Month: November 2003

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.

Singapore

Nothing, I think, could quite have made me hurry through terminal one of Singapore’s Chiangi airport like the words “free” and “internet” being prominently displayed together. Sadly, the long line of people who’d got there before me, combined with the approaching take-off slot for my flight on to Melbourne meant that it was all in vain, and I was denied the chance to make my first weblog post from Asia. Oh well, I suppose I will just have to write this the old fashioned way and fake the timestamp later…

The first (and longest) leg of my journey turned out to be surprisingly painless. My feeling of can’t-believe-my-luck smugness at being switched at the gate to an exit row masses-of-legroom seat [turns out the power of smiling sweetly at the check-in girl and pointing out how tall you are is not to be underestimated after all] was slightly diminished by the arrival of a large chap in his England rugby shirt ready to spill over from the seat next to me into mine for the next 13 hours.

But they turned out to be pleasant enough. At any rate, they left the flight in Singapore, for their onward journey to Sydney, the semi-finals, and Jonny Wilkinson’s kicking, to be replaced by an affable and chatty Melbourne businessman who was returning home, and, in the seat next to me, a reassuringly slim bloke from Singapore off on his holidays.

Two things amused me on my journey. One was the the following statement in the in-flight menu: “The cutlery on today’s flight is in accorance with government safety and security regulations. Qantas appreciates your understanding”. Which is fine, but rather odd considering that we had all plastic implements from London to Singapore, but metal forks and spoons from Singapore onwards. Evidently fork/spoon-related terrorism is strictly an ex-London phenomenon.

Also, there was the following PA announcement shortly before we landed: “ladies and gentlemen, this is a lost and found announcement: While the aircraft was being cleaned in Singapore we found a pair of earrings. If anybody has lost a pair of earrings, please describe them to the cabin crew, and we’ll return them to you…
That’s a silver pair of pierced earrings. If anybody’s lost them, do let us know.”

New look

Oh, just wanted to say that (as hopefully you will have noticed) I’ve been making some minor changes to the weblog recently. Hope people like the new (slightly tweaked) look.

Let me know in the comments if you have any major objections and/or thoughts.

Cheers!

You Need A Holiday! Somewhere In The Sun…

What with Rob’s recent posts from his secondment in Hong Kong, and my counter having finally reached zero (meaning I am now allowed to go on holiday), the Paste weblogs are about to become truly global.

Assuming that the crew of my BA flight this evening haven’t had a few too many pints before take off, [the headline on today’s Daily Mirror said: “Too Drunk To Fly”–how drunk is too drunk to fly? Is just a little bit drunk ok?] I shall be arriving in Melbourne on Friday (I thought I just wouldn’t bother with Thursday this week) for a much-needed break.

I can’t wait.

Messenger. The. Shoot. Don’t.

McDonald’s is apparently really very cross that a new edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary includes the definition for the term “McJob” as “low-paying and dead-end work” (and this is reported as “news” despite the fact that this meaning for the term was coined by Douglas Coupland over 10 years ago–frankly I’m surprised it hasn’t made it into the dictionary more quickly).

Some people never learn. Just as the ill-thought out legal action of the McLibel case backfired spectacularly resulting in years of negative publicity, so the effect of issuing this press release has been not only to promote someone else’s product, but also to paint themselves as the bad guy oppressive multinational trying to censor the English language in the name of trademark dilution. Did they really expect anyone reading this to take McDonald’s side? Of course it’s those dictionary-compiling jerks that are really at fault, not the poor little multinational conglomerate.

So. Prince Charles, then.

WARNING: If you’re waiting to see this story in the British media, and you don’t want to know the score, please look away now… (and if you do want to know the score, you can find it here).

