Farm work will be totes fine I thought, I’m pretty fit and I like being outdoors. I’m so down for farm work, I’ll just bash it out, save loads of money and off I’ll go. Farm work will be totes fine I thought. No one told me about the back ache. Or the splinters. No one told me I would be spending 88 days as a slave. No one told me about the rash (although I should have known because I do love a good rash). And I was definitely not informed about the joys of fingering mouldy eggplants.

Anyway, I’ll start from the beginning, way back in Cairns where me and Lyvette split. It’s been 61 days, numerous phone calls, one Flipagram video and whatever else since we parted ways and just for the record I left Cairns rash free with all of my toenails intact (for once). Lyvette went to Perth to visit family and I came to Ayr a small town somewhere up the coast to do my farm work. It was a bit odd to board the Greyhound bus and check into a hostel on my own. But I dealt with it because I’m an adult and I’ve dealt with a lot worse things during my travelling life, for example an Indian haircut and bus journeys in Vietnam. Now, there’s not much to do in Ayr so waiting around for work was pretty boring and I took to getting very drunk to pass the time. Then I became the hostel cleaner and I learnt that it’s not ideal to drop a bin bag full of eggs and tuna all over the floor because a) it stinks and b) you have to pick it back up with your hands.

After two weeks I got part time work picking eggplants (aubergines to you and I) on Sibby’s farm. This is where the fun began and the rash developed.  On my first day I fell off the back of the truck and ninja rolled into the dust. Now I hold on when I’m living the high life on the truck, especially with Maja behind the wheel because she drives round the farm like she’s auditioning for a part in The Fast and The Furious. Apart from the not so graceful ninja roll my first few days went ok – until I got home and thought I had flees. I didn’t have flees but I did have a rash that covered my arms and legs and I looked like I’d bear hugged a cactus. From that day forward I have worn long sleeve tops and pants to work. And I still get a rash, like, how does that even happen? Clearly eggplant chemicals don’t agree with me and my body has taken to itching at the mention of the word ‘eggplant’.

And that’s how life on Sibby’s began. 88 days of picking. Last week we did 3×9 hour days and I swear I was broken. My back was in bits from bending over for so long lugging buckets of eggplants behind me. Farm work is not easy – especially for those people who pick every day of the week. Luckily for me I have my Eggplant Girls who get me through my days by lobbing mouldy eggplants at my head and making me stick them up my bum (true story).  Did I mention that eggplants give you splinters? Maybe I forgot that. They definitely do give you splinters and it hurts – they’re actually spikey little rascals. And you can quite often find one of us screaming and jumping around the field as an important finger gets severed. A day without a hand full of splinters is as dreamy as an hour in the bath eating Ambrosia custard.  Post splinter you’ll usually then finger a mouldy eggplant, and these smell like rotten garbage with a hint of cheese, which is not what you want to carry around on your freshly splintered hands all day. Occasionally things get really exciting when someone skids on a mouldy eggplant and the rest of us watch in anticipation to see if they are going to face plant into a mound of rash infested overgrowth or survive the skid with nothing more than a sudden increase in heart rate. They can be very slippy by the way, mouldy eggplants.

The other day I got mouldy eggplant in my eye and to be frank it was disgusting, I think I’d rather massage Tiger Balm into my pupils. That was just before the flying ant things (we have named them ‘Flying Fuckers’) attacked us and I nearly had a mental breakdown. I had to take myself to my happy place (which is me lounging in a swimming pool full of mojito, eating Indonesian corn on the cob flavoured crisps, with no rash, and not an eggplant or Flying Fucker in sight). In my happy place I had to take a few deep breaths and tell myself that they were just midgies and I could deal with them, my back pain was temporary and would not lead to me needing a spinal fusion in twenty years time and there are worse things I could finger than mouldy eggplants – life was actually good. In actual fact the back ache and Flying Fucker sitch took my mind off my chaffing crotch. I’d ran out of knickers and had to wear bikini bottoms, hence the chaff. So after 5 hours of walking like John Wayne dragging a bucket whilst accumulating mould on my fingers and simultaneously fending off Flying Fuckers I decided enough was enough and took said knickers off. This helped my chaff slightly, however I was a tad embarrassed to enter the shed at the end of the day to find the farmers cat running round with my knickers in its mouth.

Other than eggplants life in Ayr consists of listening to everyone bang on about Game Of Thrones (if I have to hear about Jon Snow one more time I might take a mouldy eggplant and shove it up someone’s arse) and waiting for the weekend when the hostel ventures out and everybody gets way too drunk (mainly me). We often go to a bar called Kalamia that no one can pronounce so it’s now known as Chlamydia or sometimes Calamari depending on who’s speaking.  It’s the only way I make it through the week and the woman at the bottle shop is my new bestie.

So that’s my life at present. Lyvette has now moved back to Sydney to find work, so while she’s busy ogling guys in blue suits (she seems to have a fetish with blue suits) I’m here in Ayr losing toenails (this is becoming a serious problem) and buying the town out of antihistamines.  I’ve also come to terms with the fact that I scratch 24/7 and have nightmares about eggplants. I have come to terms with the fact that my fingers are full splinters and the skidding on mouldy plants can actually be quite exciting as it breaks up the monotony of the day. I have come to terms with the fact that if I call them eggplants I can pretend to still like aubergines. And finally I have come to terms with the fact that my back is so sore I now walk in the shape of a banana…