Archive for November, 2008

And the living is, ermm, considerably compromised by the credit crunch, thanks for asking. But that’s the fringe benefit to living in Oz – you put up with all the same shit you endure in the UK (or indeed any other country) – but at least there’s usually a nice warm sunny day round the corner to take the edge of things.

Yes, summer’s arrived down under, the temperatures are in the mid ’20s, the skies are blue and the Pacific ocean is a lovely 19 degrees. Jack has just three weeks left of his second year at Broughton Public, before the long summer holidays unfold and we have the pleasure of his company for six weeks.

This Christmas we will be going for dinner round at my parents, with my big sister and BIL in attendance. We have all sworn off the elaborate lunch and will be having a nice simple roast chook, roast spuds, roast vegies and bread sauce imported from the UK on account of they’ve never heard of it here. It might sound a bit sad and ‘unchristmasy’ but we’ve also all agreed not to bother buying each other presents, with the exception to the rule being Jack. So hopefully I won’t end up with a horrible $10 bottle of musky man scent good only for attracting voles and other woodland folk and LIz won’t be forced to gush enthusiastically over a blouse so eye-bleedingly loud, that Freddy Mercury and John Inman’s lovechild would consider it over the top. Hurrah.

An evening with friends
Saturday night we were invited round to a friends. Pete is separated from his missus and lives in a flat overlooking Broughton high street. He had his son Ben that night and the plan was to put the Polar Express on his bad-ass 60″ telly, while we sipped a few cool ones on his balcony and watched the world go by.

The kids had a rare old time, playing on the games consoles, colouring in, playing Pokemon and running around with water pistols. Other friends of Pete were there too – a copper called Chris and his missus Sara – along with Martin and Tracy and their two kids. We were even treated to a nice electrical storm that kicked off over the ocean.

We were chatting away about this and that and I mentioned how I’d lived most of my adult life in the Southwest of the UK, where there was a very strong West Indian community that had produced a lot of the music I loved most (c/o the Bristol Massive). So Pete says to me, “What do you call black fellas over there, anyway?” So I think about this for a second and then say, “British.”

Patrol
Our day at the beach again today – me, Richard and Matt keeping the beach here in Barefoot Bay safe for all the holidaymakers. I overslept a bit this morning and managed to miss the club swim, which was a shame as since I started getting in shape, I don’t need to put myself on the Oxyviva afterwards.

The IRB was already on the beach and since Richard and Matt were busy doing the club board race, I did the logging on. At the start of a patrol you have several logs to fill out – a Patrol log, a Radio log and a Vehicle log. There’s also an incident log for detailing anything that happens during the patrol.

On the patrol log you list who’s in the patrol, times of arrival and departure, weather conditions, numbers on the beach and what the ocean’s doing. Then you get on the VHF radio and log on for the day with VMR (Volunteer Marine Rescue – our equivalent of the coastguard) on channel 90. Then you get on the MW radio and call up Surfcom, let ‘em know your patrol’s started, how many you have on patrol and if the boat’s available. Then you break out the handheld radios, stick ‘em in their waterproof housings and check they’re working on Channel 2 (the beach channel).

Radios and logs out of the way, you get the two flags out (the Australian flag and the Surf Lifesaving flag) and hoist ‘em up the flagpole. The you stick the loudspeakers on the side of the building and check the shark siren’s working (always gets a good response that one). Then you settle down on a stool with the marine binoculars and get people watching.

We all take it in turns to man the radio room (there always has to be at least one person up there for obvious reasons) and to sit on the beach. Today was a perfect 26 degrees and there was a nice swell rolling in without too much wind.

I spent a lot of the patrol in the water and clocked up my first rescue of the season. A flash rip blew up right next to where a group of five young lads (about 8 years old) were jumping around in the dumpers. As I looked over I noticed that one of ‘em was out of his depth and swimming towards the beach – but travelling backwards – he was slapbang in the flash rip. So I swam over to him and asked him if he was alright. He said he couldn’t get anywhere and was starting to get paniced, so I basically brought him in and carried him up the beach. His mum came over and thanked me and before they left the beach, the kid came over and said thanks too.

