like time – only more so …
Archive for June, 2008
The blighty fund …
Jun 30th
In two weeks time we’ll have lived in Oz for two years. Like many migrants, this milestone has caused us to take stock of our lives and reflect on the huge changes we’ve been through. One decision we have made as a result of that contemplation is that we’ll fly back to the UK for a visit in 2009 – probably around July/August. We plan to go for three or four weeks, work committments permitting. This year we’ll be getting both Liz’s parents – and her big sister coming to stay here – so it’ll be nice to see them back on home turf again. To that end we have set up a saving account at the local building society and will save the airfares over the course of the next year.
Kung Fu Panda …
Liz gets a bit pissed off with me, because I usually manage to download a DVD rip of a movie two weeks before she’s even noticed it’s on cinematic release. So when she sees a film she thinks Jack would like to see, she bans me from getting it until we’ve had a chance to watch it on the big screen. And so it was with Kung Fu panda. Liz wanted to watch it at the cinema in Swindon – a move I resisted because it has excessively cramped seating in its smaller screens. Not fancying a drive up to Shellharbour, I gave in and bought three tickets for us all from the kiosk, on the way back from a customer.
We got to the cinema to find a small queue waiting for Screen 1. When we filed in i was pleased to discover a middle row with more legroom than the backseat in an Audi A8. Better still, the movie rocked. Pixar really are at the top of their game – nobody comes close to them. They manage to get just the right balance between entertainment for kids and entertainment for grown-ups. It was about half way through the film before I said, here – isn’t that Lovejoy’s voice? Sure enough it was – Ian McShane voicing the bad guy Tai Lung. The animation was something else and the screenplay was top notch too.
Some great lines in the movie – but I particularly liked this one:
Tigress: It is said that the Dragon Warrior can go for months without eating, surviving on the dew of a single ginko leaf and the energy of the universe.
Po: Then I guess my body doesn’t know I’m the Dragon Warrior yet. It’s gonna take a lot more than dew, and, uh, universe juice.
Husky …
On Saturday Liz suggested we go do something. I suggested we drive to Jervis Bay (only 30 minutes from here) and so we set off. As we approached Swindon, however, Liz remembered reading about a cool circular walk in park land just on the edge of Swindon. So we diverted to the river and followed the signs around ‘Bens Walk’.
This rock way marks the turn of the looping walk
It’s obviously a well loved and well used walk, but it takes you through some very nice countryside along a creek off the Broughton River. There’s a neat set of steps cut into the rocks strewn across the riverbed and a neat cutting through ‘Hanging Rock’ on the way back up to the carpark.
We still had a couple of hours of daylight left in the day so we decided to drive down to Huskisson in Jervis Bay. Despite the fact that we’re now approaching mid-winter, it was a lovely warm day with temperatures up around the 21c mark. When we got there, Caherine asked to see Vincentia, which is Huskisson’s sister town. It’s a town that’s comprised of a huge number of holiday homes – yes some people live there, retirees and the occasional family, but I don’t think I’d be exagerating if I said that about 2/3rds of the houses looked like holiday homes/lets.
Another horrible winter’s day in NSW
On the way home we stopped off in the town centre for some booze and noticed a couple of very interesting restaurants – a mexican and a stonegrill. We plan to get my parents to babysit for us soon and try one/both of them out.
Moon-faced bint …
Jun 26th
I love this country, I really do – but I also find myself scratching my head at some of the goings-on here. I’ve touched on the way that junk food is revered here, the way a ballet of red and yellow takes places the evening before bin day and the way all the pie shops are ‘famous’. The latest thing that’s got my eyebrows creased is the spurious (and often frankly bizarre) use of sports people to endorse commercial products.
Now don’t get me wrong – I know that in blighty there’s a long line of dubious TV adverts stretching back to the dawn of civilisation that featured athletes and sports people of one persausion or another. Henry Copper used to splash it all over, Ian Botham impressed us all with his concrete-solid bowel movements thanks to Shreddies and Gary Linneker was a long-standing ‘mouthpiece’ for Walkers healthy crisps. But here they’ve taken things to a whole new level.
