Life’s Noisy — Use Earplugs (And Eat Dijonnaise Porridge)

I could say that at 1.11am on Monday 29 April 2014 at the Sydney Railway Square Youth Hostels Australia (YHA) was the moment when I stopped blaming others for my woes and troubles and accepted that I’m the master of my own disaster.

Except I made that realisation many years ago, and so it was at 1.11am this morning that I didn’t have an insight about my culpability in this world, but fervently wished that the wally in the bed underneath mine would have had such a personal breakthrough because he was acting like a twat.

Alors. I snore. Loudly. And had probably been doing so for a couple of hours from 9pm onwards, when I was probably inconveniencing few, until just prior to midnight when I awoke with one of those ‘I’m awake for a reason’ feelings.

Chummy in the bed below me had been rearranging his meagre belongings for an age while I’d been slipping in and out of sleep. But at 11.51pm he must have decided he now had an entitlement to free airwaves, and started violently shaking the bed every time I started drifting off.

Either that or he has a most concentrated and intermittent masturbation practice. Whatever gets you there.

I figured I must have been giving it some (snoring, you pervy, no hand shandies in shared spaces) because, not to be too indecorous, I was doing a fair Homer Simpson impersonation. Sleep. Mmmmm.

After hissing a few times to Shake And Bake, imploring him to use some bloody earplugs, I realised sleep was just a luxury that was not to be afforded me tonight, and I got up at 1.11am thinking this was yet another sign of April change, come she will.

At the start of the month, recently singled, my ex-girlfriend and I were on friendly terms and playing our standard game of swapping horoscopes. Her from Medusa Meg, me from cainer.com (which is the only use for a Murdoch publication apart from wrapping the garbage). We’re both Cancer and so we’re allegedly ruled by the moon, and this has been a pretty turbulent time for lunatics. Cathartic and life-changing forces were to be afoot and so it’s proven to be.

More on that elsewhere.

Shakin’ Stevens and his antics in the bottom bunk gave me a very strong resonance of 1979 and travelling around England with my family, and then in 1985 travelling through Europe with two workmates.

Back in 1979 there were age restrictions on youth hostels, and they were eponymously intended for the youth.

Dad, then aged 51 and Mum (43) got some waiver to allow them to stay in their establishments, and we seven little Australians gave the UK and French youth hostels a caning over that year.

But Dad snored like a gutted boar being beaten with a leaf-blower.

It was horrendous. And as we were nearly always in large shared dorms, the three Quinn boys who ranged in age from 12 down to eight learnt a fair bit about familial shame. And fairly quickly.

Once, in a hostel in the south of France, I shook Dad awake twice to deliver the rather useless news, “Dad, you’re snoring”. On the third shake awake he barked at me to leave him alone and let him get some bloody sleep.

In deference to our surroundings, I gave the room a Gallic shrug and a look of, “I tried”.

The rest of us suffered that night, but we didn’t need to.

It’s not rocket science, but so many backpackers I see are just not onto it:

If you choose to sleep with random strangers, use protection.

I’m sorry, I’ll say that again only differently.

If you choose to sleep in a room with random strangers, use earplugs.

I’ve stayed in hostel rooms with people many years my senior and we crusties do have a high propensity to play the throat trombone.

That sounds mildly sexual. It was not my intention, your honour.

And as I found in 1985, again in the south of France, it’s not just age that wearies the larynx.

I was staying in Perpignan as we three unlikely lads (two x 23yos and I was only 19) rounded the Pyrenees en route to Italy.

In the morning, there were grumblings in the dorm room aplenty and beaucoup. Someone had been snoring all night, keeping people awake, and the smart money was on the swarthy Italian.

“Nah, it was that bloody Aussie in the corner bunk.”

Moi? Surely not.

Actually, given my genetic inheritance, should I have been surprised? I inherited Dad’s bronchial disorder through my jeans and then it was incubated one foetid night in May 1979 on a B&I ferry from Liverpool to Dublin.

Do NOT do cabins on these cattle barges, is my strident serving suggestion. Rug up in a sleeping bag and waterproof beanie and ride up top under the stars and foamy spray.

There is, of course, a deeper lesson here than just, “For a good night’s sleep, take two earplugs and see me in the morning if insomnia persists”.

If you want to achieve something, anything, in this life, it’s within your power to do it. Or at the very least, have a red hot go.

If others do things that affect you adversely, take action to protect yourself or mitigate the effects.If you don’t start or don’t take adequate protections against enemy action, do what I do and find a bathroom mirror to find who to blame.

Example: I’ve gotten into stoushes with people on Facebook who whinge that their news feed is log-jammed with stuff that they don’t want to read.

Solution: adjust your farnarkling filters. Hide the stuff you don’t want to see. Don’t take it out in general because you’re not hitting the target. You’re taking down the innocents and your cheer squad with friendly fire.

I know this intimately firsthand. I lost about a dozen friends and acquaintances by publicly railing against introverts and their less savoury practices. Never mind that I opened the batting by praising them to the skies and appreciating their mad skillz at internal processing and reflection.

So. Take control of what you can. Don’t whine about it if you can fix it. You have the power.

Back to Railway Square. (Sounds like a 60s drama series.) In this case, Stocatto Good Vibrations Boy just needed to go see the lovely people at reception for a pair of free earplugs in a fetching shade of pink.

In fact, he did leave the room once or twice, I thought to go complain. I wish he had. Leigh at the front desk would have slapped a pair of those pink bad boys on the bench and bellowed, “Man up, super douche!”

I made that up. Leigh is from Essex and would have been much more polite.

Me, I decided there were better uses of my time than playing the role of a gimp getting a vigorous bed job at regular intervals, and I got up. I mean, I arose. Made myself erect.

Got out of bed. Sheesh! You guys. It’s just sex, sex, sex with you people. I’m trying to do metaphors for life skills here FFS.

Having only put out breakfast at 3.40pm on Monday, and not having had anything to eat since then, I plundered the free food box (available at most YHAs; I’ve given and gotten) and can tell you this: Dijonnaise Porridge with a heaping helping of sugar is not too shabby.

It put some carbs into my system and helped lighten my mood.

If I can catch now 40 winks on the couches, I may zip over and continue my storming and performong relationship with The Star to see Aesenal go around against Newcastle at 5am.

Sleep well. And soundlessly.

Update: 10:36am. Slept through to half-time (6am), caught some more sack time above Twitchy and found six ways to get my joy back before and during breakfast. And while I sit here with 32 minutes to go before checkout, trying desperately not to fall in love with the Amazonian full-figured goddess about my age who’s heading out into the day for adventures, and as I rack up my requisite six unreturned phone calls before breakfast, I’ve had an epiphany.*

Ctrl-Alt-Checkin-Again. Happy Tuesday.

* Update on Friday 14 August 2026 12:55h ACST – I do enjoy my epiphanies, but I wish I’d been less obscure and gave some hint of which E. Piphany I had that day 12.34 years ago.

“It must have been a pack of lies,” as my late mother used to say. RIP Mary Agnes Jessie Quinn nee Turner, 5 Sept 1936 to 10 Aug 2016.

ENDS