Pork

I saw "Juno" last week and it was pretty good, if a little annoying. It's impossible not to like a movie where the main character uses the term "pork sword".

Canada

I was reading an article a while ago about Canada, and how various provinces threaten to secede, and the writer was speculating that Canada might one day just disintegrate. This idea was characterised as 'the boring-dinner-party theory' of the Canadian constitution. The analogy here (if I really must tease it out for you) is quite lovely. You know those dinner parties where once the first person leaves, everyone else decides that it's ok to leave too. So the thing goes fairly abruptly from being a full table to just being the host couple.

Tip

Get a watermelon. Put it in the fridge. Get it out, cut it up as usual. Then get a lime, or, better yet, a couple of limes. Cut them. Squeeze the lime juice over the cold watermelon slices. Eat them, upside down if you can (I mean the slices upsidedown, not you. Get a grip). You'll thank me for this.

Australia Day

I've never met anyone else who shares this opinion, and people I try to explain it to invariably think I'm a nutter. But here it is anyway.

January 26th is Australia Day, it's a national holiday where we celebrate Australianness in all its richness and whatnot; it also neatly marks the end of the summer holidays and we know that afterwards the kids all go back to school, business picks up again and things get back to normal. So far so good. I do think it's good to have a national day like this.

But why January 26th? The anniversary of the founding of the commonwealth of australia? No. The anniversary of our declaring our independence from Britain? No! The invention of vegemite? The founding of the Carlton football club? No. The official website's a bit shy about this but if you dig a bit you find that it's the anniversary of the landing at Sydney Cove of the First Fleet. So it really has not much at all to do with the founding of Australia as a country - it's an important date it its own right, but it's to do with the founding of Sydney as a penal colony, a colony which was never expected to amount to much (except to make sure the French didn't end up here). So call it Sydney Day. Or Convict Day. Or Botany Bay Wasn't What Cook Said It Was So We Found This Other Place A Couple Days Later Day.

On an unrelated note (and this was triggered by my facetious reference to Australia declaring its independence from the UK) in the mid90s I was living in London and I was a member of the UK chapter of the Australian Republican movement. We'd meet once in a while in a smokey pub near the Hammersmith flyover and talk about.. I can't remember. Anyway, I had to leave the UK, and I sent them a letter saying that my membership was going to lapse, and that it was because I was leavng the country. I couldn't resist adding that I was moving back to a country that had won its independence from England through armed struggle.

Alvin

The twins want to see 'Alvin and the Chipmunks'. I suggested they should ask their mother. She told them to ask me. For the last couple of weeks it's been passed around like a ticking parcel in a Belfast pub. There are few things worse than an annoying kids' movie and this one look like it has the lot: unsympathetic main characters, catchphrases, brain-jarring levels of hijinks and activity. I still don't know how I survived 'Chicken Little'.

But yesterday I had a brainwave (which I pretended was actually the boys' idea). I asked my sister and she said yes.

She IS woman

I went to the tennis today, the women's semifinals. Ana Ivanovic is the most attractive woman I have ever seen. That's it.

Zinc

When I lived in New York I never read the New Yorker, I just didn't get it. I'd leaf through it if I found it, looking at the cartoons but that was about it. It seemed interesting but at the same time dull - I read once someone complaining that it was full of things like a 16-page article about zinc. Beautifully-written, worthy, but very boring.

The most recent issue (or at the least the most recent I have, mine arrive on a steamship) has an 11-page article about scrap metal. And it's fabulous. So there!

Many years ago, during the Reagan Administration, I was in a bar on Broadway and about 113th (the West End, if anyone remembers it. Crack dealers and Columbia students)and I got talking to a girl who worked for the New Yorker. I was extremely drunk and I think I managed to impress her with the fact that not only had I never read the NYer, I had no desire to do so (my recollection of our talk is very vague, as you can imagine). She then stalked me a bit, in a very low-key way. Slightly spooky, but flattering. Are you out there, Holly? I'm free now.

Waste

I was at the gym yesterday doing a spin class (which, incidentally come in two flavors: 'RPM' and 'cycle'. They're indistinguishable). At the start we had the usual questions about whether anyone was new to spin, was anyone recovering from injury etc. Then we had to check we had our bikes set up properly. She then gave us a few tips on technique. One of these was that you shouldn't end up with your upper body swaying from side to side, she said this was because it 'wastes energy'.

