Moving into Darwin made me quite excited. I was going to sleep in an actual bed for a whole week. This hadn’t happened in a while and I was looking forward to it. The 3 Musketeers were easy to spot about town and I joined them in their excellent choice of a hostel on Mitchell St. With the heat and humidity building all the time, Darwin seemed to lurch from deserted ghost town, to buzzing Christmas party town depending on the time of day, and I passed the time by familiarising myself with the sites. I popped down to the zoo to see the local wildlife up close, including an enormous and very deadly 4.5m croc only a pane of glass away. I had a dip in the pools at very pleasant Berri Springs, I meandered along the beach at Casuarina and found the War tunnels dug under the town to protect supplies from Japanese attacks. I spent an afternoon down at the harbour and strolled the old streets around Browns Mart theatre. The museum was a fascinating and excellent day spent learning about the Top End’s indigenous communities and history, and just out to the East of town, I found perhaps my favourite place in all of Australia – Dudley Point. I don’t think the temperature in “my” Dudley has ever hit 34 degrees, and it certainly hasn’t on any Christmas Eve I can remember, but I sat alone above the coastline at Darwin’s Dudley Point and watched the last richly colourful Top End sunset before Christmas. My ongoing bewilderment at spending the festivities permanently sweating gave way for a few moments to a tinge of sadness as I realised that for the first time in well over 10 years, I wouldn’t be enjoying The Black Country’s finest ale down the Bathams with all the folks back home. No Guns N Roses on the jukebox, no snowball fights for me this year. At least I had the wise words of the great John Denver to accompany the deep orange glow of the setting sun.
Back in town of course though, there was a party to be had and with a healthy population of travellers looking to celebrate with anyone and everyone, I pushed on with plans to get royally trollied. Our merry band had by this point expanded impressively to include Tom, Beth and Shez, a friendly English gang, Gary who’s unique qualities included being extremely nice and being a supporter of both Newcastle and Sunderland, and a good few occasional others from around the globe who all came together to form our Christmas Eve crowd. Amongst them, rather unfortunately, was the latest “character” to leave an impression on my travels, a middle aged Australian wanderer who I quickly labelled Mangles The D1ckhead. Mangles, so nicknamed apparently for some impressive macho reason in days gone by, left the Australian Navy purely to come and irritate the sh1t out of us in Darwin, it seemed. He quickly established his theme for the festive season, which essentially consisted of being loud and obnoxious whilst effectively bullying everyone and blaming everything wrong with the World on me because, of course, I was English after all. Now, I’d been on the road for a long time by this point and, whilst perhaps not the toughest soul on Earth, the pointless insults and rantings of a confrontational d1ckhead didn’t really bother me, but it was starting to get to a lot of my more fresh faced travelling comrades, and Christmas was in danger of being washed out by the relentless drivel pouring out of Mangles The D1ckhead’s mouth. We all enjoyed our Christmas Eve meal nonetheless, with me, since I was mostly on the receiving end anyway, taking a hit for the team and sitting next to the knob head throughout. Darwin was buzzing nicely as the evening drew on and after a few more beers around town, Mangles The D1ckhead hatched his cunning plan to buy a stash of beer to last us through the night. A good plan admittedly, except being a d1ckhead, he’d left it too late and the bottle shop was closed. Being English of course, this was clearly my fault and I again tolerated another unpleasant outburst of blame from the tw&t . I’d had a few beers by this point and decided enough was enough. I was not going to spend anymore of Christmas Eve being insulted by this d1ckhead, so I rounded up the troops, and went to church.
The safe haven of Mangles free carol singing lifted the mood considerably and the festive spirit returned. I was rather pleased with my random suggestion, and eventually we headed back to the hostel via a couple more beers, for a late night swim. Mangles The D1ckhead was of course back in attendance and now even more inebriated than earlier. The Musketeers meanwhile had befriended a pleasant young German girl who they invited back for a swim as well. This as it turned out, was a very volatile situation and I soon learned that drunk d1ckheads and German humour really do not mix. An inoffensive joke using unfortunately less than perfect English saw Mangles explode with fury at a rather startled, scared and shocked young German girl, in a swimming pool after midnight on Christmas morning. The reasoning escaped me but very quickly Mangles The D1ckhead was unleashing his loudest, most aggressive torrent of abuse to date, right into the unfortunate girl’s face. After using some very uncomplimentary terms to describe her, he concluded by ordering her out of the pool and off the premises immediately.
