Ice Cold in Queensland

Back in the dark days of December, 2006 I was working late at night in Dublin when the phone rang. It was an old friend and colleague that I had worked with in Singapore six years previously. I met him whenever I passed through that city on my regular visits to the Southern Hemisphere and he knew how much I loved the Antipodes. We exchanged Christmas best wishes and then he asked if I would be interested in a job in Melbourne.

At the time, my life was in a rut. I was 41 and single, stuck in traffic most days on the way to work, with the wind screen wipers waving at me like a mocking troll reminding me of how miserable my life was.

I said I’d consider the offer over Christmas. At the time, I worked in a job that had access to American subprime data, which meant I could see the storm coming and that Ireland was in the eye of it.

I had been to Australia and New Zealand many times in the preceding years and had always enjoyed the laid-back lifestyle. So, in truth, it was an easy decision. It was a chance to start again and start another chapter in this kitchen sink drama that is my life.

Living somewhere and spending time on holiday there are very different things, of course. It rains in the Southern Hemisphere too and you still have to get up and go to work in what are often stressful or boring days oiling the wheels of capitalism.

But generally, I would say that it was the correct decision.  I was born with the gift of a curious mind and a need to search for the light the shines beyond those woods, so that I can see what makes it shine.

I met my charming wife who brought my beautiful daughter into the world, so my life certainly got the kick start it needed.

When I arrived in Australia, it filled my bucket of wonder. I discovered AFL, Tim Tams, Carlton Bitter and Chicken Parma. However, having lived there for seven years, the feeling of being on holiday had long faded. Living in the sun is one of the main attractions of a life in Oz.  But when that sun would fry an egg and burn all your bodily extremities to a crisp, then it’s not too attractive.

Since we moved to New Zealand in 2015, I’ve visited Australia regularly. Either to Melbourne to watch my beloved Carlton get smashed at footy, or to Sydney to spend Christmas with my sister.

Longer holidays have been spent in Europe or Fiji. It’s taken us ten years to realise that a perfect holiday destination sits just across the ditch in Australia.

We have rectified that this week with a trip to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. The sun is shining, the beers are cold and Chicken Parmas are as tasty as I remember. I’ve been to Queensland twice before. The first time was in 1997 when I first visited Australia and spent the week in the teeth of a cyclone. That was an epic trip that will live long in my memory.

My second trip was to Brisbane to sit an English language test as part of my Australian residency application. Readers of this blog may be surprised to hear that I passed. I then travelled up the coast to visit my in-laws who were staying on the Sunshine Coast. I hired a car at the airport. This is usually a soulless experience as you get handed the keys to a bland saloon. They obviously think differently in Queensland as I drove off in a purple Holden Commodore with an engine that wouldn’t have been out of place in a formula one car.

Both trips left me with the impression that Queenslanders are different to other Australians. Brasher, more self-confident  and wary of outsiders.

I had forgotten all this in my ten years in New Zealand. Kiwis are polite, self-effacing and easy going. That had lulled me into a false sense of security.

On my first day here, I was dispatched to the Off License to procure a bag of ice, for that evening’s Gin and Tonic extravaganza. I searched the store for ice to no avail and with  the new found confidence I have discovered from turning sixty and generally not giving a toss, I approached the guy behind the counter.

“Do you sell ice?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s in that massive fuckin’ fridge outside that you passed on your way in.”

“Right” I said. “Can I pay now and then pick it up on the way out?”

He looked at me as though I’d farted.

“That’s what most people do”, he said with a withering look.

For some reason, I felt the need to ask another question, as though the transaction required another enquiry.

“Is it fresh or salt ice?” I asked. I was on holiday with my wife’s family and they would have never let me forget the time I brought home salt ice for their evening libations.

His eyes narrowed and he placed his palms firmly on the counter.

“Fresh ice is the only fuckin ice I’ve ever heard of”.

I was taken aback and searched my mind for a zinging retort. But none came.

“I live in New Zealand”, I ventured. “And there you can buy fresh ice or salt ice. “

“That must be why they are shit at cricket” he said as he handed me my beer.

I was stumped; I had no reply to that staggering connection of ice and cricket.

I stopped in the doorway on my way out and turned to him.

