The Surly Dub and The Happy Culchie

I don’t know when it started. I guess it was the first Friday after one of my regular sojourns through the Southern Hemisphere. I would have met up with a few friends for some of Dublin’s finest Guinness in the small snug in the Palace Bar.

Their objective would have been to prove to the Department of Health that it wasn’t only pubescent teens that binge drank, but 30ish bankers as well. My intentions would have been to bore them with tales of sailing under crimson Tasman skies.

I don’t know when it started, but on one of those nights I’m sure that the exit strategy was hatched. The seed of my desire to move to the Antipathies was planted and it germinated in the nourishing nectar of Arthur Guinness’ finest.

My mate Baz was in on the plan early. He also felt the gravitational pull south and he also knew we needed a plan. As all of our discussions were held in pubs, I guess it’s not unusual that our plans centred on those sort of establishments.

Despite the fact that neither of us knew the first thing about it, our plan was to open a pub, Irish in character and physically situated somewhere between Sydney and Santiago.

I guess we figured that a pub was our ticket to financial security and an easy life. The fact that it would mean working till 4am most nights and would provide all the temptation we needed to become fully blown alcoholics seemed inconsequential to us. In our missionary zeal we felt it was our destiny as Irishmen abroad to run pubs and considered it a challenge to our personal pride that it would be the best damned Irish pub in the Southern Hemisphere.

We had both travelled extensively over the years and one of the things that troubled us as roving Irish ambassadors was the appalling state of Irish pubs around the world. We gave the gift of sociability to the people of the earth and seem to have forgotten that some gifts need to keep on giving.

We handed over the upkeep of Irish pubs to the corporate multinationals and get rich quick merchants and they turned them into a homogenised blob of shallowness. We Irish have long figured out that Irish pubs abroad are a double bogey. They steal from you the pleasure of enjoying a foreign experience while not quite making you feel at home either.

So Baz and I decided that we would head South and create an Irish pub that would be true to the traditions and glory of our heritage. A pub that would be simple and austere. A pub that concentrates on product and not presentation. On ambiance and not piped Pogues music. In short we wanted to do something that had never been done before. Run an Irish pub abroad that was just like an Irish pub back home.

Baz and I had pure thoughts. Each week after a few pints had loosened our imagination, we would perfect our plan. We worked through menus, music, signage, staff and all the other things required to a make a perfect public house. After a year or so, we could picture the pub in our heads. It would be called “The Surly Dub” in honour of Baz’s lineage and his pessimistic demeanour. When we did the cash-flows, we realised we needed extra revenue. So we updated our plans to include a nightclub down the back. I got the naming rights and being a cheerful country boy, I thought “The Happy Culchie” was appropriate.

Music would be banned unless it was live and we wouldn’t do food apart from toasted sandwiches and specially imported Tayto crisps and pink snacks. No Guinness posters would adorn our walls. We would have pictures of the Dowdallshill under 16 championship team of 1981 and perhaps a set list from the Lisdoonvarna festival of 1975.

There would be no road signs saying that it was 2 miles to Killarney along an unapproved B road, if for no other reason than it patently isn’t (are there any signposts left in Kerry by the way?). No copper kettles hanging from the wooden beamed rafters. No dark and pokey corners lit only by a small candle upon an empty whiskey barrel.

Corporate fascism seems to think that Irish pubs should look like sheebeens in kitchens of 19th Century peasant houses. Except for the food of course. Garlic bread and chicken nuggets weren’t common in the famine ravished kitchens of 19th Century Irish houses.

In fact Irish pubs look like the front room of a middle class family in the 1950’s on an evening when they’ve invited the neighbours around for a few drinks. Pubs should be bright and designed for conversation and not shouting. They should have Formica topped tables and odd sized stools and you should look at the walls because they are novel and not because they are covered with colourful animals being chased by Guinness workmen.

In the end, I took the easy option of a safe job in Australia and Baz wimped out. But every now and again when the smell of porter is caressing the air, my mind will wander to thoughts of the “The Surly Dub” and how much we would have charged for a pint of Harp Export. Imagine my disappointment then when I stumbled upon “The Drunken Poet” in Melbourne. It was as though its owner Siobhan had been eavesdropping on Baz and me all those years ago. Because God Damn it, she’s gone and designed exactly the pub we’d imagined. Right down to the pink snacks.

