Friday 21 December 2012

We'll keep the Red flag flying here


My Dad worked in a brewery, which was a great benefit to me when I started drinking. There is nothing like free alcohol around the house to excite the taste buds of a teenager. Just before Christmas 1981 he was working the nightshift when negotiations between his union and his employer collapsed. A picket was put on the factory gate at 6am stopping the morning shift from getting in but trapping my poor old Dad inside. When he finally left he had to put up with some abuse from the strikers who assumed that he had broken the picket. This upset my Dad greatly. He wasn’t militant in any way but he understood the power of Trade Unionism and the protection that it gave to their members.

As a result of the union’s efforts, he was paid for every hour he worked, including double and treble time when he worked nights or weekend. Which is more than can be said in my industry where people are paid “a salary” and then are expected to be on call 24 hours a day and to work bank holidays for nothing. My Dad got all that because he was a member of a union. They ensured that the brewery had a Christmas Party every year and not just the years when the company is making lots of money.

I’ve always had a soft spot for unions to be honest. Capitalism is a battle between the workers and the bosses. The bosses have the Police and the military to ensure that their interests are respected. Workers on their own will be picked off one by one by the whims of the system, through redundancy or wage reduction. Unless they are in a collective body which will stand up for them.

Saying you like unions these days however, is like saying that you like pictures of 3 year old Indonesians smoking cigarettes. It’s very 1950’s. I’m not helped, I must admit, by the behaviour of some Australian unions, who have been taken over by individuals and run as personal fiefdoms. The Health Services Union in Australia for example, is run by a family that would make the Sopranos look like a clan of Amish farmers.

Australia does seem to be particularly militant when it comes to the interaction of workers and bosses. I work near the Victorian Parliament and hardly a day goes by without the streets being filled with red shirted placard holders demanding better conditions for teachers, nurses or sheep inseminators (members of the Ancient Order of Mutton Botherers, with branches in Australia and New Zealand).

The teachers were the latest group to take to the streets. They want a 30% pay increase which sounds a lot when it’s reported like that (which is how the right wing media here went about things). But that’s over three years, so when broken down; it’s ... well, still a lot.

This didn’t elicit a lot of sympathy from parents who had to deal with their kids been off school for a day at short notice. The kids presumably were happier. These days, parents treat school as an unofficial child minder and get annoyed when the baby sitter is unavailable.

The nurses were up before that. They generated a lot more sympathy from the public but most of their complaints centred on their objection to plans to bring in untrained assistants to do clerical work. Nurses are pushing to do work normally done by doctors (presumably because it pays more) but object to assistants being employed to do tasks normally done by nurses. Presumably if they had cake, they would want to eat it as well.

It’s a shame really that unions have allowed themselves to be wrapped up in protectionism and a culture of jobs for the boys. Because Victoria has a proud record of labour support. The eureka stockade saw the formation of the first union in Australia and a statue on my way home commemorates the 8-8-8 movement which campaigned for an eight hour day. Victoria was the first place in the world to bring in the policy of eight hours work, eight hours rest and eight hours sleep. Although nobody seems to have told the banking industry or people with one year old children.

Banks used to open at 10am and close at 3pm. That was when they only serviced people within walking distance of the branch. Now banks are global, with clients in far flung countries who don’t even realise they are clients. As a result, you could work for 24 hours a day and find emails flying into your inbox demanding an instant response and phone calls from overseas at all hours of the night. Hardly anyone works an eight hour day in this environment, although it must be said that this is unlikely to garner much sympathy in the wider community. Banking is a pejorative term these days.

But I wonder what the men who fought for an eight hour day would think of this if they were able to gaze into the glass walled skyscrapers of the central business district? They would see an army of open shirted automatons toiling away to keep the wheels of capitalism greased. They would see lights on at 8pm and stressed out drones slouching towards miserably lit train stations.

The money is good it must be said, but it seems as though you sign a Faustian pact that negates all your other rights to rest and sleep. My Dad’s union would never have stood for it. If someone in my Dad’s brewery had been asked to work on Christmas Day for no extra pay, there would have been a picket placed immediately. But these days unions are considered to be a dinosaur, existing only to enrich their full time officials. It’s every man for himself now and the system will pick us off one by one. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and it’s no fun being a poodle.

Sunday 11 November 2012

Sleepless in Sleep School


Bedlam is a word that comes from the name of Europe’s oldest psychiatric hospital. But if you want a new definition of the word, you should visit a Melbourne sleep school at 7pm. Our baby is not sleeping too well and we decided it was time to learn a few settling techniques. The truth is that she’s probably getting enough sleep and just enjoys waking her parents up every two hours for a chat. She’s a happy little kid and developing well. She’s only ten months old but took her first steps this week and has learned to put her arms around her Dad’s neck and give him a hug. And that means I’d be willing to get up every hour if I had to.
I don’t know if they have sleep schools outside Australia. They are run by the health service and offer a four day program to parents with sleeping problems (because to be honest it’s them that have the problem and not their kids). We checked in on a Monday evening and were put on a wing with three other families. Everyone was polite to each other until about 7pm when the first kid was put to bed. She screamed her head off in a scene that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Exorcist.

Sleep schools are designed to give parents help in teaching their kids to sleep better and to therefore get more sleep themselves. You have to wonder then why they put you on a wing with three other kids. I reckon the four babies got together each day and worked out a crying schedule. Because none of them ever cried at the same time. They didn’t wake each other up but through a coordinated effort kept the parents awake all night.
In addition to keeping everyone awake, the school also ran a number of ‘Educational’ classes including one just for Dads. Four of us went to it and after a nice little chat from the facilitator about how we need to ensure that we hold on to the interests we had before we became Dads, he put up a few talking points on the board “what was it like before we were Dads”, “what were our Dads like” and that sort of thing. I was sitting on the right hand side and presumed he would come to me first, so I started rehearsing a story in my head about going to football matches with my old man and the acting life I had before I became a Father.

But he went to the guy on the left hand side first which meant I would have to go last and could relax. Richard proceeded to tell the group how he didn’t know his Father and therefore couldn’t speak to the first point. He told us he spent his youth in foster homes, started taking drugs when he was twelve and was generally a mess before he became a Dad. He was crazy about his kid but couldn’t live with the child’s mother due to ‘anger’ issues. But nevertheless they were still hoping to get married and have another baby.
We were all busy checking out the laces on our shoes at this point but he wasn’t finished. “Oh I have another kid” he said. “He’s nine and lives in America but I’d not allowed to see him”. The facilitator leaned in and placed a comforting hand on Richard’s knee. “Is his Mother being difficult?” he asked. Richard looked at him blankly and replied “You can’t get a visa to go to America if you have a criminal conviction”.

We finally moved onto Eddie and breathed a sigh of relief. However, it was almost as though Eddie wanted to trump Richard. He started off by telling us about his thirteen year amphetamine addiction before moving on to colourful tales about bi-polorism. In the midst of this, his phone beeped. He apologised and said that it was a reminder to take his mood suppression tablets. As the facilitator and myself exchanged nervous glances, Richard interjected to mention that he had been a heroin addict for seven years and for the next ten minutes he shared stories with Eddie about where to source the best grade A drugs in East Melbourne.
The third guy was a twenty one year old with the mental age of a young dog. He had stumbled into parenthood and his only real contribution was on the subject of bed sharing. His only complaint about being a Dad was that his girlfriend took up 90% of the bed. He reckoned the best thing about being a gay man is that you would get half the bed to sleep in. He also reckoned that this was why lesbians always looked miserable, because two women expecting 90% of the bed wouldn’t work.

He finished by mentioning how he had just joined the army and was looking forward to a posting to Iraq so that he could shoot people.
When it came to my turn to speak, I felt like making up a story about being raised by wolves in the amazon before spending years on the streets of Rio with a gang of seven year old cocaine addicts. My life seemed very dull in comparison to the other guys in the room but I felt very relieved about that.

