"...poker chips..."

The hostel looks like a war zone this morning. An explosion in a badly-managed brewery. There are ribbons of paper towels strewn and pasted upon every surface. Broken and intact bottles are stacked on patio tiles slick with spilt beer and spirits. They ran out of mugs and started drinking from saucepans - they ran out of saucepans and drank Goon straight from the inner plastic bags. This is known as 'Spanking the Goon'. The plates have been smashed, the toilets flooded and the fridges ransacked. Something exploded in a microwave. Cigarette butts are stick to the walls upon which they were extinguished hours ago. There are one or two dazed survivors crouched over coffee cups, trembling hands, trying to spark lighters that will never work again. There is - I am not making this up - someone in the car park playing mournful scales on a harmonica as though he has survived another night in the trenches... put that light out, Private...

About six o'clock last night I went for a swim at Byron Bay main beach. The clouds had drawn over and the beach was almost deserted. The water is warmer than the air and the waves are thin and flat. I showered, went round to the YHA to have a drink with Louis from Quebec. Two Brazilian girls from his room were drinking champagne from plastic pint glasses; class is global. I went back to my backpackers and heated up yesterday's bolognese - had a couple of beers with Martin and Marlina - a samba band with much in the way of headgear and facepaint stormed by the back gate trailed by a procession of hippies protesting everything from overfishing to the evils of holiday lets. I danced along with them for a while and the policemen took my beer away. I bumped into Brook and Ina from my dorm and danced the samba with them for a while, then went back to the hostel to fill a thermos with rum and coke - Havana Club, naturally - and grab my hipflask. An African band took over from the samba and the hippies, then a reggae band. The singer has a fat head. Marijuana coils in the air, bottles turning ankles underfoot, coffee, kids with fairy wings, digeridoo that hum and spin and all drone behind my ear... the bells, a woman in a top hat counts down from "10 - 9 - 8"... sporadic fireworks, whooping and yelling, hugging of strangers. This year must be better than the last - I have said that every year for the last six years. Brook and I decide that we're going to be amongst the first to swim in the Southern Pacific in 2007 - skinny dipping at ten past midnight, she's afraid of sharks. There are no sharks in Yorkshire and she's convinced they hunt at night. The tide is coming in and our clothes are soaked. We change at the hostel and go back to the beach to rescue Ina from a mob of rabid Canadians with greasy skin and shaking with the cold sweats. Brook swallowed too much sea water. She starts vomiting in the public toilets. Ina and I cajole her back to the hostel where she locks herself in the shower and pukes bile into the plughole. We get the door open and make her drink water. I've sobered up after barely the first hour of sitting under the shower but Brook keeps mewling something about sleeping under a waterfall. Dealing with drunk people is probably good practice for children. They are equally sly, stubborn and untroubled by reason. I get to bed about three.

This is 2007. It's funny how the days go by - "ticked off on calenders, counted down like poker chips staked against birthdays, anniversaries, new jobs, holidays..." The last days of 2006 were a lot better than the few hundred that went before them. From the Bondi Beachouse I wound up in the A.C.T. caving with my cousins on Christmas Eve and being savaged by mosquitoes. Christmas Day was just as odd - there were phonecalls and presents and a lengthy game of Jenga in which Ali introduced me to the 'J-move', where any layer that has two blocks on the sides seperated by a central gap can still be used; firmly slide one of the edge pieces into the gap in the middle and then remove the now-superfluous block from the other side. It's tricky but I've seen it done... fortunately someone else spilt the tower before I had to test it for myself. We went for a Christmas Day walk in the Orora Valley that shares the dual distinctions of being both home to the most populous kangaroo population and the coldest mean temperature in Australia. You should see the 'roos scatter before a rugby ball. They can't play at all.

