Conversations on the St Kilda Tram

“I was hoping to come round on Christmas Day”, Frank said. His face a collage of hope and trepidation. “Maybe on Christmas night. I know he’ll be there. I could sleep on the couch. I just want to play with the kids and the toys I got them. …… I know it’s awkward but it’s Christmas”.

Mobile phone calls on trams are never private, but Frank was doing his best. He looked out towards the Christmas Tree on Federation Square and it’s incongruous snow and reindeers seemed to catch in his voice. “You know I love them and they love me. But it’s up you. I know you’ve moved on”.

Across the aisle, the three Irish girls were tired and emotional. They had landed a job in the same City centre café and were fulfilling the stereotype of all backpackers by getting pissed in the afternoon. By their accents I could tell that they came from different parts of Ireland and had probably met on a beach in Queensland while getting drunk on sun and cheap ecstasy tablets. Friendships are made and lost with the speed of sunsets on the great year out. They laughed and joked about English boys they had met on their travels and about the scary Italian chap who liked to stand naked on the balcony of their St Kilda backpackers lodge.

They talked about Christmas and how great it was to spend it in the heat. “I’m heading to Sydney for Christmas” Deirdre said as though she was talking about the weather. To Grainne however, it was like lightning had struck. “I thought you were spending it with me in Melbourne” she said and the mood changed like a blanket dipped in ice had been thrown across it.

The next 10 minutes was a tennis match of half-hearted explanations and manufactured hurt. “But I told you I was going to be in Melbourne.” “You said you have loads of friends here so I assumed you wouldn’t miss me. You’re always talking about how many friends you have.” Grainne wasn’t going to let it go however. She summoned up some tears and thrust her chest out for one last valedictory speech. “I know we only met two months ago but we’ve done so much cool stuff together and I really felt that we’d become best friends. And you want to spend Christmas with your best friend”.

Deirdre surveyed the tears and emotional blackmail and decided she wasn’t going to pay up. “My best friends are in Ireland. You’re just people I’ve met traveling.”

With that, she opened a Pandora’s box that could never be closed again. They sat in silence, save for the occasional whimper from Grainne. Traveling by its nature is transient and the friendships made follow suit. Like shooting stars they fizzle brightly before dying. Email addresses and phone numbers are exchanged but everybody knows it’s a game. No one will ever make contact. You share buses, white water rafts, helicopter rides and your last bottle of VB in a Byron Bay bar at 4am. But the friendships you make are born of the moment, fuelled by the intensity of your hyper ventilated life. When you return to the dull drip of normality, those friendships seem incongruous and other worldly.

This is the great unspoken rule of traveling to which all backpackers buy in. Except Grainne it seems. She was determined to maximise the guilt. “I’m going to be on my own now on Christmas Day”.

“No you’re not”, said Deirdre, “You pick up more strays than the dog pound. And most of them look like they should be in the dog pound too”. Her initial embarrassment had turned to indignation at the idea that somebody she’d met only two months ago would be trying to make her guilty about where she spends Christmas.

Christmas Day in the Southern Hemisphere is different because of the weather, but in most other respects it is the same. Nobody wants to spend it alone, even the independent backpackers. The brave souls who wander the Milford Track or Cradle Mountain will still try and find a kindred spirit to share a beer and a BBQ on Christmas Day and mythologise about previous December days back home when the snow glistened on every tree top and happy strangers called out “Merry Christmas” while struggling home under the weight of cheerily wrapped parcels. In Sydney, the council provides penned off sections of Bondi Beach so that young Europeans can mix with their own nationality and get happily drunk without having to worry about the English ruining the party. They’ll call home and tactfully ignore the fact that they’ve traveled half way round the world to spend Christmas in a cage with hundreds of their countrymen.

Grainne will no doubt be sorted out. Frank was not so lucky. He held the phone to his ear and listened patiently to the list of reasons why his Christmas would not be a merry one. His eyes glazed up and he struggled to control his voice. “But it’s Christmas”, he said, like a small boy who wanted to stay up late for the Toy Show. And a small boy is what he had become, unable to cope with the realities of adult situations. He hung up without saying goodbye and turned to look at the gathering dusk.

There are thousands of tourists in Australia at this time of year and they will spend Christmas with fellow travelers and short term acquaintances. They have chosen to come here, to spend Christmas away from their families. They’ll go to the beach on the 25th and maybe have a swim, if they can stay sober long enough. But for many people who live here, the choice of whether or not they spend Christmas with the people they love is not theirs to make.

I hope Frank gets to spend some time with his kids this Christmas and that those drunken Irish girls realise that there are far more important things to cry about than which temporary friend you share your turkey with.

A Day at the Races

Melbournians treat horse racing the way Irish people treat weddings. As an excuse to dress up, get drunk, debauch with the opposite sex and pay a passing and somewhat disinterested look at the advertised events.

This is a City which declares a Bank Holiday on the day of a certain Horse Race and where the locals can tell you the life story of Phar Lap (a nag from the 1930’s that was a bit special) quicker than they can name the Victorian Premier. But it seems this fascination is less with the equine side of things than with the social opportunities that Horse Racing provides.

The Spring Carnival is a kind of rights of passage event in Melbourne. It’s when the winter clothes are packed away and the sunglasses and fake tans come out. For the rest of the summer, the race meetings provide the perfect opportunity to get some wear out of that $1,000 frock you bought for the carnival. The clothes worn to race meetings in Australia are another link to weddings. Slim fit frocks with spaghetti straps and built in cleavage are de rigueur for the ladies, along with ludicrously high heeled shoes and hats for those over 25. The gents wear stylish suits in the Armani style and shoes that are so shiny you could use them to start a small fire with the aid of the sun and some dry twigs.

At the start of the day, this cortege looks like a picture postcard, but it soon becomes clear that the clothing is completely inappropriate. First to go are the Ladies shoes. High heels are a crazy form of footwear to start with. When you down 16 glasses of bubbly and spend the day in a large field, they become instruments of torture. So it’s not uncommon to see young ladies parading round in their bare feet while clutching an expensive pair of Italian made Gucci shoes. Gents jackets and ties are the next to go, particularly when the mercury hits 40c and the wind decides to take a holiday. Add in copious amounts of alcohol and what starts as a fashion parade ends up like a St Patrick’s Day parade. A lot of drunken people in ridiculous clothes.

The Melbourne Cup attracts 120,000 people to Flemington racetrack. Saturday’s meeting at Caulfield was an altogether more modest affair, but the best traditions of Australian racing were nevertheless on show. Most of the punters were part of group, celebrating a hen night, bucks night (the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of our much more manly “Stag” night) or 21st birthday. The popularity of racing to these people is that it provides ample facilities for large groups to drink al fresco and at the same provides the pretence that you are actually there for something apart from the drinking. Generally, these are the only people not dressed in party frocks and suits and are more likely to be found in an Elvis outfit or “Mankini” (as promoted by Borat). Whether Borat intentionally invented a costume that encourages one testical to hang forlornly from the side is unclear, but this certainly seems to be the result.

Most people cast a half-interested eye at the nags as they thunder by every 40 minutes or so but it quickly becomes apartment that the gap between races is less about getting horses and jockeys ready than providing just the right amount of time to collect winnings, place new bet, relieve your bladder of the extortionate pressure you are putting it under and buy yourself another beer at one of the 25 bars on course. Then you return to the paddock to watch the race on a large screen. Occasionally for the last ten seconds or so, you might actually redirect your eyes to the real horses as they charge by. By this is entirely optional. Many people are happy to go to the races and never see a horse at all. In much the same way as people are happy to go to a wedding and never see the bride and groom. If you bump into them on the way to the bar, you would no doubt say hello and crack a witty comment about when is the baby due. But if you don’t see them all day, then no sweat.

Which is a shame at the races actually, because the horses are actually magnificent. They are genetic mutants of course, being inbred from a French donkey in the 18th century, but as genetic mutants go, they are not bad ones. And they just go to prove that God has no monopoly on beauty. Its seems that every Australian horse is a fantastic chestnut colour and it must be a point of honour to groom their coats so they look like school boys on their First Communion Day. But the real beauty of these magnificence beasts is best felt when they thunder past you on the home straight, necks stretched towards the finish and muscles aching against the jockeys whip. There in that blaze of equine sweat and thundering hooves is the true mystery of racing and the mastery of sport.

But by then most people are gazing at the screen or heading back to the bar. The meeting ends as the sun starts to set behind the grandstand and the winners and losers join the merry and simply drunk in the short walk to the station. Melbourne is the most accessible city in the world. Trams will deliver you directly to the beach, the two biggest sports stadiums are situated next to the two biggest train stations and race courses are served by trains and buses that can whip you back into the City quicker than you can place a reverse double.

On a nice sunny day, its hard to beat a day at races, especially when you pick the winner of the last race and go home with your pocket bulging with your $50 profit.

Show Business for Ugly People

So Johnny Howard is gone. And few will lament his passing. Australia has its fair share of selfish people who only care about tax reductions and keeping immigrants out, but even they lost interest in poor old Johnny. He had been Prime Minister for 11 years, as has Ireland’s Bertie Ahern. But he shares more than longevity with Ireland’s esteemed leader. Both follow a right wing philosophy dressed in liberal popularism. But politics these days is about style as much as substance and Johnny had about as much style as a Village People tribute band.

While Bertie pretends that he likes everyone from Trade Unions to George Bush (when in fact he likes no one except the five guys he goes for a beer with), Johnny pretends he likes no one, when in fact he is in love with George Bush.

