Sacrifices

This trip has been full of sacrifices. Recently I've realised that I've been a pretty poor friend to alot of people I know for the last few months, contacting them only when I'm asking for donations, swept up in the excitement of the brilliance of the whole thing and the wonderment of meeting 50 or more excellent people. That neglect is generally easily repaired, particularly imbibed with fluent alcohol.

As this is now my 7th year of living away from home, I'm used to missing out on the occasional function, hence I'm fluent in the language of sacrifice. Birthday's swing by and Christmases come and go that, whilst not ideal, can be reasoned away with 'another one is only 12 months away'. In addition, It always seems strange to hear of stories of children in my direct family whom I've never met, along with finding it strange to know that cousins that I grew up with and regularly babysat don't recognise me anymore.

Whilst there is always time to rekindle those situations, there are events that can't be reenacted. For example, A couple of years back, one of my best mates announced a wedding a matter of minutes after I'd locked in a flight to leave the country 3 days before the said event a couple of years back, which caused alot of fraught issues and profuse, honest, yet strangely hollow apologies.

Another one of these came about last weekend, although this time it was slightly out of my control. There was finally a wedding in my family. A wedding that my brother Phil, in a state of neurosis that many of my colleagues on this trip would argue that I've also inherited, failed to tell me about in ample time. To be fair, he only had 2 weeks notice himself as he and his partner Nathan emulated their own version of Sex and The City and arranged the wedding of the century in 9 days flat... not nearly enough time for this intrepid traveller to make it New Zealand and back.

Phil and Nathan have already been a massive help to me on this trip, so having to miss their wedding has made me even more determined to make this a success. No doubt they both would have not made it this far down in the blog as it hasn't yet mentioned Kylie Minogue nor Patsy and Eddie, but Im sure they know I'm proud of them for taking the plunge and, if given more than 8 days notice in a furiously apologetic phone call 3 weeks before a massive world record attempt, I may have been able to make it.