ABV%

At Byron Bay bustop I briskly booted Brook back on the bus to Brisbane. Hang on, thinks I, looking through the bleating ranks of backpackers and outraged Greyhound drivers... that looks much like my cousin Anna's friend Chi, but surely not! ...but that, I mused further, looks much like my cousin Anna. None of us had been very aware of the others' travel plans - it turns out that Anna plus pals were meeting Kate and Kees (other cousin and her very tall fiance) for breakfast at Aquarius backpackers, which was discovered on further inspection to be a stone's throw from my own hostel. They had been in Byron Bay for two days without either of us knowing. After a brief breakfast reunion (at least we all made good on our Christmas promise not to go years without seeing each other again - it took only the first six days of 2007) I had to flee on the Greyhound to Coffs Harbour. I didn't gawp quite so much at the giant prawn, this time. I had a hangover and it still makes me nervous.

The staff at Aussietel hostel remembered me, but I had forgotten about the punch they drink. There are no good pubs so they run a $6 bucks all-you-can-drink night swilling a mix of orange juice and Goon, with vodka to take the edge off. It is called 'Heartburn' because of what happens approximately ninety minutes after you start drinking it. Last November we all played cards but this time the staff were too busy flirting with American girls to drink with anyone else, identical American girls with identical American fringes and American teeth and smoking cigarettes like schoolgirls in the pub, elbow on the table and hand in the air, loose wrist and coffin nail loose in the first two fingers, bored and stupid, oblivious and given already to fat come age nineteen. So instead I got pissed playing 'Circle of Death' with two groups of Irish travellers. It is a very simple game known also as 'Four Kings', and under this name James Shannon may recall with well-earned shame a night in Aberdeen when he pulled the fourth King and drank something horrible poured into his mouth from the first floor window. This version is less extreme but quicker. The Irish groups mined a rich seam of personal history to stitch each other up during the ever-dangerous I HAVE NEVER round... classics including "I have never gone out dressed entirely in red, including a hat..." "I have never believed there was a restaurant at the top of Mt. Everest..." and the evergreen "I have never been discovered by my Dad face-down in the flowerbed with my car parked lengthwise in the road, blocking traffic."

I was only in Aussietel for a night before escaping into the Coffs hinterland to stay with my Mum's cousin Simon, his wife Anni and their children Oliver and Zianna. I stayed for two nights, drinking as much of Simon's homebrew as possible, eating homemade pickle and swimming in the local creeks, ice-cold and utterly clear. We laid a nice spot of turf and saw an echidna. For a garden Simon and Anni have 60 acres of rainforest. The heat is tangible, and after the rainstorms clouds of steam drifted out from the path. I climbed a strangler fig and was very nervous about the ticks and the leeches that wait on the branches. Cicadas in the trees, leaf-tailed geckos dozing on the side of the house, a goanna in the driveway. Oliver and Zianna taught me how to play Monopoly and promptly beat me at it. I existed another couple of turns on charity with Oliver waiving twelve-hundred pounds of Pall Mall rent before shame overtook me and I retired to the homebrew.

The flight from Coffs to Sydney was fine, but the queue at the domestic terminal was a horror. I took one look at the mobs of people and knew enough to settle in for the long haul, but it still took over an hour to shuffle twenty metres to the check-in desk. The Australians around me didn't know what to do; they are used to efficiency and things working properly, and they were becoming panicked and unstable. I realised that this is one of the things that makes Britain great: we have experience enough not to lift an eyebrow when life goes awry, when it goes pear-shaped, when bureacracy or stupidity stand in the way of common sense and reason... "Bloody weather, eh? Bloody buses... bloody Ken Livingstone, eh? Eh?"
"Look here, chum. Let us never talk to one another again, and stare straight ahead instead with no smiling."

I don't think the woman in the queue ahead of me knew much about Ken Livingstone. She was having a heated argument across the top of her zimmer frame, yelling at the girl at the counter, who took the abuse with a practised service industry CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT smile-for-the-airport-tv-reality-show-smile plastered across her teeth like Vaseline. When I finally made it to the counter she seemed bored and contemptuous in her too-much make-up. "I think today would have been a good day to pull a sickie," says I with much in the way of an empathetic smile, jerking a wry thumb over my shoulder at a fat man who keeps shouting something indistinct about "Hurry up!"
The girl laughs, she laughs, "It's an experiment. We're deliberately trying everyone's patience to discover the breaking point."
"Not me," I said. "I'm British."

After finally checking-in I had nine hours to kill before boarding, so I took the train into Sydney and went to the cinema. Things get a bit hazy about now. I went to see Marie Antionette. At least, I think I did... I must have bought a ticket, because the stub is still in my wallet, and I seem to recall exploring the bowels of the cinema and finding a cobwebby room marked SCREEN 18 but after that things go blank and uncomfortable, and the next thing I remember for certain is waking on the street outside as if from a deep sleep. According to my watch, slightly more than two hours had passed, and I felt curiously cheated, but I couldn't say for certain that I actually watched anything resembling a movie.

