Charlie Don't Surf

Had a cracking day down at Jervis Bay on Saturday. We drove down with some friends of ours to have a bit of R&R and had a very enjoyable day. Lunch at the Weedy Seadragon, followed by a swim at the Bay and Basin Leisure Centre. Kids all enjoyed the water slide at the pool – I would have too, but for the fact that I inadvertently wore the least-slidey shorts in the world and had to literally walk down the water slide. Twice.

Being an easily bored gadfly I left everyone else to it at the leisure centre and drove the short distance to Huskisson to see what the surf was up to. This weekend a big swell event was promised and it certainly lived up to expectations. Conditions were fairly mammoth with three and a half metre waves breaking on the rock reefs and beaches of the Bay.

Big day at Huskisson Beach in Jervis Bay. Most other beaches were unsurfable, but the bay is protected and only comes to life on days like this. Waves on the break pictured in this photo were three metres plus.

There must have been over 150 surfers in the water at points. Proceedings took a surreal turn when I noticed a wedding reception in full swing near the beach. Over a 100 guests, tables with velvet coverings, champagne glasses, a DJ and a photographer working the crowd. And all the time an endless succession of surfers trudging along the rock shelf and into the water to enjoy the near perfect conditions.

After everyone else got bored at the leisure centre, we all met up again and drove to the beach so the kids could have a bit of a run around and a play before we left. Then, with the sun heading down behind the hills, we headed for home, stopping en route for Noodles.

Turdkickers
They’ve started putting this show on the telly here and I must say how amazed I am that someone’s managed to create a show worse than NCIS Los Angeles. Both the misuss and I sat and watched the first show which was so awful she vowed never to watch it again. However I’m a sucker for punishment and wondered if the next episode would be as bad. Amazingly, it was worse still. The show was filmed in Bath (where I lived for 10 years and know pretty well) and was staged in and around the Roman Baths. The plot (for want of a better word) was that Boadicea was buried in a hidden shrine under the baths.

There were so many hilariously awful moments that it’s hard to recap them all, but I do have a couple of favourites. When the archeologists first show up on the scene they’re met by a single smash-hat wearing council engineer who tells them they can’t possibly go down there because it’s dangerous and full of gas and they’ll die. Then, instead of marching them off the premises, he just walks off and leaves them to it! Then there’s the bit where the warrior queen’s body has, instead of rotting to teeth, transformed into glittery stone. Oh man it’s a load of pants this show – hammy beyond belief, the most tepid of plotlines and less budget than Blue Peter. I will of course be watching next week.

One of the side effects of the increasing number of free-to-air digital terrestrial channels here in Oz is that there’s more ‘niche’ shows on the air. The broadcasters have all this digital bandwidth to fill up and there’s only so many netball matches they can put on so they have to buy some programmes from around the world. One of the marketplaces they score those shows from is the UK, where they can probably purchase the cheap-as-chips daytime flog-it, move-it, cook-it, rebuild-it or makeover-it shows for like six dollars and fourty two cents. Including GST.

So anyway, imagine my delight when I flick over to the 7Two channel and Escape to the Country is on. I’ve always found this TV show disturbing on a grand scale and most of that has to do with the presenter – Catherine Gee. I have no idea where they found this woman or what skillset they thought she was bringing to the show but she’s a failure on a quite spectacular level and it makes for strangely compelling telly as a result.

One of the main problems Catherine seems to have is that she looks like she hates children. Whenever some kids appear with the prospective house-hunting family she views them as she might a steaming dog turd in the middle of her silk pillow. She can’t ever wait to send them off on some errand that hinges on her rather dubious view of what children want. For instance she might tell a 14 year old skateboarding hoodie kid to run along and check out the duck pond because it’s full of ducks. Or she’ll suggest some ivory white emo girl might like to have a look at the pony in the paddock while the grown-ups check out the housey-wousey. If she has any nieces and nephews I’m pretty sure that presents they receive from would be things like Mr Men Scribble Pads and a jumbo box of chunky crayons – even if said relatives are in their teens.

The other major problem with the show is that she’s monumentally shite at her job. I mean here’s a woman that has been hired to hunt houses for people. So presumably she has some history in real estate and wasn’t a child catcher in Vulgaria previously. Given that it’s a property show it would have been nice if she’d brought some kind of property related know-how to the table instead of merely a penchant for nasty pudding bowl haircuts.

