Year: 2009

In Rockpool, Melbourne
Who’s that tall chap over there?
Swimmer, Grant Hackett.

I almost forgot to mention: on Saturday afternoon, after we’d retreated back into the cool air-conditioning of the Fitzroy Bowls Club I went to the bar for a jug of Bullmers.

“You wouldn’t be used to this, would you?” said the barman.

When I replied that no, I wasn’t and that it was really quite hot out there, he asked me where in the UK I was from.

“Well, I lived in London for 8 years, but up North originally, near Liverpool” I said.

To which he asked: “Southport?”

I almost fell over. Apparently that’s where his mum’s from. It is indeed a small world.

*

In other news, I feel I should broadcast to the wider world the fact that I’m also twittering, sporadically on the new fangled Stephen Fry information service. Although I haven’t really twittered that much so far and am mostly interested in following the inane mutterings of assorted slebs.

The local papers cracked open the hyperbole last week, giving last Saturday the advance billing of “the worst day in Victoria’s history”. We’d had five consecutive 40+ degree days the week before last, and now the sun was back for revenge, for one day only.

In the event, it proved to be something of an understatement: the mercury topped out at a record 46.4 degrees in Melbourne on Saturday afternoon, half of the state ended the day engulfed in bushfires (some of which are apparently still burning, days later), whole towns were destroyed, and upwards of a hundred and eighty people are dead.

Here in Melbourne we’re both very close and yet very far away: life here continues largely unaffected, albeit with ever grimmer news being reported as each day passes…

I was going to attempt an amusing blog about our Saturday afternoon in the heat (it was Ange’s birthday, and we went “barefoot bowling” in North Fitzroy) but anything I could tell you about just how unpleasantly hot it was outside in the middle of the afternoon seems a bit irrelevant (we survived about half an hour before retreating to the air con…)

We might have been sweating in the heat, but at least we had a home to go back to at the end of the day.

And relatives who were still alive.

Links:
– Australian Red Cross Appeal
– UK Red Cross Appeal

I continue to enjoy seeing British bands in tiny venues in Melbourne. I suppose eventually after I’ve been here for long enough I will run out of bands I’ve heard of from over there that haven’t yet made it over here, but for now it’s great to be able to go to somewhere like the Hi-Fi, the tiny underground venue on Swanston Street, and watch a band who I’d be lucky to see in somewhere the size of Brixton Academy if we were in London. Here, instead, we were able to see them in a venue the size of someone’s (admittedly large) living room.

We stood to the side of the stage, within touching distance of the band, close enough to read the setlist taped to the floor, to see every bead of sweat on Johnny Borrell’s ugly face, to verify that, yes, the chords I worked out for Golden Touch are indeed correct, and close enough that when we had a text the following day from a friend of ours who we hadn’t realised was also at the gig he said that he’d spotted us across the room, adding that it was “hard not to, as you were practically on the stage”. Not that we’d particularly tried to be that close to the front, just that the Hi-Fi has a central sunken dancefloor area, so the best place to stand, we reckon, is on the step that runs around the edge of it–not only can you sit down while the support is on, but when you do stand up, no one can block your view–and the only free spot when we arrived was just to the side of the stage.

And despite no one over here knowing who Razorlight are, the tiny venue was packed out, and the mix of ex-pats and locals who’d presumably done time in London at some point loved every minute. We were even joined somewhere inside the venue, Sal reliably informs me having spotted him on her way back from the loo, by none other than Dr Karl Kennedy off of Neighbours.

At the end of the gig, as the last chords of Somewhere Else faded out, Mr Borrell signed off with “thank you Melbourne, you’ve been great, we’ll see you again in the summer.” Ahem. Johnny: it’s forty degrees out there. This is summer. Bloody Northern Hemisphere types…

So said Ben Ottewell, midway through Gomez’s set at the Espy last night. I’d spent most of my day in an air conditioned office, and couldn’t believe how hot it actually was when I stepped out of it at half past five and almost got knocked over by the wall of heat that hit me: thirty eight blistering degrees, apparently, and it didn’t cool down quickly.

