Archive for February, 2009

• To drop off we must cool off; body temperature and the brain’s sleep-wake cycle are closely linked. That’s why hot summer nights can cause a restless sleep. The blood flow mechanism that transfers core body heat to the skin works best between 18 and 30 degrees. But later in life, the comfort zone shrinks to between 23 and 25 degrees – one reason why older people have more sleep disorders. Worth bearing in mind if you’re not used to sleeping in warmer temperatures.
• One of the most common (dangerous) spiders in Australia is the redback. The female is four times the size of the male (just like humans) and is the one to watch out for. They build incredibly crappy webs close to the ground that look like they were abandoned months ago and where you find such as a web, you’ll probably also find a female in a nest of dead leaves. While not the most venomous of spiders, their venom can cause death in the weak or elderly.
• DLUG stands for double lock-up garage – no Aussie home is complete without one.
• Electricity companies offer two tarifs for your hot water tank – one just heats up a tank overnight during the off-peak hours – the other does a second mini-recharge in the middle of the day. We’ve been running the second option for the last year and the difference to the bill is less than $20.
• The NSW state government do not allow the police to use disguised speed cameras. The Victorian state government do. Last year the Victorian government added just under $500m to the coffers through speeding fines. In NSW that figure was just under $200m. There are 1.5m more people in NSW than Victoria.
• In the UK, you get points added to your licence when  you are fined for a motoring offence. In Australia you start with 12 points and these are removed when you are fined for a motoring offence.
• The equivalent of ‘Which’ in Australia is ‘Choice’.
• Australia, founded by convicts. The homicide rate is in Australia is 1.8 per 100,000 of population. The United States was founded by religious zealots. It’s homicide rate is 6.3 per 100,000. Almost 400% greater than Australia.
• There is no such thing as paid maternity leave.
• Western Australia is eight hours ahead of GMT, Eastern Australia is 10 hours ahead.
• Speed limits here are in KM/h, not MPH. 110KP/h is about 70Mph.
• Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal, lead, sheep, wool and diamonds.
• Beyond the nationwide ‘green slip’ (which costs about $200) you don’t actually have to insure your car to drive on Australian roads.
• The equivalent of the AA or RAC is the NRMA.
• You can get the BBC World Service radio on Austar and Foxtel via the ‘Air’ radio channel.

Just noticed that it’s exactly three years since I started writing this blog (or it was when I started writing this post). When you consider that I have trouble sticking to anything, I reckon that’s something else. When I began this blog I was living in Nailsworth in Gloucestershire and had recently made the decision (along with my missus, natch) to emigrate to Australia. That decision was much easier for us, because I’ve held Australian citizenship since birth on account of having an aussie dad. So the spouse visa was just a case of form filling and an agonising five day wait!

That was then ...

My first blog post was made after a day at the Bristol Ice Rink with my wife and son and the sister in law and her daughter. Yes, it’s a pretty bitter post, but I genuinely have a lot of affection for Bristol and the Southwest of England in general. I was brought up in commuterville, 30 miles north of London, but found Bath, Bristol, Cornwall and the Cotswolds far more to my liking and made them my home for all of my adult life post-college. My all-time favourite band – Massive Attack are Bristolians and I love pretty much everything the ‘Bristol Massive’ produced, from Roni Size to Portishead and all stops in between. If our family return to the UK (you never know what’s down the line), we’ll almost certainly head for exactly the same spot we left from.

So I’m sitting here wondering if my feelings for England have changed since I began this blog and I have to say, in all honesty, probably not. I still hate grey skies and drizzle, I couldn’t give a rats-arse if there are 10 different supermarket chains, I feel no great desire to drive a car on roads constantly saturated with traffic, I do not miss the endlessly downbeat furrowed-brow UK media, I still think the education system has its priorities seriously out of whack with its focus on testing and test results, I don’t miss waiting eight months for a summer that ends up being cold and wet, I feel no great yearning to visit an out-of-town carpet warehouse, I do not miss endless piles of dogshit adorning every pavement and kerb, I particularly don’t miss the colourful baggies of dogshit which dog owners inexplicably tie to trees and fences along country walks, I don’t miss Little Chefs or Golden Eggs, I don’t miss Dixons, I don’t miss realising that 30% of the shops on a town’s high street are charity shops, I don’t miss the meager run-down sports facilities, I don’t miss knowing with all certainty that I will spend 20 minutes just looking for a car parking space when I arrive anywhere, I don’t miss walking up to an ATM and discovering (at best) gob and (at worst) vomit all over the screen and keys, I don’t miss public toilets so rank you have to hover your arse above the bog while crapping, I don’t miss Heathrow, I don’t miss the M4 and its motorway service stations, I don’t miss that feeling of malevolence when you walk past a group of teenagers, I don’t miss the British abroad and most of all, I don’t miss my wife’s parents.

Hmmm – pretty long list that. So here in no particular order is what I do miss. That rare warm day of the summer when you get to sit in the beer garden of the boozer, snow, M&S Sticky Chilli Chicken and, of course, good friends. Regular readers of this blog will know that I don’t much like Australian TV or radio, but I can get everything I need online, so that’s no biggie.

Three years ago, we were in the process of planning our move to Oz. In hindsight we were very lucky to move when we did, because the house we bought four years previously for £87k eventually sold for £225k. Without the insane British property market we would not have been able to emigrate – it paid of some fairly sizeable UK debts, it funded the move, it bought all the furnishings in our house, it bought an almost new 4WD car and a 25% deposit on our house. I wonder what that house is worth now, in the current financial climate. Like most of us, I suspect, I’m very hypocritical – I strongly believe that houses are overpriced (both in the UK and in Oz) but I’m more than happy to walk away with a £138k profit just for living somewhere for a couple of years.

