At any given time, without pulling a muscle, ruffling your shirt, dramatically changing position or even raising an eyebrow, you will easily be able to touch at least 11 people. 13 if the flight attendants are walking past with their cart. Your breath is their breath.

The queue for the toilet ends in a windowless box and wet feet.

You won’t be the first to stumble a little and miss the bowl. You certainly won’t be the last.

Don’t even think of sitting down.

There will be a group of Southern Cross tattooees. They will be wearing thongs and board shorts, even though the temperature outside is minus 18 degrees.

No one had more than three hours sleep the night before.

There will be no EFTPOS so you will be forced to borrow twenty bucks off a mate for a bottle of water.

There will be a hippie sitting nearby with their eyes rolled back in their head

You will try and sneak into the VIP section behind the curtains to see what facilities they have back there and you will be kicked out.

A Heineken will cost the same as your parents first house.

You will end up making friends with a chatty girl sitting next to you, thinking your new buddy is going to entertain you for the rest of the adventure. She will take a pill and pass out on your shoulder 20 minutes later.

The food will cost an arm and a leg. In fact, the food will be made from arms and legs. Some from animals.

A drunk bogan will awkwardly stumble and spill their beer on your crotch.

You’ll tune out for a while and realise you’ve started listening to The Living End

In London I will meet Chris, bandmate, bro, BFF. I lived, worked and played with Chris for five years and I haven’t seen him since last May, so it’s going to be quite a catchup. From there I will travel to Berlin and Prague to meet up with Sean, Marketing Mag cohort and bro. If we’re not also BFFs after a few days of bier and bratwurst I will be surprised.

Next stop will be Amsterdam where Ben, Jamie and Chris will join me and David, my best mate, bro and head BFF for some debauchery. Then David and I will head south overland to Spain, stopping along the way wherever we find wine. I suspect we may stop a fair bit. In fact, I’ll be surprised if we make it to Spain. Either way, after Dave goes back to New York, where he now lives, having moved there a week ago, I will go to Israel and catch up with Jesus, who is my homeboy.

I was trying to think of a name for this vacation so there could be a unifying theme when I write about it. I’ve just handed in the final version of my first book, which is about hipsters, so I was considering calling this blog series ‘Hip and Run’. But that’s a bit lame.

The answer is obvious anyway. I’m on a broliday.

My gosh, this is going to be fun.

I wanted to help out the people of Japan and New Zealand in the wake of their horrifying natural disasters so I asked a few of my favourite writers and friends to contribute to an eBOOK I curated. The result is Fault Lines and it’s now available from http://faultlines.info/. There’s a new (uncharacteristically serious but still lol’able) piece by me and a whole bunch of other great essays and stories from some truly talented individuals.

The book features 10 of the best, funniest, most amazing, endearing writers in Australia and all you have to do to get a copy is donate at least $10 to the Red Cross’s Japanese relief fund or the NZ fund. At less than 1c a word, you’d have to agree it’s fantasmical value. Please buy it!