Sven's life in Oz

Well, dear friends, I have some bad news and there’s no easy way to tell you this, so I guess I had better just come right out and say it: James and I have decided to split up.  I know this is going to come as a shock to you, so I prepared some FAQs for you to help you deal with the news and prevent you turning to drink, losing your job and winding up in the gutter.  Obviously this all my point of view and I can’t speak for James, but I think we are both of a similar mind and he read this before I posted so anything really egregious has been taken out already.

What happened?
Certainly for the past little while something has been amiss and both James and I have not been happy with our relationship.  Everyone has their peaks and troughs and we dealt with ours like anyone else, but the peaks were getting shorter and lower, while the troughs were getting longer and closer together.  There comes a point when you have to say to yourselves that perhaps another round of “we must try harder” just isn’t going to cut it and there might be something more to what you are feeling.

I confess that I felt this more keenly than James, so last Friday I decided that the time had come to have the awkward talk where nothing is off the table.  Previously it was just not an option – splitting up was simply not on the cards – but this time things were different.  I didn’t go into the conversation planning to end everything, but in times like these all you can do is say how you feel and see what happens.  So that’s what we did.  I said everything that was on my mind, exactly how I felt, and what I thought the options were.  Then I waited for James’s response.  For the first time since I have known him, he gathered his thoughts.  He agreed with me.  We talked about what we should do, what we would do afterwards in each case, and how we felt about each one, and then, twenty minutes after we started, we finished.  It was all very amicable – sad, of course, desperately so – but we opened the good wine we had been saving and enjoyed a quality drink together.

But you were such a good couple!
Well thanks for saying so.  James and I are great friends, and we have great friends; how could we not all have a great time together?  This was one of the reasons that breaking up was so hard to identify as the right thing to do.  We have a whale of a time with our friends, we have great jobs and prospects, supportive families and good health: how could anyone possibly be unhappy with all of that?  The problem was that day to day we simply weren’t making one another happy.  What to do? Stay together for potential future you have, or consider the actual happiness you are feeling?  Clearly, we chose the latter.

So what happens now?  Are you coming back to England?
No.  I love it here.  I love my British friends to death, but I have a great life in Australia and I’m certainly not giving it up less than a year after I arrived here.  I’m sure James feels the same.  Things are pretty much carrying on as normal for now.  I have moved into the spare room, but like it or not, James has been my best friend for three-and-a-half years and that was never the problem.  We get on famously and with a few changes to the domestic arrangements things are going just fine.  We have some joint debts to pay off (like the flights to the UK in three months!) and once that is done, I suppose we’ll assess what we should do next – move out, divide up the stuff, move somewhere else with more people, or just carry on as flatmates – but for now there’s no awkwardness or hostility and we both have our own lives.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

So that’s it.  Just what Sydney needs: another two single gays. But with all the great friends we have made together over the past few years, at least we’ll never really be alone.

Just a quick interlude to point you all toward Bossy, who has kindly selected me as her “featured gay” and is busy directing her wonderful readers over here to read all about my life in the Lucky Country.  Go and have a peek at her blog (it’s very funny), then find the “featured gay” section and come back here toute suite.  I get lonely.

Sveny has been a bad blogger lately, partly because he has been super busy, partly because Mardi Gras totally fucked with his sleeping/eating/working routine (and we all know how much he likes a good routine) and partly because he’s been in a funk about not having a permanent job/trying to set up interviews with people for his non-permanent job.  It’s a lifestyle choice, I guess: why have one job when you can stress about not having two?  That’s the way I roll.

Anyhow, to make up for my utter shiteness at bloggity blogging, I know you are all gagging to hear about the gayest day of the year, so here is a run down of my timetable to fabulousness and beyond, where beyond involves rolling in at 4.30am pissed as a bugger with some mysterious dusty dirt all over my shoes.

9.30am: Wake up.  For some reason I decided that it was a good idea to stay up until 1.30am on Friday night watching Jerry Maguire.  Let me state for the record: that film does not improve either late at night or with subsequent viewings.  Oh, and the Deaf guy doesn’t even say “you complete me”: he signs “you make my heart whole” which is (a) even cheesier, and (b) not really proper sign language since it follows a very English structure.  But that’s not for here.  Still, waking up at 9.30am is not as bad as waking up at 9.30am with a hangover, which I avoided by not drinking very much the night before.  Yes, that means I chose to stay up and watch Jerry Maguire sober.  No, I don’t know what I was thinking, either.

