Charlie Don't Surf

Blimey the weather’s up and down lately. Last week was gorgeous – it hit 32 degrees on Thursday. Today, however, feels like one of the worst of the mid-winter days. It’s cold, overcast, drizzling and bloody windy. There’s a sodding great low pressure area sat in the Tasman Sea which is circulating right above our heads. The forecast is for gusts up to 90kph, which is gusty – I could certainly feel the car getting blown about when I was driving in this morning.

Haven’t seen Bondi like this before with an angry surf. Normally when I get to the office at about 7:45 there’s already about 50 surfers in the water, bobbing about in the line-up. Today, however, there was precisely one. He was catching some pretty beastly waves, up around the 4m mark and was being photographed by some guys with long lenses outside our office.

As I watching a pod of dolphins emerged and started surfing on the waves in front of the Bondi Icebergs building. Haven’t seen them this close in either. Makes you wonder what attracts them to the surf on days like this – food I guess.

Something tells me that the tourists that come to Australia and in particular to Bondi Beach in Sydney, don’t really want to experience weather conditions like this. I’m suspecting that the number of titty photographers with their zoom lenses camped out at the top of the esplanade will be quite low today.

So I’ve got my commute. I travel a couple of hours north into the bustling metropolis of Sydney twice a week. I’m one of a certain kind of commuters who sits just the wrong side of the line that divides acceptance and obsession. Or to put it another way, I’m constantly looking for ways to shave a bit of time off my commute.

To the smoke …
When I lived in the UK I got a contract with Haymarket Publishing on a short-lived internet magazine. Only problem was, the office was in London and I lived in Nailsworth. The train fare was something like 70 quid a day and was quite long-winded, so I drove. It was almost exactly 100 miles door-to-door, but this being the UK, where traffic densities are, I’m sure, approaching that of New Delhi, it wasn’t a simple jaunt up the motorway.

That commute into London used to do my head in. I used to try and guess what the cause of the hold up would be on any given day – accident, road works, speed trap, poor weather conditions or fog. But to be honest most of the time the M4, on which most of my journey took place, just couldn’t cope with the sheer volume of traffic being squeezed onto it. Add to that the fact that M4 goes straight past Heathrow (busiest airport on the planet) and intersects with the M25 (busiest car park on the planet) and later with the evocatively named Hammersmith Flyover and you’ve got a recipe for automotive stop-go tedium.

I hated that commute so much I started developing migraines, due partly to squinting into the drizzle-obscured traffic, the procession of red brake lights of an English autumn and due partly to obsessing about the number of wasted hours I’d spent behind the wheel of my trusty Mazda 323. So yes, I started looking at alternatives. I tried the A-Roads, I tried alternative routes, I tried leaving earlier. With the exception of the last one, none of ‘em are much good, but knowing about alternative routes is very handy when you can see a three mile tailback on the horizon and you’re approaching a turn-off.

When that contract ended I can’t say I was unhappy. It was a good job and they were good employers, but I’d have been driven to madness if I’d had to continue that daily slog (three hours minimum, each way) for much more than the three months I did it for. How people endured it, day-in and day-out, I have no idea. I can only assume that they’re either very different to me, or desperate. Or possibly both.

Back to the smoke …
So now I’m back commuting. There are several differences between my old London commute and my current Sydney commute. The first, and most important difference, is that I only have to do it twice a week – Wednesday and Thursday. And since Friday is my day off I can drive up on Wednesday and say to myself, one more day until the weekend.

The second difference is that the first half of my commute is a breeze – a pretty scenic breeze at that. I drive alongside the Pacific ocean for the first 30km, around the Kiama bends and then up the hill out of Wollongong and on into the Royal National Park. It only gets a bit built-up once you hit Waterfall, which marks the southern limits of Sydney’s outer burbs.

The first 100km of my  journey takes one hour. The remaining 40km takes another hour. I travel in through Sylvania, over the Tom Ugly bridge and then hang a right onto Presidents Avenue, under the airport runway and then north, past Rosebery, alongside the Eastern Distributer and then right, past the Sydney Cricket Ground, past the swanky Bondi Junction shopping centre and finally down the hill to Bondi itself.

