6 days out of order and in a blur...

standing outside Perth Domestic Terminal on arrival i was just about ready to leave. ten-odd hours of transit from go to woah, standing in a town i recognised but no longer knew, the sense of rightness was completely missing.

walking back into the same airport 140 hours and 5 minutes later and things were... different. a nervous drive down barely-remembered streets, a visit to some old friends and a good night's sleep had put me in a better frame of mind. sepia-toned memories overlaid with the current actuality of the places in which i found myself, seeing people who are all but unchanged on the surface, but with new stories bubbling up from within. the eerie and disconcertingly familiar distilled into a comforting recognition and for once when i walked out of that town it felt like a departure rather than a harried escape.

"OH MY GOD you haven't changed a bit!!"
5 years... it can't have been 5 years... i was thinking. i recognised her instantly from outside the cafe where i stood in the rain, bright pink hair that last i remembered as black, and spiked up in devil horns now falling over her eyes as she sat looking at the newspaper. it's true thought - i hadn't seen Lil' Rach in 5 years, since not long before i first left the old town. every time i'd come through she'd been elsewhere. we hadn't even really spoken much over the years - half an hour's worth of conversation spread over a handfull of phone calls. i knew so little of her life in the meantime that i had no idea what was going to be said when i got there. the hug was instantaneous and i couldn't help but think how well she was looking - slimmer, happier, bright and shining like a star, and without thinking or planning or consideration it was as if we hadn't seen each other in 5 days, not years.

to be told that i was exactly as remembered was rather nice in a way. i looked in the mirror later that day and pondered my visage. less weight, more lines, a readier smile. my hair is more or less the same. i dress the same (although the quality has improved over the years, but the styles remain). but then it made me wonder whether i had actually changed over the years, or have i learned nothing from what has gone before? no, not really. still, i can't complain if i'm starting to look my age, rather than persistently older than advertised.

three hours i spend exchanging stories with Lil Rach. i even drove her to work so that she wouldn't have to waste the 45 minutes on buses and could spend it with me instead. we shared tales of love and loss, travel, time spent and places visited. she's been around the world, met a lad she can't live without and above all, been happy. a can-do attitude and an ability to make do. a refusal to see anything as a roadblock, and a conviction for streaking through New York city. we're both new people and it didn't matter, because we're both still the same in every way that matters. i'd have hung around all day if i'd not had so many places to be that day. i'd been on the go from 8AM, wasn't scheduled to stop until past 2 the next morning and this was my first appointment and it didn't stop coming, not for another 14 hours.

"I believe that if you're going to put something in your mouth it had better be worth it... in more ways than one..."
how on earth am i to describe Must to provide the appropriate amount of detail while at the same time reflecting the emotion of the experience? i could try to describe the food (wagyu beef shank ravioli with mushrooms and black truffle, chicken and lobster sausage with whole wheat and white-wine sauce, hand-made gnocchi with wagyu beef shank, bread flown in from france each day, a south-american slant to this month's wine selection in support of the tapas tasting menu they'd run earlier in the month... you get the idea), or the room (wall to wall wine-bottles, few of which you'd see gracing the shelves of a discount liquor store), or the wait-staff (the junior waiter we spoke to knew far more about wines than i did, and they still had a sommelier on the premises). what i think i'll brush on however, is that i have never in my life eaten food which left me in a post-orgasmic twitch after each bite. Ondine would later describe my response as "an uncertain combination of giggling and sobbing". i do know that at one point, after i'd mopped up my plate with the last of the bread and had started on her rotisseried pork and duck, seasonal vegetables and home-made polenta i hit my head on the wall when i bit into the crackling because i'd lost control of my neck.

in a word, the food was Perfect. everything. twelve inch stalks of asparagus? sweet from tip to tail, not woody in the slightest. each wine perfectly complementary. each ingredient perfectly proportioned. parmesan, rocket, balsamic and olive oil salad? perfect.

