It’s that time of year, and for the first time Ash and I are brimming with the growing excitement of Christmas with the additional lure of a trip back home. Eager anticipation has hungrily consumed the calendar as we’ve burnt through the last few weeks of December. The hot, sweaty WA coastline is sweetly calling our name and the thought of a couple of weeks without a care for normal life is spectacularly enticing.
With footy well and truly back in business, the 2020 pre-season has spelled a new role for me and a lot of fast paced catching-up as I desperately scramble to keep my feet beneath me. With her head down, Ash has been crushing sale after sale at her work. The unforgiving nature of her role is the more jobs you win, the more work you have to do. Ironically, if she wasn’t so good at it, her job would be easier. It’s been a helter-skelter dash to the end of the year, while the ongoing melee with illness and stress sometimes gets the better of us. Luckily, the captain is now beginning his decent and the distant bump on the horizon is slowly growing into the wonderful shape of Perth city.
For the first time in my life, the thought of returning home has sparked a little electricity in my feet. Typically, returning home would bring the Sunday blues of an ending holiday, the anti-climatic conclusion to travels and adventure. The gloomy sense of a return to dull productivity and routine swells inside you with each item of filthy clothing that is unpacked and fed to the washing machine. But now? Well now returning home has been redefined for us. It’s a quest for reigniting happy memories, gleeful catch-ups and some hard-earned time off. If the Christmas spirit inside me has been waning ever since I was ten years old and didn’t get the Gameboy I was expecting from Santa, then this year has got me cheerfully singing Carols as I walk the streets. Absence makes the heart grow fonder I guess, and we we’re pretty fond of Perth to begin with. It’s odd really. Holidays bring us home and home brings us holidays. Two once opposing entities are now wonderfully aligned for our mutual good. It’s like Darth Vader turning on the Emperor to save Luke. Or Justin Bieber singing Hillsong.
There is a part of me which is sad to be leaving. Melbourne has been very sweet to us this year and to not be there, holding her hand as the decade turns over seems horrendously rude. But she’s a loyal friend and I know she will understand, patiently and expectantly awaiting our return. It won’t do anything to ruin the fun we’re planning on having. I’m stupidly excited for the coming year. Melbourne, Ash and I will be getting up to plenty of mischief and adventure. This is a good thing because it somehow makes it all the more enjoyable to check back in on the city that we will always know and love.