Mr. Howard now joins his chums from the War on Terror in the dustbin of history. Tony Blair is sitting in a dark room somewhere practicing his Catherine Tate impression; Silvio Berlusconi is playing at being a Football Manager and investigating revolutionary hair replacement technology. Mr Anzar is busy lobbying the Spanish Socialist Government to award posthumous medals to dead Felangist torturers and George Bush himself is enduring the longest last dance in politics as the American Constitution does to him what the rest of the world would have liked to have done long ago.

Soon the horsemen of the apocalypse who plunged the World into a never ending middle eastern war will be gone. But it is not for the blood of thousands of Iraqis they have fallen. Consumerism has been their downfall. The Western World has surfed an economic boom for the past twenty years, built on cheap Chinese products and the never-ending thirst of American and European consumers. You would think that the politicians who brought this wealth would be cosseted by a thankful public. But in the same way that we grow tired of our two year old car and replace our plasma TV screens like we replace light bulbs, we grow tired of politicians. Johnny Howard lost the election because people were bored. The Neo cons have created a generation of dull minded consumers with a low attention span. They shouldn’t be surprised when this attention span covers politics as well.

As an Accountant, I tend look for the credit to every debit. This sounds remarkably unsexy, so in public at least, I prefer to call it the search for the Ying and Yang of life. Our leaders would have us believe that the boom of the last 20 years is a virtuous cycle of growth and more growth. The credit of course can be found in the sweat shops of Asia and the constant need for oil to fuel the furnace of Capitalism. Getting at this oil is of course why Iraq and Iran are so often in the news.

The other yang in the cycle of western consumerism is of course the Environment. Fossil fuels are being burned like there is no tomorrow (which of course there may well not be) as a consumer based boom needs oil as it’s core ingredient. The rest of the world’s limited resources are being consumed in the ravenous feast of greed. Australia is a perfect microcosm of this. Western Australia is now essentially one big mine where the holes are been dug so deep I expect an Aussie bloke with a helmet and sweaty armpits to shortly burrow through the floor of my Dad’s living room in Ireland.

In Tasmania, they plan to harvest all the trees and convert them into Big Mac cartons or something similarly hideous, while in South Australia they are domestically farming kangaroos, which is just wrong on so many levels.

But none of this caused a flicker in Australia’s recent election. The Green Party’s vote was static and unspectacular. They have hoovered up all the vegetarians and tree huggers but struggle to break through to the masses. I guess if Social Democracy is not able to convince people to look beyond their wallet for the sake of helping the old and the sick, then the Greens are going to struggle to make a selfish electorate pay more taxes to support something as intangible as the environment.

Politics has been dumbed down to the extent that elections are now just a case of swapping one group of dull civil servants for another. While I’m pleased to be finally living under a Labour Government after years of selling Socialist Newspapers and joining the incongruously named “Accountants for a Labour Victory”, I have to admit that it won’t make much difference. You couldn’t fit a red rose petal between the policies of Kevin Rudd (what other countries in the world would elect a “Kevin” as their leader?) and the outgoing Liberals. I guess we lefties just have to hope that the new regime will manage Capitalism with a slightly kinder face.

There was a time when people burned cars after elections. When they marched on public buildings and threatened to raise them to the ground. When tractors and buses arrived from the country for mass protests on public squares under the gaze of nervous riot police. When corrupt politicians and their even more corrupt wives were put up against a wall and shot. Now we just buy the Sunday Newspapers to cast a cold and disinterested eye over the election results before quickly moving to the Sport.

Nobody cares anymore. Except Johnny Howard of course. He can now go for his morning walk around Circular Quay without anyone bothering him. Even the Chasers comedy team who used to disrupt his morning walk by dressing up as Osama Bin Laden will lose interest.

Politics used to be real, vital and exciting. But sometime around the End of History, it became just another branch of reality TV. A chance to vote on something meaningless without having to pay premium telephone charges. Now it’s just show business for ugly people.

The only fly in the ointment

In recent years, Reality TV has taken over the airways as broadcasters have sought to make programs with unpaid members of “the public” rather than the previously extravagant practice of employing professionals to make professional productions. One characteristic of these programs is that they are designed to inspire you to do something better. To change the way your house looks, to change the way your body looks or in extreme cases to change the country you live in. They play on the insecurities of modern life, where materialism has led us to believe that everyone else is living a better life and that we live in a crap house in a crap country and are unfit and unable to play the piano into the bargain.

One of the most popular such shows in the UK is “Get a New Life” where the British Government financed BBC, sets out to convince people that Britain is a dive and that you would be a mug not to emigrate. Australia is a favorite destination for this show, perhaps because the British still think they own the place. The format is repetitive; overworked English couple with young kids, seeking a sun and sand lifestyle and the opportunity to cash in the equity on their over-priced London home. The program generally takes them to the Gold Coast or the English colony in Western Australia known as Perth. The closing credits will feature jaunty music on a didgeridoo while the happy family strolls down a beach into an Australian sunset.

The odd thing is that in this closing shot, you will never see the family waving their arms in front of their faces like every other beach walker in Australia does. Because in TV land, there are no flies! Those of us who have come to Australia know that reality is different. That one thing at least will not be as advertised on the “Come to Australia” seduction videos. Once the temperature goes above 16c, the flies will emerge to partake in their daily battle with humanity. It’s not as though we Europeans haven’t seen flies before, we’re just used to the more passive variety. Australian flies have a mission to get into your mouth, nostrils, ear cavity, eyes, or any other slightly liquid cavity you choose to expose. And they attack in groups, so that when you are dealing with one that has burrowed his way under your eye-lid and is merrily dancing a foxtrot on your retina, his friend will be busy depositing his fly pooh on your tongue.

A stroll down the beach on a warm day will provide the spectacle of thousands of tourists engaging in a semaphore type dance as they wave their hands manically before their contorted faces. The locals on the other hand, are much more serene to this annual insect invasion. They have long since learned that resistance in futile and that arm waving only creates sweat, which is the elixir of life to the ravenous flies. As a result, the locals tend to look like wilder beast at an African wadi with an army of flies resting contentedly and unmolested on their heads while they plan their next attack on the sweating and naïve foreigners.

One wonders why the flies here are more aggressive than elsewhere. Perhaps they are as affected by the drought as everyone else and their search for moisture on the bodies of humans is just the last throws of desperation. Or maybe Australian flies are just like Australian people, inquisitive, hungry for liquid refreshment and reluctant to stand on ceremony in their quest for personal satisfaction.

There are the occasional positives from this insect epidemic. Australians are naturally competitive and have developed the game of “Fly Tennis” to obtain some measure of enjoyment from this nuisance. The normal court of play is the opposing seats on trams and trains. The server waits for a fly to enter the arena and with as much extravagance as the packed commuter carriage will allow, he will wave his hand vigorously in a forward motion. This will cause the startled fly to turn their attention to the passenger sitting opposite. With perfect timing they will swat the fly as he arrives on their side of the court causing it to hurtle back in the direction of the server. Rallies will last until one or other passenger disembarks, which can often be 20 minutes after the game began. Players are expected to glare at each other furiously in the somewhat quaint belief that the fly belongs to one or other of them and they have no right to try and pass it on to somebody else.

The other pleasure to be taken from flies on public transport is to watch the defensive actions of passengers, who are already multi-tasking, when it comes to insect repelling. Take for example those clever souls who can talk on a mobile phone while reading the celebrity gossip in the free newspapers littered across trains. When a fly appears, the natural reaction is to wave the newspaper (to the great annoyance of the people sitting either side) or if space is tight to use their head as some sort of battering ram against the buzzing nuisance. There are few things funnier at 8am than watching a sharp suited businesswoman talking rapidly into a mobile phone while reading MX and trying to head butt a fly.

One day perhaps it will all become too much and ABC will commission a program encouraging people to emigrate to Britain. There won’t be lingering shots of families strolling down an English beach but at least you’ll be safe in the knowledge that the cold will have dealt with the flies in a way that a million flaying Australian arms never could.

Movember

When I came to Australia, I arrived not just with a backpack and jet lag, but with some well enforced prejudices. I believed that the mullet was the most common hairstyle, that all Australian men were six feet plus, that Fosters was the beer of choice and that people ate kangaroo with the regularity that we Irish eat potatoes. Of course, I have found that none of this is true.

The mullet has disappeared into history alongside Jason Donavan’s acting career and is only found these days on Pacific Islanders with biker fetishes. The traditional mullet wearer was the Australian Football League player, but they all wear tight haircuts now so that they can slip into nightclubs unnoticed and indulge in their drug taking habits. In the globalised modern world, you won’t see many differences in hairstyles between Melbourne, Montreal and Milan. Brad Pitt or David Beckham set the trend and we all follow like sheep. A number of years ago (probably around the time that Beckham decided to shave his head) barbers changed their process from suggesting a style to suggesting a number. This made visiting the barber a similar experience to visiting you local Chinese take-away. You would ask for a 3 on top and a 2 on the side or an all over 1 if you were feeling minimalist. This only works for men of course who see hair as an unavoidable nuisance (until we start loosing it of course, when it suddenly becomes the most important thing in the world). Women have a different approach and would never dream of choosing hair-styles by numbers. Which is why hair dressers can charge women ten times as much as they charge men. There is a world of difference between having your hair cut and having your hair “done” after all.

Facial hair is making a comeback here however with the introduction of “Movember”. This is a charity driven event to encourage men to grow moustaches during November and transport themselves back to the 1970’s of flairs and fast cars. It seems to have caught on, although some people are more productive than others. I insulted one guy at the weekend who told me he was taking part, by asking him when he planned to start. Thankfully, I am in a play until the end of November and the Director has left strict instructions that I am to be clean shaven until then. This saves me the embarrassment of displaying my follically challenged facial hair. On the few occasions when I’ve tried to grow beards, my chin has resembled the scrublands of centre Australia, with the occasional spurt of hair surrounded by an ocean of virgin skin. My attempts at growing a moustache have occurred during long absence from work, such as study leave. Lack of food and sleep during these times turned me into a twitchy nervous wreck, which was never helped by the emaciated caterpillar sitting on my lip.

