Pet, Love and Dear

An Australian friend (or, rather, my only Australian friend) came to stay this week. It was a long planned and long longed for chance to re-attach myself to her and appear like a normal bloke might appear, should he have suffered a chaotic balding incident at twenty-five and sustained galloping growth of his tummy "muscles", due to over food intakement.

For a certified, or photocopied lunatic, this amazing, kind, intelligent and generous woman made a damn fine job of making me sane. We were together almost all of the week, barely any more than ten feet away from each other. The calm that she inculcated inside my troubled head was both satisfying and reassuring and I am hell-bent on keeping this emotion in my Aus-less life.

I've always flirted with the thought of being an intellect of sorts and she has given me a lot of belief in that thought being true. She has a very wide ability to converse about almost anything and she has so much understanding of human behaviour, good or bad, that I'm learning just by breathing the same air as her.

One thing that has happened too is that I have laughed, almost to the point of embarrassing accidents occurring. The beauty of time spent together is that a rapport builds and a look, a word, a himmer is all one needs to be thrust in tandem into a world of our own design, masters of our land and alone in our mirth.

Presently, she has popped over to Turkey for a week, prior to her return here and more time with my good and bad selves. My friend is on strict orders to fully document her adventures and to provide many tales of great times large and small. There will be a slide show and I for one cannot wait.

A subject that has arisen during our week together is the question of my going out to Australia, to see her in her natural habitat, as I've somehow blurted out loud. My health issues are not insignificant and I have met with some negativity from health professionals about the feasibility of such a jaunt. This hurt in two ways, one being that the burden of travelling to the UK from Brisbane is firmly upon her shoulders and the other being that it put our future happiness further away from my desperate fingertips, trying to valiantly maintain some control of my life. After a lengthy and lovely discussion about the subject, I am to beging making some very firm and frank enquiries about the reality of getting myself over to Aus safely and sensibly. It is possible that this potential trip might open up my head and heart in ways that just cannot happen in a grubby market town in North Nottinghamshire. It's positive and something to look forward to, and a means of ensuring that there are solid plans for our next meeting.

Thanks to Mr Murdoch's Skype, we have very good and instant communications on a daily basis, with some juggling of times. Having this technology available really is a miracle, and one that too many people fail to appreciate fully. The obvious benefit for us, with some ten thousand miles between us, is that we can talk, freely and for as long as we want and for both of us this is vitally important.

So...after some very bleak and scary times, a positive and exciting future lies ahead. I only hope my split sides can heal again before the next laughing fit begins.