When She Sang About Angels, and the Taxi Driver was late

Strange as it sounds, I'm very much a product of my home town - cynical, jaded, tired, suspicious, likely to splurge on a ridiculously tacky item just because Pop Star X wore it - despite the lack of time I've spent there in my life. I had, until this holiday, never been out in it. Why would I bother - as soon as you get off the plane, there's a disquiet in the air. I have an uncle who literally won't cross the road to go to the pub lest the baddies out there get him and steal his wallet. So there he sits, fearful, with a chicken madras and a can of Stella, waiting for death. I could slap him. People try and create a menace in Hobart - the nadir was the front page in the Mercury which suggested gangs were slapping random Syrup patrons, to which I sent in a reply letter suggesting that those patrons presumably were just angry when Syrup DJs decided once again it was Dave Dobbyn O'Clock. I even sent it in crazy old man writing to the paper green pen. No dice. I don't know that I like my home town that much. I mean, I do, but there's something quite disconsolate about Irvine. There's letters missing in the facade of the Maritime Museum, the leisure centre is frail and crumbling, far from it's glory days during which denim clad temptresses with 80s Sharleen Spiteri haircuts would turn down paramours without even saying a word and excitable kids would learn just how to turn a pit of plastic balls into a bullies paradise. I stood there for a while just sort of staring. It's hard to explain how I feel about Irvine - I think it's a bit like seeing your old girlfriends on Facebook, being excited to see them again, then finding they lack front teeth and spend all their posts randomly attacking nonsensical targets like E-Bay and Youtube all day long like old women at bus stops. You can't help but remember when that person was...fun. Attractive. The centre of your universe. You can't help but be pained that no matter what you do, there's an entire chapter, entire events, you simply can't place yourself in or around. Things are just...different. Of course, this is purely an example, and in no way a reflection of actual events. Oh no...

Of course, 6ix shots of Tequila and a short and affordable cab ride can make anything seem exciting. Which is how I came to be standing on the wooden floor of Irvines version of Syrup. Well it seemed exciting at the time. I'm painfully aware of my limitations in the nightclub setting of course. I can't dance, I'm now probably far too old to like the music i like, never mind try and shake a limb or two to it, I'm painfully shy, and my stock in trade, jaded witticisms, simply rise to the ceiling and fall flat on the floor, unable to be heard over the thumping beats of David Guetta vs The Egg. At least Syrup is small, Irvines equivalent is positively cavernous, entire hens parties get wrapped and encased in the ebb and flow of the smoke machine, like ships going off into doomed horizons, never to be seen again, only the shiny glimpse of the fattest girls psuedo-ironic fairy wand guiding rescue efforts. As my friend is showing off her new boyfriend - and he's all aftershave and studied indifference, imported beers and shiny shoes, textbook stuff really, I've seen too many people like him to care and make conversation about Miley Cyrus - I study the DJ for a while. The 1nes in my nightclub of choice in Hobart, the Syrup massive, stare bored out the window and couldn't look less impressed in their Red Herring shirts, the DJs in Irvine are all excitable, middle aged cruise ship DJs run aground. This 1ne has a whistle, an honest to goodness whistle, and his hands in the air - I hate that he cares. I sink a shot of what could be fairy liquid for all I know, and out of the cavernous wooden floor, through the smoke and haze, 2wo girls carry the bride to be under - all hair dye and regret - each arm, as she slumps on the verge of unsciousness. She is somewhat inevitably shoeless, and as she is lead through the nightclub, through the smoke, as her tiara crashes hopelessly to the ground like some doomed in flight object heading for earth, and as we part in the traditional Scottish ach thats a shame guard of honor, the DJ chooses just that moment to launch his most excited WOO yet, and fire up some Beyonce...it just wouldn't have been the same if it was Dave Dobbyn...