I am also haunted by the memory of a girl I “shifted” when I was 19. Her name escapes me as several years of therapy have helped me to erase most of the memories of that faithful night. I walked her 3 kms back to her house and was invited in for tea. After the tea and the Mikado biscuits, I thought I was safe to move my move. The lights were dim and her lips beckoned me like the Sirens beckoned Odysseus. I moved in for the kill but found that an assassin was already waiting and my lust was her target. When lips met lips, I detected something previously undiscovered in my humble, heterosexual upbringing. Stubble! I was pretty sure it wasn’t mine as I had barely discovered shaving by then and all sorts of fears raced through my head. Was this a “Crying Game” moment? Should I check for an Adam’s apple or do the Paul Hogan test (when I was 19, that was known as “3rd Base” and I was far too shy for that kind of thing). In the end, I made my excuses and left, but my relationship with facial hair took an irredeemable turn for the worst that night and has never recovered.

Movember works as a popular fund raising event, purely because facial hair is so rare in Australia. Clean shaven and tight haircuts are the fashion here. The climate no doubt contributes to this, as walking around with a Karl Mark beard would be pretty uncomfortably in 40c heat. I think Australians also have a desire to escape from their tragic fashion status of the 1980s. In the years before the Internet and global telecommunications, Australia was starved of modern fashion trends. So leggings and big hair found a retirement home in Australia when the rest of the world had moved. These days, Australians are far more fashion conscious and they will maintain a neat and tidy state until the next trend becomes available.

As a result, I expect most moustaches to be shaved off as soon as the Movember Ball is out of the way and the young ladies of Australia have had the chance of snogging Tom Selleck look-alikes. If my experiences as a 19 year old are anything to go by, those ladies will be aching for some smooth skin after they have recovered from the beard rash. World stock markets are going through turbulent times at the moment with the collapse of sub prime debt and rising oil prices. However, if you want a sure fire stock tip, put your house on Gillette because the sales of razors (in Australia at least) are going to rocket in early December.

Unless of course, David Beckham grows a tashe. If that happened, I might even think of growing one myself.

Great Things the Australians have Invented - Part 1

Stubbie Holders

I’d put this up there with the discovery of fire and the wheel. The man who invented Stubbie holders, should be lauded in the company of Einstein and Newton. Like most great inventions, it is deceptively simple. A small flexible cup made from rubber based products and usually sporting a garish picture advertising a beer company or football team. It is designed to hold a bottle of beer (known as a Stubbie, as everything in Australia has to end in “ie”) or can of beer (if you’ve been paying attention you’ll know this is called a tinnie). The purpose is to keep the beer cold until its final sip. I had originally assumed that this marvellous invention was designed for the sultry climes of Queensland or the Northern Territories, where temperatures sometimes reach the levels of an Arab’s armpit, 3 hours into his interview in Abu Ghraib prison. But in fact, the humble Stubbie holder is useful in all beer drinking scenarios. To be scientific for a moment, glass is a medium level conductor of heat. Not as bad as metal and somewhat worse than wood. The simple act of clutching a bottle or glass while engaging in weighty conversation on the prospects of Carlton winning the flag in 2008 will cause heat to pass from your body into the clutched liquid. In much the same way as Jesus enters into bread and wine during a Mass. Well maybe not like that but beer is as important to me as God, so you’ll have to excuse the comparison.

The net effect is that the start of the beer will taste crisp and refreshing, while the dregs will taste like, well dregs. Cunning scientists employed by the Australian Beer industry realised that people drink cold beer faster than they drink warm beer (there’s a lesson to the English there). So the race was on to find the solution. While the rest of the world was busy splitting atoms and untangling the web of DNA, Aussie Scientists were busy trying to figure out how to keep beer cold. And God bless them, I say. In Melbourne, they came up with an Interim solution called “The Pot”. This involves serving beer in such a ridiculously small glass that it’s drunk before you leave the bar, thus preventing it from getting warm. But bar service is so unbelievably poor in Melbourne that this was never a long term solution. And so the Stubbie holder was born. After you get over the initial embarrassment of clutching a small rubber cup with a picture of a Koala Bear on the front, you release yourself to a night of drinking cold beer in the manner of the guests at the wedding of Cana. The last will be as good as the first. It’s nothing short of a miracle.

Kath and Kim

Kath and Kim is not the funniest thing on TV, it's not the best written or the most risky. But it captures a nation's soul in a self-deprecating manner like no other. When Father Ted was in its pomp, we Irish marvelled at its ability to dissect the sacred cows of Irish culture and serve them up to us as juicy steaks. We recognised all the caricatures as fundamental truths from our childhoods. The alcoholic priest, the murderous married couple whose mouths wouldn't melt butter when seen in public and the bishop and his mistresses. Father Ted was famously made and broadcast in Britain and while we laughed at our recent past as it was dressed in pantomime costume before us, we also hid behind our cultural cringe and only peeked over it to see if the British were laughing with us or at us!

Kath and Kim has a similar impact on Australians and Melbournians in particular. They recognise the accents as being a not so distant stretch from the average voice you’ll hear in suburban malls. The garish clothes are the sort you see on a sunny day in St Kilda and the social phopahs are indicative of a country where money and wealth are racing ahead and manners are lagging behind. The attraction of Kath and Kim is that they are materially rich enough to indulge in all of the pastimes of modern living. The big house, the plasma TV, the endless supply of Chardonnay and fake tanning. But they don’t have the “breeding” to enjoy it properly. We, the viewing public, feel that we have this breeding which allows the program to portray us as our uneducated selves. There are many countries that have experienced a similar economic boom in recent years and created a new class of people with money and pretensions. Australia has offered a ready made template to make fun of this development and Ireland in particular could make use of it. “Mary and Margaret” sounds good, not least because I could write it and base it on my two sisters.

It’s also the most popular comedy in New Zealand, but I’m pretty sure they’re not laughing with them.

Beetroot on Hamburgers

Sometimes you have to wonder who the first person to discover something was and how he came across it. What sort of experimentation was somebody doing when they discovered that a plastic bag over your head and an amyl nitrate soaked orange in your mouth would deliver higher sexual enjoyment (although presumably not for your partner who has to look at you at the time)? Or what could that person have been up to when they discovered that licking a particular frog would give you hallucination fits?

I have the same thoughts about the man that discovered that beetroot goes with hamburgers. I suspect he’s related to the idiot that invented pickles in Big Macs. But the beetroot is genius. It adds flavour and provides unwashable colouring to your hands, providing instant evidence in the morning of your previous nights dining habits. The Aussies take the beetroot thing a bit far though. You can get an Aussie Pizza here, which includes kangaroo or emu meat (this being the only country in the world that eats the animals depicted on their national emblem) and a large dollop of beetroot. It’s just wrong.

But when you’ve had a skinful of stubbies at an afternoon Barbie and you’re trying to sober up before Kath and Kim, then an Aussie burger with a large slice of beetroot is your only man.

Tonight's Menu

A picture of Bill Clinton adorns the wall of Fagan’s pub in Dublin. Tucked between a GAA jersey and the results of the pub’s golf society, Bill’s cheesy Indiana smile sits atop a creamy pint of Guinness. This holds his gaze as though he were a World War II ambulance driver who had just crossed the Sahara to Alexandria to be met by a pint of Carlsberg.

In Melbourne, there is a picture of Bill in the Meekong Vietnamese restaurant. Bill is tucking into his second bowl of Rice Noodle Soup. I mention second, because finishing one is a feat in itself. The noodles expand as they sit in the soup, so while eating it, the dish just seems to grow to the point where you give in and hand back something bigger than that which you received. It’s a bit like the Irish and the English language. It was forced upon us, but being the good-natured people we are, we gave it back to the English in a better state than we had received it.

If you want to know the heart and soul of a City and it’s appeal to foreigners, then look for a picture of Bill. You’ll find it everywhere. Drinking a glass of vodka in Moscow, nibbling cheese in Amsterdam and wearing tight leather shorts and a Tom Selleck moustache in San Francisco. Bill sums up a City better than Lonely Planet. Dublin is rightly known for it’s pubs, whose appeal increases the further away you get from them. Despite their surly staff and over priced produce, they are still the best in the world. And I should know, I’ve spent the last four months checking.

Melbourne, as Mr. Clinton testifies, is much more about Asian food. Chinatown here has a natural feel to it and services mainly the large local Asian community. All parts of Asia are represented with rice the common constituent. Chinese is the dominant cuisine, although even that splits between Cantonese and Hokkien and every other province that produces a curry. I am reminded of my mother’s comments that she wanted to stop after she had her second child, because she heard that every third child born in the world is Chinese. And Mam didn’t want a Chinese baby. When it was explained to her that this statistic applied to the world in general and not her specifically, she relented and let Dad back in the bedroom. This was a subject of great annoyance to me, because as the second child I had obtained a modicum of affection, which is reserved for the youngest in the family. Once the third child came along, I lost all that. And I’ve been jealous of my sister Lai Ling ever since.

