Hello, I’ve taken over my Dad’s blog this week to introduce myself to the world. I made my grand entrance at 12.22pm on Friday 16th December. I was a bit late, my parents were expecting me to turn up on December 5th but I figured that my future birthday parties would be more fun if they were closer to Christmas. But don’t even dream about getting me one present in the future and telling me it covers both Christmas and my birthday. I’ll be expecting to be treated like a princess on both occasions.
I think my Daddy was secretly hoping for a boy and I played a little trick on him when I popped out by placing my umbilical cord between my legs. The expression on my Dad’s face was a mixture of pride and astonishment that his offspring had an extremely long willy that happened to be green with yellow stripes.
Anyway, it didn’t take my giddy parents long to realise that I’m actually a girl, a result that would have been obvious had anyone studied my Mother’s gene pool.
I arrived into the world weighing 3.226 kg and was 42 centimetres long, which gives me a better BMI index than my Father, a statistic I intend maintaining for the rest of my life. I was born in the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, a fine establishment that welcomes several thousand babies into the world each year, but still found time to make me feel special. Mammy and Daddy bought some chocolates for the nurses, but I think they would have been better off joining the campaign to have those nurses paid a decent salary. I’m only a couple of weeks old but already I find it strange that nurses get paid less than bankers. I’ll change that when I take over the world (more of that later).
My Dad is Irish and my Mother is a Kiwi and it turns out that I now have both these nationalities plus that of my birthplace. As the only Australian in the house, I expect to be awarded special privileges, such as pavlova on demand or vegemite on my toast.
I am assured that my parents are in the process of obtaining three passports for me which will be allow me to commence my inaugural world tour. I can’t be bothered with queues and having lots of passports will allow me to get into Dublin, Auckland and Melbourne quickly.
I guess over time I’ll develop a favourite among my three nationalities. At the moment I’m happy to be a citizen of the world but Australia will have a head start as the place of my birth. Mind you, I was under the impression that this was a modern country that had fully embraced the metric system. However, when you’re born, people want to know what you weigh in pounds and ounces. Are we living in medieval England, people? Anyway, for the benefit of all those old fashioned fuddy duddies out there, I was born weighing 7 pounds and 2 ounces, which in the immortal lines of Roddy Doyle in the Snapper, is a decent size for a baby but would be small for a turkey.
I know I’m a girl and all that but it seems that I have arrived into a weight-obsessed world. I intend stacking it on for here on.
While I was still inside Mammy, I heard Daddy talking about his anxieties. He gets a bit weak at the sight of blood and was nervous about taking the wrong route on the way to the hospital. In the end I decided to help him out. I waited long enough so that Mammy was booked in for an induction and then decided to make my grand entrance three hours before this was due. As a result, Daddy already had the bags packed (why do people take more stuff to hospital when a baby is due than they would take on a two week holiday?) and had the car filled with petrol.
The dash to the hospital was much more straightforward than anticipated, although it did include three forks in the road in quick succession. Left, left and right is how I remember it, although I was swinging around in amniotic fluid at the time. Dad thinks all these forks in the road are a metaphor for something but he hasn’t had much sleep lately and can’t think what it is.
I’m two weeks old now and starting to find my feet. At least I think they are feet. They are two odd shaped things that seem to wave uncontrollably in front of me when I lie down. I’m getting eight meals a day, sometimes from grumpy parents at 3am (they’ll just have to suck it up, I’m the new boss around here) and I’m getting lots of cuddles and sleep. Oh, and isn’t it nice to have someone change your nappies? I’m getting through around twelve a day at the moment, about the same as my Dad does when he goes for beer and curry. Except I can do mine without the need for a newspaper or other reading material.
I went for my first spin in my pram yesterday. That was fun, but there are a lot of shadows out there in the big wild world and I found it all a bit too fascinating at first. But gradually the motion got me to sleep. I think Mammy and Daddy have discovered a quick way of settling me down and something tells me that I’ll be spending a lot of time in that pram in the wee small hours of the morning.
That’s my story for the time being. I wish I had more to report but it’s true what they say about Bubbas. Pretty much all we do is eat, sleep and pooh. But I’ve got a lifetime ahead of me for everything else. Time for a snooze folks. I’ll talk to you in 2012.
Friday 30 December 2011
Friday 9 December 2011
Waiting For Godot
Our child is now four days overdue and as a result, we have started calling him/her Godot. If nothing else, this gives us a consistent name that we can use in public. To date, we’ve been calling the kid by the names we have decided to announce to the world once we know if it’s a boy or girl. But we don’t want to announce these in advance, so we can only use these when nobody else is around.
When others are in earshot, we become very impersonal and call the poor unborn child “It” or “The Thing”.
So we’re waiting, waiting, waiting. We’re waiting to find out if it’s a boy or girl. Waiting to find out what colour hair he has (for the purposes of laziness, I’m going to assume it’s a “he” in the rest of this posting). Ironically, my wife’s family provide a risk of ginger to this equation, despite the fact that I’m the Irish one in the gene pool.
We’re waiting to see if he will have my ears. My mother’s family have ears like dumbo, so I risk passing on this recessive gene.
We’re waiting to see if he will sleep like me or his mother. I could sleep for twelve hours during a nuclear holocaust, whereas my wife would wake up if a feather fell off a duck in Alaska.
Sleep by the way, is the first thing people mention to you when you talk about an upcoming arrival. “Get as much sleep now as you can” they’ll say, as though sleep could be stored up like a battery. The truth is that if you slept well last night, it only affects how you’ll feel today. You can’t carry it forward.
Sleep deprivation, baby blues, post natal depression, SIDs, messy nappies and colic are all terms we’ve heard recently. Nobody talks about smiles and the way babies smell after they’ve been bathed. Or the way they run to meet you when you come home from work. There is almost a conspiracy to talk down the benefits of parenthood, even though none of us would be here without it.
It will undoubtedly be tough, particularly as I’m no longer in the full flush of youth. But the benefits will more than outweigh the costs. I’ll have somebody to pass on my silky soccer skills to. I can teach him how to steal apples from the orchards down the road and to fashion pieces of plastic into the shape of fifty cent coins for use in slot machines and pool tables. Basically, all the tools he needs for a happy childhood.
One of the key objectives all prospective parents have is to ensure that they don’t repeat the same mistakes their parents made with them. I have to say up front that our parents (and I speak for the missus when I say this) did a thoroughly outstanding job and we wouldn’t swap it for the world. But there are a couple of teeny, weeny things that I’d like to improve on.
The first thing is clothes. Mother’s should be banned from choosing clothes for boys. They don’t have a lot of experience after all, apart from encouraging their partners to wear pink more often and to ditch the beloved t-shirt he’s been wearing for the past ten years. I wouldn’t be so bold as to choose suitable clothing for a small girl, apart from suggesting that black goes with everything. For the record, I should point out some of the sartorial massacres to which I was subjected as a small boy.
Skin tight trousers with a loop that went under your feet were not trendy in the 1970s and never will be until gravity disappears. A velvet suit would have looked well if I was embarking on a career as a 1960s pimp in Harlem. But it did not look well on the day of my confirmation. Tailored short trousers look good on a Bermudan businessman but work less well in the chilly November days of an Irish childhood.
I hope our child will grow up with the freedom to make his own decisions and if he wants a velvet suit, he’s welcome to one. For now though we’d like him to make one major decision and that relates to coming out into the big wide world. It only struck me recently that we all get to choose our birthday. It’s the baby who decides when to come out, not the mother.
I wasn’t to know it at the time but my birthday has a better than average chance of falling on Good Friday or Easter Sunday. So many of my childhood parties were held on days when everyone was fasting or gouging themselves on chocolate eggs and ignoring my celebration cake.
We’re just hoping he picks his birthday soon. We’ve had the bag for hospital packed for weeks and the nursery decorated and the baby stuff assembled. All we’re missing now is the baby.
Packing the bag was interesting. The web and baby books are full of instructions, including the suggestion that you bring your favourite pillow and duvet. I know cutbacks in the health system are a problem, but surely hospitals still provide bed linen? There is even a list for what the male partner is supposed to pack into his light overnight bag. This includes energy drinks, protein bars and instructions on how to remain the emotional rock that your wife requires during this traumatic journey.
As part of my final planning, I’m reading a book called “cheers to childhood” which is an instruction manual for blokes. I’m on the chapter titled “Practical ideas for pain management” which to my disappointment is not a guide to the best pain killers the father should take when he gets a headache.
I feel rather helpless it must be said. The woman does all the work and we men are there for “support”. It doesn’t fit the alpha male need to be in charge. But it’s better than waiting. Over to you Godot. It’s time to choose your birthday.
When others are in earshot, we become very impersonal and call the poor unborn child “It” or “The Thing”.
So we’re waiting, waiting, waiting. We’re waiting to find out if it’s a boy or girl. Waiting to find out what colour hair he has (for the purposes of laziness, I’m going to assume it’s a “he” in the rest of this posting). Ironically, my wife’s family provide a risk of ginger to this equation, despite the fact that I’m the Irish one in the gene pool.
We’re waiting to see if he will have my ears. My mother’s family have ears like dumbo, so I risk passing on this recessive gene.
We’re waiting to see if he will sleep like me or his mother. I could sleep for twelve hours during a nuclear holocaust, whereas my wife would wake up if a feather fell off a duck in Alaska.
Sleep by the way, is the first thing people mention to you when you talk about an upcoming arrival. “Get as much sleep now as you can” they’ll say, as though sleep could be stored up like a battery. The truth is that if you slept well last night, it only affects how you’ll feel today. You can’t carry it forward.
Sleep deprivation, baby blues, post natal depression, SIDs, messy nappies and colic are all terms we’ve heard recently. Nobody talks about smiles and the way babies smell after they’ve been bathed. Or the way they run to meet you when you come home from work. There is almost a conspiracy to talk down the benefits of parenthood, even though none of us would be here without it.
It will undoubtedly be tough, particularly as I’m no longer in the full flush of youth. But the benefits will more than outweigh the costs. I’ll have somebody to pass on my silky soccer skills to. I can teach him how to steal apples from the orchards down the road and to fashion pieces of plastic into the shape of fifty cent coins for use in slot machines and pool tables. Basically, all the tools he needs for a happy childhood.
One of the key objectives all prospective parents have is to ensure that they don’t repeat the same mistakes their parents made with them. I have to say up front that our parents (and I speak for the missus when I say this) did a thoroughly outstanding job and we wouldn’t swap it for the world. But there are a couple of teeny, weeny things that I’d like to improve on.
The first thing is clothes. Mother’s should be banned from choosing clothes for boys. They don’t have a lot of experience after all, apart from encouraging their partners to wear pink more often and to ditch the beloved t-shirt he’s been wearing for the past ten years. I wouldn’t be so bold as to choose suitable clothing for a small girl, apart from suggesting that black goes with everything. For the record, I should point out some of the sartorial massacres to which I was subjected as a small boy.
Skin tight trousers with a loop that went under your feet were not trendy in the 1970s and never will be until gravity disappears. A velvet suit would have looked well if I was embarking on a career as a 1960s pimp in Harlem. But it did not look well on the day of my confirmation. Tailored short trousers look good on a Bermudan businessman but work less well in the chilly November days of an Irish childhood.
I hope our child will grow up with the freedom to make his own decisions and if he wants a velvet suit, he’s welcome to one. For now though we’d like him to make one major decision and that relates to coming out into the big wide world. It only struck me recently that we all get to choose our birthday. It’s the baby who decides when to come out, not the mother.
I wasn’t to know it at the time but my birthday has a better than average chance of falling on Good Friday or Easter Sunday. So many of my childhood parties were held on days when everyone was fasting or gouging themselves on chocolate eggs and ignoring my celebration cake.
We’re just hoping he picks his birthday soon. We’ve had the bag for hospital packed for weeks and the nursery decorated and the baby stuff assembled. All we’re missing now is the baby.
Packing the bag was interesting. The web and baby books are full of instructions, including the suggestion that you bring your favourite pillow and duvet. I know cutbacks in the health system are a problem, but surely hospitals still provide bed linen? There is even a list for what the male partner is supposed to pack into his light overnight bag. This includes energy drinks, protein bars and instructions on how to remain the emotional rock that your wife requires during this traumatic journey.
As part of my final planning, I’m reading a book called “cheers to childhood” which is an instruction manual for blokes. I’m on the chapter titled “Practical ideas for pain management” which to my disappointment is not a guide to the best pain killers the father should take when he gets a headache.
I feel rather helpless it must be said. The woman does all the work and we men are there for “support”. It doesn’t fit the alpha male need to be in charge. But it’s better than waiting. Over to you Godot. It’s time to choose your birthday.
Monday 28 November 2011
Cinema Paradiso
I vividly remember my first visit to the cinema. My Dad brought my brother and me to the movies to see a full length feature on the 1970 world cup. We had a black and white telly at the time, so the realisation that football was actually played in colour was my first shock. The second thing to hit me was the majesty of the theatre. The screen was bigger than anything my young mind could imagine and the way the sound enveloped me was strangely comforting. There was also the cushioned seats, which were a far cry from the wooden benches I was used to at home.
I started a love affair with the cinema then to which I remained faithful through the years, even though other technologies sought to entice me into their parlour. First, there was video, which killed the radio star and did it’s best to destroy the movie going experience too. I was around when the first top loaders came in and remember that space docking sound as it sucked the cassette into its inner sanctum.
One of mates had a player in the back room of his parent’s house and for a few years during my adolescence, we could think of nothing more edgy than to pool our meagre resources and rent a video to watch teen focussed American movies that might offer the prospect of a naked breast or at least a few curse words that we hadn’t heard before.
Adolescence in the Ireland I grew up in was a slow burning affair.
Video rental shops were the big craze back then and seemed to pop up everywhere. The one we frequented was in a pub, with the videos arranged against the back wall. This meant that your selection was monitored by a collection of surly drinkers huddled around the bar. “The butler did it” they’d say if you chose a thriller. “There are more tits on the bull I have at home than you’d see in that filum” would be their call if you went for something more risqué.
DVD came later and I was a late convert having built up a sizable collection of Woody Allen and moody European movies on video that I was loathe to say goodbye to. But the lure of the box set got me in the end. Who could resist the entire catalogue of The Wire for example? Particularly when you can set up subtitles to understand the gangster accents and watch 20 episodes back to back over a weekend.
But throughout the video and DVD age, I stayed loyal to the cinema. It forces you to sit in one place for two hours, without distractions. You tend not to visit the toilet or play text tennis, as you do when watching a movie at home.
During my bachelor years I noticed that my married friends had all stopped visiting the movies, except for the occasional Saturday afternoon visit to a multiplex with their kids to see the latest Shrek or Toy Story release. When I asked why they never bothered seeing a grown up film, they would shrug and say that they weren’t going to waste a baby sitting night by watching something they could rent six months later. It always seemed to be about the film and not the atmosphere for them.
But in a week or so, I’ll become a Daddy and for the next few years at least, my cinema visits will be limited. So the wife and I have been trying to catch as many movies as possible in the past few weeks. But I’ve never been a weekly attendant. I’ve only ever gone when there was something worth seeing. It’s only when I felt I needed to go urgently that I noticed how much dross is on most of the time.
In my local back in Ireland, Betty (the landlady) kindly displays the front page of the local paper above the urinals to give you something to read while carrying out your waste control. The only problem is that the paper is from 1965 and Betty hasn’t changed it since then. The cinema listings have always stayed with me because I’ve never heard of any of the films that were playing that week. Red Buttons was the star of one of them (which gives an indication of the star quality) and the rest would have fitted into the straight to video category if only video had existed back then.
I puzzled over this until last week when I checked out the new releases and found only rubbish. One is a movie called Red Dog. I read a review and it didn’t go much further than saying “It’s about a red dog”. It reminded me of my mother’s last cinema visit, which was to see George Clooney’s “The Perfect Storm”. I asked her how it was which she took as a question as to the movie’s plot. “It was about a fishing boat that went out in a storm and then it sunk”. I watched it two weeks later and she’d pretty much nailed it. Most films aren’t about much except pretty scenery and boy meets girl. Red Dog falls into this category although dog meets bitch would probably better summarise the ending.
The other films on offer were “We need to talk about Kevin” (which is not the sort of movie expectant parents should see) and “The Orator” which is about a Samoan dwarf and has the added benefit of being in Somoan.
I’d just about given up and resigned myself to a life of Toy Story sequels when I
noticed that my old friend George Clooney had a new release out. “The Ides of March” is a political thriller and makes the West Wing look like Glee. It is magnificent and if movies like that keep coming out, I know where I’ll be spending my baby sitting nights in the next few years. My love of cinema still has a beating heart.
I started a love affair with the cinema then to which I remained faithful through the years, even though other technologies sought to entice me into their parlour. First, there was video, which killed the radio star and did it’s best to destroy the movie going experience too. I was around when the first top loaders came in and remember that space docking sound as it sucked the cassette into its inner sanctum.
One of mates had a player in the back room of his parent’s house and for a few years during my adolescence, we could think of nothing more edgy than to pool our meagre resources and rent a video to watch teen focussed American movies that might offer the prospect of a naked breast or at least a few curse words that we hadn’t heard before.
Adolescence in the Ireland I grew up in was a slow burning affair.
Video rental shops were the big craze back then and seemed to pop up everywhere. The one we frequented was in a pub, with the videos arranged against the back wall. This meant that your selection was monitored by a collection of surly drinkers huddled around the bar. “The butler did it” they’d say if you chose a thriller. “There are more tits on the bull I have at home than you’d see in that filum” would be their call if you went for something more risqué.
DVD came later and I was a late convert having built up a sizable collection of Woody Allen and moody European movies on video that I was loathe to say goodbye to. But the lure of the box set got me in the end. Who could resist the entire catalogue of The Wire for example? Particularly when you can set up subtitles to understand the gangster accents and watch 20 episodes back to back over a weekend.
But throughout the video and DVD age, I stayed loyal to the cinema. It forces you to sit in one place for two hours, without distractions. You tend not to visit the toilet or play text tennis, as you do when watching a movie at home.