We ended up by exchanging handshakes and nobody asked for anyone else's mobile numbers. It wasn’t that sort of meeting.
I shuffled back to the wing to listen to the coordinated attempt of four babies to keep a group of parents awake and they succeeded magnificently. I never knew how much I loved sleep until our daughter came along. No doubt in time, she will develop the same love. Probably when I’m trying to get her up for school. Till then I’d be happy if she could just stretch things out a little. 5am was a time of day unknown to me 10 months ago. Now I’m on first name terms and thinking of contacting Richard or Eddie to see if their dealers had any sleeping tablets for babies.

 

Friday 2 November 2012

A Postcard from the Edge of the World


The cock he crew in the morning, he crew both loud and shrill and I awoke in Rarotonga, many miles from Spancill Hill.
Shortly afterwards several more roosters joined in to provide a veritable dawn chorus. Except it wasn’t dawn. It was about 2am and while many people describe this place as a sleepy little island, you’d have to wonder how anybody ever gets to sleep with the colony of early rising wild chickens that populate this place.
Perhaps the chickens are just as confused about the time zone as the tourists. Most visitors to the Cook Islands come from or via New Zealand. To get here you cross the International Date Line and Auckland becomes 23 hours ahead of Rarotonga (the main island in the Cooks). That means that you gain a day when you arrive here and lose it on the way back. It confuses the hell out of most people, particularly these days when you’re in constant communication with friends by mobile text messages. It’s difficult to remember that it is Thursday here but Friday in Australia.

I don’t remember there being so many chickens when I was last here in 1996. Mind you a lot has changed in the world since then. The internet, mobile phones, satellite TV and globalisation come to mind. All these have touched the Cook Islands too. Heineken for example, is available in every shop and bar. Globalisation means that one brand dominates every market. Apple in computing, Coca Cola in soft drinks etc. It’s just a shame that when it comes to beer that the fizzy tasteless rubbish from Holland had to win out.

As a country, the Cook Islands have grown up. Back in 1996 there were just two resorts and they were full of Americans stopping off on their way to New Zealand or Australia. The occasional independent traveller like myself (we hated being called tourists but that’s a subject for another day) wandered into the country and had to do with whatever lodgings we could find.

These days the place is full of boutique hotels, backpacker lodges and houses for rent. But it has managed to retain its small island charm. The local tourist board call it paradise and I’d largely agree if it wasn’t for the bugs and the spiders. I can’t imagine that God would have included them in his design of heaven.

I’m trying to be all Zen Buddhist about this and consider that all God’s creatures have a place in the choir, even insects. But I’m writing this with a can of mortine in my hand trying to stem the incessant attempts to suck blood from my pale skinned body. My ankles seem to be the favoured destination of these vampire like creatures. My lower leg area has received more hits than the BBC website. But everything is part of the buffet of the universe and we eat animals, so I guess we can’t complain too much when they eat us.
But on the positive side, the sun is shining, the sea is a dreamy shade of turquoise and the beer is cheap. We’ve rented a house near Muri beach which is the picturesque highlight of island.

Back in 1996, there were a few Utes on the island, now there seems to be more cars than people. Tiny silver Nissans usually. Tourists who rent them must get awfully confused when they stumble out of a cafĂ© late at night and see twelve of them parked beside each other. There are some bigger cars too but it’s hard to see the point when the speed limit is 50kmph and there is only one road and that’s only 35km long.
Wild chickens are everywhere except in the cooking pots of locals. All the chicken in the shops comes from New Zealand and the ones wondering around the streets seem to be revered in the way that cows are in India. You get attached to them after a few days and our daughter was fascinated by them. So when we saw a chick stumble and break a leg on our lawn one day it became the saddest afternoon of the holiday. The chick’s mother tried desperately to drag him back to wherever they were nesting. But nature is cruel and as the mother hen grew more desperate you could see that the chick was getting weaker. We buried it in a hedge among some wild flowers.

Heineken is not the only thing to make inroads here. The Chinese are also around and not the ones who run restaurants with MSG laden food. The Chinese government are investing millions in the islands, as they are anxious to get their hands on a rich seam of cobalt that runs under the sea between the islands. Rather intriguingly they have agreed to pay for the judiciary and Police Force which explains why the courthouse is the flashiest building in town and the police drive around in sparkling new four by fours. The communists in Eastern Europe believed that the way to control a country was to keep a tight grip on the interior ministry and the Chinese have obviously learned from this.
But the highlight of the trip is the discovery that fish burgers are a culinary speciality here. They are delicious and I’ve had at least one every day I’ve been here. Needless to say chicken burgers are pretty rare here. And as much as I’ve grown to like the fluffy little things in the past week, if they crow again at 2am tomorrow, I might be tempted to open the islands first branch of KFC.

Friday 28 September 2012

One Week in Melbourne

Two items dominate the local media in Melbourne this week. The disappearance of an Irish girl last Friday night and the sacking of a school principle. The fact the two stories get almost equal coverage in the posher end of the media market is a little sad but speaks volumes for what is important to middle class Melbournians.
 
The school mistress story broke first. Rosa Storelli was the principle of Melbourne’s prestigious Methodist Ladies College until she was fired two weeks ago. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing a few Methodists in my time and as Protestants go, they are the best of the bunch. They are humble and keen to help the poor, which by all accounts is why they left the Anglican faith in the first place.
 
Clearly no one has passed this message onto the people who run Methodist Ladies College. They charge $23,000 a year in tuition fees and attract the offspring of lawyers, doctors and various other social climbers. No doubt they throw out the odd scholarship to an aboriginal kid or a child genius from the poorer Western Suburbs, but the school is a factory to perpetuate social class and to ensure that the female lawyers and doctors of tomorrow are the children of today’s lawyers and doctors.
 
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t bother me. The world is an unfair place after all. But as with Ireland, the Australian government pays the same subsidy per pupil to fee paying schools as it does to state schools. And in both countries, capital expenditure on gyms, libraries etc are based on a matched payment basis. If the school can come up with $100k, then the government will match it. Needless to say, this means that the rich schools get most of the money and the inequity gap gets wider.
 
Right wingers complain about paying taxes to fund dole payments to layabouts. Well, I have the same problem in paying taxes to subsidise the education of the elite and to pay for the Australian militaries’ misadventures in Afghanistan. If we were all able to direct our taxes to the places we thought they should be best spent, then I reckon we’d have good schools and hospitals, ten members of parliament instead of hundreds and an army presence in the Middle East that would fit into a phone box.
 
The head involved got sacked after the school board discovered that they had overpaid her by about half a million dollars over the last ten years and she refused to pay it back. In fairness she probably hadn’t noticed the overpayment as her salary is also half a million dollars a year. And to think I passed up on teacher training college because I didn’t think the pay was good enough.
 
The principle and the school board are busy leaking information to the media every day and mediation councillors have been called in. The pupils must be laughing. In my day, a headmaster getting sacked would have caused great levity among the masses and a new catalogue of nicknames.
The parents however, seem to be fairly solidly behind the ex principle. A fighting fund has been organised and the city’s best legal brains (who coincidently are also parents in this case) are talking about taking a High Court case to get her reinstated. All of this makes the front page of Melbourne’s broadsheet newspaper each day and must baffle the vast majority of citizens, for whom $23,000 is annual income.
 
The other thing that this throws up is that if a school discovers that it has been overpaying it’s principle for the past ten years, you’d have to wander about the standard of bookkeeping that they are teaching their students.
 
I had the dubious pleasure of auditing a school back in my early working life. It was run by an order of Priests who covered the full gambit of religious stereotypes. The youngest Priest on the management committee was committed to social justice and argued the case of the school caretaker who was earning a wage equivalent to that of a Bombay street beggar. The young Priest was looking to get him an extra twenty pounds a week in his take home pay. The head master, who came from the pre Vatican Two tradition of the Catholic Church, tutted dismissively and explained that because of the penal tax and national insurances rates that existed in Ireland at the time, the school would be required to find 50 pounds per week to pay a net twenty and this was simply out of the question.
 