Everybody has their favorite ethnic restaurants in Melbourne. I’ve only been here 4 months, but I already know where to go for the best Indonesian Nasi Goreng, the best Malay Satay and the best Indian Butter Chicken. I’m still assessing the Chinese places. My biggest problem is that the specialise in Dim Sum, a veritable lucky dip wrapped in a dumpling dough. Take a bite and you could be chewing down on Pork, Chicken, Beef or Prawns. Or pretty much anything else that Granny Tan found in the fridge that morning. As I have the fussy eating habits of a spoilt 5 year old, I normally avoid this type of food, less my delicate palate be disturbed by flavors richer than processed chicken. I have a similar problem with that great staple of Australian Food, the Meat Pie. These are tasty little buggers, but one is strongly advised to eat them with your eyes closed. The term “meat” in the description seems to cover a multitude.

As it’s cheaper to eat out than to cook in Melbourne, it’s not surprising that there are so many fantastic restaurants. When the locals do decide to cook, it will generally be a Barbie. Aussies have this down to a fine art and a ritual. Literally anything can be cooked on the Barbie from fried eggs to birthday cakes and the occasion itself is subject to more decorum than a ball in a Jane Austen novel. It is appropriate to bring as much beer as you intend to drink yourself. And among old Melbournians, this will be VB stubbies. You should also bring a bottle of something along for the host. Ladies should bring a desert or salad but no meat. That is the preserve of the host. The season begins on November 1st and invites start flooding in from September onwards. You will invariably end up with two or three on each Saturday and Sunday during summer. And that will involve eating an awful lot of meat, or seriously disappointing some of your friends.

Shorts are allowed, but Speedos are frowned upon, even if the hosts have a pool (which are more common than indoor toilets in Ireland). Flip flops or sandals are encouraged, but not the ones you wear to the beach. So locals will invest in a pair of Birkenstocks just for the BBQ season.

Being Irish, I’ve never quite gotten the Barbeque thing. Fair enough, our climate doesn’t really suit and Barbies at the beach or sports events are the only way of getting hot food. But 99% of Barbies are held in people’s back gardens, 3 meters or so from a perfectly working kitchen. Why people prefer smoky, half burned pork chops, to a nice piece of grilled chicken is beyond me. I guess standing around drinking beer and watching somebody cook on a stove in the kitchen is not as much fun. And I’m in Australia now and if I don’t go to Barbeques, I won’t be going out on Saturdays and Sundays during summer. Onwards and upwards, that’s what it’s all about. As somebody said to me last week, “Fish can only see to the side, flies can see all around, but humans can only look forward.” That’s my new motto and I’m sure Bill Clinton would agree. He comes from a town called Hope after all.

A Day at the Beach

There are many great debates in life. Is our primary responsibility to ourselves or the wider world? Do we really exist? Is Man inherently greedy or has the world made him that way? And are Manchester United the hand tool of the devil, or is that just their nickname?

But the greatest debate of all is between Creationism and Evolution. George Bush and assorted other whackos believe that we were created 6,000 years ago, more or less fully formed. Dinosaurs it seems, are a relatively recent occurrence, only dieing out when they made the mistake of meeting in Ireland for a conference and were exposed to eight weeks of wet weather in a row, in what they had thought was summer.

I lean towards Evolution, if only because the preponderance of tattoos indicates that some people are still climbing the evolutionary tree. I believe that we came from the sea millions of years ago as slimy green amoeba, in the manner of that Guinness Ad. I felt some of this evolutionary trail in myself last Saturday morning as my condition resembled a slimy green amoeba in all but physical form. It seems strange then, that as soon as the sun comes out, we strive to insult our ancestors by diving back into the sea. Or not, as the case may be, because Melbournians seem to share a trait with their Irish cousins. If the mercury rises above 25c, they will tear down to the beach, change into ill-fitting swimming costumes, play father against son football, eat sand infested sandwiches and allow their dogs to defecate everywhere. Then they will climb back into their cars and drive home. Leaving the sea untouched and alone. Like someone’s tongue left hanging on the phone.

For the sea here shares an important quality with the one that cuddles Ireland. It’s bloody cold. Next stop from here is Antarctica after all. It’s not as cold as legend would suggest however. You don’t exactly have to crack the ice to get in or down a bottle of vodka for courage. But Melbourne beaches suffer in comparison to others found in Australia, such as in Queensland or even Sydney. Nevertheless, I prefer to make the most of what I’ve got and consider the best beach to be any I can walk to.

Elwood Beach fits that description. St Kilda beach is closer, but it suffers from an excess of skangers and sugar fuelled kids at the weekend. Elwood is altogether classier, boasting as it does a marina and a genuine Italian ice cream van. On Sunday the mercury hit 34c and a sirocco wind percolated off the Victorian plains. Apparently it was the 9th hottest October day in history here. It was certainly the hottest October day I’ve ever experienced, but I am of course a Northern Hemisphere flunkie.

So I donned my shorts and headed for the beach, to see if this legendary Australian surf culture lived up to expectations. Sadly it didn’t. When I got there I was attacked by several million flies that had clearly hibernated for the winter before hatching a plan to attack the first milk-bottle white homo-sapien they met. The only way you could get rid of them was to dive into the water, which makes it even more surprising that so few people were swimming. After I’d rid myself of the flies by achieving 30 seconds of mild hyperthermia in the ocean, I took to wondering why we are obsessed with the beach experience. Apart from the flies, you have to put up with sand getting everywhere. Every time you wash it out from between your toes, you realise that God wasn’t that clever in his design of the world. He made a purpose built sand washer called the ocean. And then put a load of sand between you and your shoes, so that your toes are full of the stuff the second after you step out of the sea.
Then there is the fact that there are more kids running around than at a Barney Concert and you’ll usually have at least one of them staring at you as you go through the spectacularly ungraceful process of trying to take wet shorts off and dry your nether regions on a packed beach. Add to this the blazing sun, from which the beach offers no shelter, the jellyfish and the fugitives from health inspection known as Hot Dog stands. And all in all, it can be a pretty soul destroying experience.

Yet every time the sun comes out and winks at us, we fall back into its spell. We join the traffic jams, we wear bad clothes, and we expose parts of our body to the public that we would normally reserve for lovers and doctors. It’s like an ancient God and we must respect its call. Like some primal pull towards an older and more spiritual home. Like our evolutionary fore-fathers are calling us back to where it all began.

Or maybe we just like looking at members of the opposite sex with little or no clothes on. But that great debate is for another day.

And now for the Weather

Four seasons in one day is a cliché popular in Ireland to describe the soul destroying weather and amongst Kiwi band Crowded House, to talk about the City they really come from. Which is of course Melbourne. Ireland has no real claim to this phrase, as it never snows in the morning only to be replaced by sunshine in the afternoon. In Ireland, the phrase really means, if it’s raining now, it probably won’t be in half and hour. It is much more accurate to say, “If you don’t like the weather, hang around for 20 minutes”. Although to be honest, you won’t like the weather much then either.

Crowded House wrote that song about Melbourne and after 3 months of living here, I can see why. Melbourne gets the kind of weather changes that make you wonder if it’s actually God’s chemistry set and he’s up there conducting weather system experiments that he might later try out on some rednecks in America and the Russian steppe. Thursday was the coldest day since I got here. An Antarctic wind was howling up Collins Street as though it was trying to deliver the body of Scott from it’s snowy grave. On Friday, the temperature rose by 10 degrees and the coats were put away again for the summer. On Saturday, the cold temperatures returned, only for the sun to re-appear on Sunday. In Ireland, there are only really two weather systems, Showery with sunny spells or Sunny spells with showers. In Melbourne, it is boiling hot or freezing cold, quite often within the same day. It is not unusual (among us new arrivals for example) to leave the house in the morning in a short sleeved shirt and sunnies, only to come back in the evening in a state of frozen shock as the walk from the tram is like trampling through a Siberian forest.

The forecast for this week is 27c today, 17c tomorrow and 27c again the next day. How is a fragile Irish metabolism supposed to cope with that? In the mornings, I find it hard enough to remember whether shoes go on before trousers or not, so I really struggle with planning what to wear for the day. It's usually inappropriate and I end up sweating or shivering. I'm sure people who see me regularly on the tram, think that I'm one of St.Kilda's many drug addicts. Which would make me feel at home on the tram, but that's another story.

One thing that is predicable in Australia (as with the rest of the Western World) is politics. Francis Fukayama wrote a famous book called "The End of History" and while I've never had the enthusiasm to read right wing triumphalism and don't have the energy to do so anyway, I have to depressingly admit that he has a point. Liberal Democracy has won the battle for hearts and minds in the west and nobody has the stomach for real change. Since communism collapsed in the 90's, western democracy has settled into a cosy collaboration with commerce and globalisation has ensured that the west at least, is protected from recession, because it will constantly find new markets in the developing world. It's as though the Americans finally found the secret to colonisation, 100 years after the European powers have given up on it. We no longer have recessions in the west, we just have economic ups and downs that are balanced by large scale labour movements too and from the east. So there is very little to get upset about and as people are fundamentally selfish, the status quo suits them just fine. So if a centrist party happened to be in power in the west 10 years ago, then chances are they still are. That's how Tony Blair hung on for so long in Britain and Bertie manages to stay in charge in Ireland. Australia has had John Howard (him of the bushy eyebrows) as premier for the past 10 years. And while it's difficult to find a person with a good word to say about him, he stands a good chance of being re-elected on November 24th. He called the election yesterday and as I'm a political anorak, this will give me the pleasure of observing two general elections in the same year. The Irish one in May was pretty disappointing (apart from being six feet away from Michael McDowell as he gave his retirement speech to the chorus of "Cheerio, Cheerio, Cheerio"). I had better hopes for the Australian version, as the Labour Party stand a genuine chance of winning. In all my life and travels, I've never lived under a Labour Government, so the prospects were quite exciting. Until I discovered that the Australian Labour Party is about as left wing as Mussolini.

