How delightful is the sun! When you haven’t had a holiday in over a year, there is truly nothing like a work-sponsored trip to Byron Bay. Yes i am the luckiest person alive, no doubt about that. Here’s the whole story:

• got bitten by a tick the very first night, and it still hurts three weeks later (on my ear)
• went to a super boring cultural evening, where the local singers all had US accents
• narrowly avoided a brown snake crawling across my sarong
• drove my hire car for 200km along unsealed roads (trying not to read the ‘thou shalt not’ sticker prominent on the windscreen), then later took all the wheels off to sweep out the tell-tale orange dust
  
• went to the most outrageously stupid ‘rainbow gathering’
• watched really bad cable tv

on the plus side

• saw whales and dolphins frolicking all over the shop, pretty much parading down the main street
  
• sat in on new enrolments at the Byron Community Centre
  
• had a whole cabin to myself for days on end
  
• 
• walked fifteen kilometres along Belongil Beach to Brunswick Heads, and back in a day
• bought organic carrots in the Mullumbimby grocery
• swam in blissfully cold mountain springs in the Washpool National Park. mmmmm that was good.

so i came back, brown all over, with knotted hair, and in a very tranquil state, but in need of a strong cultural fix. Lou suggested a gig down at Glitch bar on the Sunday night, just as i got off the plane. Enclosed in a small dingy dark bar in north fitzroy surrounded by strange young people wearing black and making weird musical noises .. i felt so at home.