They looked to me for a suggestion and I swallowed my socialist pride for a moment. I told them to get the caretaker to give a note each week saying that he bought twenty pounds worth of nails or paint and seeking reimbursement. They could then pay him this amount without any implications for tax and insurance. The young Priest beamed with enthusiasm but they headmaster stared at me with a face as dark as thunder. Suddenly my heart fell as I realised I had just explained an illegal scheme to a group of clerics.
 
“That’s brilliant” he said.”Can we do the same for all the staff?”
 
I learned a lesson that day, that schools are not the paradigm of virtue that we think them to be and yet we entrust them to educate our young and to set them on a moral path.
 
There is nothing moral about charging $23,000 a year to school a kid or to pay a principle half a million a year in my book.
 
The other issue that has filled the papers was the disappearance and murder of a young Irish girl called Jill Meagher. She was snatched from the street not far from where I live and discovered six days later in a shallow grave. It is a desperately sad story and makes me wish that the papers were only filled with tales of sacked headmistresses and the angst of middle class parents.
 
 

Thursday 13 September 2012

Do We Exist?


Scientists would have you believe that the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is on a par with the  unearthing of penicillin or the first moon landing, although the God Particle, as it is known, is unlikely to ease the pain of venereal disease or create conspiracy theories about the moon’s dark side.
In fact, it’s not a discovery at all, more a confirmation of what scientists already theorised, or perhaps it is just a simple justification for all the money they spent on the large hadron collider at a time when they should have been investing this money in the more honourable adventure of bailing out banks.

Science is the art of studying the behaviour of 15,000 people to discover what you already know or suspected. For example, you will never see a report on research by the University of Arkansas into childhood obesity, which says that to their great surprise, sugar and a lack of exercise is actually good for kids.

Last month the American National Institute on Aging released the results of a twenty five year study into the effect of eating less on aging. They raised a colony of rhesus monkeys (they are the ugly ones who like to steal tourists water bottles in India) and fed half of them a normal diet while treating the rest to a quantity of food that would not look out of place on a Supermodel’s plate.
They discovered that eating less makes absolutely no difference to how long you live. This was a great disappointment to the report’s author who no doubt was looking forward to a long career in the lucrative diet industry.

Needless to say, it came as great news to those of us who are slenderly challenged. But it does prove that scientific studies are carried out to prove things the scientists already suspected. Which makes you wonder how they ever discover anything new in the first place.
So when they dug that big hole in Switzerland and built the Hadron collider, they had a pretty good idea what they were going to find. Either that or the plan was just to keep a few hundred Irish builders in work.

The major achievement of Higgs Boson appears to be the proof that mass can be created out of nothing.  Energy shares space in Einstein’s famous little formula with mass, dangling out there on the left, like a hallucinating drug trying to get into a rave party. Energy can also be created out of nothing. Imagine you are tired after a hard week at work. You want to hit the sofa with a takeaway and a brain numbing night in with a derivative reality TV show for company. You feel like you don’t have the energy to make it to the toilet and contemplate fashioning a colostomy bag from the various crisp packets that litter your sitting room.
Then a text message arrives from a friend inviting you to the pub. For the formula to work it has to be a particular friend who makes you laugh and encourages you to have one for the road at 3am. Everybody has one of these acquaintances who possess a pied piper ability to lure you to the pub when you would refuse all others. You may not realise it, but you are probably that person in somebody else’s life.

Once the message arrives, you will discover that an instant infusion of energy results and before you know where you are, you are skipping down the road like a Duracell battery on acid.
You’ll probably wake in a molten mess on your living room floor with the remnants of a kebab knotted into your hair. And you’ll wonder where you found the energy to party the night before.

So if mass and energy can be created out of nothing, then the speed of light must also be nothing. That’s the third element of Einstein’s theory and if my old Maths teacher thought me anything, it is that if two elements of a three part equation are zero, then the third element must also be zero. And the square root of zero is also zero. Did you get all that?
This raises a few questions. If the speed of light can be created from nothing, then we don’t need the sun. This means that the sun probably doesn’t exist and this is all a dream. That shiny yellow thing I saw in the sky this morning was an orange perhaps and what passes for the moon is actually some cream cheese.

If the sun doesn’t exist, then perhaps we don’t exist either. Funnily enough, that was a conversation I used to regularly have in the pub with a friend of mine who had an uncanny knack of luring me into drinking establishments. He was a shrink who believed that nothing was real and if there was any existence at all, it was only in the realm of the unconscious or in an infinite layer of parallel universes. I found myself always arguing that we did actually exist. This went on for many years until we realised that by having the argument in the first place, we were actually proving my point.  
It would of course be easier if we didn’t exist but thought we did. I wouldn’t have to worry about my weight for example and could avoid reading obscure scientific studies to try and glean a slither of justification for my calorie guzzling lifestyle.

We need answers I think. Can light and speed be created from nothing? Does the sun exist? Do I exist? Is there a logical reason why McDonalds put gherkins in Big Macs when nobody likes them?
I have my theories but I have no proof. However, if somebody will give me 10 billion Euros and a large round hole in Switzerland, I’m confident I can come up with some answers and they will be exactly what I suspected in the first place.

 

 

Wednesday 22 August 2012

Cheering for the Brits

I have a confession to make. I have a soft spot for the English. They are polite and well mannered and they think we Irish are great fun altogether. They are also really good at queuing which is something they could teach to the Australians. They think ordering beer at a busy bar counter is an Olympic sport here.  The English are so good in fact; that I think every house should have one. Preferably as a butler. They make really great butlers, as Downton Abbey has proven to the world.

I’ve denied these Anglophile feelings for a long time and kept them hidden under the Irish Republican (non violent wing) persona that I have presented to the world. This was easy to do when I lived in Ireland as I was presented daily with the little England jingoism of the British media and the drum banging rhetoric of Irish Nationalism. Now that I’m 17,000km from the epicentre of that debate, I find that I have a fresh outlook towards my old neighbours.

I used to support two teams. Ireland and anyone playing England. When it came to World Cups, I was actually happy if Ireland didn’t qualify and England did. If we were there, I would have only one team to support with little chance of success. If England were there, I had thirty one teams to support and this has resulted in me being successful in every World Cup since 1966.

It took a while for my old prejudices to fade away and they haven’t completely disappeared. Football remains a sore point. Try as I might, the sight of John Terry belting out “God Save the Queen” before a match is enough to make me scream passionately for the opposition. Even if they are the Pol Pot 11.

Other sports offered a gentler introduction into supporting England. My first leaning towards the dark side was in cricket. Maybe it’s because the best Irish players end up playing for England or maybe it’s because they used to be pathetic underdogs. But I was caught up in the Freddie Flintoff revolution in 2005 and found myself cheering for them against Australia.

This support has grown since I moved to Australia, particularly during the Ashes series, because the Aussie media is even more obnoxious on this subject than the BBC ever were. In fact I now find myself supporting any team playing Australia in pretty much every sport. The media are at fault again. When it comes to sport, Australians think humility is how people with a lisp describe hot and sticky weather.

The recent Olympics were a case in point. Channel 9 procured the rights here to show the games on free to air TV. I say free, but this ignores the cost of having to watch ads every ten minutes. And not even funny ads like you see during the Superbowl on American TV, but the same two dumb ads for a vitamin company and a Supermarket which were repeated ad nausem for the duration of the games.

Australia a multi-cultural country; with people from all points of the globe. But you wouldn’t think this from watching Channel 9. During the opening ceremony, their highlight was not Danny Boyle’smagnificent pageant but the arrival of the Australian team into the stadium. They followed the team the whole way around the track and then onto the weird little hill where the athletes assembled.

This meant that when they returned to the parade, Ecuador was coming in (probably with Julian Assange hidden amongst them).

Apparently, Australians of Austrian or Belgian background have never seen their home countries enter an Olympic stadium.