During my bachelor years I noticed that my married friends had all stopped visiting the movies, except for the occasional Saturday afternoon visit to a multiplex with their kids to see the latest Shrek or Toy Story release. When I asked why they never bothered seeing a grown up film, they would shrug and say that they weren’t going to waste a baby sitting night by watching something they could rent six months later. It always seemed to be about the film and not the atmosphere for them.
But in a week or so, I’ll become a Daddy and for the next few years at least, my cinema visits will be limited. So the wife and I have been trying to catch as many movies as possible in the past few weeks. But I’ve never been a weekly attendant. I’ve only ever gone when there was something worth seeing. It’s only when I felt I needed to go urgently that I noticed how much dross is on most of the time.
In my local back in Ireland, Betty (the landlady) kindly displays the front page of the local paper above the urinals to give you something to read while carrying out your waste control. The only problem is that the paper is from 1965 and Betty hasn’t changed it since then. The cinema listings have always stayed with me because I’ve never heard of any of the films that were playing that week. Red Buttons was the star of one of them (which gives an indication of the star quality) and the rest would have fitted into the straight to video category if only video had existed back then.
I puzzled over this until last week when I checked out the new releases and found only rubbish. One is a movie called Red Dog. I read a review and it didn’t go much further than saying “It’s about a red dog”. It reminded me of my mother’s last cinema visit, which was to see George Clooney’s “The Perfect Storm”. I asked her how it was which she took as a question as to the movie’s plot. “It was about a fishing boat that went out in a storm and then it sunk”. I watched it two weeks later and she’d pretty much nailed it. Most films aren’t about much except pretty scenery and boy meets girl. Red Dog falls into this category although dog meets bitch would probably better summarise the ending.
The other films on offer were “We need to talk about Kevin” (which is not the sort of movie expectant parents should see) and “The Orator” which is about a Samoan dwarf and has the added benefit of being in Somoan.
I’d just about given up and resigned myself to a life of Toy Story sequels when I
noticed that my old friend George Clooney had a new release out. “The Ides of March” is a political thriller and makes the West Wing look like Glee. It is magnificent and if movies like that keep coming out, I know where I’ll be spending my baby sitting nights in the next few years. My love of cinema still has a beating heart.
Tuesday 8 November 2011
The Phantom Belly
I was once in a play in Dublin that involved a complicated costume change during the interval. Shortly into the second half I found myself front of stage during a long speech by one of the other actors. During a pause I noticed an elderly lady with a distinctive blue rinse hairstyle pointing at me. I should say that the front rows at amateur drama are usually reserved for people who are aurally challenged, so I wasn’t surprised when she spoke loudly to her partner.
“Who’s he?” she said, keeping her finger pointed straight at me.
Her partner (who was obviously equally hard of hearing) replied in a similar booming voice “He’s the fat bloke from act 1”.
Yes, it’s time I admitted that I struggle with my weight. I have done so since I was a teenager. I got a job in a pub and used to sneak out with crisps, chocolate and anything else I could find (with the strange exception of alcohol). In no time at all I had developed a belly, or a spare tyre as my Mother so cruelly called it.
Then I went into my last year at school and had to give up work, due to the pressures of study. I went back to a frugal existence of three meals a day and soon returned to the scrawny shaped youth I was before I started work. Then of course I discovered beer and the belly returned. Over the years I guess it has fluctuated but the sport I played in my twenties probably kept it under control.
My next challenge was pasta. I didn’t start eating it until I was in my late twenties and moved to Luxembourg. I wouldn’t exactly say I was jockey like when I arrived there, but after 3 years of Tre de Pate every day I came back looking like the Michelin man. Luxembourg is squeezed between France and Germany and has developed a culinary tradition that takes the rich style of cooking from the former and portion sizes from the latter. It might be the smallest country in the European Union but it boasts some of the biggest people.
There followed 10 years in Ireland, which could best be described as an odyssey of Guinness and fried food. As the years passed, I played less and less sport and in one of those cruel games that nature plays I started losing hair in direct proportion to the weight I gained.
Moving to Australia was partly motivated by the desire to live in a healthier, outdoors type culture and this has worked to some degree. I’m five kilos lighter than I was when I got here and have the motivation to drive this further.
But recently I’ve noticed that despite my weight remaining steady, my stomach has bulged outwards. Last night I started getting cramps in the belly department and I was hit with a sudden realisation. I have developed a phantom pregnancy! My good wife is now eight months into her confinement and perhaps I’m subconsciously feeling jealous. I’ve had a well-structured belly for years after all but now she’s getting all the attention, including small children who want to touch her bump. The only people who have ever wanted to touch my bump are Chinese tourists who think I might be the reincarnation of Budda.
Jealousy or not, it is very strange. I find myself struggling to get out of sofas and hold the small of my back while waddling around the house. I’ve also started getting up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night as though some small creature was pressing against my bladder.
It seems odd though that men should want to share in the trials of pregnancy. It looks a pretty uncomfortable experience. I hope my own phantom experience doesn’t extend to the labour stage. I cry when I get an injection after all. I shudder to imagine what it would be like to have a thing the size of a melon pass through me.
However, I am pleased that my belly will become useful in a few weeks. The biggest thing I’m looking forward to is having our new born child rest on my stomach while I introduce him/her to the delights of football on TV. Skin on skin contact in the best bond a parent can develop with their child and I have enough skin to last the kid until adolescence.
We got into a bit of a panic a few weeks ago when we realised we had nothing bought. But a couple of laborious Saturdays spent in Mothercare and Baby Buntings has sorted us out. Junior now has somewhere to sleep and to wash and enough cute baby clothes to bring a tear to an ogre.
All that is left is for him/her to make their grand entrance. The doctor told us this morning that the baby’s head is now “engaged” which makes it sound like we are involved in a space mission, where we have hooked up with the rocket ship that will take us into the great unknown.
We are certainly on the cusp of something life changing and amazing and that might be a more realistic reason for last night’s stomach cramps. I don’t have much experience with kids after all, apart from once being one myself (and that was so long ago I can barely remember it). So I will admit to being a little nervous. Will I be a good Dad? Will I raise somebody to be my best friend, as my Father has been to me?
All expectant fathers have these fears apparently and all we can do is sit back, let our wives do all the hard work and then hope that instinct kicks in. If I can be half the Dad my Father was to me I will do well. And if our kid can be half the offspring I was, they will also be doing well. Because that means they will be unlikely to have a bulging belly.
“Who’s he?” she said, keeping her finger pointed straight at me.
Her partner (who was obviously equally hard of hearing) replied in a similar booming voice “He’s the fat bloke from act 1”.
Yes, it’s time I admitted that I struggle with my weight. I have done so since I was a teenager. I got a job in a pub and used to sneak out with crisps, chocolate and anything else I could find (with the strange exception of alcohol). In no time at all I had developed a belly, or a spare tyre as my Mother so cruelly called it.
Then I went into my last year at school and had to give up work, due to the pressures of study. I went back to a frugal existence of three meals a day and soon returned to the scrawny shaped youth I was before I started work. Then of course I discovered beer and the belly returned. Over the years I guess it has fluctuated but the sport I played in my twenties probably kept it under control.
My next challenge was pasta. I didn’t start eating it until I was in my late twenties and moved to Luxembourg. I wouldn’t exactly say I was jockey like when I arrived there, but after 3 years of Tre de Pate every day I came back looking like the Michelin man. Luxembourg is squeezed between France and Germany and has developed a culinary tradition that takes the rich style of cooking from the former and portion sizes from the latter. It might be the smallest country in the European Union but it boasts some of the biggest people.
There followed 10 years in Ireland, which could best be described as an odyssey of Guinness and fried food. As the years passed, I played less and less sport and in one of those cruel games that nature plays I started losing hair in direct proportion to the weight I gained.
Moving to Australia was partly motivated by the desire to live in a healthier, outdoors type culture and this has worked to some degree. I’m five kilos lighter than I was when I got here and have the motivation to drive this further.
But recently I’ve noticed that despite my weight remaining steady, my stomach has bulged outwards. Last night I started getting cramps in the belly department and I was hit with a sudden realisation. I have developed a phantom pregnancy! My good wife is now eight months into her confinement and perhaps I’m subconsciously feeling jealous. I’ve had a well-structured belly for years after all but now she’s getting all the attention, including small children who want to touch her bump. The only people who have ever wanted to touch my bump are Chinese tourists who think I might be the reincarnation of Budda.
Jealousy or not, it is very strange. I find myself struggling to get out of sofas and hold the small of my back while waddling around the house. I’ve also started getting up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night as though some small creature was pressing against my bladder.
It seems odd though that men should want to share in the trials of pregnancy. It looks a pretty uncomfortable experience. I hope my own phantom experience doesn’t extend to the labour stage. I cry when I get an injection after all. I shudder to imagine what it would be like to have a thing the size of a melon pass through me.
However, I am pleased that my belly will become useful in a few weeks. The biggest thing I’m looking forward to is having our new born child rest on my stomach while I introduce him/her to the delights of football on TV. Skin on skin contact in the best bond a parent can develop with their child and I have enough skin to last the kid until adolescence.
We got into a bit of a panic a few weeks ago when we realised we had nothing bought. But a couple of laborious Saturdays spent in Mothercare and Baby Buntings has sorted us out. Junior now has somewhere to sleep and to wash and enough cute baby clothes to bring a tear to an ogre.
All that is left is for him/her to make their grand entrance. The doctor told us this morning that the baby’s head is now “engaged” which makes it sound like we are involved in a space mission, where we have hooked up with the rocket ship that will take us into the great unknown.
We are certainly on the cusp of something life changing and amazing and that might be a more realistic reason for last night’s stomach cramps. I don’t have much experience with kids after all, apart from once being one myself (and that was so long ago I can barely remember it). So I will admit to being a little nervous. Will I be a good Dad? Will I raise somebody to be my best friend, as my Father has been to me?
All expectant fathers have these fears apparently and all we can do is sit back, let our wives do all the hard work and then hope that instinct kicks in. If I can be half the Dad my Father was to me I will do well. And if our kid can be half the offspring I was, they will also be doing well. Because that means they will be unlikely to have a bulging belly.
Friday 28 October 2011
Waiting for the Stork Part 2
Week four at the antenatal classes and I’m struggling to stay awake to be honest. It’s three and half-hours in a warm room at the end of a long working day. If nothing else it is getting us used to the first months of the kids life, when trying to stay awake will be a daily challenge.
The instructor tries to make it interactive, but as we’re all first time parents, nobody wants to make a fool of themselves by giving a stupid answer. I’d been on a training course at work the week before, which was not dissimilar to the baby class I now found myself in. Both were run by slightly smug individuals who spent most of the time asking patently obvious questions which nobody wanted to answer for fear of becoming the class pet. And both were training us for a scenario that would involve forgetting everything you’ve heard during training.
The only problem with these courses (both Baby and work related) is that they involve long periods of silence while the instructor waits for an answer to her longwinded questions. In most cases, she asks questions relating to the topic she is about to explain. This is pretty redundant and reminds me of the dark days of school when the teacher would ask “What is the capital of Poland?”, just before he was due to tell us anyway. That’s why many of the kids from my school went on to be experts at quizzes.
One of the questions she asked was “Who knows what the three day blues are”? After an age, I thought I’d venture a response. “Is it a music festival in Adelaide”?
All the blokes laughed but the women weren’t impressed. Later on we got on to the subject of breastfeeding. “How long does the average woman breastfeed for”? We were asked. Again the silence was deafening, so I answered “surely you’d do it until the baby was full”.
At that stage I think I was marked down as a troublemaker. You’re supposed to take these things seriously after all. There are male midwives apparently, but our classes were determinedly female. Childbirth is their thing after all and we men are there for support. Kind of like the little guy who runs onto the football pitch with a bottle of water and a sponge when somebody goes down injured. Nobody pays in to see that guy. They are there for the footballers.
On the third class, we got a tour of the hospital, which at least gave some attention to the guys. We were shown where to park when we rush the wife to hospital. How much it costs to park while she’s in labour (an arm and a leg) and where the canteen is. The birthing suites are nicely modern and well equipped and had enough gadgets to keep the men interested. Most of us were drawn to the TV and fridge. It made the space look a hotel room. The fridge apparently is provided so that we can bring in cooling packs and food for the expected 8 hour ordeal (only the woman giving birth gets fed by the hospital).
You could tell that all the blokes wanted to know if you could bring in a six-pack but nobody had the guts to ask.
They showed us where the baby will be weighed and measured and where the umbilical cord is cut. Many aspects of this whole fatherhood thing are coming as a shock to me. Not least is the fact that the modern man is supposed to take a pair of scissors to the cord connecting the baby to the placenta. I went white at the mention of this process. I’m an Accountant who feels faint when I get a paper cut. If I wanted to be a surgeon or a butcher, I would have trained to be one.
My squeamishness wasn’t helped when the midwife mentioned that the cord is like nylon rope and you had to give it a good snap with the scissors. When she said that some men liked to wait until the cord had stopped pulsing, I nearly passed out. I can see that I’m going to have to work on my resilience over the coming weeks.
The lowlight of the tour was when they took us to the post natal ward and explained that the mother and baby would only spend one night there. So if the baby is born at 10pm, we’ll be on the mean streets of Melbourne by 6pm the following evening with a small bundle of joy and two inexperienced parents.
But that’s life and I doubt if we’re the first parents to find ourselves in that position. The seven billion people clinging to this mortal planet all got here through similar means. Most people cope and that is what we will do.
We bought our first set of nappies last week and have started to think about all the other things we’ll need. Last Sunday we went to a Baby Expo, which was just about the most soul-destroying thing I’ve ever done. Most of the displays were designed to target your guilt or vanity. There were cots that cost as much as a small car, prams that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Grand Prix circuit and a bewildering assortment of gadgets designed to monitor a baby’s temperature and heartbeat. It seems that the modern nursery is better equipped than an intensive care unit.
After we passed a stall selling aromatherapy treatments for infants, we were hit by a sudden weariness and sat down to enjoy a coffee. My eyes were drawn to a strange green figure on a stage to my right. It turned out to be Dorothy the Dinosaur. She danced and sang a tinny tune and the kids screamed their approval. Somehow I think I’ll be seeing a lot of Dorothy in the future. I can only hope that she knows a few Leonard Cohen songs.
The instructor tries to make it interactive, but as we’re all first time parents, nobody wants to make a fool of themselves by giving a stupid answer. I’d been on a training course at work the week before, which was not dissimilar to the baby class I now found myself in. Both were run by slightly smug individuals who spent most of the time asking patently obvious questions which nobody wanted to answer for fear of becoming the class pet. And both were training us for a scenario that would involve forgetting everything you’ve heard during training.
The only problem with these courses (both Baby and work related) is that they involve long periods of silence while the instructor waits for an answer to her longwinded questions. In most cases, she asks questions relating to the topic she is about to explain. This is pretty redundant and reminds me of the dark days of school when the teacher would ask “What is the capital of Poland?”, just before he was due to tell us anyway. That’s why many of the kids from my school went on to be experts at quizzes.
One of the questions she asked was “Who knows what the three day blues are”? After an age, I thought I’d venture a response. “Is it a music festival in Adelaide”?
All the blokes laughed but the women weren’t impressed. Later on we got on to the subject of breastfeeding. “How long does the average woman breastfeed for”? We were asked. Again the silence was deafening, so I answered “surely you’d do it until the baby was full”.
At that stage I think I was marked down as a troublemaker. You’re supposed to take these things seriously after all. There are male midwives apparently, but our classes were determinedly female. Childbirth is their thing after all and we men are there for support. Kind of like the little guy who runs onto the football pitch with a bottle of water and a sponge when somebody goes down injured. Nobody pays in to see that guy. They are there for the footballers.
On the third class, we got a tour of the hospital, which at least gave some attention to the guys. We were shown where to park when we rush the wife to hospital. How much it costs to park while she’s in labour (an arm and a leg) and where the canteen is. The birthing suites are nicely modern and well equipped and had enough gadgets to keep the men interested. Most of us were drawn to the TV and fridge. It made the space look a hotel room. The fridge apparently is provided so that we can bring in cooling packs and food for the expected 8 hour ordeal (only the woman giving birth gets fed by the hospital).
You could tell that all the blokes wanted to know if you could bring in a six-pack but nobody had the guts to ask.
They showed us where the baby will be weighed and measured and where the umbilical cord is cut. Many aspects of this whole fatherhood thing are coming as a shock to me. Not least is the fact that the modern man is supposed to take a pair of scissors to the cord connecting the baby to the placenta. I went white at the mention of this process. I’m an Accountant who feels faint when I get a paper cut. If I wanted to be a surgeon or a butcher, I would have trained to be one.
My squeamishness wasn’t helped when the midwife mentioned that the cord is like nylon rope and you had to give it a good snap with the scissors. When she said that some men liked to wait until the cord had stopped pulsing, I nearly passed out. I can see that I’m going to have to work on my resilience over the coming weeks.
The lowlight of the tour was when they took us to the post natal ward and explained that the mother and baby would only spend one night there. So if the baby is born at 10pm, we’ll be on the mean streets of Melbourne by 6pm the following evening with a small bundle of joy and two inexperienced parents.
But that’s life and I doubt if we’re the first parents to find ourselves in that position. The seven billion people clinging to this mortal planet all got here through similar means. Most people cope and that is what we will do.
We bought our first set of nappies last week and have started to think about all the other things we’ll need. Last Sunday we went to a Baby Expo, which was just about the most soul-destroying thing I’ve ever done. Most of the displays were designed to target your guilt or vanity. There were cots that cost as much as a small car, prams that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Grand Prix circuit and a bewildering assortment of gadgets designed to monitor a baby’s temperature and heartbeat. It seems that the modern nursery is better equipped than an intensive care unit.
