Your hair are your aerials, man...

I'm currently sitting in a super hostel in Valparaiso writing this. It is, therefore, written with a Chilean keyboard with lots of Chilean functions that I cannot grasp. So if there happens to be funny squiggles over any of the letters, strange spaces in the quotation marks, or even any spelling mistakes, I apologise.

As I may or may not have already mentioned - I could obviously check this, but I´m not reading this bollocks back, it haunts my dreams enough as it is at the moment - Helen´s mother, Mary (or MrsMaryMum as I embarrassingly called her the first time that we met) was coming out to meet us for Christmas time. And, better than her word, she actually did.

Mary flew into Brisbane airport on 18 December, where the three of us met her with open arms and smelly breath. I´d forgotten to brush my teeth.

This may be a good time to recant possibly the funniest thing that has happened since we´ve been away, and maybe ever in the history of history.

A few weeks prior to Mary´s arrival, whilst using the magical see-speak gadgetbox that is Skype, Helen and Emma noticed a different tone to their mum´s usually blondey barnet. 

They asked Mary if she had done anything to her hair. ´No!´, was Mary´s curt response before diving down under the table and grabbing a magazine, in the order of Good Housekeeping or possibly a pullout from the Mail on Sunday.

Adamant, especially after the Action Man antics, that she had, Hel and Emma pressed her further. Mary eventually revealed she had recently dyed her hair brown, after having blonde hair for her entire life. Her not-really-upset answer: ´I wasn´t going to tell you, it was going to be a surprise when we get to the airport.´

I was honestly, and I PROMISE, absolutely no exaggeration whatsoever, nearly sick with laughter.

But I digress. Mrs Dagley, new hair colour and all, landed safe and sound and we proceeded to where we had been staying for the week, in the store cupboard in the back of the shop... the Ritz it aint. Surprisingly, or perhaps not after such a long flight, Mary took to the living conditions very well indeed and had some good nappage in the back.

With the Midland Police Service´s HR Queen partially refreshed, that evening we went out to Chinatown in Brisbane and, incredibly, had a Chinky (I'M IN FUCKIN AUSTRALIA SO ILL SPEEK THE FUKING LANGWIDGE). 

It was great to see the three Dagley ladies reunited, and it was also supremely rewarding to eat something other than apples, a strange cereal called something along the lines of ´Wake the Fuck Up´ and toast.

If my memory serves me correctly, which if the last six or so blog entries are anything to go by - it doesn´t*, the next day, whilst yours truly caught up on some little needed beauty kip, Team Dagley went out to collect a rental car. It was all right, and, much to Mary´s relief, was not a Toyota Yaris. ´I tell you Chris, I´ve seen them and there´s no way, no WAY, we´d get four people´s luggage into a Yaris.´

* Helen read through the last few entries that I´d written the other day, her response: ´You do realise that none of this happened? Or if it did it certainly didn´t happen in that order. You´ve compacted the entire Halong Bay trip into one day. You´re an idiot. Do you even know where you are now?´ Home truths. I told her that where her wisdom teeth are coming through at the back there is a smell that reminds me of the time I found a dead cat in my Grandad’s compost machine. This backfired though, as she´s taken to rubbing her finger on the offending stump of gum and gnasher and wiping it on my upper lip while I´m concentrating on something, like eating, or the wind.

[This was also long before we found out I had a brain tumour...]

Alas, I digress.

The very next day we left Emma all alone in her ´orrible shop to go down and have a party in Byron Bay. As Mrs Dagley was essentially on holiday we were afforded to up the ante somewhat on our accommodation budget and splashed out on a superwicked triple room in a reasonably posh motel. Strangely enough, unbeknownst to Hel and I at the time of booking, it was but one door down from where we´d stayed the first time round. Spookier than a threesome with Casper and Dusty Springfield.

Our time in Byron was mostly spent deciding which was Mary´s favourite Australian beer (Toohey´s), lazing down the beach (strange squeaky sand) and arguing with Australians - well, one in particular - about who was better out of the Stones and the Beatles (we were firmly in the Stones camp, plus the bloke was a charmless narcissist dressed as a sycophant who attempted to ridicule Mary and got ´beat down´ by the two young Dutch lads that we had been sat and ´making some shmoke´ with. (Me that is, not Mary, if you´re reading this Chief Superintendant.)

But in all seriousness, she didn´t.

We also made the trip up to the lighthouse and the most easterly point of mainland Australia, saw lots of live music and generally had a great time. I think out of the places that we spent any considerable time in Australia, Byron Bay was probably my favourite. If you can ignore the fashion-over-function surfers and just plain idiot floosies that flock around them then it´s actually a very fun town.




Our time in Byron also allowed Mary a nice and easy place to adjust to the heat and the ´lifestyle´ that doesn´t really exist but Australians consistently harp on about. During this time she made some rather brilliant observations:

1. Mary Dagley (she didn´t say them like this in the third person, she wasn´t like my dad from Christmas 1998 - ´Brendan wants more custard´ etc) does not like Australian lorries.
2. Mary Dagley was surprised at the lack of Jags, pleased at the lack of BMWs and also thought the junction turning system was mental. (It is - look it up.)
3. Mary Dagley believes that Australia, as much as she had seen of it, was very much like America, or how she imagined it, as she's never been.
4. Thank the Lord we didn´t get a Yaris. Have you seen them?

