Thought I’d begin with a few things that are making the news here in Australia-land. Firstly, today was an official national day of mourning for the people lost in the Victorian bushfires. Amazing stories continue to appear regarding the fires – such as one couple who lost mains water and successfully tackled the blaze in their house with a couple of crates of Pepsi.

Also in the news, an Australian won this year’s Oakley big wave award. The wave in question, a 40m beast, was at Cow Bombie near Perth. Absolute nutters those big wave surfers. I mean, how in the name of all that’s holy do you survive a wipeout on a wave that big?

An author by the name of Harry Nicolaides, has just been deported from Thailand to Australia after serving five months of a three year jail sentence for criticising the Thai royal family. I suppose it’s not bad enough for him that his book only sold seven(!) copies, he got to spend five months with the lady boys of Bangkok for an indiscrete joke. I suppose it also just as well that there aren’t such draconian laws in the UK, because let’s face it, 90% of the country would be doing time.

In other news, the armed forces of Australia are, apparently, lard-arses. Now as someone with an impressive gut, I have some sympathy for the one in seven members of the miliatary officially classified as obese. But only a little sympathy, because my chosen career doesn’t involve yomping miles across hostile terrain with a heavy backpack on and a semi-automatic rifle slung over my shoulder. I hope that if I had chosen to join the armed forces (here in Oz, or elsewhere) that I’d keep myself a bit trimmer. One corporal, responding to the charges levelled against our fat-forces, said “I have a bit of a beer gut but I am not carrying a carton.” Well that’s alright then.

The NSW Fair Trading Department has revealed some of the stranger requests it has been called in to mediate. In one case, an apartment block owners meeting was called to discuss the behaviour of one of the owners who liked to do her gardening stark naked. The meeting was, appparently, split fairly predicatably along gender lines. The story does not record the outcome. In another case, a man was ordered to urinate on the sides of his toilet, rather than right down the middle into the water because the noise was ‘pissing off’ his downstairs neighbour.

Boat crew …
This weekend I’ve been down in Huskisson helping with water safety at the triathlons. We were originally going to take two boats down on the Saturday, but the driver of my boat was called away urgently when a close friend became suddenly ill, so I moved over to rescue board duties. I helped out at last year’s event too, but only on the Sunday and was therefore somewhat unprepared for the seemingly never-ending races that took place.

On the Saturday I was up at 4:45am (ouch) and met up with Karl and Lloyd from the surf club at the local McDonalds which is helpfully open 24 hours. Equipped with a veeeery welcome coffee, we headed down to the boat ramp in Husky and by 5:45am were putt-putting up the river and round to Shark-Net beach where the swim legs of all the various races start from. First race was at 7am and I paddled the board out to one of the ‘cans’ that mark the turns in the race.

We pulled eight people out of the water on the Saturday. One lady got into trouble and took refuge hanging onto my rescue board. As we chatted, while waiting for the IRB to come and pick her up for return to shore, it turned out that she’d never swum in the open ocean before! Apparently she’d been swimming along fine and then noticed a fish swim underneath her – and freaked out. Another girl lost her undies in the scramble that is the start of the race and started hyper-ventilating when she noticed and had to be, ermm, discretely returned to shore. Yet another lady, who swam back to shore herself, complained that the sea was too salty! It wasn’t just the amateurs freaking out either – we pulled one of the pros out of the sea with a panic attack.

It was 4pm before the last of the swimmers had left the water, by which point I was well and truly fucked. We loaded up the IRB with our stuff, chugged back to the ramp and wearily drove home. Then, gluttons for punishment that we are, we were back again the next day at the same time. The Sunday is the long course triathlon in which they swim 3Km, ride 80Km and run 20Km – full on, eh! It’s also over much more quickly thankfully.

Since there was only one boat going down (which had a rostered crew) and since I’d well and truly had enough of the rescue board I was going to give the Sunday a miss, but the Swim Director (who also happened to be the local rescue association skipper) lost his crewman and so I stepped in.

Found it very enlightening chatting to Mario during the course of the race. We also had one of the race officials in the boat with us so she could check on cheating and she asked Mario if there was much in the way of sharks in there. I expected him to downplay it, but he said, “Shit yea!” He went on to describe the many and varied forms of shark that live in the bay which include the Grey Nurse, the Port Jackson, the Hammerhead and the Bull sharks. Apparently you’ll also find plentiful numbers of seals, stingrays dolphins, octopi, cuttlefish and yellowtails – and of course for four months of the year, you also get whales. The race official (who had made us pull the boat right up on the beach so she didn’t get her trainers wet!) looked visibily shaken – was pretty funny all things considered.

Anyway – it was all over by 10:00am and we were packed up and back at the boat ramp by 10:30. We loaded the IRB back on the trailer and headed back to the surf club to hose everything down. Another very enjoyable Husky tri – I’ll definitely be back again next year.

You can always count on your mum …
Prior to the husky triathlon I’d been round at my parents with Liz and Jack and was reading the race listings out loud. I mentioned that I didn’t think the Optus Mini Triathlon was beyond my grasp (it being a 300m swim, 8km bike ride and 2km run) and my mother turns to me, tilts her head to one side and says (in this dead-patronising tone) “Yes dear, but another year older, another year fatter.” Thanks.

When is a variable rate mortgage, not variable …
When you live in Oz of course! In the UK we always had variable rate mortgages and the way it worked was that if there was a change in interest rates, the bank would write to us and say, “As you know the interest rate has just gone down/gone up by 0.5% and therefore your new repayments figure is …” Over here, however, they only ‘re-index’ variable rate mortgages every six months or so. Well the interest rate here has been in freefall just like everywhere else. So we got ourselves reindexed and our repayments fell from $2700 a month, to $2002! All of which makes our lives that little bit easier. The price of petrol has mystically risen 30c a litre in the space of a month (because refineries can apparently only use this more expensive kind of oil), but at least the house is a bit more affordable.

Later ‘taters …