Big Mc

Life isn’t like the movies.  It’s not even like TV, least of all reality TV.  If life was like the movies I’d have had an immediate reward for going to McDonalds on Friday morning.  Is that how you spell it?  McDonalds?  So how come it’s a Big Mac and not a Big Mc?  Surely the pronunciation of Big Mc would be more appropriate?  Not that anyone in Australia ever calls it McDonalds.  It’s macca’s mate and don’t you forget it.  The branch of maccas I walk past on the way to work everyday takes up a corner of the Sydney Entertainment Centre and it’s hardly a flagship.  I don’t know why anyone would want to wipe a burger on a window, but surely someone could wipe it off again?  Anyway, this corner of the Entertainment Centre – across from Paddy’s Markets and just outside Chinatown – is a favourite haunt of several homeless guys of the beard-and-checked-shirt variety.  This is probably because the doors of Centre are deep and can relied on to provide shelter in even the heaviest rain.  Good shelter, easy access to cheap food, what’s not to love?   Now, I don’t normally take much notice of these guys but on Friday our never-ending summer ended, the sky turned grey and it was suddenly freeeezing.  OK, not freezing, not even cold by US/UK winter standards but chillier than you’d want to sleep out in.  As I pass, the homeless guys are just getting up, lighting up the remains of cigarettes and drinking some urine-yellow substance out of old water bottles.  Whereas me, I’m well-fed, well-slept and on the way to a warm office.  So I go into macca’s and buy four large cups of tea.  Now, you probably know that in each country McDonalds is a little different.  In Germany they selll beer, in Sweden the staff don’t have acne and in Australia they are really (really) slow.  On the rare occasion I go to a macca’s I swear next time I will film the people who work there and send the footage to an anthropologist or a sociologist or someone who can tell me how and why otherwise normal people move so slowly behind the counter of a macca’s.  I asked for four large teas and it took three and a half minutes to get the order into the till.  And yes, I know the joy of middle-age is that you learn to slow down but there are limits.  Maybe I should get a job at macca’s?  Would that stop me wanting to scream at the girl ‘Come on!  I’m being charitable here but only if it takes less than five minutes!!!’.  Anyway, half an hour later the teas are ready so I carry them out to the homeless guys.  One of them is banging something into his knee with his forehead while another gives him directions.   A third is staring at the queue of fat teenagers which has materialised outside the door to the Entertainment Centre.    Where did they come from?  There are at least two dozen of them, slouched or cross-legged in an untidy line across the cold concrete, playing with their hair and looking at their phones.  I stand there, four supersized teas steaming on a plastic tray, staring at them until the fourth homeless guy coughs and I say ‘Oh yeah.  How you going?’.  He squints at me, nods and coughs again.  ‘Thought you guys might want a hot drink’ I say.  At this point, in the movie, an elderly man is just passing in his limo and says ‘Gosh, what a thoughtful young man.  At last, someone worthy to inherit my endless fortune.’  In reality the homeless guy says ‘Alright’ and I put the tea down on the plastic table between us.  For some reason at this point most of the queue of fat teenagers loses interest in their phones and hair and instead looks over at me and the homeless guys and the tea.  Soon they’re staring in that way only fat teenagers can.

‘Alright?’ I say to the nearest girl, cross-legged about three metres away.  She has pigtails, an unfortunate chin and no-one to tell her she’s too big for lycra.  ‘What are you guys queuing up for?’

‘A gig’ she says.

I resist sarcasm – I’m a nice charitable guy remember – and ask who’s on.

‘Ocean’ she says shyly.  By now the rest of the queue is transfixed.  Who’s this weirdo with a beard and what does he want?  So, sensibly, I say ‘Cool’ and carry on to work.  Don’t I.  Don’t I?

‘Ocean?’ I say in my best English accent.  ‘Did you say “Ocean”?’

‘Asian’ she says, a little louder this time but still half-swallowing her answer.

‘Asian?’

