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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.

Not that I could particularly care less what Stevie Gerrard may or may not have done to some DJ who refused to play a Phil Collins record for him, but it’s nice to see Southport in the news, there.

I’ve never been to The Lounge Inn (bit after my time, I think), so I’m obviously disappointed that premiership footballers aren’t beating people up in the Kingsway or Manhattans (not that I’d know what either of those are calling themselves these days, mind).

I’m not sure about this, though, The Guardian: “The timing of the incident could not come at a worse time for Liverpool FC. The club has a real chance of winning the Premier League – it hasn’t claimed the title in 19 years.”

Huh? (Possibly) winning the league for the first time in two decades is a bad thing? Dark days for the club indeed.

Oh, and I do recommend you watch that little bit of video on the BBC story, if only for the comedy value of the photo they show: what the indie and other papers describe as Gerrard “[posing] for pictures with a young fan about an hour before the fracas” turns out to be him sitting at a table at the back of the shot facing the other way while a gurning idiot sneaks a furtive cameraphone picture…

On previous occasions when I’ve left a bit of a gap between blogs, I’ve always had some kind of excuse to myself–usually a backlog of travel related musings that I wanted to get down before moving on to more recent events. But this time I’ve just not had anything much to write about.

Before we left, I thought that moving to Australia would provide me with the impetus I needed to ramp up the blogging again–all those amusing cultural differences to observe and wittily chronicle–but it turns out that going to the pub over here is much the same as doing it back home. Who knew? I can’t even really comment on the curious aussie habit of drinking out of tiny glasses, because pints seem to be available in most bars now (although you still do see plenty of aussie blokes drinking beer out of laughably small thimbles known as “pots”; they claim it’s because the beer gets warm, but I think we all know it’s because they’re a bunch of wusses).

All of which is not to say that we haven’t been out busily enjoying all that our new home has to offer. Melbourne might not have the size and something-always-happening buzz of London, but it’s not short of decent restaurants and other venues in which to spend your evenings and weekends. And I’ve signed up to just about every gig related mailing list I could find. Last week we attended a “secret” Jet gig at the East Brunswick Club. Not that I’m a huge fan of the band or anything, but as they were playing in the back room of a pub we couldn’t resist. We’ve got a bunch of stuff lined up for the new year too–Mystery Jets on the 1st, Gomez at the Espy in St Kilda playing Bring It On in its entirety in the middle of the month, Razorlight on the 31st, the Kings of Leon, and then the Killers, Kaisers and Elbow at Melbourne’s V Festival. All of which should keep us busy.

It doesn’t feel like Christmas here, though, as I sit here in my office on the morning of Christmas Eve. Outside my window I can see a palm tree, blue skies above it, and busy St Kilda Road beyond–it’s a far cry from the chilly Southport Christmas Eve I might normally be experiencing. And tomorrow promises to be a bit different to usual–I’m swapping an intimate gathering of just the immediate family at home for a sprawling mass of someone else’s extended family at Sal’s cousin’s place in Elwood. There’s still going to be turkey, apparently, but we’ll be eating it outside in the sunshine.

Ah I see. So squirting your tomato sauce onto the top of your pie in the shape of the country of Australia, that’s just a serving suggestion.

Living as I do these days in a cultural backwater, I didn’t get to see the new Bond film until last night. Although we had to wait for it, we haven’t been spared the hype, marketing, and product tie-ins, so it was surprising that given all that pre-publicity we were able to roll up to our local multiplex on the spur of the moment on the film’s Aussie release day and get tickets for that evening’s showing with no problems.

Now since everyone else has already had several weeks in which to see the film and form their own opinion, there is nothing original left for me to say about it. Of course it’s not as good as Casino Royale, but then I knew that beforehand and actually found it to be better than I was expecting as a result. If I were a lazy tabloid journalist reviewing the film, I might say that it was “packed with non stop action”, or something equally trite, and that some of it is a bit like the bits in the Bourne films with the jumping across rooftops and through balconies and houses in a picturesque old town. Unfortunately they seemed to have forgotten to include a properly fleshed out story. When it suddenly came to an end, with the bad guys having been disposed of without too much difficulty (oops. sorry–spoiler alert…), I found myself sort of thinking: “is that it?”

But mostly I came away from the cinema wondering what part of Bolivia that was supposed to be, with all those perfectly tarmacked roads. I guess they thought that if they didn’t film in Bolivia itself, most viewers wouldn’t notice. But their “La Paz” looked nothing like the real one, being neither at altitude nor on the side of a hill (Wikipedia tells me that this is because those scenes were filmed in Panama). And I’m not sure I saw a single building anywhere in Bolivia that was quite as plush as the hotel that Bond apparently stayed in.

But it’s the roads that are the dead giveaway: roads in Bolivia are a pot-holed, bumpy mess, and not the sort of thing you’d want to subject an Aston Martin to. And they certainly don’t have pristine road signs dotted along them. In fact, I thought to myself, the bit at the end looked a lot like the bit of Chile that we crossed into after our tour of the salar de uyuni, where the disparity in road quality was one of the first things I noticed, and this turns out to be because it was indeed filmed in the Atacama desert. Which is close, I guess, given that this part of the world was actually in Bolivia, once.

