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.

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.

David Iredale

In December last year 17-year old David Iredale decided to hike across Mount Solitary in the Blue Mountains, two hours west of Sydney.  These mountains, which get scatters of snow through the winter but never enough for skiing, are deceptively pretty, their rocky faces smoothed by the eucalypts which give them their name.  

David and two school friends had thought the treck across Mount Solitary might contribute to their Duke of Edinburgh award.  When they told this to the teacher at their school who administered the award program, he was about as interested as any teacher is when a pupil tells him what they’re doing over the weekend.  This didn’t surprise them.  This was the teacher, after all, who had been promising for weeks to bring them a GPS but kept forgetting to put it in his bag.

Mount Solitary is a three-day hike along a well-marked track.  It’s heavy going, especially the second day when a walker needs to climb 810 metres to the top of the mountain.  It might not sound much, but remember December is mid-summer in Australia and it gets bloody hot that far from the coast.  Walking anywhere can be tough.

My mate Kurt, who’s quite the outdoor-expert, told me recently than when you are walking in the mountains you should carry three litres of water a day per person.  Plus a litre or two for cooking at night, plus extra if you want to wash.  David Iredale was carrying two litres for the entire trip and, unsuprisingly, ran out on the first afternoon of his hike.  Undeterred, he and his friends pushed on to the next day’s climb.  The maps they’d brought with them showed fine blue lines trailing down each side of Mount Solitary and they assumed these were creeks where they could fill up their bottles.  Big mistake.  

Blue on an Australian map is mostly a suggestion of what might occur.  Open an atlas and you’d be forgiven for thinking lakes dot the centre and south of this country.  But one of those lakes, Lake Eyre, has water in it now and tour companies are selling “once in a lifetime flights” to view it.  

Creeks in the Blue Mountains are not quite so rare and most winters can guarantee a trickle somewhere close to the fine blue line on the map.  But you should never rely on them, especially not in mid-Summer.

At the top of the mountain David left a hand-written note which read “Got to the top!  Haven’t had H2O for a whole day but river coming up! Enjoy the view”.  Needless to say, no river came up.

At some point in the following hours David “cracked the shits” with his two mates and walked ahead down the path.  What happened next is on the one hand unclear, but on the other recorded in painful detail.  

The unclear part is why or how David left the path and ended up 200 metres to the north on a rocky incline.  If he was looking for water why did he leave the path which appeared to be heading towards it?  Dehydration probably, delirium perhaps.

The all-too-clear part of those dry and desparate hours was played to a packed court-house at an inquiry last week.  Five calls to the Emergency Services in 16 minutes.  Five different operators refusing to help David because, although he said he was on the Mount Solitary walking track, he was unable to name a cross-street.  His calls were audio-recorded but not entered onto the computer system as the operators didn’t think they were worth it.  The last person he spoke to said “OK, so you’ve just wandered into the middle of nowhere.  Is that what you’re saying?”.

David’s body was found nine days later.  That delay shows more than anything how easily you can get lost in the thick undergrowth of the mountains.  But no one in Australia is blaming the mountains just now.  They are just wondering why until this week, five months after David died, the emergency services had still not reveiwed their operating procedures.

Victoria Bush Fires

Radio 3AW presenter:  We have on the line Rhiannon from Kinglake.  So what's your situation Rhiannon?

Rhiannon: (very young but calm) Er..well.the property we've moved to is completely surrounded by fire and we're just waiting for it to hit.  Um..er..we've seen no emergency people and we really need help right now.  

P: How many of you are there Rhiannon?

R:  Well, there's eight kids, all under the age of ten.  Two elderly ladies.  Four adults.there's quite a lot of us.  And.

P: And how far is the front of the fire from you do you think?

R: Half a kilometre.  Not even.

P: And it's burning towards you at the moment?

R:  That's correct yes.

P:  And is there any capacity at that property in terms of water and pumps and. 

R: We have pumps and sprinklers going but.uh.I don't know if that's enough.   We really.we heard that there's a strikeforce or something, some fire engines being sent up Chum Creek Road, Heath Road.  And if they are there now we really need help.

P:  We'll see what we can do.  We'll see if we can get some action.  Unfortunately there.

R: It's only minutes away.

