The Situation

Surprisingly not a blog about the guy from Jersey Shore…..

Since I’m now unemployed and not in New York with my family, what else do I have to do but blog? And I have so many different thoughts in my head that I would like to express here. I’ve always thought that I would write about the different aspects of being an Australian in London, telling my stories and venting my opinion on anything related. Then life got in the way and I have written hardly anything on here at all! Until the past couple of days where I wrote about what was going on with my cancelled trip to New York, posted it on facebook and got an overwhelming response of support from friends. The power of social media strikes again!

FYI, for those interested, I’m going to New York. Just 4 days later than we had planned. I’ll miss Christmas day with my family but will be there for New Years and a little bit of time either side. It’s not ideal, but it is better than a whole week later, which was the next available flight Virgin offered us. So I feel that I have remained positive whilst trying to figure this out, even as we were met with obstacle after obstacle….’yes we can get you on an earlier flight, it will be 3000 pounds each please’!! Even the day we are going, there will probably be a tube strike, making the journey to the airport just that little bit harder. But hey, I’m still going to get there right? I mean really if I have to pay for a cab I’m not going to complain because it means that I will get there and that in itself is freakin’ awesome!

But it has been hard and when I was in the shower yesterday I had a moment where I couldn’t help but cry. The fact I hadn’t cried up to this point is actually rather unusual. Anyway it got me to thinking about why this situation was so upsetting. I feel that it would be upsetting for anybody, like I said before, when you have your heart set on something and it doesn’t happen you will always feel disappointment. But I have been feeling rather sorry for myself about this. It reminded me about a post I read recently on a blog that I follow; about how this time of year can actually be really hard for a lot of people. And people wrote in saying why they found the festive season hard, or a time of sadness. And I can actually understand.

This is a time of year filled with tradition. These traditions are usually unique to your family and they can be odd and no one actually knows how they began, but if you didn’t do them one year it would just be wrong! For those of us that are lucky Christmas is a time that we enjoy spending with our family. So what about when something changes and you no longer have the same people with you at Christmas? What if it is no longer possible to carry out the traditions from previous years? You are basically forced to make new traditions and still have Christmas but it will never be the same again.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, life is always changing and as we grow older we can’t expect things to remain like they always were. But it is hard. You can’t help but notice the one person who is suddenly missing, Christmas 2007, they were there; drinking the mescal as we sat around outside in the warm night air. Christmas 2008, they weren’t. And people will deal with this in all different ways. 2008, a toast was made in his honour, a nice reminder that everyone there was missing him. It means tears at the Christmas lunch though, not a tradition I remember from previous years. It doesn’t mean the day is no longer enjoyable at all, we know he would want us to have fun getting really merry and playing silly games. But it’s so different.

My Christmas 2009 was probably my most unusual yet. It was a lot of fun, being in a (closed) pub with a really big group of friends eating lots of food and having copious amounts of booze, a friend on the decks and dancing into the wee hours. Actually, not that different to what we get up to at our family Christmas’s back home. What was different, of course, were the people. Most of these were friends that I had only known for a couple of months, at the most! So it was a lot of fun, but to be perfectly honest it could’ve been any weekend really. It didn’t feel like Christmas usually does. It’s hard to explain but there is a feeling that I’m used to getting at this time of year. And I haven’t felt that in the past couple of years. I guess being apart from home and family and the usual familiar settings, it’s always going to feel different.

Which brings us to Christmas 2010. I was once again going to be with family (not the usual crew) but with my immediate loved ones. I feel that we were going to be making a new sort of family Christmas. It really couldn’t be any different from what we have traditionally had, hello white Christmas in New York! Just slightly different to the hot and sunny ones we have Australia. But the point was that we were going to be together again. Well, thanks to the situation at Heathrow, a huge spanner has been thrown into the works and I will not be spending Christmas with my family.

It is for this reason that I want to say a big, ‘FUCK YOU!’ to the universe.

Christmas these days has an element of sadness that it never used to. And it’s hard enough without our plans being ruined! I think we are good people and we didn’t deserve to have this happen to us. Yes, I know so many worse things happen to undeserving people all the time and my heart goes out to those that are having a hard time right now (some personal friends I’m thinking of in particular) but this really sucks! I know Christmas will never be the same but I just wanted what I had planned to happen. And so I’m really disappointed.

Grrrrrr. I know this feeling all too well, there isn’t anyone to blame and everyone has been so nice and supportive! But I wanted to vent my frustration at the situation (rhyme!).

I will try to write a more positive post soon but right now I’m going to go and have a shower….and maybe a little cry…..