It's so nice to be back home where I belong

It's so nice to be back home where I belong

I was back in London after nearly nine months of travelling. I had originally arranged for my round the world ticket to get me back in mid February for a couple of reasons. I had a couple of birthdays I wanted to be in the country for, I wasn’t sure if I would be bored of travelling after nine months and it would give me a handy excuse if I had overspent my travel budget (most likely on gin). Thankfully I was still under budget and had an appetite for more travelling so I began work on arranging the remaining gays in various European cities to get me to 80.

I suppose this part of the story isn’t really a part of my 80 Gays travels. If this whole adventure ever gets turned into a movie, this bit would be covered by one of those montage scenes with some appropriate song playing in the background, which fades away so you can hear snippets of various conversations. I’ll do the screenwriters a favour and just give the potted highlights of my couple of weeks back in the UK.

Place mat

• I was collected from the airport by my dear friend Gail, one of the rare occasions she was actually on time for meeting me. I spent a couple of days with her, her husband and my godsons. Helping to look after a three year old and a one year old was a great way to stop the jet lag from hitting me. The boys had changed so much in the time I had been away. We headed out to a restaurant for lunch on my final day with them. I kept the boys entertained by making a cat out the paper place mat. My eldest godson recognised what I had made, which made me feel pretty good. Gail joined in by making a paper plane, going for something thin and sleek in the style of Concorde. She said “What has Mummy made?”. The response was a quizzical look, followed by the suggestion it was a nail.

• I headed up home to see family and friends for a few days. I got a massive hug at the station from Mother and it was a good few minutes before she finally let go. Once we were back at her house and my sister arrived I gave them both the gifts I had picked out at the airport in Hong Kong – a Tiffany heart keyring for each of them. My sister opened the card first, and having read the message inside, started to cry. Mother looked up to see why she was crying as she had made a beeline for the present, ignoring the card attached to it.

• We had a family trip over to see my granddad for his 92nd birthday. Over lunch I told him a little bit about my travels and some of the things I had done while away. I told him how I had held a gun in Texas but hadn’t had the chance to go shoot it, asking him if he had fired his gun during the war. He told us that he had never fired the gun they had given him but just after the war had ended and they were still in Germany they had come across a German rifle in the woods, near a railway line. My granddad had picked the rifle up. At that moment a few hundred feet away a deer was crossing the railway line. My granddad had taken aim and fired, not imagining for one moment he would get anywhere close. The deer dropped onto the tracks, having been unlucky enough to be hit by a novice marksman.  My granddad and his fellow soldiers handed the rifle and the deer carcass to a rather bemused German farmer.

• I spent a very enjoyable evening with Sara(h) Squared watching the men’s 10m synchronised diving championships in what would in a few short months time be the aquatics centre for the London 2012 Olympic Games. It was a great evening out – fit men in speedos to watch while we enjoyed a drink in the stands. We spent the warm up session picking out who we thought had the nicest design on their trunks and then got ready for the competition. I wasn’t paying attention when the announcer said what the first dive would be. I turned to Sarah and asked her what they were doing.

Sarah: “I think it is a back one and a half somersault with tuck”

Me: “With tut?”

Sarah: “Yeah, just as they are about to hit the water they have to tut”

Dean and Ramon

• Having successfully navigated around the world for nine months I managed to get totally lost on the way to Claire’s 30th birthday party, in central London. I arrived about a half hour later than planned but we had a good catch up and reminisced about the wine tasting tour we had done a few months earlier in Sydney. Neither of us had been able to think about a Semillon in the same way ever since.

• Dean got a new friend, Ramon, to join him on the European leg of my trip, courtesy of Sarah and Marcella who had given me Dean as a going away present. 

“It's so nice to be back home where I belong” 
Lyrics from Hello, Dolly! from the musical Hello, Dolly!