After we passed a stall selling aromatherapy treatments for infants, we were hit by a sudden weariness and sat down to enjoy a coffee. My eyes were drawn to a strange green figure on a stage to my right. It turned out to be Dorothy the Dinosaur. She danced and sang a tinny tune and the kids screamed their approval. Somehow I think I’ll be seeing a lot of Dorothy in the future. I can only hope that she knows a few Leonard Cohen songs.
Thursday 6 October 2011
Waiting for the Stork Part 1
Helen runs our local breastfeeding class and is a slightly intimidating lady. “Do you have any experience with babies?” was her first question.
“Well, I used to be one” I said. “I was a lot fitter back then, mind you. I weighed 9 pounds, 4 ounces but I’ve been stacking it on ever since”.
She didn’t laugh. Years’ working as a midwife obviously numbs you to baby jokes. I was going to try my old favourite “I like babies but couldn’t eat a whole one” but thought better of it and slunk away to find a place among the other parent’s to be. It was a motley crew it must be said. Two lesbian couples who looked a little smug. This is probably due to the fact that they have double the output capacity of the other couples. Two women who arrived on their own and muttered darkly whenever they mentioned their absent husbands and just three blokes (including myself) who had turned up with their partners.
We were asked to introduce ourselves to the group and I had the honour of going first. “Despite my bulging tummy and man boobs”, I said. “I just want to point out that I’m not actually pregnant”.
The fat bloke two seats to my left glared at me and said “You’ve stolen my bloody line”.
I also mentioned that I’m Irish and breastfeeding is about as common there as ham sandwiches are in Israel. Helen looked at me as though I was a caveman and shook her head. I slunk back into my seat and buried my head in the handout we received at the start. The first thing I noticed was a glossy colour pamphlet with the heading “poo chart”. To my disappointment it contained nothing about a cuddly bear called Winnie, but had lots of pictures of excrement. I’m learning new things every day, but apparently it’s OK for a small child to have bright green poo, and they don’t even have to consume a bottle of Creme de Mente like their father does.
I now know what to expect when I open those 72 nappies that will be needed in the first week of juniors’ existence. To be honest, I’ll probably be more concerned about the condition of my own poo in that week as I don’t respond well to lack of sleep and a diet of takeaway food.
The class was pretty boring, until they introduced the live demonstration. Two women had brought along their little boys and we were expected to stand round in small groups and stare at their mammaries. I was a little uncomfortable. The last time I’d paid that much attention to boobies, outside of a loving relationship, was when I first stumbled upon a topless beach in Spain. I say stumbled, because I tripped over an elderly German tourist on a sun lounger while staring at somebody else.
The little boys were 4 and 8 months and the younger one fitted the breastfeeding stereotype that was in my head. It was brought to the feeding station and held there while he filled himself up. The older one was more mobile and he treated his Mother as more of a self service option. Every hour or so, he would crawl over to where she was sitting. He would then climb up and start unbuttoning her blouse. Pretty soon he’d be getting a mouth full while his Mother read a book. We were there to learn how to breastfeed but the thought struck me that she would actually have a harder job teaching her kid when to stop. If it’s that easy, why would you ever bother with the pureed vegetables that other kids are forced to eat?
Two weeks later, we went to our first ante natal class. I’ve been talking to a lot of Dads recently and one thing that always comes up is the horror movies that are shown at these classes. Thankfully, ours was more old school and the presenter decided to showcase her acting skills by playing out most of the action that would normally be seen on screen. This involved lots of moaning and face pulling that would not be out of place at a Pentecostal speaking in tongues festival.
The gathering here was much more conventional with equal numbers of Dads to Mums. Naturally, it focused on the females but we men did get the occasional mention. It’s our job to drive to the hospital (and home again two days later) and to be the chief forehead wiper and back masseuse. We are also expected to be strong and supportive, particularly during that point in labour when it is pointed out that all this pain is actually our fault.
In two weeks time, we get a tour of the hospital. Apparently these days, the delivery rooms are en suite with TVs and vending machines. We’re expecting an 18 hour process, so I might bring along a Box Set of the Sopranos. It’s all very different to when I was a nipper. Mammy won’t be lying down for the delivery it seems. These days you are encouraged to lie across a large exercise ball or to be on all fours. It all seems terribly undignified to me, but then there is very little dignity involved at the start of the baby making process either.
The first class was fun and it gave us a chance to meet other people in our area who are also close to becoming parents. We feel we are part of a club now that lets you into the secret of life. In a few weeks we will become responsible for a little person. To mould them and to teach them and to give them the confidence to set forth into this mad world.
But the thing I’m learning now is that this small child has so much to teach me. He or she will make me a Father and that’s the greatest gift I will ever receive.
“Well, I used to be one” I said. “I was a lot fitter back then, mind you. I weighed 9 pounds, 4 ounces but I’ve been stacking it on ever since”.
She didn’t laugh. Years’ working as a midwife obviously numbs you to baby jokes. I was going to try my old favourite “I like babies but couldn’t eat a whole one” but thought better of it and slunk away to find a place among the other parent’s to be. It was a motley crew it must be said. Two lesbian couples who looked a little smug. This is probably due to the fact that they have double the output capacity of the other couples. Two women who arrived on their own and muttered darkly whenever they mentioned their absent husbands and just three blokes (including myself) who had turned up with their partners.
We were asked to introduce ourselves to the group and I had the honour of going first. “Despite my bulging tummy and man boobs”, I said. “I just want to point out that I’m not actually pregnant”.
The fat bloke two seats to my left glared at me and said “You’ve stolen my bloody line”.
I also mentioned that I’m Irish and breastfeeding is about as common there as ham sandwiches are in Israel. Helen looked at me as though I was a caveman and shook her head. I slunk back into my seat and buried my head in the handout we received at the start. The first thing I noticed was a glossy colour pamphlet with the heading “poo chart”. To my disappointment it contained nothing about a cuddly bear called Winnie, but had lots of pictures of excrement. I’m learning new things every day, but apparently it’s OK for a small child to have bright green poo, and they don’t even have to consume a bottle of Creme de Mente like their father does.
I now know what to expect when I open those 72 nappies that will be needed in the first week of juniors’ existence. To be honest, I’ll probably be more concerned about the condition of my own poo in that week as I don’t respond well to lack of sleep and a diet of takeaway food.
The class was pretty boring, until they introduced the live demonstration. Two women had brought along their little boys and we were expected to stand round in small groups and stare at their mammaries. I was a little uncomfortable. The last time I’d paid that much attention to boobies, outside of a loving relationship, was when I first stumbled upon a topless beach in Spain. I say stumbled, because I tripped over an elderly German tourist on a sun lounger while staring at somebody else.
The little boys were 4 and 8 months and the younger one fitted the breastfeeding stereotype that was in my head. It was brought to the feeding station and held there while he filled himself up. The older one was more mobile and he treated his Mother as more of a self service option. Every hour or so, he would crawl over to where she was sitting. He would then climb up and start unbuttoning her blouse. Pretty soon he’d be getting a mouth full while his Mother read a book. We were there to learn how to breastfeed but the thought struck me that she would actually have a harder job teaching her kid when to stop. If it’s that easy, why would you ever bother with the pureed vegetables that other kids are forced to eat?
Two weeks later, we went to our first ante natal class. I’ve been talking to a lot of Dads recently and one thing that always comes up is the horror movies that are shown at these classes. Thankfully, ours was more old school and the presenter decided to showcase her acting skills by playing out most of the action that would normally be seen on screen. This involved lots of moaning and face pulling that would not be out of place at a Pentecostal speaking in tongues festival.
The gathering here was much more conventional with equal numbers of Dads to Mums. Naturally, it focused on the females but we men did get the occasional mention. It’s our job to drive to the hospital (and home again two days later) and to be the chief forehead wiper and back masseuse. We are also expected to be strong and supportive, particularly during that point in labour when it is pointed out that all this pain is actually our fault.
In two weeks time, we get a tour of the hospital. Apparently these days, the delivery rooms are en suite with TVs and vending machines. We’re expecting an 18 hour process, so I might bring along a Box Set of the Sopranos. It’s all very different to when I was a nipper. Mammy won’t be lying down for the delivery it seems. These days you are encouraged to lie across a large exercise ball or to be on all fours. It all seems terribly undignified to me, but then there is very little dignity involved at the start of the baby making process either.
The first class was fun and it gave us a chance to meet other people in our area who are also close to becoming parents. We feel we are part of a club now that lets you into the secret of life. In a few weeks we will become responsible for a little person. To mould them and to teach them and to give them the confidence to set forth into this mad world.
But the thing I’m learning now is that this small child has so much to teach me. He or she will make me a Father and that’s the greatest gift I will ever receive.
Monday 26 September 2011
That game played by men with odd shaped balls
I sat in the back of a cab in Singapore discussing English football with the Taxi driver. He was up to date on the latest transfer speculation and even knew which player was doing immoral acts with grannies or farm yard animals. He asked me who I supported and I told him “Arsenal” which at the time was not the subject of ridicule that it is now.
He nodded sagely and left a gap in the conversation for me to return the question. “And who do you support?” I asked. “Goalkeepers” was his response. “I watch games and I want to see the keepers do well. Best game for me is one that finishes 0-0”. I thought he might have been extracting the urine, but Singaporean taxi drivers are not known for their humour.
I thought about his comments afterwards and while his support is unusual, it’s no dafter than attaching your fanaticism to a bunch of sulky millionaires who play for the same team in a league at the other side of the world.
Being a sports fan is crazy when you think about it. You will inhale the occasional whiff of high octane when your team does well but given the odds, you are far more likely to experience heartbreak. Leagues tend to be made up of 16 or more teams. Only one can win and the rest must wallow in the sport’s fans biggest fanciful dream, which is that next year will be better.
Last weekend, Ireland beat Australia for the first time at a World Cup. One headline I read said “One night in paradise makes up for 24 years of pain”. But is that true? Perhaps it is appropriate to a sailor on shore leave after a long stint at sea, but it doesn’t really apply to the rest of us. I could have switched teams for example and barracked for the All Blacks if I wanted success (or maybe not, given their World Cup record). I could have given up following Rugby completely, which in Melbourne at least would make me the same as everyone else.
The other complication is that for every team I like, I tend to passionately despise another. You might think that evens out my chances of being happy. But actually it tends to double the pain. I’m naturally drawn to underdogs and as a result I tend to dislike cocky favourites. The problem is that the cocky ones are usually favourites for a reason, as are the underdogs.
In AFL for example, I follow Carlton, a team that hasn’t won anything in sixteen years and were bottom of the league when I arrived in Australia. I am just as happy to see them win as I am to see Collingwood lose. They are the self appointed giants of AFL and strut around like peacocks in heat. I’ve put up with four years of disappointment, watching Carlton stumble at a crucial stage of the season and at the same time seeing Collingwood rise to the top.
This year I made the mistake of getting my hopes up. We finally found some form and made a late run for the title. That dream ended last Saturday night when they went down by 3 points in Perth. What was worse for me (apart from the fact that Collingwood still look odds on to win again this year) is that the Carlton game was on TV immediately after Ireland’s historic win against Australia in the Rugby world cup. Nothing highlighted the swings and arrows of outrageous fortune more than those few hours. I went from being ecstatic to been downright grumpy, with the beer I’d drunk being a catalyst to swing my mood.
At least now that Carlton are out of the running in the AFL and Arsenal never even got into a running stride, I can devote my attention to the Rugby. I have a chequered past in that respect. Despite my size and obsession with sports, I never actually played the game. In my hometown, Rugby was the preserve of the Doctor and Solicitor community with the occasional social climber from my working class end of the street. I followed games on TV and became fascinated with the complicated rules of the sport. But to the outside world, I maintained a well nourished chip on my shoulder about the middle class roots of the game.
Then of course I met a nice middle class girl whose Father happened to be President of the Munster Rugby Union. And so it came to pass that the first ever live game of Rugby I attended was the World Cup Final in 1991. We obtained 11 tickets from her Father and distributed them among the few people we knew in London at the time who had a passing interest in the game. That only amounted to 7 and so we watched the sell out final from the West Stand at Twickenham with 4 empty seats beside us.
After that nice middle class girl turned out to be not so nice after all, I rebelled a little against Rugby and mocked the pretensions of its yuppy supporters. But like Michael in the Godfather, I tried to get out but they pulled me back in again. I started going on away trips to Rome and following club matches and before I knew where I was, I was back in the warm embrace of those with money and manners.
Alas, I won’t make it to any games at this World Cup. Upcoming fatherhood brings other priorities. But I am at least in the right time zone to enjoy the matches and I find that I don’t dislike any of the teams with the sort of venom I reserve for the likes of Manchester United and Collingwood. So if Ireland doesn’t win, I won’t be too distressed about the team that does.
If Ireland does win of course, that will be a different matter. My cries of joy will be heard as far away as the taxi ranks of Singapore.
He nodded sagely and left a gap in the conversation for me to return the question. “And who do you support?” I asked. “Goalkeepers” was his response. “I watch games and I want to see the keepers do well. Best game for me is one that finishes 0-0”. I thought he might have been extracting the urine, but Singaporean taxi drivers are not known for their humour.
I thought about his comments afterwards and while his support is unusual, it’s no dafter than attaching your fanaticism to a bunch of sulky millionaires who play for the same team in a league at the other side of the world.
Being a sports fan is crazy when you think about it. You will inhale the occasional whiff of high octane when your team does well but given the odds, you are far more likely to experience heartbreak. Leagues tend to be made up of 16 or more teams. Only one can win and the rest must wallow in the sport’s fans biggest fanciful dream, which is that next year will be better.
Last weekend, Ireland beat Australia for the first time at a World Cup. One headline I read said “One night in paradise makes up for 24 years of pain”. But is that true? Perhaps it is appropriate to a sailor on shore leave after a long stint at sea, but it doesn’t really apply to the rest of us. I could have switched teams for example and barracked for the All Blacks if I wanted success (or maybe not, given their World Cup record). I could have given up following Rugby completely, which in Melbourne at least would make me the same as everyone else.
The other complication is that for every team I like, I tend to passionately despise another. You might think that evens out my chances of being happy. But actually it tends to double the pain. I’m naturally drawn to underdogs and as a result I tend to dislike cocky favourites. The problem is that the cocky ones are usually favourites for a reason, as are the underdogs.
In AFL for example, I follow Carlton, a team that hasn’t won anything in sixteen years and were bottom of the league when I arrived in Australia. I am just as happy to see them win as I am to see Collingwood lose. They are the self appointed giants of AFL and strut around like peacocks in heat. I’ve put up with four years of disappointment, watching Carlton stumble at a crucial stage of the season and at the same time seeing Collingwood rise to the top.
This year I made the mistake of getting my hopes up. We finally found some form and made a late run for the title. That dream ended last Saturday night when they went down by 3 points in Perth. What was worse for me (apart from the fact that Collingwood still look odds on to win again this year) is that the Carlton game was on TV immediately after Ireland’s historic win against Australia in the Rugby world cup. Nothing highlighted the swings and arrows of outrageous fortune more than those few hours. I went from being ecstatic to been downright grumpy, with the beer I’d drunk being a catalyst to swing my mood.
At least now that Carlton are out of the running in the AFL and Arsenal never even got into a running stride, I can devote my attention to the Rugby. I have a chequered past in that respect. Despite my size and obsession with sports, I never actually played the game. In my hometown, Rugby was the preserve of the Doctor and Solicitor community with the occasional social climber from my working class end of the street. I followed games on TV and became fascinated with the complicated rules of the sport. But to the outside world, I maintained a well nourished chip on my shoulder about the middle class roots of the game.
Then of course I met a nice middle class girl whose Father happened to be President of the Munster Rugby Union. And so it came to pass that the first ever live game of Rugby I attended was the World Cup Final in 1991. We obtained 11 tickets from her Father and distributed them among the few people we knew in London at the time who had a passing interest in the game. That only amounted to 7 and so we watched the sell out final from the West Stand at Twickenham with 4 empty seats beside us.
After that nice middle class girl turned out to be not so nice after all, I rebelled a little against Rugby and mocked the pretensions of its yuppy supporters. But like Michael in the Godfather, I tried to get out but they pulled me back in again. I started going on away trips to Rome and following club matches and before I knew where I was, I was back in the warm embrace of those with money and manners.
Alas, I won’t make it to any games at this World Cup. Upcoming fatherhood brings other priorities. But I am at least in the right time zone to enjoy the matches and I find that I don’t dislike any of the teams with the sort of venom I reserve for the likes of Manchester United and Collingwood. So if Ireland doesn’t win, I won’t be too distressed about the team that does.
If Ireland does win of course, that will be a different matter. My cries of joy will be heard as far away as the taxi ranks of Singapore.
Thursday 15 September 2011
Rugby as non International Sport
Don is an American and very proud of his country. Although not so proud that he would actually live there (the irony of me being proud of my country is not lost on me). I want to watch Ireland’s games at the World Cup in the company of somebody from the country against which we are playing. Rugby is a deeply illogical game and having somebody to banter with is the only way of making it even mildly entertaining.
We played the yanks on September 11th, a day that is important to them for obvious reasons. Don got emotional during the minute silence before the game. I thought it might be a good time to bring up some of the conspiracy theories that surround that day. I don’t mean the ones about the towers been brought down by preset explosives or the van load of Israelis who were seen cheering as the towers collapse. I mean the one about how America used the events of that day to press their crazy date system on the rest of the world. Days are followed by months which are followed by years and that’s the logical way to express a date. So why does the world talk about 9/11? Let the Americans call it that if they want. But to the rest of us it should be 11/9.
I think this is a slippery slope and soon we will not just be using their date format, but we’ll scrap metric and return to pints and gallons. I think there is also room to speculate that the London bombings in 2005 were orchestrated to happen on the 7th July so that the English could talk about 7/7. This allows them to simultaneously keep their American paymasters happy by using the Yankee date format while pretending to the rest of the world that their using their format too.
After Don had dismissed my theories with a disdainful look, we turned our attention back to the pre match entertainment. The Auckland choral choir stepped up to sing the Irish anthem. Except of course it wasn’t the Irish anthem. It’s a made up song designed to not upset anyone but in the process pleasing no one. “Ireland’s Call” is a dirge that would not be out of place in a Michael Flatley musical.
