Prior to flying from the USA to the UK, I put the feelers out on Craig’s List to see what was available. There were a couple of places that suited my dates and my price-range, so I put in requests for them, my little heart swollen with hope, and waited, nervously enjoying the sights of New York, such as the Broadway adaptation of the 1979 film 9 to 5, music and lyrics by Dolly Parton, starring Allison Janney.

That was f****ing awesome.

Only days before my flight was due to leave for Edinburgh via London, I had had no response via Craig’s List. I had nuttin'. I’d heard the Scottish had somewhat of a reputation for being a bit stabby-stabby, so the thought of sleeping on a park bench under a tartan blanket didn’t really appeal to me.

I jumped online and miraculously booked into a terrace house right in the centre of the city. It was going to set me back about £650 for the nine nights I was going to be there, but it looked nice enough and at a guess, I would say the chances of getting stabbed there would be significantly lower than if I was staying at the Chateau de Gutter. I paid the deposit and relaxed a little bit.

A day before my flight from New York leaves, I get an email from a very nice young Scottish man, wondering if I was still interested in the room they’d advertised on Craig’s List. I told him I bloody well was. If I counted the deposit I’d paid as a write-off, it was still far cheaper to just cancel my terrace booking and stay at the Craig List room. Things were back on track, the sun was shining, I didn’t suck at travelling and I really liked the 9 to 5 souveneir programme.

High-five team all round.

Thing is, I forgot to cancel the terrace house booking. After my first day in the great Scottish capital, I received an irate call from a middle-aged Scottish woman who had – quite reasonably – assumed I was a no-good Australian con-man and who was threatening legal action unless I coughed up the payment for the accommodation that I wasn’t going to use whatsoever. I did, it set me back about $1200 AUS (thanks, cancellation fees!) and, although I had a great time in Edinburgh, it was somewhat tarnished by that little kerfuffle.

Now, I understand that in the grand scheme of things, that’s quite a lame gripe. It’s a very first world, middle-class problem that pales in the face of people losing their jobs or losing family members or being diagnosed with cancer or living in extreme poverty or being an executive at 2Day FM. I know all that now, but it was very hard to keep that in mind when I was calling the Commonwealth Bank in Australia to ask them to increase my international money funds transfer limit so I could pay the Scottish lady who was regularly calling me to make sure I wasn’t going to flee the country and to remind me that she’d dealt with people like me before and won so I shouldn’t think that I could get away with this.

When bad things happen to you, it’s pretty tricky to get all Confucius and immediately accept it as a life lesson, even when the bad thing is pretty trivial. I recently lost my wallet and suddenly felt like a victim in life’s cruel, cruel game. "Why me?!" I exclaimed to the skies. "This is shit! I don’t want to have to go to VicRoads to get a new licence! I don’t want to have to cancel my cards! That’ll be annoying and it’ll take ages to get a new one! I had a MetCard in there with three more trips on it! I had $70 in cash and cab charge! I’m on the goddamn telly! Whhhhhhhhhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy yyyyyyyyyyy mmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee e?!"

But I got over that. I got over that after I reported the missing wallet at a police station, where there were a whole lot of people with real problems; problems that aren’t solved by politely filling out a form.

Shit happens. Literally. This week, thanks to a dodgy vegetarian burger, I came down with a nasty case of food poisoning. Mm-mm. There was trouble at both ends, I chundered through the night and had to take a day off work. Thinking I had recovered by Friday, I had an over-enthusiastic dinner and ended up being violently ill outside the Hotel Warrnambool. Normally I would’ve fit right in, but 9:15pm was perhaps a little early for such behaviour.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, they don’t. "Good" and "bad" are about as subjective as terms get, and the universe doesn’t really care either way. That’s what I try to think about as I’m forking over hundreds of pounds or stressing about my wallet or vomiting in an alley on the streets of Warrnambool; this is nothing compared to the kind of issues facing the universe.

Plus, no matter what happens, no matter how bad things get, no matter what I lose, no matter what goes wrong, no matter how low I get, no matter how dark the skies become, I can remember one thing, one special, momentous, important thing...

I was on the telly.

Everything’s going to be just fine.