I am now somewhere in Europe after surviving the always hideous flight all the way from Australia. If you’ve never done two flights back to back that total twenty-four hours in flight time then you don’t know what you’re missing and you probably should never try and find out. I went via Singapore because I refuse to give Arabs any of my money ever again if I can help it. I find it vaguely amusing that so many Mancunians were outraged at the Muslim atrocity at a concert in their city but then they’ll willingly totter off to watch Manchester City play its next match even though the club is almost entirely owned by the deputy prime minister of the UAE.
But I digress.
My plan in Singapore was to break up the trip by taking a swim in the rooftop pool in terminal 1. Seriously, Singapore is the best airport in the world bar none. It is so far in front of any other airport on the face of the earth that it is almost like being on a different planet. Perhaps this is what future planetary travel will feel like. You leave a crumbling and dysfunctional shithole such as Australia and then you step off the spaceship into something like Singapore airport and you say to yourself, fuck yeah – let’s make something happen!
Unfortunately my layover was too short for me to partake of the pool’s chlorinary and urinary delights – damn you Singapore Airlines and your efficiency! Two hours just wasn’t going to cut it and so I trooped onto my next flight and another 13 hours of sitting upright and hating the world. I can’t sleep on flights. Even when I have flown in business or first class I still can’t sleep. I can sometimes doze, but it’s always a fitful state of half-awareness at best.
So when I arrived somewhere in Europe at 7am local time I hadn’t slept for close to 40 hours. I managed to stay awake until mid-afternoon and then I fell over, only to wake up the next morning at 2am. Did I mention how much I hate this flight and all of its effects?
Some of you may have been aware that I am working on my third book, a tour de force of brilliant awesomeness that stalled some time in the last six months and hasn’t shown any signs of recovering. It stalled after I made the decision to move back to Europe in January. Having half my mind in Europe and half in Australia was not conducive to concentrating at the level required to do my best possible output. This was particularly frustrating as a good publisher has expressed considerable interest in publishing the new book.
But now the sun is up and I’m feeling energized, more energized than I have been in the last three years, or so it feels to me. I have a lot to do, a great many things to organize, and the additional hurdle of having to learn yet another language. But it no longer feels daunting; it just feels like something that needs to be done and is now achievable, at least in my own mind.
I also feel a great urge to get moving again on my stalled book. A sense of place is very important for me in order to be productive and my patience with Australia had run out. Once something runs out for me, whether a place, an entity, or a person, then it’s all over. In a way I feel like I’ve been run out of my own country by a series of governments that have done nothing but twist and deform a nation state that once we all had so much pride in but are now reduced to being so ashamed of that a national meeting of Australian councils voted yesterday to lobby the federal government to change the date of our national holiday.
I have received plenty of comments on my articles on social media on this subject that begin with ‘good riddance‘ and usually end with ‘and don’t come back‘. These elicit some sadness in me, not because I am offended but because these people are resigned to the failure of their country and my refusal to go down with the ship angers them. They are the crabs that failed to stop a brother crab escaping from their collective barrel.
I suppose that I am fortunate that I have the option to go, but the fact is that I have spent almost all of my adult life creating that very option. It didn’t just magically appear overnight. It is a product of many tough decisions and much hard work.
It’s funny though; on the one hand you can’t just pack up and move your whole family overseas, but on the other hand you can do exactly that. Like every other thing in your life you just make it happen. People that I meet are often amazed when they find out just a fraction of what I have done but the truth is that I don’t do everything that I set out to do. I probably achieve 5% of what I say I will do, but that is 5% more than most other people manage.
If more people would just stop putting off doing what they need to do then most of the world’s problems would be solved within a short space of time.
Even though I have physically departed I will not stop writing about Australia. It is my birthplace, the nation of my ancestors, and I owe it much. I am in exile from my country, a refugee of political correctness and progressive ideology gone mad, and as such it is my responsibility to continue the fight to shine a light on the lie that the western world believes Australia still to be.
In other words, the shit-stirring won’t stop. You can count on that.
Photo by GothamNurse 