Every Second Thursday

This was published more than 4 years ago

Attitudes and opinions change and evolve.

You know that feeling you get when you stumble upon something you wrote in the distant past and it's terrible? There are many cringe-worthy bits of immature writing on this website (and I'm probably still creating more).

As well as the mere cringe-worthy, there are also opinions and attitudes expressed that I no longer hold and am, frankly, embarrassed by. (Please don't go looking, they're deliberately hard to find, but left for the sake of posterity.)

I hope if you've stumbled across some here, you'll give me the benefit of the doubt.

Nearly a decade ago there was Every Single Wednesday. And before that there was Most Nights of the Week.

The view from Gerties's
New Farm, 2013

This was a time before parenthood.

Most Nights of the Week got started by accident, or rather, that’s just how life seemed to work for people our age—with a huge level of luck—living in central London. That luck would see us beat the GFC to London by just a couple of months and find good employment. We were there, we were employed, we had no responsibilities, and no interest in squirrelling away our pennies. Nothing to do but to go out Most Nights of the Week. But times like that can’t last and this one ended—maybe a little too soon—on our return to Australia.

Every Single Wednesday was our attempt to recreate those glorious London nights. By 2010 we were living just off Brunswick Street in New Farm, the closest Brisbane analogue we could find to our just-off-Queensway flat in Bayswater. If you adopted the right attitude, the 196 with its 15 minute interval could feel almost as frequent as the Central Line. It’s the best bus route in Brisbane, and Every Single Wednesday for a couple of years it delivered many of our friends—quite a few of whom were also recent repatriations—to Gertie’s.

But this too ended. Not with a 30-something hour journey across the world but with something much, much more tiring.

Now, more than a decade later, we’re closer to the other end of the 196 bus route. We have new jobs, a new apartment, new commitments, new ideas, new joys—whole new lives really. But many good friends we don’t see quite enough of.

As well as all that we have a new local. And that is what this is all about. The next chapter. Every Second Thursday starts today.

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