To make matters worse, the Auckland choir decided to only allow its female singers to participate, which made the aforementioned call sound like a screech from a pack of banshees who had just had boiling water poured on them. The male members of the choir followed with a powerful rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” which was almost enough to encourage me to buy a helicopter and head off to some Middle Eastern country on a bombing mission. The contrast between the two anthems could not be starker.
Don, like many Americans, has some Irish blood racing through his veins. It’s mixed with some German, Cherokee Indian and lots of cocaine, if his bulging eyeballs were any guide. When the fine ladies of Auckland had finished butchering Ireland’s Call, Don looked at me with a quizzed expression. “That’s not the song they used to play at the end of the night in Dropkick Murphys in Boston”, he said. I sighed, because I knew that I was about to set off on an explanation of Ireland’s twisted nationhood for the thousand time since I arrived on this fatal shore.
I should say upfront that I voted for the Good Friday agreement which was the definitive Irish solution to an Irish problem. That agreement allows people in Northern Ireland to choose between British and Irish citizenship. I might be wrong, but I think this is the only place in the world that allows this duality. You can be in Ireland all your life but choose not to be Irish. As a country of course “Ireland” doesn’t actually exist. Geographically, it is an island off the North West coast of Europe. But politically, in terms of the United Nations and all that, it’s made up of the Republic of Ireland and a dysfunctional province which is part of the United Kingdom.
Many Australians think Ireland is part of the UK as the media likes to use those two letters as shorthand for anything in that far off neck of the word. This pricks my national pride as it is only Northern Island that is part of the United Kingdom, but we southerners don’t help the confusion by using the shorthand of “Ireland” to represent our part of the country.
Don’s eyes were drooping as I continued with an explanation of dominion status in the 1930s. None of it matters of course, except when it comes to sport. Ireland has two soccer teams which reflect the political structure of the Island. It sends one team to the Olympics which is drawn from the whole island but only includes those who have chosen to be Irish. The only sports in which we present an All Ireland team are Rugby, Hockey and Cricket. Which are of course, the old middle class garrison games of British occupation.
None of these teams fly the Irish flag or play the Irish anthem before games. To complain about this sets you out as a petty minded nationalist. Yet these teams participate in International sport. Which of course contains the word “nation” at its heart. Sport between countries is all about nationhood. The feeling of representation that it brings and the pride in being from a particular place. We Irish are the only participants at the world cup that come from a compromise of two countries. And that compromise dilutes us all I think.
But they wear the green and at the end of the day that’s enough for me. I think we have a good chance of winning, even though Don thinks it has already been fixed that New Zealand will lift the trophy. He likes a good conspiracy theory it must be said.
We played the yanks on September 11th, a day that is important to them for obvious reasons. Don got emotional during the minute silence before the game. I thought it might be a good time to bring up some of the conspiracy theories that surround that day. I don’t mean the ones about the towers been brought down by preset explosives or the van load of Israelis who were seen cheering as the towers collapse. I mean the one about how America used the events of that day to press their crazy date system on the rest of the world. Days are followed by months which are followed by years and that’s the logical way to express a date. So why does the world talk about 9/11? Let the Americans call it that if they want. But to the rest of us it should be 11/9.
I think this is a slippery slope and soon we will not just be using their date format, but we’ll scrap metric and return to pints and gallons. I think there is also room to speculate that the London bombings in 2005 were orchestrated to happen on the 7th July so that the English could talk about 7/7. This allows them to simultaneously keep their American paymasters happy by using the Yankee date format while pretending to the rest of the world that their using their format too.
After Don had dismissed my theories with a disdainful look, we turned our attention back to the pre match entertainment. The Auckland choral choir stepped up to sing the Irish anthem. Except of course it wasn’t the Irish anthem. It’s a made up song designed to not upset anyone but in the process pleasing no one. “Ireland’s Call” is a dirge that would not be out of place in a Michael Flatley musical.
To make matters worse, the Auckland choir decided to only allow its female singers to participate, which made the aforementioned call sound like a screech from a pack of banshees who had just had boiling water poured on them. The male members of the choir followed with a powerful rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” which was almost enough to encourage me to buy a helicopter and head off to some Middle Eastern country on a bombing mission. The contrast between the two anthems could not be starker.
Don, like many Americans, has some Irish blood racing through his veins. It’s mixed with some German, Cherokee Indian and lots of cocaine, if his bulging eyeballs were any guide. When the fine ladies of Auckland had finished butchering Ireland’s Call, Don looked at me with a quizzed expression. “That’s not the song they used to play at the end of the night in Dropkick Murphys in Boston”, he said. I sighed, because I knew that I was about to set off on an explanation of Ireland’s twisted nationhood for the thousand time since I arrived on this fatal shore.
I should say upfront that I voted for the Good Friday agreement which was the definitive Irish solution to an Irish problem. That agreement allows people in Northern Ireland to choose between British and Irish citizenship. I might be wrong, but I think this is the only place in the world that allows this duality. You can be in Ireland all your life but choose not to be Irish. As a country of course “Ireland” doesn’t actually exist. Geographically, it is an island off the North West coast of Europe. But politically, in terms of the United Nations and all that, it’s made up of the Republic of Ireland and a dysfunctional province which is part of the United Kingdom.
Many Australians think Ireland is part of the UK as the media likes to use those two letters as shorthand for anything in that far off neck of the word. This pricks my national pride as it is only Northern Island that is part of the United Kingdom, but we southerners don’t help the confusion by using the shorthand of “Ireland” to represent our part of the country.
Don’s eyes were drooping as I continued with an explanation of dominion status in the 1930s. None of it matters of course, except when it comes to sport. Ireland has two soccer teams which reflect the political structure of the Island. It sends one team to the Olympics which is drawn from the whole island but only includes those who have chosen to be Irish. The only sports in which we present an All Ireland team are Rugby, Hockey and Cricket. Which are of course, the old middle class garrison games of British occupation.
None of these teams fly the Irish flag or play the Irish anthem before games. To complain about this sets you out as a petty minded nationalist. Yet these teams participate in International sport. Which of course contains the word “nation” at its heart. Sport between countries is all about nationhood. The feeling of representation that it brings and the pride in being from a particular place. We Irish are the only participants at the world cup that come from a compromise of two countries. And that compromise dilutes us all I think.
But they wear the green and at the end of the day that’s enough for me. I think we have a good chance of winning, even though Don thinks it has already been fixed that New Zealand will lift the trophy. He likes a good conspiracy theory it must be said.
Thursday 1 September 2011
We Can Be Heroes
They say that you should never meet your heroes because you’ll find that they are human like everyone else. I don’t hold to this belief. I want to see my heroes as real people. It makes me realise that anything is possible. You don’t have to be superman to become a writer or a football star.
I had the pleasure of meeting two of my heroes recently. Martin Flanagan writes about sport and culture in the Melbourne Age. I noticed him shortly after arriving in this fine city when an article about the aboriginal contribution to Australian Rules Football appeared in the paper. He seeks out the spirituality of sport and delves into its emotions. His book “Southern sky, Western Oval” was almost enough to make me give up my new found love of Carlton and pledge my allegiance to the Bulldogs.
He is the first person I look for in the Saturday newspaper and I was delighted when I found out last month that he was booked to speak in our local, at an event called “Spirituality in the Pub”. This is aimed at what might be charitably described as cafeteria Catholics. There were about 300 hundred people there, but it felt like he was making the speech directly to me. Like many Australians he has an Irish surname and through his writing I know that he is proud of his heritage and has visited the old country on many occasions.
His story that night began in 1977 when as a troubled Tasmanian teenager; he made his first journey to Roscommon where the Flanagans originate from. He found himself at a Mass rock in the wild countryside and felt a homecoming. It wasn’t to the land of his forefathers however. Instead, he finally felt a connection to the aboriginal people of his homeland and he had to travel to the other side of the world to discover it.
He went on to explain that Irish and Australian indigenous spirituality is basically the same. I could tell that this was shocking most of the audience, who being Catholic, were largely comprised of third and fourth generation Paddies who had risen to the middle class ranks of Melbourne society. While many would have a strong social conscience, there is an undercurrent of racism in Australian society and they would not like to think that the Irish culture to which they cling to so proudly could be connected to the black fellas of Australia that they spend so much of their lives avoiding.
But I was fascinated. I suddenly saw that the things we did as children were similar if not the same as that done by aboriginals. They walk many miles to a particular tree in the desert to sing a song and eat a meal that reminds them of their ancestors. They treasure rocks such as Uluru and hold them sacred and they have a connection and affinity to the land and sky.
In Ireland, we climb Croagh Patrick in our bare feet. We leave fairy mounds untouched while ploughing large fields. When we were kids we would regularly climb into the car on a Sunday and travel to a place called Faughart. The back door would open and the five of us would pour out and make our way to a stone in the centre of an ancient graveyard that had a strange indentation.
We would touch this indentation and then climb back into the car. At other times of year we would visit a holy well and wait for a spring to miraculously appear. Luckily the rainfall in Ireland means that you can justify a puddle as a spring and we were always satisfied that a miracle had occurred.
It suddenly all made sense. We are an indigenous people and we share a spiritual connection to our brothers across the world. When I shook his hand at the end of the lecture, I realised that he was a humble man who was happy to chat about his possible cousin, Ming Flanagan, part time pot smoker and full time politician.
I still search for his stories first each Saturday and, if anything, meeting him in person has increased my fascination with the man.
Last week I met another hero. On my second day in Melbourne I went to an AFL game. Carlton was playing Melbourne at the MCG in front of a bored crowd. It later transpired that the Blues were bottom of the league and Melbourne weren’t much higher. I had pinned my colours to the Blues mast before landing on these shores because they contained among their playing list a guy who had thrilled me on the hurling pitches of Ireland. His name is Setanta O’hailpin and he plays AFL like nobody else. Which is why he regularly gets dropped from the team.
I met him at a local footy oval where Ireland was playing New Zealand in the semi finals of the International Cup, a sort of World Cup for Aussie Rules without the inclusion of Aussies. I built up the courage to approach him and planned to say something erudite and witty. In the end I gushed in a high pitched voice “you’re my hero”.
He had the good grace to ignore my teenage fan club impersonation and we ended up speaking for ten minutes on diverse issues such as whether Jim Corr is gay and the obvious mutual dislike that exists between Setanta and the Carlton coach.
I came away feeling that my hero worship had been justified and I’ll be screaming support for him on Saturday night when he plays against St Kilda.
Ireland went on to win that International Cup in a come from behind victory against Papua New Guinea. It was a day when a group of ordinary Irishmen became heroes on the majestic open spaces of the MCG. It showed me in the most spectacular way that we can all be heroes and if not, we can at least talk to a hero every now and again.
I had the pleasure of meeting two of my heroes recently. Martin Flanagan writes about sport and culture in the Melbourne Age. I noticed him shortly after arriving in this fine city when an article about the aboriginal contribution to Australian Rules Football appeared in the paper. He seeks out the spirituality of sport and delves into its emotions. His book “Southern sky, Western Oval” was almost enough to make me give up my new found love of Carlton and pledge my allegiance to the Bulldogs.
He is the first person I look for in the Saturday newspaper and I was delighted when I found out last month that he was booked to speak in our local, at an event called “Spirituality in the Pub”. This is aimed at what might be charitably described as cafeteria Catholics. There were about 300 hundred people there, but it felt like he was making the speech directly to me. Like many Australians he has an Irish surname and through his writing I know that he is proud of his heritage and has visited the old country on many occasions.
His story that night began in 1977 when as a troubled Tasmanian teenager; he made his first journey to Roscommon where the Flanagans originate from. He found himself at a Mass rock in the wild countryside and felt a homecoming. It wasn’t to the land of his forefathers however. Instead, he finally felt a connection to the aboriginal people of his homeland and he had to travel to the other side of the world to discover it.
He went on to explain that Irish and Australian indigenous spirituality is basically the same. I could tell that this was shocking most of the audience, who being Catholic, were largely comprised of third and fourth generation Paddies who had risen to the middle class ranks of Melbourne society. While many would have a strong social conscience, there is an undercurrent of racism in Australian society and they would not like to think that the Irish culture to which they cling to so proudly could be connected to the black fellas of Australia that they spend so much of their lives avoiding.
But I was fascinated. I suddenly saw that the things we did as children were similar if not the same as that done by aboriginals. They walk many miles to a particular tree in the desert to sing a song and eat a meal that reminds them of their ancestors. They treasure rocks such as Uluru and hold them sacred and they have a connection and affinity to the land and sky.
In Ireland, we climb Croagh Patrick in our bare feet. We leave fairy mounds untouched while ploughing large fields. When we were kids we would regularly climb into the car on a Sunday and travel to a place called Faughart. The back door would open and the five of us would pour out and make our way to a stone in the centre of an ancient graveyard that had a strange indentation.
We would touch this indentation and then climb back into the car. At other times of year we would visit a holy well and wait for a spring to miraculously appear. Luckily the rainfall in Ireland means that you can justify a puddle as a spring and we were always satisfied that a miracle had occurred.
It suddenly all made sense. We are an indigenous people and we share a spiritual connection to our brothers across the world. When I shook his hand at the end of the lecture, I realised that he was a humble man who was happy to chat about his possible cousin, Ming Flanagan, part time pot smoker and full time politician.
I still search for his stories first each Saturday and, if anything, meeting him in person has increased my fascination with the man.
Last week I met another hero. On my second day in Melbourne I went to an AFL game. Carlton was playing Melbourne at the MCG in front of a bored crowd. It later transpired that the Blues were bottom of the league and Melbourne weren’t much higher. I had pinned my colours to the Blues mast before landing on these shores because they contained among their playing list a guy who had thrilled me on the hurling pitches of Ireland. His name is Setanta O’hailpin and he plays AFL like nobody else. Which is why he regularly gets dropped from the team.
I met him at a local footy oval where Ireland was playing New Zealand in the semi finals of the International Cup, a sort of World Cup for Aussie Rules without the inclusion of Aussies. I built up the courage to approach him and planned to say something erudite and witty. In the end I gushed in a high pitched voice “you’re my hero”.
He had the good grace to ignore my teenage fan club impersonation and we ended up speaking for ten minutes on diverse issues such as whether Jim Corr is gay and the obvious mutual dislike that exists between Setanta and the Carlton coach.
I came away feeling that my hero worship had been justified and I’ll be screaming support for him on Saturday night when he plays against St Kilda.
Ireland went on to win that International Cup in a come from behind victory against Papua New Guinea. It was a day when a group of ordinary Irishmen became heroes on the majestic open spaces of the MCG. It showed me in the most spectacular way that we can all be heroes and if not, we can at least talk to a hero every now and again.
Monday 22 August 2011
Of Mice and Men
Red back spiders hide under toilet seats and bite the bum of unsuspecting visitors. Brown snakes live under houses, ready to pounce on children who foolishly climb under floors to retrieve lost balls. Possums invade attic spaces and drive house owners demented with their scratching and nocturnal lovemaking.
I heard all these stories before moving to Australia and I’m pleased to say that none of this has happened, at least not to me. But I did get my first shock from a wild animal last week and it turned out to be of European origin. It was I’m embarrassed to say, a humble mouse.
In my defence I should point out that I was under a bit of stress at the time. I had just spent the afternoon making a curry paste with various exotic spices. Rather stupidly, in hindsight at least, I managed to get a lot of it on my hands and nature being what it is, it came back to bite me. About two hours after I’d massaged most of the paste into my hands, they started burning like irons that had been left in the fire overnight. I had to resort to immersing them in a bowl of water, which was soothing but not really practical for sleeping or any activity that involved moving around.
When I was a teenager, we would play a trick on friends who had fallen asleep on sofas after a night’s drinking. We would place one of their hands in a bowl of water and through a process of osmosis; this would cause the unfortunate sleeper to wet himself. Oh, how we laughed. I wasn’t about to inflict this trick on myself and in any event, it really only works with one hand. I haven’t mastered the gymnastic requirements of keeping both hands in a bowl of water while sleeping. At least not in such a way that would stop the bowl from spilling during one of my nocturnal twists and turns.
So it was that I found myself in a slightly agitated state in the bathroom around 11pm, when our rodent friend darted across the tiled floor. I’d like to say I shrieked like a little girl, but it was worse than that. My attempted scream was trapped in my throat as though somebody had pressed the pause button on my body. I finally summoned the strength to flee from the bathroom and took sanctuary in the arms of my heavily pregnant wife. Despite her “in utero” condition I implored her to sort the problem out.
She humoured me by heading off to investigate, suspecting, it seems, that I might be hallucinating. Shortly afterwards, I heard a laugh which suggested that the ugly little creature had appeared to her too. There followed a restless night where I dreamed of dipping my hands into molten steel while mice nibbled at my earlobes. I’ve had better night’s sleep on airplanes and that’s saying something.
The following day we laid more traps and poison than you’d find at a bakery that was next door to the town dump. We toyed with the idea of setting humanitarian traps for a second until I remembered that mice aren’t human and if they called the traps ‘miceitarian’ I might be more sympathetic. I appreciate that this might be offensive to some people; particularly those who contribute to donkey charities while three million people starve in East Africa. But I’m not a fan of animals, apart from when it comes to eating them. I considered becoming vegetarian once (like most bad decisions I’ve taken in life, it was done to impress a girl) until I realised that if God didn’t want us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them out of meat.
It took the mouse two days to be tempted by our alluring concoction of peanuts and butter, but early on Tuesday morning we heard a loud snap from the spare bedroom and on investigation we found a mouse who, if he hadn’t been dead, would have benefitted from a good shoulder and neck massage.
They say that when you’ve seen a mouse, you’ve really only seen the one who is scavenging for a family of ten. My dad used to say that he was scared to kill a mouse because two hundred would turn up for the funeral. Both of these statements suggest that mice are communal and our friend is unlikely to have been alone. So we’ve kept the traps and poison set in the event that his family come out of hiding.
