Spend a few days in a foreign city and you may start to believe you’ve developed a sense of the place — perhaps you could even picture yourself living there. But stay a little while longer and you quickly come to realise you scarcely understand it at all.
I visited Sydney for three weeks over Christmas (I marinated in factor 50 and returned paler than when I arrived). The first week in Australia was — crippling jet lag and the intergenerational trauma that is Christmas gift-giving aside — a world of prelapsarian delights. A time machine back to, if not quite the womb, then perhaps the mid-Noughties, only with Uber.
How can you not love a place where the default condiment is aioli, the automatic reply is “yeah, no” and the C-word a term of endearment, or at most mild admonishment? Where shorts are standard dress for men, public water fountains a dime a dozen and GDP per capita is 30 per cent higher than in the UK?
After a week of living on the city’s bourgeois eastern shores, with its harbour views and sea breeze, I swiftly learned to pity those living in the stifling western suburbs. Parramatta, the new CBD? I laughed along too. I was a local now.
But the longer I spent there, the more annoyed I grew with the sort of trivial inconveniences that residents endure but tourists often overlook. The coffee is good, sure, but try getting one after 3.30pm. My thongs (flip-flops — please) started to give me blisters. And after a while, it began to feel weird living in a country that did not have an independent nuclear deterrent.
It gets worse. Everyone is beach body-ready, so as a solid seven in London I was demoted to a five, five and a half on a good hair day (which never happened, thanks to my sun hat). I took my shirt off at the pool and yearned to assure the locals that, actually, I’m in reasonable shape for London.
After two weeks, Sydney started to feel small. Maybe I should visit Canberra, tick off another parliament? How far away could New Zealand be? And while we’re globally minded, where are the major Australian companies that don’t involve digging stuff out of the ground? My theory is the country is just too nice to live in. Aussies are suffering from the lesser-spotted high-income trap. I was ready to come home.
Waiting for the plane, I recalled a joke I heard when I was young that I didn’t understand at the time. An old man dies and goes to heaven, but before he walks through the pearly gates, he asks God if he can see hell. He descends to a place that, while on the warm side, boasts cold drinks and ample shade. Despite God’s protestations, our man decides that he’d prefer to stay in the underworld.
And just like that it transforms into, well, hell. Hot pokers,
an eternity of pain, the whole shebang. He asks the devil, “What happened? It was so nice on the tour.” And the devil replies, “Of course it was — you were on holiday.”
If it’s that bad, just leave
Is there anything more liberating than quitting a book you’re not enjoying? As it turns out, there is. Last weekend
I saw M3gan at the cinema, starring the usually engaging Allison Williams, pictured. It was so bad that my only regret was I suffered through a whole 45 minutes. And my time is not precious.
It reminded me of the best lunch I ever had. My Dad and I had tickets for Lord’s in late September, long before England were good and summers warm. After shivering for an hour, we glanced at each other and left.
There’s one proviso, however. Years ago, I saw The Play That Goes Wrong, in my humble opinion the least successful piece of art — book, film, sculpture — ever made. After 10 minutes I wanted to leave. After 20 I was imagining ways to injure myself. But there was a fatal problem — my friend had paid for the tickets. Escape was impossible. Never again.