During our time doing absolutely nothing of any cultural value or mental stimulation (although those Dutch lads did try and alter that) we also bought my second ball of the tour (at the very secret cost of $23, I told the Boss it was $10) and taught myself two new tricks, and I think, invented one.






Above all it was good to see Helen and her Mum spend some time with each other, as they had both missed each other lots and lots. It became ever so much more evident that Helen isn´t fibbing when she says she is homesick. The real shame was thinking about Emma the Younger slaving away in possibly the most boring environment conceivable for the equivalent of about three quid an hour.

But that was all about to change, we were off to Brisbane, we had a car (thankfully not a Yaris, you´d never fit four people´s luggage in a Yaris), a full tank of gas, it was night and we were wearing sunglasses. [We] Hit it.

(Again, if you are reading this Chief Superintendant, at no point did Mary Dagley wear sunglasses while driving at night, nor did she hit anything. Other than that drifter, but I'm pretty sure he was already dead.)

So, feeling like that big nosed man that presents Big Brother, in unison we say: ´Hold on Emma, we´re coming for you!´

(Emma, if you´re reading this, obviously we´ve already come for you, and we got you, it was nearly three months ago, so it´s not necessary for you to hold on any longer.)

Lisa's Hospitality and Byron's Hosteliality

We stayed for one night down in Coogee Bay. This place was relaxed and it looked a bit like a better photo of a place like this.


We finally managed to meet up with Tori who played hockey with Helen at Uni. (If you recall, we were going to meet her in Laos, but she had a few too many 'shroom shakes and we just generally had the shakes.) Then Emma had to leave us to go back up to Brisbane and Noosa to go back to work.

At some point or another in the four or five months prior to our arrival - don't look at me, I'd been drinking - Helen had got in contact, or vice versa, with her old school friend Lisa Guy.

Lisa had said that while we had a few days left in Sydney we could come and stay in her flat as her flatmate Alice was away for a week or so. We were ecstatic at the offer and shifted our bags round for a most enjoyable few days and nights. It was a great feeling to have what felt like our own little space again and it was in a good location to have a better explore of Sydney too.

Again, we're hugely indebted to Lisa (and Alice too!) as not only was it great fun but it saved us an Australian monkey, as rent even in the shittiest of hostels in Sydney is higher than Bush Jnr during the Vietnam war.

The time in the flat allowed us to find our feet a bit, write some blog and eat some food. And eat we did. I took it upon myself to eat anything that I saw.

To quote my little sister: 'You looked fat in Australia. Well, really chubby. Well, either that or you were just standing next to boys who might exercise occasionally.' Cheers Chloe.

Also in Sydney, if you haven't heard already, as she made enough of a racket about it, Tony and Guy (both of 'em) ballsed up Helen's hair, and she essentially got bumrushed out of the shop by the artistic director for the southern hemisphere or someone equally unimportant in the real world.

She was angry, like this:







She did eventually get it sorted out though, and then she was happy, like this:



We visited Bondi Beach, which was everything I hate about everything.

We had another special night out in the famous World Bar (not world famous bar) this time with Lisa and later a few of her friends.

I am distinctly red. That's not sunburn or embarrassment, that's just the colour of my skin.

We were seriously winding down into holiday mode, and readying ourselves for our first foray into Byron Bay.

Emma had clubbed a few days holiday out of her boss, and when she made the trip down the coast to us she also brought along her boss's mate Rick 'The Rat' who was over in Australia on holiday.

Byron Bay was pretty good fun, and not much else, with a few bars that played good live music. We did manage to meet back up with Jose. Out of the blue we also got an email from Pip who was at Southampton in our first year, and we met up with her for a few days too.

We didn't do much here apart from laze around, so I'll let the photos do the talking (or typing, or whatever).

We did drive to a hippy commune called Nimbin where reputedly you could buy cookies that would make you chuckle. But the police presence was greater there than in a particularly good episode of Taggart, so we left empty-handed and went to the pub instead. Much healthier for us...

It was at this pub, and later club, that we learned that Rick, rather than dancing, would slap walls as hard as he possibly could.

Strange? Yes. Idiotic? Yes. But he's a nice bloke and a great laugh so I won't have you say another bad word about him.


'Twas this fateful night that I made the embarrassing move of - after realising Jose had never spoken about a girlfriend - suddenly becoming very aware of how much everyone was saying things were 'gay'. Therefore, naturally, as any man would, I took him outside of the bar and asked if he habitually fucked men in the arse.

The answer was no. But, for some unfathomable reason, I categorically wouldn't let it lie, and for around twenty five minutes I dug myself deeper and deeper into a homosexual mistake hole.

But it was all OK in the end.

Apart from when anyone mentions what happened, speaks about Jose or says the word 'embarrassing'. Then I get the same sick feeling you have about ten seconds after you've been kicked in the balls.

Anyway, after this giant craziness we made our way up to Noosa, a strange place where people poo money. Metaphorically.