This is the first rodent I’ve seen in years, but time is not the explanation for my meekness. The truth is, I’ve had a phobia about rodents since out pet dog killed a family of rats and left them in a neat pile at our backdoor. I thought I’d grown out of this fear in my teenage years until I got a job working in a pub and had the unenviable task of putting the bins out each Sunday night. There were no wheelie bins in those days, just open cardboard boxes with empty bottles, food scraps and cigarette ash (recycling in those days described an occasion when you used your bike twice in one day).
As I balanced a particularly heavy box on my knee, a large mouse popped out the top and after a momentary appraisal of the situation, he figured that the shortest route to ground was to hop onto my knee and scurry down my leg. In my darkest, rodent filled nightmares I can still feel the patter of those tiny feet running down my leg.
So I live in a country of snakes, spiders and crocodiles and I’m surrounded by seas filled with sharks and killer stingrays. Yet none of these particularly bother me. But put me in a room with a tiny mouse and I turn into a quivering wreck. We choose our own devils. The devil doesn’t choose us.
I heard all these stories before moving to Australia and I’m pleased to say that none of this has happened, at least not to me. But I did get my first shock from a wild animal last week and it turned out to be of European origin. It was I’m embarrassed to say, a humble mouse.
In my defence I should point out that I was under a bit of stress at the time. I had just spent the afternoon making a curry paste with various exotic spices. Rather stupidly, in hindsight at least, I managed to get a lot of it on my hands and nature being what it is, it came back to bite me. About two hours after I’d massaged most of the paste into my hands, they started burning like irons that had been left in the fire overnight. I had to resort to immersing them in a bowl of water, which was soothing but not really practical for sleeping or any activity that involved moving around.
When I was a teenager, we would play a trick on friends who had fallen asleep on sofas after a night’s drinking. We would place one of their hands in a bowl of water and through a process of osmosis; this would cause the unfortunate sleeper to wet himself. Oh, how we laughed. I wasn’t about to inflict this trick on myself and in any event, it really only works with one hand. I haven’t mastered the gymnastic requirements of keeping both hands in a bowl of water while sleeping. At least not in such a way that would stop the bowl from spilling during one of my nocturnal twists and turns.
So it was that I found myself in a slightly agitated state in the bathroom around 11pm, when our rodent friend darted across the tiled floor. I’d like to say I shrieked like a little girl, but it was worse than that. My attempted scream was trapped in my throat as though somebody had pressed the pause button on my body. I finally summoned the strength to flee from the bathroom and took sanctuary in the arms of my heavily pregnant wife. Despite her “in utero” condition I implored her to sort the problem out.
She humoured me by heading off to investigate, suspecting, it seems, that I might be hallucinating. Shortly afterwards, I heard a laugh which suggested that the ugly little creature had appeared to her too. There followed a restless night where I dreamed of dipping my hands into molten steel while mice nibbled at my earlobes. I’ve had better night’s sleep on airplanes and that’s saying something.
The following day we laid more traps and poison than you’d find at a bakery that was next door to the town dump. We toyed with the idea of setting humanitarian traps for a second until I remembered that mice aren’t human and if they called the traps ‘miceitarian’ I might be more sympathetic. I appreciate that this might be offensive to some people; particularly those who contribute to donkey charities while three million people starve in East Africa. But I’m not a fan of animals, apart from when it comes to eating them. I considered becoming vegetarian once (like most bad decisions I’ve taken in life, it was done to impress a girl) until I realised that if God didn’t want us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them out of meat.
It took the mouse two days to be tempted by our alluring concoction of peanuts and butter, but early on Tuesday morning we heard a loud snap from the spare bedroom and on investigation we found a mouse who, if he hadn’t been dead, would have benefitted from a good shoulder and neck massage.
They say that when you’ve seen a mouse, you’ve really only seen the one who is scavenging for a family of ten. My dad used to say that he was scared to kill a mouse because two hundred would turn up for the funeral. Both of these statements suggest that mice are communal and our friend is unlikely to have been alone. So we’ve kept the traps and poison set in the event that his family come out of hiding.
This is the first rodent I’ve seen in years, but time is not the explanation for my meekness. The truth is, I’ve had a phobia about rodents since out pet dog killed a family of rats and left them in a neat pile at our backdoor. I thought I’d grown out of this fear in my teenage years until I got a job working in a pub and had the unenviable task of putting the bins out each Sunday night. There were no wheelie bins in those days, just open cardboard boxes with empty bottles, food scraps and cigarette ash (recycling in those days described an occasion when you used your bike twice in one day).
As I balanced a particularly heavy box on my knee, a large mouse popped out the top and after a momentary appraisal of the situation, he figured that the shortest route to ground was to hop onto my knee and scurry down my leg. In my darkest, rodent filled nightmares I can still feel the patter of those tiny feet running down my leg.
So I live in a country of snakes, spiders and crocodiles and I’m surrounded by seas filled with sharks and killer stingrays. Yet none of these particularly bother me. But put me in a room with a tiny mouse and I turn into a quivering wreck. We choose our own devils. The devil doesn’t choose us.
Saturday 13 August 2011
A Guide to the Australian Vernacular
Last week I found myself saying “Fair Dinkum” in response to an outrageous statement I’d just listened to. The person who had uttered that statement didn’t bat an eyelid. “Fair Dinkum” is mentioned as often here as “what’s the craic?” is back in Ireland. I remember a Polish shop attendant once saying that to me and as I was struck by how funny it sounded. Australians are much more forgiving when I mangle their vernacular.
For those wondering what Fair Dinkum means, it really depends on the inflection you put at the end of the last syllable. This is sometimes difficult to discern, as Aussies tend to raise their voice at the end of every sentence, so that everything sounds like a question. This is a particular problem when asking for directions from a teenager. I was only here a week when I needed to find the train station and made the mistake of questioning a surly youngster. I got a reply, which sounded like “You go to the end of this road and turn left?” To which I rudely answered, “Well if I knew that I wouldn’t be asking you, would I”?
The most common usage of Fair Dinkum is to register surprise or to ask whether the speaker is serious. It has a childish quality however, which makes me think that John McEnroe would not have had the same dramatic influence on the tennis world if he had been Australian. Shouting, “You cannot be fair dinkum” at an umpire just doesn’t sound so scary.
Strewth is another word I find myself using with worrying regularity. A mild exclamation, it can be included in most sentences without insulting God or any of his family. It can be used for example to express disgust at a bad pint of beer and is more economical than its Irish cousin, “Jesus, Mary and St Joseph”.
Sport has its own language in many countries. I can’t quite bring myself to call a football field “a paddock” but I do now ask people who they barrack for rather than asking who they support. Carlton are my team and one of the ongoing debates in our stuttering season has been whether we should play Lachie Henderson upfront instead of my Irish hero, Setanta O’Hailpin. Last week I found myself sending a text to a fellow Carlton fan that read “You’ve been spruiking that drongo Henderson all year. He couldn’t hit a roo’s clacker from two feet away”. I had to wash my mouth out with salt afterwards.
Australian rules football is a basic catch and kick game that has been sullied in recent years by the introduction of hand passing. Like many fans I hanker for the old days, except in my case I didn’t actually experience them. I can be found screaming at a player in possession “Put it on the slipper” which is an exultation for him to kick the bloody thing.
But it is not only in pubs and sports grounds that Australian English differs from the rest of the Anglophone world. The business pages regularly tell of business people or politicians who have ‘rorted’ the system. It refers to the act of defrauding and can be used as a noun or verb. I rort, you rort, he rorts etc.
Many of these Australian specific words come from old English slant terms. Rort for example derives from ‘rorty’, a term that means having fun or being boisterous, which gives an indication of early Australian attitudes to crime.
The Americans of course have also taken old English and given it a new life. They talk of sheriffs and penitentiaries but we’ve seen enough Hollywood films to make these terms acceptable all over the world. Indeed, it seems that American English is now the default version of the old Anglo tongue. The recent riots in London, for example, started with a text that said, “The Feds are chasing me”.
Australian English, on the other hand, is much less prevalent in the wider world. The makers of “Neighbours” and “Home and Away” have an eye on International sales and are careful not to include too many local phrases.
We Irish of course were forced by our oppressors to speak their tongue, but being the good natured people we are, we handed English back in a better condition than we had received it.
Our original language was vivid and full of expression (we have 31 words for seaweed for example), which might explain why Irish people spend words like sailors while the English hoard them like misers.
I tried to explain to an Australian recently that the richness of the Irish language was a result of its complex grammar and tense structure. This includes the “modh coinnÃollach” which is the bane of Irish school days. This is basically a conditional or as my Australian friend put it, a wishful thinking tense. It also explains why Irish people say, “Would have, could have, should have” so much.
In July, I celebrated four years in this land of kangaroos and funny words. A lot has happened in that time. The world has lurched from financial crisis to financial crisis. I fell off my bike and cracked my head and danced with cancer and came out the other side. And most importantly, I got married and have a kid on the way.
But one thing hasn’t changed in those four years. I still have my Irish accent. I still struggle to pronounce words beginning with ‘th’ and I put the emphasis at the beginning of words and not at the end as many Australians do.
I don’t have red hair or twinkling green eyes like many of my countrymen. I don’t even have an Irish sounding name. So my accent is my only means of preserving my identity. I hope it stays that way and that’s fair dinkum. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to throw a few prawns on the Barbie and to tuck into a few stubbies that I have chilling in my eski.
For those wondering what Fair Dinkum means, it really depends on the inflection you put at the end of the last syllable. This is sometimes difficult to discern, as Aussies tend to raise their voice at the end of every sentence, so that everything sounds like a question. This is a particular problem when asking for directions from a teenager. I was only here a week when I needed to find the train station and made the mistake of questioning a surly youngster. I got a reply, which sounded like “You go to the end of this road and turn left?” To which I rudely answered, “Well if I knew that I wouldn’t be asking you, would I”?
The most common usage of Fair Dinkum is to register surprise or to ask whether the speaker is serious. It has a childish quality however, which makes me think that John McEnroe would not have had the same dramatic influence on the tennis world if he had been Australian. Shouting, “You cannot be fair dinkum” at an umpire just doesn’t sound so scary.
Strewth is another word I find myself using with worrying regularity. A mild exclamation, it can be included in most sentences without insulting God or any of his family. It can be used for example to express disgust at a bad pint of beer and is more economical than its Irish cousin, “Jesus, Mary and St Joseph”.
Sport has its own language in many countries. I can’t quite bring myself to call a football field “a paddock” but I do now ask people who they barrack for rather than asking who they support. Carlton are my team and one of the ongoing debates in our stuttering season has been whether we should play Lachie Henderson upfront instead of my Irish hero, Setanta O’Hailpin. Last week I found myself sending a text to a fellow Carlton fan that read “You’ve been spruiking that drongo Henderson all year. He couldn’t hit a roo’s clacker from two feet away”. I had to wash my mouth out with salt afterwards.
Australian rules football is a basic catch and kick game that has been sullied in recent years by the introduction of hand passing. Like many fans I hanker for the old days, except in my case I didn’t actually experience them. I can be found screaming at a player in possession “Put it on the slipper” which is an exultation for him to kick the bloody thing.
But it is not only in pubs and sports grounds that Australian English differs from the rest of the Anglophone world. The business pages regularly tell of business people or politicians who have ‘rorted’ the system. It refers to the act of defrauding and can be used as a noun or verb. I rort, you rort, he rorts etc.
Many of these Australian specific words come from old English slant terms. Rort for example derives from ‘rorty’, a term that means having fun or being boisterous, which gives an indication of early Australian attitudes to crime.
The Americans of course have also taken old English and given it a new life. They talk of sheriffs and penitentiaries but we’ve seen enough Hollywood films to make these terms acceptable all over the world. Indeed, it seems that American English is now the default version of the old Anglo tongue. The recent riots in London, for example, started with a text that said, “The Feds are chasing me”.
Australian English, on the other hand, is much less prevalent in the wider world. The makers of “Neighbours” and “Home and Away” have an eye on International sales and are careful not to include too many local phrases.
We Irish of course were forced by our oppressors to speak their tongue, but being the good natured people we are, we handed English back in a better condition than we had received it.
Our original language was vivid and full of expression (we have 31 words for seaweed for example), which might explain why Irish people spend words like sailors while the English hoard them like misers.
I tried to explain to an Australian recently that the richness of the Irish language was a result of its complex grammar and tense structure. This includes the “modh coinnÃollach” which is the bane of Irish school days. This is basically a conditional or as my Australian friend put it, a wishful thinking tense. It also explains why Irish people say, “Would have, could have, should have” so much.
In July, I celebrated four years in this land of kangaroos and funny words. A lot has happened in that time. The world has lurched from financial crisis to financial crisis. I fell off my bike and cracked my head and danced with cancer and came out the other side. And most importantly, I got married and have a kid on the way.
But one thing hasn’t changed in those four years. I still have my Irish accent. I still struggle to pronounce words beginning with ‘th’ and I put the emphasis at the beginning of words and not at the end as many Australians do.
I don’t have red hair or twinkling green eyes like many of my countrymen. I don’t even have an Irish sounding name. So my accent is my only means of preserving my identity. I hope it stays that way and that’s fair dinkum. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to throw a few prawns on the Barbie and to tuck into a few stubbies that I have chilling in my eski.
Thursday 4 August 2011
Can Mr Stork please come to gate 31?
It was almost midnight when our creaky old 747 pulled out of Singapore and headed for the turbulent skies over Asia. It felt like midnight to me but Singapore is an aviation hub and my fellow travellers would have come from Katmandu, Karachi and Canberra and their body clocks would be all over the place.
The grumpy British Airways crew didn’t care however and were determined to feed everyone a choice of two stews before filling them with sufficient alcohol to get them to sleep. My experience of long haul flying is that flight crew want to do as little as possible and having a comatose passenger list is the best way of achieving this.
In my backpack I was carrying the 20 week scan pictures of my unborn child, which I was bringing home to show to my family. I felt a connection at that point because flying isn’t much different to being carried in the womb. You are snugly strapped in and fed periodically by a mother type creature who delivers food of such sickly consistency it might as well be delivered intravenously. And all the time, you are carried along in a hermetically sealed container. The main difference however is that my future child is on their own while I had 300 other twins to share the space with.
There was a time when the Boeing 747 was the most glamorous ship in the sky. In my early teens I was a plane spotter (there was little else to do in 70’s Ireland) and the highlight of each day’s spotting was when the Aer Lingus flight from New York would arrive and the beautiful bulbous head of that magnificent machine would appear over the horizon.
But times have changed. The double decked Airbus 380 is now the king of flying and the poor old 747 looks like a sad uncle who tries to get down and dance with the teenagers at a wedding. The one I was travelling on looked like it helped out during the Berlin airlift. Everything rattled, lights flickered on and off and a strange alarm went off periodically to the annoyance of the passengers and confusion of the crew. I was left to hope that the engines were better attached and that the controls on the flight deck weren’t connected to the same system as the entertainment platform, which seemed to have a mind of its own.
Thankfully, the plane was only one third full and I was able to stretch out across three seats in an attempt to get some sleep. Singapore to London is thirteen hours of endless boredom and catching some sleep is a must. Unfortunately, airplane seats are uncomfortable enough when you’re sitting upright. Lie across three and you’ll feel belt buckles and seat ridges biting into you. I’m also just a little too tall for this process and to gain some level of comfort, I had to dangle my legs out beyond the seats and into the passageway.
This meant that every time I achieved some level of slumber, I’d be rudely awakened by a whack from a passing trolley or the drunk like swaying of a passing geriatric with bowl problems on their way to the midget sized toilets down the back.
I tried watching movies but Hollywood produces better golfers now than movies. At least it’s better than the old days when movies were shown on a screen at the front of the plane and had to be edited down so as not to show any offensive bits. This meant that Borat would run for about 15 minutes on a plane.
These days, you can choose from hundreds of movies beamed directly to a matchbox sized screen in the back of the seat in front of you, even when sitting down the back in cattle class. This allows for viewer discretion and so the movie is shown in full. I was once watching the above mentioned Borat on an international flight.
There is a scene where he ties a weight to his willy and swings it like a pendulum. This is shown in close up and I was rather embarrassed and tried to turn it off. The remote control had fallen between my legs and under the blanket in which I was wrapped. While I was desperately fumbling , I noticed an elderly passenger to my right who was staring alternatively in horror at the screen and the movements beneath my blanket.
My next trip to Europe will, God willing, be in May 2012 when my wife and I will bring our new born child back to Ireland to be Christened. I doubt if I’ll be watching too many movies on that trip. Families with small kids have been the bane of my international travel experience and I have often said that I would pay a premium to travel on an airline that had an over twelve’s policy. But very soon I’ll be part of that set. Changing nappies during turbulence, pacing the aisles with the geriatrics with bowel problems and trying to muffle screams while the rest of the flight is trying to sleep.
It’s all ahead of me as people keep saying, as though we were the first couple in the world to ever have a baby. It seems strange that humans have been doing this since the dawn of time yet most people seem to think it’s the scariest and most exhausting thing you’ll over do.
Maybe they are right. To date, climbing into a metal box and been flown to 36,000 feet by a stranger while travelling nonstop for 36 hours is the most frightening and exhausting thing I’ve ever done. So I don’t have much to compare it to. But new life surely is nature’s most wonderful gift. I’m looking forward to it, particularly as it means I’ll have somebody to hold my arm when I’m stumbling towards the midget sized toilets as a geriatric with bowel problems.
The grumpy British Airways crew didn’t care however and were determined to feed everyone a choice of two stews before filling them with sufficient alcohol to get them to sleep. My experience of long haul flying is that flight crew want to do as little as possible and having a comatose passenger list is the best way of achieving this.
In my backpack I was carrying the 20 week scan pictures of my unborn child, which I was bringing home to show to my family. I felt a connection at that point because flying isn’t much different to being carried in the womb. You are snugly strapped in and fed periodically by a mother type creature who delivers food of such sickly consistency it might as well be delivered intravenously. And all the time, you are carried along in a hermetically sealed container. The main difference however is that my future child is on their own while I had 300 other twins to share the space with.
