Camp law

It is 5.45, and I am in a silent campsite. For many kilometres around me, people are sleeping in various contraptions and self-made semi-competent tent arrangements. It's almost like a graveyard. I can picture each body falling into their place, heavily, as if to say yes please, rest seems necessary. One of my friends is stirring in a tiny two person tent. I suppose cramming three people in there with one pillow and two sleeping bags to share was a bit idealistic. But I like being up at this hour.

The Woodford countryside is very picturesque. All you can hear is the occasionally mouthy bird - that and the subtle, quiet trickle of women slipping away to the toilet facilities. It's like everyone with a vagina is born with the inbuilt knowledge that yes, of course it's easier to have a cold shower earlier rather than later and if I just skip off now at sunrise...

At about eight, the yoga mothers and earthy types trek into the festival to hear talks on soy-milk and chakras. After that the place starts to wake up a bit, and you can see the Badly Prepareds rise from their tents, which have invariably collapsed in the night, with startling bed head and slightly dead eyes. We - there's four of us - fit into that sorry category. After half of our sleeping arrangements were drenched by torrential rain, we were left with very, very minimal bedding and what creativity we could summon at three am. The result was deeply unpleasant. I currently feel like there is a mariachi band dropping all of their instruments simultaneously inside my skull.

More on the actual festival when my eyes can stay open without manual effort.

Teenage Dirtbag... or Dirtbagguette?

It has occurred to me that I was not a very cool teenager. I say 'was', despite being not even nearly out of the woods yet, because I feel that turning 18 is officially the end of teenagedom, mainly because it implies that you are now legally allowed to do all the things that were so exciting in the throws of fifteen-year-old passion. At 18, you are allowed by society to be an Official and Certified Fuck-Up and to ruin your life however you so choose, but before then you are still a child of the community, or, in my case, a child of suburbia born to a family of nudists and eccentrics of varying severity. A childhood of pop culture infiltrating my brain has led me to believe that the years between discovering that one thing that boys are so keen for and being able to vote are meant to be tumultuous.

Maybe it was due to my two saintly years at a fancy girls grammar school, during which I knew no boys or parties or anything except the fact that once a month, the entire school would become a seething pit of hellcats, with Mother Nature laughing overhead. I had dysfunctional friends and we fought a lot and shared stories and walked everywhere in a mass of badly-proportioned limbs and cheap girlishness. But we never just did without thinking. Or at least I never did. Perhaps I might have if I had the chance but I didn't, so by the time I left the school and discovered the boys and the parties and the bad, bad things, I could only think, and never lose myself the way other teenagers seemed to. I could party, sure, but never completely throw caution to the wind and just trust that the fates would take care of me and my friends and the night. My dad talks about the God of Children and Idiots - a very busy deity who spent a lot of time saving my father in the seventies - but maybe I don't have enough faith.

Ho Ho Hot Damn

Ah, the taste of freedom. Sweet, sweet freedom. It tastes like joy, bundled in cookie dough. I no longer have to wear a stripy, maroon tent and clumpy leather shoes with a hat that sticks out far enough to shade four people around me. I no longer have to do exams or past papers or homework or study in any kind of way. I have been rewarding myself with my bed, mostly, although it keeps being disturbed when my friends sneak through the back door of my house and nag me to go out with them. We usually end up roaming in a squad of borrowed (parental) cars from one house to another, and watching bad movies. The teenage life is a wild one.

Then there was schoolies. A blur - or more likely smudge - of alcohol, card games and both at the same time. There were also some cigars, loud music and bad cooking involved, and many many many many treks to the beach (UPHILL). I have returned sufficiently brown and never willing to live in filth again. Twelve teenagers in a house for eight leaves everything everywhere, and cooking in bulk (without an oven - it was broken) led to blackened pizza cooked on the BBQ, and plastic plates melting under hot pasta.

So now I wander about and around, usually with people (and their useful cars), and always rejoice when I return home to find that I have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO, except maybe watch Entourage or put together a resume or something non-essential like that. I've been writing a bit, as you can see here, and recording a tid bit, as you can see here. And as Christmas is approaching, I can only sit back and enjoy not stressing about dysfunctional family meals or moulting trees or which colour socks to buy the bizarre aunt who keeps hinting she would prefer a young male escort underneath the tinselled tree. Really, as the resident Jew, I can say that I am not jealous, and the Santas in the malls, whose beards droop a bit and whose $40 on-sale running shoes peek out of their voluminous not-quite-red-enough fatsuits, scare me. A lot. Fake snow too.

Happy holidays, try not to get smothered by overpricing wrapping paper or have an aneurysm wishing that we could finally have a white christmas in our sub-tropical continent. We won't, but if you are nice enough to me, I will come to your house and gently drop white confetti on you while you try to build snowmen and frolic with shiny baubles hanging from your nipples.