This is one of those comedies of errors that I can see the funny side of but wasn’t laughing at since it happened to me. I got to the end of the first week at the Taieri Herald - one down two to go - and they’d won some free drinks at the local pub. I’d been planning to go into Dunedin for Friday night but to be sociable I went along for a couple of (free) beers. The newspaper staff are all women – one reporter, three advertising staff (typical ratio probably), a manager and a secretary. It turned out one of the youngish ones is a) single and b) kind of cute (though very short, which would normally put me off – she’s also a jockey). So I tagged along when they decided to go for dinner at another pub (there are three or four here). I had ‘the vegetarian dish’ which was a mild and unspectacular but filling curry. By the end of the meal it was starting to get dark so prospects of getting to Dunedin were fading – not many buses and I wouldn’t hitchhike at night. In Dunedin there were several good bands playing at Arc Café and I’d also arranged to meet a girl who I’d emailed off a dating website (there goes another of my dark secrets).
But I got stuck at the pub in Mosgiel. There was a guy doing a one-man-band act (guitar and playing along to computer backing tracks) who wasn’t bad considering the repertoire was mostly 70s pop covers. I had a couple more beers but the dinner was soaking them up. The thing I find with beer is that the first one is always the best, especially at the end of a day’s work, but continued drinking just becomes a chore. And as far as alcohol goes beer’s pretty inefficient, I feel bloated before I get drunk. Being my usual shy self I didn’t get into the social scene with the locals much. There was a guy showing a fairly major forearm scar he’d got at the freezing works, made me feel self-consciously like a middle-class townie.
I also had my laptop with me, which was making me nervous that it might get stolen. Like they said in Fight Club, ‘the things you own end up owning you’. So when the hourly complimentary van departed I got on it to take the computer back to where I’m staying. It was 10.30pm, not that late so I dropped the computer off and started walking back to the pub – just in time to see that I’d missed the late bus to Dunedin by five minutes. And I took a wrong turn somewhere and couldn’t find the pub. I ended up wandering out into the country and must have walked a few kilometers before getting back to the house. I could pay the $30-40 for a taxi to Dunedin but I don’t really have that kind of disposable income, and it would have been a hassle to arrange a bed there late at night without notice.
So Friday night was a bit of a write-off. It occurred to me on waking this morning that I could have dropped the computer off and got the van back to the pub – benefit of hindsight. In all the night was just another skirmish in my ongoing campaign to prevent myself having a happy & successful life. Talking to locals at a pub was actually a fairly important thing to do for a trainee journalist trying to get a grasp on a new small community.
I have the long weekend free, hopefully I can entertain myself somehow. The girl off the dating site has end-of-course and work parties to go to Saturday and Sunday nights so I probably won’t meet her, and the Wolfskull guys aren’t jamming again til next weekend. I really want to go tramping but without transport and a partner it could be impossible. I suppose I can always walk the Dunedin town belt by myself. I’ll see what happens. And I’ll leave the computer behind, see if I can cope without it for a couple of days.
& I should play at Arc Cafe on Monday...
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