St Patrick in the Land of the Snakes

Irish Bars are a scourge upon the world, making the citizens of earth believe that all Irish people do is drink Kilkenny beer, collect Guinness ads from the early twentieth century and watch English soccer on TV. When in fact, only the last of these is true.

It’s hard to find a village these days anywhere on the globe that does not host a Bridie O’Reillys Irish Pub. They are as endemic and culturally accurate as McDonalds and yet on one day a year, it seems that there are not enough. 17th March is a day that when the world kindly allows the Irish to drink, urinate and vomit in public. It is probably the only national day on earth that is recognised and celebrated by people from all countries. The only national day where getting drunk is considered to be the best tribute you can make to a saint and the only national day where parades are allowed to be more flamboyant than Gay pride marches.

As I stood in the queue for PJ O’Briens on Melbourne’s south bank (the promise of “curry chips” had encouraged me to wait in the 40 degree heat) last Monday, the thought struck me that any enterprising bar in the City should have the sense to throw up a couple of green balloons and they would benefit from the overflow from the City’s over stretched fake Irish pubs.

I decided to investigate and low and behold just 40 metres down the bank, the World Bar had decided to get in on the action. They had the full balloon quota and had hired a rinky dinky little Irish band to entertain the patrons. They say that Guinness deteriorates the further you get from St James Gate. Well the same is true of Irish music. The best I’ve ever heard was in Connors Pub in Doolin in County Clare. The worst I’ve heard was in the World Bar on St. Patrick’s Day 2008.

As I entered, I spied the singer crouched over the mike with a hand clasped to his ear like Van Gogh on the way to hospital. He looked to be in so much pain that I was sure I was witnessing the first male child bearing act. My mind analysed the available data and I assumed that they had opened up the karaoke early for patrons who had been drinking all day. I settled in to try and figure out which song he was murdering when it became clear to me that he was the actually the official lead singer (and the only Irishman in the group as it turned out) and was managing to sing “Dirty Old Town” in a more drunken and incoherent manner than Shane McGowan had ever managed.

By the third or fourth song, it became clear that his approach was to sing each song in the voice of the original singer. Creativity was clearly not part of their plan. They did try something funky for “Molly Malone” but maybe this was only because there is no original voice to sing this in, unless you want to imitate South Dublin rugby tossers. The singer dropped his voice for the sad verse at the end of “Molly” and hugged the microphone like a drunk clinging to a lamppost on his journey home.

The verse would have had a better impact if he hadn’t just song it as the verse before. For that is the greatest fault of Irish bands that ply their trade in the Southern Hemisphere. Not only can they not sing, but they don’t know the bloody words. Like the guy in the kitchen at parties who knows the first verse and chorus to every song in the world but doesn’t know the second verse of any.

But the old folks who were there seemed to appreciate it. They got up to waltz to the “Green Fields of France” and for a moment St Patrick smiled benignly upon the exiles in Melbourne.

Then I saw another Guinness hat in the shape of a Shamrock and saw what St Patrick’s Day had become. Another human sacrifice at the altar of consumerism. Another opportunity to globalise, homogenise and standardise. Guinness are doing their best to buy the rights to St. Patrick’s Day and turn it into a global advertising campaign. When we were kids, we wore green rosettes and shrubs of shamrock with healthy portions of mud attached. We watched the Fire Brigade and Boy Scouts march down Main Street and we guiltily consumed mid Lenten sweets.

Now it seems impossible to celebrate without wearing a Guinness advertisement on your head, all of which are designed to perpetuate a cultural stereotype. Sure aren’t we all leprechauns at heart.

Not to be outdone, Heineken were keen this year to get in on the act. They are a Dutch brewing company but who’s going to complain when they’re handing out funny green hats. Some whiz back at head office had come up with the novel idea of giving out scratch cards with each purchase of their fizzy beer. The possible prize on offer was a green paper hat with the word “Heineken” liberally emblazoned upon it. No doubt they are still laughing in the board room back in Amsterdam at the thought of drunken Irishmen buying more and more of their tawdry product in the hope of becoming a walking advertisement for their beer.

I left as the band chose Van Morrison as their next victim for the firing squad. The river bank was crowded with drunken backpackers and the more established Irish community. Green was the dominant colour with the figure hugging rugby jersey being the most popular. In Sydney people tend to wear their County GAA jersey on St. Patrick’s Day. Melbourne has an older, more established Irish community and as with everything Sydney is brasher and more in your face.

I like the fact that Melbourne is more reserved and cultured. Unfortunately that means we didn’t get a parade whereas Sydney did. That seems a shame and next year I’d welcome one, even if it had to be sponsored by Guinness and Heineken.

