them as we leave again, just in case – what? How stupid can I actually be? When I finally get to my station, not only do I check the name on the platform, but I check the screens on the opposite platform going the other way to make sure I’m in the right place.

Tell me I’m not the only person who does this kind of thing. Or tell me that I am, and $175 is cheap compared to the therapy I’ll need if I don’t sort myself out soon. Somebody, please, save me from myself.

Australia is an arid, parched land most of the year. Not that we city-dwellers would know it: I turn on the tap and water comes out, so I don’t ask any questions. I seldom think that only a few hours drive away there’s a giant desert the size of Europe where every drop of water is trapped and reused three times before it eventually evaporates away. But the idea that we live in a paradise of perpetual summer is not entirely accurate. It may not ever freeze in the Red Centre, but Sydney gets cold in a hurry when winter arrives and I am never prepared for it.

Before I continue I should  define the term ‘cold’. I am not talking northern hemisphere cold. If it ever snows in Sydney I’ll eat my bobble hat. I don’t think I’ve even seen a frost in the city, although last year the temperature did drop to -1C overnight. The days usually peak at around 12/13C in the coldest period, which may not seem all that frigid to you, but when it’s 30C on an average day a 20-degree drop feels pretty baltic to me.

As usual I caught the first cold of the season, spread it around the office and got it back again with interest. I was feeling smug to have shifted it in two days, little suspecting my colleagues were just looking after it for me. I’m beginning to think I’m some kind of influenza incubator; a common-cold Typhoid Mary just waiting for the next wintry snap to spread my infection like a seasonal plague.

Last week I packed up the fans and rolled out the heaters as my aluminium-framed windows aren’t exactly built for the colder seasons and, this being Sydney, central heating is unheard of. I admitted defeat and accepted the summer was over when I dragged my duvet out of the cupboard and installed it on the bed. I dug my slippers out from the back of the drawer and wrapped myself in a blanket while I watched tv. I am a beaten man.

Winter in Sydney is horrible for two reasons. Firstly, it’s not Christmas. In the UK winter means the end of the year, a winding down from the summer and a ramping up of the party season as we race towards December. Here there’s nothing to look forward to but the return of summer. There’s no Christmas, no New Year and no party season. It’s just an inconvenient three-month interregnum between barbecues and pool parties. And secondly, nothing happens. Everyone rugs up, stays in and waits for the sun to come back. When you live in an outdoors-y nation like this one, you forget how to entertain yourself at home. By September everyone has gone stir-crazy and deathly pale.

At least this year I have three things to look forward to: my holiday in NYC, my birthday and my sister’s wedding. I’m sure that will keep the blues at bay. Now, where did I put that Scrabble?