Tuesday 30 November 2010

Buddy, can you spare a dime?

The papers here are full of stories about the Irish bailout and the fact that some toff in England is marrying a poor person. Although to judge by the house her parents stood in front of when they were on the news, I’d have to guess that the Brits have a different view of what poor means to the rest of the world.

Ireland is certainly poor at the moment if the media is anything to go by. But then again I also read that it’s still the third richest country in Europe. Which I guess just goes to prove that there are lies, damned lies and everything the Irish Government has said for the last three years.

At least Ireland can be proud of its diaspora (with the exception of myself and the disproportionate amount of us who end up in jail in the countries we choose to live in). I recently visited two museums hoping to find some reference to the Irish in Victoria. One thing I noticed when I arrived in this fine state is that there is no obvious Irish part of town. The Greeks, Italians, Chinese and Indian communities all have their areas, mostly built around food. Needless to say the Irish are unlikely to build up a reputation in the culinary department but it does disappoint me that the only obvious influence we have here is the amount of Irish pubs in the City.

There are lots of people with Irish names but most of them speak with Aussie accents and upon inquiry it turns out that their nearest Irish relative came here on a wooden boat where the only metal was around their ankles.

The immigration museum was my first stop. It was full of exhibits about “ten pound poms” and brave Vietnamese who spent six months in a leaky boat in the 1970s. The only reference I could find to the Irish was on a small computer screen at the back where you could click on a country and find out how many people from that place ended up in Victoria. It turns out that we mainly came here in the years after the Great Famine to escape hunger and seek fortune on the gold fields. Two hundred thousand arrived then, but we’ve only been coming in dribs and drabs since.

The other museum I visited was in a little place called Port Fairy, famous for a folk festival held every March that is dominated by Irish acts. But it turns out our only influence there was to give the town it’s original name of Belfast, which they sensibly changed after a few years when the realised they were twinned with a place best known for sectarian violence and fried bread for breakfast. Port Fairy sounds much more benign.

But those Irish people who came in the 19th Century have left a great legacy in Australia. Peter Lalor from Laois is my favourite as he is often identified with the birth of democracy here. He led the Eureka rising in 1854, when a thousand minors, most of them from Ireland, formed Victoria’s first trade union and formed a stockade against the tyranny of the government. They were smashed by the army but their deeds became famous and are thought to be the reason why Australians have a healthy disregard for authority and a strong believe in giving everyone a fair go.

They had their own flag, which can be seen on every unionised building site in Melbourne and amongst football supporters when they want to demonstrate a communal feel.

I reckon my homeland could do with a touch of that communal feel at the moment. As an Irishman abroad I’m wavering between embarrassment and relief at the moment. Embarrassment as anyone who hears my accent is quick to point out that my country is a laughing stock. Asking for a bailout is bad enough but when you’ve spent the previous ten years displaying your wealth to the world like a premiership football star, the world tends to take pleasure in laughing at your hubris.

But I lost this embarrassment when a Greek person asked me how Ireland got to this position. People who live in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones and it demonstrated to me that the whole world is in a pickle and Ireland is merely the latest cab off the rank.

Relief is my more common emotion because I can now take on the hubris previously shown by my countrymen (I picked it up for a bargain at a recent liquidation sale). I got out just in time in seems and can smugly say; “I told you so”. Except I don’t say this because I’m too sad for all the friends and family I didn’t bring with me.

Before I left, there was a General Election and I tried to convince as many people as possible not to vote for the government. I failed in that respect and that government has now destroyed the country my grandfathers fought to set up. Their latest act of folly is to seek a bailout from the IMF at an interest rate that Tony Soprano would be embarrassed to impose on a late paying drug addict. When I was a young fellow, the IMF went into countries like Argentina and various places in Africa. Ireland is now part of that of that sad club. Although I have to say it’s rich of the IMF to come into a country and lecture them on fiscal restraint when the IMF are part of the global capitalist structure that caused all the problems in the first place.

But there is a risk of course that we’ll do what Irish people have done for centuries and blame everyone else for our woes. It wasn’t the IMF, or the Germans or the Brits who made us buy holiday villas in Romania on 100% credit. It’s tough times ahead for Ireland and I just hope a new leadership emerges. We could do worse than have the ghost of Peter Lalor emerge and return to the land of his birth.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

American Pie

It’s 9pm in Zio’s, a small Italian restaurant in Sydney that specialises in selling tiny portions to tourists who will never come back. The staff are getting a bit frazzled because Tony the boss wants the clientele turned over every 45 minutes. So when you’ve just put your fork down after eating the seven pieces of Tortellini that they call a ‘main’ meal they shove a menu for desert under your still hungry nose.