Thankfully, I have Foxtel who offered 9 channels during the games and even though they were also Australian focused, their breath of coverage meant that they occasionally had to show athletes from other countries. Due to the time difference between here and London, I mainly got to see events held in the early afternoon in the UK. This tended to be outdoor stuff like equestrian (what is that horse dancing nonsense by the way?), sailing and rowing.

This led me to realise that there are a lot of posh sports at the Olympics which I guess is not surprising when they the games were reinvented by a baron. Charlie Brooker made a very pertinent point in the Guardian. He said that you would need your own castle and grounds to practice for these sports. It seems that Ireland punches above its weight in these upper class endeavours, which shows that the death of the Celtic Tiger hasn’t impacted on those who want to own a boat or an expensive horse.

We also punch at every weight in boxing and like everyone else of Irish heritage I rejoiced in the victory of Katie Taylor, even if there were only 11 competitors in her competition.

We also won 3 other medals in boxing, two of them by fighters from Belfast. This led to some questions at work because Australians can’t understand how boxers from Northern Ireland can win medals for Ireland while rowers from that part of the world were winning medals for Team GB. I tried to explain the dual citizenship outcomes of the Good Friday agreement but it was met with glazed expressions. I come from a unique country that can compete at international sport in a different manner to how it is represented in international law.

But perhaps it’s not that unique. My new friends, the English, are similarly muddled. They compete under that name in Football and Rugby. But under the name of Team GB at the Olympics. Even this is misleading as they are really Team GB and Northern Ireland. Or Team United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But TUKOGBNI doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

But congrats to them anyway, I loved the games and realise now that I have more in common with the English than any other country. But don’t tell anyone. I’m still getting over the shock of this.

Sunday 5 August 2012

Auskicks is for beginners

Kyle's Dad relocated from Sydney to Melbourne eight years ago, just before Kyle was born. Conscious that his son would need an Australian Rules football team to support in this AFL mad city, Kyle's Dad settled on the Sydney Swans, if only to imbibe his son with a connection to the city of his parents.

As with nearly all kids in Melbourne, Kyle was desperate to join up for Auskicks when he turned five. Sponsored by the AFL, it's a training ground for boys and girls that introduces them to the game and allows them to run around a park on a Saturday morning like headless chickens, while their parents sip lattes on the sidelines and wince at the lack of talent displayed by their offspring.

It was all going well until Sydney won a Friday match against Collingwood. Only one game is played on Friday night and the tradition at Auskicks the next morning is to call up the kids wearing the shirts of Friday's night’s victors to receive the acclaim of all the other kids and to belt out their team's song with gusto. Kyle had received a red and white Sydney shirt the previous Christmas which he wore with pride every Saturday morning. Unfortunately, Sydney are not a popular team in Melbourne and Kyle found himself alone in his swan's shirt in front of what was mainly Collingwood supporters, who were not best pleased at being reminded of their Friday night debacle.

Kyle learned an important lesson that day. It might be cool to support a team from a far off city, but if you're going to carry it off, you'd better remember the words to the team song. Kyle stumbled on the second line, partly from a lack of practice (Sydney weren't winning a lot at the time) but mainly from stage fright brought upon by the angry stares of fifty, feral eight year olds.

Jimmy was an English kid and he had a different problem. His parents had relocated to Melbourne when Jimmy was six, after watching a travel show on BBC that portrayed Australia as a paradise of beaches, BBQs and tanned fit people. Unfortunately, his dad was a city planner and there is not much call for that line of work in the sun kissed parts of Australia. The only job he could get was with the Victorian State Government and he found himself living in a part of the world which looked like his native Manchester, albeit a tad warmer.

By the time the family moved here, Jimmy was already a dab hand at football (or soccer as they call it in Australia) and he found it hard to adapt to a game where you are allowed to use your hands. To onlookers unfamiliar with his background, it seemed that Jimmy had a disability that prevented him from bending down.  Auskicks, like any other sport enjoyed by eight year olds, involves pretty much everyone chasing after the ball. The only exceptions are those slightly introverted kids who are forced into team sports by their parents but who would much prefer to stand in the middle of the pitch and stare at passing clouds.

When the pack of kids would reach the ball, twenty pairs of tiny, delicate hands would reach down to pick it up. Jimmy however, would stand erect and without any care for the fingers in the vicinity, would boot the ball as far as he could. This would draw howls of protest from the watching parents, but an approving nod from the coach who liked the see game flowing. Except on those occasions when Jimmy booted the ball in the wrong direction, which is an occupational hazard in Auskicks, where it often seems as though both teams are kicking in the same direction.

Girls are allowed to take part, at least until they are ten years old when the AFL shuffles them into female only competitions which are ignored by media and the football authorities. Before the reach the ripe old age of ten, they are allowed to muck in with the boys and they are generally successful. Girls tend to develop more quickly than their male counterparts and it’s pretty common to see an eight year old girl burst through a pack of timid boys with pony tail waving furiously behind.

Kyle, Jimmy and all the girls who play Auskicks share one dream. They hold out for the opportunity to play at the MCG. Not as adult professionals but as part of the half time entertainment during an AFL game. Every week, hundreds of Auskick children are dressed up in the uniforms of the teams playing that day and they take part in a ten minute game of football during the interval, watched by their proud and adoring parents and thousands of uninterested supporters. Occasionally the crowd will cheer if a kid in their team’s colours kicks a goal, but only if they are watching at the time. This is rare as most football supporters in Australia spend halftime getting as drunk as possible or in the toilet dealing with the unfortunate by product of getting drunk. Getting a meat pie is also a popular half time activity, if you’re willing to queue with the other 40,000 fans with the same idea.

100,000 kids take part in Auskicks every year and if they don’t go on to be AFL stars, it at least gets them out of the house for a couple of hours every Saturday morning, when they could be at home watching TV or playing video games like eight year olds in the rest of the world. This mass participation is part of the reason why Australians are so good at sport (not that the current Olympic medal would back this up). They get them young and pluck out the ones with talent for hot housing and development. Kyle might go on to become a sprinter or a swimmer. At least in those sports, he won’t be expected to remember any team songs.

Saturday 14 July 2012

The Last Five Years


The best thing about being an Accountant, apart from the money and the fact that models are attracted to us, is the opportunity to travel. This is particularly so if you work in the Fund Administration business like I do. We look after the world’s tax dodgers and we can find work in exotic places like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands or any other place that acts as a haven for the world’s ill-gotten gains.

From my own point of view, I’ve had the chance to live in England, Luxembourg and Singapore as well as back in Ireland of course, which is a haven that likes to attract banks that help people avoid tax and yet expects its taxpayers to bail out those banks when they get into trouble.

But apart from my homeland, I’ve lived longer in Australia than I have in any of those countries. I celebrated my fifth anniversary here last week and I thought it a good opportunity to reflect on the highlights since I stepped on that Singapore airlines flight back in 2007.

I guess the highlight of the first year was meeting my now lovely wife. Back in the days before the great crash I was travelling a lot with work. Tipping up to Sydney once a month or so to see a client and to go on the beer with my sister and heading up to Singapore occasionally to stay in posh hotels and indulge in the best cuisine in the world.

The global financial crisis has had an effect on the company’s budget to say the least. But I still managed a business class trip around the world to spend a week or so in the wasteland that is Columbus Ohio. I also managed to procure a visit to Bangalore, which to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, is a place worth seeing but not worth going to see.

In 2009 I applied for permanent residency which was an arduous process that involved travelling to Brisbane to prove that I could speak English and handing over lots of cash to an immigration lawyer and the Australian government. If nothing else, my residency allows my daughter to be an Australian citizen which makes her the only one in this house.

2010 was my annus horribulis of course. They say bad things happen in threes, so after I smashed my face in a bike crash and lost my mother, I should have known that the grim reaper was stalking me. Nevertheless, testicular cancer came as a bit of shock, particularly when I had been checked two years earlier and told that I was too old for this disease.

The bike crash has left a couple of physical scars. I have a thin blue line above my right eye in the spot where I received 12 stitches on that faithful day. I should have known something was up when the doctor who took the needle to me said that she was the only member of her large Scottish family that couldn’t put a hem in a skirt.

