30days30years

30 Days of Becoming an Uncle

Name: Dave Dellar

Occupation: TV Producer

How we met: In the immortal words of Britney Spears, “There’s only two types of people in the world. The ones that entertain, and the ones that observe.” David Joseph Dellar is certainly one of the former.

Dave and I used to live together and despite him being a cool urban hipster and me being, well, anything but, we managed to bond over a mutual love of sitting on our balcony overlooking the Yarra River and drinking copious bottles of wine at 2am on a school night.

His OCD tendencies – he’d spend hours perfectly aligning the knifes on the magnetic knife rack in the kitchen and years at boarding school meant his bed was ALWAYS made with hospital corners  – made me question his sanity on more than one occasion but his ability to make me laugh (he openly calls his mother Jan a ‘dirty bird’) is unsurpassed.

On my birthday this year he sent me this message informing me of the correct dance moves to Michael Jackson’s Beat it:

Happy birthday ya dirty big Cynthia – now follow my lead – in 5, 6, 7, 8 – feed the chickens, feed the chickens, now reach for the sky, right, left, right, left, pull into the pelvis, pull into the pelvis, front, back, front and eagle arms and eagle arms, then back to feeding the chickens – rinse and repeat – word!

Meet the Logie award-winning Dave Dellar:

If you’ve met me, you’ll know that I am loud and not so much obnoxious, but more obnoxious adjacent.  I love peppering the c-bomb into conversation and many would testify that I’m somewhat of a social hand-grenade.  My personality also dictates that I’m a little left of centre – think: Jim Carey when he goes rouge and decides to do a dramatic role… odd yet effective.  However, people do occasionally get to see the softer side of me.  Promise.  This is one of those times.  Score.  So with that, let us begin.

Towards the end of last year, I moved from Australia to the United Kingdom.  Don’t worry though, even before arriving I made a conscious effort not to be one of those annoyingly ‘Aussie’ Aussie’s who return to the motherland to work in a pub, live above that pub and then on my night off, get totally juiced in ‘said’ pub.  Quite the opposite in fact, I’m in TV and the move was a purely career based decision to further myself as a producer.

Noah in utero

Back home however, my sister, Sarah, had her first child, ergo, me becoming a first-time uncle.  A slight bone of contention in the Dellar household, as not long after I up stumps and moved to London, my sister went into labour – meaning I missed the birth by about 3 time zones.  Her husband phoned on cold British winter’s morning to give me the news; that at 8:34pm on the 6^th of December 2011 weighing in at just less than seven pounds twelve ounces, little baby Noah was born.  A great result all round.  Zang!

That said, now might be a good time to pause and go off-piste in the hope of giving you a brief back-story to who my sister is. Point blank, Sarah and I are the antitheses of each other. Take my opening paragraph, reverse it, replace the words ‘I’ with ‘her’, add three years and you pretty much have my older sister.

Sarah is kind and warm and has always wanted a family of her own – whereas I’ve always been career focussed and all about the cash.  Put another way, if we both had the choice between a family or $1,000,000 (or GBP £650,000 – high five exchange rate); then she would hands down always take the former and I would without doubt be a couple of 0’s up in the bank account.  We are two polar opposite individuals.

Sarah and Dave – the wonder years

Cut back to me in London with a look of shock on my face as I was hit with a startling realisation – I actually love my older sister!  I mean, I always kind of liked her; but lets be honest, growing up, siblings can really give each other the shits.  Even into our late teens and early twenties, Sarah and I really knew how to get under each other’s skin.

We’re so different, the fact we share the same parents seemed for a long time only to be a coincidence.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always wished the best for my sister; but as soon as the news of Noah came through, all those years of pointless bickering and spats of sibling rivalry seemed to instantly vanish.  Something transcendental occurred that changed my outlook on our dynamic – I had been struck with a sense of unrequited brotherly love.   What the F? How could this be?  What had changed?

As I sat in the kitchen of may mates SW13 flat and looked out onto the Thames, it suddenly dawned on me – Sarah now has everything she’d always dreamed of…  and even for someone who’s as undeniably selfish as myself, I was actually truly happy for my sister.

Noah, now

Sure some 20 years ago she may have smashed me in face with a half-full cordial bottle because I spilt ice cream on her ALF nightie; but she is also the one who makes me laugh the most.  Yep, she’s the girl who dared me at the age of 10 to wee on our neighbour’s electric fence just to see if it was on; however Sarah is also the person who has always looked out for me.   And okay, this is the woman who in 1992 justified kicking me square in the nuts as a pre-emptive measure for something she was sure I would do to her in the future; but this is also the lady who has never stopped believing in me.

Good and bad, my family have left an indelible impression on me; and granted I may have only just recognised this; but regardless, I would not change it for the world.  I look forward to the day when we’re all together again and I finally get to meet my little nephew.  I’ll take him for a pint and tell him about the night he was born, where I was and what it means to be part of our family… sans a crack to the head with a cordial bottle, of-course.