Excerpts from ‘Southern Hemispherical Tales’
The electronic correspondence of Miss Lorna O.
Heading up the East Coast of Australia, working in a peach packing shed… It’s my birthday - I think…
After a half bucket of punch I started to tell everyone about my 30th birthday party – strippers, bananas and all. I got quite animated and raved about how much fun I had.
Mistake.
The guys I met in the launderette offered a repeat performance, right there and then. Now, don’t get me wrong this could have turned out well. Very well, except for the fact that I would rather have seen 15 plucked chickens do a trip for me rather than these guys. (Do I sound shallow?).
Perhaps. But really it wasn’t pleasant. Most of them had bellies that began at their chins and ended at their knees. Kinda like they had swallowed a giant punch bag or had been inflated with a water cannon and only one of them appeared to have any teeth. Call me fussy or old fashioned but I do like a man to have teeth. Even false ones are OK, but a gaping hole or black stumps just doesn’t do it for me. I wondered what kind of person the dentist on Cobram must be. Maybe people had been tortured there or disappeared after a routine check up because none of these people had been – ever.
“One more glass of punch”, I thought, “…and I’ll ask them”.
I didn’t. My British politeness preventing me from forming the words so I tallied up the total teeth of these guys instead. No word of a lie, between the five would be Chippendales they had a total of six teeth and two of those were black. I tried not to focus on them but it was impossible. It’s like when your boss rocks up at a meeting with his flies undone and you want to tell him and have been looking for way too long and now you really can’t say anything because it will be really embarrassing but if he realises now and will wonder why you didn’t say anything and on it goes so you try to talk about other things to take your mind off it and then you realise that you have asked the same question six times but you haven’t registered the answer and now he just thinks you are weird…
This was my dilemma. I found out that Mark was a removal man, 7 times, Alan operates an excavator 4 times and that Fergie lived on the caravan park for two years at least eight times.
“More beer anyone?” I said as a last attempt to remove myself from the potential strippers and the teeth problem and swished to my caravan fridge like a real hostess.
The great thing about travelling is the people you meet, not just the places you see. More often than not it will be the people that make a place. Will it ever be the same if you went back?
Lorna spent ages travelling around the Southern Hemisphere and these are excerpts from her emails home. More will come… later.