She has stolen my dream but I’m not bitter. Because I’ve finally found an Irish pub here that I’d be happy to frequent. The Guinness isn’t too bad either, which is not something I thought I’d find myself saying in this country. And maybe she has some room out the back and might be interested in a joint venture. The Happy Culchie might have a future yet.

The Kalgoolie Liberation Front

Succession plans are in the air this week. Will Tibet manage to sneak away from China while everyone is concentrating on the Olympics? Will
Burma succeed from the Alice in Wonderland existence it currently lives in and join the civilised world? And most importantly of all, will
Carlton's plans to dominate AFL over the next 10 years come to fruition.

Some plans have to be spoken of in more careful tones. The world is listening you know. Some computer buried deep inside a mountain in
Colorado is about to be triggered because I've used the words military takeover in a blog. You ask me why I'd do this if I know it's been monitored. I'd like to say that I'm pushing the boundaries of liberty. But the truth is, I'm
just desperate for more readers and the CIA will do. How's it going
guys? Have you found Osama yet?

Actually, if the CIA are reading this, I'd like to ask them a question.
When did conspiracy become a crime? When did two people just thinking
about something, become worthy of ten years in Federal Prison? A friend
of mine and myself use to plan the overthrow of the Irish Government and
the establishment of a 32 County Marxist Republic whenever we got drunk.
Little did we know that we were breaking several laws in countries that make
up the coalition of righteousness in the global war on terror.

But risk be damned, I'm going to launch a conspiracy anyway. There is
one great separation movement yet to be born. I call out to all free men
(and free women if they can take a break from running the world) to join
me in this great struggle for life, liberty and the pursuit of material
gain. Together we can strike at the imperial heart of colonialism and
raise the flag of freedom above this parched and tortured land.

I present to you the Kalgoolie Liberation Front (Maoist wing). Join this
week and you get a free beret.

Let me try to explain the indignity and injustice that the good people
of Kalgoolie have had to ensure. There are 150 seats in the Australian
lower house. 149 of these are split between two thirds of the country.
The other one third of the land mass only gets one MP. You might think
this a little unfair until you realise that Kalgoolie only has 80,000
residents, despite covering 2.3m square kms.

It's basically Western Australia minus Perth. Stretching from the
Southern Ocean to the Indonesian straits with the Indian Ocean nestling
to the West. A land of desert and baking all year round sun. You'd
wonder how it can attract even 80,000 souls until you realise that what
lies below the desert is what counts.

Kalgoolie sits on a treasure chest of natural resources that are
the envy of the Industrial World. There is more gold than you could fit
on a rappers chest. More Iron Ore than you'd need to fill Shane
McGowan's teeth, more diamonds than would fit in Victoria Beckham's
belly button and more Uranium than Iran would ever need if was doing
what the yanks claim it is doing.

But the Kalgoolie Liberation Front won't mention any of this. We won't
mention the fact that succession will result in us becoming the third
richest country in the world by capita, or that cleaners can earn the
salaries of Wall Street Accountants in the mines of our fair land. Like
all good liberation movements, we'll play on the softer, more altruistic
reasons for our struggle. We don't want the world to turn against us when
we're fighting against the tyrants in Canberra (although the offer of
cheap Uranium should keep most of the world happy). We'll play on our
concerns for the local indigenous people whose lands we will continue
raping after we take over. We'll play on the lack of democracy and that
our one representative in Canberra is finding it difficult to arrange
parish hall clinics each weekend, given that his constituency is about
the size of Europe.

We do of course have the problem of Perth. This leeching excuse for a
City will become even more isolated once we obtain our independence. It
is already pretty isolated to be honest, perched as it is on the West
Coast of Australia. Once you leave the City boundaries, you'll drive
2,000 miles before you come to the next Krispy Kreme donut shop and
that's just not civilised.