Now leaving aside for a moment those adverts that feature sports people who might feasibly get recognised somewhere other than Australia (step forward Shane Warne) and passing swiftly by adverts that feature sports people advertising sporting events that they’ll be playing in, we come to the world of the D-list sports celebrity endorsement.
There are a couple of adverts that caught my eye recently. The first one is an advert for Nestles ‘Feeling Good’. This is one of those mock informational adverts where some cashed up medical professional throws their morals out of the window in the name of advertising dollars. The particular advert in heavy rotation at the moment features a moon-faced bint talking to a doctor who himself appears to have been beaten savagely about the head with the ugly stick. They appear to be suggesting that coffee’s good for you and should be consumed whenever possible. And who is the moon-faced bint – none other than a netball player. WTF? Who they going to use next, the Australian Indoor Tiddlywink Champion? And let’s not even go near the whole ‘Nestle make blood-sucking corporate leeches look like saints’ issue.
Woo – where do I sign Mitsubishi? It was her teeth
that swung it for me!
There’s also an advert (not sure if it’s local or national) that features a couple of members of the Australian basketball team promoting Mitsubishi cars. Now I genuinely pity the poor bastard of a director that had to come up with some interesting way of using these anonymous sporting zeroes, but dear god – could he not have found something slighty better than the athletes doing some gentle stretches on the bonnet of a Mitsubishi car? Because, you know, the thing that’s going to turn me on to Mitsubishi’s range of motor vehicles is some masculine looking female athlete stretching her calf muscle on the wheel arch of a Pajero.
Billy Eliot …
Jack has a new pasttime to replaced the team sports he decided he wanted no part of. He has taken up dancing. Now Jack has always liked to bust a move – it’s all we can do to see the TV for his little body-popping body gyrating around in front of the TV everytime some high-energy dance track blasts out of an advert. But it occured to Liz that it might be an idea to channel all that nervous energy in a slightly more disciplined way than random spasms in our living room.
So she took him to a proper breakdancing class at a local dance school the other night. And, surprise surprise – he loved it. Liz reckoned she had a tear in her eye at one point when the dance teacher invited them all to go into the middle and do whatever they liked. Jack rose to the challenge and bopped like only an unco-ordinated six year old with only the shakiest of understandings of beat and rhytymn can.
Fat … but happy
Jun 24th
I mentioned a report last week that showed that Australia was the most obese nation in the world. Newspapers and other media outlets all over the world covered it. Well – turns out that the story, much like that one the other week about the ‘lost’ Brazilian tribe – isn’t actually correct. An article on the Nature.com website explains that not only is the whole story factually incorrect, but that Australia still has some way to go before it’s as chunky as America. It should also be pointed out that the survey uses the extremely crude BMI measurement – a largely meaningless assessment of someone’s weight. How meaningless? According to BMI ratings – Matt Damon (he of the Bourne Identity) is obese. Oh and Brad Pitt too. And George Clooney. Need I say more?
Matt Damon – lard arse
As interesting as the media reaction to this country’s fat epidemic was (and I’m not saying we’re not turning slowly oval incidentally) – what puzzled me was something else. Just two days after the ‘fat bomb’ report came out – another from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) was released which showed that at 81.4 years, Australians have the second highest average life expectancy in the world. Second only to Japan, in fact. So – despite the fact that we’ll all soon need industrial grade Segways to go to the bathroom – we’ll outlive most of you other fuckers by some margin.
I were right about about that saddle though …
Jun 23rd
One area in which Australia is sadly lacking is public access to land. In the UK, where public rights of way evolved over hundreds of years, there’s hardly any field or meadow you can’t strike out across if the mood takes you. Not so here … or at least not in populated areas here. Admittedly I have several national parks nearby where I can walk, bike, ride or drive and admittedly one of those parks alone is about the same size as Wales – but access in this immediate area is a bit more problematic.
We take our dog Kali to the local beach here. Strictly speaking we’re supposed to restrict ourselves to a section of beach to the north of the surf club – but we don’t – and neither does anybody else. We also take her to the river, particularly on windy days when the banks of the Shoalhaven provide welcome protection. If we fancy taking her for a run-around in a field then we have to drive to Gilmore where there’s an off-leash area up on Black Head, or to Sandy Point where there’s a very popular dog-walking field.