After having dinner down by the beach in St Kilda, feeling like the most overdressed person in town (we were surrounded by people more properly attired for enjoying the beach on the evening of the sunniest day of the summer so far), we headed for the Espy in search of somewhere cool to sit: we didn’t find it. It was sweltering inside and outside.

We were there to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Bring It On (the Gomez album, that is, not the shabby US teen cheerleader comedy), and to commemorate the event the band had decided to play the whole thing in full, in order.

Oddly, they also decided to do this twice on the same night: the original gig that I’d booked tickets for was shunted back to 9pm doors, and another one was crowbarred in before it from 6 to 9. All of which meant that I at least was sweating profusely after we’d hung around in the sweltering Espy for a couple of hours, and then squeezed in to the front of the long airless Gerswhin Rooms waiting for the roadies to test every drum and tune every guitar string (just what is it that takes so long about setting up a band? Especially considering they’d already used all those instruments just a few hours earlier…)

But I forgot all about that when they finally arrived on stage and launched into album opener Get Miles: I was instantly taken back to my wooden floored room at Wills Hall, where I listened to the album ten years ago as a fresh-faced innocent in my first year at Bristol Uni. I can’t quite believe that that was a whole decade ago.

Where did it go?

It’s a shame I’m not around in the UK to see the fruits of the atheist bus campaign trundling around the capital telling everyone that “there’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Still, even from this distance it’s nice to see something positive in the news for once.

Of course it was inevitable that someone would start complaining about it eventually, and it’s no surprise to see that it’s the notoriously publicity shy Stephen Green (he of Jerry Springer The Opera fame) who has stepped up to the plate.

According to the BBC, his complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency is on the basis that the atheist bus ads “break rules on substantiation and truthfulness”. Apparently the ASA’s code states that “marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove all claims”.

Now I suspect that this will probably be thrown out by the ASA at least in part because of the use of the word “probably” in the phrasing of the slogan–I’m sure Carlsberg never had or needed documentary evidence to support their claim that their fizzy piss represented the pinnacle of brewing excellence–but I wonder if it could have some more far reaching consequences.

In fact, I wonder if perhaps Stephen Green is really an atheist mole, working deep undercover as a religious nutter. He’s already managed to get the UK’s blasphemy laws abolished, thanks to his hard work on the Springer case. Is this latest campaign designed to get rid of all religious advertising of any sort in the UK?

Because if the atheists have to prove their claims, then so do the people behind any religious advertising. And as no one can ever possibly prove or disprove the existence of God, then it will all have to go (and no, Stephen, “documentary evidence” does not mean quoting from some book that some people made up a couple of thousand years ago…). On the other hand, if the ads get to stay on the buses, then all he’s done is give the atheist message a lot of extra publicity.

All of which is a fiendishly clever scheme. I wonder if he got the idea from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Now, it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some have chosen to see it as the final proof of the NON-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.” “But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don’t. QED” “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. “Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

So a while ago now I was on the 67 tram one evening after work. It always fills up pretty quickly on its way up St Kilda Road, and as usual we were standing room only before we were half way to the city. I think I was staring out of the window, or reading my book, and so I didn’t notice a couple of older ladies–maybe in their mid 60s–until the couple opposite me had stood up to offer them their seats. After briefly attempting to refuse the offer (“we’re not that old” they protested) they took the seats and turned to the couple now standing beside them to impart the news they were clearly bursting to tell to someone:

“We’ve been to Deal or No Deal” said the first lady.
“And we won!” her friend chipped in. “Thirty Six Thousand Dollars!”

Well that isn’t something you hear everyday on the tram (not that you ever really hear that much of anything on the tram). After a bit more explaining to the couple (they were going to share it between the two of them and their husbands; the show would be airing early in the new year) the two ladies went back to talking to each other.

“It has been a nice day, hasn’t it?” said one.
“Oh yes. And he’s so nice isn’t he? The way he talks to you, even when they’re not filming…”

[He, then, would be Andrew O’Keefe, the show’s Australian host, who, in a former life, when he was briefly a lawyer, once used to work with my sister–the old ladies might not think so highly of him now, though, after some shaky cameraphone footage of him rolling around being a bit drunk outside a bar on Chapel Street after a night out ended up splashed all over the Herald Sun in a slow news week just before Christmas.]