“I wouldn’t say you are the biggest prick in the world. But you had better hope that the guy who is the biggest prick doesn’t die soon”.

I didn’t say that last piece. I’m sixty but still not confident enough to say what’s going through my mind.

Free Palestine

I was four months into secondary school when I sat my first exam. That was back in December 1977.

Our English teacher came up with a task that was revolutionary for its time. We were invited to write an essay on anything we liked. I felt emboldened, as though the shackles of primary school had been cast off and I was heading into a life of free thought and independence. That was shortly disabused, as it later became clear that that the vague instructions were due to a Christmas Party induced hangover and not the first light of liberation.

 I took pen to paper and decided to write about what I had seen on the news in the previous nights. I don’t remember the exact events, but Israel had done something bad to the Palestinians and as a twelve-year-old I was filled with righteous anger. I wrote my first opinion piece, laying down what I thought were cogent arguments weighing up the morality of the situation and handed it in with the flourish and excitement of a Washington Times journalist who had just penned the first article about Watergate.

I got my essay back the next day, dappled in red pen and exclamation marks. In the corner was a mark of 55% and I quickly determined that he had corrected spelling and grammar only and had deducted five marks for each error. I don’t think I could correctly spell Palestinian now without the electronic assistance of spell checker. I had nine errors and had barely scraped above a pass mark. If I had written the essay in the style of a ladybird bird book aimed at four-year-olds, I would have scored top marks.

I got no credit, good or bad, for my writing style or argument. The only feedback was a note in red pen at the end that said, “You’re a bit hard on the Israelis”.

I thought about this recently because it struck me that I was brave enough to speak up when I was twelve but feel nervous to do so now. I guess part of this is related to age. We naturally become more cautious as we get older when protecting your family becomes paramount. I think there is also an element of exhaustion. At sixty, there is very little new under the sun and while the situation in Gaza is horrible, it has been horrible for most of my life. Nothing was done to fix the problems in 1977, so it’s hard to build up an expectation that pressure and public opinion will change things now.

The other thing is social media and the connected world we now live in. That essay I wrote when I was twelve was only seen by me and my English teacher. And unless he was an undercover agent for Mossad, it is unlikely that I would have ended up on a watchlist.

This blog, on the other hand will probably attract as many actual human readers as my 1977 essay but will live forever in digital form in a data centre. It will then be harvested by AI tools and parsed and sliced and fed through algorithms. I’m not a conspiracy theorists (not that anyone ever admits to being one) but it wouldn’t take much effort to figure out that this is a pro-Palestine post and to then link it to my identity.

If Mossad or the Americans are listening, I might as well tell them what I think.

I was born twenty years after the end of World War Two. The war still dominated popular culture in the 1970s from Lawrence Olivia narrated documentaries to comic books like Commando and Battle and TV shows like Colditz. I was fascinated by the subject and particularly the Holocaust. I couldn’t understand how a country that spawned Beethoven and Einstein could descend into depravity in the lifetime of my parents. I had immense sympathy for the Jewish population and felt that the barbarity of the Holocaust would ensure that it would never happen again.

History, of course, has a nasty habit of repeating itself and I know enough now about the origins of World War Two to realise that the desire for genocide didn’t appear out of thin air.

It is of course ironic that is the abused that has now become the abuser. What Israel is doing in Gaza is barbaric and genocidal. They have taken the sympathy that we felt for their treatment in World War Two and flung in back in our faces. But what is worse is the lack of pushback they get from foreign governments.

When people wonder why western governments seem to be slipping towards fascism dressed in the sheep’s clothing of populism, they should look at how previous governments have behaved. We like to think that we get the governments we deserve. The truth is that we elect governments to do one thing, and they end up doing something completely different. Nobody in the UK would have voted for austerity in 2010. Nobody in Ireland would have voted for a bank bailout and nobody in the Western World would have voted for military and political support for Israel. It is as though election campaigns are between two similar centrist parties who will enact the same policies regardless of what the public want.

Is it any wonder that the west is getting tired of the same old politics from our leaders and look to nutcases like Trump to at least provide some entertainment. They are going to ignore us and focus on strategic interests and national security. Which is code for protecting trade interests and keeping rich people happy. We might as well have a soap opera to watch or a chance to express all the nasty thoughts we dared not previously expressed.