11.30am: Head out to prepare the float.  Two hours after getting up James and I were dressed and ready to get our gay on.  Fortunately, our date with sticky tape and astroturf was only five minutes walk away, so we left late and still arrived early because as you know, gays are always late for everything.  A few weeks ago, James joined the Sydney Convicts – Australia’s premier gay rugby team and current holders of the Bingham Cup – so for our first Mardi Gras, we got to march with them near the front of the parade and lap it up.  Yes, we are jammy bastards, especially with the queue-jumping powers of the rugby shirts when it came to getting into the Midnight Shift.  The Convicts plan for the float this year: a mobile rugby pitch.  Eight rolls of green electrical tape and $1000-worth of astroturf later:

Ta da! One mobile rugby pitch!

I would like it on the record that Belly and I (don’t you love Rugby names) did the doors, bonnet and front panels, which I sure you can appreciate are the trickiest parts to cover.  Still, it looks cool, no?  We were all finished by 2.30pm, and then the big green truck was whisked away to have a massive speaker system and spotlight fitted, because it ain’t no party without no disco in the back, now is it?

2.30pm: Those of us not going to get the ute pimped up hit Dan Murphy’s (the discount liquor stroe of champions) before going home to get changed.  One hour and a bottle of cheap champagne later, I was ready to hit the town.

I made the pom poms myself!

4.30pm: James and I arrived at Midnight Shift.  On the way there we were stopped by strangers who wanted to take our photo.  As sponsors of the rugby team, we got into the Shift for free and had a few drinks (not free) before cutting through the crowd and then marching down the parade route back to the start and our waiting turf-mobile.  The crowd were cheering, we were laughing and I got a text from a friend to say that he had spotted me on the Channel 9 news! 

6.30pm: Lock down for the parade.  Everyone who is marching in the parade has to stay in the holding pen from 6.30pm until the start of the march.  Sam, Stuart and I all got busted by a marshal for breaking out to go to the toilet, but he let us back in when we told him our sorry tale about being directed to the wrong toilet by someone else.  Toilets at the Mardi Gras are an experience worth mentioning: I’ve never used an outdoor urinal in front of 20,000 other people before, but there’s not time for stage fright because there’s a queue of gays behind you who all need to toilet, like, yesterday, and since I think we pushed in the line (“we’re in the march, yeah?”) you just have to breathe deep and get on with it.  Or not so deep, actually: urinals smell.  Back at the truck we had a punch mixed up in sports bottles and enough nervous energy to keep us all occupied (“let’s have a jumping competition!”); not to mention 170-odd floats to have a look around.  The sun set at around 8pm and before we knew it, the march was off.

8.30pm: Mardi Gras march.  I have never had such fun in all my life.  The crowd were screaming, waving, shouting, dancing, you name it.  In front and behind as far as the eye could see there were lights, glitter, floats, dancing, drag, pom poms, balls, boys, girls, cameras and flashes.  The march itself was only 2.5km but it took us about an hour-and-a-half to finish, and all the way there I waved, danced, jumped and ran.  It’s so weird: people you don’t know roaring for attention, appreciation and encouragement.  If you waved at them, they hollered for you.  If you posed for them, they snapped you.  If you cheered for them, they loved you.  It’s hard to describe the energy, but by the end I just wanted to run around and do it all again.  All my photos were crap, but it was the fastest and most fun hour-and-a-half of my life.

A look back down the crowd

10.30pm: Back to the Shift.  Being near the front, we were back in the bar before the rest of the parade had finished, and we drank and drank and drank.  The rest of the night is a little hazy after this point – there was some pool, some drinks, some dancing, some drinks, some more pool, some more drinks.  There was Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand, and more dancing.  James disappeared at midnight and never came back.  I stumbled home around 4am (ostensibly having trekked through some flowerbeds, given the state of my shoes) to find Jim having a party of his own on the balcony with a bottle of sparkling wine.  I fell into bed pretty soon after, and if I dreamed anything it wasn’t worth remembering.  What could possibly beat a day like that?

…but who wouldn’t want a present wrapped like this:

Man, I need a job.