I did notice one nod towards Bolivian reality, though. When Felix Leiter and James pop out for a beer in La Paz it looked remarkably like they were drinking Paceña Gold, which is a real Bolivian beer (and probably the only one you can buy outside the country). I’m surprised it wasn’t Heineken or some other western brand who’d paid a fortune for some product placement, but I don’t think that the type of bar they were at would be selling the Gold version; it’d be much more likely to be the bog standard white label Paceña pilsner. And in poxy little chica bottles like that? Nah. Bolivian beer is mostly sold in whopping 600-odd ml affairs, although perhaps that would have made it too difficult for the actors to keep the labels carefully covered up, as they did throughout the scene (hardly surprising really, as I can’t imagine that the Bolivian national brewing company would have paid to have their brand appear in the film…)

As my ongoing photo a day project will attest, we’ve now been in our new home in Australia for six weeks, and now that I’ve finally got round to blogging the rest of our amazing South America trip, I can start to talk about the real world, insofar as we find ourselves back in it.

After a few days back in Southport, the final legs of our journey took us briefly back to London, then on to Singapore and finally Melbourne, where everyone except for us, it seems, is either getting married, having kids, or has already done one or both of those things.

So far, we have completed only two-thirds of the back-to-the-real-world life trifecta: we’ve both managed to find employment and so are able to start replacing the savings we splurged in South America, and thanks to a brief upturn in the pound/aussie exchange rate that saw us transfer some cash over at almost $2.50 to the pound a few weeks ago, we have bought the car that is sadly a necessity in a spread out city like this one, but with most of the rest of my savings languishing in a heavily depressed index tracker that’s been faithfully following the FTSE’s recent journey downwards, the house might have to wait a while, and so for the moment we’re staying with Sal’s folks.

I don’t think we’ve outstayed our welcome yet, but then Sal was away for six years, so that’s got to buy us a few months before we need to find our own place.

*

I’ve nearly been in my new job for a month now, and working life in Australia appears to be much the same as it was in London, albeit for me personally with a longer commute and a slightly smarter dress code than I’ve been used to.

One interesting difference is that, for no discernible reason, my new employers choose to pay their staff on a weekly basis. It’s very odd.

My first payslip was emailed to me a few days after I started, showing my annual salary recalculated as an hourly rate, and applied to the precisely 22 hours and 48 minutes that I had apparently worked since starting (it took me a while to work out where that figure had come from, since I don’t have to clock in and out, but of course it’s just three fifths of a 38 hour week).

Best of all, my first payslip informed me, I’d accrued 1 hour and 46 minutes of annual leave. I won’t be using that all at once, now.

*

I remember when I used to commute in London that occasionally you’d be joined in the carriage by some holidaying Aussies who’d be loudly complaining to each other that no one talks to each other on the tube. “Why’s everyone so miserable?” they’d ask.

So now that I commute to and from work every day on Melbourne’s own public transport, it’s a pleasant change from London to experience the joyful world where people strike up conversations with random strangers and everyone’s just happy to be there.

No. Of course not.

Commuters are miserable the world over, no matter how friendly they might be in other social circumstances or how sunny it might be outside. If anything, the fact that it’s a glorious sunny day out there just makes it worse that you have to go to work rather than the beach.

The other day I was joined in my packed train carriage on the way into the city by a couple of middle class white teenagers looking a bit miserable and pretending to be hard while cranking up the volume on their mobile phone speaker so that the whole carriage got to listen to some rubbish sounding tinny music. It was just like being on a London bus, and despite the fact that it was clearly annoying to everyone in the carriage, of course no one said anything to them. Just like London.

When they pushed their way through the standing commuters and off the train at North Melbourne, one of the middle class white teenagers brushed against a businessman who was standing near the door. Obviously feeling affronted in some way and realising that this was the perfect opportunity to show just how hard he was, the middle class white teenager involved turned to the businessman and said something like “You wanna back that shit up? Huh?”, then paused briefly inside the train carriage before getting off and making an angry face back at the guy on the train. It was, shall we say, rather amusing.

There is one part of my commute that comes close to the ludicrous idyll imagined by those holidaying aussies in London who’ve probably never used the public transport system in their own home in their lives–the bus I catch in the mornings to take me from the end of the street to the local train station, and then again in the evenings to get back. Not only do the drivers wait at the stop by the train station for the train to come in before leaving, they smile and say hello to you, remember the names of some of their passengers, wait for people when they see them running for the bus, and actually open the doors early when they are on the way to the station if they get stuck at the traffic lights around the corner so that the commuters can dash over the road to catch the next train instead of missing it while the driver waits for the lights to change so that he can pull up at the stop.

It’s not quite like that on London buses, is it?

*

Of course I miss our old London friends and our old London life in general, as much as anyone living there while the city struggles into winter might find that hard to believe, but then I knew that was going to be the case when we left. I’ve been clinging to the bits of home that I can–picking up my Weekly Guardian from the newsagent at Flinders Street on a Thursday morning, reading the Private Eye that finds its way across the world and into the letterbox every other week, and taking the edge off that commute by listening to the Collings and Herrin and Adam and Joe podcasts–but being in Melbourne in Spring has its advantages.

We’ve just had the annual Spring Racing Carnival, for starters, during which two weeks of horseracing just down the road at the Flemington racecourse stops the whole nation. I don’t have any particular affinity for the sport, but it means standing in a field and drinking in the sun, which is always a fun day out.

And of course, there are the beaches and barbies. It might be a cliché, but it’s still good.

Yay! I win at betting: