Archive for January, 2007

Well blimey – don’t know what’s come over us all lately, but we’ve actually ventured out of the house and out of the town and actually done some of the things we said we said we were moving to Australia for. Don’t know whether the impending start of big school for Jack or the start of work for me has spurred us on, but we have got off our collective fat arses.

Our first jolly, yesterday, was a canoe safari. The surf school up the road from here in Gilmore, also operate various other summer activities, one of which is said canoe trip. So we phoned up and signed up. We arrived at the allotted location and introduced ourselves to our guide, Kieran. The other family who’d booked in then arrived and Kieran ran through the safety procedures, drills, strokes, entry and exit techniques and various other REALLY FUCKING BORING things for about 35 minutes. Jesus Christ the carpenter, Kieran REALLY needs to work on his delivery – I’d zoned out after two minutes. I mean, it’s an open-top style canoe and the river is mostly 18 inches deep, with the odd ‘danger’ section of about two feet. Capsive techniques? Ermm … stand up, turn your canoe the right way up and get back in it. So anyway, eventually the intro finishes and we’re actually allowed into the canoes – so then Kieran makes us paddle upstream for a bit, to check our technique. Only thing is, that stretch of the river is fucking teaming with families splashing about – hordes of little kids in snorkels just waiting to be plouged down by a fucking great canoe. So we pick our way through the tourists and get plenty of harsh looks along the way and then Kieran decrees that we can head downstream. Hurrah. So we go downstream – and everyone’s so bored that a splashing fight ensues – the other family all deliberately capsive and even Jack is struck by the tedium, so we let him get out and walk alongside the boat in the middle of the trecherous river. 90 minutes later, my arse is totally numb and the boredom is starting to overwhelm even the otherwise unbeatably upbeat Liz. Sheesh it was dull. Jack enjoyed himself though, which is something.

So our next adventure took place today, when we headed over to the local waterpark – Jamberoo. We’d arranged to meet Lyndall and her two kids and her new boyfriend Darren at the park. We arrived at about 9:45 and made our way inside – first impressions were good, nice and clean, lots going on – shame about the six trillion flies though. We found some lockers (cool pin system on them so you can return as often as you like) and dumped the stuff. We had a quick explore before Lyndall and co arrived and I sneaked in a quick go on one of the waterslides. We hooked up with everyone else and staked out a couple of lounge chairs by Billabong Bay – the kiddies area. Liz suggested that Darren and I try a couple of the more grown up rides, so we had a go on the helter-skelter style slide (pretty tame) and the flume style slide (much better). We headed back and all made our way to ‘Rapid River’ and Liz, Lyndall and the kids had some fun while Darren and I watched the bags. Then it was lunchtime. I have to say, I thought it was great the way the park encouraged you to do your own thing food-wise -there were plenty of park eateries (clean ones too), but they also laid on big barbie areas with loads of tables where you could eat your own grub. We’d come prepared with eskies of sandwiches and so got stuck in.

Everyone satisfied, we decided to give the chairlift a go. 40 minute queue for that one, but it was worth the wait, you get swept in leisurely style up the hill to commanding views of the countryside all the way to the coast. At the top you then toboggan down. Jack and I shared a trolley and he even let me go above walking pace a couple of times. After a bit more splashing about in various pools we all agreed it was time to go, so we cleaned out the locker and headed for home. I was very impressed by the park and the way it was run – not so impressed by the lardy Aussie kids I saw all day. Now I’m not in the running for slimmer of the year myself, but I can tell you one thing – at the age of 8, I did not look like some obese little spud. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many flabby, overweight, depressing looking kids – young boys in board shorts with flabby guts hanging over the top of them, pre-pubescent girls in bikinis with wobbly thighs, fat arses and creases of flab disguised as girl-boobs. Yea, I know – if you got a load of British kids together in a waterpark you’d probably see exactly the same thing, only in pale white rather than tanned brown … doesn’t make it right though. And there is no way on earth we’re ever going to let Jack get like that.

So there we are – lots of activities to accompany the hot weather we’ve been having lately. Tommorow we all plan to do absolutely fuck all.

So it’s early morning and I’m lying in bed (like you do), just starting to regain consciousness. I do that squinty eyed check on the time on the bedside clock (funny story about that – I’ll tell you in a minute) and ascertain that it’s 8:00am. I look at the curtains and see bright light creeping round the edges (still get a kick out of that) and then I do my usual morning wife check (roll over, casually feel her up, get a bollocking) and her side of the bed’s empty. So I sit up and see her putting her dressing gown on and hear the joyful melody that is Jack, crying, in the background. Liz opens the bedroom door and asks Jack what the matter is (mum’s do that far more tolerantly than 8:00am dads do, let’s face it). So back comes the response, “My Snakes and Ladders dice is down the toilet.” Well, obviously, I think to myself – early morning tears are nearly always about items of gaming apparatus down the shitter. So Liz peers down the bog and there, nestling in the curve of a perfectly formed turd, was Jack’s dice. Jack asked Liz to get it out and she said, “I am NOT putting my hand down that toilet with your poo.” Jack looks crestfallen, so Liz says, “It’s your poo – why don’t you put YOUR hand down there and get it,” to which Jack simply says, “Urrrgh … no!” So then we turned to a discussion of how said dice got down the bog in the first place. Liz asks Jack how it got down there and he says, “It fell down there,” so she says, “How? Did you stick it up your bum?” To which Liz gets the reply, “Mummy!!” So anyway – the poo and the dice were flushed. And so began another day in paradise.