When you’re in the process of emigrating, it’s far too easy to become obsessed with the whole process. I have no doubt whatsoever that I bored friends and family shitless with talk of Australia and it’s a testament to their goodwill that none of them (well, none except the wife’s parents) said anything. I remember pouring over the real estate supplements my mother sent over and scouring the Internet for information on the towns we were interested in living in. I recall watching anything related to Australia on the TV, including terribly out-of-date Australian property shows on the Real Estate channel. I listened to ABC radio on the Internet and adorned my computer desktop with the image of Sydney harbour which is now the backdrop to this blog. I joined the British Expats forum and posted endlessly, arguing the toss about what life would be like in Australia with people who’d lived there for a decade.

So was it what I expected? Pretty much, yes. I’ve reinvented myself since I moved here and have tried to get involved in stuff that interests me. I joined the local surf life saving club almost by accident – Jack was in nippers and they were short-handed one day and I asked if I could get in the water to help only to be told that if I didn’t have my Bronze Medallion – no. So I did my bronze medallion and became a surf lifesaver. Then I joined the committee and now I’m the club’s registrar. We couldn’t afford to live right on the coast in the UK, but I’d have loved to have joined the RNLI and get involved in that. I’m pleased that Jack’s growing up in a beach town – on rainy days here the kids look not to their Playstation, but the surf, because they know that when it’s raining the waves tend to be that little bit glassier.

I have no idea really of how the move has affected Jack. We can only make guesses about how he’d be maturing if he was still attending Amberley Parochial School in Gloucestershire. But I’ve made my views on the subject of the British school system clear and I hope that he’s becoming a well-rounded young man here. The missus says she hasn’t been homesick at all, though I’m sure she’s had the odd moment here and there.

... this is now.

So much has happened since I started writing this blog that it takes moments of sober realisation like this to reflect on it all. When you start out on this emigration lark it seems like a pipedream that won’t ever happen. Then it happens and you’re on a roller coaster. You wash up in Australia and spend some time finding your feet, making friends, working out the system(s), how things tick. And before you know it, it’s routine again. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it of course, just that if you do, you’d be very foolish not to take advantage of all the things Australia has to offer and instead just plop back into your old life, 12,000 miles from where it was before.

Who knows where the next three years will take us.

I was getting ready for bed the other night and I commented to Liz, that my fine masculine leg hair felt really peculiar in two stripes across the rear of my thighs. She looks at me over the top of her book and says, “Oh.” I stare at her with a querulous look on my face and she says, “I might know something about that.”

Turns out she’s been getting annoyed by the state of ‘the boys’ toilet upstairs, which is used pretty much exclusively by me and Jack. So one morning she put raw bleach on the toilet seat – and forgot to wash it off. So when I paid that loo a visit for a read of my new copy of Empire, I sat right on the raw bleach, which killed the hair in a bog-seat shaped swathe across the rear of my legs.

How the other half lives …
During the course of my job I sort out the computers of all sorts of people living in all sorts of houses. Many of my customers live in ‘demountable homes’ in the caravan parks round this way, a lot of ‘em live in the equivalent of council houses and flats – and some of ‘em live in gorgeous properties on acreage. I had a call out to a customer the other day that lived in the latter.

Her house was at the end of a discrete side turning on one of the roads heading out of Broughton and occupied several acres of land. I was blown away by the place – it was very modern, with a huge living room looking out over the Illawara escarpment. Turned out that my customer owned the place and was in fact a developer – but this place, priced at $1.6m had gone on the market the week the world went to hell in handbag. I told her that if I had $1.6m in loose change I’d buy it off her and she said I could have it for 1.5! Obviously I reached for my wallet.

The first state …
So on the British Expats forums recently some upbraided me for referring to Sydney as a capital city. In one of those lovely moments that come along now and then, I pointed out that since I’m an Australian citizen, registered voter and resident of New South Wales, Sydney was, in fact, my capital city. And I wouldn’t have it any other way either. What in the name of all that’s holy, they were thinking when they built Canberra, is beyond me. It’s like Milton Keynes without the atmosphere.

It’s weird coming from the England where devolved politics has only spread as far as London, but here the states have real power. It’s generally accepted that politicians are clusterfucks worthy only of jettisoning into orbit without a spacesuit but your average state and even local politicians are quite unbelievably useless. Nearby Wollongong’s council was so inept and corrupt that they had to sack the lot of ‘em and bring in administrators who are, by all accounts, doing a million times better than the rent-a-gobs they replaced.

It’s pretty much accepted that they’re all rotten, profiteering wankers in the pay of property developers and while that may well be the case in England too – at least they were slightly better at disguising it. Down here in South Coast, NSW, many of the local seats in parliament are Labour (vaguely left wing) strongholds – but right here in the Shoalhaven, we’re in a safe Liberal (right wing) seat. Our MP, the improbably named lesbian Joanna Gash (!) seems like a genuinely good sort though – I regret not voting for her and will certainly be doing so at the next election.

Anyway – the point of all this rambling is that you have to leave your party politics at home when you move here, because they’re irrelevant. You vote for the man or woman who looks like they can tie their own shoe-laces – not for the socialist or the nationalist. I voted for Kevin Rudd at the last election and while I could never countenance voting for Michael Howard, Rudd has turned out to be as wet as his first name would suggest. His latest idea is to doll out several thousand bucks to every family in the country in the hope that this will somehow stave off a recession. It’s the most bizarre thing – and he and his party keep referring to these efforts as ‘nation-building’. Honestly what a load of bollocks – the electrical shops willd o well out of it for a couple of weeks while everyone upgrades their telly and then what?