It was the second day of Spring here - the second day of Autumn at home. The air here was close to my skin and heavydamp. I had been wearing a tee shirt but changed in to an oxford cotton shirt before I left the house. It was too hot for it and it stuck to my back but I needed something from it - a feeling of adulthood. I was out walking trying to outwalk my maudlinness. I had woken up under a cloud and got out of the wrong side of my bed. I got out under the cloudless blue Australian sky and set of pushing the sadness in my soul down to my soles. White wooden houses grew up among the lush green under the blue. The air was of chlorophyll.

I was missing home. I was missing the drama of the Edinburgh Autumn. The city looking ready to fall off of its own slopes and crash. This is a nice time of year there, there is beauty in the grey. There is a feeling that every moment is monumental. The city is worn out and post-coital after the Festival and just wants to cuddle. If I was walking at home I would watch women wrapped up warm in black sit, red lipped and sip and watch their cappuccino steam rise up over Princes St. Why had I left? I had a home?

Thinking such odd, unhelpful thoughts I put my headphones in and clickedscrolled through the LCD alphabet of albums. Unsure. Feeling like Radiohead but feeling like I needed something happy, uplifting. Something to fix my stilted attitude and ageing perspective.  Hmm. My eyes settled on “Loch Awe.” This was a record a friend of mine had emailed me from Edinburgh. I was excited to hear it. My thumb froze though as a voice on my shoulder said “Are you sure it’s clever to listen to that, feeling as you do?” My unruly thumb recklessly disregarded.

My ears were filled with an accordion beautifully pushing a microphone a little hard, breathing in and out. In a moment, in my mind I was looking out over the shore at Skye, smelling the saline sea air. I could see soaring seagulls and hear their squaking. I could feel air alive with rain and feel beautiful piano fingers against my cheek.

A man and a woman sang in stereo-harmony “I was pulled away by the ocean in me.” The Sun moved to the left in the sky and I could feel a plate tectonic rumble under my feet. Sometimes one line is all you need. The world changed through me when I heard that. Crystallisation. My Father had been a sailor. He was a nomad with itchy feet. He never seemed to stay too long anywhere and never seemed to have too much of a problem leaving. It was as if he was pulled away by a tide in him. Maybe I was simply my Father’s son. I had no reason to go - I just went because what seemed new seemed good. We all want. We are all stretching, searching, screaming towards the next point in space and time - the paycheque, the end of exams, the retirement, leaving for Australia, getting home from Australia.

I took a deep breath and felt something heave and relax. My hummingbird heart steadied and my anxiety dissipated. People had been telling me for weeks “to just relax and enjoy your time away.”

I sat down on a bench by the road. The problem had been me and I saw why now. I let the gentle folk melodies of Loch Awe flow through me and wash over me, as if I was sand on the shore and the music was the sea. The frantic search for unity and meaning and profoundity that had been shredding my nerves and eating my soul for the past week was being washed out of me. I stopped desperately rushing to the next dot on the map, the next page of the calendar and was content. I sat under the cloudless, Australian sky beside the road, simply happy that I lived in a world where there was music such as this, where answers could be found, where there was love, simply happy that the sky was still above and that I was still alive and happy that, in that moment, that was enough.

“Sometimes money costs too much.”

“The outside world of dead friends and parking spaces came flooding on in and we forgot what we wanted and we became what we become - waitresses and bartenders.”

I have managed to find myself a job out here in Kangarooland. This was pretty high up on my list of priorities when I left for Australia. There aren’t that many places that are more expensive to live than Edinburgh I have found one.