I don’t normally eat afters but the main course didn’t fill me and I start to understand their business model.

As I’m pondering over the tiramisu or gelati a bunch of Americans come in. You can tell they are yanks because of their size. Europeans tend to have one fat friend in every group (I used to rent myself out for this purpose). But Americans are the opposite. They are a bunch of fat people who hang around with one skinny guy that they abuse for having an eating disorder.

They spent an age studying the menu while the waiter hovered over them. Ginny ordered first. “I’ll have the side salad with no olives and no dressing”. Now I don’t like olives myself but I’ve never found the need to refuse them. They are fairly easy to spot after all and I usually push them to the side and then offer them to one of my dining companions who doesn’t mind something with the taste of rubber and the texture of an old boot.

But Americans can’t look at a menu without changing it. Louis was Ginny’s companion. He wanted the Veal Cutlet with no breadcrumbs, presumably working under the assumption that the chef had a live calf out the back and could kill and prepare it any way you chose.

The waiter tried to explain that most of the food was prepared earlier and when you order it, they basically just heat it up. He might as well have said that he fiddles with small boys by the look the Americans gave him.

I assume they think everything is cooked fresh which is ironic considering they come from a country that invented spray on cheese and food that tastes like it was cooked in the 1970’s.

But it’s easy to poke fun at Americans. They offer a big target after all. Some of them are smart it must be said. My bosses, bosses boss (basically a lot of levels above me) was in Melbourne this week and she came across as a smart lady. She understood there are 14 hours difference between here and New York in Winter and 16 hours difference for the rest of the year. Seems logical to me that clocks change one way in the Northern hemisphere and they change the other way in the Southern. But it seems to confuse most Americans who think it’s normal that I should get up at 4am for a conference call.

I’m sitting here typing this on an Apple Macbook that was invented in America (although probably built in a cave somewhere in China) while listening to music on Youtube, a website also set up by clever people in California. And if you want to see more smart Americans then go and watch “The Social Network”. It’s full of nerdy yanks doing complicated things with maths and computers that leads them to set up Facebook.

I saw it last week in the company of three hundred Gen Y kids. A group of them sat in front of me and as the opening credits rolled they took out their smart phones in unison and logged onto Facebook so that they could poke their friends (I believe that’s the technical term) with the witty message that they were watching a movie about Facebook while surfing the website. It was all very 2010 and made me feel suddenly old.

The social networking phenomenon has passed me by. Although that hasn’t stopped Linkedin sending me messages every day telling me that the world and his brother want to connect with me. I may not know much about these sites, but it’s clear to me that Linkedin is the next big thing. Myspace is now an abandoned theme park and Bebo has gone back to being the name of a Spanish clown and not a means for 12 year olds to post dodgy pictures of their teachers.

Facebook might have thought it had a clear run of that space on the web reserved for people without the social skills to talk to real live humans, but Linkedin is coming up on the rails. I received an invitation to join three years ago and invites to connect to others used to come in every six months or so. But this week, I’ve received three. So I’m going to make some predictions. Jesse Eisenberg will win next years Oscar for best male actor and Linkedin will overtake Facebook in membership. It’s aimed at desk bound professionals after all and they spend more time on the internet each day than even the Gen Y people.

Back at the restaurant, Ginny pulled out her Blackberry, the communication toy of the sort of people who prefer Linkedin to Facebook. “I’m just going to email Steve in the Santa Monica office. He told me this place was excellent and they can’t even do a Decaf Double Shot Soy Latte. I’m not going to listen to him again”.

“Isn’t it like 10 o’clock in Santa Monica or something?”, Louis said. “Is that 10 o’clock in the morning or the evening?” replied Ginny. A strange calm descended upon the table which made me realise that the best way to shut Americans up is to ask them a timezone question.

The moral of the story is that you can’t reduce a country that has produced both Woody Allen and George Bush to a simple cultural stereotype. And anyway, we’re all part of a dynamic global community now. One in which Ginny had just unfriended Steve, her erstwhile restaurant suggester.

