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?