It was nobody’s fault really, that the kid got caught – just one of those things that can happen on beaches. The flash rip appeared very fast and the mum, who was being very vigilant, had no time to react. I happened to be in the water and fairly close by at the time – but it just shows you how fast things can change. The flash rip appeared right between the flags, so obviously as soon as everyone was accounted for, we moved the flags and re-set the beach.

If you’re new to beaches and aren’t sure about where it’s safe to swim then here’s a brief heads-up. Firstly, if the beach is patrolled, obviously swim between the flags – that’s the area the lifesavers will be concentrating on. Secondly – the tell tale sign of a rip is a calm patch between breaking waves and usually stuff on the surface of the water – sand, bubbles flowing back in a stream, seaweed etc. So don’t just go charging into the sea – particularly if the waves are up a bit. Have a look at the way the water’s moving and then pick a landmark of some sort on the beach, that you can use to track where the current’s pushing you. If you get caught in a rip and can’t make headway to the beach – swim parallel to the shore and then swin in – rips and generally fairly narrow jets of water that are easy to escape if you don’t panic.

The strange case of the man, the pasta jar, the penis and the Jack Russell at Nobby’s Beach …
This must rank as one of the funniest news stories ever. I include it, verbatim from the Sydney Morning Herald.

A man caught near Nobbys Beach with his penis in a pasta sauce jar led police on a 20 kmh car chase, Newcastle Local Court heard yesterday. Police drew their weapons when they suspected Keith Roy Weatherley, 46, was armed. Instead, they found him partially clothed with his genitals in a jar, a police statement said.

Weatherley, of Promontory Way, North Arm Cove, attracted attention parked in a no-stopping zone before noon on October 26. Police believed Weatherley was doing something with his hands in his lap and thought that he might have a weapon. Weatherley saw the police and drove away, despite them flashing
their lights.

The chase lasted five to 10 minutes, with a top speed of just 20 kmh, before Weatherley was stopped at Centenary Drive, Newcastle. He refused to leave the car. Four officers used batons and capsicum spray to remove him. They found a 750-millilitre jar around his penis and noted that Weatherley attempted to continue “pleasuring himself in between bouts of wrestling”.

A search of his car uncovered pornography, a home-made sex aid, women’s stockings and a Jack Russell terrier.Weatherley pleaded guilty to offensive behaviour, resisting police and disobeying a police direction. Magistrate Elaine Truscott asked Weatherley, who represented himself, why he behaved the way he did. He said he resisted police because he was trying to make himself “decent”. He was fined $600 for offensive behaviour and convicted of the
other two offences without further action taken.

I promise I didn’t make it up – the original’s here.

My favourite television show on air at the moment, is Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
I keep a stash of Arnott’s Kingstons in my glove box.
When a good song comes up in my iTunes rotation I sing the words in an over-the-top and camp way, like a vaudeville tranny, using a pen as a microphone.
Up until the age of about 12 I used to go to mass (Catholic) about four times a week and had every intention of entering the seminary.
I drive too fast (though never in built-up areas) – but have only been caught for speeding twice – once in the UK (speed trap in Bath) and once in Australia (speed camera in Batemans Bay).
Thus far I have been arrested in five different countries – the list does not include Australia.
At the age of 11 I was interviewed by SO13 (Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism unit) regarding the theft of over 500 ‘detonators’ taken from an entire shunting yard’s worth of trains.
When I was 16, I was run over by a bronze Ford Capri driven by my best friend Spud, who’d had a couple of drinks. As I lay on the road with a dislocated shoulder I made up a story for the police about a blue Ford Sierra so that my friend wasn’t arrested.
I got a really bad fit of the giggles at my grandmothers funeral and had to pretend I was crying to cover it up.
If you come up beside me on a feeder lane, instead of filtering in further back, I will run you off the road and into a ditch sooner than let you in.
Sometimes I leave my spin class, drive out of the carpark, and some 90 seconds later, pull straight into the McDonalds drive through line to purchase myself a Filet of Fish meal and a box of McDippers.

The more observant of you may have noticed that I’ve made a couple of changes to the site. Thanks to the miracle of database driven sites, I’ve been able to make site-wide changes to names. So people who you may have been reading about on this site for the last couple of years, have had their names changed to something different, so if you see me referring to people you’ve never heard of before, you’ll know what’s up. George Orwell would be proud.