It being the summer holidays here, Jack is at home with us all day (until he starts big school at the end of January) and so we have to find ways of amusing him. This summer it hasn’t been too bad, because my brother and his girlfriend, who took a real shine to Jack (and vice versa) have been on hand for beach and river walks, rock-pooling, drives to look-outs, shopping expeditions, ferry trips, days at the aquarium, days at the zoo, trips up Centrepoint and, of course, extended splashabouts in the pools (my parents and ours). It helps that my brother Jim is a scuba-diving instructer (nearly as cool as a dustbin man in Jack’s universe) and Jim’s been teaching him scuba pool entry, scuba swimming and all sorts of stuff. Unfortunately my brother returns to Thailand on Sunday and he’s spent his last few days here doing essential shopping trips and stuff. So Jack and I spent a few hours in our pool, then we had some lunch and then we went shopping (essential supplies for a full-on roast turkey nosh-up on Satuday at my parents). We got back and Liz, going more than a little stir-crazy, suggested we take the pooch for a walk, so headed over to Sandy Point. There’s a great walk there (though the tide has to be out) where you walk round the headland at the southern end of Werri beach to the boat harbour and then return over the top of the cliffs, cutting through the cemetary. The wind was gusting about 50kph, the leading edge of the storm front due to hit us later, but it was a great walk – just the right length and being in a loop, no pissing about retracing your steps to get back to the car.

Anyway – about my clock radio. I bought this Sony Dream Machine (yea I know – pretty fucking grandiose name for an alarm clock) decades ago. I got it for one simple reason – it had the ability to tune into the atomic clock in Germany via shortwave radio and make sure that it was always accurate. It would even, I was promised by the salesman in the Sony shop, automatically change to daylight savings for me. So I bought it and you know what? It never, ever, ever, set its time automatically. I mean, it kept pretty good time, but it never did its party piece and tuned into the incredible atomic clock in Munich. Every now and then I’d set the time incorrectly deliberately to see if it would sort itself out, but it never did. That is (you’ve guessed haven’t you) until we moved to Australia. Once we’d moved into our house and unpacked all the shipping, I just took the clock upstairs and plugged it in, thinking to myself I’d set the time later. I forget all about this until the next day, when I wake up and check the time and… FUCK ME… it’s set itself! Quite what it’s problem for the last 15 years was I don’t know, maybe Uri Geller was one of our removalists, maybe it feels a bit closer to home here, but whatever the reasons, I’m glad my silver dream machine is finally doing its thing.

As is traditional, we had a pretty damned boozie new years eve. Everyone descended on my parent’s gaff and we wasted no time in consuming vast quantities of beer and fizzy wine. About 11 o’clock, my parents and my big sister and he old man went to bed (bloody light-weights) and Liz and Jim and Shawna and myself went into town. We headed over to the Broughton Hotel, where we drank ginger beer and shandy until two in the morning at which point we staggered home. Everyone was still awake though, so we hammered a bottle of Smirnoff until about four in the morning, at which point Liz pointed out that Jack would be up in about three hours and we really ought to get some kip.

To say we felt shit on New Years day would, of course, be something of an understatement, but hey, it’s traditional. I don’t suppose many people made it much further than the couch all day. Given the amount of booze I’d had, the BIL had to drive my car home for me – I supect I didn’t reach legal blood/alcohol levels again until the 2nd of January.

Anyway – it’s the long summer holidays here and so we have the pleasure of Jack kicking around the house all day. I took him out for a bike ride yesterday and, as I followed him slowly down the road on my bike, noticed that the trainer wheels on his bike were a couple of revolutions short of exploding, leading to an inevitable and undoubtedly bloody accident as the wheel-less stabiliser dug into the tarmac. So I suggested we head home. Once safely back I told Jack that, since his stabilisers were knackered, he wouldn’t be able to ride his bike again until he mustered up the courage to ride without ‘em. So he said he wanted to try it there and then. So we wheel his bike out to the back garden and I give him this really long pep talk about how it was okay to fall off, that I’d fallen off lots when learning to ride a bike and that there was no failure in falling off. He seems cool with that. So I sit him on the bike and tell him to just coast down the garden and not worry about pedalling. So he say’s ‘ok’. I give him a little push to get him going … and he pedals off, down the garden, turns the corner at the bottom, comes back up, stops and asks me if he can go to the sports field now on account of there’s a lot more space there. So off to the sports field we go and within five minutes he’s bombing it down the slopes at the side of the field and generally careering about like he’s Lance Armstrong.

Tommorow we have our first visitor from England – a very old friend of mine, who I haven’t seen for about 20 years. He made contact again after Liz tracked him down for my 40th b’day in October and emailed to let us know that he was out here for the new year and wanted to drop by and say hello. On Friday my parents are taking Jack to the local aircraft museum and Saturday we’re all heading over to Jamberoo water-park (‘where you control the action’) for some fun on the water slides. Our little town is positively heaving with holidaymakers at the moment – seems a bit weird to be honest – all these strangers at ‘my’ beach.

Speaking of beaches, I took my brother boogie-boarding the other day and made a right twat of myself (yea I know, alert the media!). There was a 5m swell so we headed down to Gilmore knowing that the waves are that bit smaller there. We get out the back okay and I pass up a couple of foamy waves. Then this big fucker of a wave rears up and Jim, being handily situated at its southern break point gets on it and rides it all the way to the shore. So I sit there and fuck me if two bloody four metre waves don’t come in and break early, right on my head. So I do the old washing machine rinse cycle, pop up and get twatted again in the same way. So I decided to cut my losses and get the fuck into the shore where I could ride foamy waves more in keeping with my complete lack of talent. I know my limitations and I don’t think Jaws or Pipeline are in any danger of being conquered by me in this lifetime.