Funnel Web Spiders

Years ago, when Oliver and I were in London and sort-of kind-of deciding to move to Australia, I booked myself onto an arachnophobia course at London Zoo.  No, not a course that teaches you how to be scared of spiders, quite the opposite.  It was a one-day course which you passed by being able to trap a large house-spider under a glass, slide a piece of card underneath and carry it across the room.  If you think this sounds like not much of a big deal, well woopy-doo, you don’t need to go on the course. 

I did.  Most people who knew me back then will attest to a Ged Is Scared of Spiders story, my favourite being about the small vietnamese house I nearly knocked down trying to escape a large, green specimen in the bathroom.  Apparently they hadn’t heard a white man scream like that since the sixties.

The course at London Zoo was very effective and just the other day I was sharing a shower with a big black beast thinking ‘I couldn’t have done this ten years ago’ (clearly, this is only true about spiders).   The course was based, largely, on teaching its audience about our eight-legged friends, explaining what amazing creatures they are and, above all, how vulnerable they are.  The poor wee things only move quickly because they have to, to avoid being eaten.  They will not run towards you because, no matter how scared you are of them, they are far more terrified of you.  There is nothing a spider could do to ever harm you.  And so on and so forth, then a bit of deep-hypnosis and bob’s your uncle, look at the cute little spidey widey with all his funny legs.  Definitely worth the money.

The weird thing is the course still works, all these years later.  Sure I may scream like a banshee, pull my elbows in and dance around on my tip-toes singing Kate Bush at the very idea of a spider, but push-comes-to-shove I can actually put a glass over one (as long as Oliver does that bit with the card).  Trust me, this is a vast improvement on my pre-zoo days.  The reason I say it’s weird is because all that stuff they tell you at London Zoo simply isn’t true out here.  Spiders move so fast in Australia so they can catch you quicker.  They will only run away from you in a mock retreat, hoping you will follow and fall into their man-trap.  They can do you harm.

I know all of this you see because I’ve been researching funnel web spiders.  The CSIRO (Commonwealth Something about Science and Research) has a fascinating fact-sheet on them with advice such as ‘bites have resulted in death’, ‘if bitten, only move if necessary’ and  ‘fang bases extend horizontally from the front of the head (do not check this on a live spider!).’  Whoever felt the need to add that last parenthesis clearly does not live in the same universe as me.  

The reason I’ve been researching funnel webs is I have found, in our garden at Copacabana, several examples of what the CSIRO call ‘burrows lined with a sock of opaque white silk and several strong strands of silk radiating from the entrance’.   Basically it’s a ten-pence-piece sized hole with a huge pair of eyes at the other end.  Karen, my hippy friend, has suggested that if you pour water down the hole often enough the fellow-inhabitant-of-the-universe will get annoyed and walk off to live somewhere out of your way.  Big Andrea, whose normally wiser in such situations, proposes that the water should be boiling.  Ignoring Karen’s disapproval, she goes on to warn that this takes some time to kill the spider, which will exit its burrow furious with the world and looking for someone to bite before it dies.  ‘You might want to stand well back’ she says.  

Last time we were up at Copa a local friend of ours, Zen, was around.  (Sorry – yes, we have a friend called Zen.  Three awful things about this.  1.  He is actually very laid-back, easy-going and, I hate to say it, zen-like.  2.  His name was originally Xen (chinese parents) and he found that ‘explaining that an x can sound like a zee made me sound like a Sesame Street narrator’.  3. He surfs).   Anyway, I said to Zen ‘Let’s pour boiling water down the funnel-web holes and watch the spiders come out!’.  Unfortunately he saw straight through my ‘wouldn’t that be fun’ façade to the ‘and I can hide behind you’ reality beneath it.  He went pale (not easy for an over-tanned, chinese surfer) and told me he’d read that funnel web spiders could jump.  A metre at least, he reckoned.  There’s not a lot fazes your average Aussie male but snakes, spiders and multisyllabic words will do it.  I let him get out of it and moved the conversation on, the two us gingerly stepping up to the house before darkness fell.  ‘Male funnel-webs wander at night.  Females are sedentary, only venturing out momentarily to grab passing prey.’