Why the change? Well, the missus was paranoid that a member of her family would stumble upon the site. In fact it always came up annoyingly well in Google searches if you looked for our home town. She might not get on very well with her parents or her sister, but she doesn’t want to disenfranchise them completely. And so I’ve changed all the names of the people and the names of the local towns, so that the chances of someone we know stumbling upon my blog are less likely.

I used to get people asking me about the local area, having searched for nearby towns, and that will stop now. But it means that Liz won’t be on tenterhooks every time I make a post about something related to her family. It was quite a lot of fun re-naming everyone. In my son’s case, I’ve given him the name that very nearly went on his birth certificate – if we’d known how many [insert my son's actual name] there were in Oz, we’d have gone with Jack in the first place. The missus has been re-named to her middle name and the in-laws have been given suitably dull pseudonyms.

Back to life, back to reality …
So, with the in-laws having safely re-entered their lives in blighty, we have been free to return to ours here in sleepy South Coast, NSW. Jack’s back at school, I’ve got my head buried in misbehaving PCs and Liz has got stuck into her graphic design work. The weather has been consistently improving over the last couple of weeks and the number of tourists passing through our little town of Barefoot Bay has been increasing steadily.

The American election has been in the news here and for once, the time difference on this side of the planet was a useful thing. While the rest of the planet slept, over here in Oz we got realtime updates on all the counts coming in from the voting stations in the states, during our daytime. So, finally the yanks have voted in someone with an IQ greater than your average pot plant. Hurrah.

Over here the political situation is akin to that of a village council in the UK. Incompetent dullards are voted in for little more than turning up, only to embarrass themselves by either taking the first back-hander that comes their way and getting caught in the process, or for dancing naked on a polished committee table with a tulip up their arsehole in the presence of another councillor’s teenage daughter and five members of the press.

The government here seem to be pressing ahead with their ludicrous Internet censorship. These utter idiots seem to think that filtering all WWW requests at the ISP level will somehow stamp out child porn. Or maybe they don’t believe that and they’re just using it as an excuse to introduce censorship just like that used in China, North Korea and Burma. In any case – the ISP filters will not affect P2P traffic or indeed anything that’s encrypted (namely pictures of children being abused – because let’s face it, most kiddie fiddlers are not as fucking dumb as Gary Glitter) or anything sent via proxy or VPN. So the government here plan to spend upwards of $40m on a filter that will do nothing to stop child pornography, which will slow down the Internet for all Australians and which can be used to censor *anything* some crackpot marginalised political party consider verbotten. Did I accidentally emigrate to a Marxist state? Whoops.

Not a football follower…
So I nipped into the bottle ship in Broughton on the way home from my spin class. The bloke that works in there is an Essex lad and he looked really pleased when I walked in. The reason for this soon became apparent as he said, “At last, someone with a cockney accent. Spurs won at the weekend and I’m very happy.” Now the problem here is that I fucking hate football. I know it’s not a very British thing to admit to, but there you go, I don’t give a shit – I think it’s a game played by ponces and supported by knuckle-dragging dullards who make trainspotters look like social butterflies.

As always in this situation, I was faced with two possiblities. Firstly, I could lie. I really like the bloke in the bottle shop and he was clearly dying to have someone with whom he could discuss his team’s win  and with whom he could engage in a bit of the old banter. Secondly, I could tell the truth and admit that I wasn’t now and nor had I ever been a football fan in any way, shape or form.

There was an awkward pause while I weighed up my options and then I plumped for honesty. I told him that I was sorry to disappoint, but that I didn’t follow football. He looked crestfallen – in fact if there are any football fans in the South Coast, NSW area who would like to engage in a bit of football banter, let me know and I’ll tell you where the bottle shop is – he’ll be over the moon. I told him I followed the rugby union and the cricket but not much else.

So then he asks me if I support Australia or England in the rugby or cricket. I tell him that I support England for those sports, but the Socceroos for football. He says that it’s the other way round for him and we come to the conclusion that if you’ve put any time into following a team (English football team in his case, English cricket team in mine) then you can’t switch allegiances just like that.