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.

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.

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.

     

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.   

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.

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.

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.