The City appears to exist purely to profit from the resource boom of our
fair land of Kalgoolie. Which is why it is the favorite destination for
English and White South African settlers. They have a long history of
profiting from the labour of others. They will of course want to join us
in our independence struggle but we must fight this at all cost. That would
reduce our share of the pie substantially and would risk them wanting
to run things in the future. Democracy has failed Kalgoolie up till now.
Why would want to risk it in the future?

So our first task must be to build a strong border around the perimeter
of Perth and guard it with our lives. Or at least the lives of the
Kalgoolians we will conscript into our army. With a bit of luck, most of
them will be killed and we'll be left with just enough people to run the
mines and ourselves. We'll run the country from our embassy in
Melbourne, because it gets a bit hot in the homeland to be honest.

So come join the fight. As George Bush would say, you're either with us or
against us. Although it's fair to say that in this context there is also
the chance that you've never heard of us. We plan to strike during the
Olympics when the eyes of the world are on separatism in Tibet. And if
the CIA are listening, can we buy all our guns from you like Al Qaeda
did?

We won't make a crisis out of a drama

I studied "The Merchant of Venice" for me Intercourse. That was what we called the exams that you did at 15 in Ireland. It was the only intercourse I was getting at the time but that’s another story. I used to know that play off from beginning to end. I knew that Antonia fancied the arse off Bassanio (literally) and Portia was an early Kd Lang fan. At 15, the gay references in literature were very important to us for reasons that only Freud could decipher. However, I don't think I ever really analysed it the way I have "The Memory of Water". I've now seen MOW so many times, I'm having dreams about it and unfortunately they all involve coffins rather than the snogging scene.

I directed this play in Ireland in 2006 as a tribute to my dear old mum. I was very jealous of the cast back then as they get to burn brightly under the stage lights while the poor director bites his nails in the darkness of the auditorium.

It’s been my dream therefore to act in this play even though the male parts are the equivalent of the reproduction process. We’re there at the start, full of enthusiasm and energy and we turn up at the end for support. But we don’t really contribute much in between.

We've now finished our marathon 14 night run and I'm more exhausted than Warren Beatty's index finger. I really don't know how people act and hold down full time jobs here.

Drama has been a large part of my life since I first played a love hungry young farmer in 1993. I’ve performed with four different groups in three different countries but the most interesting thing I’ve found is the ability to compare this latest production to our humble production back in 2006.

Rehearsals were much more intense. I kind of wonder how my old group in Dublin can pull off such wonderful productions based on two nights a week for 9 weeks. They start at 8.15pm when everyone stops talking about the Hermes Bag they picked up in the Brown Thomas sale. Break at 9pm for tea and Jaffa cakes and a chat about Charles' dogs or the latest gay cowboy movie showing in the Multiplex. Start again at 9.30pm and finish at 10pm when Paul locks the doors.

In Melbourne, we did 7.30pm to 10.30pm twice a week with no break and then 2pm to 7pm every Sunday. In Dublin, the idea of warm ups was to lift four chairs and make a phony set. In Melbourne, vocal and physical warm up was obligatory. I can now say "I want a proper cup of coffee in a proper cup of coffee cup" while standing on one leg and turning my knee clockwise.

The lighting was fantastic and benefited from a fixed gantry and the lighting manager from the Melbourne Opera house doing some freelance work. There were 97 light and sound effects during the play which is about 95 more than we had. The overall effect was to have a floating bedroom slide into the sea. We had side curtains and a back screen that could take light changes and projection. I hate to say it but flats are very 1980's. My recommendation to Dublin would be to invest in some side curtains and a back canvas. Takes away all that painting fun but means that future Me’s don't have to climb ladders.

The acting was excellent as was the direction. It was a bit over the top though. The director came in at the interval and end of each production to give us notes. I also struggled with some of the voice direction. She wanted me to project from the stomach but with an inflection from the top of my head, as though I was smiling behind my eyes! I took this to mean shouting which came in handy when the air conditioning machines were turned on and the cockatoos started dancing on the tin roof. Not a problem we had to face in Dublin, it should be noted.