So I haven’t done anything about it yet.  OK, I’ll be honest, I sprayed some napalm-like bug-killer down there, but apparently this just gives them a sore throat.  So the holes are there, three of them in the garden, on and around the path, echoing to the sound of spiders coughing.  Karen suggests I make sure I don’t go out barefoot at night.  Go out?  At night?  I don't think so.

Cat Wars update

Sorry about the extended delay in transmission. I’ve been a bit pushed busy-wise. No excuse really, other than getting ready to do up the weekender, avoiding Christmas and New Year and attending lots of weddings. On that note, by the way, I know you’re not supposed to know about each other (11 weddings in 5 months) but I can’t keep it a secret any longer. Or rather, I’ve realised I don’t need to. You see, when the mantel-piece broke under the weight of the invitations, Oliver and I worried you might think your wonderful special day was a little less special to us because it was number (fill in your own blank here) out of eleven. But, with what my friend Big Andrea calls ‘the easy wisdom of hindsight’, I can now see that even if we went to a hundred weddings this year, each of them would remain special.

We are, in fact, on number 6 this weekend, and so far every one has been beautiful. Uplifting, reassuring, romantic and downright good fun. Thank you, all of you, who have decided to get married at the same time (why?) and thank you especially for not knowing each other so that Oliver and I can get away with the same suit to every single wedding. Oh shit, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that bit. (Think I might miss Oliver out on this month’s distribution list).

Anyhoo, I wasn’t intending to talk about weddings today. I was going to tell you about funnel web spiders, of which the weekender has, at last count, three nests in the garden. If I had known that the New South Wales central coast was the ‘spider capital of the world’ (everything in Australia is the world-capital of something) I’m not sure we’d have bought a house there. In fact, if I had known there was any such a place as the spider capital of the world, I would probably never have left Halesowen. I wonder what Halesowen is the world-capital of?

But, before I get to the spiders I have to give you an update – by popular demand – on Cat Wars. I think last time I wrote I was surrounded by flashing teeth and torn fur. Well, we tried the cat-calming spray but it didn’t work and I couldn’t bring myself to go to a cat therapist. Karen, our hippy friend, offered to come and do reiki on Nip but…well, frankly I’d rather go the the psycatrist. So, with heavy hearts, we decided we had to give Tuck away. He is, of course, the victim in all of this, but Nip travels up the coast better (although she insists on smoking all the way and won’t wear a seat-belt). It was absolutely heart-breaking letting Tuck go but we found a good home for him with friends of friends, and deposited him there the day before we left for the UK.

‘I just know’ said Oliver, ‘we’ll never see him again’.

We got back to Australia to a gentle voicemail from Tuck's new house and then a less gentle, indeed somewhat insistent, series of text messages. Tuck was ok but not what they had wanted i.e. a cat. You know, something that came out of the cupboard sometimes. They were a bit bored of finding an empty food bowl and a full litter tray and having no other discernible evidence of owning a pet. Typical Tuck, all pussy and no cat, he was too scared to meet his new owners even after three weeks.

Oliver and I pretended to be disappointed and dragged Tuck from beneath a chest-of-drawers to kiss and cuddle him all the way home. Ginger Nips, as you can imagine, isn’t best pleased. She’s calmed down now and only tries to attack him when he moves but Oliver and I are refusing to live behind closed doors or in a segregated household. Tuck is going to have to toughen up, Ginger is going to have to learn to share her territory and Oliver and I are going to have to get used to the hissing, screaming, yowling world of cats.

Oh bugger, I ran out of space for the spiders.

If you don't know what to do, do what you ought to do.

I think I’ve made my mind up to go back to full-time work.  I’ll be honest though, I’m still struggling with the decision.  I hadn’t realised until this week how much of my sense of self is built around the fact that I have afternoons free whilst no-one else does.  I might drive a shoddy old car (sorry Bella!) and can’t afford to eat out, but every afternoon spent on the beach makes me feel like a millionaire.  Am I crazy giving all this up?