Despite the fact that the Sandy Point dog-walking field is incredibly well used – it is largely free of dogshit. Pretty much every dog walker I see there has a plastic bag with them, with which to collect bum nuggets and warm their hands on colder days. There is no doubt whatsoever that Australians take far more pride in their surroundings than the British, who (on the whole) will let their dog shit anywhere it chooses.
Something else you don’t see here is the old gift-wrapped turd in a tree. When we lived in the UK, we used to take our dog along the cycle path and at regular intervals you’d see a small white bag hanging from a fence, bush or tree - a bag that contained a dog turd. This behaviour always confused me. I mean – if you’re going to go to the trouble of picking up your dog’s shit – then what’s the point of leaving it hanging on a bush where it’ll take many years to degrade? Are they anti-establishment rebels who cock a thumb at ‘the man’ by sticking to the letter of the law by picking up their dog’s doo-doo – and then hang it for all to see on a nearby railing. Everyone would be better off if they left it on the ground where it’d be gone in a couple of days.
New South Whales …
It was while we were on our last dog-walk up in the Sandy Point headland that we discovered that the council had installed a cool new whale watching platform. Up on the cliffs above Sandy Point is a great place to spot whales because it jutts out over the inland shelf and looks onto deeper water.
Both humpback and southern wright whales migrate up the coast, past us during June and early July. In fact there’s one whale in particular – a white humpback called Migaloo who has been spotted every year since 1991. He heads north to warm tropical waters with the rest of his species – or at least those ones that the ignorant Japanese whalers didn’t slaughter in the Antarctic circle.
Whilst humpbacks and southern wrights are the most populous species of whale in this area, you can also see minke, blue, sei, fin, orca , sperm, pygmy and brydes whales. Just down the coast from us in Jervis Bay is a very popular whale watching boat that offers you a free return cruise if you don’t get to see whales during the trip. We haven’t been on that one yet, but we did go on their dolphin watch cruise which we thought was excellent until we discovered that we could have just stood on the beach and watched about 80 of them frollicking in the surf.
It shouldn't happen to a vet …
Jun 21st
The dog and the cat were both due their injections at the start of the year, but for one reason or another we let it slide. Well, doing a bit of work for our local vet I was reminded of this situation and we arranged to get them both fully up to date with all the appropriate bits and pieces. They were booked in at 10:00am and as always we were running around the house still getting dressed at 9:55. To make matters worse, we didn’t have a cat box for Mukka, so Liz just picked him up and put him under her arm.
When we got the in the car, the dog was (of course) fine, but the cat didn’t like it all. In fact, when I started the engine, he let rip with his arse glands, slashed at Liz’s wrist and hid in the back with the dog. The smell was, as you can probably imagine, divine. So we got an old towel and totally immobilised the cat and his stinking arse and drove gingerly to the vets. Ironically when we were there, the cat was fine with the injections, but the dog put up a bit of a fight and bent one of the needles inserted in the scruff of her neck during a struggle.
I quite enjoyed my time working in the vets. I was there most days for about three week in all and I came to the conclusion that many pet owners are strange fucking bastards. There was one old lady who used to come to the vets every week trying to get free consultations – if the vet baulked at her request she made noises about getting her (young) cat put to sleep. When the vet pointed out that euthanising a cat cost $120 she soon changed her mind – not that he’d have done so (as he told me later) – he just did it to get rid of her. Then there was the guy who rode around with his tiny dog (in a fetching woollen jersey) in a plastic box on the back of his bicycle. Or the lady who came in to get her chicken to put to sleep (!!). Or the blind bloke with a blind dog.
Morning coffee…
I’m such a creature of habit that it drives Liz stark bollock staring mad. I hate anything messing with my schedule and go out of my way to avoid anything that might upset it. So it is with the morning school run. Most mornings I drive Jack to school in Broughton because i’m usually headed that way anyway. And when I do drop him off, I always go to the Emporium cafe in Barry and get a large latte for me and a small capuccino for Liz. So as you can probably imagine, the people in the cafe have got to know me quite well.