Whereupon the homeless guy who had been headbanging into his knee stands upright and shouts with such fury that the speckles of his saliva sparkle silver in the morning sun.

‘ED SHEERAN!!’

And the entire fat queue dissolves into helpless laughter.  I turn, just a paragraph too late, and continue on my way to work.

Seasons and Aileen

The Australians are very strict about their seasons, mapping them to the calendar with a precision I’ve experienced nowhere outside of fashion (and boy is Australia outside of fashion). December, January and February are Summer; March, April, and May are Autumn; June, July, August, well you get the idea. So drum rolls please: in two weeks Spring begins. I can’t wait. I found myself explaining to someone a while back that we’d move to Australia largely for the climate and it sounded strange and somewhat superficial. At the end of a wet and dirty winter it sounds deeply spiritual and nourishing.

It’s ironic that the modern Aussies are so robust in their definitions of the seasons. It turns out that the very idea of four seasons is yet another colonial import that doesn’t really work down here (think rabbits, crinoline skirts, irony). Depending on where they live/d – sorry but neither tense makes this sentence correct – Aborigines believe/d there are between five and eight seasons. What we are in now is something between Winter and Spring, a Sprinter if you will, and it is indeed something to behold. The Australian bush has a beauty which is normally unphotographable. When you are there it is serene, massive and empty. When you photograph it it’s just big and empty. The difference is perhaps the wind that whispers and roar through the 700-odd types of eucalyptus and…well, no ‘and’. That’s probably about it. The bush is green, green, green. But then Sprinter comes along and suddenly there are patches of yellow, purple, red and white. If these were imported blooms, roses or tulips, it would be too cold for them now. And also, this is difficult to describe, they’d be wrong. The way even the best silk flowers in the world are wrong because you can only compare them to the real thing. The flowers of Sprinter are beautiful because they are so uniquely Australian.

This has been the worst winter. I feel like writing something vaguely poetic, like ‘It was a wet and dirty winter, the winter Aileen died’. But grief isn’t poetic in real life. It’s just shit. It’s strange being so far away from New York and still missing Aileen. Being down here Oliver and I could probably have counted on seeing her and Mike and the kids about once every two years. And yet I miss her all the time. I miss the possibility of her, the idea that sometime in the next twenty-four months she’ll be in my life as more than a memory or an old photo.

Bizarrely, I keep remembering the things she taught me. I had no idea until she died that Aileen had ever taught me anything (other than not to get cornered by her when drunk past 11pm). But now I come to think of it the list of what she taught me is endless. She taught me you should always put face-cream on when your skin is still wet because that way it retains the moisture. She taught me you shouldn’t scowl at the parents of a crying baby on a plane because they’re already deeply mortified and they do have a right to travel. She taught me how to powder my nose without going to the bathroom. She taught me to give to homeless people. My religion (uptight judgemental selfishness) bans this last practice, preaching you’re only exacerbating the problem, feeding someone’s habit and their dependency. Try telling that to a bum on a cold winter’s night, Aileen said. All he wants is the drugs you’d take if you were in the same situation. One man’s barstool after all. I thought of this tonight, on the way home, and I turned back to give an old man some dollars. He said it was his fiftieth birthday and I told him he should thank my friend Aileen. Like that might make a difference. I was going to wrap this back nicely to the seasons. Something about roses being here when they shouldn’t be, Aileen not being here when she should. But what’s the point? Things don’t always end the way they should.

Jack Mundey

The real story of Sydney this week is the torrential rain, but I talked about the weather last time, so this week you're getting corruption, murder and three-letter acronyms.

They say you never see Venice for the first time. There are so many images of it in magazines, films and ice-cream advertisements that by the time you actually get there you’re already familiar with it. The same is true of Sydney you might think. Those helicoptered panning-shots of the bridge and the opera house, the huge beaches stretching up the coast, the boats littering the harbour (cut to a koala in the zoo). Well, unfortunately you’re wrong. My friend Karen calls the harbour the lipstick on the pig of Sydney, and I have to agree. You see, aside from the bridge and the opera house and a handful of other buildings Sydney really has one of the ugliest architectures on earth. If it wasn’t for the beaches and the weather you might as well be in Coventry.