P:  We'll do what we can.  What you guys need to do is..er.if possible try and find somewhere in the house.

R: We're in a house.  And the idea that we're, we're putting into place is going to the centre of the house where there's a bathroom and just covering ourselves with wet towels and to stop the smoke or anything like that.

P: Absolutely.  And make sure you've got no synthetic clothing on.  It needs to be woollen.  If you have synthetic clothing then get rid of it.  Endeavour to fill the bath so that you have water there as much as you can.

R: Yep (shouting in the background)

P: How far are the flames away now Rhiannon?

R: I can't see, there's too much smoke now.

P: Rhiannon, we'll see what we can do.

R: (crying) Please send help.

P: You're ok.

R: What?

P: You're ok.

R: Well, yes for now.

P: What can you see?

R: Not a lot.  There's so much smoke  (dog starts barking). The house we were in is now engulfed in flames and..oh.there are still people in that house.

P: There are people still in the house that's on fire?

R: (upset) Yes, we're going to back for them.  Maybe cut through the paddock.

P:  Rhiannon, Mary's on the line who's in Heath Road and her husband's trying to come up with a tank of water on a trailer.  Can you speak to Mary?  She's on the line now.  Are you there Mary?

Mary: Yes I am.

P: Can you hear Mary, Rhiannon?

R:  Yes I can.

Line goes dead.

P: We've lost them.

Woman interviewed outside community centre:

We managed to save..um.the horses and neighbouring sheep and, I think, the cattle.  Um.but Pete lost his house and all his tools and everything.  While we were in a safe spot because the grass fire had gone through the open paddock and we'd parked everything down there.um.a  man came down with his daughter and they were really badly burnt..um.and he'd lost his wife and other children.    And we got separated because they came into town in the ambulance.with his daughter. I.er..(upset) She was only about two or three years old.

Man interviewed on the radio:

(North English accent).  We moved here because we wanted to live in paradise.  We lived in a caravan while we built our house.  Then we leant that caravan to new neighbours when they came and built their houses.  We were off the mountain because we went to pick up my daughter from the airport.  My house is gone.  It's only treasure, it's only junk.  But my neighbours, they're all in their houses.  They're all dead.  They're all dead.

Radio 3AW presenter a few hours later:

P: We have on the line Mark, Rhiannon's dad.

Mark: (crying) Oh man, yes I am.  

P: What's the situation Mark?

M: Rhiannon's safe.  Her brother saved her.

P: Oh fantastic.

M: (very upset) Oh mate, you've no idea.  You've got no idea how happy I am.

P: Oh Mark.  That's great, we're so happy to hear from you.

M: You ain't go no idea.  (crying).  Her brother, he's an absolute legend.  He's gone down through the burning paddock, cut his way through to the other house and got 'em all out on a little tractor with a little pump on the back of it.  And he's got 'em out of the house.  And I think the house is burnt.  He's got 'em all out, they're all safe.

P: And he did that single-handedly.

M: (crying) He's a legend.  With his brother, or his cousin, I'm not sure who it was.  It's a tiny little tractor and he's dragged them all out and put 'em all on it and got them back to safety.

P: How old is he Mark?

M:  He's 18.

P: And how old is Rhiannon?

M: It's her 21st next Sunday.  

P: Well, Mark, you give her our love and say (crying) we're very relieved here because.

M: You've no idea how happy I am.

P: (crying) It was so distressing.

M: Can I just say too please, I spoke to a woman at the fire brigade at Hillsow and she's a legend that woman.  She's done everything she possibly could and I.the CFA goes much further than firefighters.  This woman in the office, mate, she had everything under control and she organised it and I really take my hat off to those guys.  And also those guys working in the CFA office.  I just thank them so much.

The CFA is the Country Fire Association.  It's entirely voluntary.  There have been many reports of CFA firefighters protecting neighbours' home whilst watching their own burn.

So far, 171 dead bodies have been discovered.  

Death of a Dream

Grief is the most tenacious of emotions.  It only feigns defeat so it can reappear, fresh-armed and stronger than before, and when you are least expecting it.  I was waiting for the bus this morning, watching crazies stumble through the sunshine of Crown Street, when suddenly I was immensely sad.  Weak and tired under the weight of the emotion I thought I’d buried last month.  I’d forgotten that grief, like any emotion, only intensifies when you bury it.  Deny it, ignore it, look the other way and that elephant will just grow and grow.  I see now that yesterday afternoon it was squeezing me hard against the wall on the beach, pressing me harder with every smile I forced and every ball I served.  