So, as I’m sure everybody knows by now, even if they don’t get Popbitch, a “senior Royal” might have been caught in a compromising (homo)sexual situation with a close aide. Allegedly. Or he might not. Well, so what if he was? I’m not sure I can really work out what the fuss is about, to be honest. The last time I checked it was the 21st century, where homosexuality isn’t actually illegal, and I’m fairly sure that most people (at least outside the Church of England) think that what consenting adults get up to in the privacy of their own palace is a matter for them alone. That said, if one of those consenting adults happened to be next-in-line to be head of the Church of England, that might potentially cause a problem for these people (link is to the “Newsday” website story purely for the childish amusement value of the headline: “Split Widens Over Gay Bishop”. Sorry.) However, the question remains whether the rest of us could really care less if the allegation turned out to be true.

An allegation of homosexuality, valid or otherwise, shouldn’t necessarily “destroy the monarchy” ((c) The Daily Mail) any more than infidelity and divorce have done–fodder for the tabloids, yes, but accepting that the monarchy are human beings, rather than God’s representatives bestowed with the divine right of Kings, as I think most of us did several hundred years ago, what, ultimately, is the problem?

Perhaps something that would be a problem, if it were true, would be if the Royal Family could be proven to have perverted the course of justice to prevent their secrets from coming out (if you’ll pardon the pun)? If “a(nother) senior royal” were to remember suddenly a conversation about “dark forces” and the safe-keeping of possessions that was enough to end a court case, it might, perhaps, highlight the absurdity of the Royal Family being, to all intents and purposes, above the law (and in a position to manipulate that law to achieve their own objectives).

I tell you what, though, the Queen’s speech this year should make for interesting viewing. Although I think I might choke on my turkey if she mentions an annus horribilis.

In other news, I did rather enjoy the LNR’s caption competition.

As is traditional, last night we celebrated the failure of a terrorist plot 400 years ago by blowing up a whole pile of stuff in the back garden. Because there’s nothing quite like a really, really, loud rocket for encapsulating 17th century Catholic disenfranchisement.

The standard of our fireworks this year was generally pretty good, but the rubbish ones were given an extra edge by the prospect that something could go horribly wrong at any moment. Perhaps this was connected to the small fire at the back of the garden started by an errant projectile early in the evening. (Which reminds me, I must go and inspect our next door neighbour’s vegetable patch at some point at the weekend. Oh, and our other neighbour’s greenhouse, the recipient of one firework that had fallen due to the force of its first couple of firings, sending the last one horizontally out to the side of the garden.)

I think it was Chris who pointed out at one point that none of us were actually looking at the explosions–instead we were all watching the wobbling tube from which the firework was actually firing itself, thus gaining those precious few extra seconds we’d need to dive inside the house if it turned out to be heading straight for us.

Same time next year then? Absolutely.

Last night was something of a lesson in asking questions first. It might, for example, be a good idea to find out which part of the venue your friends are going to be in before buying an overpriced last-minute ticket (er, then spending more money to get another one, also for the wrong part of the venue). Luckily it was all sorted out and I eventually managed to change that for a ticket that let me in to sit with everyone else, without spending any more.

And it was a cracking gig. I’ve only got two Powderfinger albums, but I knew every song they played. I’m not used to sitting down, though. Watching a gig from one of the upper levels of the Shepherd’s Bush Empire is an odd experience. It feels like the band are playing to the people down on the floor and your just observing from above–a sort of out-of-body gig experience.

The other thing about sitting down is that you can keep going back to the bar all night without having to worry about finding your way back into the crowd. That seemed like a good thing last night, but this morning I’m not so sure.

I’ve also never seen a support band I’ve never heard of go down as well as Jebediah did, but then I suppose their generic aussie guitar rock was slightly more familiar to the rest of the audience than it was to me.

Oh, and Powderfinger will be back in the UK in February, apparently. Maybe this time I’ll get tickets when they go on sale, like everybody else.

Today, I will be wasting time browsing the excellent Group Hug online confessional website (links from the Guardian Online section and the lnr journal). It’s a bit like the man who fell asleep website (which is full of things supposedly overheard on the tube, sample: “I spoke to God and he told me that he hates you”).

Only better.