Some areas are better than others of course and over the years activists have managed some great victories. Bondi beach, for example, is still sunny in the afternoon Not so the Gold Coast, where unchecked development has led to huge tower blocks with beautiful views along much of the seafront, their thick shadows darkening the beach from lunch-time onwards. But even Bondi is a dog, a scraggy ragtag of ice-cream parlours and a carpark overlooking the famous sands. Maroubra, a few exclusive beaches to the south, looks like a favella.

This is what happens when you build your city with dirty money. Stories of corrupt councils still abound and there’s not one good property developer who doesn’t lobby (or sit on) his local decision-making body. When signing the forms for Copa’s renovation last month, we had to declare any political contributions we’d ever made. ‘Damn’ said Oliver ‘Wish we’d thought of that’.

But there a few beautiful (i.e. old) buildings left dotted around the city, and for most of those we have to be grateful to one man. My hero, Jack Mundey.

In the early seventies Jack Mundey was the leader of the New South Wales (NSW) branch of the Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF) and it was from this position that he led, between 1971 and 1974, forty-two ‘green bans’. Basically, the union refused to pull down beautiful old buildings to replace them with orange-brick monstrosities. Looking today at what they saved it is horrible to thing about what they lost so let’s be grateful for what little we have: The Queen Victoria Building (QVB), a three-level arcade of twirling, carved victoriana now housing the City Business District (CBD)'s chichiest stores; The Rocks, 18^th and 19^th century terraces whose pubs contain smugglers’ tunnels down to the harbour; the Royal Botanic Gardens, rolling parkland skirting the harbour and presenting the city’s best views (once earmarked to become the carpark for the opera house). None of these would be here but for the BLF. Or rather the NSW BLF.

It was too good to last of course. Jack Mundey was incorruptible, so the developers went a little higher and in 1975 Jack and his NSW team were sacked from the BLF by its national leader, Norm Gallagher. I picture Norm Gallagher as looking like the greasy dad in Muriel’s Wedding. He'd already had the whiff of corruption around him a few times before he got rid of Jack Mundey and he was subsequently convicted of having had corrupt dealings with developers. Unfortunately, to get this conviction jurors were locked in a room for ten days and told they couldn’t come out until they’d reached a decision. Their later claims of imprisonment and coercion got the original conviction declared ‘unsafe’ (fair enough!) and after four months Norm walked out of jail.

But wait, it gets worse. One of the most famous green bans concerned Victoria Street in Kings Cross, a stretch of huge sandstone terraces. Frank Theeman, a lingerie millionaire, bought the lot in the early seventies and planned to demolish it to build a $40m apartment complex. No thanks, said the residents who worked with the NSW BLF to resist the developers. Arthur King, the head of the residents group, was persuaded to think otherwise after being bundled into a car boot and kidnapped for three days. Local journalist, Juanita King, was not so easily dissuaded and she publicised the campaign in her magazine, Wow, despite repeated threats.

On 4^th July 1973 Juanita was invited to a local nightclub to discuss the possibility of its advertising in her magazine. Most clubs in the Cross, then and now, are owned by shady figures. But this one just happened to be owned by Abe Saffron, who just happened to owe $20,000 to Frank Theeman, the developer. Juanita Nielsen was never seen again.

A coronial inquest found Juanita was likely to have been murdered but only convictions for kidnapping and harassment were ever brought. Not against the big money of course, jus the thugs that did their work. And Victoria Street, like most other streets in central Sydney, is now a traffic jam between high rise blocks.

Jack Mundey is still alive though. He’s 91 and the head of the Historic Houses Trust where my friend Big Andrea works. I’m trying to get to meet him. I’d love to ask him about the old days, get him to sign the photo I have of him being arrested in grainy black-and-white. And, above all, to thank him for what few old buildings we have left in this ugly-beautiful city.