Back at the airport the queues had died down but the checkout girl had gone too, so I had a beer by myself and boarded for Perth. The size of Australia starts to make sense when you travel six hours to cross from one coast to another. Off the top of my head that's roughly how long it took to fly from London to the skies over Egypt. At nine kilometres high we chase the sunset east across the outback, nine kilometres up and the horizon darkens into a dull rainbow, the clouds pink and grey, gutted salmon, dirt tracks that run straight for dozens of kilometres and sometimes cross smaller tracks and trails that stretch away to nowhere much. There are fields, I suppose, or rather massive tracts of scrub and sand in geometric shapes, fenced-in for reasons I will never understand. When the sun drops further the sporadic waterholes are reflected red, bright studs in the murk, and I think I can tell different layers of atmosphere, split apart in gigantic arcs.

It is dark only for a little while, and then we land in Perth. Cousin Jeremy rescued me from the airport and poured beer into me. This was to become a regular pattern over the next few days. He and Joan live in a lemon orchard with dogs and bull ants. These first are called Tooky and Aloo, and they are dumb and try to dig big holes under the house. The second are a menace, ants a full inch long that bite and sting. Jem copped a sting through his shirt and the mark is still going strong after five days. Joan can cook just about anything and I've been making up for two months of malnutrition with Burmese curries and fried rice.

We've been talking about a lot of family history. I suppose one of the reasons I haven't written in so long is because I'm still trying to digest it all... some things I knew but didn't understand and many more that I had no idea of - much to do with World War II, and I'm finally just beginning to grasp the size of the thing, to attach some meaning to it other than feeling guilty if I forget the minute's silence on Armistice day. It is too big for most of us, I think, those of us who were never affected by it directly. I don't know what to say. Well, I do, but I'm not writing it here.

Joan is Burmese and her family in Western Australia number about 200 in three generations. It's even more complicated than the Sylvester clan. Her daughter Vanessa and boyfriend Neil threw a barbeque on Friday night - a dozen people coming and going and eating and drinking, a great night out in Perth. Bacardi 151 is 75.5% alcohol. We went to 'The Aberdeen', which was much better than the actual Aberdeen, and drank a lot of tequila and rum and bourbon and the next day I stood accused of being a pimp and spontaneously starting a taxi singalong of 'Turn around bright eyes', both of which I deny. We watched The Simpsons until the wee smalls, and I recovered with six hours of Scrubs. It was too hot to move. Temperatures at the weekend were pushing 40oC, impossible heat, impossible to do anything except sit, drink water, try not to exert any energy. Joan's other daughter Kathy threw a birthday party and I topped up the ABV% in my blood with Jack Daniels and 'Death By Chocolate' and staggered home at one. Birthday parties for young and old, ride-on mowers, chicken curries, ants, heat.

Jeremy has lent me his Ute - 'pick-up', for those at home - and I am roaming the Southern Forests at the moment. I drove straight through to Albany, stayed a night in a hostel trying to catch the eye of an attractive bookworm but getting too hooked into 'number9dream' to make any progress, drove along the coast to Denmark, stopping at Gap - not what you think - nothing to do with sweatshops - photos to follow (next stop the Antarctic) - and stayed the night in a hostel with six Irish boys who just the day before had crashed and written off their brand-new-second-hand jeep and were still trying to work out who to blame, drove on along the highway and found my way to Elephant Rocks. Which is amazing. Massive granite boulders, smoothed over by the sea, grouped knee-deep in the ocean, a herd of elephants marching out to some hidden gravesite way under the water. My photos won't do it justice but the similarity is uncanny, magnificent, awe-inspiring. So then I climbed on them. Amazing friction on the feet, nice landings in the sea or on the sand, and passersby who know nothing about climbing to cheer the easiest moves. I climbed my highest top-out, too, I think maybe six or seven metres. It was pretty easy, to be honest, about 4c/5a with a 5b move near the top where a gnarly little flower has taken root in the only good handhold. I'm looking forward to getting back into regular climbing.

Today I've driven all over the Southern Forests, ancient Karri trees, hot sun, tiger stripe roads, craning my neck to identify the roadkill
that comes and goes
and never knows
what hit it
bugs tip-tap bouncing
on my windscreen
on to Margaret River where all the hostels were fully-booked so I raced up the highway to Dunsborough before the reception closed. Then I wrote all this, mainly to call a halt to the harrassment I've endured for not updating the blog before now. Jesus, what am I? Your prancing monkey? In fact, no-one is to answer that, especially Jeremy, Tim, Mike, Bob, my Mum, Baker and his pseudonyms, or anyone else.

I'll probably head back up the coast to Perth tomorrow. On Saturday I'm going paintballing as part of a Buck's night (which is exactly the same as a Stag's night except the Australians have to rename everything to compensate for their inferiority complex about being so dismal at things like cricket and not being English anymore). Not sure what happens after that. I've been making noises about moving back at the start of February and my cash has now gone. But I am getting very nervous about jobs. I've been looking for work over the internet for about six weeks now and the only job I was interested in the man at the agency couldn't be buggered writing back about.