As with all groups, there are nice people that I would like to work with again and not so ni nice people. You meet a lot of pre-Madonnas in amateur drama. I was in a play in Dublin years ago, where I had to walk on at the end and execute the lead character. That’s all I did. I used to joke that "Lonely Hearts" was a tale about an executioner with some flash backs, but one of the girls in this play took “Me, me, me” to new levels. She told me the other night that I should take two steps back because she couldn't see Frank when he was speaking and she needed to see him to reply. I said "Have you tried acting?" and she hasn't spoken to me since.

The party was a damp squib, but then I am cursed to remember the Northbrook Hotel in the early years of the 21st Century and compare everything to it. John "Darcey" Glynn reciting "The Planters Daughter" to a trembling female audience, Charles and myself re-enacting act 2 of "Round and Round the Garden" while helping ourselves to beer from behind the bar. And stumbling out at 8.30am into a Dublin Sunday morning having drank ourselves sober. We’ll never see those days again.

We had the cast and crew party in the foyer. There were some nice presents, particularly for me. Nobody told me, but the tradition is for the cast to buy each other a present. So I got 5 presents and didn’t have to buy anything! Bonus. I was driving as we were out in the sticks. So I had one glass of wine and made my way home. No murdering of Leonard Cohen songs, no Waltzing Matilda with footnotes. No mad hooves galloping in the sky. But the weak, washy way of true tragedy.

At least I didn’t have to help with taking the stage down. I think I was supposed to, but I didn’t anyway. That’s one tradition I am taking from Dublin.

The audience loved the play. Said it’s the best piece of theatre they’ve seen etc. And it is. I hope the DVD will be out in time for Christmas!

The Great Ocean Road

Surely there is no greater contrast between safety and danger than that represented by the border of land and sea. On one side you can sip cocktails and enjoy the magnificent vista. Two meters away the sea can rage in God made fury and yet offer no threat unless you cross the threshold from terra firma to water.

The Great Ocean Road provides this contrast better than anywhere else on earth. The might of the Southern Ocean has been battering the land for millions of years and has created cliffs and coves that pockmark the coast like a broken saw.

And yet you can stand at the many well maintained viewing points and review in comfort the raging torrents below. It’s like standing on the edge of the world, but the world has you safely tucked in its arms.

There are many places in the world that have had the arrogance to place the word “Great” before their title. I think you should only be allowed to call yourself “Great Something” if a smaller version of yourself is close at hand. Such as Great Snufflebottom and Little Snufflebottom. But throwing a “Great” in just because you feel a bit up yourself is a different matter. Who decided that Britain was great for example? Great at invading other countries perhaps. I suspect it derives from a state of national insecurity, brought on from trying to convince the Scots and the Welsh that they weren’t really being annexed by England.

Australia seems to revel in the “Great” prefix. You have the Great Barrier Reef, the Great Dividing Range and the aforementioned Ocean Road. Their titles no doubt derive from the Australian requirement to be the best in the world at everything but I prefer to think that the names arose because Australia’s large Irish community would have been the first to witness these places.

I can picture a freckly red head with a pig under his arm. He’s just cut through the uncleared bush land of Western Victoria to reach the wild and untamed shore. As he stood upon the cliff top and admired the twelve limestone stacks that stood imperiously against the on-coming tide his face broke into a toothy grin and he exclaimed “Ah, sure that’s just Great”.

My other theory is that Australians like adding Great before place names because of their shocking lack of imagination when it comes to naming things. The Snowy Mountains, Snowy River, Blue Mountains and Mount Beauty suggest that poets were not included in the naming process. It seems more likely that it was left up to sheep farmers to do the business. Bruce would have turned to Dougy and said, “What’ll we call them Dougy? To which Dougy replied “Well it’s got lots of snow on it. We could call them the Incandescent Peaks of Celestial Majesty, but I can’t spell that, so bugger it, why don’t we just call them The Snowy Mountains”.

The Ocean Road would sound a little weak without its prefix though. Great gives it an importance befitting its wonder. There are few comparable drives in the world where each corner turned elicits a gasp of astonishment from the viewer. There are bigger cliffs elsewhere, stronger waves, more beautiful hamlets tucked in sleepy bays. But none of these come together in such natural serendipity as on the Great Ocean Road.

