The Best Night

Last August I published a post entitled The Best Day about the day I did the Neighbours tour and met two of the guys from the show, Fraser and Ringo. It was the best day.

Well, here‘s ‘The Best Night’!

As you know, I am a little bit of a Neighbours fan. Just a tad. Being back in Melbourne this summer, I wanted to do the Neighbours tour again, but no-one wanted to come with me – and going on my own would be crossing a line I didn’t want to cross (unlike doing the Neighbours tour twice). So what to do?

Well, it just so happens that there’s a Neighbours evening held at an English pub in the city – so we went there instead! And check out these photos...

This may be the coolest photo I’ve had on my blog yet:

The Doc – the reason I’m doing my PhD. (Not really). Mum kissed him twice (but my Dad’s cool with it).

And we also met Steve and Stu Parker and Marco: It was a great evening – rounded off by Doctor Karl’s band, The Waiting Room (geddit?), who were actually really good (and much heavier than you’d think).And there was a pub quiz that night too. Our team was the Salvos, and we came in third (which was pretty good, I thought. Roughly two places behind the winning team). The quiz had absolutely nothing to do with Neighbours (which is why we only came in third), but was much more general knowledgey – do you know the four countries in Europe that drive on the left?

As the guy read out the results, he asked if we really were Salvos, to which we said ‘yes’ (because we were) and he asked for another round of applause for all the work the Salvos do, to which there was applause (as requested) and cheering. I had mixed feelings about this: on the one hand it’s great that we got to raise the profile of The Salvation Army amongst the group and to show them that there’s young people in the Army – it’s not all Harold Bishops. They all seemed to know who we were, which is also good (not really an issue in Australia, where the Salvation Army has a very high profile, but most of the people in the pub that night were from the UK, Ireland and New Zealand), but it did leave me feeling a little guilty about sharing some of the credit (which of course, we’re not in it for) for the fantastic things the Army does, when I don’t quite do as much as I should. And who’d have thought I’d come away from a Neighbours night at a British pub feeling challenged about what I do as a Salvationist?

I didn’t actually get to see much Neighbours while I was there, but be prepared for the tackiest funeral you ever did see (tacky even for Neighbours).