London and Shitty Estate Agents
It was no thanks to the idiot(s) at the estate agents, but we finally got into our new flat yesterday. And, following Sal’s spur of the moment decision to hire a large transit van yesterday, it’s now full of stuff too.
“This is a staff announcement: Would Santa Claus please return to his grotto. Santa Claus to his grotto please…” (overheard in Southport dept. store)
Merry Christmas all…
Rejecting once again the living hell that is the West Coast Main line on a Friday evening, I chose to return home to Southport for Christmas by plane, just like I did last year. Rather predictably, it took me longer to get from work to Heathrow than it did to get from Heathrow to Manchester, but that wasn’t my favourite example of the ludicrousness of modern cheap air travel: On arriving at the airport, I paid almost £5 for a packet of sandwiches and a small bottle of water, and it occurred to me later on, as I was accepting the free sandwich and beer on the plane, that, at airport prices, I’d almost recouped the cost of my £11 plane ticket in food alone.
The only other aspect of my journey home worth a mention is the fact that the crew on that particular flight might just have been the campest flight crew I’ve ever been attended to by. Then again, maybe that’s just what happens when you spent the previous evening watching the Christmas special of the utterly fabulous Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
Moving, just keep moving…
This lunchtime, after much queueing and some rigmarole in the bank, we finally obtained the necessary funds in the appropriate form (your handy choice, from the estate Agent that likes to say “no, you can’t write us a cheque”, of either a wad of used fivers or an IOU scrawled in Eddie George’s blood), and signed up for our fab new flat in London’s-trendy-Islington ((c) the daily mail). We move in a week on Monday, and I can’t wait. Mainly it’s for the much reduced commute, but I also expect that, living somewhere like that, I will be practically falling over celebrities every time I go out of the house. Frankly, if I’m not best mates with Dido by the end of the month I’ll be asking for my money back.
Middle-aged Telegraph Reader
I’m a worried man. Yesterday, I returned home to find two items of junk mail waiting for me. Now normally I would just put this stuff in the bin and think no more of it, but I was disturbed by the type of people who have started writing to me. One letter was from The Daily Telegraph, who wanted to tell me about their latest wine offer. I don’t think I’d read their nasty right-wing rag if you paid me, much less buy wine off them, but worse awaited me in the second item of mail, which thanked me for my interest in over-50s holiday specialists SAGA, and offered me a questionaire to complete so they could send me the brochure that best fits my needs.
How did this happen? What box did I tick (and on what form) to indicate that I was some kind of right-wing 50 year old? How could the junk mail industry get their targeted demographic so wrong–have I been buying the wrong sort of things on my reward card? Has the big computer in Ken’s living room that tracks your Oystercard travel been registering some activity of mine that betrays my advancing years? Have I been buying the wrong sort of stuff off Amazon? (If you liked this, you might also like… over 50s holidays!)
I need to know.
When I mentioned this to my dad, he said something along the lines of “oh well, only 24 years to go”. Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better.
It’s got nothing to do with your Vorsprung durch technic, you know
Shrugging off the nasty cold that’s been bugging me ever since returning home, but which thankfully seems to be on its way now, I headed over to the Brixton Academy last night to see Blur for the second time this year. On the whole they were very good, choosing to play more of a greatest hits-y set than they did when we saw them at the Astoria back in March. Obviously there was still no Graham, so no Coffee and TV, but they did play a whole pile of stuff off Parklife (like Bad Head, This Is A Low, To The End, Girls and Boys), along with the likes of Tender, For Tomorrow, She’s So High and The Universal. All of which made the few songs they did play from Think Tank (as well as Trimm Trabb–why?) sound a bit average. But, the highlight for me would have to be the appearance of Phil Daniels during the encore for both Me, White Noise (the hidden track off Think Tank), and, fantastically, Parklife. Wonderful.
…Vulture Street, which was named after the street in Brisbane where the album was cut…
BBQs attended 4, BBQs assembled 1, beautiful sunsets 2, hot air balloon trips 1, rainy days 1, sunny days at least 15, loops of Qantas radio channel 7 on which I heard the same 3 Powderfinger/Alex Lloyd songs at least 10, thousand miles flown over 20, photographs taken 181, bottles of champagne 3, bottles of wine too many to remember, longneck bottles of VB far too many, weddings 1, kangaroos lots, quiet country towns 2, dramatic coastal roads 1, games of tennis 1, posh hotels 2
Ah well, back to reality then I suppose. Roll on Christmas…
Suite at the Hilton, dahling
Somewhat optimistically, the locals (or at least Gary, Sal’s friend Anna’s uncle, who took us on a tour of the city) like to think of Perth as a kind of mini Sydney, without the fancy bridge and concert hall, obviously, but with an impressive harbour, and lots of sunshine.
The views of the city from the Kings Park are stunning, especially during the evening as the sun goes down, reflecting its orange glow back off the skyscrapers.
The view from our suite on the top floor of the Hilton was slightly less impressive (with the exception of the bizarre art exhibit we could see down below) given that someone had had the audacity to build a whole pile of skyscrapers between us and the Swan river (although they did provide a stock ticker on the top of one of them, apparently visible only to us and the workers on sufficiently elevated levels of the adjacent buildings–a nice thought, even if the fate of the ASX wasn’t upmost in our minds as we ate our room service breakfast each morning listening to the Something For Kate album).
