One morning last month, naked and shivering in my parents’ guest bathroom, I lubed myself from head to toe with half a tub of Body Shop Nut Butter in preparation for some vigorous exercise al fresco.
As a long-time resident of the ever-moist CharmingVille, I usually glisten like an unctuous seal. But after a KNY fortnight Down Under on a power shopping spree ‘n’ parental pilgrimage, my skin was dry as a chip.
Except for a few warm, wet nooks up north, the antipodean atmosphere desiccates a tropical pelt. And autumn down south can be bitter. Not Yakutsk in January, granted, but still. Even a few hours’ exposure tramping from mall to dire mall to tick off my ‘Only-in-Oz’ shopping list (orca-fit cotton underpants, obscure electric toothbrush heads, Spanx™) and I itch and whine until even my deaf mother pulls across three lanes of oncoming traffic so she can dump me on the kerb to find my own way home.
I don’t know if you’re entering middle age and have been recently abandoned in an IKEA car park late on Easter Sunday in a third-tier Australian suburb by your 74-year-old mother, but it really confirms that one of you is the worst person in the world. Luckily she couldn’t work the GPS and after circling the trolley park had to come back so I could help her find the exit. Me and Mum. Probably a good thing we don’t share a hemisphere.
Anyway, as the morning chill goosed my every bump and sucked the juice from every pore, I prepared thusly for my am ‘run’ – all 325 metres of it – which I’d promised my Bodes-side gym instructor I’d do during my trip. Well, I promised him I’d do an hour of meaningful exercise every morning. But these days I’m barely Australian, let alone Christian, and in the lead-up to Khmer New Year I’d forgotten about the whole Easter thing. Jogging past a nearby strip mall wearing a sweatband, tearfully discovering a giant chocolate bilby centrepiece outside the Jobcentre, detouring through the front bar of the local and tottering back to base, hours later, cheeks stuffed with Caramello Koalas, is probably not what he meant. But anyway.
I felt a bit weird caressing myself with a fistful of fair-trade nut fat while Mum and Dad shambled next door in the kitchen. I could hear them stacking the breakfast dishwasher and talking in Old Person (‘Is it bin night tonight? What time does Eggheads come on? Is it bin night tonight?’), but needs must. My epidermis rustled. Like a fragrant but shameful Channel swimmer, I checked and rechecked the lock on the folk’s facilities before waxing on. Given my generous acreage this took longer than ages, and after a while I started to think about the Bodes: the Hubster, the Bunster, pork noodles on a Sunday morning. My thoughts wandered. Now don’t take this the wrong way (if you’re American, it’s not too late to go get a donut), but they wandered to how much I missed bum guns. Mum and Dad had trucked in the best loo paper money can buy, but nothing gets you feeling fresher than a pre-paper blast from the elephant-in-the-room of personal hygiene. I found myself reaching for a phantom squirter on more than one occasion. Pavlov would have smirked knowingly. Though I often whinge and carp about all things KOW, I was shocked at how acclimatised I’ve become.
On holidays in a town with three Targets, four Officeworks and a couple of overrated pandas on a sex-exchange programme, you’d think I’d died and gone to Adelaide. I admit I revelled in my choice of pickled walnuts and cheap gossip mags. I kicked red leaves down the street and rollicked in the dog park with tick-free Tilly, Smokey and Rex. Cold Chisel is still on high rotation if you like that kind of thing. But as the normcore days wore on I began to yearn for old CharmingVille’s quirk and edge. I venture we even have better mod-cons here, too: free wifi, world’s best Bloody Marys, one-dollar eyebrow waxing.
And while the days chez rellies were chilly, the nights had me almost weeping for my adopted home and Marital HQ. Of a sub-Arctic eve, tucked up in the bed where I suspect Gramps drew his last breath in 1988, the jolly thump of the disco tuk tuk was replaced by the council rubbish truck and incessant beep of the nearby pedestrian crossing.
As much as I love my olds, and no matter where I am, I yearn to sit on my CharmingVille balcony in knickers and a T-shirt, any late afternoon of the sweltering year, and feel that portentous wind-rush just before the hot drama of a calamitous, all-night thunderstorm. I almost always feel good in my skin here. And my arse is home and hosed.
Sensational!