So I’m trying to un-deny it today, to admit to my grief and my broken heart.  But it’s difficult you see because if I’m honest I’m embarrassed.  Embarrassed that my grief is for a dream that has died, not a person.  Embarrassed I ever really had the dream.  On the bus it occurred to me that perhaps I need a funeral.   That’s what we do with people isn’t it?  Acknowledge the loss, vaunt our sadness.  It’s one of the few times in our lives when being unhappy is socially acceptable and we embrace it with black garb and weeping.  Which is why I’m writing this really.  This letter is my refusal to be ashamed.  My confession of a silly ambition, but one which I really believed in and which I mourn now it is gone.

I’ve always loved volleyball.  When I was 19 and living in Germany one of the few sporty things I ever did was join a volleyball club for a week or two.  Years later I played in a gay volleyball team (The Volley Partons) in London, attended tournaments in Prague, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona.  It wasn’t a very high standard and we only ever won the Miss Congeniality prize but it was fun.  It was volleyball.

When I got to Australia five years ago I discovered the combination of volleyball and the beach and immediately fell in love.  I found myself thinking that the utter pleasure I experienced when playing beach volleyball was more intense than any I’d ever known outside of love and making love.  It was so concentrated and complete, such a technical team sport (name any other where two players pass a ball back and forth), so…whatever.  It doesn’t matter really does it?   I just loved it immediately.

I soon realised I wanted to be really good at this game.  I was fed up of losing the court to better players (King of the Court is the rule on beaches around the world).  And then that ambition, combined with (take your pick here) looming middle-age;  a never-very-far need for validation;  a refusal to live life locked in an office;  a desire to be recognised as a fully-signed-up member of the male tribe;  competitivity;  trying to escape from the meaninglessness of life;  wondering if now – at last – I could achieve something in life, bla bla bla….anyway, it combined with a bundle of emotions and I decided to Go For It.  

Here’s the reasoning:  No one in Britain can play beach volleyball.  In 2012 London will host the Olympics.  Host nations like to be represented in every sport.  Host nation teams by-pass normal qualification procedures.  If I worked really hard for six years I could represent Britain in beach volleyball at the London Olympics.  Don’t laugh.  OK, laugh, see if I care.

Bizarrely my coach thought this was just about feasible too.  He thought it would take two years to get me to AA level, another to go interstate and then another to go international.  No other Brits are on the international tour.  Why shouldn’t this work?

Well, here’s why not.  The less you know about something the less aware you are of how little you know.  Just because a sport is not popular does not mean its athletes are any less able.  After three tired, disciplined, emotionally draining years I only now realise  I’m not a natural athlete.  This is not self-pity, it’s level-headed fact.  I don’t have any natural sporting talent.  I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be thick and now, at last, I know.  Also I’m not 19 (although that’s less of a factor).  And now I’m sick of doing nothing but beach volleyball every day.  In October of last year I actually realised I’d come to hate the game.  

All different ways of saying I’m just not good enough and – gulp – never will be.  I play against tourists who played a lot in high school and see they are better than I will ever be.  Admitting that is tough but denying it has been a lot tougher.  Watching them makes even admitting my ambition embarrassing.  I, who had the temerity to think I could represent my nation, will never be good as a good tourist.

So I’m burying my ambition.  This letter is its funeral.  But I’m not burying the emotion that goes around it.  I am sad, I’ve lost a dream which I really believed in, and I’m embarrassed that I ever had it.

The farewell has its advantages of course.  I’m learning to surf, I’m mountain biking when it’s not too hot.  I could go home and read the paper all afternoon if I chose.  And I’m learning to love the game again.  Maybe I’m even improving faster now that the pressure is off.  But it’s not all rosy in my heart just now.  Which is fine.  It’s OK to be sad.  OK to be normal and not over-achieve.

Canyoning

I was sitting in a meeting room on the thirty-fifth floor the other day when suddenly my heart began to hurt.  A British Airways jet had risen from the airport and I watched it circle lazily and disappear over the hazy blue horizon. 

