Days 13-14 (June 19-20) - Emma, Zach and Jerry

Woke up on sunday morning with a massive headache and an empty KFC box in front of my face on a too small couch without a clue where I was or how I got there. Then Alex appeared from a pile of blankets on the other couch and I realised that I could at least find my way back to Julias place. We walked out and got a bus to the nearest tube station which turned out to be on the exact opposite side of London to where I wanted to be and went our separate ways. Arrived back at Julias with just enough time to buy my coach ticket and say goodbye, but not to change or shower, before heading back out to get to Victoria station to get a coach to Southampton, which at least gave me a chance to get an hours sleep before I met Emma, and then shortly thereafter my nephew Zach who I hadn't met before and Jerry, probably looking slightly the worse for wear.

Lazed around there house in Hedge End the rest of the day, its a very nice house, Jerry seems like a cool guy and we bonded over sport. Zach was apparently in a bad mood as he had a cold but he had moments of happiness and friendliness and seems nice (can there be such a thing as a not nice baby?). Emma has transformed since I last saw her into the picture of a perfect mum and we spent the day catching up, playing some iPod scrabble (which could take up a dangerous amount of my time if I get regular wifi) and watching England get knocked out of the U21 football world cup.

Slept in the next morning to catch up from saturday night and had a really creepy dream where I was stuck at work doing my usual thing but also was completely aware that it was a dream and I was actually in Emmas house in England but couldn't wake myself up and meanwhile my boss was getting angrier and forcing me to work (See, if you didn't think this blog was crap before, now I'm describing dreams). Eventually I woke up and spent about an hour playing around with Skype for the first real time before emerging and spending the day either playing with Zach (who was a lot happier and doesn't seem, possibly being too young to know better, to dislike his Uncle Hugh... which I can still totally not see myself as) and Emma or watching the latest couple of episodes of Game of Thrones while Emma read (this house has a huge and incredibly impressive array of books) and Zach napped.

When Jerry got home he took me with him to play football with his mates, it is slightly appalling how much my fitness has dropped off after 2 weeks of drinking and eating and no exercise but I managed to hold my own, which was nice as an Australian playing football (the soccer kind) with poms, and scored a couple of goals.

After football we arrived back to Emma having cooked dinner (she really has become a very competent woman) and got shown some crazy, and unnecessarily graphic, English reality TV show about obscenely fat people who wanted surgery or had had surgery and had massive skin flaps or (and yes, this is a thing) couldn't find their genitalia. You would think if you started having problems finding yourself you should probably start dieting or think about taking up an eating disorder (well, if your that fat you probably have one, but one of the thin making ones instead of the cake eating ones).

Days 11-12 (June 17-18) - London

There are some stereotypical activities that seem so stereotypical you never expect them to actually happen. Sometimes though, they do. Every meal I had with Gar (2x lunch, 2x dinner) included a delightful side of boiled cabbage. After lunch (chicken, baked potato and boiled cabbage) Gar drove me back to Lewknor, from where I caught a bus back to London then had my first experience with the London Tube, which is actually impressively fast and inexpensive, although some stops seem unnecessary, they are spaced out about 5 minutes walk from one another. There is also a stop at the end of one of the lines called Cockfosters, which I admit causes the immature inner child in me to giggle every time I hear it announced. Made my way to Covent Garden where I had organised to meet up with Julia, an old friend from my high school days, at her work. I found her but she was assisting a woman (who apparently is some sort of bigshot TV host celebrity over here, although neither myself nor Julia had heard of her) and waited 40 minutes for her to finish up and notice me. Luckily the store had free wifi so I was able to quite happily entertain myself.

I left my bag there and walked back into London to kill a couple of hours until Julia finished work. I went to check out Trafalgar Square, which I had probably seen several times back when I lived here but didn't really remember and was suitably impressive plus only 10 minutes walk, but then it started raining so I headed back to Covent Garden. An hour later I finally got back and decided that the streets were a terrible maze so I ducked into a nearby pub to pass the rest of the time. After I met up with Julia we headed to her place in Canary Wharf which was a really nice flat looking out over the city, had a couple of drinks and then went to the O2 which is this huge... dome-thing where apparently a lot of concerts take place and had dinner at TGI Fridays whos cocktails come in huge fishbowls and then found ourselves a pub called "The Slug and Lettuce" which I decided justified going into but was filled with very poncy and lifeless poms so we headed back to Julias. On the way we stopped to have a look at a ship moored on the side of the Thames and ended up spending about 2 hours talking to the 4 American coast guard trainees who were on watch while a succession of drunk old poms walked up, hit on Julia really badly (as in both a lot and without any success, subtlety or shame) and asked for directions to some nearby strip club.

