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.
Monday 22 August 2011
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 coinníollach” 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 coinníollach” 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.
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