It was my very own annus horribilis: I'd come back from my last overseas assignment in Greece and, after an unsuccessful attempt to resettle in Townsville, seemed to have found my feet in Sydney when WORMALD International hired me as "Internal Consultant".
I moved into a unit facing Blues Point Road and, turning "house-proud", tried to recreate the ideallic lifestyle I had enjoyed in Piraeus but Athens was a long way from Sydney in more than a geographical sense.
I tried to get over the "culture shock" of adjusting to an Australia that I had idealised during all those years of expatriate life but found wanting.
After a hard day at the office, sleep couldn't come soon enough - except it never came because just as I was to slip off to my much-needed rest, an inebriate from the nearby "Grape Escape" had made his escape and, fumbling with his car keys below my window, set off his own car alarm.
Needless to say, I never set foot inside the "Grape Escape" and, after almost six months of constantly interrupted sleep, moved to Canberra where I had taken my first tentative steps as a young migrant twenty years earlier. There I wrote computer software in the PICK language for a large mailorder business for the first twelve months and then began to specialise in PC-based computerised accounting systems, selling and installing off-the-shelf ATTACHÉ, SYBIZ, NewViews, and other packages, and also writing custom-built solutions in TAS, under my business name Canberra Computer Accounting Systems.
All this was thirty-five years ago and I now live on a riverfront acreage near Batemans Bay. While I still visit Sydney for medicals or on my way to the airport, I'm grateful to the "Grape Escape" for having helped me to make that "Great Escape" which was the answer to all my hangovers.
P.S. After some digging, I traced the history of the "Grape Escape" in the pages of one of the founder's diary of 11 January 2012 and 11 January 2012 and 18 January 2012 and 23 January 2012 and 27 February 2012 and 3 March 2012 and 4 March 2012 and 9 March 2012 and 10 March 12.