Earlier this year when I had my eyes tested for a new set of specs, I discovered another legacy from that fateful day back in March 2010 (although I thought it was April which got me a nice bed in the head trauma unit). The optician made me stare into one of those strange machines that they have and then left the room in a hurry. He came back with his supervisor who asked me if anything traumatic had happened to my right eye since the last time they had seen me. I said there was just the small matter of a titanium plate being inserted under my eyeball after I fell off my bicycle and decided to head butt St Kilda Road. Ah, they said, well that would explain why your right pupil is twice the size of your left one. It seems that when you get a shock, your pupils dilate. When it’s a particularly nasty trauma, like the one I went through, then it can stick and I’ll go through the rest of my life with uncoordinated eyeballs, unless of course I manage to fall off a bike again and come down on my left hand side this time.

Once my face and broken arm had healed, I had to make two trips back to Ireland to see my mother for the last time and then to return for her funeral.  I miss her but God replaces everyone and my beautiful daughter came along a year or so later and has a lot of my mother’s characteristics, with stubbornness being the latest one on show.

Testicular cancer was the third horseman of the apocalypse to visit me. I lost my left nut, but perhaps that balances out against the gap in my right eye socket.

2011 was a better year all round. I got married in New Zealand, something that some of my friends in Ireland said would never happen. It was a great day, but I hope nobody who was there will remember the music. I spent weeks putting it together, only to find that the hotels sound system consisted of a beat box with the power of a 1960’s transistor radio.

A few months later, our little daughter came along and 2012 has been all about looking after her. I know all Dads are biased but I think she’s the cutest kid I’ve ever seen, although if she would sleep better at night, it would certainly help.

So it’s been a busy five years. I’ve dropped a few kilos and I’m getting more exercise and eating better now that I’m married. I kind of hope that the next five years will be less eventful but life being what it is, who knows what tomorrow will bring, never mind the any longer than that. I’ll keep writing in the hope that all of you will keep reading.

     

Saturday 30 June 2012

Jesus was a Refugee


Most refugees come to Australia on airplanes. But these get hardly any mention in the media. The ones who come on rickety boats get all the attention. They pay a few grand to people smugglers for a place on overcrowded fishing vessels, many of which sink in the treacherous waters between Indonesia and the Northern Territory.

Those who survive the trip are taken to Christmas Island (the most misnamed place in the world I reckon) and put in what is effectively a concentration camp for years. 15% are given visas to stay, the rest are hustled onto planes in the middle of the night and sent back to whatever hell hole they originally escaped from. 

Many of course make their way back onto boats and play the lottery to win one of those golden visa tickets.

I also paid a few grand to get residency in this fine country. I didn’t pay it to people smugglers, unless you want to put immigration lawyers into that category. A large portion of what I paid was directly to the Australian government. Which makes me think that they are hypocrites when they call the people smugglers the scum of the earth.

Only a few thousand try to make it to Australia in this way but it exercises the minds of the media as though it was Armageddon. It seems amazing to me that a country of this size and resources can’t accommodate a few people who turn up on their shores. They sent thousands of soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan for example, all of whom require feeding and equipment. And yet when it comes to a few Afghans looking for a better life, the system goes into meltdown.  Two boats have sunk in the past week and a few hundred unfortunate souls are now at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

And what are the Australian politicians doing about this? They have spent all week arguing about which off shore country they should send asylum seekers to for processing. Labor wants Malaysia, whereas the opposition has plumped for Nauru, if only because that’s the place they used when they were last in power. 

Both parties seem to think that if they process asylum seekers off shore the message will get back to Kandahar and Colombo that it’s not worth getting on a fishing boat and sailing across the Indian ocean. They seem to misunderstand the misery that many people in the world live under and that they will do almost anything to carve out a better life for their family and that spending a few years in a camp in Malaysia or Naura rather than a camp on Christmas Island would make any difference.

The difference of course is that Christmas Island is part of Australia and the authorities here would prefer to have their dirty laundry sorted out somewhere else. Only the Green Party can see through this moral bankruptcy, which is a particular problem for me as I’ve been slagging them off for the past twenty years or so. I’m a Socialist at heart and always looked on the Green Party as one trick ponies, wanting to stop the poor from getting cheap food and electricity.

I was excited in 2007 when I finally got to live under a Labor government, after the dark years of Thatcherism in England, the corruption of Charles Haughey in Ireland and the right wing madness of the Celtic Tiger years.

But I have to admit it has been a huge disappointment. I should have known that things were not as they seem when Kevin Rudd got up to make his victory speech on that night in 2007. After thanking Australian working families (a phrase he never got tired of saying) he got on to thanking the Americans. It struck me as odd at the time. A little like that line in the Irish declaration of Independence in 1916 that mentions “our gallant friends in Europe”, which was code for the Germans. Everything has a context I guess. And Rudd was thanking the Americans because Australia is fighting two wars with the yanks at the moment.

But it struck me as an odd way to start a Labor government and to be honest it’s been downhill ever since. When Rudd was overthrown in a palace coup by Julia Gillard, I hoped things would get better. But even though I didn’t think it possible, the government lurched further to the right. They allow the mining industry to run up huge profits and not to share these with the Australian people who surely own the stuff the mining companies are digging out of the ground. They refused to pass legislation to restrict the massive gambling that goes on in this country because the billionaires that control the industry opposed it.

I put up with all this, because the alternative, the Genghis Khan policies of the opposition party are even worse. But I think the recent refugee issue is the final straw. I’m declaring that I have finally given up on Labor. They are a disgrace to the name of socialism and I’m throwing my lot in with the Green Party. I don’t make this decision lightly. I’m not vegetarian, I agree with nuclear energy and I think farmer’s markets are a con. But they have a compassionate attitude towards the unfortunate people who are willing to risk their lives for the chance of a new life in Australia.

They only thing is, this change of heart on my behalf makes no difference, because I can’t vote. You have to be a citizen here to do that. And then funnily enough you are obliged to vote. So maybe it is time that I swallowed my national pride and applied for citizenship. Some things are more important than my sense that my Irishness will be diluted. If I can help change the government’s attitude towards refugees, then I will have done some good. All journeys begin with a single step.   

Monday 11 June 2012

Travelling with Kids

They say you should never work with children or animals. I’ve haven’t been involved in the chimney sweeping or circus industries, so they opportunities haven’t really arisen for me to test this concept. Little is said about travelling with children (apart from on the internet where reference to it is almost as common as gambling and pornography) and particularly the impact of time zones. As I’ve just got my head together enough to be able to spell, I thought it was time to address this issue.

Sometimes I imagine our five month old daughter is like Stewey from “Family Guy”, sitting there thinking conspiratorially thoughts about her parents while smiling angelically to the outside world. I’m sure some of these thoughts must have been going through her head when we arrived at Melbourne international airport on a Saturday morning some weeks ago. Ordinarily she’d be looking at a 45 minute snooze and maybe a trip to the zoo. Instead, we carried her onto an Airbus A380 (I’m a plane geek so I had to sneak that in) and took her off to Singapore.

The time zone probably didn’t bother her too much at this stage. It’s only two hours difference to Australia and she seemed to take it into her stride. She wasn’t too crazy about the temperature but thankfully Singapore seems to be based on the Truman Show and if they haven’t built a big Perspex screen over the whole island to keep the air conditioning in then I’m sure they have it in their plans.

We then flew to Paris where she slept for eight hours straight on her first day there and then slipped comfortably into European life. We took her to all the top Parisian sites for which she showed distain bordering on contempt. Youth isn’t the only thing wasted on the young. Culture and scenery come a close second.

After a week of meandering across the world, we ended up in Ireland. She coped well with the three flights that this involved, crying occasionally but generally showing so much curiosity that I think she would have flown the plane if we had let her. I did have to walk her up and down the aircraft a lot, particularly on the longer legs. This gave me the opportunity to observe the movie or TV selections of the other passengers (mainly out of envy I should point out as travelling with a baby precludes video entertainment if only because they take pleasure in ripping the headphones off your head at the first opportunity).