Ondine's a jewel, especially when it comes to food. put her in a town for a week or two and she'll be on first name basis with some of the chefs of the best restaurants within 20 kilometres of the city centre. give her a month and she'll have home and mobile numbers. she knows food both from an eating and a cooking perspective and she loves sharing the experience with people who appreciate it. i'm not entirely sure how i keep on her foodie-radar, bearing in mind how lazy i can get when it comes to putting effort into my eating. there have been far too many weeks where i've eaten naught but packet pasta and pizza. still, i DO like food, even if i don't always pursue it to the n'th degree at all times. Ondine does, and i get to enjoy her hard work, and she enjoys my enjoyment so everybody wins.

a couple of days after my first Must experience i was arriving for another breakfast/brunch rendezvous to find her sitting under a makeshift covered area behind a butcher's in Mt Lawley. she and a friend were at a gourmet market, top hat and long-coat, multiple petticoats, tea set and lace tablecloth. the admiring stares and comments had the two of them preening like cats and pleased as punch. a pate and sweetbreads platter, a board of cheeses you have to know exist before anyone will let you buy some, fresh bread and coffee from one of the better roasters in Perth. it almost made me forget the 4-5 hours of sleep i'd had the night before, not to mention the drive i'd undertaken using the best of Zen Navigation (turn when it feels like you should turn). delightful, civilised, and with a sandwich consisting of about a third of a roast lamb squeezed between two slices of slightly stale bread.

now i'm glad that i'm on an uncatered flight because i don't think i'm going to, in all conscience or concern for my waistline, eat again for the next 3 or 4 days. damn you Ondine, for ruining my waist-line. thank you for taking me to Must for the best meal and later the best Scotch i've ever tasted.

"You are correct - she IS ridiculously lonely... but then so am I.."
i'm seeing it more more, but last saturday night was a sledgehammer to the skull. it's occurred to me a number of times over the last few years, but looking around the Engagement Party and seeing all the people i knew who were married, engaged to be married, in long term relationships, children running around the room and the glimmer in people's eyes of more in the planning stages, the small couch-load of singletons felt awfully isolated. my sister got married a couple of years ago, not too long after her son was born (named for our grandfather). The Boy has been seeing the same girl from four years now and if she's put up with his shit with a smile for this long i can't see any particular risk of her leaving any time soon. they're a foregone conclusion as far as i'm concerned.

the same sort of thing is happening in Canberra and i can see how anyone long-term single hanging around the crew would be getting towards "sharpening your razor blades on your wrists" stage. i was starting to get a bit of the blues going myself, but then the pretty little thing i like to hug and kiss a lot was a long long way away. yes, she'll be even further away in a week and a half - thanks for reminding me. arsehole.

either way, i found it interesting to stand there surrounded by happy, smiling couples with a beer in hand, a "fuck you" smile and a big shit-eating grin on my face. it's lovely, though. Kandi and Mav are the couple you wish you and your partner were. they act like they just met and are still exploring the ins and outs of each other's genitalia despite having been going at it unchanged and unabated for six years now. they make single people jealous just by walking into the room and despite my comprehensive understanding that that sort of joined-at-the-hip, life-in-each-other's-pockets behavior would drive me to distraction and speeding fines, i can't help but be effected by it all.

nonetheless, it seems like almost everyone i know i perth is either happily in a long-term relationship, married or soon to be married, or desperately lonely and wishing they could join the club. given another couple of years and i have feeling that i'll be a member of an increasingly diminishing species, standing alone while the rest of them all stand together... that is, unless a certain little geek girl comes to her senses.

i keep referring to this as Canberra... mostly, i think, because i always assume that Perth is wherever i'm not. now i'm leaving Canberra too, and i honestly can't tell whether i'm coming or going anymore...
once again i'm on an aeroplane headed east. every time i've left Perth in the last 5 years i've felt like i was escaping back to the promised land - the land of Anywhere But There. i've always had a good time, but i've also been relieved to be getting out of there. now i'm tired and drained and with no regrets as to the way i spent my time over the last week, but i find myself missing it more the patchwork of rural western australia, then south australia, now victoria pass under my window and i wipe a small child of indiscriminate gender's drool off my arm. the ice glitters in my window, my isolation headphones seclude me from the jets and the hubbub of humanity and my head-space is so geographically disperse that i can't quite put a finger on where anything is. i'm liking the uncertainty of not being able to say where "home" is anymore. when the world around you is less than stable it gives you a chance to find out how good your own balance really is.

a good trip, all told, and for once i wish, in a small way, that it could have been longer. still, i'll be back sooner or later, of that i have no doubt.