Disclaimer: In this blog I am not going to try and hide things that happen, especially things that will make good stories, but the next paragraph will be very short and if you want to know details then ask me privately and I may or may not fill you in.

The next day I took a tube back to Covent Garden where I met for the very first time (well, that I can remember) my birth father George. The only thing I am willing to say as it may come up later in the blog is that we discussed my older half brother Ben who is interested in meeting me.

After lunch I met up with a friend from highschool, Alex, who has been living in London for a couple of years and is currently a cripple boy on crutches, for a couple of drinks at a nearby pub. A couple of drinks turned into going back with him to his mates place for a couple more and then from there, at about 11, on to a big house party full of people who had been at the Royal Ascot races all day. Suffice to say I was seriously under dressed but being an Aussie backpacker that worked somewhat to my advantage and I met a bunch of really cool people. I am not sure when exactly we left but at some point we went and got KFC and went back to another of his mates places. It was a somewhat hazy evening.

Days 8-10 (June 14-16) - Grandparents

Made full use of a real bed by sleeping for about 12 hours and awoke to Granny Pat cooking me and awesome full cooked English breakfast then caught a bus in to check out Derby. Derby can be summed by by the following anecdote: I went in to the visitors centre right in the middle of the city and asked the lady working what there was to do, she picked up on my accent and I told her I was from Australia and she then said "Oh thats good, it means I can give you another place to go... there's the Cathedral you can look at but its closed, theres a little chapel on the bridge, a house decorated like an old Georgian house and there's also an Australian pub. You can also kill time by going to the Westfield shopping centre or the library". You know a city is really vibrant and fun when the officials meant to tell you what to see want to help you "kill time".

The cathedral was nice, but as mentioned closed, but the chapel on the bridge was cool, one of very few remaining original 14th century bridge chapels and the old couple looking after it were very friendly and showed me around. The georgian house was a bit interesting but also features a terrible trap. The woman at the entrance told me that at the bottom was a "brewhouse" so I saved that until last. I slowly made my way through the basement level and saw the last door labelled "brewhouse". Heart racing with excitement that I might finally see something really cool I open the door and am greeted by a wall of leaflets and a coffee machine. Goddammit!

After that I felt justified in going to the Australian pub. They are apparently an England wide chain called "Walkabout" and about 500 times more Australian than any pub I have ever been to in Aus but they do sell VB, New and Extra Dry which was a nice adventure into local beverages for me. Their menu also includes far more Kangaroo than Aussie ones and a "real Oz pie" that involved steak, mashed potato and mushy peas with red onion... real Aussie indeed. In a last ditch effort to find sights to see I asked the bargirl what there was to do in Derby and she summed it up eloquently as "Nothing".

Killed a bit of time in the Westfield (English shopping centres are the same, funnily enough) and then walked along the river back to the bus station and bussed back to Spondon. That evening Pat took me to a fantastic fish and chip shop, so English, their meals came with mushy peas, buttered bread and a pot of tea.

Next morning I woke up, said my goodbyes to Pat and her dog Maddie and made my way to Gar's place. Public transport here is super expensive by comparison, £20 for a 3 hour coach from Derby to London (or £49 if I wanted to do it by train, and these are the cheap prices you can get by pre-booking) then £14 for a 45 minute bus to Lewknor where I met Gar and went back to her new house in Watlington which she tells me Mum found her and where I got to meet her dog Topsy.

