So at last we’re leaving Melbourne.

We’re making our last preparations and come Tuesday we’ll be on the road.

We have to make some final purchases for boring food cooking-type things in the wonderful Sunbury (or Scumbury as a friend puts it) and then just drive off into deepest Victoria and beyond on Tuesday.

But today, our last day in Melbourne, was a good one.

Today we had our last send off with Cafe Church today at Trotter’s Cafe Lygon Street (Sunday brunch is a long-term ritual of Cafe Church and an important part of the community that they share). It’s always a sad moment to leave people behind, and for us Cafe Church have come along at an important point in our lives – both in terms of moving around and life stages and in terms of where we are with our spirituality.

Cafe Church holds as it’s biggest value the right to be yourself. If you don’t want to discuss the topic that’s being highlighted, you don’t have to. If you have a different opinion to everyone else at the table, regardless of how radical, then you should feel okay to express it. And the church will pay for coffee and soft drinks.

With the possible exception of the last one, these have been important values for us over the past 8 months and I’d just like to say thank you to Cafe Church and, if you’re ever in Melbourne, check them out.

So, here it is. We’ve finally left our house in Carlton (NE Melbourne) and have moved to stay with our friend Rod Baker for a week in his beautiful country home in Riddells Creek (60km NW of Melbourne). This seems a good time to reflect a little of some of what we have experienced during our time in Melbourne.

I would like to say that I’m sorry to leave that house, but then I’d be a liar.

The truth is that we’ve had so much trouble in that house that we’re both glad to see the back of it.

Now the story hasn’t been divulged here before, and it’s so damn long and tortuous and that I’m not about to relate it all here entirely. Nor can I really be bothered in person. But here’s a summary:    

• We had to change address 3 times in the first 2 months. We lived in a ultra-expensive house in St.Kilda for 3 weeks, then moved to hostel for a week whilst we were waiting to move into a flat in the city.
• That flat started out okay, but apart from the fact that the other tenants had a kind of ‘old-school’ club that we seemingly couldn’t join either because they’d grown very close and/or smoked half of Australia’s Marijuana supply together, but the flat was cockroach infested. We’re talking ‘roaches coming out the cooker, we’re talking about several ‘roaches a day, DURING THE DAY! This was in winter – what was it going to be like in spring or summer? Urgh….. The two stoners and (as we later discovered) alcoholic depressive (the sole lease holder) that we were staying with didn’t count this as a problem. I quote, “Oh, I quite like them actually – it’s like having little pets.”

  Sorry sunshine – can’t agree with you there.

  So we had to move out into the house in Carlton. This seem good, although it was a lot of hassle to put together (that’s yet another story). But the house was nice and we had high hopes. Oh how foolish and naive we were.

• There have been several changes of housemate – 4 to be exact. There was never meant to be any, and we were forced, more or less, to manage the house and oversee all that stuff.
• One of the original housemates (who, much to our chagrin, was of course chosen by us!) turned out to be a drug-addicted loser. It was like living with a teenage drug addict. Except he was 22. To put you in the picture, he lied, left crushed up LSD all over the kitchen, stunk out the front door and front hallway area with the stench from lack-of-washing that came from his room, kept LSD in the freezer, spent most of his days smoking pot out the back, didn’t believe in deadlines or paying bills on time etc. You get the picture. His parting shot was to draw a huge penis in chalk on the front porch. Yes, you read that right. That was also after he’d told me that I was immature and unfit to be a teacher because I didn’t want to talk to him due to a tirade of abuse I had received from him the previous day.
• The letting agency neglected to do their job at every turn, including making sure our bond was transferred into our names. They neglected to post off 6, yes – count’em, 6 transfer of bond forms, never acted on any rejection notices they got that said these forms were faulty when they did post them off and then had the audacity to say that it wasn’t their fault. Amazing. They’ve had to go to a tribunal court to sort it all out. Dicks.

That is the briefest summary, but the account of our housing situation ends here.

Regretably the administrative stress didn’t end there. There was the car to buy and sort out. Now buying a car anywhere, anytime, is a stressful business, but buying an interstate car in Australia is a downright pain. But it’s all sorted now and it’s legally mine (which is helpful) and we’re through that as well.

So all in all, our time in Melbourne hasn’t been all that rosy. If it hadn’t been for the fantastic friends that we’ve made via Cafe Church, juggling and housemates (who didn’t take drugs all the time and actually had a life) then it all would have been a dead loss.

Having said that, despite all the hassle, it’s been much better than staying in London for the same time. Although, now that we’ve had a serially awful house share, we’d be hard pushed to go into another shared house again. It’s been great to live in Carlton which has been so convenient and so near the city, but at what cost?

Many people say that we’ve just been unlucky, and they could be right. But you can only go on your experience, and ours of Melbourne hasn’t been great.

It’s also been a shame that we haven’t had much chance to get out and enjoy more of the night life. Gigs are impossible because they all start late and so if you’re not a student or working in hospitality then you’ll never make it to one – that really sucks. The bars are good here, but are so expensive (comparable to London sometimes – alcohol is expensive here) that Bernice and I haven’t been able to get too many because we’ve needed to save money.

Having said that, I’m not sure that I would have changed much with regards to that if I had this time again. In place of going out etc. I’ve had more time to think, reflect, cultivate more of an interior life and I’ve definitely had more opportunity to progress spiritually. So, when you put it like that, was it really all that bad that we couldn’t go out that much?

Anyway, with a bit of luck this blog will become more regular with the time we have in the evenings on the road and with my recent purchase of the ecto blogging client, which should make things easier.

I was with friends the other day from the emerging church that I go to here in Melbourne – a place called Cafe Church – which has been a breath of fresh air and the right thing at the right time for me, incidentally. But when one of them was talking about Jesus being the centre of their life / the most important thing in their life (which if course isn’t surprising for a Christian to say!) it made me think, “Is Jesus the focus of my life? Is he that important at all?”

And I actually don’t think that he is to me. And, moreover, I think this has actually been the case for a long time.

You have no idea how weird this can feel coming from someone who has grown up in the church, been very involved with the church and indeed has co-led a church. But at this point in my life and my spiritual journey I have to be real and honest.

I went home and thought, “Well, Jesus isn’t very important to me at the moment.” It’s a bit of a water-shed to say this, but when I thought about it, I think there’s actually been an undercurrent of this for a long time. I mean, I never really related to Jesus in the Bible if truth be told. We all talked about Jesus because that’s what Christians do. But I never felt like he was important in my life or related to him in any way. But I always related to God. And so to God I continued to pray and on God I continued to focus. But you don’t ever really stop to think about these things when you’re ‘in the thick of it’ so to speak. This has been the first time I’ve been able to properly think about it.

I wouldn’t at this point say that Jesus would never be important to me. Or that Jesus is simply not important. That’s not what I’m getting at. What I’m getting at is that I’m still an out-and-out Theist. I’ve got precious little time for Richard Dawkins et al. and the rubbish they come up with. But I definitely don’t feel any lack in my life or any gap to speak of since ceasing to concentrate all my energies upon this figure in history known as Jesus.

Yet again, I’m worried about how some of my friends of old might feel about this and react to this, but this is something that I have no control over. I can only be true to myself at this stage. To do anything else would be to be living a lie and being inauthentic. I have had enough of being inauthentic and I seek something deeper and holistic and which is more all-encompassing than I believed and practiced before. 

(Incidentally, by inauthentic I don’t mean total lie and sham. That’s not it. I mean just that nagging feeling that something is missing, that something doesn’t match up, that something doesn’t quite add up and that things just don’t seem to fit together.)