Dan Fogelberg and The Innocent Age

Many Australians ask me why I left Ireland. They are mainly ones who haven’t been there. I think they have an image of freckly red heads dancing jigs before Guinness addled tourists in Western Seaboard pubs. Even the ones who have been there seemed to have spent their time flirting between castles and ceilis and managed to leave before the harsh realities kicked in.

There are many reasons why I left of course and most of them I’m not even consciously aware of myself. I guess it had more to do with the arriving than the departing. I wanted to come here more than I wanted to leave. But I don’t tell people this. I just mention the weather.

The truth is Ireland has the worst weather on the planet. Never cold enough to ski, slide or even throw snowballs. And never warm enough to leave the house without a woolly hat and gloves.

Australia on the other hand has ‘proper’ weather. Snow, ice, cyclones, spectacular electrical storms and blazing hot days when you could fry an egg under the sun, if you had an egg. And you get all this in a seven day period in Melbourne. Most days in Ireland it was too cold to leave the house. Ironically, today in Melbourne it’s too hot to do so. It’s 30c outside and it’s 11pm. I know this because I’m looking at the most popular website in Australia (OK, Australian Idol probably gets more hits, but I’m looking for dramatic effect here). The Bureau of Meteorology weather outlook. This gives 15 minute updates on temperature, humidity and rainfall. But everyone just looks at the temperature and wonders if they can make it from their air-conditioned office to their air-conditioned train without melting.

It peaked at 35c today. Not particularly a scorcher, we’ve had 45c this summer already, but hot enough to make you think twice about going for a jog on the beach. It’s the nights that are a problem. If it doesn’t drop below 20c you are faced with the prospect of a sleepless night or a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc induced slumber. On nights like this, I realise why Australia has such strong wine sales.

So I stuck the air-conditioning on at home and opened the internet to keep an eye on the weather. Technology is such now, that it’s easier to get accurate information from a web page than it is to stick your head out the window. While surfing the information highway, I stumbled across You Tube. I’m too old for bebo, too middle class for MySpace and too paranoid for facebook. You Tube gives me social networking without having to divulge any more information about myself than I’m a heterosexual male who likes female country singers who hate men.

I visited the site to do something I’ve meant to do since Christmas. For those of you who don’t know, Dan Fogelberg left us on December 16th and as the man said, I didn’t even know he was sick. Actually that’s not true. I heard he had problems a couple of years ago and that friends were rallying round. I wanted to call but it had been so long I was scared the shock might kill him. Little did I know then that the Big C would finally get him? And I don’t mean drowning!

Dan and myself kind of lost touch around 1992. I had moved to London and lost his address and he stopped writing (I actually only ever got one letter from him and that was a demand that I lay off the stalking back in 1985). The CD age had arrived and I had all his records on vinyl. It took me a while to backfill his catalogue and my tastes had kind of moved on then to maudlin tunes sung by anorexic long haired females. Dan was my teenage years, my growing up, my innocence. It was a bygone time when we had all our conquests planned before our dreams were turned to water and they trickled through our hands.

I first heard him sing on RTE Radio 2 on a tinny transistor back in 1981. The song was “Same Old Lang Syne”, a poetic tribute to a lost love. Back in 1981, I hadn’t had any loves, never mind lost ones, so it’s strange that this song should have touched such a chord. I saved up some money from my early creative work (overcharging drunk punters in the pub I worked in and pocketing the difference) and bought one of the seminal albums of all time. Dan Fogelberg’s “Innocent Age”. This was a double album, favoured by connoisseurs of “concept albums” like myself and it must have been really classy, because it contained all the words to the songs on a booklet inside.

I bought the album just before Christmas of that year and lost myself in its melodic tunes of Innocence Lost. Ironic really as my other obsession at that time was losing my innocence. I brought it to a party at Larry Cotters house around then as was the fashion in those bygone days. My mates were into The Human League and Duran Duran and I was hoping to educate them. I also wanted to impress a girl called Dearbla but she showed as little interest in me as my mates did in quality music.

I retired to a back room and put the Innocent Age on the record player, sat on the floor in the dark and listened to all four sides before returning to the party. Dan helped me through those years. He gave me a sense of common thought in a confused world.

So I logged onto You Tube tonight and typed in “Dan Fogelberg”. Maybe you have to die to get noticed, but Dan is certainly being noticed now. There are hundreds of videos and tributes to the man. It’s strange to read words written by somebody in Japan who is saying the same things as I’ve said above. It’s comforting to know that there are a lot of people out there as soppy as me.

Shoshin Seishu left this message and I think he sums up well for me.

“His music: So wonderful & full of insight & vulnerability (which in the privacy of our interior worlds, allowed even well-defended & emotionally walled-off men such as myself not only to feel but also to express our tenderness). In a particular four-year period, I can track passages, transitions, ups & downs, triumphs & heart-breaks, loves won & lost by certain Fogelberg songs & albums.”