In a desperate attempt to grab the middle ground, the Labour Party are now saying that they are most economically conservative party in the country. Well whippy doo. So much for taking control of the means of production and giving it back to the workers.

I had an excellent dinner in Melbourne on Saturday night and as you do, we got to talking about politics. One of the party was among the few to openly admit support for John Howard. He said that Communism had failed everywhere it was tried and therefore Capitalism was the only solution left. It won by default. Capitalism of course has failed more than half the world. But they live in China, Burma, the Middle East, Africa and South America. Capitalism in those places means working in a sweat shop or providing fodder to the War for Oil. We live in the west where everything is just rosey. No need to upset the applecart. And so, I confidently predict that John Howard will be returned to power on November 24th. Now if only the weather was so easy to predict.

The Girl in The Galleon Cafe

The St Kilda Galleon Café is busy on Saturday mornings. Something to do with their eclectic mix of student dining and hippy soul searching I think. We got the last two seats wedged between a gaggle of giggling teenagers and a dreadlocked couple dreaming of Jamaica and hallucinogenic drugs as they gazed into their skinny lattes.

You were wearing those oversized sunglasses that Victoria Beckham has cursed upon the world. They made your head look like a fly that had been magnified a trillion times, but in a nice way. When you took them off to peruse the menu, your eyes caught mine and I blinked first. An uncomfortable lump had developed in my throat and I felt the first trickle of perspiration on my brow. I fumbled over the menu, searching for something that would make me seem sophisticated and worldly wise. I settled for avocado and mushroom on Pied toast. I emphasised the Pied bit as though I was exclaiming to the café, “No ordinary toast for me, I have wandered the back streets of Marrakech and sipped coffee on the footpaths of Constantinople. And what’s more, my body is a temple, unsullied by the indignity of white bread and preservatives”.

But you paid no attention to my pathetic attempts at being cool. You could do it effortlessly. You asked for the low carb, vegan breakfast with rye bread and Guatemalan coffee as though it were cornflakes and you’d been having it every morning since you were three. The Café was noisy. Full of chat about backpacking around Europe, college exams and whether Brad Pitt would get back with Jennifer Aniston. We were aloof to such trivial matters. Sometimes words just aren’t enough.

Like most Australian cafes, the Galleon provides free newspapers for its patrons, but at the same time, they like to make a political statement. Rupert Murdoch dominates the newspaper industry in Australia in the manner of Charles Foster Kane, but without the chubby good looks. It’s difficult to pick up a newspaper here without reading a justification of the War on Terror or how immigrants are plague ridden welfare sponges. The Galleon is cheerfully left wing and stocks only non Murdoch papers. Which means you have to read “The Age” or stare at the hippy posters on the wall. The weekend edition was sitting between us and you instinctively moved for the Arts section as I reached for the Sports. I immediately regretted this, as I was keen that you didn’t see me as a brainless jock. But as you had already grabbed the Arts, I was left with little opportunity to paint myself as a sensitive intellectual. The Gardening and Motoring sections left little room to impress. I sensed that you were more concerned with saving the planet than a small garden and if you were forced to drive, it would be a Citroen 2CV. The car for people who hate cars.

When the drinks arrived, we both stretched for the milk and our fingers touched in one of those cinematic moments beloved of Hugh Grant. I giggled like a 12 year old girl at a Westlife concert and you smiled at my innocence. We read the paper and occasionally glanced up to smile at each other. But you seemed in another world. You would read something in the paper and then tilt your head upwards to contemplate. This showed the majestic arch of your neck and the tumbling mane of your flowing locks. I tried the same but only succeeded in looking like Mussolini in one of his more pompous moments.

My food arrived first and I became conscious of you watching me as I ate. Suddenly every chewing action became a thunderous movement of jaw muscles. My face stretching in obscene directions and my mouth dribbling and finding it impossible to keep itself closed. But thankfully you seemed uninterested at this point. An article on lesbian drama in the Melbourne Arts Festival seemed to hold your attention and made me momentarily worried that my attentions were focussed in the wrong direction. But then you caught my eye again and in that flirtatious look I knew that you were interested in men, if not necessarily in me.

The couple beside us were talking about “Australian Idol” and began every sentence with “Oh my God”. We looked at each other and raised our eyebrows in a solidarity moment of contempt. Your food finally arrived and the waiter made a lame joke about having to go to Guatemala for the coffee. You humoured him a with a smile but your lips registered enough annoyance to suggest that he wouldn’t be getting a tip. You ate your food like a ballerina would cross a stage. I was ashamed of my oafish munching and disappeared behind the paper.

When I looked up, you were at the counter paying your bill. As you left, you turned to look at me. You didn’t smile, you didn’t nod, you didn’t speak. You just looked.

And in that look, a thousand dreams went through my head, but none of them came true.

We had shared a breakfast. Two strangers in a busy café and we hadn’t said a word. I didn’t speak because I’m shy and clumsy. You didn’t speak because you are too cool for conversation. All I was left with was regret and indigestion. We search the world looking for love and dream up poetry and prose to charm them. And yet, when we find what we are looking for, how often does fear overpower our desire?

But sometimes, words just aren’t enough.

Tea and Sympathy

I guess I came here for change, the shock of the new and the chance to see how the rest of the world does things. But similarities are also comforting, like finding Irish breakfast tea and English premiership football on TV. It’s hard to describe the pleasure a good cup of tea brings and its place in Irish culture. Tea was of course invented by the Chinese as a way of purifying water (we Europeans came up with beer for the same purpose which is an interesting cultural comparison). It was then cultivated by the English colonists in South East Asia and exported through the trade routes to Europe. Indians drink their tea sweet with milk in the way Irish kids do until their mother weans them off the sugar. This is normally done by making 8 year olds give up sugar in their tea for lent. One of the few partnerships between spiritually and dental health I reckon.

The Chinese like to drink their tea light with warm water and a sprinkling of leaves, which makes it taste pretty much how it is written. It seems to be more about the serving than the taste, which is the polar opposite of the Irish experience. Unless of course you are serving tea to the parish priest in the “good” room at the front of the house which is reserved just for that purpose. In that case the best delft gets dusted down and the tea pot that Aunty Maggie gave you as a wedding present gets delicately removed from the cupboard where it has stood since the day of your nuptials.

But in the normal course of events, we Irish like to drink our tea strong and bitter with a touch of milk to take the cut off it. Grannies would make it like treacle, adding twelve large spoons of tea to the pot and leaving it to stew on the cooker for a day or two. You could generally stand a spoon upright in it and rich tea biscuits would not so much melt as spontaneously combust when coming into contact with it. But nothing could better a cup of that tea after a day spent in the summer sun on Granny’s farm. The standard greeting on entering an Irish home is not “how are you doing” but “will you have a cup of tea?” Even in the remotest parts of the West, Irish mammies will have a pot of tea ready on the remote possibility that a stranger might call.

So it was with great delight that I found “Irish Breakfast tea” in the local supermarket. It’s not quite Lyons (you don’t stand to win a car every month for example) and it is horrendously expensive, but it leaves a comforting stain on your teeth and is dark enough that you can’t see the bottom of the cup.

Likewise with Football. If you’re willing to swallow your pride and to suckle from the teat that is Rupert Murdoch, then you can get English football to your hearts content in Australia. Which is just as well when Arsenal seem set to dominate for the next decade. ESPN even have Tommy Smyth doing commentary. Tommy grew up 5km from where I did in the rolling drumlins of North Louth. He moved to the USA in the 50s but hasn’t lost his distinctive Dundalk accent, which now brings pleasure to millions of ESPN viewers around the world.

I went to my first Australian wedding last Saturday looking for differences to the Irish experience. But the similarities are what stand out. A nervous man marries a nervous woman. There are guests looking uncomfortable in suits and big hats and there are hyperactive kids running around on sugar-fuelled acts of destruction. You’ll have at least one argument between a couple who have had true love exposed to them on stage and therefore feel a piercing light shone into their relationship. There is nothing like vows of adoration between the newly married couple to make other couples feel inadequate in their own relationship. There is food and wine in abundance and speeches that vary from the bizarre to the sublime. At Saturday’s wedding, my sister took on the role of Chief Bridesmaid. It was her 5th such outing which makes her seem like a character in a Jane Austen Novel. She delivered a marvellous speech, which was well received; although I’m not sure the groom appreciated the threats to break his legs if he ever disappointed the bride.

After the official reception, we retreated to a rented house in the middle of the Blue Mountains (which aren’t very Blue, but I won’t go there). We partied until dawn crept like an angry bouncer across the porch and shuffled us off to bed. Earlier, the three Irish people at the wedding fulfilled the prophecy of James 19:88 “Wherever two or more Irish people meet in my name and alcohol is involved, they will sing the Fields of Athenry”. And low it came to pass. We gave the Fields socks in the most reggae version ever heard.

Then I did the same thing I’ve done at parties since I was 17. I found a nice girl and sat in the kitchen talking about life, politics, history and why there are always sea-gulls at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Kitchens have always been my favorite place at parties, you have easy access to the fridge and it creates the kind of cosy domesticity that makes conversation natural. We talked until 5am and then she went back to the living room where her boyfriend was asleep on the couch. That’s the problem with beautiful interesting women. They are rarely single. You can look for differences in the world, but more often that not, what disappoints is that most things are just the same.

Who dares to speak of Love

Relationships are like dirty laundry. They shouldn’t be aired in public. And yet that’s where most of the drama seems to be. I reckon most people try to break up in public to stop the other person from making a scene. Yet that’s exactly what they will do. I got the tram on Thursday night and a young couple sat down beside me. He was dapper in a perfectly tailored dress suit and shoes that were so shiny you could direct the three wise men by them.