The weather plays an important role in the magnificence of this and other Australian attractions. The sun shines most days here and this means that the tourist is almost guaranteed a view of the coastline at its finest. The light catches the limestone stacks of the Twelve Apostles and provides a brilliant contrast to the bluey green of the surrounding ocean.
The day we got there was overcast but the light still danced along the coastline like a proud shopkeeper displaying its wares. The wind was calm and yet the waves still crashed against the shore as though an angry ocean was screaming for attention. A few brave souls had taken to surfboards but the rest of us just stood and admired the fury of the open sea and the quiet resistance of the land to the ceaseless pounding. At night we camped by the beach and fell asleep to the comforting rhythm of the waves as they caressed the shore.

I compare this to Ireland which has comparable sights of natural wonder. But on the three occasions when I’ve visited the Cliffs of Moher you couldn’t see the ocean for all the mist and rain and the wind blew you back every time you went within 100 meters of the edge. They’ve built a large interpretive centre there now. This is to allow visitors the chance to enjoy the beauty of the cliffs without having to brave the elements. For those unwilling to pay the ridiculously high admission charge to see a computer generated cliff, there is always the well appointed car park in which to huddle from the Atlantic rains.

Rain is a problem in Victoria too. Except here it is the lack of it that causes people to worry. Drought reigns (if you’ll excuse the pun) and the occasional shower is enough to make people run into the street and stand with hands outstretched and face pointed skywards. The dry and parched earth of the countryside seems incongruous beside the expanse of the Southern Ocean. But that just adds to the colour and beauty of the drive.

I’m slowly ticking off the places I want to see in Victoria (the rest of Australia and New Zealand are a different matter). But as we drove back along the Great Ocean Road I wondered about those other things I wanted to see here. Wildlife. The search for the first Kangaroo goes on. It’s been 10 months guys, when are you going to say hello? I’m beginning to think it’s all a myth and that Kangaroos, Koalas and Emus are only a tourist ploy. I blame Skippy. He set an expectation that the Australia countryside is sadly failing to live up to. What will I do if I’m ever stuck down a well?

And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda

April 25th is Anzac Day and is the closest thing I’ve seen to Good Friday in Ireland. Not so much because of the celebration of death (one person died in 33AD on Good Friday and thousands died on Anzac Day in 1915) but more because of the lack of alcohol. Pubs close on two days in Ireland. Good Friday and Christmas Day. You’re generally sorted for the latter through the generous quantities of Whiskey and Blue Nun wine that your parents have been stocking up since September. And it’s rude (and usually too cold) to leave the house on Christmas Day anyway.

Good Friday is another thing altogether. Modern Ireland has lost most of its spirituality and sense of tradition. In the old days, we fasted on Good Friday having endured 40 days of chocolate or sugar in tea denial. Fasting wasn’t quite starving yourself. You were still allowed one main meal and two collations. The collations exercised my mind as a youngster. As a young child I thought my Dad was saying “relations” which pleased my immensely. The Good Friday main meal was normally frugal, consisting of smoked fish and some indigestible white sauce that tasted like the nasal outpourings of a diseased skunk. So the thought of eating two cousins for breakfast and tea was a thrilling prospect. I had some very fat cousins.

As I got older, I learned that collations are a meal not exceeding seven ounces. My Dad used to wind us up by getting the baking scales out and weighing our cornflakes on Good Friday morning. I guess in his own way he was trying to make us feel the pain of Christ on his way to Cavalry. The Catholic Church has some weird similes like that.

Now as an adult, I’m able to look up Wikipedia and see that “In the Roman Catholic Church, the term collation is used to describe each of the two small meals allowed on days of fasting (with or without abstinence). The term originated in Benedictine monasteries where the reading of excerpts from The Lives of the Fathers (Collationes Patrum), written by John Cassian, was followed by a light meal.”
And there was me thinking that Dad had made it all up.
All that is gone now of course, along with Corpus Christi processions, getting soot on your forehead on Ash Wednesday and standing round rock pools on August 15th waiting for the water to miraculously rise. They were part of a simpler, more innocent Ireland before Starbucks and pre marital sex.