My observations showed that “Bourne Identity” type action movies are popular and that more adults watch cartoons than would care to admit it. The extensive European Movie menu on offer was meagrely savoured.

Traveling back to Australia was a different kettle of fish. We made the decision to make a dash back to Melbourne, in so far as you can do this while taking three flights and travelling 17,000km. Our only break to this plan was to take a six hour stopover in Singapore. We booked into a “day” hotel which offered clean sheets and a chance to sleep for a couple of hours. There are many other hotels in Asia that specialise in renting rooms by the hour, but ours was a civilised affair and didn’t carry the risk of discovering that the person you shared a short term bed with was actually the same sex as yourself.

The toughest of the six legs of our odyssey was undoubtedly the last. Most people on the flight from Singapore to Melbourne thought it was a red eye, leaving Singapore late at night and delivering its cargo, blearing eyed, into a Melbourne dawn. Our daughter was still on European time and considered the flight a mid-afternoon jaunt, during which she expected to be entertained while practicing her new rolling skills. She only got contrary when we needed to hook her into the ridiculous seat belt attachments that they gave you on airplanes. Trying to keep a wriggling baby with no concept of danger inside one of these things is like trying to herd cats. I hate to break it to the civil aviation authorities in Singapore, France, Ireland, UK and Australia but our baby wasn’t belted up while landing in your countries and to be honest, her nervous father who was fussing with her during most landings, wasn’t hooked up most of the time either.  

We arrived back in Australia pretty frazzled. As a European with our open borders, it is often confronting to come back to Melbourne and realise that this is a large island, protective of its food industry. If you were to judge by the signs in Melbourne’s arrivals hall you would think that it was a capital offence to smuggle an apple into the country while they would turn a blind eye to the fact that you have half a kilo of heroin hidden a place that only you and a doctor checking you for prostate cancer should look.

“Border Security” is a popular Australian program shown all over the world. I think it is fair to sat that the purpose of the show is to scare people rather than entertain, unless you find the idea of Chinese people who can’t speak English trying to explain why they have a live python in their luggage funny.

We were carrying two packets of tea in our luggage as my wife has become addicted to Irish brands of this elixir. We pondered whether we should tick the box on the arrival form to say we were carrying a food product into the country and put up with the endless questioning that this would result in.

In the end we decided to risk staying quiet, despite the panic that “Border Security” induces. Perhaps they took pity on us because of the goggle eyed baby in our front pack, or maybe we just look honest. We sailed through and are now smug smugglers. We can rest easy, if only our daughter realised that she’s now back in the Southern Hemisphere. Sleep well tonight darling, so we all can.






Tuesday 1 May 2012

Baby Love

My baby is now four months old and has reached all the developmental milestones that you’d expect from a kid of that age. She’s in the 70% percentile for preventing parental sleep, 60% percentile for being inconsistent on feeding choices and 100% percentile for being damned cute.

She’s good on all the serious stuff like weight and height which we know because we’re obsessive about trawling the internet to find out if our child is ‘normal’. It seems as though all parents desire their kids to be average, even though our own experience is that the world is full of short and long people, fat and skinny people and people with different sized fontanel’s.

My wife and I regularly talk about how we don’t care how our daughter turns out as long as she’s healthy and happy. The truth is though, that we both secretly hope that she turns out to be a Nobel Prize winning scientist, preferably in a field that pays well so that she can keep her parents in the retirement style to which they aspire.

So we watch keenly for any signs of high intelligence, although nothing a four month old baby could do would give you any clue to their future ability to write novels or find a cure for cancer.

Mother’s groups feed this frenzy by creating a competitive environment. You can be sure that all the parents there are benchmarking their kids against the other babies in the room and going home to the fathers with tales of the child who learned to roll first, or the first one to grab a pen and paper and knock off a symphony (apparently Mozart did that when he was three, so there is a precedent).

Last week our little one discovered her toes and we took this as a major breakthrough on the scale of Einstein unveiling his theory of relativity. There were high fives and a few tears while the baby looked on wondering what all the fuss was about. From my point of view I was just happy that at least one member of my family can still touch their toes.

She has a new found interest in the dexterity of her limbs and their extremities. She can stare at them for hours as though she doesn’t actually realise that they are part of her body and it has meant that we have saved on expensive toys, knowing that she can keep herself amused by twiddling her fingers and grabbing her toes. One downside of this increased dexterity is that she had started to treat my glasses as a combined sucking implement and hammer. So when I pick her up for a cuddle, she’ll make a grab for my goggles, give the frame a quick suck and then hammer them against the nearest hard object, which unfortunately is usually my head. It does have its advantages however.

Last week I was holding her when I sneezed so violently that my glasses flew off my head. It took me a second or two to refocus and when I looked down my daughter was holding the spectacles in her hand. I was ecstatic and gave her an extra long hug as I dreamed of her future high paid job on a Japanese female baseball team.

My sister warmed me about this attraction that kids have to glasses. She ended up getting expensive laser eye surgery because her first born took to grabbing her specs and hiding them behind the sofa before she had a chance to focus. Her eyesight is now twenty-twenty and her kid is bored.

In honour of her super charged development, we thought it time that we invested in a proper cot so that she could progress from the bassinet which has been her home for the past four months.

She used to get lost in it and now she can almost touch both ends and bangs on the sides like a trapped animal. She woke us up on Sunday morning and made it clear that she was ready to embrace the day. We got up and had some breakfast and then piled baby and her assorted baggage into the car and set off for Baby Bunting, Melbourne’s one stop kiddy shop. We got there ten minutes before it opened, which was a new Sunday morning experience for me. I’ve never been anywhere on a Sunday before it opened, with the possible exception of kebab shops.

By 1.30m we were in town, with the baby in the front pack like a kangaroo and her Joey. It felt like we’d been out for the whole day at that stage, which is an unfortunate by product of getting up at 7am. She seems to like shopping it must be said and casts a curious eye over all that she sees. It helps of course that she doesn’t have to pay for anything. Her attitude might change when the clothes we buy are coming out of her pocket money.

We were home by 4pm, knackered and ready to bed. I’m now going to bed at roughly the time that I used to get up. But it’s all good. A friend with a child a little older than ours says that the greatest pleasure you get at four months in an internal sense of achievement that you’ve managed not to kill your offspring. My wife and I look back on the last four months with amazement at our naivety, as we will look back in four months time at the mistakes we’re making now.

In the meantime our young one will plod along. Poohing at will, feeding from the never ending supply of nectar from her mother and sleeping for about 14 hours a day. And probably lying there wondering why her parents are acting like crazed loons.

It’s not a bad life if you can put up with being picked up at random by adults, tickled in places you haven’t even discovered yourself yet and kissed by people who haven’t shaved for four days.

But she’s happy and healthy and like I say, that’s all parents care about.

Thursday 12 April 2012

The Tyranny of Airports

Alain De Botton wrote a great book called “A week at the airport”. I say great because he managed to make the airport experience exciting when most of us who have to use those facilities find them dull to terrifying with every other negative emotion in between.

I used to spend a lot of time in airports before the global financial crisis put a stop to business travel and heralded the dawn of video conferencing. This is pretty impractical as it’s hard to read body language and therefore difficult to hold a normal conversation. But it does at least allow the sad sacks who work in Financial Services to pretend that they are on telly.

My time at airports now is driven by the fact that I live in a City that is so far from any other centre of civilisation that the only way to get anywhere is to fly. My most recent trip was to the land of the long white cloud. We brought our baby daughter on her first flight. She was there to visit her kiwi relations including her one hundred year old great grandmother, who was quick to point out that she had no responsibility for the sinking of the Titanic or the start of World War One, even though she was around at the time.

Our daughter seemed to enjoy her odyssey through the international terminals of Melbourne and Auckland airports, but I enjoyed them less. Years of travelling has not inoculated me to the trauma of queues, suspicious looks from officials, crap food and endless waiting.