I’ve been missing people a lot recently.  Maybe because so many friends and family have big-0 birthdays this year.  Lots of gatherings of people who it saddens me not to see.  Or maybe because we’ve just celebrated our fifth anniversary of living in Australia and that feels like a long time.  Or maybe no reason.  Anyway, I’m missing everyone and wish so much…well, not that I was there with you but rather that you were here with me.  Blue skies, clear ocean, crashing waves.  You get the picture.  Anyway, back to that hazy blue horizon.  Hazy because of pollution or heat inversion depending on who you talk to.  Blue because of the mountains.  

The Blue Mountains start 50km west of Sydney and shoot up from the Cumberland Plain in a solid wall of sandstone.  The first white settlers considered the mountains “insurmountable” which says more about their arrogance than anything else.  It was only after 20 years of failed expeditions that someone thought to ask the aborigines how they did it.  Easy.  Don’t walk up the valleys as in Europe or America, that way only leads to treachorous cliffs and deceptive dead-ends.  Instead, walk up the ridge lines, the song lines where generations-old songs will guide you the way.  

Still today, asphalt and tarmac smoothing the way, you can see what an incredible job it was to cross the Great Dividing Range, even with that invaluable advice.  The land regularly dips away to reveal infinite eucalypts rolling to the horizon, their leaves reacting with the heat to produce the blue haze which gives the mountains their name.  Every so often, the endless forest is cut by a line of nothing as it falls into a canyon upto 760 metres deep.  Picture that, it’s deep.  Sandstone is soft you see and after ten million years even the tiniest creek can etch deep into the bowels of the earth.  Well, OK, maybe not the bowels of the earth but it certainly feels that way when you’re down there.  Did I mention I went canyoning this week?

At first it felt like a normal bush walk, slugging through the wilderness with heavy packs.  We gawked at the 300 metre cliffs that appeared through the trees and wondered at the silence of the Australian bush (it’s already hot by 9am and all the birds, insects, marsupials, everything is hiding in the shade and trying not to move).  Unlike most walks though,  this one didn’t end when the path disappeared over a ledge.

“Ever abseiled before?” asked my mate Kurt, pulling ropes off his back.  I sort of knew he was an outdoorsy person so was sure it would be fine.  Walking backwards over a cliff ten minutes later I wondered if I should have asked about his qualifications.

At the bottom of the first 20 metre abseil, once I’d stopped kissing the ground and followed Kurt and his mate Zen down the creek until we hit one of those famous dead ends.  Except, what’s that tiny hole under that rock?  That black abyss full of water?  We climbed down into it, the 14 degree water making me gasp.  As instructed I had two layers of thermals on underneath my wetsuit, and as predicted it wasn’t enough.  The woolly hat under my helmet helped, as did the woollen socks inside my shoes.  But after watching me shiver Kurt soon gave me his diving gloves too.  Together with the abseiling harness I looked like I’d walked out of an outdoor equipment store unable to decide what to buy.

It took a while to get used to swimming in a cave that had never seen sunlight but the glow-worms helped, little blue stars littering the ceiling better than an african sky.  Lovely, it’s freezing, let’s go.  And so on (and on) we went.  The sunlight, when we found it again, had turned green through the filter of ancient ferns.  We abseiled again into unknown pools, not combat-style with two wide feet down a flat wall, but crawling and scraping so as not to swing in under the overhang and slam into the jagged rockface underneath.  

We walked the floor of wrinkles two feet wide and a hundred feet high, huge rocks split in two by the gently flowing water.  We found a red-bellied black snake (one of the most poisonous in the world), several spiders, a marsupial that looked like a mouse.  And then more green pools, black swimming caves which probably, hopefully led further down.  

I have never before felt like this - a visitor to a world made neither by nor for humans.  We were alone and far from home down there, freezing in the gloom and looking up at the baking sky.  And oh it was beautiful.  Trees which three hundred years ago had started their journey up to the light buttressed out of the rock above us.  Fish which didn’t know to fear us swam around our feet.  Bright red yabbies, somewhere between a prawn and a lobster, were gnarly and happy to attack intruders.  Our bodies and breath steamed in the green and golden sunlight.

