Signs

Back to one of my recurring themes: funny signs. And before you roll your eyes like that, it could be worse. At least I'm not doing one of my 'kids say the darnest things' posts.

I'm staying in a cheap hotel in Melbourne (I'm paying for it myself; if it were my employer paying it'd be a bit more grand.) Directly opposite is a bar called "Mrs Parma's". It took me about a day (!!??!!) to work that one out. It proudly says it's an 'ALL-VICTORIAN BEER BAR", so there's none of that nasty interstate beer there.

When I was a lad every December the men who drove the trucks for the beer company would go on strike. Bear in mind this was just after university holidays started, it was getting very hot and dry. Because of the way Melbourne is there's only one beer company, CUB (as it then was) and there was a vaguely soviet quality to the way you'd get beer here. I remember going to Sydney in the early 80s and having to learn how to order beers, you had to specify the size of the glass and the kind of beer ("old", "new", "resch's", others even worse). In a Melbourne pub you'd just say "a beer" and the guy would pour you a beer. Interestingly, most of those Sydney beers died out: it turns out Sydney people didn't like them either.

Anyway. During the beer drought, word would go around Melbourne that a truck had been sighted coming towards the city, a truck full of beer! It was like on Gilligan's Island when someone spotted a plane or a ship, but before Gilligan managed to mess everything up so that the plane or ship passed by without seeing the over-engineered rescue signs. We'd all head to St Kilda or Port Melbourne to the pub that was rumored to have sourced some beer from interstate. If it was XXXX we'd be happy, it was a pretty good substitute for real beer. Swan or West End were generally not tolerated until we were in the second week of the strike and we'd completely lost our pride. NSW beer was very suspect. Then, eventually the beer company would do a deal with the drivers and things would go back to normal, but not before a lot of musing about whether beer truck drivers should be put under the Essential Services Act, the one that starts the army from going on strike.

Another sign, yesterday on Kingsway. A big illuminated temporary sign saying "WESTGATE BRIDGE WORKS", and I for one am glad that it does.