But for some reason, the pubs still close on Good Friday. This leads to panic stocking up on Holy Thursday (although I don’t know why we still call it that when nobody treats it as Holy anymore) and impromptu house parties. For those of us who grew up close to the border, Good Friday was the only day of the year when we applauded the Protestant controlled government of Northern Ireland. They might have closed the pubs up there every Sunday but they opened them on Good Friday just to annoy the Catholics. In one of those beautiful ironies that comes from bigotry, most of the patrons in the pubs were Catholics. Feckless alcoholics that we are.

We’d sneak across the border and drink guiltily in the gin palaces of South Armagh. Getting back was always fun as you’d be three sheets to wind and so had to avoid the British Army, Police and IRA checkpoints. The IRA ones generally didn’t care if you were drunk, but you didn’t want to accidentally run over one of those boys in the dark.

Anzac Day in Australia is similar. People go to extremes to drink, like visiting RSL pubs (the only ones allowed to open during the day) to sit at formica tables and watch ninety year olds play cards. Ninety thousand of them pitch up at the MCG to see the two most hated teams in AFL take lumps out of each other just so they can drink at the bar at halftime.

Many Australians will rise at dawn and make their way to War memorials to remember those who fell at Gallipoli and other far flung shores. Gallipoli is seared into the Australian psyche; mainly it provides an opportunity to bash the English for poor management and to exert Australian independence. Few people here mention the fact that Australians traveled half way round the world in 1915 to invade somebody else’s country and had their arse kicked in the process. And I wonder how the large Turkish population in Australia feels on April 25th? They won the battle of Gallipoli but don’t seem to get invited to the party.

Isn’t it strange though how countries prefer to remember military defeats rather than victories? In Ireland we commemorate the glorious failure that was the Easter Rising. The English like nothing better than to talk about the Dunkirk Spirit, as though running away was anything to be proud of. If it was, the Italians would have a celebration every day of the year. And even the jingoistic Yanks love making movies about Vietnam.

There seems to be something nobler about glorious defeat as opposed to the jingoism of victory.

I guess that there is nobody left who stood on that beach in Turkey in 1915. But there are plenty of old men left who fought in Malaya and Papua New Guinea in World War Two and maybe they’ll be joined by Vietnam and Iraq veterans. Every generation of Australians since the founding of the Federation have found an excuse to spill their blood upon a foreign field. Their battles become less popular but it does nothing to diminish their sacrifice. To die in Kandahar in 2008 is just as miserable and pointless as falling on the beach in 1915.

In sixty years time, the survivors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will gather at the war memorials as tired old men. One can only hope that the pubs will be open then for them to enjoy a pint afterwards.

Stand Up Comedy-One Night Only

Welcome to the Melbourne Comedy Festival and thanks for dropping by. I can’t see you too well, what with the lights and everything, but I’ll assume the hall is full. That fits into my feeling of paranoia. I’ve always assumed that people are following me. Unfortunately, I’ve got low self esteem. So I assume these aren’t very important people. But please don’t take that as an insult. See I also suffer from a fear of upsetting people.

I’m part of the meek population. We’re the ones that God says will inherit the earth. But being meek, we’ll feel overwhelmed with the responsibility and say to God “No actually, if you don’t mind, you can give the Earth to someone else. We’ll just stay here and stare at our shoes.”

I have to admit that I’m a bit nervous about this as it’s my first public performance. You tell yourself these jokes in front of the mirror but when you start laughing at them, you convince yourself you’re mental. That stops you laughing and then you get depressed at how fat you look and start to notice the tuffs on your chin that you forgot to shave.

Blokes shouldn’t really look at themselves in mirrors. We’re programmed to think of women as good looking, so staring at yourself can be a little unsettling. Girls on the other hand are happy admiring other girls, which is just as well because blokes like looking at them doing it.

They make you fill out a form before you can take part in this comedy festival. It asks loads of personal questions for reasons that have to be evil. Why do they need to know your mother’s maiden name? Are they trying to check whether they dated her in an earlier life, so as to avoid embarrassment later?