After six hours we splashed out of the canyon and into the main river, its waters joyfully warm after the black creek of the caves.  We swam still deep between red cliffs for an hour or so until at last we found our path.  Then we slogged up the harsh hill, wetsuits wet and clothes damp, back packs heavier than ever.   I am sore all over today and all the happier for it.  Have I ever forgotten to mention before?  Australia is a land of endless beauty.  So, yes I miss you all, but I miss you here, not there.

Anne

Agh!  My mother is driving me crazy!!!   Last night she insisted on helping with supper but refused to peel the beetroots “on principal”.  This morning she interrupted my clearly late-for-work rush to insist, insist I pay attention and remember who Oedipus’s daughter was.   Oliver is grinning through it all but I can see him counting the hours under his breath.  Only 47½ before she returns to New Zealand and peace descends again.

Mum and Mike are in town for the funeral of Mum’s sister, Anne.  “There’s a sister?!” my stepmother gasped when she heard of Anne’s existence.  Like the rest of us, she struggled to believe the world had produced anything close to my mother.  Oh yes.  

Anne was just as insane, just as talkative, just as loveable-slash-offensive as my mother is.  They were the spitting image of each other.  My cousin Tina once said to me “Your mother and mine were separated at birth and your mother got the heart”.  Harsh, you might think, but more forgiving than Anne’s other daughter who refused to even contact her for the last twelve years of her life.  It’s all very Running with Scissors and slightly amusing one step removed, each of them as bad as the other, aware of all faults but their own.  “I don’t leak” Anne said over and over again to me and my sister Becky one evening.  “You can say anything to me and your secret is safe.  Remember this: I Don’t Leak”.  Well, she does now.

Anne was found by her neighbour and best friend Julie on Saturday evening.  She’d been making jam when she died, which is a lovely way to go I think.  At a certain point she decided to curl up comfortably on the living room floor and gently leave the world.  Julie, when she found her, sat and held her hand until the ambulance came.  Then she sealed the still open jam and took it off to sell at the charity fete as Anne had intended.  There were no flies apparently so we’re not too worried it had been in a room with a dead body in the Australian summer heat for two or three days. 

Given all the disfunctionality and bad blood flying around I must admit I was quite looking forward to the funeral.  After all, one of the guests was going to be the daughter of the man Anne had been sleeping with for 25 years (despite being good friends with his wife).  Also, Anne’s half-brother John had displayed the family’s propensity for drama by flying in with 80kg of luggage despite having only met Anne once for an hour several years ago.    Anne’s son, Tim, couldn’t come as he’s “unwell” with major quotation marks.  But the real draw card was to be Antonia, the estranged daughter.  Seven times engaged and reported to have kept the ring each time (treasured family heirloom or not).  Very well hitched in the end and suspected by Anne to have ditched the family so she could invent a more suitable background for herself.  I imagined her in furs and outrageous heels, mysterious and alone at the back of the chapel.

In the event she sat at the front.  Cried throughout the ceremony and held the hand of her lovely husband.  Tina, her sister, made a beautiful speech which didn’t pretend things had been better than they were.  She was eloquent about the love she felt for the difficult woman we were there to remember.  Mum was stoical until the very end of her eulogy (“It’s very strange” said Oliver who’d typed it up “but it all seems to be about herself”).  Then she broke down in tears and spoke of how she’d miss her sister.  The music was wonderful, very fitting for a woman who’d spent most of her life alone.  The Ballad of Lucy Jordan etc.

And then the next day I had to pick up some things from Anne’s flat.  Mum and Mike have been helping Tina clear it out (Antonia only wants the jewellery) so I slogged upstairs expecting boxes and mayhem.  But most of the stuff had already gone and the place was empty but for the stain on the carpet where they’d found Anne lying.  

Suddenly, in this sad and empty flat, where my mad aunt had cooked for me and made me laugh, jokes about leaking and crazy relatives felt disrespectful.  Here a woman had died alone.  She was self-opiniated and talkative and mad as a stick but in the end she was a lonely old lady.  And like the rest of us she just wanted to be loved.  So I’ve forgiven mum for the beetroots and Oedipus and all the talking.  She’s only here for another 47½ hours and I don’t know when I’ll see her again after that.

