18 Oct 2008, Posted by Cat in News, 6 Comments. Tagged old friends

all my friends are more interesting than me

Had a terrific day yesterday. it began with a secret mission: a rendezvous at Sydney airport where I handed a suspicious-looking package to a bearded man about to board a plane…

Nick Stathopoulos, if there’s anyone left reading this blog who doesn’t know already, is an artist, guest of honour at Perth’s Wastelands convention this weekend. Through various small acts of fuckuppery, I’d managed not to send a bunch of Scary Food cookbooks across to the con, so Nick agreed to transport them in his luggage. We had coffee in the departure lounge & Nick presented me with a belated birthday present that’s so special I’m going to blog it later in its own separate post.

After Nick boarded, I made my way to Rozelle where I met up with a very old friend and his family who were visiting from Hong Kong.

Mike flies 747s for Cathay Pacific these days. We first became friends back when I was 15 and he was 17. He was going out with my school friend Peggy and the three of us became, and stayed, firm friends. Even then, he knew exactly what he wanted to be. It was an airline pilot or nothing, although he did flirt with the obligatory rock and roll band thing to the point of becoming quite a proficient guitarist. [Note to self... must dig out those embarassing old photos of M with big hair, goatee beard and leather pants sometime] Getting to fly big planes for a living was a long hard road for Mike, fraught with dodgy small craft jobs and disappointments. We shared several houses along the way so I got to witness a lot of the process up close. Of all the folks I know who’ve ever achieved success, Mike’s the one I find most personally inspiring because he managed to channel his obsessions into his dream and he never ever ever gave up, no matter how impossible the odds.

He and Tania have three big blue-eyed boys that look just like him: Jack, Jesse and Huw (pictured). Hong Kong living sounds like a bit of an adventure in itself. We never email and I don’t really know why that is. I’m trying to encourage him to blog because even the most ordinary of his days are probably a whole lot more interesting than mine. Back when we used to live together, he and I used to fight a lot. We couldn’t stand each other’s friends. I still can’t stand his taste in music. By a cruel twist of fate, his musical taste is pretty much the same as Rob’s: wall to wall relentless prog rock.

Mike says he can remember the exact point when I started writing, although neither of us can recall exactly *why* I developed a burning passion for it. Most writers I know say they always wanted to be writers, but I didn’t.

From Rozelle, I walked up the road to Balmain where I met up with two more old friends (and fellow supermodels) Katherine and Helen. We hopped into Helen’s car and drove to her gorgeous little house in Erskinville. It’s one of those places that looks like a shack from the outside, but has a Tardis-like interior, larger than it should be, all polished timber floors and fittings. Helen is an archaeologist and like all archaeologists, her home is filled with statues, pots, rugs, curios and nick-nacks from her travels. She’d just returned from Croatia. I don’t see her much, probably  because she’s always off somewhre interesting, either leading a tour or up to her knees in mud down a trench. She and I met on a dig in Pella (Jordan) back in the early 90s. I met Katherine at Rukeis, another Jordanian dig, and at some point the three of us headed off to Syria where — and this is where the supermodels gag comes into it — we were sexually harassed from Damascus all the way to Aleppo and back! For some reason we could never quite fathom, we were presumed to be Russian prostitutes by many of the Syrians we encountered. I wrote a story about our adventure but never tried to get it published. Its called ‘Supermodels Go Aleppo!’ and if I can find it I might blog it here just for fun.

Katherine (pictured middle) used to be a chef. She was the cook on the Rukeis dig and her superpower was conjuring up gourmet food from miserable scraps of local produce and suspicious-looking tinned stuff. She’s a potter these days, living in a cottage by the sea in Wellington, NZ. We ate cheese and salami and paw paw. My email communication with these two women is infrequent also and, again, I really do wonder why that is.