I had to answer that question about eye colour. As I was standing in front of a mirror telling stories to myself, I took the opportunity to check. Guys only know three colours. Red, Blue and Green. We think Peach and Orange are fruits and that Magenta is a porn star’s name. I figured my eyes couldn’t be blue or red, despite all the booze and lack of sleep. So green they must be. Imagine my surprise when I looked and saw that they were mainly white!

But enough of the observational stuff. What’s been happening in the news? Well I see that poor old Charlton Heston is dead. No doubt the anti gun lobby are currently trying to snatch the rifle from his cold dead hands. They’d do well to remember one of his most famous quotes. “Guns don’t kill people. It’s the little bullets that come out of the guns that kill people”.

Sage words indeed, but that’s no surprise given the biblical characters that Charlton played down the years. His gun totting attitude got him into a lot of trouble on those sets though. He tried to get them to rewrite “The Ten Commandments” so that when Moses is expelled from the land of Egypt, he retaliates with a blast from his legally held AK47 assault rifle. And he caused more trouble on the set of “The Greatest Story Ever Told” when he tried to slip a rifle under his John the Baptist tunic so as to blow Salome’s head off instead of his.

Charlton is a big hero of the religious right in America, which is ironic because his most famous role was a vindication of evolution. Except that “Planet of the Apes” suggests that apes evolved from men and not the other way round. By the way, did any of you find that one of your early sexual experiences was to fancy the female ape in Planet of the Apes? Still bothers me that one.

Americans are weird about their guns. Just because a document written 230 years ago says “We uphold the right of all men to bear arms” doesn’t mean you have to stick by it now. If that was the case, Italians would still think it was OK to marry horses and England would still think it ruled most of the world. OK maybe that last bit is still true, but the yanks are on dodgy ground if they are relying on old documents. I mean there were a lot of misprints in those days. What if the revolutionary American army was short of men and wanted to enlist trained grizzly’s from Yellowstone national park (Imagine Yogi and Boo-boo in military fatigues and you’ll get the picture). Jefferson turns to Washington and says “We better write this down”. But somewhere in the process “We uphold the right of all men to arm bears” gets screwed up and before you know where you are, you’ve 300 million guns and defenceless bears being shot at. As Alanis Morrisette would say, “Now isn’t that ironic”.

Talking of ironic, I’ve been looking around Melbourne lately. You guys have a great City. But you’re a bit boring with the names. How many dead white men can there be? But the Harold Holt swimming pool in Malvern makes up for this. What delicious imagination you need to call a swimming pool after someone who drowned. Harold was Prime Minister of Australia in 1967, when he mysteriously disappeared at sea. Calling a swimming pool after him would be like Dallas opening the “John F Kennedy Memorial Rifle Range” or Buckingham Palace launching the “Princess Diana Memorial Driving School”.

Harold may well be enjoying the irony because many people believe he didn’t drown at all but was picked up by a Chinese submarine and whisked back to Beijing. But I prefer to think that he’s up above, arguing with God about how he’s too meek to inherit the earth. Last week Charlton Heston arrived in heaven. St. Peter said, “what did you die off?” To which Heston replied “A Tuesday”. St. Peter didn’t laugh as he’d heard that joke from every dead Irish person since 1850.

“What killed you?”

“The Big C”.

“Right” said St. Peter. “You can share with Harold Holt. The same thing happened him in 1967”.

You’ve been a great audience, goodnight.

Away with the Birds

Ornithology is not a subject that was close to my heart in Ireland. I’m sure that are beautiful birds there but to me they all looked the same. Well OK, I can tell the difference between a swan and a robin redbreast but most of the ones in between just look like small brown or black things with angry faces.

Victoria on the other hand has every variety under the sun and a few more besides that shirk God’s rays and only come out in the twilight hours.

Pigeons seem to be the dominant species, in the City at least. Many people consider them to be rats with wings, but rats wouldn’t be so cheeky or oblivious to the public around them. They thrive on Burke Street where the rubbish of a million shoppers provides ample nourishment.

As I waited for a tram yesterday on the corner of Burke and Swanston, I spotted a clever member of the pigeon population who had realised that a bounty awaited him within the groove of the tram tracks. He swooped from a great height and made for a tasty morsel trapped in the rails. He stood astride the metal bar and poked to his heart’s content, seemingly unaware that he was placing himself directly in the path of the wheel of the oncoming tram.