‘You know my theory?’ says Andrea when I tell her about my quandry.  ‘If you can’t decide what to do, always do what you ought to do.  Because, frankly, when you can’t decide what to do, whatever you end up doing you’ll slightly regret not doing the other thing.  But at least if you do what you ought to do, that way it’s a lesser regret.  Also, it’s just an easier decision.  Like tidying up.  If you don’t know where to start, always start on the left’

Andrea is giving me this advice in the local supermarket slash methadone-clinic-waiting-room where I’ve bumped into her shopping with poor little Tom.  As methadonians in various states of dementia stumble around us, we stand chatting whilst poor little Tom, carefully out of his mother’s line of sight, stands unwrapping one of the cheeses.

‘But what if you don’t know what you ought to do?’ I say.  I’m whingeing, I can hear it, but I really can’t help it.  Poor little me, shall I increase my income by 30% or not?  Andrea, single-mother, single income, is patient with me.

‘You always know.  You might be pretending you don’t, which is why you’re in a quandry, but if you’re honest with yourself you do know.  And if you don’t, then ask a friend.’

So I ask her but before she can respond she spots poor little Tommy with half a wheel of brie in his mouth.  ‘Tommy!’ she screams, loud enough to scare the poor innocent methodonians around us, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!’  I make my excuses and hurry along to canned vegetables.

On the subject of our local supermarket I have to repeat a story which Zen told me the other day.  He was in there once, a couple of months ago, when two of the methodonians started arguing at the checkout.  By the way, Zen’s allowed to tell this story because he works with metho’s, and indeed addicts and the homeless of all shapes and sizes, and is generally so right on that he’s allowed to laugh at them sometimes.  Has to laugh at them sometimes, I suspect.  Anyway,  two of them are arguing at the checkout, a man and a woman, each uglier than the other, getting loud in public and proactively Not Caring.  

You know that whiney, nasal voice they get when they shout and swear?  Ng ng ng, na na na.  So these two are screaming and spitting at each other and everyone else in the supermarket is trying to pretend it’s not happening when the male of the two, to close the argument before stomping off, yells at the top of his voice:  ‘Ah, shat yar facking face.  I buys you pies and fucks you don’t I?’  

Isn’t that sweet?  Who says there are no gentlemen left in the world?

Zen is less patient with my quandry than Andrea.  He thinks I'm a lazy slacker who doesn't know the meaning of hard-work and could do with a year down the mines to teach me.  More about Zen's stories of life in the mines another time (think rows of hard men with morning-semi's in the shower), for the moment I think maybe he's right.  He says I'm a hedonist, but I say who wouldn't be if they could afford it?

'Maybe that's the issue' says Zen.  'Maybe you've just realised that you can't yet afford it (you lazy git).'

I start interviews on Thursday.

Red Dawn

I was wondering on Tuesday night why it’s so long since I’ve written one of these emails.  It occurred to me that maybe I’ve been here too long.  That nothing is really new anymore, that my ability to see it as a foreigner has waned.  There have been other signs that this is the case.  I’m able to watch the news now without guffawing at how perochial it is; I understand the rules of rugby league;  this winter seemed long and cold.  

I went to bed on Tuesday wondering if I’d ever write another letter.  Maybe nothing remarkable would ever happen again.

I’ve mentioned before how most of the ‘lakes’ in Australia are in fact dry.  On Tuesday evening, just as I was thinking about how unremarkable this country has become, gale force winds picked up some dust from the Lake Eyre basin seven hundred miles west of here in northern South Australia.  (There is no state called Central Australia so the country’s dead red heart is made up of northern South Australia, southern Northern Territory and eastern West Australia.  No wonder we, sorry they, call it The Red Centre.)  Anyway, the dust picked up by the wind was then sucked 2 miles into the sky by an intense low-pressure system.  The phenomenom continued over the next 24 hours until millions of tonnes (think about that, millions of tonnes) of dust and dirt had been pulled up into the air.  