There was a time when the Boeing 747 was the most glamorous ship in the sky. In my early teens I was a plane spotter (there was little else to do in 70’s Ireland) and the highlight of each day’s spotting was when the Aer Lingus flight from New York would arrive and the beautiful bulbous head of that magnificent machine would appear over the horizon.
But times have changed. The double decked Airbus 380 is now the king of flying and the poor old 747 looks like a sad uncle who tries to get down and dance with the teenagers at a wedding. The one I was travelling on looked like it helped out during the Berlin airlift. Everything rattled, lights flickered on and off and a strange alarm went off periodically to the annoyance of the passengers and confusion of the crew. I was left to hope that the engines were better attached and that the controls on the flight deck weren’t connected to the same system as the entertainment platform, which seemed to have a mind of its own.
Thankfully, the plane was only one third full and I was able to stretch out across three seats in an attempt to get some sleep. Singapore to London is thirteen hours of endless boredom and catching some sleep is a must. Unfortunately, airplane seats are uncomfortable enough when you’re sitting upright. Lie across three and you’ll feel belt buckles and seat ridges biting into you. I’m also just a little too tall for this process and to gain some level of comfort, I had to dangle my legs out beyond the seats and into the passageway.
This meant that every time I achieved some level of slumber, I’d be rudely awakened by a whack from a passing trolley or the drunk like swaying of a passing geriatric with bowl problems on their way to the midget sized toilets down the back.
I tried watching movies but Hollywood produces better golfers now than movies. At least it’s better than the old days when movies were shown on a screen at the front of the plane and had to be edited down so as not to show any offensive bits. This meant that Borat would run for about 15 minutes on a plane.
These days, you can choose from hundreds of movies beamed directly to a matchbox sized screen in the back of the seat in front of you, even when sitting down the back in cattle class. This allows for viewer discretion and so the movie is shown in full. I was once watching the above mentioned Borat on an international flight.
There is a scene where he ties a weight to his willy and swings it like a pendulum. This is shown in close up and I was rather embarrassed and tried to turn it off. The remote control had fallen between my legs and under the blanket in which I was wrapped. While I was desperately fumbling , I noticed an elderly passenger to my right who was staring alternatively in horror at the screen and the movements beneath my blanket.
My next trip to Europe will, God willing, be in May 2012 when my wife and I will bring our new born child back to Ireland to be Christened. I doubt if I’ll be watching too many movies on that trip. Families with small kids have been the bane of my international travel experience and I have often said that I would pay a premium to travel on an airline that had an over twelve’s policy. But very soon I’ll be part of that set. Changing nappies during turbulence, pacing the aisles with the geriatrics with bowel problems and trying to muffle screams while the rest of the flight is trying to sleep.
It’s all ahead of me as people keep saying, as though we were the first couple in the world to ever have a baby. It seems strange that humans have been doing this since the dawn of time yet most people seem to think it’s the scariest and most exhausting thing you’ll over do.
Maybe they are right. To date, climbing into a metal box and been flown to 36,000 feet by a stranger while travelling nonstop for 36 hours is the most frightening and exhausting thing I’ve ever done. So I don’t have much to compare it to. But new life surely is nature’s most wonderful gift. I’m looking forward to it, particularly as it means I’ll have somebody to hold my arm when I’m stumbling towards the midget sized toilets as a geriatric with bowel problems.
Wednesday 6 July 2011
The Day before the Wedding
Sharon runs the Wincorp adventure park in Pauanui on the North Island of New Zealand. If you’re ever passing that way (and unless you’re heading to Pauanui, there’s not much reason to pass) you should call in. Sharon is a middle-aged lady with a down to earth style who sums up a certain kiwi spirit. Bridges were made to be jumped from, rivers are for rafting down and if you don’t spend a day a week shooting at something, then you haven’t lived.
Most of her clients are sporting teams and organisations looking for bonding. To be honest, I feel tired just typing those words. So imagine how I felt when I was dragged there by my soon to be in laws on the morning before I got married.
Sharon started off by telling us that they had a good safety record. “We only had one broken leg in the past month”, she said. And that was due to a large lady not following instructions. That’s the thing about New Zealand. They tempt you into doing crazy things but if anything goes wrong, it’s your fault.
Sharon went on to explain in great detail how the unfortunate lady had come to hurt herself, which wasn’t exactly what we wanted to hear as we donned safety gear and headed off into the early morning mist. I was getting married the next day, so making sure I got home in one piece was my main priority.
Our first stop was the shotgun range. It was a bit rough and ready to be honest. I’ve done it once before and safety was the big issue. In New Zealand they hand you a gun and tell you to hit anything you see flying. Luckily there were no birds passing so I had to settle for the clay pigeons that Sharon released with a bored thug of her muscular wrist. I managed to hit three out of ten, which isn’t that impressive, but then I was always kind to animals.
The scariest moment was when my future father in law stepped up to take his turn. He turned round to face me and while he wasn’t quite pointing me the gun in my direction, I got the message. Look after his daughter or there would be trouble.
With our ears still ringing, Sharon led us towards a ladder hidden among the trees. “If you want to drop out, now is the time to do it”. But when a fifty-year woman says that to a group of guys, it’s pretty hard to admit that you are coward. I climbed up to what she described as a “rope ladder”. I had in mind the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge in County Antrim that I once dandered across without a care in the world. This was an entirely different experience. For a start, ropes were in short supply. There was one to stand on and two to grip.
We were about 14 meters up at the top of the tree line but I wasn’t in a mood to enjoy to the view. Terror was starting to surge through my body. I have a fear of heights that stops me from standing on a chair to change a light bulb. In my old drama group in Dublin, I liked to muck in when we were putting the set up before a play. But they couldn’t get me up a ladder with a cattle prod. So even though a harness supported me, I set off across the ladder with the sort of feelings that Frodo Baggins had before he attacked the Misty Mountains.
Just before I began, Sharon mentioned that if I slipped, the harness would stop me from falling into the valley below but I’d have to drag myself back up using only my arms. And as I’m horizontally challenged, that wasn’t a happy prospect.
As soon as I stepped on the rope it wobbled like a jelly in an earthquake. But I’m a quick learner and I realised that to steady the thing you had to push the two side ropes out as far as you could. Physics kicked in at this point. The heavier you are, the more downward weight you exerted, which caused the two side ropes to squeeze inwards. So those of us who are unfit had to work harder to push the ropes out.
With as much balletic elegance as I’d could muster, I made it to the other side. Just as I was mentally patting myself on the back I noticed that I had only made it to the starting platform and a much longer ladder stretched out in front of me. I dug my elbows into the side ropes and set off. I had a couple of wobbles on the way, but made it in one piece to the platform from which the fun really started.
Sharon was there to strap me into what she called a flying fox. That turned out to be a cable car type contraption without the benefit of a car. I gripped a handle connected to a pulley and stepped off the platform. Gravity then took over and I shot down into the valley below. The trip itself was fun but the destination did pose a challenge. I landed with all the grace of a drunken elephant in high-heeled shoes.
I ended up covered in muck but the trouble was only starting. My brother came down next and he looked to be making the same sort of landing as me. So gallant sibling that I am I tried to rugby tackle him. Alas, I hit the metal handle instead and without wanting to be dramatic almost lost two fingers. There was a little blood but I was patched up and made it back to town for my last night as a single man.
Shaking hands the next day was a bit of a problem and when you get married you have to do a lot of that. But I survived to tell the tale. And that is the real Kiwi spirit.
Most of her clients are sporting teams and organisations looking for bonding. To be honest, I feel tired just typing those words. So imagine how I felt when I was dragged there by my soon to be in laws on the morning before I got married.
Sharon started off by telling us that they had a good safety record. “We only had one broken leg in the past month”, she said. And that was due to a large lady not following instructions. That’s the thing about New Zealand. They tempt you into doing crazy things but if anything goes wrong, it’s your fault.
Sharon went on to explain in great detail how the unfortunate lady had come to hurt herself, which wasn’t exactly what we wanted to hear as we donned safety gear and headed off into the early morning mist. I was getting married the next day, so making sure I got home in one piece was my main priority.
Our first stop was the shotgun range. It was a bit rough and ready to be honest. I’ve done it once before and safety was the big issue. In New Zealand they hand you a gun and tell you to hit anything you see flying. Luckily there were no birds passing so I had to settle for the clay pigeons that Sharon released with a bored thug of her muscular wrist. I managed to hit three out of ten, which isn’t that impressive, but then I was always kind to animals.
The scariest moment was when my future father in law stepped up to take his turn. He turned round to face me and while he wasn’t quite pointing me the gun in my direction, I got the message. Look after his daughter or there would be trouble.
With our ears still ringing, Sharon led us towards a ladder hidden among the trees. “If you want to drop out, now is the time to do it”. But when a fifty-year woman says that to a group of guys, it’s pretty hard to admit that you are coward. I climbed up to what she described as a “rope ladder”. I had in mind the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge in County Antrim that I once dandered across without a care in the world. This was an entirely different experience. For a start, ropes were in short supply. There was one to stand on and two to grip.
We were about 14 meters up at the top of the tree line but I wasn’t in a mood to enjoy to the view. Terror was starting to surge through my body. I have a fear of heights that stops me from standing on a chair to change a light bulb. In my old drama group in Dublin, I liked to muck in when we were putting the set up before a play. But they couldn’t get me up a ladder with a cattle prod. So even though a harness supported me, I set off across the ladder with the sort of feelings that Frodo Baggins had before he attacked the Misty Mountains.
Just before I began, Sharon mentioned that if I slipped, the harness would stop me from falling into the valley below but I’d have to drag myself back up using only my arms. And as I’m horizontally challenged, that wasn’t a happy prospect.
As soon as I stepped on the rope it wobbled like a jelly in an earthquake. But I’m a quick learner and I realised that to steady the thing you had to push the two side ropes out as far as you could. Physics kicked in at this point. The heavier you are, the more downward weight you exerted, which caused the two side ropes to squeeze inwards. So those of us who are unfit had to work harder to push the ropes out.
With as much balletic elegance as I’d could muster, I made it to the other side. Just as I was mentally patting myself on the back I noticed that I had only made it to the starting platform and a much longer ladder stretched out in front of me. I dug my elbows into the side ropes and set off. I had a couple of wobbles on the way, but made it in one piece to the platform from which the fun really started.
Sharon was there to strap me into what she called a flying fox. That turned out to be a cable car type contraption without the benefit of a car. I gripped a handle connected to a pulley and stepped off the platform. Gravity then took over and I shot down into the valley below. The trip itself was fun but the destination did pose a challenge. I landed with all the grace of a drunken elephant in high-heeled shoes.
I ended up covered in muck but the trouble was only starting. My brother came down next and he looked to be making the same sort of landing as me. So gallant sibling that I am I tried to rugby tackle him. Alas, I hit the metal handle instead and without wanting to be dramatic almost lost two fingers. There was a little blood but I was patched up and made it back to town for my last night as a single man.
Shaking hands the next day was a bit of a problem and when you get married you have to do a lot of that. But I survived to tell the tale. And that is the real Kiwi spirit.
Friday 24 June 2011
Drinking Beer by the Indian Ocean
They say that Guinness doesn’t travel well and therefore the best you’ll get is in in the brewery in Dublin. And there is something to be said for being able to smell the hops and barley while enjoying a tasty ale.
I got a taste for it in my teens. My Dad worked in a brewery and each Christmas, he would take me there to a check all the pipes and tanks. We’d end up in the tasting room where I was introduced to the delights of lager and learned how to make up excuses for being late for dinner and the Christmas one in particular.
Over the years I’ve dipped into a few other breweries. You have to do the tour first and pretend you are interested in the different techniques for making ales and stouts. But actually people are only interested in the free beer at the end. And the quicker you can get there the better. The Guinness warehouse is Ireland’s biggest tourist attraction because it has a lift that takes you straight to the bar on the top floor.
So when I went to Perth last weekend, I made it a point to visit the Little Creatures brewery. Their Pale Ale is one of my favourite tipples and I was delighted to see that they don’t bother with a tour but just let you drink their products while gazing at the Indian Ocean that laps against the back wall.
The other thing I like about Perth is that the standard drink size is a pint. You can get that size in most pubs in Australia but you sound like Barney from the Simpsons if you ask for one. They say Perth is the most popular destination in Australia for English emigrants looking for a new life and maybe the pint glass reminds them of home. Apparently there are entire suburbs full of people walking bulldogs and drinking warm beer.
The city centre looks the same as any other Australian city, full of chain stores and surly young teenagers. But English accents were everywhere. Banks had posters advising you on how to transfer your UK pension, pubs argued about which was the oldest English style tavern in Western Australia and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was as common as kebabs are in the rest of this country.
I went to a cafe at 10.30am on Sunday morning and was told that only the “Big Breakfast” was available from their morning menu. They had thoughtfully included a picture, which made it clear that the big adjective wasn’t an exaggeration. It contained so much fried food that my arteries were hardening just looking at it.
So I decided to be healthy and ordered a pie. Perth was the only state capital I hadn’t visited before last weekend and comparing pies across Australia is one of my favourite pastimes. I was asked if I wanted chips with it and a quick look around the café informed me that I’d be out of place if I didn’t. But the waitress wasn’t finished with her upselling. She leaned closer, possibly making a judgement on my ample belly. “Would you like peas and gravy with that?”
I could have been in Barnsley, if it wasn’t for the sunshine outside and lack of tattoos among the general population.
Just down the road from Perth is the historical port of Fremantle. As we neared the coast I realised that I’d seen every ocean in the world except the Indian. All that changed as the train came over a brow and there in front of us was the mighty sea that separates Australia from the east coast of Africa.
That ocean of course delivered lots of convicts to Western Australia and I took myself up to the fine old prison that stands on the hill overlooking the town. It was the last place in Australia to accept convicts and the photos adorning the museum showed hardened Victorian men with bad teeth and steely eyes. Many of them were Irish and I had to admit to a smidgen of pride when I read that the only people to successfully escape from the prison hailed from the Emerald Isle.
They were Fenians, possibly the first underground terrorist group in the world. The ones the English didn’t hang, they sent to Fremantle. That included John Boyle O’Reilly who had a street called after him in my hometown, which we managed to mangle into a one syllable word. He escaped from Australia on an American whaling ship and had the decency to send another boat back from the States to pick up six of his mates.
Strangely the prison seemed proud of its escapees. You couldn’t imagine a bank for example, promoting its best robbers.
I escaped from the prison in time to make it back down the hill to the brewery. The sun was starting to sink into the Indian Ocean and the beer was going down well. Unfortunately time waits for no man and I had to make my way to the airport in the hope that I could make it back to Melbourne. An ash cloud is hovering over Australia and air travel is a precarious activity. Volcanoes have been erupting since the dawn of time and airplanes have been in the air for over one hundred years. But it seems that it is only since that volcano in Iceland, with the unpronounceable name, blew up last year, that air travel has been affected.
Thankfully I got away and made it back to chilly Melbourne in the early hours of Monday morning. Australia is of course a huge country and the temperature had dropped by about ten degrees on the way back.
I’ve now visited all six states and just have the two territories (Northern and Canberra) to go. Neither is famous for breweries or Irish history however. So it might be a while before I get there.
I got a taste for it in my teens. My Dad worked in a brewery and each Christmas, he would take me there to a check all the pipes and tanks. We’d end up in the tasting room where I was introduced to the delights of lager and learned how to make up excuses for being late for dinner and the Christmas one in particular.
Over the years I’ve dipped into a few other breweries. You have to do the tour first and pretend you are interested in the different techniques for making ales and stouts. But actually people are only interested in the free beer at the end. And the quicker you can get there the better. The Guinness warehouse is Ireland’s biggest tourist attraction because it has a lift that takes you straight to the bar on the top floor.
So when I went to Perth last weekend, I made it a point to visit the Little Creatures brewery. Their Pale Ale is one of my favourite tipples and I was delighted to see that they don’t bother with a tour but just let you drink their products while gazing at the Indian Ocean that laps against the back wall.
The other thing I like about Perth is that the standard drink size is a pint. You can get that size in most pubs in Australia but you sound like Barney from the Simpsons if you ask for one. They say Perth is the most popular destination in Australia for English emigrants looking for a new life and maybe the pint glass reminds them of home. Apparently there are entire suburbs full of people walking bulldogs and drinking warm beer.
The city centre looks the same as any other Australian city, full of chain stores and surly young teenagers. But English accents were everywhere. Banks had posters advising you on how to transfer your UK pension, pubs argued about which was the oldest English style tavern in Western Australia and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was as common as kebabs are in the rest of this country.
I went to a cafe at 10.30am on Sunday morning and was told that only the “Big Breakfast” was available from their morning menu. They had thoughtfully included a picture, which made it clear that the big adjective wasn’t an exaggeration. It contained so much fried food that my arteries were hardening just looking at it.
So I decided to be healthy and ordered a pie. Perth was the only state capital I hadn’t visited before last weekend and comparing pies across Australia is one of my favourite pastimes. I was asked if I wanted chips with it and a quick look around the café informed me that I’d be out of place if I didn’t. But the waitress wasn’t finished with her upselling. She leaned closer, possibly making a judgement on my ample belly. “Would you like peas and gravy with that?”
I could have been in Barnsley, if it wasn’t for the sunshine outside and lack of tattoos among the general population.
Just down the road from Perth is the historical port of Fremantle. As we neared the coast I realised that I’d seen every ocean in the world except the Indian. All that changed as the train came over a brow and there in front of us was the mighty sea that separates Australia from the east coast of Africa.
That ocean of course delivered lots of convicts to Western Australia and I took myself up to the fine old prison that stands on the hill overlooking the town. It was the last place in Australia to accept convicts and the photos adorning the museum showed hardened Victorian men with bad teeth and steely eyes. Many of them were Irish and I had to admit to a smidgen of pride when I read that the only people to successfully escape from the prison hailed from the Emerald Isle.