Over the last two months I have worked out exactly where the hold-ups always are, which rat-runs work and which lane is the best one to be in. For the most part, the best lane tends to be the left lane. I’m not sure why exactly, but I have a couple of theories. I suspect most people sit in the outside lane because of its perception as the ‘fast’ lane. But when everyone crowds into one lane, it’s not usually very fast. Secondly, they operate clearways during the rush hour so the side of the road which would normally be full of parked cars, is clear – but people seem mistrustful of this.

So once I get into the Presidents Avenue part of my journey towards the airport, I sit in the left lane. And inevitably I make a lot better progress than the people sitting in the right lane.

Except you really can’t ever fully predict these things. And the other day, on my homeward journey, sitting as always in the left lane, I found myself watching an endless stream of cars flowing along in the other two lanes. I’ve learnt better than to lane-hop and so I waited it out, but the stream of traffic carried on and on, and as far as I could see the left lane was chocker. It was left lane failure.

Maybe all those people that sit in the other two lanes and watch people like me merrily cruise past them suddenly caught on and get in the left lane. Maybe there was roadworks up ahead or a broken truck in the left lane. I stuck with the left lane and, for the majority of the journey out of Sydney it was without doubt the slowest lane by some margin.

The next day normal service was resumed. Very odd.

Universal constants …
There are many universal constants. Here’s one of them: go to any seaside resort, in any moderately developed civilisation, and at some point you will spot a pigeon trying to eat a chip. That pigeon will be pecking at the end, tossing the chip in the air trying to break a bit off and it will usually have some form of deformity, like one leg. You get ‘em in Margate, Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco and Bondi Beach.

Another universal constant is that the weather of a long weekend at the start or end of the summer will always be shit. Yes, even here in sunny Australia. It’s the spring long weekend right now and it’s grey, raining and 13 degrees. At least I live here, some poor bastards sat in traffic for three hours driving down from Sydney to endure this weather in a caravan with nothing but travel scrabble for amusement.

I like Subway. I try and go there in preference to somewhere like a fast food joint because let’s face it, a roll with some ham and cheese in it is considerably better for you than some deep fried chicken. My favourite is a foot long meatball sub which costs a princely $7.00 and is one of the heartiest sandwiches you can get in Subway.

So anyway, I decided to visit my local Subway on Friday (my day off) and I joined the short queue. Unfortunately I’d chosen to visit Subway on the day that the-man-who-had-to-have-everything-in-his-sandwich was visiting too. He was having a foot long too and it was already adorned with both ham and chicken by the time I joined the queue. To this was added meatballs and cheese. It was already groaning under its own weight when the-man-who-had-to-have-everything-in-his-sandwich added lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion and olives to the mix. Was he done? Dear me no. He wanted mayonnaise, ranch and sweet onion sauces and yes, of course he wanted salt and pepper too. By the time his mordibly obese sandwich reached the end of the preperation counter it took two assistants just to close the fucking thing and transfer it into a wrapper. Not content with making everyone wait, the-man-who-had-to-have-everything-in-his-sandwich then proceeded to order three smoothies which added another couple of minutes to everyone’s wait. By the time the-man-who-had-to-have-everything-in-his-sandwich paid there were nine other sandwiches queued up at the till.

Away day …
They’d threatened me with national travel and now it has come to pass that I’m booked in for my first flight. I’m due to conduct a class in our new incident management system in Ballina/Byron this coming Sunday. That particular airport not exactly being Heathrow, I’ll have to fly up Saturday afternoon, stay overnight and fly back to Sydney on Sunday afternoon. Which is nice as it will be the furthest north I’ve been in Oz (Ballina being on the border of Queensland).

The beach …
Lovely spring day today and Liz suggested a short drive down the coast to Jervis Bay. We stopped off at Greenfield Beach in Vencentia and then decided to drive right round the peninsula, stopping off at Hyams Beach and Old Erowal.