“Yes, such a nice day,” concluded the ladies to themselves. “I don’t think I can ever remember a day out as nice as this one.”

Now I’m just guessing here, but I can’t help thinking that maybe–just maybe–the thirty six thousand dollars might have had something to do with that…

As part of an ongoing attempt to post more stuff on here, here’s another short entry of suitably diminishing quality:

So the area around my office here on the edge of Melbourne’s St Kilda seems to have its fair share of crazies hanging around. A few weeks ago, for example, my boss told me that, on driving into the office on his way back from lunch, he disturbed an otherwise normal looking middle aged lady who was using the driveway of our building as a substitute for a toilet. An odd choice, perhaps, given that we’re situated on a major road (dual carriageway, 4 lanes on each side, loads of cars, plus trams running up and down the middle) so it’s not exactly a subtle place to relieve yourself.

About 10 minutes from the office is an area called Balaclava, and sometimes when I don’t fancy catching the tram to or from the city, I go down there to get the train. It, too, has a healthy selection of crazies on the streets. Last night, as I was scurrying down there on my way to the supermarket and station, I passed a guy who was otherwise quite normal looking, but appeared to be shouting things out at random at anyone who walked past him. Although I wasn’t quite close enough to hear anything that was directed at anyone else, I’m pretty sure that his comments as I passed him were directed at me.

I can only assume that he had spotted me in my work clothes (the “businessman in his suit and tie“) and felt the need to yell apropos of nothing in particular:

“Sad New Year Buddy. Why don’t you go home and pay your mortgage…”

Well, quite. There’s no answer to that, is there?

So I’m thinking that the bottle of wine and accompanying block of posh cheese that I found on my desk this morning on my return to work might have been a nice gesture on the part of a well meaning co-worker (or possibly my company, although who knows as there’s no accompanying note, or explanation, and no one else seems to have one…)

Might have been, that is, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve been away since New Year’s Eve, and the cheese therefore appears to have been sitting on my desk, unrefrigerated, for five days.

Hmm. Not so much.

It was probably a bad sign when, on the way into the city to see the Mystery Jets, it became apparent that the kids on the other side of our train carriage were also going to the same gig.

They were discussing their fake ID strategy for getting themselves admitted to the venue, which included the convulted explanations they were going to use for why the names on their tickets didn’t match the ones on the real IDs they had presumably borrowed for the evening from similar looking, but older, friends or relatives.

And if the fact that they must have been about 16 at most didn’t make me feel old, the fact that the date of birth printed on their real fake IDs read 1990 certainly did. These kids weren’t born when The Stone Roses and She’s So High came out.

We spotted the kids inside the venue later on, so clearly their elaborate plans worked. But if the Hi-Fi Bar hadn’t let anyone underage in then there wouldn’t have been much of an audience. We were significatly older than anyone else in the venue: it was like a kiddies version of Camden, all skinny jeans and porkpie hats. And with just 200 tickets sold (according to the girl on the door) for a 650 capacity venue, they’d had to make it two-for-one just to fill the place up. Hardly surprising, I suppose, that not so many people are prepared to commit to a gig by a little known British Indie band on New Year’s Day (the band themselves even admitted that they wouldn’t have gone to a gig on the first of January–to thank us for making the effort they produced a tray of drinks and passed them out to the underage kids at the front).

That said, we enjoyed the gig, and they seemed to go down surprisingly well with teh kids in the room. Not the best looking group of lads in the world, though–you can sort of understand why they might have decided to start a band…

Oh, and the Hi-Fi turns out to be a cracking little venue. I’ve now been to three of Melbourne’s gig venues, and I think that this one is my favourite so far. Small enough that you can pretty much stand anywhere and get a good view (and we positioned ourselves on the raised bit at the sides so that even Sal could enjoy an uninterrupted view of the band).

I’m very much looking forward to returning there at the end of the month to see Razorlight in similarly intimate surroundings.