Schapelle Corby

Did you hear the news?  Schapelle’s got depression.  Did you see the frenzy?  Journalists found her at a beauty parlour and mobbed the place.  Did you see her sister?  Mercedes was swinging at the cameras.  And that was just last month’s episode.  Don’t tell me you don’t get Schapelle over there?  It’s my favourite soap opera / new story.

I thought of that opening paragraph on the bus yesterday and had intended to write an amusing account of the Schapelle Corby case and the storm that surrounds her every move.  But I went online this morning to check some facts and now I’m not so sure it’s very funny.  So here instead are some facts.

First of all you need to know about Bali.  This island in Indonesia is best described as Australia’s Ibiza.  Like Ibiza it combines stunning landscapes with the best and worst that tourism can offer.  You can sample expensive spas set high in the jungle where infinity pools hang over deep valleys and quiet staff cater to your every whim.  Or you can kick through streets littered with loud Australians who stumble between dance parties and cockroach-infested hostels.  It’s San Antonio versus Ibiza town.  

On 8^th October 2004 Schapelle Corby, a beautician from Queensland, was arrested at Bali’s Denpasar Airport.  Police had found 4.2kg of cannabis hidden in her boogie-board bag.  From that point on there was little in the Australian papers for a full twelve months but stories about poor Schapelle.  She was perfect newsfodder, her huge blue eyes guaranteed to produce tears as her perfect nails pushed her hair from her face.  Schapelle’s advisors seemed to think a heavy media involvement would be beneficial to her cause and she held frequent press-conferences to state her innocence.  

Oliver and I were on holiday in the Northern Territories at the time of her sentencing in May 05 and like the rest of Australia we managed to find a television so we could watch the verdict.  Schapelle was found guilty and was sentenced to twenty years in jail.  I formed a personal connection with her at that moment as the first thing she had to do was to turn around in the courtroom and ask her mother to shut the hell up.  

Since then the media frenzy has died down but any new information is immediately front page news.  Her brother Clinton led a home-invasion of a known drug dealer.  Schapelle was caught with a mobile phone and had her sentence increased.  A photo showed her sister Mercedes smoking a big fat spliff.  Oh, and everyone knows her dad is a lifetime grower and dealer.  It goes on and on.

Since then of course we’ve also had the Bali nine.  A group of Australians aged between 19 and 28 arrested for smuggling heroine.  The luckier amongst them got life-sentences, the others the death penalty.  All caught because the father of one of them, Lee Rush, informed the Australian police of what his son was planning to do and begged them to intervene.  The Australian police did so by informing the Indonesian police and now Mr Rush is unlikely to ever see his son free again. 

And then there’s Michele Leslie, the model caught with ecstasy in her handbag.  The one who got it right, converted to islam, claimed an addiction, kept a low profile and got away with a three month sentence.  

Now no one thinks any of these people are innocent, but Australians are sickened by the Indonesian justice system and to fully understand why you have to go back to 2002.

In October of that year a bomb went off in a nightclub in the Bali resort of Kuta.  Unsurprisingly the club emptied everyone, injured or otherwise, onto the street.  There, fifteen seconds later, a much larger car bomb exploded.  A total of 202 people died and many others were horrifically burnt.  88 of the dead were Australian (14 or so from my old surf club in Coogee).  Most of them were young and the last pictures of them, smiling and having fun, are heart-breaking.

Abu Bakar Bashir was convicted in 2003 of conspiracy over this bombing and others.  He is widely believed to be the person who conceived and organised the whole thing.  Bashir received a two-and-a-half year sentence.  He was released from custody on 14^th June 2006.  Schapelle should get out in about twelve years.  So you can you see why Australians are angry.  And why somehow Schapelle’s story isn’t so funny any more.

The day the pope got in the way

Surry Hills – the suburb where we live - is in lockdown.  Now when I say “suburb” I don’t mean it in a Margot and Jerry way.  It’s very central I’ll have you know and ever so hip.  Full of bijou restaurants and shops selling stuff no one needs.  But in Australia everyone lives in a suburb.  Sydney itself, the narrow strip of skyscrapers between the harbour and Central Station, is called a suburb.  Which perhaps says more about this place than any number of letters I could write.

