Passing out on New Year's Eve

Fireworks launched from Sydney Harbour Bridge

We thought it was our friend but it proved to be our downfall

When we were still respectable on NYE 2006

Rudolph's corpse

Regal? Maybe.

Happy New Year from Sydney! Was everyone's new year full of festive joy? Good. Ours began by getting to Sydney harbour about 5pm. From where we were sat, the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge were both in view so you could say we had a good spot. And more importantly, it was one of the minority of places that let you bring your own booze. So, naturally we started on the cheap box-wine at about 5.30pm. When I say cheap box wine, let me give you some perspective of just how cheap. About $14 for 4 litres, which is less than £6  Needless to say it gives you a distinctly fuzzy hangover the next day, but that is probably because the boxes usually mention that either fish or milk is involved in the making of the wine and therefore may still contain traces. How is fish or milk involved in wine making?!? I don't know, nor do I really want to.

So, after some pretty amazing fireworks, we decided to wander back to Kate's flat (where we're staying) with a plan to go on to a party. However, by about 3am we had all passed out in one way or another. My experience was that I woke up at about 6am still fully clothed, curled up in the foetal position on the floor. Our friends said that Nick fell asleep half way through sending someone a text message. Rock on.

Darlington, where Kate's flat is, is the heart of Sydney's gay scene. In the Lonely Planet guide, out of 11 gay nightspots in Sydney, 8 of them are around here. Also, we are sharing a sofa bed. On the wall by the sofa bed we are watched over by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall sharing a warm embrace from a 'Brokeback Mountain' calendar. But it gets better. The first night we were here, I was knackered from a long coach journey so didn't go out. But the message I received from Nick at 2.24 that night was as follows: "I'm at a gay club. There are lots of men with their shirts off. My destiny is complete."

To wrap up, whilst we were still in Melbourne, we went to the biggest casino in the southern hemisphere. One of our mates won $200. I did not. We went to a club that was hidden down an alley next to brilliantly named ACDC Lane. I've bought a couple of festival tickets for February, one called Good Vibrations will be headlined by Jurassic 5 and the Beastie Boys (sweet). The other is called Laneways Festival and is held in an alley.

Keep enjoying the sunshine people.

Blagging our way round Australia

"Yes, my drink is quite camp isn't it?" I later drank a couple of jugs of it myself, good stuff.

Four people who all went to Fryern Junior School at the same time. Coincidence or conspiracy?

Nick now demands to be surrounded by a hareem of women at all times

The MCG, Melbourne. Capacity 100,000 (or 14285 x the population of Cook)

Flintoff throws down another ball which was probably thumped for 4 by them damn Aussies

I hope everyone is feeling festively plump after Christmas? I am, because me and Nick were fed like kings, courtesy of our Aussie friend Amy's family who took us in like english orphans, straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. We will be repaying the favour grandly next year when Amy comes over to Europe. We will probably even be able to match the weather as Melbourne decided this was to be its coldest Christmas for about 150 years. It was probably warmer than England but then that's never really saying much is it?

For Christmas Eve, we went to the Portsea Hotel, basically a massive pub/club about two hours south of Melbourne, near the Mornington Peninsula. The nearest thing I have experienced to this day was a university 'drink the bar dry' as it carries the same drinking-all-day-until-falling-down ethic. We were there by 5.30pm and it was already pretty full, I'm guessing with anywhere between 1000-2000 Australians. (Tom Waterman's worst nightmare?) 

So a lot of people had been there much earlier than us. As you can imagine, by midnight, carnage. Broken glass all over the place, and walking from one place to another taking twice as long because your feet seem to be sticking to the floor. Nick says he saw at least one projectile vomiter. Possibly the best thing about the event though, was that while guys all turn up in the usual shorts/trousers & t-shirt, the girls all look like they thought they were being taken to a classy dinner dance and somehow took a wrong turn.

After Christmas dinner with our adopted family for the day, we headed back to the hostel only to be told by our old Fryern Junior School classmate Craig, that there was another guy from the same school here now. Having had a few Christmas drinks, this seemed in no way implausible. We've only gone about 14000 miles, and having never really bumped into many people I went to junior school with back home, why shouldn't I meet 2 in 2 days here? So Rob Gasson, was in the year above us at junior school, also went to Toynbee and Barton Peveril. Nick and him did athletics together. Maybe we'll meet our old headmaster next Mr Johnson, maybe he'll be a barman or a croupier in the casino we're going to later? (As long as they don't have any kind of dress code which we have no way of adhering to).