At this point I want to take a second to paint a word picture of Topsy, half because it gives me a chance to use the phrase "word picture" legitimately and half because of how wonderful the dog is. Topsy is a 6 year old pug, rather... stout... from years living the quiet life with Gar, going on short daily walks, being fed well and also occasionally convincing Gar she hasn't already been fed. She is totally devoted to Gar and to food, I intended to take a photo but unless I was holding food she was always right at Gar's heel and not looking away. Topsy is missing 3 of her teeth on one side of her mouth so her tongue is always flopping out to one side, giving her an interesting "not all there" look and leading her to leak when she drinks and to also appear to be in a constant battle to stop her tongue actually falling out. She also makes very distinct noises. Imagine someone you know who snores really heavily. Now picture an old snorkel, its been through a lot, its a bit battered and leaks slightly, so when you use it everything is a bit damp. Topsy sounds like that snoring person if they were given this snorkel and put underwater. And then Topsy goes to sleep, and actually starts to snore... All said though, she's a really lovely dog.

In the evening I walked into Watlington town centre to, theoretically, find a pub for a pint and to watch the football (U21 world cup) but only found one place, which was the absolute classic old fashioned English pub and didn't have a TV, but fortunately did have a pint and a bartender who lived in High Wycombe, which is right near where I used to live.

The next day was very lazy, hanging around at Gar's, talking and doing my washing, the highlight being a game of Scrabble. I know that sounds really dull but Gar and I have a long history of competitive Scrabble games so it was actually awesome. Man I'm cool.

Days 3-7 (June 9-13, 2011) - Download Festival

Left Pen and Stephens at about 9:30 with Lewis, Chubi (our car) and Cumu (our na(wo)man). Cumu almost immediately let the team down by showing that even navwomen have terrible senses of direction (I'm going to make sexist etc jokes in this blog; they are just jokes) and trying to take the whole trip via backroads, but Lewis worked his magic and seduced her into taking us onto the motorway. Arrived and got directed to a carpark and told is was a 15 minute walk to the campsite. 30+ minutes later we arrived at the entrance to the village (a set of food stalls, carnival rides, an open air metal DJ bus and a circus tent of comedy and burlesque shows, and also the gateway to the campsite) only to be told we couldn't bring in gas or glass, so we could either abandon the gas for our little camping stove and our various sauces or hike back to the car and back with our rather heavy bags. Needless to say we abandoned them but the lady let us keep the peanut butter (its in glass jars here, wierd) which was a lifesaver as it, bread and tinned tuna was about all we had left that we could eat. Luckily we had decanted our scotch bottles into a single plastic water bottle for ease of transport or we might have been in trouble.

Another 10 mins walk or so to our campsite where we set up and cracked our first beers. Beers seem to be primarily sold in pint sized (as in a whole pint, not as in the saying that means small) cans which is awesome. Before long a group set up behind us, some poms, a spaniard, a dane and a swede, and we introduced ourselves. They had 2 20L goonsacks of 6% strength cider, which definitely makes up for anything bad I can say about this country. Our other neighbours turned out to be an older stoner couple with crazy tattoos and hair and a young couple who had (so I'm told, I was passed out by then) rather loud sex. The campsite was an enormous sea of coloured tents and people, a large amount of the tents also had flags flying, mostly of various European countries but a lot, presumably the english ones who had no need for their flag, with beer or pot or similar flags, quite a sight. That night we ended up drinking with the group behind us and then wandering up into the village with extra beers to partake in the carnival atmosphere before (I guess, my memory here gets somewhat hazy) going back to our campsite, drinking a bit more and going to sleep.

At this point I am going to say that English metal head crowds are very similar to aussie ones, but somewhat more extreme in appearance, a lot more visible tattoos, brightly coloured and/or hectically styled hair and facial piercings. Apparently there is also a big problem here with youth unemployment rates, I cannot help but wonder if these two things are linking. The crowds also had a tendency, whenever there was a break between bands or a large crowd walking/queueing, to break into empty (mostly) bottle throwing fights or chanting, the most common chants being "backscratcher" yelled from someone then someone else etc, "Spartans, what is your profession?" followed by the crowd all yelling "HOO-AH" or "Ogi ogi ogi, Oi oi oi" which we thought initially was the aussie aussie aussie chant but alas, poms have no taste.