Anyway, Surry Hills is in lockdown.  Two of its main thoroughfares, Foveaux and Bourke, have been shut off entirely.  Those foolish enough to drive this weekend have been funnelled into Crown and as I type are sitting in their cars going nowhere.  Helicopters hover low in the sky and groups of policeman are hanging around on street corners.

Devonshire, the street which runs from our place to Central Station, is also blocked off, crowded with water trucks leaking all over the tarmac.  This morning as I smugly left my car at home I asked one of the council workers if a pipe had burst.

“No pipe” he said “Just pope”.

The water vans were there to fill the huge plastic barricades which ran the length of Devonshire.  Did you know they are filled with water to keep them solid and emptied again when they need to be moved?  Well now you do.  And the reason for the barricades?  For the lockdown of Surry Hills and half of Sydney this weekend?  The council man had it right.  The pope’s here and God it’s getting annoying.

July 17^th – 21^st inclusive are World Youth Day (named by somebody who can’t count I’d guess).and apparently this a big deal in catholic circles.  We were told it would be the “biggest youth event in the world ever” but that didn’t sound such a big deal.  After all, what were they comparing it to?  And we scoffed at the idea that hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would make the trip to Sydney.  I mean, that pope, he’s not so big any more is he?  

Oh how out of touch we atheists can become.  60,000 people are planning to attend the Friday night mass on the harbour.  250,000 will be at the weekend services at Randwick Race Course.  And as far as I can tell the vast majority of them are indeed youths and more surprisingly actually from all over the world.  Mexico, Chile, Croatia, Austria, the US, the UK, Germany, France, India, Guam, Senegal, I could go on.  Thousands and thousands of young people everywhere you go, all of them singing and dancing and playing the guitar badly.

And you can’t help but like them.  Admittedly they’re clogging the transport system and they have terrible skin, but they’re all so happy in their matching rucksacks, so friendly and optimistic.  Great hordes of them have been crossing my beach all week like a disorganised but victorious army, calling out and challenging each other to games of volleyball or swims in the icy water.   

Some locals have objected to the $150 million the NSW government has put into this jamboree but when you see them all here from all over the planet, smiling and spending money you can’t help but be uplifted.

At least that’s how my thinking went for a while.  But then, on Thursday evening, the pope got in my way.  

Every afternoon I train for four or so hours on Manly Beach.  By the time I’m on my way home I’m exhausted, covered in sand and - at this time of the year – cold.  All I want to do is get the ferry to Circular Quay and jump on my bus down to the Hills.   Which is easy enough if some popstar in a white dress isn’t planning to drive past your bus stop.  

I got off the ferry to find thousands of people lining both sides of the road screaming at an approaching cavalcade.  Deep breath, I’ll get a train.  Except, as I queued for my ticket, the station suddenly closed because the platform was too full.  Deeper breath, I’ll walk.  Oh, except they’ve closed off all the roads because Bride of Chucky is doing his drive past right now.

“You could try and flag down a helicopter” suggested a policeman before retreating from the look I gave him.

The worst moment was when I walked from the place where  the popemobile was about to drive to where it had just driven.  Four thousand catholics turned as one and ran past me to get a second look.  And there’s me carrying ten volleyballs.  As you can imagine, this was just about efuckingnough.  How dare this stupid man get in my way?!  We’re trying to run a city here not a cult.  And have none of these people noticed that this stupid man won’t allow condoms in AIDS-ridden Africa?  Or that he thinks that my lifestyle if evil and that half my friends should go to hell?  Or that the insitution which he leads has caused systematic child abuse and ruined hundreds of thousands of lives?  How dare a man whose only redeeming feature is that he actually looks evil tell me how to live my life?

Oliver designed a t-shirt which read “World Youth Day 2008, I was touched by a priest down under” and oh I wish I was wearing one just then.  “Oh” I shouted “oh, you mindless idiots, did you hear about why the mass is being held at the race course?  Because it’s the only place in Sydney where you can legally ride a three year old!”  

Except I didn’t of course.  I just fought through the crowds and once they opened the barricades somehow caught a miracle taxi home.  Maybe God was feeling protestant that day.  Anyway, there are still quite a few pilgrims milling about, still singing and carrying crosses.  And I don’t mind them, so young and guilt ridden, so malleable and out of tune.  But I’ll never, never forgive the pope.