He walked three paces in front of his partner who was clothed in the sort of cocktail dress that would fit into a cocktail glass. They looked like they’d just come from the Oscars or some equivalent awards ceremony. By the expressions on their faces it was clear that they hadn’t won. They sat down and stared directly ahead as if transfixed by a magic lantern. After several uncomfortable minutes (particularly for me) he said something. She immediately turned away from him and stared out the window into the inky darkness. It seemed like one of those melodramatic movie moments, the sort where he suddenly utters the phrase she’s been longing to hear and she turns tearfully and hugs him in a passionate embrace. But this was the weak, washy way of true tragedy and she held her gaze into the comforting night.

Eventually their stop came along and the uncomfortable silence was broken. But only as far as the platform. She immediately took off in a direction he wasn’t expecting and he was left open mouthed and full of uncertainty. You could tell he wanted to chase after her but was extremely conscious of the tram load of passengers that he now had for an audience. She was also conscious of that audience but was determined to play up to them. She walked past the tram window, her head held high in the glow of the lights and her face a mixture of hurt and self satisfaction. It was clear that whatever had gone on, she was the winner. And if he thought he was having the last word in the argument, he was probably only having the first one in the row they would have the next day.

I thought of them on Saturday morning as I tucked into a rugby consolation breakfast. I’d dragged myself out of bed early to watch Ireland play France and after the middle class tossers had let the country down again I thought I deserved one of the specials that Tracy comes up with in her café round the corner. I was tucking into my new favourite of scrambled eggs on toast with avocado and mushroom, when Trent and Sharon wedged themselves in beside me. Couples in cafes on Saturday mornings fall into two categories. They are either long term partners or people who’ve just slept with each other for the first time. Trent and Sharon certainly fitted into the latter category. The long termers generally pick up the weekend paper on the way in, split it so that he gets the sport and she gets the fashion and then disappear behind the papers to eat their breakfast in total silence, save the occasional burp and grunt. The newbies like Trent and Sharon will giggle nervously and tease out information about each other that they can’t remember from their drunken exertions the night before.

Trent seemed to have her eating out of the palm of his hand until he made a fatal mistake. She was in mid sentence when his phone rang. He put up one finger as if to say “Stop, somebody more important than you wants to talk to me.” Even though at that point, he had no idea who that other person was. He shouted into the phone like he’d forgotten that electronic impulses carry your voice. In fairness he imparted the minimum information to his caller, that he was indeed very fine and more importantly was having breakfast with a woman. When he hung up, she was waiting to pounce. “Don’t answer your phone when I’m talking to you”. His face was a mass of confusion. He didn’t know her well enough to judge if she was joking. A second later the look on her face confirmed that she wasn’t. He floundered desperately, but it was clear that he was a man in a hole who possessed only a shovel. He did his best to apologise, but it was too late. The 24 hours of spade-work he had just put in had been ruined by one careless moment. As though putting the last card on top had caused the whole house to tumble.

She recognised that she’d been a little tough and tried to soften the blow. But her words were patronising and hollow and he knew it. They made their exits shortly afterwards, with half hearted commitment to call each other. But the moment was gone and even if they go out with each other for the next ten years, they will never recover the electricity and innocence they had before that phone rang.

After I’d got over the feeling that I must have the sort of face that people feel comfortable breaking up in front of, I got to thinking about the fragility of relationships and unfortunately that’s how most of them work out. If we have 100 of them in our lives, 99 will end in heartbreak and the final one in death. But as Professor Levy said in Crimes and Misdemeanours, “it is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. Most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.”

Trent and the dress suit guy will no doubt be back looking for love this weekend. I think I’ll join them and not worry about melodramatic scenes on railway platforms. For even on trams, the journey is often better than the destination.

Scenes from the St Kilda Tram

I’ve heard St. Kilda being described as the Blackpool of the south. This is a little unfair as the sun often shines in St. Kilda and I haven’t seen busloads of factory workers with “kiss me quick” hats. It does have a Luna Park however, a ramshackle collection of roller coasters and bumper cars rides. But that makes it feel like Coney Island just after the war. The sort of place that Tony Soprano goes to in dream sequences and Woody Allen uses to show the loss of innocence. So each time I pass it, I feel like I’m either going to be whacked or find myself felling nostalgic for a time that never once.

Besides, I’ve never actually seen anyone on the roller coaster.

The rest of St Kilda is made up of funky little restaurants that sell gluten free food and bars that are full at 11am. Because of this, St Kilda attracts more than its fair share of back-packers, winos, new age hippies and the occasional International banker like myself. You can find all these on the St Kilda tram, a fine piece of public transport that runs from the City to the beach every 10 minutes or so. I broke my Ipod last week, (sorry Andrew!) so I’ve been reduced to eavesdropping on other people’s conversations and living my life vicariously through them.

It seems that every tram has to include one example of the lesser-spotted Australian tramp. This migratory species is generally healthier than its European cousin and in the winter months at least, they display a fine plumage, usually in the form of a bushy white beard and riotous hair. For some reason, these tramps are usually sober and sit quietly without muttering arguments against the inequities of the world. However, even without the beard you can spot them easily by the four empty seats either side of them.

At weekends, the smartly dressed middle-aged tourists and scruffy back packers dominate the tram. The back packers could blend in with the hippy locals were it not for well-thumbed copies of Lonely Planet peeking inquisitively from their bags. They can often be found gabbling excitably into mobile phones in various European tongues. What they are saying is anyone’s guess, but the smile that accompanies “I met an Aussie girl last night and went back to her place”, is the same in any language.

The Irish of course can be found in any situation where the people of the world meet, be it on the new bus service from London to Sydney or the unfortunate plane crash in Phuket. I reckon that when Sherpa Tensing recounted the tale of his climb to the summit of Mount Everest, he neglected to mention that there was already two Irish guys there brewing a cuppa and complaining about how you can’t find Barry’s Tea in Nepal. So on every tram I’ve been on to date, I’ve heard Irish accents or simply spotted a big paddy head with pale as milk bottle skin and eyes that sparkle like a Caribbean lagoon. The old song about “when Irish eyes are smiling” is not wrong; you really can spot Irish people abroad by their eyes, although the St Vincent’s GAA club fleeces are normally a giveaway too. The modern Irish traveler is a confident soul, far removed from the “tip your hat” sort of the 1950’s. I sat beside a bunch of these on the tram yesterday. One of them was wearing a t-shirt that boasted “The Irish Abroad, building the rest of the World”. It was a big statement, although by the size of him, he looked strong enough to be doing it on his own.

They spoke with a kaleidoscope of accents, which suggested they were college friends who had come together for their big year out. They obviously hadn’t been here long though as their eyes lit up as we rounded the corner onto the esplanade and the sea opened up in front of us. Groups of guys display a similar dynamic. The quest to be the alpha male. In this group it was difficult to spot. You had the talker, who had an opinion everything, usually what he had just said as no-one else could get a word in. He spent most of the trip talking about some obscure video game and the best way to kill people to ensure maximum points (a knife through the rib cage from behind apparently). Not the sort of conversation you want to come in on half way through.

Then you had the tall silent guy who didn’t even smile at the talker’s occasional attempts at humour. It was hard to decide if he was cool or simply vacant. Maybe it’s the same thing. The third guy was a giggler, desperate to ingratiate himself with everyone and in the process alienating all.

It took me a while to realise it but the alpha male was clearly the fourth guy. He had smiled occasionally at the inane conversation of the talker, all the better to soften him up before he moved in for the kill. The talker was just moving into what seemed like the 3rd hour of his discussion on the unfairness of how you only got three lives in whatever blood soaked gore-fest he was recently playing.

The fourth guy interrupted with some enthusiasm to say, “yeah, wouldn’t it be better if a shot in your leg meant that you couldn’t use two fingers in your right hand, which means you only have 60% pressure on your trigger hand, so the bullets would travel 40% slower and the baddies had more chance to escape. But heh, you’d save a life”. The talker stared at him for a second before he realised he had been gazumped. The only way to deal with somebody talking complete shite is to answer it with bigger shite.


The rest of the trip was quiet. That’s what alpha males do.

Snow in September

It’s best to contemplate the philosophy of skiing when you are lying on your backside in the snow, legs akimbo and your skis pointing vertically in some strange semaphore formation. I found myself in such a position on Saturday morning on the slopes of Mount Buller. I was wondering what is this fascination we have with sliding down mountains while trying to get up from the crumpled mess I found myself in.

I was at the bottom of a T-Bar lift, a piece of machinery with which I share a checkered past. I think the last time we locked horns was in the early 90’s when Jella and myself were taking on the Austrian Alps. After 5 days tuition from the lovely Inge, we felt confident enough to tackle the beast that was the mountain overlooking the little village in which we stayed. Our challenge all week was to ride to the top of the mountain and then ski non-stop to the bottom where a welcoming Gluwein awaited us.

The last stage of the trip involved riding a T-Bar, but we were gung-ho at this stage and would have ridden an elk to the top if that were required. For those unfamiliar with this hideous contraption, it involves having a piece of metal unceremoniously wedged under your posterior, which then drags you up the mountain. In Austria, Jella and myself decided to go halves on a T-Bar, so that we could share our boasts about the fantastic skiers we had become. We made it to within a couple of yards of the summit when the incline suddenly steepened. Our new found confidence ebbed away like spring snow and we panicked. We both gripped the central bar and this brought our momentum towards the centre. Suddenly, there was shuddering jolt as our skis crossed and we looked like drowning men clinging to a life raft.