On the friday, the first of the 3 days of live music, we woke up to a lovely, completely unique breakfast of peanut butter sandwiches (we had brought weat bix and long life milk but couldnt refridgerate the milk due to lack of ice and peanut butter on weat bix is the dryest thing in the history of dryest ever things) before walking over to the arena area and seeing D.R.U.G.S. (Destroy, Rebuild Until God Comes) and Anti-Flag, neither of whom I knew but both were really impressive. We then had a brief interlude of more campsite drinking before Bring Me The Horizon, who I didn't expect to like but actually put on a hell of a show, then the big 2 bands of the day for me, KoRn, who played a fantastic, energetic set which included a meddly of a lot of the songs they didn't play properly and turned into Twisted Transistor and then closed with Y'All Want A Single, which blew my mind just a little. After KoRn was Pendulum, who took a very long time setting up a very complex stage setup and seemed like they would be a bit out of place at a metal festival but once they started the crowd, as far back as I could see (and the stage was at the bottom of a hill so you could see all the way to the top), turned into a massive party with an amazing laser and light show as well.

The second day the bands started a couple of hours earlier, and so we were up nice and early to see All That Remains, who I was really keen for having missed them due to a clash with Stone Sour at Soundwave and were excellent, and Rise To Remain, a british band I hadn't heard who were very similar to ATR. We then went back to the campsite for lunch and more drinks, taking a detour via the car as we were running low on alcohol and running out of alcohol would have been terribly un-Australian of us. Then it was back in the evening again and we got there earlier than we needed to, which turned out to be very fortunate as we saw a band called Down, who had half the members of Pantera in, sounded remarkably similar and even played Respect in a dedication to the guy from Pantera who died whos name I can never remember. Then Avenged Sevenfold came out, and of course the crowd turned suddenly into an army of teenagers fight-pitting and throwing bottles but who still managed to surprise me with the quality of show they put on but really were for me just a warm up for the band that was the reason we moved our flights and bought our tickets and were essentially there in the first place: System of a Down. System opened massively and didn't stop for the full, roughly 2 hour set, with Chop Suey of course sending everyone crazy, and finishing big with Toxicity and Sugar. After lunch I had almost fallen asleep but I came out of SOAD suitably fired up and we went back to the campsite with the other group, collected a bunch of drinks and descended on the village, running riot through the fun house before myself and Chris, one of the poms, went off to the metal DJ bus until it closed sometime in the early hours.

We woke up on sunday to pouring rain and freezing cold, the weather having previously been fine, and stayed in the tent (purely because of the weather, nothing at all to do with the late, alcohol laden night we had just had of course) until mid afternoon when we braved the weather to see GWAR, who were as always ridiculous and awesome and ended up fighting a giant robot which sprayed fake blood over the crowd, and Turisas, who were my surprise highlight of the weekend. I knew they would be good but wasn't expected the stage show, crowd even in the cold and wet getting into it so much or the super hot blonde accordian girl. They closed with Rasputin and then Battle Metal and wow, crowd response was amazing. Soaked through and frozen we then pushed ourselves on to the main stage to see Disturbed, who were really good, although the crowd didnt rise to them as much as they would have if the weather had been good. After that though we had reached our limit and went back to the campsite instead of staying around for about 3 hours more to see Bullet For My Valentine (who I have already seen a couple of times) and Linkin Park (who I would have liked to see but I was expecting them to play mostly new stuff, which isn't that great, although we could hear them and they did throw in a few songs I would have loved to have seen). After that we joined Bob, Ali and soon after Chris, in their tent for a long night of drinking and talking, broken only by a brief invasion by a drunk new zealander woman wanting us to help her find fire and a bearded man.

Woke up monday morning to find the rain finally gone, and with it half the campers, although not near half the camp. The enormous fields of tents (70,000 peoples worth) now looked like a huge landfill of mud, piles of rubbish and abandoned tents. Apparently its become commonplace for people to buy cheap tents and mattresses and abandon them afterwards, most of them also either slashing the sides of smashing them in which seems remarkably wasteful and petty. After packing up we walked back with our much lighter packs to the car and drove in towards Derby where Lewis dropped me at my Granny Pat's place before he has now gone on to his own relative tour with the car (I let him take it as I only need to really go to London whereas he has to go all over England). Pat was very much the same as ever, and has a lovely new (well, 10 years old but new to me) dog called Maddie. About an hour later I emerged from the bathroom finally clean and clean shaven, albeit with my chin looking like it was having a heavy flow month as I had never before had to use a non-electric razor and it took some... learning... to get right. I then had a very nice relaxing evening of homecooked hot meal (first in a while), my first real English Ale (Newcastle Brown, very nice) and then we watched a very moving and thought provoking documentary by Sir Terry Pratchett about assisted dieing.

