The First and Last Days

Friday 1st January 2010, 11.40am, Bobby Brewers Coffee House, De Tham Street - Ho Chi Minh City

On the first day of 2009 I was with a group of 10 or so of my best friends, visiting them in Canterbury. I'd taken a week off work and went for a mini-break to see them in their home town. It was a gloriously lazy and decadent week of pub lunches, river walks, horror movie afternoons, SingStar karaoke, communal cooking efforts, vintage clothes shopping, You Tube surfing, espresso and Marlboro Lights on the cobbles, Moroccan restaurant dining, and of course a New Year's Eve party that culminated in the lot of us sprawled out on the lounge floor at 7 in the morning listening to Sia and Elliot Smith, drunkenly professing undying love and friendship (I.D.S.T.). One of my friend's put some photos from that week up on facebook and entitled the album 'The Reason 2009 Will Be OK'. That stuck with me because I knew how right he was, whatever 2009 threw at us we'd still have each other. This turned out to be more vital to me than I could have realised at the time, 2009 bringing the cancers of betrayal, heartache, stress, depression and illness to parts of my life and to those closest to me. But you know what, 2009 was OK! In fact, without deconstructing the specifics, 2009 held a lot of joy and good fortune for me. Sure there were some pretty awful downs (June in particular can kiss my arse and go to hell) but there were also some fantastic highs because of the people that surrounded me. My friends and family, as Dan correctly predicted, made everything just A-OK.

If somebody had told me on the first day of 2009 as I was cushioned safely in the bosom of love that true friendship provides, that in a year's time I would be sitting in a coffee shop in Vietnam, thousands of miles from all the people that have been integral to my enjoyment, and sometimes survival of life, I would have balked at the idea (and probably thrown up a little bit). Yet here I am.

New Year's Eve in Saigon was what can only be described as SPECTACULAR. Firstly, I have never seen anywhere so decorated. I said to Ella that it was as though someone on the Street Care team at Ho Chi Minh City Council opened a cupboard at work and found 10 billion fairy lights, 5 million multi-coloured balloons, a million Vietnamese flags and thought 'what are we gonna do with this lot?! Oh fuck it, let's put 'em all up.' Traffic came to a standstill, the streets were packed back-to-back with human bodies of numerous nationalities, music from competing bars blared from huge speakers erected on street corners, the confetti and spray foam sellers had the best sales figures of their lives, strobe lights illuminated the sky and at midnight everyone embraced and danced and cheered - it was the photo opportunity of Chinese tourists' dreams.

Ella and I covered ourselves in glitter and went to the Golden Dragon Water Puppet Theatre earlier on in the evening which was hilariously entertaining and simultaneously baffling (are the puppeteers under the water wearing scuba suits and oxygen tanks on their backs we pondered?!) before meeting Hitan, a friend we'd made in Sihanoukville, plus two heart-breakingly gorgeous Swedish girls who we had met the previous day on a tour of the Mekong Delta. The Delta tour consisted of eating coconut candy, rowing through canals in wooden kayaks wearing cone-shaped straw hats, listening to local musicians over honey tea, taking in the scenery from a river barge, and for me only... getting lost on an island jungle walk, jumping out the way of a large black snake, being chased by an angry territorial dog, and then hitching a ride with a Mekong local on her motorbike back to the confines of the tour group! Ella was sensible and had cycled round the island with the rest of the group rather than playing Indiana Jones like yours truly, and while I was having 'real cultural experiences' she had got chatting to the beautiful Kattis and Emelie, thereby recruiting fellow NYE revellers for the next evening.

So that was how I spent my last days of 2009, a year that I am partly relieved to see the back of, but mostly grateful for - it was the year that showed me what I am capable of facing with the unwaveringly loyal aid of those that love me, and safe in the knowledge of their unconditional steadfast support, 2009 gave me the courage to leave them. I'm here having the time of my life, and in spite of distance, they are there for me as I for them - this is the reason 2010 will be OK.