Looking back at this precise moment, I should be thankful that I had spent the year listening to the wise and uplifting words of the great John Denver, instead of the gritty, solemn pessimism of god amongst men Johnny Cash, who would most likely have told me at this point to murder Mangles with my bare hands, buy a gun and live the rest of my life as a fugitive. I didn’t. But I did explode with a degree of rage not seen since the woeful 2004 Villa v Blues derby which resulted only in dad’s car window getting smashed in and me giving a very stern lecture to a group of clearly innocent young boys in the street. I loudly reminded Mangles several times that he was a d1ckhead and that since she had been invited for a swim by the Musketeers, the German girl would not be leaving and that was that. Pleasingly he soon came round to my way of thinking, agreed with me completely and even mumbled out an apology. Good.
Christmas morning began in very peculiar fashion, with our group of confused northern hemispherians sitting around the pool in bathers drinking tea under the bright sunshine. Even more confusingly I phoned home to find that everyone was still down the Bathams celebrating Christmas Eve, very strange. Finest of friends Paul relayed my messages of goodwill over the jukebox noise of Guns N Roses, whilst Mom, Dad, Sister and Gran all looked forward to seeing me soon. For the first time since I thought I was dying of malaria in Vietnam, I felt a little homesick. Fortunately, Tom, Beth and Shez came to the rescue and served up a tremendous Christmas meal with plenty of wine and distractions to while away the happy day.
Mr Nice Guy Gary had meanwhile, been busy organising the most important event of any Christmas festivities (apart from the Queen’s speech of course) – the park football match. This cheered up me greatly as my long standing run of appearances in Kinver’s equivalent match back home, had also just come to an end of course. The line-up promised much, Anglo-Italia v Australia, but I was immediately thrown off guard. The Christmas Eve match as I know it has only 4 rules:
1- No offsides.
2- Each player must carry a can of Stella at all times.
3- Every player, no matter which team he is on, should always try and kick James.
4- No matter how much snow might be falling, the game only ends when it gets dark.
Darwin, as always was 34 degrees and ludicrously humid, whilst the Australians introduced a disappointingly girly “no tackling” rule. We had several tackle shy Italians in our line up of course so I hope this might suit us, but this was not park football as I knew it and we immediately struggled. In the stifling humidity, acclimatised Australia raced into an early 6 goal lead before Europe slowly settled and clawed back for a potential draw, only for Australia to change the rules again and switch players around in the hope of securing victory. This in my mind, immediately rendered the match null and void, and I no longer made any effort to keep score, quietly deciding that Europe had won 3-0 by default. It was of course a friendly kick about celebrated with a pleasant beer afterwards, but my time in Darwin was coming to an end. With my failed attempt to sell Gumdrop, I had to get on the road again quickly.
Before leaving Darwin, by now one of my favourite places in my favourite area of Australia, I had just enough time for very fortunate and enjoyable catch ups with both Malaysian Pete, and Malaysian Jane. This was tremendously good fortune as both were passing through town at just the right time. We sank a few beers, laughed about old times on the island, shared stories of worldly adventures since, and thought with a hint of sadness, that the next time we sit around a table, all of this will long since be over for all of us.
The clock was ticking though, and as sad as I was to leave friendly, relaxed Darwin and The Musketeers, I was more than happy to climb back inside Gumdrop and head out on the open road together again. Only one thing in Darwin remained. Mangles The D1ckhead’s failed Christmas efforts to stock up on booze meant that he still owed everyone a good few dollars each. Knowing we were all about to move on of course, he had conveniently vanished. This annoyed me greatly as, whilst the sums involved were not going to break the bank, we were all on tight budgets eeking out travels in far off lands. Being the slightly more senior member of the group, I took it upon myself to the tackle the problem on behalf of my younger team mates. Of course, Mangles’ disappearance rendered a solution impossible so I did only what any other mature, sensible adult would have done in the same situation. I filled his work boots full of pancake mixture, and left.
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