So I work in a cocktail bar in Fortitude Valley - Brisbane’s notorious party district. I told an Australian friend that I had gotten a bar job in the valley and she replied “Well at least you’ll never have to see the outside of the valley on a Saturday night.” A friend described the outside of the Valley on a Saturday night as a ‘disgrace to humanity’ - I feel that this might be a BIT strong but it gets pretty crazy. Walking along Brunswick St I feel like a wee life raft adrift on a sea of bare thighs, small dresses, tight tee shirts and booooooooooze. The place is a complete drunken carry-on. You know in Scotland when you go out you have that one mate that gets too pissed and makes a fool of themselves? In the valley that’s EVERYONE. In my view, it says something about the place that, in order to get a job that involves selling alcohol in Australia you have to pay $75 and sit and exam and that one of the points raised in the exam is that a bartender can be fined $8,000 dollars for allowing people to consume alcohol from “a vessel that does not allow them to monitor their liquor consumption, such as a water pistol.” Yes, a water pistol. They tell bartenders here not to let people drink liquor from a water pistol in a bar. Madness.

Anyway, the bar itself is an upmarket hybrid of a scene from the Jetsons and a Cuban plantation house. (see below) Rum flows, there is a DJ and the standard of bartending is extremely high. Armed with but a few bartending shifts at home and a bit of cocktail training I am not good enough to work there, as I am repeatedly reminded. I got the job on the basis of my “Scottish Charm” (which is real currency out here). So my first proper shift was on Friday the 13th, the second song the DJ played was ‘Hit the Road Jack” and the first thing Papi had said to me was “You are a good boy, don’t make me fire you.” The omens were not great.

For the first two weeks I balanced on this blade between being sacked and quitting. I do two big shifts Friday and Saturday every week and, by way of example, didn’t get home from work until 7:00 this morning. It is massively high stress and I wasn’t sure I could hack it. I am really starting to love it though. On my way there as I get off of the bus and onto the train I am a raincloud thinking “Damn this, I just wont work and will live in romantic, artistic, poetic poverty.” Then I get into a taxi on the way home with a bellyful of expensive beer and a wallet full of enough money to pay rent and buy food for the next week and I think “Naaaaah man, this is class.” And this is the danger.

Which brings me to the point of the story. My boss at Skyroom is an handsome, flamboyant Cuban man called Papi. He dresses exclusively in black and is as fire-y as the fact that he drinks Havana Blanco straight in a rocks glass for fun would suggest. He is a contender for the title of “most intense person Jack has ever met and is ever likely to meet.” He is a World Class bartender and runs the tightest, rum fuelled ship that has existed for a couple of hundred years. Think part Tom Cruise and part something from an advert for Bacardi. So it’s pretty intimidating working with him. At first I mistook his kingly condescension and intimidating exasperation to be negative things but he and I are getting along well. Papi and I sat around after last night’s shift and drank rum and the following is the resulting story:

In Communist Cuba, Papi was a professor of literature and had a book of poetry published. He can talk at length about Borges, Marquez and Dante. He met his wife and they moved to London - the picture of aspirational young love - he could not speak a word of English and didn’t have enough money to buy a jumper to keep his Cuban skin in from the cold. He got a job polishing glasses at one of the best bars in London and learned English without a book or a lesson in 6 months. Gradually he worked his way up to the point where he was managing bars and had a real reputation. He had a daughter and moved to Australia for a quieter life. Still though, his job, his wife and his job stole all of the time he had spent writing and reading and now, he tells me, he hasn’t written a single line in ten years. I was sure I could see something being stretched inside him as he told me this story. For poetical effect I mihgt say that he welled up a bit as his facade cracked by the pain of it. Frightening.

So the moral of the story is, I think, the same as the moral of many other stories. Live consciously and do not become a passive observer of your own existence.

And don’t let people booze out of waterguns in a bar you work in.

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”

Here I was. I was picked up at the airport in a limousine by a man in tailored black suit and driving gloves. I hadn’t slept, showered or eaten for almost 50 hours - the flight had been brutal. Dishevelled, dirty, broken, sweaty, poor and alone. The driver told me about the history of Australia. Now I can’t remember a word of what he told me apart from the tidbit that Brisbane was built where it was built to prevent the escape of convicts. He spoke irresponsibly with a forked tongue and was somehow redolent of a snake. I remember him being seven or eight feet tall. His pallid skin and sunken, yellow eyes were not congruous with the glorious sunshine shining outside. “The Australians have some cheek” thought I “to call this Winter.”