Anyhow, Perth provided a pleasant, and sunny, end to our trip, and made us both very sad to be getting on the plane and heading home on Sunday night. Oh well, back to reality, I guess.
Skippy The Happy Kangaroo
Although we have only just returned to Melbourne, it will soon be time to leave again to travel over to Perth, which everyone says is very nice. We spent the last few days travelling away to Colac, a small country town around 2 or 3 hours away from the city, to attend the wedding of Sal’s good friend Liv (in which Sal was acting as one of the three bridesmaids) and then back, slowly, along the Great Ocean Road.
Colac is a small town–not quite the sort of place where everyone knows everyone, but almost. It’s the sort of place where people run around in circles for 6 days just to have something to do.
The wedding was lovely, and there will be some photos of me looking slightly, erm, tired and emotional, at the reception posted up here when I get a chance (or drunk, if you prefer). Amusingly, as I was introduced to a guy also called Matt sitting in the row behind us in the church, on explaining why I was there what with Sally being a bridesmaid and all, he said that I must be a worried man this weekend… but it was his girlfriend who went on to beat off the scrum to snatch the bouquet several hours later. Ah, the irony.
[Oh, and speaking of scrums, I was delighted to be able to dip into the house and catch the last few minutes of real time, and then the whole of extra time in the World Cup Final. All the Aussies that were there (which would be, um, everyone apart from me) took it surprisingly well, although the papers aren’t quite so good, after the week’s build-up of “countdown to glory” style headlines. Apparently we’re arrogant winners and poor losers. Hmm, that sounds familiar…]
Drunk as I might have been, at least I wasn’t as rough the following morning as Chris, with whom I had travelled up to Colac on the Friday, and who was sitting on our table. He was so rough the next day that he couldn’t even join us at the barbeque (oops, make that 3 in just over a week) at the groom’s parents’ house, preferring to sleep it off in his car, flattening his battery in the process and having to call out the RACV. That’s what dirty VB does to you then (ah, how quickly we turned from disparaging the stuff to guzzling it, when there was so much of it going around–I think we all regretted it the next morning, though).
Deciding not to remain in Colac, we headed down to the Ocean Road, and spent Sunday night at a lovely resort in the town of Lorne (brilliantly, there’s a crown green bowls club in the town, which I hope is purely so that it can be called the Lorne Bowls Club–I didn’t see the tennis club, but hopefully that’s the Lorne Tennis Club, or even the Lorne Lawn Tennis Club…). We did play tennis, however, if only because the resort’s court was literally outside our room, so it would perhaps have been rude not to (happily there weren’t too many people staying there to witness our pathetic attempts at play, given that all the appartments and rooms look directly onto the court).
Finally, on Monday, we travelled back to Melbourne along the rest of the Ocean Road, stopping off in Anglesea on the way to see the kangaroo-infested golf course, where the animals wander the fairways and greens. Yesterday, they were mostly sleeping under the trees (although the evidence of their having travelled the rest of the course was deposited around for all to see). Whilst photographing one group of kangaroos, we were both highly amused to watch the large alpha male of the group casually attempt to mount a much smaller female while she tried to wriggle away and the rest of the group rested uninterested. I bet they don’t put that on the front of the guidebooks…
Melbourne
As the photos, when I finally get round to uploading them, will testify, it’s been bloody hot here mate. I mention this only to illustrate my first observation about the natives–they do like to talk about the weather a fair bit. When they aren’t talking about house prices, that is.
Perhaps it’s just a myth that the English talk about the weather (or, for that matter, house prices) all the time, as the rest of the world seems to be equally obsessed. They’re a friendly bunch round here though. Out shopping in the city on Monday, it struck me how people in shops seem to be genuinely friendly and, well, happy (maybe it’s all that sunshine). It’s a bit of a contrast to the grumpy, customer-comes-last “service” culture we have in the UK, or the “have-a-nice-day-I’ll-be-your-waiter-for-this-evening-I’d-like-a-big-tip” fakery of the US.
Conforming to cliche, they also like a beer or two over here, and although I haven’t even been here for a week, I’ve already been to two barbeques, as well as having built one (although that’s a bit of a long story that I won’t go into here).
Yesterday was probably the highlight of my trip so far. My birthday present from Sal: hot air ballooning over the Yarra valley. The day started at the ludicrously early time of 2:30 am when my alarm went off. At this point we weren’t even sure if the ride would take place, but nevertheless we were out of the house by 3, and parked up outside the Chateau Yering hotel and winery in the dark by 4.30 waiting for our pilot to arrive and take us off to the meeting place. After a short while, a young chap called Simon, the ground crew, popped up in his little red vintage MG, and he let us know that the pilot would be along shortly. After a little while, turn up he did, and we were off to a large dew-covered field a short drive away.
Part of the fun of the balloon ride is that they get you involved in putting the thing up and taking it down again, so they soon had us helping the basket off the trailer, velcro-ing the bit on the top of the balloon on, and pulling it upright. Before we knew it, though, we were drifting up above the vineyards, and sipping champagne in the sky.
The Yarra valley is a fair way outside the city, but at one point we could clearly see the skyscrapers of Melbourne’s CBD shooting up into the sky way off in the distance, as well as the rolling hills, the vineyards, and, perhaps the most beautiful part, the mist rising off the lakes below.
If you ever get a chance to go up, I’d strongly recommend it.