At the time this seemed reasonable. But when I thought about it later it occurred to me that the whole point of a spin class is to waste energy. In fact the more energy you waste the better off you are. Having said, I'm usually semi-comatoase at the end of one of those classes anyway so I don't feel a compelling need to ramp it up.

Voice

When I call the company that manages my corporate pension, I have to go through one of those multiple-choice menus before I get an actual human. I don't mind that at all, but really gets me about this one is that it operates on voice recognition. So instead of pressing 1 for member services, 2 for account balance and so forth, you have to say "member services", or "account balance" or whatever. I work in an open-plan office, and it's sometimes surprisingly quiet, and I hate having to say this stuff into the phone. It could be worse, of course, I was imagining a sadist setting a similar system for a sexual health clinic, so you'd have to say "Chlamydia", "genital herpes", "crabs" and so on.

As I say "member services" or whatever, I say it in a very angry whisper, and with each whisper I seethe more and more. Finally it asks me my membership number, and it says I can tell it or I can type it in on the touchtone pad on my phone, and it very helpfully says that I should do this 'one digit at a time' - just on the offchance that I'm going to mash down all the digits at once.

More t-shirt stuff

I wore my 'I judge you when you use bad grammar' t-shirt to yoga this afternoon, and as I walked in it did occur to me that's not a very yoga-esque sentiment. I didn't wear it during the class though, so it's not that bad.

I remember seeing a cartoon once, two yogis arguing, one saying angrily to the other "No! I am the most serene and blissful!"

Safa

I was accosted in the street yesterday.

A blonde and non-entirely-unattractive woman around 40, one of a group of three, pointed to my chest and said something that I couldn't quite hear, but it was unmistakeably with a strong south african accent. Now, as it happens, I have a bit of a thing for south african accents, especially on blonde women, so my mind was racing. What exactly was she proposing? I asked her to repeat it and she said that the cartoon on my t-shirt was, in fact, her husband's favorite cartoon. On the one hand I was a bit disappointed that she hadn't propositioned me (I know this is unlikely, but I live on hope), on the other hand - as I explained to her - it did mean we had a connection. I told her exactly how to get a t-shirt for her husband. She took a photograph of me and then got on a bus. (I got on the same bus, but not in a stalkerish way.)

Which t-shirt? It's an New Yorker cartoon. A man stands at his desk and he's rifling through his calendar. He's saying to someone on phone "No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?"

I'm a jerk, apparently!

Lovely story (and I know I always say that, but bear with me) in the NYT about how this whole mid-life crisis thing is a sham, and that it's used to excuse all sorts of behaviour: 'you have to admit that “I’m having a midlife crisis” sounds a lot better than “I’m a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown.”' Mmm... this is me, isn't it?

Resolution

I made a couple of NY resolutions, most of which were along the usual lines of exercising more, becoming a greek god etc. But the most useful one was that I want to, by the end of this year, play live in a pub with a band again. It's only been 25 years....

Grammar Nazi

If you see anyone wandering around Melbourne with a t-shirt that says "I judge you when you use bad grammar", it's my friend A. I suspect it's the only one in Melbourne - a nice xmas present, I thought. (I couldn't just order one....)

Beard

Beard: Yes or No?

Hangover

While I was in Melbourne I went out for a drink with a friend. And a drink turned into a series of drinks, and by the end of it I was completely legless. I don't drink very much and I have a famously low tolerance for alcohol and it was the most I'd had to drink since.. well, the week after my youngest son was born and I went to Cuba. That was almost 10 years ago.

The next day I was incapacitated by a hangover. I've had hangovers before but nothing like this. I couldn't move. I had had two light beers, three cocktails and a vodka tonic, so it wasn't all that outrageous (I had 4 cocktails one evening with V and wasn't too bad the next day). How bad a hangover? If you've read "Lucky Jim", Kingsley Amis catches it perfectly. And if you haven'y read Lucky Jim you should. Now.

"He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."

Back

After 3 harrowing weeks in Melbourne I'm finally back in Sydney. I was on QF490, which was supposed to leave Melbourne at 2000. It didn't take off til 2035 (missing crew??!!??) which was quite vexing, as it was eating into my tiny window of personal time between handing back my kids and going to work tomorrow. We took off, went along for a bit, the hosties brought out some drinks and snacks and then, abruptly, we started descending. We landed at 2130. That's right, 55 minutes! That's how long the flight used to take back in the 80s.