So today we went to the Ashes with Rob. It all started quite well, my hopelessly optimistic prediction of possibly getting them down to 5-100 actually happened. But then the pressure of doing well must have got the England bowlers because they crumbled hard. Apart from Monty Panesar because everyone loves him here, the other day there was a big feature in the paper - '20 things you didn't know about Monty'. So I can't say anything bad about him. Apparently, his unusually large hands allow him to get more spin on the ball. I'm sure there's a cheap joke in there somewhere but my grandparents may read this so you'll have to invent one yourselves.

On Friday we're off to Sydney for New Years Eve and a couple weeks more. Having not managed to get anywhere to stay for the 30th and the 31st, we've come up smelling of roses once again as we now have the floor of a friend of a friend's flat to collapse onto. Like a cat dropped from a window, we keep landing on our feet. Having said that, would a cat land on it's feet if you dropped it out of a 20th floor window? I imagine you wouldn't be able to tell from the cat-shaped splat on the ground. As I've now drifted into rambling I shall end here.

Our day out with Mike Atherton

A Chinese, hairless crested puppy. And me.

We hunt for food these days

Nick 'Danger' Horton

A small fairground in St Kilda

There was a sign that said no photography on the rides but, being the renegades we are, we took a cheeky photo anyway. We laugh in the face of the law.

Mmm...cake

Well it wasn't quite a day out but he did ask us for directions. If you don't know who Mike Atherton is he used to be England's cricket team captain when they were rubbish and no-one paid any attention. Surely he's been to Melbourne, losing at cricket, more than we have? And why was he looking for the free train, the cheapskate? So many questions, so few answers...

Well, Nick's relatives were great hosts, they fed us, let us play with the dogs AND gave us an archery lesson. I was surprised how often I hit the target, while Nick on the other hand caught the inside of his arm a couple of times with the bowstring, resulting in his arm looking like that of a heroine addict for a few days. It's like Trainspotting down under.

Brilliantly, the area they live in is sort of set up by the council for it to be really easy to get animal breeding permits and kennel building permits. All the council members breed animals and so create a community that serves their best interests. It's a cross between Crufts and the mafia, but with considerably fewer mobsters with names like Jimmy Four Fingers wandering about threatening to make you 'sleep with the fishes'.

On Wednesday we went all arty and went to go see an exhibition of the work of Osamu Tezuka, the man generally considered the godfather of Manga. It was stunning, they reckon he created about 1500,000 pages of manga during his lifetime. I have an urge to ramble on about him some more but it is something I would probably gloss over if someone else wrote it so I'll spare you.

The picture of Nick holding on to a zip wire type of thing is from an amazing adventure playground for kids that we had a look at/ran around excitedly the other day. It was set up partly by the council and partly by some hippies for the children of the community and I've never seen a playground so good. Back home you would probably be charged entry and even then it would have been vandalised. Which is the case with several aspects of life over here. For example, in a lot of places there are gas BBQs provided by the local council for public use whenever you like, for free. They are usually next to some picnic benches in a scenic area. Can you seriously imagine something like that lasting more than a few days in England without it getting destroyed or a small child being cooked on it? I'm not trying to paint a rose-tinted picture, Australia has it's problems too, but there are some noticeable differences here and there.

Last night, we were in the hostel bar next door playing pool. A guy we're chatting to says he recognises me from somewhere. His name is Craig Proudley. Turns out he's from Southampton. Nothing unusual there. Went to Tauntons College and knew Tom Farmer, quite a big coincidence but Farmer is an international playboy these days. But that didn't explain why he knew me. Anyway, turns out he went to Fryern Infants school and junior school with me and Nick, was in our class quite a few years and once we figured that out we both remembered him straight away. His mum is going to email him some old school photos so we can see that we're probably sat next to each other when we were 8 years old. Bizarre.

Have a good Christmas and a fun new year although it's not allowed to be more fun that ours in Sydney. We're not going all this way to be upstaged by any of you back home, no way.