My city of Sydney

I fly to Sydney on Monday. In an unfortunate subsequent development, I have to come home at some point. I love Sydney. It's mad, stupid and corrupt. It's loud and obnoxious and costs too much to get drunk in. It's not even a city, really. It's a thousand little villages with their own distinct cultures, languages, cuisines. It's fucking mental. And I love it. There are 4.5 million stories in the naked city of Sydney, and this is mine.

Sydney taught me to do all the important shit. Taught me to drink, for one. She took me on as a wet-behind-the very-wet-bit-behind-the-ears 17 year old first-year student, and sent me on my way with first class honours in pisshoundery (and some other stuff, but that's not relevant to the discussion at hand.) Thursday nights at the Uni bar on $2.50 vodkas or Tooheys Pils. Friday drinks up at the Royal or the Coach and Horses, tipping back a few Reschs Smooths. Share house parties as messy and drunken as they came (handy hint: never trust punch made in a bin liner). Sydney taught me to drive, too. Not the boring, fundamental shit - mirror, signal, manoeuvre. I mean the proper stuff. The knowledge. Rat-running. Divebomb-merging. Traffic snarl avoidance. Parking by Braille. Knowing what lane to be in at any given moment on Cleveland St so as not to get pinned behind a parked car on the left or some gumby fucktard making a right turn for no apparent fucking reason. All those sixth sense predictive-awareness things that differentiate decent drivers from the peons and the sheep.

That was my Sydney - the inner east and west. No further west than Dulwich Hill, where the old man grew up; not much further south than Eastgardens; east to the beaches and north to the CBD (didn't meet the dress code for venturing further north than Bondi.) My Sydney: The dodgy Vietnamese bakery in Randwick that did the awesomest bread in history right up to the day the kitchen burned down. Chicken hero rolls and Powerades from the 24 hour servo at the bottom of our street, the venerable 'last round of drinks' en route home from the uni bar. Stinking hot summer afternoons punctuated by a mission over the hill to Coogee and a plunge into the Pacific, probably followed by beers. Fuck-off-cheap movies at the Ritz followed by fuck-off-awesome Thai or Arthur's Pizza washed down by longnecks of comeback-special Reschs DA from the local bottle-o. One-day cricket games on the box at the Coogee Bay or the Clovelly Hotel, or just at the Hovel over a $22 case or two of New - likewise Bathurst 1000s and Australia Day Hottest 100s as memorable as they are unable-to-be-remembered. Cocktail parties at that one wannabe-trendy thirty-something lecturer's place overlooking the beach on Arden Street. $5 student tickets to Sydney City Roosters games at the SFS - turn up and back whoever they're playing, it's only five bucks for fuck's sake. Honours graduation beers in that fucking cool Thai beer garden underneath the Bank Hotel in Newtown. Kmart Bondi Junction's annual clearance sale on expired-date AC Cola that somehow always resulted in pallets of the shite stacked in our kitchen.

That was my Sydney. Which I left, brusquely, like you'd ditch a cheating lover, in order to take up with the more laconic, rustic charms of Brisbane, the overgrown country town. Less stress. Less angst. Cheaper beer. It suited me better, cos I'm rural, ay. My Sydney became Homebake roadtrips and New Years missions. My old man's old neighbourhood in Dulwich Hill got gentrified, from tyre dumps and stolen cars in council parks to awesome street-corner cafes in what had been old abandoned corner shops - all for the better, IMHFO. Every time I go back to my Sydney, I can't shake that insistent feeling: I could live here. Really, I could. Proper coffee. Proper Italian food. Proper public transport. Bands playing. Cafes. Restaurants. Local sporting teams that aren't the fucking Highlanders. I could live here, seriously. And I could. Except for the whole having-a-family-hence-only-being-able-to-live-in-fucking-Blacktown part of the equation.

Anyway, I'm back next week. For a few days at least. Who's up for a beer?

The Doctor is OUT.