We’ve gone past the shortest day here in the Antipodes! The Winter Solstice is a milestone I mark each year, not least because it means that from this point onwards the days are getting longer again. Admittedly, we still have to get through that small botheration called winter, but nobody has really noticed much of that around here lately because we’ve all been glued to various devices trying to get tickets to see Taylor Swift.

So, keeping with our theme of brevity, let’s jump straight into the June THREAD.

THINK | HEAR | READ | EAT | ADMIRE | DO

I’ve been thinking a lot about equity and fairness during the past week or, perhaps more specifically, since Taylor Swift announced the dates for the Australian leg (such as it is) of her Eras tour. As regular readers of this blog will know, I live with a pair of Swifties — one diehard, one far more nonchalant — so the news that Tay Tay was finally heading Down Under was met with great excitement.

However, as details of concert dates and pre-sales and ticket pricing began to filter through, my cogitations began in earnest. The amount I would have to spend on some of the packages available to attend just one of these highly desirable concerts is equivalent to the amount we would normally spend on a weeklong family holiday. Could I justify the expense? Was it fair of me to tell my children that if I did manage to get tickets, they might not get Christmas and birthday presents this year? Would Marvel Girl even cope if we did not secure this most elusive of bookings?

I’ve been hearing a lot of the same sorts of questions from other parents, and from other people who are fans. The hype surrounding the Eras tour has been phenomenal, and I know that this concert is not simply a “bit of a gig”, but a full blown stadium spectacular choreographed down to the last pyrotechnically enhanced millisecond.

I’m also conscious that, if I did get my hands on Taylor Swift tickets, this would be Marvel Girl and Miss Malaprop’s first proper concert (because at this point I’m not counting the Babies Proms at the Sydney Opera House folks…that ship sailed so long ago it’s halfway to Haiti by now). I’m also acutely, painfully aware that — thanks to a global pandemic and a bunch of lockdowns — my kids have missed out on unforgettable experiences like this.

So, like so many others, I started reading all the fine print. And the presale information. And began setting alarms and checking login details and updating passwords and acquiring ticketing codes and taking a long hard look at my bank balance. I also started reading Curtis Sittenfeld’s new book Romantic Comedy, and had been perusing a bunch of travel guides (dreaming of a European vacation before the girls get to the pointy end of high school), but all these had to be put on the back burner. Tay Tay was coming to town, and I had to be ready.

It was around this point that the stress eating began. I can safely say that I have eaten more chocolate in the past week than I ever ate at Easter time.

I may also, equally sadly, have fallen into the trap of eating cheese and drinking wine. So much so that The Bloke — who, by now, had joined the feeding frenzy — went to the trouble of finding Tim Minchin’s hilarious song about cheese on Spotify or YouTube or some other thing and began playing it for me in a very misguided show of what he called ‘support’. I think it’s fair to say that Minchin’s lyrics about him loving cheese but cheese not loving him did apply, but it was not The Bloke’s finest moment?!

As things turned out, however, it did become one of Miss Malaprop’s finest moments, one that I am still admiring. The first presale came and went with a giant crash (brought to you by American Express), and despite frantic — and might I also say valiant — efforts on my part to navigate some sort of safe passage through the maze of the interwebs to ticket ownership, I came up empty handed. By some small miracle, one of The Bloke’s staff got wind of what we were up to (perhaps because there were several fraught phonecalls to his office as we kept him apprised of our lack of success), and she managed to find her way onto the presale site…but the best she could come up with was a pair of tickets (at a whopping $900 each), and I was determined that both my girls would be coming with me to the show or none of us would go at all.

It was at this point that Miss Malaprop, bless her cotton socks, piped up that if we could only get two tickets we should nab them and that I should take Marvel Girl, superfan as she is of Ms Swift. Her generosity and selflessness caught me off guard, and made me even more determined to get her a ticket as well…if that was humanly possible?!

Which brings us, of course to doing. By the time the next presale rolled around (OK, it was only two days later but I can tell you the hours drag until the event begins), we were ready. We were SO ready. Three laptops and three phones were logged on and ready to enter the Ticketek lounge — home of the infamous blue bar of doom (if you were there you know what it is I speak of) — and after 10:00am the minutes, which had so recently felt like they were lagging by, suddenly began to fly past as I knew there were tickets flying into people’s online shopping carts faster than you could say …Ready For It.

And then, about twenty adrenaline-filled minutes in, The Bloke called. It turned out that half the staff in his office, upon hearing of our plight (first world problem as it absolutely is), had registered for presale codes and were all trying to get us tickets as well. And — wait for it — the same staff member who had got through to the elusive Amex presale had been miraculously plucked from the Ticketek lounge (which we are all now aware is anything but a queue), deposited on the hallowed seat selection page and beaten the famous clock to secure us a trio of tickets for Taylor Swift’s opening night in Sydney.

We were gobsmacked. Celebratory. Relieved. Grateful. Even a little bit tearful, in Marvel Girl’s case. Miss Malaprop was practically turning cartwheels and the cat, never one to be left out, got the zoomies and began racing up and down the stairs.

I still can’t quite believe our luck, not to mention the generosity of The Bloke’s staff. But that’s good people for you — they chip in and help make the impossible somehow, unexpectedly, brilliantly possible.

We’re going to Taylor Swift.

And until a Taylor’s version is released, that’s a wrap on the June THREAD.

I’m officially exhausted.

Mind yourselves,

BJx