Dust storms are fairly frequent in the Red Centre and many of them blow into the country towns of western New South Wales.  In places like Mildura and Broken Hill it’s not that unusual to bring in your laundry dirtier than it went out (and trust me, the laundry doesn’t always go out clean out there).  But even by Australian standards, Tuesday night’s dust storm was a big one, the biggest in seventy years in fact.  At its peak it was picking up 140,000 tonnes of dirt an hour, was 250 miles wide and a thousand miles long.  That’s a big red Great Britain floating towards Sydney.  And me, with the windows just done.

Funnily enough, there was a strange smell in the air when I woke up on Wednesday morning.  More like plaster dust than anything and I wondered if next door were having some work done.  

‘Jesus’ said Oliver, who rarely says anything before 11am.  ‘Look at the sky’.

‘It’s a bushfire’ I said, knowingly and rolled over to wait for the alarm.  But if that was a bushfire it was bloody close so I opened my eyes again.  The sky was corner-to-corner orange.  Not quite the red you may have seen in the papers (every photo I saw had had a red filter applied), more a burnt sienna, a glowering and dangerous colour on a scale I’d not seen before.  

Looking closer, awake and somewhat nervy now, I could see it wasn’t the sky that was red, it was the air.  As if nitrogen were suddenly visible and not quite how you’d imagined it.  The radio calmed me down, 24-hour news already hyperbolic and asking people to ring in with their dust storm stories.  (‘Hi, this is Brenda from the northern rivers.  I was scared.  I turned on the radio.  Now it’s fine.’)  I turned off the lights and wondered around the apartment, looking at what orange light does to the world.  Now it was just dust it was strangely comforting, like being in a cocoon on Mars.

It didn’t last of course.  The orange light came not from the red of the dust but from how it defracted the dawn light (the same reason sunrise is often a little red, just normally on the horizon).  By the time I left for the airport the world was just a little frosted, as if I faintly pink fog had settled.  I was on my way to Perth for work and felt assured my flight would be on time.

Wrong.  

Maybe Surry Hills got off likely, maybe the three inches of dirt on my taxi should have been a sign.  I sat at the airport for six hours reading about what was going on outside.  A normal day in Sydney sees 20 micrograms of air pollution per cubic metre.  A bad bushfire might generate 500 micrograms.  On Wednesday concentration levels reached 15,400 micrograms.  Visibility at the airport was 400 metres and even when flights could leave, they had to wait for the planes and crew which had been turned away for the previous six hours.

I heard some people complaining about it.  Isn’t it awful, how annoying (see, I can hear whingeing now) and I just wanted to say: no, it’s wonderful!  What an incredible, remarkable country.  Where else would I ever have seen that?  It’s great living abroad.

Cat Wars

I had been planning to write an email about the dust storm but my current situation is a little more tense.  You can never beat correspondence from the battlefront so this is what you’re getting instead.

 We have two cats.  Nip is a ginger streetfighter with saggy bellies from long ago.  The vet thinks it was a botched abortion but Ginger (as she prefers to be known) doesn’t like to talk about it so we tell everyone she’s got short legs.  Tuck is black and was born in captivity.  He’s a timid pussyboy who never grew up and thinks his balls are living happily on a farm in the countryside somewhere.  

Tuck and Ginge arrived at our place in the city within a week of each other, both rescued from death row at the local dog’s home.  Seriously, charity is hardcore over here and the website is clear that Unless This Cat Finds A Home It Will Die.   Tuck’s too stupid to grasp the concept (his best friend is that little black cat in the mirror) but Ginge is pretty grateful.  She knows how tough it is out on the streets and, whilst she misses the fags and booze, she’s more than happy to stay indoors.

Until now.  

Oliver and I have just bought a place up the coast and in our naivety (oh happy, distant days) we thought we’d just take the cats up at the weekends.  Let them explore slowly and get used to the one-hour journey.  And at first everything went much as we thought: Ginge strode out the front and bullied next door’s dog out of his lunch money whilst Tuck hid in the linen cupboard saying ‘there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home’.  Then, after a few weekends, Tuck too started to explore.

