Kim
When it comes to fast, hard and complicated friendships, it doesn’t get much bigger than Kim and I. We became very close very fast, we went through the brilliant side of London partying hard, we went through the hard side of London together and then apart, and we have arrived at the complicated return to Australia that means a very different life for both of us.
I met Kim, like I met Jacinta, in completely abnormal surroundings. We were two of a grand total of six women at an Aussie Rules function in North London somewhere with almost a hundred guys, in a venue like a sauna and with me drinking two pints of beer for the first time in my life. I watched this pretty and perky blonde start up a friendship with me in jealous disbelief that she was not wilting in the cripplingly uncomfortable conditions, but our great partnership was cemented when I met her Perth boyfriend a week later and ended up, to be perfectly honest, in an entertaining situation with his two friends.
Kim, Jacinta and I became the Three Musketeers the next week and the rest is, as they say, a great history of tracksuits on the couch, high heels at dawn, bewildered boys, mismanaged men, drenching drinks, take away and non-stop long weekends. We found ourselves a hapless local pub quiz team who kindly let us over-run them with Australian visitors, we were out almost every night to this pub or that to meet each other’s mates and we spent weekends at each other’s houses, washing our clothes for the next day while we slept.
There is an even more important debt that I owe to Kim though, and that is EVERYTHING I know about traveling. My four main holidays with Kim were four lessons on how to travel and squeeze everything you can into each second.
There is an endless expanse of anecdotes conjured up when I think of our travels, and they are merely the brighter stars amongst the constellation that was our time in London. It would have been a much darker and duller London without her.
When it comes to fast, hard and complicated friendships, it doesn’t get much bigger than Kim and I. We became very close very fast, we went through the brilliant side of London partying hard, we went through the hard side of London together and then apart, and we have arrived at the complicated return to Australia that means a very different life for both of us.
I met Kim, like I met Jacinta, in completely abnormal surroundings. We were two of a grand total of six women at an Aussie Rules function in North London somewhere with almost a hundred guys, in a venue like a sauna and with me drinking two pints of beer for the first time in my life. I watched this pretty and perky blonde start up a friendship with me in jealous disbelief that she was not wilting in the cripplingly uncomfortable conditions, but our great partnership was cemented when I met her Perth boyfriend a week later and ended up, to be perfectly honest, in an entertaining situation with his two friends.
Kim, Jacinta and I became the Three Musketeers the next week and the rest is, as they say, a great history of tracksuits on the couch, high heels at dawn, bewildered boys, mismanaged men, drenching drinks, take away and non-stop long weekends. We found ourselves a hapless local pub quiz team who kindly let us over-run them with Australian visitors, we were out almost every night to this pub or that to meet each other’s mates and we spent weekends at each other’s houses, washing our clothes for the next day while we slept.
There is an even more important debt that I owe to Kim though, and that is EVERYTHING I know about traveling. My four main holidays with Kim were four lessons on how to travel and squeeze everything you can into each second.
There is an endless expanse of anecdotes conjured up when I think of our travels, and they are merely the brighter stars amongst the constellation that was our time in London. It would have been a much darker and duller London without her.
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