Flight and days 1-2 (June 6-8, 2011)

Got to flight fine, if somewhat rushed due to Lewis discovering that his drivers license was going to expire in July and my desire to not be the only driver for our reckless voyage. Flight was fairly uneventful, left Sydney at 4pm and arrived in London at 6:30am but in the middle had about 4 full meals so it felt a little like a constant stream of serious midnight snackery. Turbulence only really hit once, at the glorious moment of Lewis just getting his meal and scalding hot tea but before I got mine, which left me free to wait for it to go before I got mine and in the meantime mock Lewis as he desperately tried to juggle his tea around to avoid spilling it.

After getting off, finding out luggage etc (we expected weight to be an issue so didn't bring certain "luxury" items, primarily meaning I didn't bring my ugg boots... epic fail!) we met my godfather/uncle/all round legend Stephen and went back to his place in Surrey. Beautiful area, very picturesque, stereotypical English village feel. Intended to have a quiet, lazy day to beat the jetlag we then went out, bought new phones, had our very first Fosters (not as bad as I anticipated) and bought and insured a red Honda Accord, which is by far the nicest car I have so far owned. Turns out that cars here cost virtually nothing, we paid £1200 for a car worth $6000 in Aus, but the insurance is brutal, we called up a friend of Stephens who does insurance and gave him our information, 4 hours later he called back and said that he had called 60 different companies and none would insure us. We ended up paying £1800 for the insurance from a company which was, apparently, a pretty good deal, although it would have been £2400 if we had added Macky as a driver.

In the afternoon my cousin Kirsty joined us and we went to a nice Indian place for dinner, butter chicken over here is actually buttery and yellow like it is meant to be (so I'm told) rather than the tomato-y colour/taste it is in Aus.

Got to bed at 10pm, so effectively beat our jetlag on the first day through the application of a sizeable quantity of alcohol and caffeine.

Woke up at 7am feeling great, jetlag definitely done, and had a lazy morning while Lewis frantically tried to finish his work on his laptop in order to get paid and thus pay for his trip. Went in to town again for lunch and came to the realisation that English fast food is crazy. Maccas is green instead of red, Subway does nachos and donuts, everywhere sells Dr Pepper and all the fast food we have had so far is super sweet, finally an explanation for the stereotypical English teeth.

Did a bunch of shopping by myself while Lewis went back to keep working, noone in the Sainsbury's (supermarket) knew what beef jerky was and had some confusion because capsicum is called pepper here, which we forgot and made for a rather difficult conversation. Also on the list of communication muckups so far: Thong (flip flop vs g-string) and gastro (apparently here a gastro pub is a place that does really good quality food, seems like the opposite of what an Aussie would call a gastro pub). The only problem we ran into was buying an eski, they are called cooling boxes here and it took a bit of explaining to find what we wanted, and they only come in one size, additionally it's nigh on impossible to find bags of ice. Pen and Stephen (my aunt and uncle) seemed baffled by the idea of places selling big bags of ice, servos here sell firewood and beanies instead of our bags of ice and sunnies... typical.

Met up with Rose in the afternoon and went down to a "proper" pub for a beer, so far very impressed by the transition my cousins have made from when I was young and they were just cousins to now where they seem like cool people to be friends with.

Ended up having a nice walk and chat with Stephen, apparently he found my at the airport because I look just like my father did, not sure if this is a good or bad thing but at least I will soon get a glimpse of how well I will age. Then dinner and retired with Lewis to the conservatory with tea (how English of us!) where he finished off his work while I kept him company by using his phone to play Angry Birds.

What is this and why would I read it?

This the intertube edition of my journal I am keeping of my travels. I am mostly doing this as a way for myself to remember everything, so a lot of it will be boring, meaningless drivel to everyone else. I am adding all of this crap to the already cluttered internet because it will, assuming there is no internet-based apocalypse, last considerably better than the, admittedly awesome zombie themed, journal I am writing in every night (well, every night that I get the chance, some things like lack of access, camping, forgetfulness and alcohol will obviously make it not always possible). I will try and add photos when I get the chance, although thats even harder to do as it will require me to have access to wi-fi and then a real computer I can save them to, which will be difficult while living out of a car, lost somewhere in Europe.