Tuesday 9 November 2010

Annus Horribulis

I went back to work last week and a lot of people said to me, “it’s been a tough year, hasn’t it?”

I have to admit it has, but people don’t know the half of it. I mean Collingwood won the flag, didn’t they? But I’m looking on the bright side. I’m still here, I’ve been given the all clear by the cancer doctors (although once you’re in that system you never get out of it). And as my sister said, there are only seven weeks of the year left and if I don’t step in front of any buses between now and then I should be okay.

I guess most people lose a parent or two at some point in their life and have the occasional accident which might necessitate a visit to the local hospital. And one in three people get cancer. But I think it’s fair to say that I’m pretty unlucky to experience all this in the same year. Annus Horribulis was a term invented by the English Queen when she found out one of her sons was gay, one was an incurable womaniser and the other was talking to plants while his wife was sleeping with everyone in Britain with a double barrelled name.

I’m sure it was tough on her but I think I’ve trumped her.

The year started off badly. I swam in a river on Australia Day (January 26th) and picked up giardia which took me six weeks to shake. Mainly, I admit, because it took me that long to visit a doctor. I spent two weeks of that time in India which might sound like a double whammy, but actually that’s the best place to be if you have the shits because nobody turns a blind eye in India if you jump up and rush to the toilet and come back sweating.

Unfortunately, I spent the following week in Singapore, a country so proud of it’s cleanliness that I wonder if they use toilets at all.

I got over that in time to smack my face off St Kilda Road on the last day of March. I spent a couple of nights in hospital then which introduced me to the delights of the Australian medical system. Little did I know that by year end I’d be an expert on how to adjust the angle on hospital beds, how to operate the remote control for the TV (which is more complicated than key hole surgery) and crucially, how to negotiate an early release, because hospital is prison without the fun of football games in the yard.

I just about got over that when my mother decided to help me earn some air miles by traveling twice to Ireland in the space of three weeks. She earned a few herself, mind you, on her trip to Heaven.

I was getting over the jet lag from the trips to Ireland when my wisdom tooth decided to give out. Probably because I’d subjected it to twenty or so airplane meals over the previous three weeks, including some tasty mints that help your ears while landing while simultaneously setting about your teeth like a jack hammer.

I had it taken out by a nice lady dentist who was slightly horrified when I told her that I wanted to take the tooth home. I think dentists want to keep them and sell them to ivory poachers or something. She seemed very possessive anyway. Getting it taken out was fine but a few days later the place it came from got infected. Nature abhors a vacuum and it filled mine with food that I was too lazy to get rid of. I turned into a baby with the pain and had to plead with a young dentist in Singapore to sort it out. Her solution was to give me a bottle of pink liquid and a syringe and to encourage me to do it myself. Strangely enough it worked, which means that if my annus horriblus continues and I contract diabetes before year end, I will be well practiced in the art of self injecting.

Sport is often a positive distraction in times of misery, but this year it has followed my run of bad luck. Back home my beloved home county were robbed of their first title in fifty years by the worst piece of refereeing since England were awarded that goal in the 1966 World Cup. I follow AFL football over here and given that sport usually involves liking one team and hating another one with all your passion, I chose Collingwood for the latter. And needless to say in the year of misfortune they broke a twenty year duck and won the Grand Final.

But I guess that the plus side of getting cancer and surviving it is that you get a new perspective on life. For a start I’ve realised how many friends I have and how lucky I am to have a supportive and loving partner. Plus I’ve received cards, emails and presents from so many people I am truly humbled.

I think it’s time to stop and smell the flowers which is opportune because spring came to Melbourne this week and our street alone is awash with roses and colours that would give Willy Wonka a fit. I enjoyed the racing carnival last week and made my first visit to the Melbourne Cup, the race that stops a nation. I’m not a big horse fan I admit. I couldn’t eat a whole one, although having said that I’ve actually eaten more of them than I’ve ridden.

I visited an Oncologist last week (a word I couldn’t spell never mind understand four weeks ago). He told me things are looking good but once the Big C has visited he likes to come back. So I’m booked in for a session of chemo next Wednesday which won’t be fun but will put me back on same level as the landbubbers (those of you who haven’t surfed on the Big C). And then it’s only 43 days until year end. Boy will I celebrate New Year’s Eve - my second life begins on January 1st!