The world is not so different to the way it was in 1977. I hope I’m the same and can keep calling out evil when I see it. Even if I am being a little tough on the Israelis.

Turning Sixty

They say the meek shall inherit the earth. And then the meek will say “Oh, no thanks. We couldn’t possibly run something as complicated as that. We’ll wait at the back here staring at our shoes while the rest of you sort if out”. For most of my life I was a loyal servant of that meekness army. So meek in fact that I would have been reluctant to even talk about it on an anonymous forum like this.

I can think of many examples from my humble and nervous life story. I’m an Accountant and have been part of the professional class from the age of twenty-two. This should have provided a good dose of social capital, particularly in situations where I was the customer. But this has rarely manifested itself in real life. I have never complained about service, sent food back or brought something back to a shop, even when I had the receipt.

I’ve spent my life wearing clothes that don’t fit, eating food I haven’t ordered and paying bills even when I can see that I’ve been overcharged.

I called a washing machine repair man once. He came round and told me the machine was knackered and needed to be replaced and as luck would have it, he happened to have a beautiful new machine in the back of his van. I knew I was being ripped off but I didn’t argue. I handed over the cash and quickly installed his gleaming piece of Chinese engineering.

As he was leaving, I casually mentioned that I was looking for a new oven too. This is when I discovered that he was a bespoke trader in all white goods and could satisfy all my needs. He duly measured up the space (with his eyes and not a tape it should be said) and promised to return the following week with the new equipment.

When he wheeled it into my kitchen, the following Tuesday, I was not impressed. I’m not an expert on ovens, but I can spot a cheap imitation when I see it. I presume that most of the oven industry is aimed at discerning homeowners and businesses that fuss over functions and wattage. Then there is a small market for slum landlords who want to kit out their decrepit bedsits with the cheapest and tackiest equipment possible. And my new machine fell into the latter category.

But there was a bigger problem that the rogue trader should have spotted when he measured up the space. My existing set up was a separated hob and oven. The hob sat up top of a bench while the oven was below the bench. The new machine was a combined hob and oven which couldn’t be fitted as there was the not insignificant matter of the bench being in the way.

We stared at it for an age before the trader spoke. “I’m sorry mate, but this is what you asked for” as he pointed at the piece of cheap crap he had just wheeled inti the kitchen.

My immediate thought was that I hadn’t asked for anything. I wanted my current set up replaced and he had stood in the same kitchen a week before looking at the set up.

Then he put on a pleading voice and claimed he was doing me a favour and he couldn’t bring it back.

Any rational person would have told him to take a hike, but I meekly handed over the cash and then asked a carpenter friend to call round and saw off a piece of my bench.

I say all this to highlight that I’m no longer as humble as I once was. This is down to getting old. I recently turned sixty and while it caused me to look back on a lot of things that I no longer have the energy or inclination to do, it also made me realise that there are advantages to being in the third age. The main one being that I no longer give the proverbial. I will complain about poor service, ask questions if something is unclear and not be afraid to publicly moan. I’ve turned into a parody of Victor Meldrew, which is fine apart from the fact that I’m now six years older than he was when he started his role in One Foot in the Grave.

But it is better than living your life like Milhouse in The Simpsons.

I’m trying not to think about the things I’ll never do again. Some of them I’m happy to give away, like nightclub visits or drinking Tequila. Others come with a tinge of regret. I’ve probably played my last game of football. It’s been nine years since my last outing. I was man marking a guy called Rob. he was in his forties, bald as a coot but built like a brick shithouse. He had good close control and could run all night and as a result was normally the top scorer at the seniors five a side night in Blockhouse Bay. I had been given the task to mark him and the only thing we had in common was a lack of hair.

I was fifty-one at the time, had the close control of an elephant and was carrying more weight than a pack mule. I also hadn’t played football for about ten years. But I stuck manfully to him and think I kept him to single figures.

I know that there is nothing stopping me from joining an over 60’s football team, but the truth is that if I had no interest in the last 10 years, why would I suddenly get an interest now.