They were Fenians, possibly the first underground terrorist group in the world. The ones the English didn’t hang, they sent to Fremantle. That included John Boyle O’Reilly who had a street called after him in my hometown, which we managed to mangle into a one syllable word. He escaped from Australia on an American whaling ship and had the decency to send another boat back from the States to pick up six of his mates.
Strangely the prison seemed proud of its escapees. You couldn’t imagine a bank for example, promoting its best robbers.
I escaped from the prison in time to make it back down the hill to the brewery. The sun was starting to sink into the Indian Ocean and the beer was going down well. Unfortunately time waits for no man and I had to make my way to the airport in the hope that I could make it back to Melbourne. An ash cloud is hovering over Australia and air travel is a precarious activity. Volcanoes have been erupting since the dawn of time and airplanes have been in the air for over one hundred years. But it seems that it is only since that volcano in Iceland, with the unpronounceable name, blew up last year, that air travel has been affected.
Thankfully I got away and made it back to chilly Melbourne in the early hours of Monday morning. Australia is of course a huge country and the temperature had dropped by about ten degrees on the way back.
I’ve now visited all six states and just have the two territories (Northern and Canberra) to go. Neither is famous for breweries or Irish history however. So it might be a while before I get there.
Friday 3 June 2011
The Etiquette Guide to Melbourne Trams
Melbourne offers a wide and frequent tram service and the following guide is designed to assist local and overseas visitors. Please observe the following rules and have a pleasant trip.
Hailing a Tram
You will have noticed a recent advertising campaign showing delirious young people waving enthusiastically while sporting jolly smiles. This is to alert you to the fact that you need to let an oncoming tram driver that you wish him to stop. The fact that you are standing in the middle of the road at a tram stop is no indication to him that you are a potential passenger. You may just be enjoying the view or be one of those weird people who note down tram numbers and models. The issue of weird people will be dealt with later.
Seating etiquette
Most of our seating is structured to allow two people into each seat. This is to allow you to travel with your loved ones or to pile up your shopping. If you are using the second seat for shopping storage, please avoid eye contact with all standing passengers who will think you are an inconsiderate buffoon and will be anxious to demonstrate this in their gaze.
If you happen to be sitting beside a complete stranger it is not polite to stare at the inane text messages or facebook postings they are making on their smart phones. It’s pointless and hurtful anyway, as they will usually be typing “stuck on a slow tram beside a guy with hygiene issues”.
If the stranger on the inside gets off at the next stop, you are not to assume that this is related to your hygiene, but we do recommend a swift and discrete sniff of your armpit area. It is polite at this stage to shuffle across to the inner seat which will allow another passenger to easily sit down. However, you are allowed to continue sitting on the outside seat, thus discouraging others from pushing past you. However, in these situations, it is wise to turn up the volume on your Ipod and to stare at the floor. Displaying mannerisms that suggest you are slightly mad would also help.
Weird People
Our trams offer easy access with no turnstiles or necessity to buy a ticket in advance. We depend on your goodwill and honesty in this regard, despite years of experience that tells us that neither of these qualities exist.
Unfortunately, this easy access allows the mentally unstable and simply bewildered to avail of our services for free. If you feel nervous about approaching them, imagine how our plain clothed inspectors feel? We are happy to provide this as a social service but we do recognise that it may have a detrimental effect on our paying guests. We recommend the following behaviour in these situations:
If you are sharing a tram with a homeless person who has not availed of a shower for a week or too, it is inappropriate to run to the other end of the tram holding your nose. However you are allowed to raise your eyebrows in the direction of the first person you make eye contact with and we will not consider you a social snob if you get off at the next stop and hail a taxi.
If the weird person insists on talking loudly to nobody in particular (a practice commonly seen on our showcase 96 route), you should bury your head in your newspaper and feign intense concentration, even if you have turned to the business pages. If the weird person directs his conversation directly to you, you should reply in soothing non confrontational tones. Or pretend that you are from Russia. That usually works.
Talking on Trams
We discourage talking on trams, even when travelling with friends or family. Talking disturbs the ambience for other travellers, who prefer to listen to the grinding noise of tram wheels rounding corners, tinny bass sounds coming from nearby personal music players or the robotic announcements about the next stop. These announcements are purely for entertainment purposes as they are rarely accurate.
We do allow talking in limited situations. Friends and family are allowed to say “This is our stop” and strangers are allowed to mutter one sentence to each other. This can be along the lines of “I wish those people in the middle would move down a bit” or “does this tram go down Bourke St”? These statements and questions should be answered with a nod of the head or a simple yes or no. Under no circumstances is it to be taken as the initiation of a conversation.
Even when you find yourself pressed against a member of the opposite sex on one of our many overcrowded trams, this should not be taken as an invite for social interaction. That’s what the internet is for. We offer many opportunities to look over the shoulder of other passengers as they type emails and text messages. This gives you access to much of their personal information and will allow you to contact them in the comfort of your own home.
Fare Evasion
You may wonder why you are the only fool who validates a ticket when you board one of our trams. We can assure you that the other passengers have already validated their ticket on an earlier tram, even when you have boarded the first one out of the depot. In a limited number of cases, they are fare evaders. Well ok, most of them are fare evaders but we don’t like to talk about it. Most Melbournians have worked out that the frequency of ticket inspections is so low that they can travel for months for free before being caught and forced to pay a fine, which on average will mean that they are in profit.
If you are thick skinned enough to withstand the added humiliation our inspectors will try to impose, then this is a lucrative course of action. If you are of a more delicate nature, we recommend buying a ticket for a longer trip. However, if your journey is just for 3 or 4 stops, why not use the time searching in your wallet for cash so that you give the impression that you are at least planning to buy a ticket. Then check that there are no inspectors standing on the platform before you alight. They can usually be spotted by their lack of neck and 70’s clothing.
Hailing a Tram
You will have noticed a recent advertising campaign showing delirious young people waving enthusiastically while sporting jolly smiles. This is to alert you to the fact that you need to let an oncoming tram driver that you wish him to stop. The fact that you are standing in the middle of the road at a tram stop is no indication to him that you are a potential passenger. You may just be enjoying the view or be one of those weird people who note down tram numbers and models. The issue of weird people will be dealt with later.
Seating etiquette
Most of our seating is structured to allow two people into each seat. This is to allow you to travel with your loved ones or to pile up your shopping. If you are using the second seat for shopping storage, please avoid eye contact with all standing passengers who will think you are an inconsiderate buffoon and will be anxious to demonstrate this in their gaze.
If you happen to be sitting beside a complete stranger it is not polite to stare at the inane text messages or facebook postings they are making on their smart phones. It’s pointless and hurtful anyway, as they will usually be typing “stuck on a slow tram beside a guy with hygiene issues”.
If the stranger on the inside gets off at the next stop, you are not to assume that this is related to your hygiene, but we do recommend a swift and discrete sniff of your armpit area. It is polite at this stage to shuffle across to the inner seat which will allow another passenger to easily sit down. However, you are allowed to continue sitting on the outside seat, thus discouraging others from pushing past you. However, in these situations, it is wise to turn up the volume on your Ipod and to stare at the floor. Displaying mannerisms that suggest you are slightly mad would also help.
Weird People
Our trams offer easy access with no turnstiles or necessity to buy a ticket in advance. We depend on your goodwill and honesty in this regard, despite years of experience that tells us that neither of these qualities exist.
Unfortunately, this easy access allows the mentally unstable and simply bewildered to avail of our services for free. If you feel nervous about approaching them, imagine how our plain clothed inspectors feel? We are happy to provide this as a social service but we do recognise that it may have a detrimental effect on our paying guests. We recommend the following behaviour in these situations:
If you are sharing a tram with a homeless person who has not availed of a shower for a week or too, it is inappropriate to run to the other end of the tram holding your nose. However you are allowed to raise your eyebrows in the direction of the first person you make eye contact with and we will not consider you a social snob if you get off at the next stop and hail a taxi.
If the weird person insists on talking loudly to nobody in particular (a practice commonly seen on our showcase 96 route), you should bury your head in your newspaper and feign intense concentration, even if you have turned to the business pages. If the weird person directs his conversation directly to you, you should reply in soothing non confrontational tones. Or pretend that you are from Russia. That usually works.
Talking on Trams
We discourage talking on trams, even when travelling with friends or family. Talking disturbs the ambience for other travellers, who prefer to listen to the grinding noise of tram wheels rounding corners, tinny bass sounds coming from nearby personal music players or the robotic announcements about the next stop. These announcements are purely for entertainment purposes as they are rarely accurate.
We do allow talking in limited situations. Friends and family are allowed to say “This is our stop” and strangers are allowed to mutter one sentence to each other. This can be along the lines of “I wish those people in the middle would move down a bit” or “does this tram go down Bourke St”? These statements and questions should be answered with a nod of the head or a simple yes or no. Under no circumstances is it to be taken as the initiation of a conversation.
Even when you find yourself pressed against a member of the opposite sex on one of our many overcrowded trams, this should not be taken as an invite for social interaction. That’s what the internet is for. We offer many opportunities to look over the shoulder of other passengers as they type emails and text messages. This gives you access to much of their personal information and will allow you to contact them in the comfort of your own home.
Fare Evasion
You may wonder why you are the only fool who validates a ticket when you board one of our trams. We can assure you that the other passengers have already validated their ticket on an earlier tram, even when you have boarded the first one out of the depot. In a limited number of cases, they are fare evaders. Well ok, most of them are fare evaders but we don’t like to talk about it. Most Melbournians have worked out that the frequency of ticket inspections is so low that they can travel for months for free before being caught and forced to pay a fine, which on average will mean that they are in profit.
If you are thick skinned enough to withstand the added humiliation our inspectors will try to impose, then this is a lucrative course of action. If you are of a more delicate nature, we recommend buying a ticket for a longer trip. However, if your journey is just for 3 or 4 stops, why not use the time searching in your wallet for cash so that you give the impression that you are at least planning to buy a ticket. Then check that there are no inspectors standing on the platform before you alight. They can usually be spotted by their lack of neck and 70’s clothing.
Wednesday 25 May 2011
The Terror of Oakura
We never got to find out his name, but he terrorised us for two days, so let’s call him Osama.
It was a beautiful moonlit night when we arrived in Oakura in the winterless North in New Zealand.
It was the first night of our honeymoon and after a few days of living it up like teenagers, it was time to take things easy. The priest at our wedding had upset some of the congregation by making reference to how our nuptials involved two people in “mid-life”. I wasn’t particularly bothered to be honest. I’ve been called worse and it is a statement of fact after all. The complaints came mainly from people older than us because if we’re in mid life, where does that place them?
So in keeping with our mature status, we avoided the party venues of Hawaii and Hong Kong for our honeymoon and instead rented a beach house in a little village 30km from the main road. Serenity was our objective.
We arrived late at night and had to navigate the odd Kiwi tradition of leaving keys in obscure places to the point where gaining access to the building you have rented takes on the appearance of an Agatha Christie mystery. Keys in hand, we finally pulled into the driveway of our dream getaway.
Osama met us as we climbed out of our car. He was unkempt and had clearly seen better days. His coat was ragged but hinted that it had once been a noble blue and his stomach suggested that he had wined and dined mightily before falling on hard times.
Now he was reduced to begging and like the orphans of Bombay, he wasn’t very tactful about it. I’m made of sterner stuff however and I brushed past him to carry our bags inside. Undeterred, he tapped at the glass door as if demanding entry. We quickly shut the curtains and tried to ignore him and when his plaintiff pleas became louder, we simply turned up the volume on the TV.
Osama wasn’t going to give in so easily. He waited until we went to bed and then positioned himself beneath our window to ensure that we’d be awake all night. That’s not an uncommon occurrence on the first night of a honeymoon, but it wasn’t so pleasant in our case. We tried throwing buckets of water over him but that would only encourage him to come back for more.
It was clear that he never slept and his moaning went on until we rose half dead the next morning. Enquiries with the neighbours led us to understand that he was a serial offender who preyed on the good nature of the visitors to the holiday home we were staying in. The lack of a good night’s sleep had tested our generosity however and we were not the mood to give him the time of day. The neighbours assured us that the authorities had been notified and that Osama would be picked up that afternoon.
We went sight seeing, safe in the knowledge that a good night’s sleep awaited us. We returned as dusk was setting in over the Bay of Islands. We stood on the beach outside our holiday home to enjoy the full moon as it glistened over the pacific. Then we heard the now familiar cry. We turned and Osama was standing behind us, mocking us for our naivety yet still demanding our attention and succour. I chased him away but he returned when we were sleeping before once again setting out to destroy our peace. This time he waited until 3am before beginning his piercing song of lament and loneliness from beneath our bedroom window.
By this stage our thoughts had turned to murder. A night time pursuit ensued when we chased him around the garden. He took refuge in the shed and we quickly bolted the outside door and high fived each other in the belief that we had solved the problem. Thirty minutes later however, he arrived back at our window to brag that a mere padlock was not going to hold him back.
We despaired and resigned ourselves to another restless night. Osama had beaten us and to make things worse, Osama was a cat!
I’ve never liked cats, I must admit. I’ve often thought that they are the hand tool of the devil with those beady little eyes and lazy mannerisms. But when you’ve been haunted by one for two days, your thoughts go from dislike to outright hatred. In the sleepless hours of the night that were initiated by his whining, we worked on the three best ways to kill a cat.
A friend in Melbourne told me that the best way to get rid of possums is to leave out a saucer of milk with two Disprin dissolved in the liquid. She cautioned however, that this would also rid you of next-door’s cat. In our case, we reasoned that it would rid us of Osama and also take care of any possums that were knocking around the neighbourhood.
My second suggestion was to ask my lady wife to hold the cat on the ground while I reversed over him with the large four by four vehicle we have borrowed for this trip. This had the added risk however, that I might also run over the arms of my loved one, which is not a good way to kick off married life.
Our final thought was to drive him 20km out of town before dumping him at the side of the road. It was pointed out to me however, that the New Zealand bush is unforgiving and that Osama would either die a slow painful death from hunger or be torn apart by a wild animal. After the previous two nights, either option seemed fine to me but my bride blushed at this cruel and unusual punishment.
In the end, we managed to get him into a cardboard box and took him to the SPCA. They use injections rather than bullets, but with some luck Osama the cat will be meeting the same faith as that other Osama, some time tonight. We slept in peace.
It was a beautiful moonlit night when we arrived in Oakura in the winterless North in New Zealand.
It was the first night of our honeymoon and after a few days of living it up like teenagers, it was time to take things easy. The priest at our wedding had upset some of the congregation by making reference to how our nuptials involved two people in “mid-life”. I wasn’t particularly bothered to be honest. I’ve been called worse and it is a statement of fact after all. The complaints came mainly from people older than us because if we’re in mid life, where does that place them?
So in keeping with our mature status, we avoided the party venues of Hawaii and Hong Kong for our honeymoon and instead rented a beach house in a little village 30km from the main road. Serenity was our objective.
We arrived late at night and had to navigate the odd Kiwi tradition of leaving keys in obscure places to the point where gaining access to the building you have rented takes on the appearance of an Agatha Christie mystery. Keys in hand, we finally pulled into the driveway of our dream getaway.
Osama met us as we climbed out of our car. He was unkempt and had clearly seen better days. His coat was ragged but hinted that it had once been a noble blue and his stomach suggested that he had wined and dined mightily before falling on hard times.
Now he was reduced to begging and like the orphans of Bombay, he wasn’t very tactful about it. I’m made of sterner stuff however and I brushed past him to carry our bags inside. Undeterred, he tapped at the glass door as if demanding entry. We quickly shut the curtains and tried to ignore him and when his plaintiff pleas became louder, we simply turned up the volume on the TV.
Osama wasn’t going to give in so easily. He waited until we went to bed and then positioned himself beneath our window to ensure that we’d be awake all night. That’s not an uncommon occurrence on the first night of a honeymoon, but it wasn’t so pleasant in our case. We tried throwing buckets of water over him but that would only encourage him to come back for more.
It was clear that he never slept and his moaning went on until we rose half dead the next morning. Enquiries with the neighbours led us to understand that he was a serial offender who preyed on the good nature of the visitors to the holiday home we were staying in. The lack of a good night’s sleep had tested our generosity however and we were not the mood to give him the time of day. The neighbours assured us that the authorities had been notified and that Osama would be picked up that afternoon.
We went sight seeing, safe in the knowledge that a good night’s sleep awaited us. We returned as dusk was setting in over the Bay of Islands. We stood on the beach outside our holiday home to enjoy the full moon as it glistened over the pacific. Then we heard the now familiar cry. We turned and Osama was standing behind us, mocking us for our naivety yet still demanding our attention and succour. I chased him away but he returned when we were sleeping before once again setting out to destroy our peace. This time he waited until 3am before beginning his piercing song of lament and loneliness from beneath our bedroom window.
By this stage our thoughts had turned to murder. A night time pursuit ensued when we chased him around the garden. He took refuge in the shed and we quickly bolted the outside door and high fived each other in the belief that we had solved the problem. Thirty minutes later however, he arrived back at our window to brag that a mere padlock was not going to hold him back.
We despaired and resigned ourselves to another restless night. Osama had beaten us and to make things worse, Osama was a cat!
I’ve never liked cats, I must admit. I’ve often thought that they are the hand tool of the devil with those beady little eyes and lazy mannerisms. But when you’ve been haunted by one for two days, your thoughts go from dislike to outright hatred. In the sleepless hours of the night that were initiated by his whining, we worked on the three best ways to kill a cat.
A friend in Melbourne told me that the best way to get rid of possums is to leave out a saucer of milk with two Disprin dissolved in the liquid. She cautioned however, that this would also rid you of next-door’s cat. In our case, we reasoned that it would rid us of Osama and also take care of any possums that were knocking around the neighbourhood.
My second suggestion was to ask my lady wife to hold the cat on the ground while I reversed over him with the large four by four vehicle we have borrowed for this trip. This had the added risk however, that I might also run over the arms of my loved one, which is not a good way to kick off married life.