Queuing is my biggest complaint. Airports are designed to shuffle you from one place to another like cattle making their way through an abattoir. It starts at check in when you are made to snake through a cordoned off maze while staring at the empty on-line and business check in queues. This process seems constructed to make you plan to pay for an expensive ticket or print out your boarding pass at home next time.

After check in you have to queue to get through security. This is when the first pangs of anxiety kick in. Hardly any of us are terrorists, but the system makes us all think we are. Staff here are usually soulless automatons ready to pounce on the smallest infraction and unwilling to yield to logic or fairness. You can take ten containers of a murky liquid onto a plane along with a large empty bottle to mix them in (they’ll sell you large bottles of vodka in duty free which are perfect for the purpose as well as offering a sharp object when smashed. And you can down the contents to work up the courage to become a jihadist before hand). This is providing no individual container holds more than 100ml. But god forbid you try and bring a half empty tube of toothpaste onto a flight and argue that if the tube holds 120ml when full, then it holds about 60ml when half full.

These people spend their entire working life confiscating toiletries and soft drinks and yet don’t seem to know that 100g is not the same as 100ml and whether jam is a solid or a liquid. But that’s the subject of a completely different blog.

After the scanning machine, you usually meet a steely eyed gentleman who pulls some people aside for a random check, apparently to check for explosives. It’s supposed to be random but for some reason they always seem to pick on me. I must fit some profile on international security systems. I’m guessing it’s because of the scruffy knapsack I carry with me when travelling, which has now been checked for explosives more often than a Kabul backpacker.

This is where Auckland airport first impressed me. The guy wielding the magic stick knew that he was performing a useless task so he spiced up his day with a little humour and actually treated me like a person.

After security you have to queue to get through immigration. This really should be called “emigration” but I wouldn’t recommend pointing this out to the humourless customs officers who man these posts. I have travelled all over the world with my passport in a protective see through plastic cover with no issues. But every time I pass through an Australian airport I’m asked to remove it as though it was covered in cow poo. Being surly is an obvious requirement for employment in the Australian Customs service.

The final queue you will stand in is the messiest. Getting on a plane used to be simple; you waited for your block of seats to be called and then strolled down the gangway to your seat. Now airlines charge extra for checked in baggage, so passengers typically carry everything bar the kitchen sink as hand luggage. This creates storage wars and makes everyone want to get on the plane early to get first dibs on the overhead lockers. Parents with kids and old people needing assistance are allowed on first. This is widely flaunted however so that children can be as old as 37 and old age pensioners seem to begin at 39.

Anxiety normally increases for me at this point. People join the queue from the side which annoys me mainly because I’m too shy to verbally abuse them. When I eventually make it onto the plane, I think my waiting is over,but I’m usually stalled by a middle aged businessman who stands in the aisle while he sorts out the contents of his briefcase, turns his blackberry off and makes a final call to his secretary. All the time ignoring the forty people waiting to get past. And then you’ll sit on the plane on the tarmac for longer than you’ll actually be in the air.

Perhaps Mr De Botton enjoyed himself at the airport because he never actually went anywhere.

Wednesday 21 March 2012

Jim Stynes

I never met Jim Stynes and to be honest, I’m not sure I’ve even seen him in the flesh but he’s a hero of mine, so I thought I’d mark his passing.

Before I moved to Melbourne, I was conscious that I needed to pick an AFL team to support. It’s like registering for tax when you move to another country. If you don’t have a team you are excluded from most Monday morning conversations at work and are looked upon like one of those kids at school who liked stamp collecting and spent the breaks doing his homework and not kicking a worn out tennis ball around the school yard.

I plumped for Carlton because it was bottom of the league at the time (I’m a sucker for underdogs) and was home at the time to Setanta O’Hailpin. Over the years, I’ve been asked by many Melburnians to justify my choice of team. Arguments have been put forward for many alternatives. The criminals who funded Collingwood in the thirties and forties were Irish criminals so I was implored to follow them. They also had Marty Clarke on their playing list, although he comes from County Down, which is a neighbouring county to my own and I’ve never tired of telling Australians that neighbours in Ireland are rarely friends.

Essendon and St Kilda also had a significant Irish contingent on their playing lists. The strongest argument however, was that I should support the Melbourne Football Club. It is allegedly the oldest football club in the world, in any code. It is a former powerhouse that has fallen on hard times. So all the boxes about history and of being a sleeping giant about to awaken were ticked. On the flip side, they are considered to be the snobbiest club in the city and many people blame their poor attendance numbers in July to the fact that many of their supporters are busy sking.

But they did have Jimmy Stynes and that was almost enough to swing it. I had heard of Jim before I moved to Australia. He comes from a famous Dublin footballing family and I cheered for his brother Brian on many occasions when he togged out as a rampaging centre forward for my hometown team of Dundalk.

Jim is the hero of the family, however. His record is legendary. Played the most consecutive games in AFL history, was the only non-Australian to win the player of the year award and as President he saved his club from extinction. Outside of football, he established the Reach foundation which helps disadvantaged kids by providing social outlets and summer camps. He apparently based this on his own experience of visiting Gaeltacht areas in the west of Ireland as a teenager.

Although I’m pleased to say that Australian camps don’t enforce the speaking of Irish on reluctant teenagers and doesn’t employ fierce landladies to ensure 10pm curfews. Jim received the Order of Australia for his charity work which is just about as big an honour as you can achieve in this country and rarely bestowed of foreigners.

But it was in the dark world of cancer that I was most attracted to his light. He was diagnosed in 2009 with a virulent form of cancer that seemed to declare an angry and vindictive war on his body. In typical fashion he fought it like a caged animal and defied all doctors’ expectations until today, when he finally succumbed to the beast. I had my own brush with the Big C in 2010 of course and feel humbled to even mention my single tumour incident in the same sentence as his monstrous struggle. He had 12 tumours removed from his brain alone and every other organ in his body was attacked.

But when I was feeling down after my own brush with cancer, I looked towards Jim Stynes for inspiration. He went through his struggles publically and with immense bravery, including a documentary which introduced the wider world to the indignities that cancer sufferers must endure.

Whatever I went through I could comfort myself with the knowledge that Jim Stynes was going through something worse.

It’s ironic that Jim finally passed away in the week that St Patrick is being celebrated throughout the world and when Ireland has its annual showcase on the world stage. A few weeks ago an Irish backpacker drowned in Melbourne while trying to swim across the Yarra River after a night on the beer. It portrayed an image of Irish people that was not exactly favourable and I was asked by more than one person if it was normal for young people from my country to do stupid things.

Jim Stynes evokes the opposite response among Australians. They admired and loved him and more importantly connected all his positive qualities to his Irishness. His courage, his strength, his empathy and his social conscience. While I’m sad today, I’m also extremely proud to be an Irishman in Australia. Jim showed that we’re not all drunken buffoons. That some of us can write great books, like Tom Keneally, discover new places like Robert O’Hara Burke and introduce Trade Unionism and worker’s rights like Peter Lalor.
But when the lists of the top 100 Irish Australians are put together in years to come, Jim Stynes name will be at the top. You played a great game Jim. Enjoy a few cold ones in the great club room in the sky.

Wednesday 7 March 2012

What's lost is lost forever

My first observation of alcohol in the workplace occurred in 1990 when I was working for a British insurance company. I was posted to a small department in an obscure office just outside London. We shared the floor with thecompany’s internal audit team. In the accountancy world, internal audit are the Darth Vaders of finance and we traditional bean counters look on them with the same mixture of pity and contempt that the rest of the world reserves for us bean counters.

At Christmas however, this team of cardigan wearing, be speckled nerds would come alive. The company had a policy of no alcohol on the premises and this was enforced by the internal audit team who would visit branch officesand search manager’s desk drawers for that bottle of scotch which they kept to entertain clients. This would be duly confiscated and retained in a safe place back at base to be brought out at the annual internal audit Christmas party.