The sticky end of summer

Eugh.  This is the hot and / or damp end of summer.  Hot and damp generally means you’re producing the moisture yourself, so if you’re wearing a shirt to get to work, you better take another one to work in.  Hot or damp means it can be a baking harsh day in direct-sunlight then drop five or ten degrees when the rain arrives, then turn steamy and humid once the sun comes back.  All in the space of an hour.  Or just raining and hot, that happens, a warm shower on the way home.

There’s a myth over here that only pommies whinge, and whilst it’s true that complaining is less acceptable in Australia, that doesn’t seem so true when it comes to the weather.  Kurt, my gorgeous-but-vain friend, was moaning about the humidity the other day and I got a chance to do one of my favourite things.  We were in a crowded café (everyone piling in for the air-conditioning) so at an opportune moment I got to say, in a loud english accent ‘Oh stop whingeing’.  Suddenly people were backing away from Kurt as if I’d just fingered him as having the plague.  To be accused of whingeing is bad enough, but to be accused of it by an Englishman…..the shame.  Kurt, being Kurt, just gave me a withering look and carried on with his story of arriving on a blind-date with his shirt stuck visibly to his torso.  I couldn’t resist pointing out that most women would love a blind-date which involved a Kurt turning up with his shirt stuck damp to his body but he told me I was being gay and making him uncomfortable.  Then he carried on whingeing.  

OK, I’m supposed to be talking about February in Sydney here but I’m going to allow myself a slight diversion.  No one in Australia gets to read these and names have been changed to protect the innocent so I’ll tell you a little about Kurt instead.   He’s goooorgeous.  He knows it unfortunately so is a little bit arrogant about it, but once you get used to that he’s a nice bloke and we’re becoming quite good friends.  He was at school with a very good mate of mine (Zen) and the three of us – check it out dude – are learning to surf.  Guess who’s worst at it.  Anyway, Kurt is fascinating because he has four children from three different gold-diggers.  My analysis not his, but I think he’s being a little naïve.  You see Kurt is what in socio-econometrics is referred to as Seriously Fucking Loaded.  Or rather, his parents are.  He’s the friend I wrote about in an earlier post who took us out on the harbour in his boat (parent’s boat) which cost more than our house.  I think it’s called a cruiser, a giant speedboat with a deck and a cocktail fridge.  Blondes seem automatically programmed to strip down to bikinis and sunbathe on its deck.  On the day Oliver and I were on it, we parked at one point below Kurt’s parents’ house so they could come out on their balcony and wave.   Karen (cynical, hippy friend) was one of the blondes that day and she yelled up at the top of her voice ‘Adopt me, please! I can cook!’.

Anyway, back to February.  It’s humid and either raining or hot.  It’s back-to-school time but not in the British way where different schools start on different days and there are gradually less children in the way.  Monday 1^st February was the first day back at school for every child in Australia as far as I could tell.  On Tuesday 2^nd there were suddenly twice as many people in the office as I have seen for weeks (January closes Sydney in the same way August closes Paris).  I would have thought they’d be back on Monday but Monday was quieter than Christmas, half the office being of the age where they have a child starting school for the very first time.  This requires a day-off apparently (eight-hour farewells in the playground?),  followed by photograph-swaps on Tuesday.  I must have looked at pictures of seven different children I didn’t know, crying in a uniform that didn't fit them.  It was like a bad paedo-convention.

So we have one more month of summer to run, 1^st March being very officially autumn, but I’ll admit it’s useful having a humid, sticky end to the season.  It means you regret its ending less and get to think wistfully of the cooler weather before the reality of it arrives.  I’m normally planning my winter skiing about now, but the house up at Copa means I probably can’t afford it this year.  Instead, I’ll be working in the garden, moaning about the cold, longing for the languid, lazy days of summer.

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.