At 6am on Boxing Day cousin Ali and I went climbing at Baroomba, a granite crag in the A.C.T.. It's a thigh-crunching trek to the top of the climb, where we dropped off our bags and jam sandwiches and scrambled down the side of the cliff. This was my first multi-pitch 'trad' climb, and this is how it works: Ali climbs first with a harness full of safety gear. He places these stoppers into cracks in the rock and then clips his rope into them before climbing onward and upward. I belay him from underneath, paying out the rope as he climbs. After thirty or so metres (roughly one 'pitch') he ties himself into the rock and I climb up as he belays from above, collecting the safety gear as I go. When I reach the same safety point, I give him his gear back and the process is repeated until we hit the top. We did two climbs run together - 'Denethor' into 'Ivory Coast' - four pitches totalling 120 metres of granite slab climbing. The hardest, crux move is at the start of the first pitch; the second pitch is an easy scramble; the third pitch begins with a revolting crack climb that bloodied the mosquito bites on the back of my hands; and the fourth pitch is a monster. I'd said on the first pitch that I didn't like the hollow noises made by the layered slabs of granite - it sounds as though they will detach at any moment and slide you down the cliff, complete with the safety gear. When I said this, Ali just chuckled to himself. On the fourth pitch, 'Ivory Coast', I found out why. It starts with a tricky traverse to reach the bottom of a huge flake, a massive shield of this layered stuff. It's about ten metres of really good climbing up this edge as the booms, knocks and creaks vibrate and echo obscenely throughout the entire layer. It was only when we reached the top that Ali told me about the old man he'd met earlier in the year:
"What did you climb?" asked the man.
"'Ivory Coast'," says Ali.
"Is that still there?" replies the man, startled. "I thought that fell off years ago."

Jam sandwiches have never tasted so good.

Anna's friend Chi taught us how roll our own sushi for lunch - the sticky rice seems the tricky part but I'm rapidly getting hooked on sushi and I need to learn to how make it. And oh, but so many happy moments thrown out by the difficulties and differences in English and Japanese. At one point Chi asked me, "Simon, do you have a-" and wiggled her little finger at me. When almost everyone had finished crying with laughter we established that the gesture in Japanese means 'girlfriend', and not quite how we understand it in the UK. Culture shock? You have no idea.

Cousins and fiances and friends disappeared on the 28th and I stayed overnight in the Canberra YHA. In a double whammy of bad things, I left a CD full of photos in an internet cafe (pictures of Christmas and climbing to follow when Ali has sent me a replacement!) and had my iPod stolen from the hostel. They've been over the CCTV with no luck. My travel insurance only pays $100 per item with a $50 excess, so that's not good at all. No more Mogwai, no more Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, no more Arcade Fire, no more Sleater-Kinney, no more Arab Strap. I am not pleased. There's always Triple J - taking a radio with you is the best of whatever poor advice I could offer anyone else on the move. The flight from Sydney to Byron was uneventful - on the bus between airport and town three women in front of me were muttering and whispering important things about the woman sitting in the front of the bus, who seems to have been a Big Brother winner or something else I don't care about.

Since arriving in Byron I've finished 'Flashman's Lady' by George MacDonald Fraser (author of the excellent MacAuslan saga), 'Ice Station Zebra' by Alistair Maclean (for the fifth time), and a repeat of 'Lunar Park' by Bret Easton Ellis which I stole from the Bondi hostel and is, on the second reading, better written, incredibly sadder and much more frightening than I found it the first time round. It is a genuinely disturbing novel. So then I swapped it for 'Generation X' by Douglas Coupland but first I have to finish James Kelman 'You Have To Be Careful In The Land Of The Free'. I put this up before but no-one acknowledged it and it still makes me laugh, so - how many James Kelmans does it take to change a lightbulb? Three. It takes three James Kelmans to change a lightbulb. To change a lightbulb, it takes three James Kelmans.

I made that up.

Laugh, you Philistines!

Right, that's it. I've got better things to do than hang around here having my best made up joke ignored because only Dan and Iain and Bob know who James Kelman is and they didn't find it funny the first time anyway.

I somehow thought that this would make an amusing picture. I was dreadfully, horribly mistaken. This was dubbed 'Brokeback Simon' and I was called Ennis for the next three days. There's more Christmas pictures if you check cousin Anna's blog in my Links.