My apartment was all in one piece. Only four things in my mail, one of which was a voucher for more online betting.

Sharrod.

Nice story in today's Age about a Collingwood footballer who cost the club $500,000 in lost sponsorship. His name? Sharrod! Sharrod?

I'm hot.

It's 41 degrees here today (or 106F, if you must). But it's a nice dry heat. Aaaaargh!

Suburbs

I had dinner last night with A and as well as dinner we had a bit of a cultural safari. A owns a business in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and I was staying with my kids at my mothers' house, not far from there. So we we decided to abandon our South Yarra/Elizabeth Bay milieu in favor of something much more exotic: we had a dinner in Vermont South (!!??!)) and then a drink at the Burvale.

The Burvale, for those who don't know it, is an iconic 60s suburban beer barn, on the corner of Springvale Road and the Burwood Highway, in outer suburban Melbourne. It's massive and graceless, but also very much of its time, and for me quite evocative. I hadn't been there before but I had spent a lot of time in similar establishments. If you've been to the Village Green and the Mountain View, you've been to the Burvale.

I hadn't been in one of these pubs in 20 years and there were a few changes. The rear of the place had been turned into a gaming lounge, with the usual dead-eyed suburbanites playing poker machines. The front bar was a lot less blokey than it would have been 20 years ago (I'm guessing the area that's now the gaming lounge was originally the ladies' lounge, so the hotel is now less differentiated along gender lines). Going in, A and I had joked about the likelihood of being beaten up, and I promised not to be too Elizabeth Bay (If anyone asked, I was going to say that I'd been to Glenny High, which is true).

The biggest shock was the opening hours. The Burvale's open til 5am! We were trying to imagine what it would be like at, say, 430 on a Satuday morning.

A grew up in South Yarra and finds the outer suburbs quite bewildering ("I get panicky if I get past Glenferrie Road") but to me it's both familiar and exotic. In winter I take my sons to their football matches, which are sometimes way out on the fringes of Melbourne and as I stand there on the boundary line with the other dads I feel a strange amalgam of horror and fond nostalgia.

Whom

I was out in the wilds of suburban Melbourne today when I saw this - Warrigal Road, near High Street. On the one hand, it's technically correct and it does gladden my inner grammar nazi when I see that someone actually cares. But on the other hand, I really don't have objection to ending a sentence with a preposition, so I'm happier with "Who shall we go to?".

And 'whom' is always a bit of a minefield. If you err on the side of omission and use 'who' when you should use 'whom' I don't think most people notice (I might), and even if they do, I doubt many would care (I wouldn't). So leaving whom out altogether doesn't have any real downside.

But if you do use whom, there's a risk you'll use it incorrectly and you'll end up sounding like a complete idiot. Whenever I hear the word whom I can't resist parsing the sentence to see if it's wrong. And there's a delicious pleasure in catching someone out - I do usually resist the urge to tell people.

Headline

I saw a headline the other day, "Pakistan descends into chaos". How can they tell?

Melbourne!

There's an article in today's New York Times, "36 Hours in Melbourne, Australia". Right now, if you click on the NYT online there's a link on the homepage! How exciting. It's part of a series - 36 hours in Bogota, Vientianne, Des Moines and so forth.

It's not bad but it doesn't really capture the strangeness of Melbourne; you could read it and be none the wiser. But then again, it could be worse. They used to do a similar thing, with the title "What's doing in [whereever]", and you can imagine my surprise when, within about a month of my moving to New York in the late 80s they had "What's doing in Melbourne". And what was doing in Melbourne? They'd gotten a local journalist to write it, and he'd spent the whole page talking about the opera, the ballet and whatnot. Cultural cringe, provincial hubris, pathos.. it was all there. I can't imagine what he was thinking, maybe people in NY would forsake the Met and the half-dozen ballet companies around Lincoln Center to go to Melbourne to see the same thing? One of the really great things about New York is that to the native New Yorker (which I almost became) everything in the City is, by definition, the biggest and best. World's best opera company? World's biggest bookshop? It didn't matter if it was true or not. So if you're trying to sell Melbourne to New Yorkers you'd have to sell it on the basis that it's not at all like New York. Say there's kangaroos in Collins Street, anything. (In the 80s it was possible to make up the most fantastic stories about Australia and still be believed.)