He really is too much of a pussy to go anywhere by himself but Ginger gently led him outdoors and showed him the grass and the pavers and the sky.  And then, we don’t know what, but something happened.  

The best way to describe it is to imagine a feline Hannibal Lecter.  The noises coming out of Ginger’s mouth were bizarre, a deep, long growl akin to caterwauling but much more evil than that.  I managed to grab Tuck before she did and threw her into the house and close the patio door behind her.  Have you ever seen a cat throw itself against glass so it can do you harm?  It’s almost as much fun as holding a cat that thinks its life is in danger.  And by the way, those long red scratches aren’t the ones to worry about.  It’s the little red dots where the claw has gone cleanly into your flesh that you really want to avoid.

She attacked him four more times that day (scratches, red dots etc) until timid little Tuck was a quivering and somewhat patchy ball of fluff.  Our Paul, my lovely vet brother-in-law, took a drunken midnight call to offer his advice.  Mine would have been “Don’t call me at midnight when I’m drunk” but he, and subsequent vets, have shed some light on our situation.  

It’s about domination, territory marking, rules changing as environments change.  Your average marriage basically but with regular fights to the death thrown in.  And, just as with trying to save a marriage, there are a number of things we have to try before we give up and give away.  

So now I’m sitting in our living room with Ginger under an upside-down shopping trolley and Tuck barred from running out of the room.  Their mutual cries of fear and imprisonment are breaking my heart. 

And on that last point, if you’re reading this and thinking ‘For goodness sake, it’s just a cat!’ then I in turn am thinking three things about you.  One: you won’t want to hear when we give up on this option and move onto cat family-counselling (three hours, both owners, both cats) or cat prozac.  Two: you don’t have cats.  Or three: you have children, or may one day have children, and you fail to see that even without them the onset of middle-age is beset by pouring your love into ungrateful, heartbreaking and endlessly-expensive little animals.

It’s a wonderful world.

Sydney 1 Melbourne 0

I can’t do it.  I’ve tried and I’ve tried but I’m sorry, I just can’t.  I know I must be in the wrong because everybody – everybody! – keeps telling me so.  But despite everything I just can’t bring myself to like Melbourne.

I can hear those of you in the know gasping.  Has Ged become so shallow that he’s fallen for the fake and easy charms of Sydney?  Is he such a fan of boardshorts, beer and barby (not Barbie) that he prefers the bottle-blond of the nation’s largest city to the sophisticated allure of it’s cultural capital?  Well, yes.

You see, I think Melbourne looks like Birmingham.  And not even Birmingham now, but Birmingham in the 80’s.  It’s dirty and grey and every so often smells of urine.  I know it’s got the laneways and the funky shops and an apparently endless list of seriously cool bars.  But I have a theory about that.  As Big Andrea once pointed out, only countries with really bad climates are good at interior design.  “If you have to create your own environment you tend to do a good job of it”.  Big Andrea’s like that.  She’s always right.

It’s certainly true Melbourne has a bad climate.  It swelters in the summer for weeks on end of 40 degrees plus (those awful bushfires earlier this year were only an hour or so away), and in the winter it freezes (ski fields only three hours away).  Taxi drivers keep telling me Melbourne is in a drought but every time I’ve ever been there it’s been raining under a concrete sky.  Which reminds me of my favourite Birmingham quote.  “Even if you cleared up the dog shit, it’d still be Birmingham”.  That’s how I feel about Melbourne.

Admittedly, the last few times I’ve been there it has been for work and a long-distance commute does few cities any favours.  The only thing worse than airport-taxi-office-airport is airport-taxi-novotel-office-airport.  But this time I spent an extra day there, hung out with my cousin Millie who took me to best tapas bar I’ve seen outside of Spain and to an exhibition by an amazing artist I’d never heard of.

So I’ll give you the bars and the galleries.  And the cafes.  And the funky little boutiques, the seriously cool graffiti and the different little restaurant every time you go.  It costs $10,000 to open a bar in Victoria, $250,000 in New South Wales and that, until recently, explained the different experience of visiting the two cities.  They get off-the-wall holes-in-the-wall, we get mega-sportsbars.  But didn’t legislation change that last year?  Everyone seems to think so but no one’s quite sure.  Certainly there’s nowhere yet serving alcohol in Sydney that could be described as funky or cool.

But so what?  Even if we’d got Wicked! instead of Priscilla, art instead of Andre Rieu, skiing less than six hours away, the Australian Open, the Grand Prix, Kath & Kim, a half-decent casino, I’d still prefer Sydney.  Walk with me for ten minutes by great rolling ocean, swim out with me in crystalline water, sail on our harbour and tell me there’s any city, anywhere in the world* that has anything to compare.   See.  You can’t.

*South Africa doesn’t count, Brazil’s too violent and Marseille lost its allure years ago.  Always read washing instructions.  Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up payments on a loan taken out against it.

Just another league sex scandal

In a group-sex session between nine huge men and one “immature 19-year-old woman” is each of the men individually responsible for checking he’s not taking part in gang rape?  This is the question which currently divides Australia

Or to be precise: when a woman agrees to have a threesome with two rugby players and six other players turn up and decide they want to take part, at what point does it become rape?  If the woman at first “brags” about the act the next morning, but then later comes to regret it, does that mean it couldn’t have been rape? 

Australia is currently having a mass debate about this issue because the men were all rugby players.  Or rather, because one in particular – one of the original two – is a huge rugby star.  His name is Matthew Johns and he and his brother Joey are NRL royalty.  

The L stands for League, and to get your head around this whole issue you have to understand how big Rugby League is out here.  It’s bigger than football in England, bigger than “football” in the States.  It’s huge.

As are the men who play it.  League is a big violent game where necks and brains are unwelcome diversions from the ferocity of running into and through the only men around as big as you.  The physicality of the game has been used by some academics here to explain the peculiar nature of League sex scandals.  You see, no one is surprised when these unintelligent young men spend the money that is thrown at them on fast cars and alcohol, nor that they attract a certain type of attention.  

But what is surprising is that when these men copulate drunkenly in hotel bedrooms, they tend to do it in each other’s company.  “Personally,” my mate Kurt tells me, “the sight of my best mate’s bum banging up and down would be the biggest turn off in the world”.  Not so for League players.

When Matthew Johns and a “fellow, unnamed player” accompanied a 19-year-old New Zealand woman to her hotel room during a 2002 tour, neither of them thought it strange when their team mates came barging in for a piece of the action.  Or so they say.  The girl (operating under a pseudonym which confounds those claiming she just wants attention) says John’s took her to a taxi later and said “he hoped things hadn’t got too out of hand in there”.  Now why would he think that?

What I find most shocking about this debate is the views of those around me.  Women above all keep telling me “she obviously wanted it”.  Even Kurt, who’s played a bit of rugby in his time, confirms that it’s a difficult issue because there are so many predatory women who’ll follow a tour.  But my favourite quote of the debate is from a player from another team who said “The best way to avoid these scandals is to treat the girl right afterwards, make sure she gets a taxi for example”.

It’s not clear why this story has emerged only now, seven years after the event.  What is clear is that the girl involved blames the events of that night for the collapse of her life.  “If I had a gun I’d kill them all” she says. “I hate them.”

It is doubtful whether she will get an opportunity with a shotgun but she may well have done for the club.  LG have withdrawn their sponsorship of the Cronulla Sharks and the club is suddenly facing bankruptcy.  In the current climate no other sponsor is likely to step in and few expect the club to survive.

With Telstra (our telecom) threatening to withdraw its league-wide sponsorship, the entire sport is looking shakey right now.  Peter Fitzsimmons, everybody’s favourite sports writer, wrote before this scandal broke that “unless NRL can drag itself into the 21^st century its fan-base will desert it and it will die”.  Few expected his words to come true so soon.