I remember the fear most. Those cold nights getting dressed out of a suitcase and tucked in to my single bed in the hostel feeling the cold tingle down my spine and the empty weight in my stomach. On my first day I got out of the oddly sinister limo at midday and had ate alone. I showered and got dressed out of my suitcase. I visited the empty campus. As I walked around I could feel something twinge inside me. I realised what it was - there was a rope that connected my solar plexus to Scotland and I had stretched it like an elastic band. It was trying to pull me home. I was determined to stay awake until nighttime and take the fight to jetlag. Jetlag laughed coldly at my bluster and sent me to sleep at four in the afternoon. I wakened at two in the morning feeling more tired than I ever had before. I was starving hungry and the elastic band threatened to tear me limb from limb. I wanted so badly to give in to the will of the tight elastic cord. If there had been a helicopter outside as I left that night I would have gotten on it and gone home. I was crying like a child lost in a supermarket. I would like to be able to tell you, dear reader, that I was saddened by having realised my own inconsequentialness in the world due to the scale I had experienced in travel. This, though, would be common bollocks. I was just a frightened wee boy again.

I was comforted by a security guard who shared his 2AM dinner with me and told me how his son was going to prison. He let me use his phone. I called home for reassurance and was given a cold hard lecture about opportunity and strength. I watched my cowardice dissipate into the cold, softly damp night like breath into vapour. I am truly thankful for having someone who will pick up the phone in the middle of the night and give me the raw, sore truth in a world of yeasayers and pussyfooting.

If there had been a helicopter, getting on it would have been a tremendous mistake. To all of those who are leaving one life for another I would offer the following words - the first week is tough. A strong force of nostalgia and comfort will attempt to tractor beam you back to your home. This is feebly called ‘homesickness’ but this does not capture the depth of the malady. Grim as it is though you, like me, will get through it. Just remember to pack senses of humour, adventure and direction, the phone number of someone who will tell you that giving up on this opportunity is not a open option and, perhaps most importantly, do NOT leave home without a trust in the essential goodness of massive, midnight security guards who are built like brick outhouses and have the table manners of a moose. And sunscreen. Sunscreen is important. Even in the middle of “winter”.

Life here crackles and fizzles at my fingertips, every day truly is a gift. I have learned what aspects of my old life I want to go home to and what new aspects of myself I want to nurture. I am becoming better acquainted with that painfully enigmatic and elusive character - my true self.

“A journey of a thousand miles must start with a single step.”

My first step was the tear streaked one I took as I watched you leave down the escalator back to our home in sunny Scotland. I had the words “To live in one land is captivity” written on the guitar on my back and burnished in my heart. As I took a deep breath and a step to order a nerve calming handful of whiskys in anticipation of the unavoidable contemplation of the forty hour flight I repeated these words and polished the edifice I had built for them in my core.

My Scottish, conservative cautiousness compelled me to put the chain on. I opened the door a crack and a voice drifted in:

“Hello Jack, it’s opportunity. Can I come in?”

“Hmm, I don’t know. Last time you came round, you scared off security and comfort zone.”

“But Jack, you worked so hard for me to get here. Surely now that I am here, you will let me in.”

I thought about it for a moment. I could stay here forever and chain the door every time opportunity knocked and live in my small pond and be a small time, small town big fish. OR I could let opportunity in, watch security and comfort zone leave their seats by the fire in my warm home and find myself a miniscule minnow in a massive pond. Like a common goldfish though, I thought, I’d only grow in a bigger bowl. After weighing up weighty options  in a heavy mind I decided I’d jump into the ocean and be carried by the tide. I realised that I only have one time and took the opportunity of a lifetime to travel into the New World’s light and my bright, shining new life.

And in making this decision I became, in a small way, a man.