“All Aboard!”

With my book, “Between Borders and Buses”, a mere 7 weeks away, I give you all a sneak peak of my first chapter of entitled “All Aboard!”Also In conjunction with the sneak peak, my website is live as of now – www.beyondyonderpublications.com

Check it out and if you want to pre order the book feel free. And don’t forget to tell your friends

So without further adieu, let us begin our journey Between Borders and Buses…

Listening to the howling wind and the murmuring London traffic from my hostel bed it suddenly occurred to me how quickly the last two years had passed me by. It seemed like only yesterday I’d arrived in London and made my way to The Fox and Goose, the pub where I’d planned to work behind a bar for a couple of months to earn some quick dosh so I could bum around Europe for a while.

On my arrival the manager had taken one look at me and relegated me to the restaurant, probably because he could see I had no hope of reaching the wine glasses on the rack above the bar.

Not that being a waiter prevented me from having accidents. If anything, this increased my chances for mishaps. At least if I’d been confined to the bar there was only the danger of spilt drinks and broken glass. Putting me to work in the restaurant meant there were the added perils of spilt gravy, mushy peas, bolognaise sauce and anything else that could leave lasting impressions on the clothes and bodies of unsuspecting patrons. One such incident left me covered in cream and my manager wearing hot, sticky apple pie. Needless to say he was not impressed. The customers however were overjoyed at the impromptu cabaret.

I’d planned to work at the pub for about three months before beginning my small tour of Europe, but I was so busy experiencing the relaxed antipodean London lifestyle that my plans quickly fell by the wayside. Not only did I stay at The Fox much longer than expected, but my travel plans were pushed aside indefinitely. At least until my two year visa was about to expire.

Not that I spent the entire two years at The Fox. I may be clumsy, but I certainly am not crazy-okay, maybe a little. If I’d stayed at the pub for that long I definitely would’ve left London in a straightjacket and the only sightseeing I would’ve done is from the confines of a padded cell.

Working at The Fox wasn’t all bad, but after six months I was at the stage where if I’d had to eat yet another toasted sandwich and chips I would have gone stark raving mad.

Added to this was the fact that the staff house where I was staying, a mere ten minute walk from the pub, made the Leaning Tower of Pisa look sturdy, and I’d been silly enough to choose the bed that sat directly under the leaky portion of the roof. That said, the roof leaked only when it rained; being London this meant there was enough water collected in the yellow bucket I’d placed there to fill Sydney’s Warragamba Dam.

The food was similarly predictable. Breakfast was a choice of either cereal or fried eggs accompanied by some sort of pork by product-whether it was bacon or sausages was anybody’s guess-while lunch was a little something I like to call ‘Leftover Surprise’. Why? Because it was always a surprise what was left over from the lunchtime pub rush, and because it was a surprise if it was actually edible. While lunch gave most people indigestion, heartburn, the runs, or all of the above, dinner simply gave people the opportunity to swear profusely. It consisted mainly of toasted sandwiches and chips, soup and chips, and for the real adventurous who thought their heart-and stomach-could take it, there was melted cheese on chips. Obviously, this pub was in charge of keeping the country’s hot chips economy afloat.

Little wonder that after only a week of this I was pretty sick of toasted sandwiches and chips. Yet I watched with disbelief as the same people came into the pub day after day and ordered that same meal over and over. I soon began to wonder if the English had any idea about variety and if the only spice of life they ever got came courtesy of the local Indian takeaway.

That aside, I look back on my time spent at The Fox and Goose with fondness because in all honesty they were some of the best times of my life.

One memory that always brings a smile to my face is the time the staff got together to celebrate Australia Day. I was no longer working at the pub by this stage and had moved on to bigger and better things. According to the piece of paper I was handed just before leaving Australia, I was a qualified industrial chemist and I was eager to find out what that meant. My mates at The Fox weren’t too sure about my choice of career. They’d seen first hand how uncoordinated I was with pub food and dreaded to think how I’d behave with much more dangerous substances. I guess they were waiting for the headline, Clumsy Anglo-Indian Causes Right Royal Mess! Nevertheless, I finally found a company brave enough to hire me and was soon embroiled in the thrilling world of automotive coatings. It was as fun as it sounds and before long I could proudly say I was actually being paid to watch paint dry.

Anyway, when Australia Day finally arrived-something I’d been looking forward to for quite some time-I left work early and quickly made my way to the pub.

