Lost in translation

'I said to the man 'do you speak my language?'
And he just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich'
                      'Down Under' Men At Work'

Sandy is relatively back on deck after what could reasonably be described as a godawful week of fatigue.  May be over the flu though, she said, wishing she believed in any kind of god so she could ask the flu gods for mercy.  Fatigue levels not really helped by trips to Liverpool on Monday and an overnight trip to Leeds and Manchester yesterday and today. Hey ho, would have been buggered anyway. Might as well get out and live!

Food becomes more of an issue when the ME is kicking and it's not just a comfort thing. Sometimes it's literally an attempt to stay awake. Need to work out why I feel I have to stay awake when the option is there not to be.  Displaced sense of social propriety? Guilt? Sheer bloody stubbornness? I tend to suspect A, B and C with a distinct leaning towards C.  Regardless, in terms of food control, it ain't good and considering I've been barely able to move for a month with this currently lovely flu/ME cocktail I've gone from feeling like a beached whale to feeling like a beached whale in calf. Bloody awesome.

Self-hypno has also gone a bit belly up (pardon the pun) i.e. it hasn't happened since Sunday.  Well, I did have a crack at it last night, but I fell asleep in the process. I see hypno-dude tomorrow so hopefully he'll slap some sense back into me. Literally or figuratively, I don't mind. Will deffo do a session tonight.  My motto for this year has been fall down seven times, get up eight. I'm getting back up.  No surrender!!

On the upside I have managed to skirt around emails from not one but two companies that sell Australian foods here in the UK and by food I mean mainly crap.  Because all homesick Australians need to stuff themselves stupid with Australian lollies and chips, apparently. That's sweets and crisps to my UK readers. Nothing says Australia like a bag of banana-shaped lollies that taste slightly of banana but mainly of nuclear fission.  I'm sure they tasted better when I was younger and that's probably why they should carry a warning saying 'may contribute to your arse becoming massive in the mid to long term'. Probably wouldn't have taken any notice of that when I was six, though.

I have not, touch wood, been unbearably, gutwrenchingly homesick since I've lived here but I have definitely had my moments and that's where insanity like 'I need to buy some Black & Gold musk sticks, Arnott's Mint Slice, Fruit Tingles, Jatz crackers and Twisties so I can feel closer to home' starts to kick in. What the actual fuck? Maybe if I made all the empty packets into a raft they might get me over the English Channel, but they're not going to get me to another hemisphere.  Food is not a plane ticket. If it was I would have gone around the world first class 300 times by now.

You're probably gathering I'm a bit frustrated with my own weaknesses at the moment and you would be right. Fortunately this time around, despite being both exhausted and homesick, I only filled up the online shopping cart with crap. I didn't actually buy anything. Success with relatively minor levels of annoyance!

There's a fairly logical sequence of events going on here, really. I'm been crook for a month. (Crook is Aussie for sick.) ME is kicking because I've been crook for a month. So am crook and tired and when I'm crook and tired I feel vulnerable and the first thing you want when you're vulnerable is comfort and something familiar and when you're 10,000 miles from home, sometimes the familiar can be very, very thin on the ground.

I need to dig my heels in and harden up on this one because the ME is not going away just yet and Australia's not getting any closer. Although I did watch something on the BBC last weekend which reckoned the whole continent is moving north and will eventually crash into Asia.  That should save me a shitload of money in airfares to Thailand should I ever move back home.

Twisties and Fruit Tingles might taste of home, but they're not home. They can't do what I want them to, because nothing can. I am an expat. No amount of shite food from anywhere is going to give me what I really want, which is that sense of being with people who get what you're about and what you're on about. Who won't give you blank looks when you go on about pointing the bone, bushwhacking and secret women's business. None of those are sexual innuendos, by the way.  I wouldn't have to tell an Aussie that. Sometimes it's a relief to talk to somebody who just gets it.

I don't think all is lost, though. Last night in Manchester me and my friend the Yorkshire rose were at the MEN...two women who met a couple of years back after spending their lives on opposite sides of the world, yet were as one while both belting out 'It's A Sin' along with the Pet Shop Boys. You really don't need Fruit Tingles to feel part of something. You just need some kindred spirits.