I will probably never play squash again. Again, this is not because it’s banned for over sixties, but I lost interest years ago and am unlikely to rekindle it.

The meek will inherit the earth. But they will be sixty when it happens and won’t be afraid to tell anyone about it.

Do you satisfy my values?

 “I come from down in the valley, where mister when you’re young, they bring you up to do, just like your Daddy done”. Well, my Daddy worked in a brewery and while I love beer, my parents had greater ambitions. Unfortunately, the limit of that ambition is that they didn’t want me to have to wear overalls in whatever job I ended up in.

Forty-three years ago, I was studying hard for my school leaving exams. I grew up on a street that the poet Patrick Kavanagh famously described as one that he wouldn’t bring a bucket of shit down, in case the shit got a bad name. But in my secondary school years, I had delusions of grandeur and attached myself to the kids who grew up on the smart side of town. The sort of people who lived in houses that weren’t stuck to other houses and had front gardens.

The talk at school in January 1982 was all about college courses. Some of my friends wanted to do medicine, some engineering and some business and marketing. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had no ambition to pursue a particular career or to change the world. In the end, I applied to do an arts degree, which is the course taken by people who just want to drink and meet girls at Uni.

In the end, I didn’t even do that. My Dad was on strike for a lot of my final year and money was tight. My Mother was nothing if not practical and she didn’t see the financial sense in shelling out lots of dosh when I had no plan for my life.

I swallowed my pride and headed back to my careers teacher from school and asked if he could help me find a job. I think I had the idea that I’d work for a year and then self-fund my own glittering college career. However, the job he found me was in an Accountancy office, where I was initially paid less that a paperboy would earn. After the first year, I found that I was good at accounting and could see a future with lots of money and a job that would satisfy my ego’s desire to present myself as a success.

Now I’m hurtling at full speed towards sixty and finding that I’m drawn towards introspection and questioning my values for the first time. I fully accept that this is a luxury offered to those of us with money and time. I’m sure my Dad never spent time wondering if his creativity values were being met while he was cleaning out a brewing tank.

I have often wondered why I ended up in a job that I never even considered studying at school. Why do I do it when it results in so much stress and pressure? And why have I lived in five different countries and have now settled as far away as possible from where I was born?

I recently set out on a journey to try to understand this. To figure what my values are and the bigger questions in life, such as why am I here and where am I going? And is there a returns policy?

I have filled out questionnaires and completed on-line studies. I have stared into my soul and asked all the difficult questions of myself.

And my conclusion is that I’m quite happy with who I am.

My personality is creative, I love the Arts, from movies to theatre to books. I’m fascinated by history and politics, and I crave friendships that make me laugh. I also love adventure. Doing things for the first time and seeing as much of the world as possible.

But I also have an insecurity born out of my working-class upbringing that means that I want to be financially comfortable.

All in all, this tells me that I pursued a career that I wasn’t particularly excited by but was relatively competent in. However, it has provided the financial security to pursue all my other interests. It has paid for exotic holidays to exciting places, allowed me to perform on stage, go to the theatre and write blogs like this.

But most of all, I’ve made great friends through work, and this has satisfied my needs for humour and fun.

My need for adventure and to see the world has been met through work transfers that brought me to Luxembourg, Singapore and Melbourne.

To borrow a term from the accounting world, my Balance Sheet of life is looking healthy. On the asset side, I have lots of friends, a book in the process of being published, a loving wife and daughter and enough money to do the things I want to do.

On the liability side, my job gives me stress and parenting can be exhausting. I also feel like my body is aching in the places where it used to play. All of that means that I would love to go bungy jumping and head to the theatre once a week, but struggle to find the energy or time to do either.

In short, it seems that instead of trying to find a world that met my values, I have adapted my values to the environments I found myself in. At work, I look for creative and intellectually stimulating tasks. I seek out friendships and fun in the office and I use the money they pay me to pursue the things that really please me. That includes paying me to go to places I never would have gone to otherwise. This is why I have been able to work for rapacious American banks whose internal values don’t align with mine.

I have never been defined by the job I do. It’s a chore that gives me some positives and the freedom to follow my dreams outside work. The problem comes when work is all consuming like it is for me currently. But that is next week’s story.