I arrived as the self titled ‘Bar Boys’ were closing up for the night. There was Toby, a tall blond larrikin who once talked me out of buying a T shirt just so he could buy it (and yes, you’re right in thinking he’s a bastard!), Robert “don’t fuckin’ call me Ronald” Macdonald who loved all things Bon Jovi and was adamant that everyone at the Fox kept the faith, and finally Lincoln, a lanky Kiwi who was the most high tech backpacker I’d ever seen. While others were content with just a camera or two, Lincoln turned up at the staff house armed with a video camera, a laptop and plans to turn our room into a high tech Mecca. In the space of a week he’d outfitted his laptop with a CD burner, the house with an Internet connection and there was even talk of installing a collapsible satellite dish before the month was out.

Once the boys had closed the bar the four of us and a few other workmates walked to the staff house. The place hadn’t changed much since I’d left. Eleven people were still crammed in there and it still looked like it was about to collapse any minute-the fence had already done so-and the roof over my old bed still leaked.

While Lincoln fired up the laptop and streamed Triple J, the first beers were cracked open and celebrations began and continued well into the next day. Admittedly, there was a short break at around four in the morning when pretty much everybody, overcome by copious amounts of beer consumption, crashed and burned.

Australia Day in London was not at all like Australia Day back home. The weather had a lot to do with that. Grey, miserable and reflecting the state of English cricket-shithouse!

But being the Australian pioneers that we were, Rob, Toby and I weren’t going to let a little drop of rain stop us and we waded into the backyard to fire up the barby. With the rain streaming and the wind blustering, you can imagine this proved quite difficult. Using our extensive knowledge of engineering and building practices, along with some old ladders and clear plastic sheeting we spotted in the shed, we built a pergola. Okay, that’s not exactly true. When I say we built a pergola what we actually did was prop ladders up against one another and hoped for the best. Even then it took us the better part of twenty minutes to settle on a design that successfully stood up of its own accord for longer than two seconds.

Finally, wiping the rain from our brows, the three of us stepped back and congratulated ourselves before a small breeze whistled through the backyard and sent the whole thing crashing to the ground and us scrambling for cover.

As a result, the barbecue-the smallest I’d ever seen at one and a half times the length of a loaf of bread and about two times its width-was moved into the shed. Looking at it, I wondered if it would even hold the weight of a sausage, let alone a few chunky rissoles.

Lunch was followed by a game of backyard cricket, which unfortunately didn’t last as long as we hoped. First, the light began to fade at about three o’clock, which was typical of a London winter, and second, Toby gave into the urge to smash the ball into the canal that flowed behind the houses on the other side of the street. This left us with little else to do but pop open more drinks and play drinking games until we all passed out.

For this most of us were glad because in the room directly above us the head housekeeper and her husband, both illegal immigrants, were again giving the bed springs a work out-they were notorious for it. It was a similar situation where I was staying at the time. I’d moved out of the staff house and into a bed sit in West London when I’d started the job at the paint company and while the roof wasn’t leaking the other residents seemed to be forever bonking. If it wasn’t the couple in the room next to mine it was the son of the landlord and his girlfriend. It therefore came as no great shock when I came home from work one day to find someone delivering a brand new bed.

Thankfully, Scotland wasn’t as bad. After I’d finished watching paint dry I moved up north to see how life was in the land of coos-hairy cows-and kilts. Instead of spending my time in Edinburgh or Glasgow I ventured into the Highlands, which turned out to be a great decision. The scenery was beautiful, like something out of The Lord of the Rings, the air was fresh and the people, well, let’s just say they were different. While they didn’t feel the need to shag around me like bunnies on Viagra-in itself a good thing-I did find a few of the locals a quid short of a fiver. It was a couple of weeks after I’d started work at a Scottish pub when the bar manager told me very casually that a girl had slashed his back with a knife.

“Why?” I asked him.
Apparently he supported the wrong soccer team.
At that point I made a mental note: When chatting to girls in Scotland (a) do not mention soccer and (b) make sure they’re not carrying concealed weapons of any kind. It was a mantra I would follow forever.

One day I was picking up a roll of developed film when the guy behind the counter casually asked me where I was from. I told him.
“Aye,” he said as his eyes glazed over. “Yeenaw, arv alwees want’d ta visit Awstreelya.”
“What’s stopping you?” I asked.
“Jist ma crim’nal reick’d.”
Deciding not to pry, I simply nodded.
“Yissee, in ma young’r dees, ah wa a wee bit sillay an kill’d sum people ata fitba match.”
“Oh – okay.” What else could I say?
“That’s the thin with us Scawttish,” he sighed. “We’re lurvely people, ba we’re aw fuckin’ nuts!”
I certainly was not going to argue.

Despite this Scotland was a place of amazing and rugged beauty and I was sad to leave. But I had a whole other continent waiting to be explored and the following evening would find me in Paris. I could not wait.

…..To Be continued….

(only if you buy the book )