A small group of us assembled to see if he would be crushed. It was a morbid gathering it must be said but none of us seemed the least bit concerned at the imminent prospect of feathers and blood adorning the footpath. Perhaps like me, they had lost sympathy for our grey feathered friends and were equally curious as to why none of these birds ever seem to come to harm, despite hurtling themselves between tramlines, buses and the swaying bags of inconsiderate back-packers.

Down the street the 96 tram trundled and we waited to see if the pigeon would notice. He seemed oblivious to the imminent danger and pointed his backside defiantly to the on-coming vehicle. He pecked on as the tram grew ever closer, its wheels creaking along the metal groove. The tram driver rang his bell and for a moment the world stood still.

I wondered would the street miss one pigeon. They seemed to have so many after all. They love the fast food restaurants and sandwich shops that service the City centre. Most of these shops leave their doors open in summer, in order to tempt the passing public with the aroma of fresh bread or fried chicken.

Unfortunately, it also tempts the birds. The little sparrows attack anything on the ground, while the pigeons take on the tables and benches. Last week, I passed KFC where inside 12 pigeons were gathered round an abandoned tray of nuggets and chips like the apostles at the last supper and were busy tucking in while the staff and customers went about their business as though the birds weren’t there.

I wouldn’t call myself squeamish but it strikes me as odd that a City that prides itself on cleanliness in the area of parklands and street cleaning should be so lax when it comes to feral birds.

A little bit outside the city centre, the sea-gulls reign. Melbourne is a maritime city, but it’s strange how far inland they roam. Their favorite venue appears to be the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Maybe they’re there all the time but you only really notice them when a match is on TV.

They drift in one by one and gather on the pitch oblivious to the 36 players on the field and the 70,000 watching in the stands. I don’t know if they are there for the worms or whether they are like the rest of Melbourne and are just mad about the Footy.

The players seem immune to their presence in fairness and there seems to be an unspoken rule to avoid the part of the pitch occupied by the birds. The Argentinean soccer team that played there last October hadn’t been let in on this secret. They thought they had stumbled onto the set of a Hitchcock remake. Messi was so traumatised he hasn’t played for Barcelona since.

A little further out in the parklands that run alongside the Yarra River, the bats are king. Bats get a bad rap in mythology. Dracula, vampires and being extras in every horror movie since Nosferatu.

But when you see one up close, you can see that this reputation is entirely justified. It’s hard to imagine that there is an uglier animal in existence, although the Manchester United team of 1999 would give them a good run for their money.

To their credit, bats seem to be social creatures. They congregate in their thousands among the tall gum trees that garland the riverbank. They hang upside down and cry out to each other in blood curdling shrieks until the riverside becomes a cathedral of noise and faintly unpleasant smells.

Then at twilight they drop from their lofty perches and glide down the valley. The slow swish of their massive wings sounds like an armada of attack helicopters and the sky darkens as they depart on mass, in search of bloody prey and the opportunity to scare young children.

Watching them I found was the perfect way to spend St Valentines Day!

There are of course beautiful birds here too. Gayly colored parrots are common; their red and green feathers offer a welcome distraction from the parched earth of a Victorian summer. Galah’s live in the suburbs because farmers hate them. Their pink and grey plumage brightens the suburban sky and the bright brush on their heads gives them the majestic look of an Indian Maharaja.

I guess Australia has the advantage of having had a full complement of beautiful native birds before the white man got here and has added several hundred species of European birds in the meantime.

That’s the only explanation I can come to for why there are so many birds here. Or perhaps they are just indestructible. You regularly read about people being hit by trams but you never see dead birds in the street.

Our hungry friend confirmed that yesterday. The tram was about 10cm from his exposed behind when he flew off without as much as a backward glance. Maybe it’s peripheral vision or motion sensitivity that keeps them safe. Or perhaps they’ve sold their souls to the satanic rats in return for immortality.

The clocks went back this weekend and winter is approaching. I can hear the bats as I write. Perhaps the latter option is not so fanciful.