Those missing letters on the Maritime Museum really bug me you know - although the locals for what its worth seem more intent on discussing why the Polish workers haven't built their bridge yet, thus condemning the whole town to...well, an extra 1ne minute going round a roundabout more than usual, but still...my hangover is somewhat subdued from last night. It's getting dark by know, although I am old, that might be fading eyesight. The wind has whipped up by now. Eventually, I sit down and wait for the bus home - the bus home is now a combination of 3hree buses home, combined by mergers and budget cuts. I'm watching a man who should know better kick an ATM. Not just kick it, but positively Jackie Chan it in a way that makes his Nike swoosh fly through the air, his spittle flecked anger towards this harmless giver of cash positively frightening. I study him for a moment, as his cheeks pinken and purple, his eyes cast to the skies as if his world has crumpled. His beard even seems to redden, under the kind of burden that only the failure to get cash from a stationery object can bring, his Tommy Hilfiger jumper almost wrenched from his body in a flurry of arms, limbs, pin numbers and discarded Irn Bru bottles. The old woman in the queue behind him spins hard on her heels and walks away, tutting at no 1ne in particular. I don't especially feel the need to get involved, and I bury my head in the paper, re-reading again a nonsensical story about a woman who lost her keys and needed help to find them. The man in question walks away after a while, and a cheeky 50ty pound note pops its head out of the slot for a moment, winks, and then retreats back into the ATM. I'd tell him, but ya know. I'm not nearly awake enough to engage in the hustle and bustle of getting on the bus first, the rabble and froth and bubble by which men fake limps and women pretend nearby kids are their own simply to get on the bus first and a seat up the back where they can stretch out. My indifference earns me a seat next to a computer nerd with thick glasses and braces she could only have welded on, and it's then as I try and stretch out I see a high heel stuck at a jaunty angle in the gutter...

Outside the nightclub, I'm suffering from smoke inhalation. 1ne brave member of the hens party has managed to retrieve a shoe from the wreckage, and she holds it aloft triumphantly, the high heel shimmering in the moonlight. I smile meekly in appreciation, because I'm bewildered and unsure of where I am. The fairy liquid is kicking in after all. My friend is bouncing around in a hyperactive new relationships are boss kind of way, and I'm eating a chip that I believe was dug out of a labyrinthe pit of pure grease at some point in 1984 and left to sit on a bed of oil ever since. I'm sitting in the gutter eating this chip, studying it in fascination, because anything is better than eating it. Even the DJ has left by know - we watched him leave, he seemed smaller somehow, as if he had assumed a character before, and without his whistle and ability to yell he was without soul or purpose. He slumped over his record crate as he loaded into his van and launched the most mournful sigh imaginable into the night air. I sympathise to some extent with people who spend just a brief moment of exaltation as a wacky character then go back to, I don't know, a typing pool - I used to live with a girl who was the Chickenfeed Chicken, and when the costume was hung on the rack, it was so lifeless it was sad. I presume he had to go home to prepare for his stint at Hospital Radio. We waited a long time for a taxi as it happens, until the hens part left, leaving behind the infamous shoe in the gutter, departing in a swirl of casual vomit, glitter, floods of tears and 1ne of the worst attempts to pash a stranger I've seen. The DJ left, driving his mini van crammed with so many records I don't even know how he could see. Hell, even my friend left in the end, pashing her new boyfriend as if she'd just discovered the joys of tongues. And so there I was, alone, under street light, surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of a night out, under a neon sign that flickered horrendously loudly in my ears, eating a chip that could mostly be described as ambivalent to the notion of taste, with a sticker attached to my shoe for the nightclub that couldn't have been more gaudy, with a taxi on my way that I had no idea that I would be picked up by a taxi driver with a neck the size of Ecuador, who seemed oddly addicted to CDs of impossibly beautiful female singers that didn't match his SICK FUCK tattoo on his knuckles...

Understanding home? I couldn't get in a taxi without feeling dizzy and confused...no wonder my head still hurts...