For a few seconds, we held onto each other in a desperate quest for balance. Then our second ski crossed and I was faced with a damning realisation. It was going to be a dog eat dog situation and it was no fun being a poodle. I let go of Jella’s arm and he fell backwards grasping for air onto the icy trail. One of his skis came loose and it scuttled off into the bushes like a frightened deer. In the meantime, Jella began to slide back from whence he came.

I managed to cling on and risked one guilty look backwards. Jella had just taken out the couple on the T-Bar behind us and was continuing his decent like an accelerating bowling ball, scuttling all that came before him. I could see the look of terror on their faces as they could but watch as a screaming Irishman came hurtling towards them. He took out about 12 couples before he managed to direct his momentum into the ditch. It was a scene that Homer Simpson would have been proud of. In the meantime, I sailed sheepishly to the top and began the decent alone.

An hour later, I was tucking into my 3rd Gluwein when Jella appeared looking like somebody who had just spent 3 years making it back from the American Civil War. He had walked down the mountain and then organised a search party for his missing ski. They found it as dusk was falling and the sun was throwing fantastic colours across the snow. Forensic tests would later discover that it was covered in the blood of 10 Germans and a mountain goat. They still talk about that day in Austria in the same hushed tones they invoke when discussing the day the Russians appeared in the valley in 1945.

On Saturday last, fate and the T-Bar caught up with me. I had knocked off a couple of easy runs and my confidence was high. The sun was up and the sky was a brilliant blue. I was in the process of musing on how wonderful everything was, when I made it to the front of the queue. I’d been using chairlifts all morning, so I had become used to sitting down and letting the machinery do all the hard work. Somehow when it was my turn I switched off. Maybe I thought it was a chairlift or maybe I’m just dumb. Anyhow, I sat down when I should have stood and three seconds and some desperately unballetic maneuvers later, I was lying in a heap in the snow while being giggled at by the forty Aussie teenagers waiting in the queue. The final indignity arrived two seconds later when the next T-Bar whacked me on the back of the head.

Having dusted myself off and searched among the slushy snow for my dignity, I gripped tightly to the bar and contemplated the point of all this. The trip up the mountain is long and arduous. You get up at the crack of dawn and put on more kit than an American football player. You carry heavy skis in clunky boots uphill to lifts. You queue for 20 minutes to get a lift to the top of a run that takes 4 minutes to descend and you sweat in your 4 layers of clothing in the sun and freeze in the shade.

Maybe we do it because mountains provide a challenge by just being there. Maybe it’s all about the post snow bath and the feeling of accomplishment that you’ve pushed your body to limits you didn’t know possible and conquered the pull of gravity in the process. Or maybe it’s because of the fresh air, the view and that sense of freedom you get when it finally clicks and it no longer becomes a battle between you and the mountain. Then you feel part of the mountain and your descent becomes an effortless and graceful glide.

And if none of that works, there is always the après-ski party and the opportunity to bore everyone when you get back to work on Monday.

Reach your hand for the crescent moon

Reach your hand for the crescent moon, take hold of it by the hollow.
If it sits in the palm of your left, then the moon will be fuller tomorrow.
I’ve bored enough people in Ireland over the years with that Cowboy Junkie’s lyric whenever I’ve spotted a half-moon. But it doesn’t quite work down here. Like most things, it’s the other way round. In Singapore, it appears to be the top half of the moon that goes missing when the moon is on the wane. That’s just one of the funky things that happens when you’re dancing around the equator.

22 minutes out of Singapore, heading south by south east, that’s precisely what we were doing. We reached 33,000 feet and flightpath, the on-screen map that keeps you amused while waiting for the movies and the tasteless food was showing that we were right over the equator. Although given the size of the plane on these maps in proportion to everything else, we were also over Indonesia, Malaysia and several islands inhabited only by man-eating tribesmen and Japanese soldiers who forgot to surrender in 1945.

I was on the flight back to Melbourne and the moon kept me company most of the way. I glanced out the left hand window and there it was, a wispy orange galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. For a moment, I thought it was the sun, but as it was close to midnight and half of it was missing, I quickly realised that it was in fact the most beautiful moon I’d ever seen.

Huge and throbbing, it danced among the clouds like Ginger Rogers beneath a chorus line of twinkling stars. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by the moon. I’ve seen more than 15,000 of them after all. But like butter chicken and Guinness, you can never get enough of it. Except in Singapore of course. There was a stall near our office that sold butter chicken, rice and nan bread for $5 (about 2.5 euro). Due to my unfortunate combination of laziness and in adventure, I rarely made it past this stall in 3 weeks. By the time I left Singapore, I had enough butter and cream in my arteries to earn a cardiologist a new Porsche.

Guinness, alas, lived up to its reputation of worsening the further you get from St James Gate. One sip in Singapore’s foremost kitsch and formulated Irish pub was enough for me.

That pub however, did give me my biggest chuckle of the trip. An Irish guy was talking to a local at the bar about their favorite horror movies. “Did you see Saw” said the local. “I did”, said the Irishman “and I saw Saw two too”. I guess you had to be there.

On the trip back I realised that I must get out to movies more, because you can’t depend of in-flight entertainment for your cinematic stimulation. Even these days, when business class offers 81 interactive choices, the curse of the lowest common denominator still strikes home. If you’ve seen one Will Farrell movie, you’ve seen approximately one too many. And the summer block buster action movies lose some of their luster when projected onto a six inch screen. It makes me realise how crazy the world has become when people think that the height of technical advancement is the ability to watch movies on a mobile phone.

The Arts section did at least give me the opportunity to massage my self-inflated ego. I dipped into “Betty Blue” for a few minutes until I remembered the Peep Show’s assessment of it as “film about sex and suicide that made an entire generation of teenage boys fancy mentally deranged girls”. Thankfully the flight back was only six and half hours, a mere hop, skip and jump in this part of the world. So a ludicrously implausible Anthony Hopkins vehicle got me through the night.

I got back to Melbourne and put my jacket on for the first time in three weeks. Heat is all very well, but there’s a certain pleasure in raising your collar to the unexpected bite of an early morning chill. The taxi drove through deserted Sunday morning streets with only the litter from revelers on Saturday night for company. The driver talked about footy and how Carlton were “tanking it” (Aussie for deliberately throwing games). He played Arabic music and spoke with a middle eastern Aussie accent that involved saying mate at the end of every sentence. More worryingly he appeared to have been awake as long as I had, as he swerved all over the road like a drunken sailor.

It was late and I was tired, so I said nothing except some nonsense about the weather. We turned the corner onto St Kilda Esplanade. The sea bobbed like a giddy child watched over by a motherly moon. I looked up and noticed that its left hand side was missing, so the moon was on the wane. But it was there, like it has always been there. One constant in a sea of change. And as a cloud passed across its tip, it seemed to wink and say “Welcome Home”.

At 5am, I can get whimsical like that. But a twelve hour sleep sorted me out and I’m back to being as bitter and cynical as ever.

Fusion

Fusion food is the new big thing in Singapore. Thai crossed with Indian so that glass noodle spring rolls now precede Tandoori chicken. Italian crossed with Chinese, so that linguine now comes with fish head curry. But sure didn’t we Irish invent this years ago when we took our national dish, the humble spud, and fused it with foreign dishes. We took 9,000 years of Chinese culture and reduced it to pouring curry sauce over chips. We insisted that Lasagne had to be served with potatoes of the chipped or gratin variety. And we trained every eastern European that entered our catering industry to say at the end of each order, “do you want chips with that?”
 
It’s difficult to find chips in Singapore. I thought of this on Friday night as I tucked into some fast food after a night of decadent consumption of outrageously priced alcohol products. The hawker market on  Panang Road is pretty famous I believe. But at 1am you’re just looking for a high cholesterol fix. Unfortunately I had to make do with some steamed chicken and spicy noodles. I know this because I found most of it down the front of my shirt the next morning. You just can’t get junk food here.
 
Fusion was also the theme on Saturday when we went to Fort Canning for the Womad concert, or world of music art and dancd as I now know it. I always thought that Womad  was a 70’s reggae band. So imagine my surprise when the first act was a Japanese Ainu band that mixed traditional Japanese instruments with something that sounded like Led Zeppelin. This was followed by an Israeli guy who did a passing imitation of Pavorotti crossed with Little Richard. All of this was done the way Singapore does things. Everybody brought a little plastic bag to bring home their rubbish, the queue for soft drinks was longer than the one for beer and the toilets had paper and soap. Oh, and everybody stood up, sat down, clapped or held hands when they were told to.
 
You could say it was anti-septic but the searing heat and 90% humidity was hardly conducive to healthy living. Most people here live in air-conditioned buildings, travel in air-conditioned cars and trains and if they do go outside, they keep it to a minimum and walk at a pace that would make Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army look nifty. Bu we decided to spend the weekend outdoors. This meant that by the time Youssou N’Dour came on at 11.30pm, we were solely testing the old cliché that horses sweat, men perspire and ladies simply glow.
 
Let’s just say that by the time we all got up to bop to Seven Seconds (the only song I recognised the whole night to be honest) there was a lot of glowing going on. Once it was all over, we made our way down to the hundreds of taxis waiting at the main entrance. Because that’s the way they do things in Singapore.
 
The way things are set up here, you’d swear that the City had been designed by a teenager who spent hours on City Planning games on their PC, when they should have been out playing football.  Or perhaps this is Second Life for real people. They neatly package all the clothes shops into Orchard Towers, all the electronics into Simlin Square and all the prostitutes into Orchard Towers, known to every taxi driver as the four floor of whores. No matter where you want to go on a Friday night, if you're a Westerner (or Caucasian as they call us when they are trying not to offend) this is where the taxis will want to take you. That’s about as rude as they get here.
 