Our final thought was to drive him 20km out of town before dumping him at the side of the road. It was pointed out to me however, that the New Zealand bush is unforgiving and that Osama would either die a slow painful death from hunger or be torn apart by a wild animal. After the previous two nights, either option seemed fine to me but my bride blushed at this cruel and unusual punishment.
In the end, we managed to get him into a cardboard box and took him to the SPCA. They use injections rather than bullets, but with some luck Osama the cat will be meeting the same faith as that other Osama, some time tonight. We slept in peace.
Wednesday 11 May 2011
Working for the Yankee Dollar- Part 6
A bottle of Red wine and four cans of beer is no way to prepare for a big date but Frank never lived by the rules. His life was true tragedy or true ecstasy and there was no room for passengers in between.
It was Sunday. He'd given up on God years ago after realising that for all the time he believed in God, God didn't actually believe in him. So the day would be long. Time to think, time to dream, time to talk yourself into being maniacally depressed. He left two hours before the date. Was this keenness on the boy’s part or a desire to work up Dutch courage in the local pub?
One advantage of working for an International Bank was the number of international women who also worked there. The Celtic Tiger was booming and Europeans flocked to Dublin like shoppers on the first day of January sales. Frank found himself working beside a gorgeous German girl called Yvonne and at Friday night drinks he had worked up the courage to ask her out on a date.
He made it to the pub ten minutes early. A long bar draped on one side to hide it’s narrowness. Single men hogged the high stools, gazing into their bottles of Heineken to avoid eye contact. Were they like him, awaiting the unknown? Or had they darker reasons for seeking the company of the old hoary bastard called beer?
She turned up fashionably late and they sat at the bar. She drank red wine, the music was 1930’s European Jazz, the art deco was French and his beer (trying desperately to impress) was German. But his charm and confidence were definitely Mullingar, circa 1982. You can take the man out of the bog, but you can’t take the whimpering stupidity out of the man.
They talked freely for two hours, even managing to have a conversation about “people who fucked us up emotionally” without Frank having to mention the person who did fuck him up emotionally. He knew he was talking too much though. Knew he wasn’t making her laugh enough. Knew that beer and football are probably not top of women’s conversation topics, but his nervousness led him to ramble on anyway. “Oh wait till I tell you about the time I got pissed in Munich and puked all over a Policeman’s shoes” is probably not the best chat up line in history but there are some nights when it has to do.
The wine flowed and the conversation mellowed. Yvonne mentioned Colin; a friend of Frank’s that she had met the night before. Frank sensed competition and like a coiled animal he accessed all the possibilities. So he alluded to Colin being a closet Homosexual. Straight away he knew this wasn’t a smart move. Not only is Colin a good mate but an old theory of Frank’s was quickly proven. Women are actually attracted to Homosexuals.
Yvonne kept looking at Frank’s watch, which either meant she greatly admired the garishly yellow timepiece he had recently picked up in Duty Free, or she wanted to go home. He wasn’t taking any chances, so he offered to share a taxi back to her place and then he would walk home from there. Cunning plan apart from the fact that he lived about two miles away and it was actually shorter for him to walk straight home from the pub. But if he was going to endure the disadvantage of facing a German sense of humour, he was at least going to enjoy her lack of knowledge of Dublin geography. On the way there he posed the big question, “would you like to go for dinner some evening?”
Now this was a dangerous question for many reasons. Women don’t like eating in front of strange men. If they do, they order a salad and then nag you into ordering a desert before saying “can I just try a spoonful?” before cleaning it off like a tramp in a soup kitchen. And it was late on Sunday and he was quickly realising that he had picked the worst night of the week for a date and was now compounding it by asking for the worst sort of follow up date.
He figured he would count the seconds between the question and the response and take it from there. 1, she’s thinking about it. 2, maybe she didn’t understand it. 3, the excitement is obviously too much for her. 4, if she doesn’t answer soon I’ll pretend it was all a joke. She answered on 5. “That would be nice” which was probably the best he could hope for in the circumstances. But he felt that there was something in that pause. Words unsaid, uncertainty. They were two players now, reading nuances into each other’s speech.
Back at her place, they climbed the four flights of stairs to her flat. Frank tried to look cool while fighting off a heart attack. Dan the flatmate was up and in no mood to vacate the living room. Frank and Dan had worked together previously and he was anxious to catch up on old times. They drank their coffee and watched Dan do his ironing. Sometimes big first dates come to this.
Frank figured he’d cut his losses at this stage. The scene was getting a little suffocating and anyway he had a two-mile hike to look forward to. At the front door they hugged (not Dan, thankfully he stayed in the living room). But Frank’s mind was working overtime at this stage. What sort of hug was it? See, couples are well matched if when they hug each other, they instinctively move to the correct side of the head and their ears interlock. And this wasn’t that sort of hug. But he left not knowing if he was the one who put in no energy. If he was the one who couldn’t wait to get out the door.
He walked home in the late evening drizzle. The streets seemed filled with couples. He seemed filled with doubt. Something had gone wrong at the end of the night and he couldn’t figure out if it was him that threw in the negative vibe.
But maybe he’ll ring her anyway. I mean all that can happen is that he will be humiliated. The alternative is never knowing if this beautiful, interesting girl really wants you. Humiliation or never knowing? What delicious questions stem from love and life and time?
It was Sunday. He'd given up on God years ago after realising that for all the time he believed in God, God didn't actually believe in him. So the day would be long. Time to think, time to dream, time to talk yourself into being maniacally depressed. He left two hours before the date. Was this keenness on the boy’s part or a desire to work up Dutch courage in the local pub?
One advantage of working for an International Bank was the number of international women who also worked there. The Celtic Tiger was booming and Europeans flocked to Dublin like shoppers on the first day of January sales. Frank found himself working beside a gorgeous German girl called Yvonne and at Friday night drinks he had worked up the courage to ask her out on a date.
He made it to the pub ten minutes early. A long bar draped on one side to hide it’s narrowness. Single men hogged the high stools, gazing into their bottles of Heineken to avoid eye contact. Were they like him, awaiting the unknown? Or had they darker reasons for seeking the company of the old hoary bastard called beer?
She turned up fashionably late and they sat at the bar. She drank red wine, the music was 1930’s European Jazz, the art deco was French and his beer (trying desperately to impress) was German. But his charm and confidence were definitely Mullingar, circa 1982. You can take the man out of the bog, but you can’t take the whimpering stupidity out of the man.
They talked freely for two hours, even managing to have a conversation about “people who fucked us up emotionally” without Frank having to mention the person who did fuck him up emotionally. He knew he was talking too much though. Knew he wasn’t making her laugh enough. Knew that beer and football are probably not top of women’s conversation topics, but his nervousness led him to ramble on anyway. “Oh wait till I tell you about the time I got pissed in Munich and puked all over a Policeman’s shoes” is probably not the best chat up line in history but there are some nights when it has to do.
The wine flowed and the conversation mellowed. Yvonne mentioned Colin; a friend of Frank’s that she had met the night before. Frank sensed competition and like a coiled animal he accessed all the possibilities. So he alluded to Colin being a closet Homosexual. Straight away he knew this wasn’t a smart move. Not only is Colin a good mate but an old theory of Frank’s was quickly proven. Women are actually attracted to Homosexuals.
Yvonne kept looking at Frank’s watch, which either meant she greatly admired the garishly yellow timepiece he had recently picked up in Duty Free, or she wanted to go home. He wasn’t taking any chances, so he offered to share a taxi back to her place and then he would walk home from there. Cunning plan apart from the fact that he lived about two miles away and it was actually shorter for him to walk straight home from the pub. But if he was going to endure the disadvantage of facing a German sense of humour, he was at least going to enjoy her lack of knowledge of Dublin geography. On the way there he posed the big question, “would you like to go for dinner some evening?”
Now this was a dangerous question for many reasons. Women don’t like eating in front of strange men. If they do, they order a salad and then nag you into ordering a desert before saying “can I just try a spoonful?” before cleaning it off like a tramp in a soup kitchen. And it was late on Sunday and he was quickly realising that he had picked the worst night of the week for a date and was now compounding it by asking for the worst sort of follow up date.
He figured he would count the seconds between the question and the response and take it from there. 1, she’s thinking about it. 2, maybe she didn’t understand it. 3, the excitement is obviously too much for her. 4, if she doesn’t answer soon I’ll pretend it was all a joke. She answered on 5. “That would be nice” which was probably the best he could hope for in the circumstances. But he felt that there was something in that pause. Words unsaid, uncertainty. They were two players now, reading nuances into each other’s speech.
Back at her place, they climbed the four flights of stairs to her flat. Frank tried to look cool while fighting off a heart attack. Dan the flatmate was up and in no mood to vacate the living room. Frank and Dan had worked together previously and he was anxious to catch up on old times. They drank their coffee and watched Dan do his ironing. Sometimes big first dates come to this.
Frank figured he’d cut his losses at this stage. The scene was getting a little suffocating and anyway he had a two-mile hike to look forward to. At the front door they hugged (not Dan, thankfully he stayed in the living room). But Frank’s mind was working overtime at this stage. What sort of hug was it? See, couples are well matched if when they hug each other, they instinctively move to the correct side of the head and their ears interlock. And this wasn’t that sort of hug. But he left not knowing if he was the one who put in no energy. If he was the one who couldn’t wait to get out the door.
He walked home in the late evening drizzle. The streets seemed filled with couples. He seemed filled with doubt. Something had gone wrong at the end of the night and he couldn’t figure out if it was him that threw in the negative vibe.
But maybe he’ll ring her anyway. I mean all that can happen is that he will be humiliated. The alternative is never knowing if this beautiful, interesting girl really wants you. Humiliation or never knowing? What delicious questions stem from love and life and time?
Friday 29 April 2011
A Tale of Two Weddings
Once upon a time in a mythical kingdom far, far away, a princess was born. She grew up surrounded by birdsong and the tinkling melody of a nearby brook and spent her days dreaming of a prince who would take her off to the Land of Oz where they would live happily ever after.
Alas, she didn’t manage to find a prince and had to settle for me instead. Yes ladies, that’s right. The author of this little old blog is about to hitch his wagon to the matrimonial star. Sorry to let so many of you down.
I’m walking up the aisle on the 14th May in a beautiful sea side town in New Zealand and while I’m not expecting much media attention and couldn’t care less if I don’t get any, I am a little miffed that the nuptials of a couple of upper class Brits is attracting so much attention.
Will and Kate sound like the characters from a bad American sit-com. They seem like a perfectly decent couple and I wish them well, but do we have to see and read so much about them?
When I lived in Ireland, British media overwhelmed us. You couldn’t pick and choose your viewing pleasure. For every quality costume drama on the BBC, there was a Princess Diana documentary or a fawning examination of the Queen’s fondness for small dogs with big ears (they remind her of her eldest son, I’m guessing). We were trained to hit the off button when the Queen’s speech was broadcast on Christmas Day, but during the rest of the year it was easier to sit back and take whatever the English were throwing at us. Royal “It’s a knock-out”, Charles talking to plants or the cringingly embarrassing way Britain lost the run of itself when Diana died.
When I moved to Australia, I thought I was safe from this picture book fascination with the British Royal Family. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. If anything, it’s worse. Britons are lumbered with their royalty. Australians choose to have the 85 year old decedent of some Germans as their head of state.
Every few years, they have a referendum to ditch the Royals and become a Republic. But it always fails because the collective imagination of 22 million Australians can’t come up with anything better than paying homage to a pensioner at the other side of the world. The stumbling block appears to be how they would elect a head of state, in the absence of having one born first to the ruling Windsor family. It’s a problem that 170 other republics in the world have figured out, but is still perplexing Australians. My guess is that this constitutional issue is really a smoke screen and that Australia secretly likes a bit of the romance that royalty brings and more importantly that inertia is the strongest contributor to elections.
So it shouldn’t surprise me I suppose, that they are falling over themselves with unbridled enthusiasm when it comes to this upcoming wedding. All five free to air channels have cancelled their Friday night schedules to cover the event live and there will be more Australian journalists in London this week than you would find at a free bar at a media awards night.
Normally liberal newspapers like the Melbourne Age are carrying marsh mallow coloured supplements this week with sections called “What will she wear” and helpful links to websites selling commemorative mugs and tee towels. There is of course the occasional satirical piece but they all just add to the fascination with something that really should be left to the pages of Hello magazine and one of those lifestyle channels on pay TV.
Even those satirical efforts are under attack however. “Chasers” is the funniest thing on Australian TV. My favourite sketch was when George Bush came to Sydney and they dressed a guy up like Osama Bin Laden and he got through 3 security barriers and into Bush’s hotel. They also had a good go at lampooning the Pope when he came to Australia.
But the Royals are out of bounds it seems. The Chasers had planned to do an “alternative” wedding show from London. But Buckingham Palace has said that coverage of Will and Kate’s nuptials cannot be used “in any drama, comedy, satirical or similar entertainment” which will come as a surprise to most of the British media who have been taking the piss out of their Royals for as long as I remember.
The best we can look forward to on Friday is that Dame Edna Everage will provide commentary on one of the Australian channels, which at least means we’ll get a small laugh among all the pomposity.
Of course, by me writing about the royal wedding here, I’m falling into the same trap and no doubt encouraging you, my readers, to subconsciously wonder what colour hat the Queen will wear (I’m guessing Green) and to think about dresses and horse drawn carriages.
They talk about how two billion will watch tomorrow’s wedding. Nobody mentions that the other five billion in the world won’t watch, even though through the power of modern media most of them could. I’ll be part of that five billion. Not because I’m anti English. Personally I think they are great and every house should have one. As a butler preferably. They make great butlers.
I won’t be watching for the same reason that I don’t watch Oprah, don’t care about Brad and Angelina and don’t watch reality TV. I get my escapism through sport. And anyway, I have my own wedding to plan. My stag party is on this Saturday and I have taken responsibility to put together all the music for our big day. I also have to get all the commemorative mugs or tee towels sorted out. Seems you can’t have a wedding these days without them.
Alas, she didn’t manage to find a prince and had to settle for me instead. Yes ladies, that’s right. The author of this little old blog is about to hitch his wagon to the matrimonial star. Sorry to let so many of you down.
I’m walking up the aisle on the 14th May in a beautiful sea side town in New Zealand and while I’m not expecting much media attention and couldn’t care less if I don’t get any, I am a little miffed that the nuptials of a couple of upper class Brits is attracting so much attention.
Will and Kate sound like the characters from a bad American sit-com. They seem like a perfectly decent couple and I wish them well, but do we have to see and read so much about them?
When I lived in Ireland, British media overwhelmed us. You couldn’t pick and choose your viewing pleasure. For every quality costume drama on the BBC, there was a Princess Diana documentary or a fawning examination of the Queen’s fondness for small dogs with big ears (they remind her of her eldest son, I’m guessing). We were trained to hit the off button when the Queen’s speech was broadcast on Christmas Day, but during the rest of the year it was easier to sit back and take whatever the English were throwing at us. Royal “It’s a knock-out”, Charles talking to plants or the cringingly embarrassing way Britain lost the run of itself when Diana died.
When I moved to Australia, I thought I was safe from this picture book fascination with the British Royal Family. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. If anything, it’s worse. Britons are lumbered with their royalty. Australians choose to have the 85 year old decedent of some Germans as their head of state.
Every few years, they have a referendum to ditch the Royals and become a Republic. But it always fails because the collective imagination of 22 million Australians can’t come up with anything better than paying homage to a pensioner at the other side of the world. The stumbling block appears to be how they would elect a head of state, in the absence of having one born first to the ruling Windsor family. It’s a problem that 170 other republics in the world have figured out, but is still perplexing Australians. My guess is that this constitutional issue is really a smoke screen and that Australia secretly likes a bit of the romance that royalty brings and more importantly that inertia is the strongest contributor to elections.
So it shouldn’t surprise me I suppose, that they are falling over themselves with unbridled enthusiasm when it comes to this upcoming wedding. All five free to air channels have cancelled their Friday night schedules to cover the event live and there will be more Australian journalists in London this week than you would find at a free bar at a media awards night.
Normally liberal newspapers like the Melbourne Age are carrying marsh mallow coloured supplements this week with sections called “What will she wear” and helpful links to websites selling commemorative mugs and tee towels. There is of course the occasional satirical piece but they all just add to the fascination with something that really should be left to the pages of Hello magazine and one of those lifestyle channels on pay TV.
Even those satirical efforts are under attack however. “Chasers” is the funniest thing on Australian TV. My favourite sketch was when George Bush came to Sydney and they dressed a guy up like Osama Bin Laden and he got through 3 security barriers and into Bush’s hotel. They also had a good go at lampooning the Pope when he came to Australia.
But the Royals are out of bounds it seems. The Chasers had planned to do an “alternative” wedding show from London. But Buckingham Palace has said that coverage of Will and Kate’s nuptials cannot be used “in any drama, comedy, satirical or similar entertainment” which will come as a surprise to most of the British media who have been taking the piss out of their Royals for as long as I remember.
The best we can look forward to on Friday is that Dame Edna Everage will provide commentary on one of the Australian channels, which at least means we’ll get a small laugh among all the pomposity.
Of course, by me writing about the royal wedding here, I’m falling into the same trap and no doubt encouraging you, my readers, to subconsciously wonder what colour hat the Queen will wear (I’m guessing Green) and to think about dresses and horse drawn carriages.
They talk about how two billion will watch tomorrow’s wedding. Nobody mentions that the other five billion in the world won’t watch, even though through the power of modern media most of them could. I’ll be part of that five billion. Not because I’m anti English. Personally I think they are great and every house should have one. As a butler preferably. They make great butlers.
I won’t be watching for the same reason that I don’t watch Oprah, don’t care about Brad and Angelina and don’t watch reality TV. I get my escapism through sport. And anyway, I have my own wedding to plan. My stag party is on this Saturday and I have taken responsibility to put together all the music for our big day. I also have to get all the commemorative mugs or tee towels sorted out. Seems you can’t have a wedding these days without them.
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