Travel Writing Awards Entry
Sure enough come the morning of the 31st of December I had a pounding headache. I remember conversing with someone the night before about meeting at 11am in order to have a drink to celebrate the NZ New Year. What a ludicrous idea.
I slept well passed 11am, and awoke to a call from my mates back in NZ. I’m fairly sure that they’d be drinking. I can’t be sure, but I’ll let you judge for yourselves. This was my mate Ricks conversation with me ‘How the hell are ya?, No seriously, how the hell are ya? No seriously, how the hell are ya? No seriously, how the hell are ya?’ This sentence was repeated a good 20 times, each time Rick stressing a different word in the sentence. By this time I had got up, got changed and was walking through the streets of Edinburgh to find a pub. I’m not sure Rick was satisfied with my answers of ‘good’, ‘yeah good’, and ‘what more do you want from me?’ I could tell he was only going to pass the phone on to my mates if he heard some excitement from me. So whilst walking down the main street of Edinburgh in a hung over state passing by hundreds and thousands of people I started yelling at my phone that I was “f*cking good”. Bizarre, as was the rest of the conversation. I got a bit homesick; it would have been to catch up with all the boys.
When I finished my call we had walked all the way into town and found a café to stock up on stodge to line the stomach. Simon and Joel started drinking early, I thought about it, but thought that there’d be a good chance I’d fall asleep in my pint and not wake til the following year.
Later in the arvo we cranked a few tunes and sank a few brews back at Bevan’s flat. That got us in the mood for the night’s festivities. Nic and I had tickets to the concert in the park, so we went to that while the others went to the street party. Nic and I found that the best place to see the concert would be from half way up a hill on a footpath. This turned out to be a great place to stand, not only did we have a good view of the stage, but we also had front row seats for the mud slip and slide. What I mean by this is that people were trying to walk up the bank which was incredibly muddy and slippery and were arsing over left, right and centre. It was hilarious. A group of guys on the hill were killing themselves laughing. 30 people or more must have fallen over. The best of the night was a guy who didn’t see the short chain fence, clipped it with his foot and went flying down head first. Oh, how I laughed.
The two bands we saw were local Scottish band Idlewild and Brit band Kasabian. Both were brilliant. Nic is a huge fan of Idlewild so was stoked to see them live. As soon as Kasabian had finished we thought we’d go find Jaimee and Joel to spend the countdown with them. That turned out to be impossible as the street literally has close to a million people on it. We watched the fireworks, fired from the top of the castle which was amazing, and found Jaimee and Joel shortly afterwards.
The rest of the night is a bit of a blur. I do remember one bit, well mostly through people’s stories recounted the next day. In a bar I grabbed a pillow off a couch and put it under my top imitating a fat person. I then went on to the dance floor with Joel, he was fake punching me in the stomach when we looked across the dance floor and saw a guy with a beard who looked like Jesus, he looked like he wanted to join in so I said ‘punch me Jesus, punch me’. And so it came to pass that in the first few hours of 2008 I was on a dance floor in Edinburgh looking like a fat bloke being punched by Jesus. Almost as weird as the year I was tossing apples into a basin full of urine but that’s a different story.