But it’s like the City planner forgot that the thousands of tourists who pass through here might want more than shopping and the immoral pleasures that the four floors may offer. So they decided to build a resort but stuck it on an island off the coast called Sentosa, so as not to interfere with the relentless pursuit of capitalism that goes on everywhere else here. They stuck in a load of sand and made the flimsiest beach I’ve seen since I lived in Luxembourg. A couple of bars of the Phuket variety and some funky little trains to keep the kids happy.  But walking around it on a Sunday afternoon is like walking along the floor of a swimming pool filled with very warm water.
 
But life is not supposed to be about order, The centre cannot hold and all that. So I’m heading back to a climate that is unpredictable, where trams don’t always run on time and where the beaches have been created by the sea, rocks and time. Fusion, in other words, as it should be.

Looking for soul in Singapore

August is a wicked month. I believe Edna O’Brien once said that although my limited education and inability to access Google means I can’t confirm this. The Singaporeans certainly seem to think so. They call it the ghost month. Nobody buys a house in the seventh Chinese month or so the story goes. Although it’s clear that Capitalism occasionally sneaks in and overcomes superstition.
 
This is a strange country in many ways. It’s the darling of the Economist and the World Bank. They say it is the world’s most open economy, which is code for allowing the Americans to come in and steal as much of your assets as they like. You can see this open economy in the shopping palaces of Orchard Road, the Tag Heuer watch arcades in Raffles Hotel, the money lenders in their banking temples along Boat Quay and Simlin Square, where you will find the latest in Japanese electronic gadgetry. In some cases before the Japanese have even invented them.
 
But if Karl Marx was to take a wonder in his time travels along Singapore River, he wouldn’t be too disappointed in how this little country has turned out. Every citizen is entitled to a house, which they buy at a cheap mortgage from the government. You’re guaranteed a job so long as you do your military service and chip in with some community work. That bit isn’t obligatory but Prime Minister Lee, who along with his Pappie has ruled this country since independence in 1965, is looking down on everything. Including this blog I suspect, so I better watch what I say.
 
Its East Germany with Rolex watches. Stalinist Russia for the Ferrari set. Asia doesn’t fit the sort of economic model we studied in school. The De La Salle brothers hadn’t contemplated a communist country like China taking on the West in consumerism. But the brothers did teach us about all those martyred priests in the boxer revolution and the superstition behind it. Which might explain why the Chinese want to start the Olympics on 08/08/08. Eight apparently is the luckiest number. Unless the ghost month falls then one presumes.
 
Superstition never had a place in my life, but spirituality does. Superstition to me is about fear. Spirituality is about hope. You have to dig hard to find the bones of God here, but he pops up in the strangest places. I woke on Sunday morning to a thunderstorm. Singapore was having weather of biblical proportions. When I lived here in 2001, the sun rose every morning at 6.46 and set at 6.50, the temperature was 32c during the day and 29c at night. It would rain for 35 minutes at 2.40pm each day. And that was everyday. It was as regular as taxes and the shattered hopes of the Louth football team. It was so regular you wondered why the paper bothered to print the forecast or sunrise times. It was Groundhog Day crossed with the Weather Channel.
 
But now it’s different. Perhaps it’s global warming or it could be the monsoon season. Or maybe, it’s God. I turned on the TV and not surprisingly the Ads were on. Asian Ads aren’t known for their humour so I wasn’t expecting much. It opened with a cartoon man sitting on a park bench looking glum. A dog walked up to him and said, “Have you seen a talking dog around here”? Without saying anything the man just pointed in the opposite direction. The voice over said, “Not surprised by a talking dog? Maybe you’ve lost your soul”. When you’re sitting on a bed in an Asian hotel doing a passing impression of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, this comes across as fairly profound. It turned out to be an ad for the Korean Capital and I guess the agency thought it slightly ironic to use a dog in this context. At least they stopped short of having the dog say, “Please don’t eat me”.
 
But it spurred me into thinking that this is Sunday and I should feed my soul. I’d spotted the Catholic Cathedral the day before. From its design it was clear that the French brought the church to this part of the world, despite, I’m sure, the best efforts of English colonialists.   On my way there I found the remains of a Buddhist offering in the stump of an old tree beside the road. Three sticks still simmered long after the worshipful had moved back to their toil in the real world. The oranges and flowers were there as an offering to the Gods. Somebody had knelt here and prayed beside a main road in the capitalist hub of this globilised city. I passed a Hindu temple divesting itself of it’s fantastically clothed guests and a little further on, a group of Filipino maids, dressed to the nines in their Sunday finest and enjoying the only day of freedom from their serf like existence. Like me, they were making their way to Mass.
 
The congregation was an ecclesiastical united nations. Chinese and Indians whose ancestors had clearly been shown the light by Irish Missionaries joined the Filipino’s. And immigrants from Cambodia and Laos who had been led here by the French. And the occasional Gowhylo like me (as we honkies are known by in this part of the world). There was a lot of singing, which I found to be a bit Protestant, but was prepared to overlook given the day that was in it. Father Ng gave a rousing sermon, which I boiled down into an understanding that all sheep are going to heaven while all goats are going to hell. That’s another thing the De La Salle brothers never taught us.
 
I got back to the Hotel and turned on the TV.  It was back to the usual stuff, Football and stock markets. All this country cares about. Except for some of us who burned sticks, went to Temple or sang along to Chinese accented hymns.  We had opened a crack in the tough shell of consumerism and let a little light in. And I felt that if nothing else, I would certainly be surprised by a talking dog.   

Came so far for beauty

I awoke on Sunday morning with a start. I'd prefer to have awoken with something else of course, but on this morning a start had to do. It was a cramp in my leg. The sort of cramp that 1970's footballers used to get when FA Cup finals went to extra time. The sort of cramp that marathon runners get when a hill appears unexpectedly after 25 miles. The sort of cramp that young calves get on the boat to Holyhead.

Or the sort of cramp I get when I drink for 48 hours in a hot climate. I guess it's due to dehydration or a lack of salt in the diet, but when it happens you don't really care about the cause. You just want to jump out of bed and race to the nearest solid object with a view to pressing your foot firmly against it. I'm not exactly sure what this does, but when it happens primal instinct kicks in. This has led to some embarrassing episodes in the past. The confluence of climate and alcohol tends to happen when I'm on holiday. I've been known to bed down in a mixed dorm after a heavy nights cultural learning with my fellow back-packers. I've stumbled back to the dorm and crawled into my sleeping bag sans pyjamas. On occasion, I've had to hide sheepishly at the back of the bus the next day after my colleagues were awoken at 5am by a screaming Irishman lying naked on his back with his leg pressed to the wall while shouting obscenities at the Virgin Mary and the collected saints.

Normally I'd take this as an occupational hazard of being a bachelor playboy in the naughties. But on Sunday afternoon, I was due to climb into a large metal box, strap myself into a restrictive piece of furniture and expose myself to the sort of air pressure that encourages deep vein thrombosis in healthy adults. In short, a cramp wasn't the best preparation for a long distance flight. I had just spent three nights in Sydney on a mini family reunion. Eating, drinking, bobbing on the Manly ferry under an unseasonably warm sky and listening to didgeridoo music on circular quay (who would have thought that the aboriginals invented electronic drum and base accompaniment all those years ago). In short, all the things that makes Sydney such a wonderful place.

From there I took the short road to Singapore. Distance here has a different meaning to back home. I grew up in Dundalk (or Fundalk as it will be branded by Tourism Ireland). Our nearest town to the south was Drogheda (or Faluja as it will be branded by Tourism Ireland). It was 20 miles away, but you'd only go there for important events like being born or beating the crap out of their sissy football team. In Australia, they'd travel that distance for a decent cup of coffee or for petrol that's five cents a liter cheaper. People drive from Melbourne to Sydney and back every weekend, they put a brick on the accelerator and head for Perth while catching 40 winks in the back seat and they travel around Asia Pacific like it was a back garden.

You get into this mindset fairly quickly. I used to look forward to long distance flights with a mixture of excitement and dread. Excitement because I'm a big kid at heart and dread because my buttocks were not designed for aircraft seats. But somehow in my mind, I'd convinced myself that this was just a short hop. A 7-hour flight to Singapore was nothing compared to what some Aussies kids have to go through just to get to school. I decided I wasn't going to sleep as it was a day flight and it's amazing the amount of anxiety this releases. Trying to sleep in a narrow seat, surrounded by strangers and listening to the endless drone of the aircraft engines is no fun, so I settled in to watch some movies.

To my disappointment, the Simpsons Movie was not on the menu. When you desperately want to watch a film but are too embarrassed to go and see it in the cinema, in-flight entertainment is the best option. This is how I managed to see Shrek and Sleepless in Seattle for example.

In the end, I plumped for "I'm your Man", a biopic of Leonard Cohen that included highlights from the "Came So Far For Beauty" tribute concert. One of the best plumps I've ever made I reckon. It's difficult to express the genius of the man, but listening to him makes you realise how high the bar is set if you're ever thinking of writing seriously. The music was wonderful and for me it added a new dimension to the debate about what is the greatest version of "Hallelujah". Most of the girls I know lean towards Jeff Buckley. But that's because he was good looking and tragically died young (which is how girls like their men) while the guys lean towards Jack L or Leonard himself. Personally, I've always had a soft spot for kd lang's version, because I like my music in a female, man hating country voice. But haven't watched this movie, I'd like to add another to the list. Rufus Wainright is a man who sings like a woman, so I think he covers all the bases.

I got to Singapore in a thunderstorm. The rain danced in the street like a jazz singer on acid. I made it to the Hotel at midnight and threw myself on my 5th different bed in 10 days. As I drifted off to sleep, I dreamt of a cramp free night and the words of Leonard Cohen whispered in my ear.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.