The journalist's first name was Julian. It would be, wouldn't it?

New Song!

New song - and for the first time ever, words! They were made up on the spot and sung by one of the twins. I like the bit where she triumphantly says "I can sit!".

And don't forget the old favorites, vaguely country and this one.

Resort

When the twins were very little (not quite 1) we stayed in a place in Cornwall, a vaguely resorty place. There were a few well-appointed cottages and a central converted farmhouse that had, among other things, a nice swimming pool. There were a number of other guests in the other cottages, mostly families like ours. Parents and kids.

What was really striking about this place was that there was a roster for the swimming pool. You put your name down for a timeslot, and at that time the pool was all yours. You couldn't use it without booking. I mentioned to the guy who ran the place that this seemed a little strange. He said to me that the reason for this was so that you could use the pool without having to worry about having to deal with other people who were using the pool, and what struck me at the time was that to him (and, I suspect, to the other people there) that seemed a perfectly good and sensible arrangement.

To me this just sounded horribly English.

More NYE

We're staying in a resort-type place, lots of apartments, a communal pool, the works. It's great. About 8pm on New Years Eve, when I had just gotten the girls to bed and was counting down the minutes until I could reasonably send the boys to bed (and hence me) there was a knock on the door. I couldn't imagine how this could be a welcome interruption.

I opened the door, with my face arranged in a very surly expression. It was two young men, around 20. Not drunk, just normal guys. One looked at me with a bit of surprise and said "is Matt there?". I said no. His mate then asked me "are you sure?". What I love about this is that his mate thought it was quite feasible that Matt was, in fact, in my apartment and that I was somehow hiding him. I was very tempted to sigh, turn my head in the direction of the living room (which they couldn't see from the door) and say "Matt... you better come out now". But I didn't, I just couldn't think fast enough.


Speaking of nice young men, I was having dinner with my kids at the pub here and there was a young man near us who I couldn't help noticing had a superbly athletic body, and as I was drinking my (full-strength!) beer I was idly wondering why I didn't ever have a body like that (and also, why he was wearing a baseball cap indoors, and what his wife - who was with him - was like). My older son leaned towards me and said "Dad, don't look now but that guy over there is Brad Johnson from the Western Bulldogs". I somehow felt better for knowing that - it's his job to have a superbly athletic body, it's not like he's some real estate agent who just works out a bit and was lucky with genes.

More Pants

I posted a thing on xmas eve about how I'd noticed a strange smell, and how I eventually figured out that it was my trousers, which I'd picked up from the cleaners a couple of days earlier.

Bizarrely enough, the dry cleaners called me yesterday and left a message on my phone asking whether I'd in fact picked up my pants. I couldn't resist - I called them. I told the woman there that I had picked up my pants after all; she then asked me whether I was sure I'd picked up the right pants. I said they were - they're a little tighter than when I left Sydney a couple weeks ago but definitely my pants. I hung up.

Now I'm thinking. There's been some mixup, they think I got the pants that were meant for someone else. And my pants had an odd, chemically smell. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? I should rinse them out and then drink the water, they must be impregnated with cocaine. Or at the very least, wet them a bit and suck them. In the movie version of this there'd be shadowy hitmen willing to risk anything to get the pants back.

I'll report back.

Lorne again

While I was safely asleep on New Years Eve - with the aircon turned up full to block out the racket from the street nearby - a Carlton footballer was being assulted about 50 yards away. The report in the Oz said that his girlfriend got a broken tooth in the assault, and that the 4 guys who did it were all from Western Australia.

I can't come down here without being reminded of Lorne Guyland, the character in "Money". His name only makes sense if you imagine it being spoken.

Holidays

This is what being on holidays with my kids does to me.

New Year

I was asleep by 9pm on New Years Eve, and had the first decent night's sleep I've had for a few days. No, it's not just because I have no friends; I'm at the beach (Lorne) with my 4 kids doing the Dad thing.

How was 2007?

Good things:
I fell in love. Once.
I'm quite a bit wealthier.
I started playing piano.

Bad things:
Not much really, I'm just a year older.

A good year.