Our small team always got an invite to this event, which was hardly a gag fest but did involve lots of free booze. I was troubled by the hypocrisy of their actions and was often tempted to quote that Latin phrase Quis custodietipsos custodes? (who will guard the guards?) to demonstrate my smart arsed grasp of obscure quotes and my sense of probity.

But discretion is always the better side of valour and I kept my mouth closed, apart from opening it every 30 seconds to pore in some free whiskey.

That was my last sight of alcohol in the workplace, until I arrived in Australia in 2007. At 4pm on my first Friday at work here I noticed that a lot of staff got up and walked to a corner of the office. I followed them andfound a small trolley with 24 beers and two bottles of wine. I discovered that this was a weekly event and was designed to give staff a feeling that the week was over and to provide a chance to stand and chat.

There were about 90 people on our floor at the time and I was worried that I might be trampled in the rush. To my amazement, this never happened and on occasion, I’ve been able to account for 6 of the 24 beers available. Staffare mainly interested in the free crisps that are also provided and many of them would fashion origami influenced paper structures to better transport the mountain of crisps collected back to their desk. I’ve often thought that it would be an interesting sociologicalstudy to compare this behaviour to that found in Ireland. I’d guess that if a beer trolley was brought out each week in a Dublin office, it wouldn’t survive the first visitor who would pocket all the alcohol available in every free orifice.

Sadly, this free beer came to an end two weeks ago in the latest round of expense cuts to hit the Financial Services industry. We bankers might have destroyed the world economy, but that’s no reason to take away our free grog.

There are some people here who naively believe that the beer trolley will return when the good times are rolling again. But I’m an old salt and I know that once things go, they never come back. Back in 1980, I was the victimof bullying by a boy called McNally, who was in my class. He had an issue with my older brother but found it easier to take out his frustrations on me. One lunchtime I was cycling home for dinner (we had our dinner at lunchtime but that’s a subject for anothersociological study). As I was freewheeling down the hill from school, McNally stepped out and pushed me off my bike. Tears flowed and to my eternal shame I took no action other than blubbing out the sad tale to my unsympathetic mother, who was more concernedwith the cost of repairing my torn uniform.

My brother sat listening but didn’t say a word. That afternoon, we retired to the library for supervised after school study. This ran from 4pm to 6pm with a ten minute break at 5pm when the supervising teacher would sneakout for a cigarette or a nip from his hip flask. On this particular day, I was drawn to a commotion in the toilets during the break. Pushing my way to the front I found my brother holding McNally’s head in a toilet bowl and flushing regularly. This had a similareffect to the water boarding activities used in Iraq by the CIA and led McNally to offer fulsome apologies for his actions.

The teacher eventually intervened, but by the time he had pushed his way through the baying crowd, all he found was a prostrated McNally doing an impression of a drowned rat. Needless to say, he didn’t dob in my brother. Ourschool ran an honour system that would have made the Sicilian mafia jealous. But the headmaster was upset and ordered that the 10 minute break during study should be suspended until we learned how to control ourselves.

That was in 1980. My nephew now attends the same school and stays back for after school study. Last July, I asked him if they got a break at 5pm each evening and he looked at me blankly. Thirty two generations of boys havepassed through that school, oblivious to the fact that would get a ten minute break each day if it wasn’t for my brother’s torture techniques.

So it will be with the beer trolley. Future generations of Australians will never even know that free beer was once available on Fridays. As a new Dad, I’ve had to stop going out at night because of bathing and bedding responsibilities.As a result, drinking at work was my only avenue to alcohol. Desperate measures are called for. It’s time I got my CV up to date and started looking for positions in internal audit.

Tuesday 21 February 2012

The tyranny of meetings

I went to a meeting recently that was about as much fun as having hot needles poked into my eyes. Like many meetings, it was dominated by the person who called it. Unfortunately, she lacked the oratory skills of an Obama or Oprah and mumbled her way through a presentation in the manner of reading a telephone directory from front to back.

She wasn’t helped by her material, in fairness. It related to a directive which has come down to us from our global masters in New York instructing us minions in the far flung colonies to follow a new procedure. This involves a lot of pointless reporting which serves no purpose other than allowing a graduate trainee in the US to report that his project has been completed successfully.

Large corporations are full of this sort of internal balderdash, which keeps 80% of the staff busy while the other 20% try to service clients and earn revenue for the firm. Its capitalism, but not as we know it.

I do my best to ignore this sort of nonsense, in an effort to save my sanity. But occasionally I get dragged in unknowingly. I think accepting a meeting request might result in some nice pastries being placed on the table and a collegial chat ensuing between like minded people. Reality is cruelly different. Most meetings are called by lonely people in an attempt to bring a modicum of social activity into the humdrum emptiness of their lives.

They speak for twenty minutes (usually from a pre prepared text that they could have easily emailed to the meeting participants as an alternative to dragging them into a room) and then ask if there are any questions. I’m usually sleeping with my eyes open at this point, so I rarely come up with incisive queries. However, there are always those who need to hear their own voice at every gathering. They will ask the obvious and dumbest questions.

“Will we receive a copy of the presentation in soft format?”

“When will this be implemented?”

“Can you start again, I came in five minutes late and haven’t a clue what this is about?”

We managed to get through several of these dumb questions from all the usual suspects and this was followed by a pause when we hoped that paper would be shuffled and the host would thank us for our attendance. Instead she said “So does everyone agree that we should meet again at the same time next week?”

The collective sigh of the attendees was powerful enough to drive a sailboat. I thought about saying no, that another meeting would be a tragic vindication of the complete waste of time we had just sat through. But I didn’t, none of us want to tell the emperor that he is wearing no clothes.

I hoped that somebody else would protest but my fellow meeting attendees were busy examining the contents of their fingernails while chewing furiously on their lower lip. We all nodded agreement to this ridiculous suggestion and shuffled out and back to the solitude of our desk bound existence.

The following week was worse. This time we knew what was coming and had to fill ourselves with strong coffee beforehand to stay awake. Endless statistics were read out, acronyms that nobody understood were thrown around liberally and the previous week’s presentation was regurgitated in case we hadn’t enjoyed it enough the first time.

To amuse myself, I decided to watch the other attendees to see their reaction. Most were like me, bored to tears and searching for matchsticks to prop their eyelids open. There were the new kids on the block, furiously taking notes in blissful ignorance.

Then there were the ones who felt the need to say something every ten minutes just to prove that they were still awake. Their comments rarely extended beyond saying “Interesting” or “Is that a fact” and it did make me wonder if they were running an app on their iphones which transmitted a meaningless comment at regular intervals.

The worse participants were the ones who felt the need to make a constructive comment because this had implications for the rest of us. Overzealous control freaks like to take processes that are already bureaucratic monsters and add an extra layer of pointless paperwork.

“Why don’t we do a semi annual review to look at progress against targets”, one of them suggested while the rest of us exhaled loudly thinking about the two useless forms we would now have to complete each year. There is usually only one such freak at meetings, but at this one we were graced with two.

“Why don’t we do that in June and December” she said. For a moment, we thought she was joking, because 99% of semi annual reviews take place in those months and making that suggestion was akin to a proposal that a birthday party should be held on somebody’s actual birthday. If she’d suggested April and October, it would at least have been interesting, but no, she was saying it simply to have something to say.

We trudged out dolefully, clutching our handouts and mourning the hour of our lives that we would never get back. Perhaps the problem is that people don’t realise that the things that are important to them personally are not necessarily of interest to other people. I’d like to ask twelve people at work to attend a one hour presentation on the impact of jet engined aircraft on transatlantic travel in the 1960s. But I accept that anyone with a life would be reluctant to come along unless I dressed it up as a strategic planning session for 2013 expense optimisation.

That always gets people’s attention. Because while it will be mainly pointless and contain enough accounting jargon to lull a rave dancer into deep slumber, it will at least have pastries. Any meeting to discuss expense reduction has to involve pastries. Because cutting them from future meetings will always be on the agenda.