The other day I was saying to Greg who makes my morning coffee that they need a light takeaway snack on the menu. I said that I didn’t want a wrap or a full English, but something you could stick in a bag like a hot croissant. I went in a couple of days later and, with a flourish, Greg produced a hot cheese and ham croissant from underneath the counter. I laughed and thanked him and told him to get it on the menu. He said he’d love to put it on the menu but the store’s owners said he couldn’t – no doubt because it would place them in the same socio-economic strata as the bakery next door – when in reality they have a very carefully manufactured upmarket image. Best coffee in town mind you – croissants or not.
2 fat 2 proud …
So it’s official – Australia is the most obese nation on the planet. 
Can’t say I’m hugely surprised by the findings. I always thought us Brits had a lousy diet until I emigrated – I was amazed at the way junk food still ruled here. In the UK, for instance, McDonalds has a slightly shonky reputation – nobody likes to be spotted eating there. Over here however, they’re just a well respected and much loved eatery – along with Burger King and the other peddlers of transfatty cardiac killers.There’s a jokey kids rhyme reportedly chanted by bored sprogs during long car journeys in Oz that goes like this – “Bush. Tree. Bush. Tree. Bush. Tree. KFC!” The national diet seems to be based around KFC, McDonalds and the local ‘famous’ pie shop. They honestly can’t get enough of it. I was totally amazed by the fact that McDonalds sponsor the certificates the kids get for doing well at nippers down at the surf club – talk about cross purposes – the message seems to be – “Well done for doing something active kid, now get down to McDonalds and gorge yourself on stuff that’ll undo all your hard work.” Mad.
And that’s not to say that there aren’t alternatives, because for the most part there are. For instance, when we get our traditional Friday night takeout, I observe first-hand the Australian obsession with artery hardening shit. The noodle place where we get out takeaway (all fresh, cooked in front of you, no additives or transfat) is right next door to Dominos. But you have to fight your way past people queueing up for their pizzas to get in the noodle bar’s door. Up the road from there, Pizza Hut does a similary roaring trade – and all those shops are handily situated on the same street as Blockbuster and Video Ezy, so you can get a nice DVD to watch while your arse piles on the pounds.
Mind you – don’t think I help the statistics when I moved here and I’m not averse to a Sausage and Egg McMuffin, so put me firmly in hypocrites corner. 
Upgraded …
It’s now coming up on two years since we moved here (I plan to do a big blog entry about that in July) and that means that many of the things we own are now two years old. We sold most of what we owned in the UK and bought new here and that included a new laptop computer for Liz. Can’t quite believe her Vaio is two years old – it still looks great and runs perfectly – though it has had a new keyboard after she poured coffee all over it. Anyway – she has quite simply outgrown her laptop.
She’s been getting increasingly frustrated with her PC – with the speed things take to open and the fact that lots of parts of the operating system are broken. It’s not a reflection on the laptop, but on how hard she pushes things. So I decided to liberate some funds from a recent well-paid job and build her a new work PC. One of the advantages of being in the PC business is that I picked up the parts on Friday from my wholesaler and, paid considerably less than you’d be charged on the ‘highstreet’.
Her new system comprises an Asus P5K-VM motherboard, Intel Quadcore Q6600 CPU, 4Gb DDR2 Kingston RAM, 500Gb Samsung HD, Asus EN8600GT Magic graphics card, PSU and a nice new black case to house it in. Total cost to me $740 (£350 in old money). I was very impressed by some of the new features they’re building into motherboards for the new Intel CPUs. In particular little touches like the easy case connector, where you attach all the leads to a tiny breakout board and then attach that to the motherboard in one go. I put it all together, fired it up and it worked perfectly from the first moment.
Of course Liz finds it hard to worked up about the technology – but she’s very pleased to have a PC that can now cope with having most of the Adobe CS3 suite open at once (!!!), along with several browsers, email, notepad, screen ruler and Skype. Before I handed it over, I installed Crysis on it and was pleasantly surprised how it ran, considering I didn’t spec Liz’s machine for gaming – but for office work. My system’s two years old too (my old one got trashed during shipping) and I plan to substantially upgrade it next month. Can’t wait.
Choons …
Love this track by the brilliantly named Dan le Sac VS Scroobius Pip, which includes the following lyric – “Thou shalt not think that any man over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a paedophile – some people are just nice.” Enjoy Thou Shalt Always Kill.