Has she ever successfully found a home for the people she’s house hunting for? It never happens in the episodes I watch. She goes through the motions, the couple who are looking to buy pretend to watch footage on her Macbook while we all note that they’ve simply superimposed the images on the screen in an editing suite, they pick the two least repellent houses to view, they get 15 minutes on their own to view them without her ‘helpful’ asides and then the credits roll with the following voiceover, “Vivian and Nigel didn’t put an offer in on any of the houses, but are still house-hunting and hoping to move to the country some time this year.” Yea, no thanks to you love. No thanks to you.

Let me explain where Catherine’s going wrong. Rather than actually listening to the requirements of her house-hunters, she picks three properties at random from the back pages of Country Life magazine. Then she attempts to shoe-horn their requirements into whichever property we’re viewing. So you get amazing advice like, “Now I know our family wanted a swimming pool and I think I’ve found just the thing. Behind the house, you’ll find this quaint swamp which, with a couple of retaining walls and some tiles could, I’m sure, be a swimming pool in no time.” No Catherine, it bloody couldn’t, why didn’t you (bear with me, I know this is a bit of a leap for you) find them a  house with a swimming pool?

So the poor house-hunters go out to view the two least worst houses Catherine found for them and this is followed by a cosy chat around the kitchen table in which the house-hunters let her down gently. It’s awful television and yet strangely compelling at the same time.

Money, as per usual, is pretty tight in this household. And it doesn’t help that it costs me $45 in petrol costs every time I have to travel up to Sydney. Actually that’s $45 when petrol’s around the $1.20 mark – at the moment it’s nearer $1.28 and so my commute works out at an even $50. So I was trying to think of ways of bringing that cost down, as you would. The government are offering rebates on most of the installation costs of getting your car converted to LPG. So that’s an option. Another option is to sell the Kluger. We bought it at a time when the furthest I had to commute was Broughton, 10km down the road, but now I have to travel 130km into Sydney and back and the Klug’s turned into a bottomless pit for cash. I did look at traveling by train, but there isn’t a massive difference in the cost and it takes about two hours longer each way – so bugger that for a game of soldiers.

The third option, which is the one I’ve settled on for now, is to drive Liz’s car. She’s got a little white Mazda Astina (that’s a 323 folks) with a little 1.6 engine and a far more frugal appetite for non-renewable fossil fuels. Now thus far I’ve resisted this option because I really hate being down low in a car and your arse practically scrapes the tarmac in an Astina. Also its engine is literally half the size of the Kluger’s and I do like cars with a bit of poke. But needs must when the devil shits in your kettle, so a couple of weeks ago I did an experiment. I filled it up and then did my usual commute to Sydney. The next morning I went to my usual petrol station and filled it up again to get a proper comparison of costs. Instead of costing me $50, it cost me $34. That’s some saving. $50 a week or nearly $2500 a year. So now I commute to the city and back in the Astina. It’s a very uncomfortable car compared to the Kluger, it has no cup holders, the stereo is shit, the brakes aren’t terrific and pretty much every car on the road feels they can bully you – but you can’t argue with annual savings of $2500, so there you go.

I am, it must be said, at ease with my commute now. I know where the slow bits are, I know which lane to be in at which moments, I know which rat-runs actually work and I know that the difference between driving like an escaped convict and driving like Miss Daisy is about 20 minutes. So I don’t stress too much these days and traveling is far more enjoyable when you’re not stressed. I tend to listen to the Danny Baker show on BBC Radio London during my commute – it gets recorded by a Mac application called Radioshift. There is, however, something surreal about the traffic reports for inner London when you’re driving through Botany Bay towards the airport tunnel that goes underneath the main runway at Sydney airport. Listening to the weather reports always raises a chuckle too.

In order to keep some more of our hard-earned cash out of the hands of the government I have installed an app called Trapster on my iPhone. Very good it is too. It’s basically a wide area police surveillance network that leverages the power of the mobile phone network, the iPhone and the eyes of thousands of commuters to keep tabs on all the police traps. It overlays live information about the police, red light cameras, static cameras, congested areas, tricky corners and school zones on a Google Map. As you travel it’s constantly updated by other Trapster users who have logged a checkpoint ahead of you. I’ve logged a few traps myself on my journey.