Dan and the Innocent Age. It was nice knowing both of you.

A Letter from St Kilda

Controversy abounds in St. Kilda this week. This hippy Latin Quarter of Melbourne seems to have awoken from years of marijuana induced slumber to realise that Capitalism has overtaken it. The City is booming with rich migrants (like my good self) and heaps of foreign investment. A lot of this finds its way to St. Kilda each weekend, if it doesn’t get way laded at the casino on route.

The cake shops and pubs are the main beneficiaries, although there a few novelty shops that do well too, like the one on my street that only sells dog accessories. Or the one that sells only one brand of sports shoe and only in one size and colour at that.

But while the good folk of St. Kilda are happy to rake in the shillings, they don’t seem to like it when the shillings ask for something in return. Two issues seem to be bothering the locals at the moment. The triangle development is an attempt by big business to build 50 or so shops on the last remaining piece of land in this suburb. Which would be fine except the land is about the size of a postage stamp.

At the same time the government have decided to dredge the bay. This seems to have created the fear that two hundred years of sludge are about to be dumped on the fair beach of St. Kilda, which already has several hundred used syringes and condoms to deal with. Given how dirty the beach already is, you’d wonder why they care. But I guess even bag ladies don’t like being rained on.

The St. Kilda festival was on last weekend and it allowed protestors against both issues to campaign amongst the thousands of young people who had come to drink and listen to music that was free. To my educated ear, I am guessing the music was free because no-one in their right mind would pay to listen to it.

There are many fine festivals around the world, which will specialise in Art, Music, Comedy or Film. They allow patrons to indulge in a feast of similar events. Like seven movies you’ll never see at the cinema over seven nights. Gluttony of comics at a comedy festival or six Shakespeare plays over a long weekend. They can be exhausting but they serve a purpose. The St. Kilda festival is not like this.

It just seemed to be there because people remember St. Kilda festivals from years gone by and vaguely remember having a good time. After two hours of wandering around concession stands and avoiding novelty stilt walkers, I found myself turning into the Steve Martin character from Trains, Planes and Automobiles. I wanted to hunt down the festival organiser, grab him by the throat and yell “if you’re going to have a festival, have a bloody point”.

So I wasn’t feeling very positive when the first petition was shoved in my face. The girl holding it looked like she’d just disembarked from a Greenpeace anti whaling ship. The development was the issue exercising her dreadlocked mind. I asked her where the development would be and she looked at me blankly before replying “St. Kilda”. I told her that I’d kind of figured that much out from the name. She looked a bit lost, so I pointed over her shoulder at the patch of waste ground that stood like a carbuncle between the grand old Palais Theatre and the newly renovated St. Kilda Baths.

“What would you suggest we do with it if the development doesn’t happen?” She turned to survey the weeds and rubble and said ruefully “I guess we should just leave it as it is”.

And that’s the problem with development. Big business gobbles up any free space available and seeks to fill it in the same way that nature abhors a vacuum. Being big business it will concentrate on fast food outlets and chain store shops. The council planning process will hoist some altruistic requirements upon them, like the inclusion of an ethnic fruit and vegetable market or a water fountain.

The sad thing is that most people’s experience of similar developments has been negative and so they would rather leave the plot empty and ugly and give St. Kilda the impression of being unfinished.

The irony of course is that the beach front is already filled with fast food outlets and chain stores. The conspiracy theorist within me feels the heavy hand of Capitalism on both sides. The loudest complaints against the development come from the existing business community. Like all good capitalists, they are happy to fumble in the greasy till, but will raise the ‘rent a mob’ of anti progress protesters whenever competition raises its head.

I had barely moved ten metres when an identikit protester approached me. She was adorned with “Save the Bay” stickers that nestled between her Greenpeace and PETA badges. If there is one thing protesters enjoy more than stopping something, it’s saving something. It’s a cause and happy are those who race to protect its flag.

The interesting thing about the bay dredging debate is that most scientists are in favour of it. The bay has an average depth of only three metres as I discover to my cost whenever I’ve gone for a swim. The water is so shallow; you expend more energy walking out to find depth than you ever will expend swimming.

The channel through which the big container ships pass is clearly deeper, but the scientists say it needs to be dredged or else trade will dry up and Melbourne will lose the rationale for its existence.

But science gave us GM foods, nuclear waste and Anthrax. So when Joe Soap is faced with a scientist on one side and a nice, articulate college student who claims that Pandora’s Box lurks beneath the silt of Port Phillip Bay and should stay untouched for fear of what it might reveal, then the sympathy will go with the college student.

I smiled and took the pen and signed “Charles Haughey”. As someone who knew everything about corrupt development, I thought it appropriate that he should start atoning for his sins from beyond the grave.

Zen and the Art of Cooking

I’m not sure why I never took up cooking. It’s not as though I have been fed tasty morsels each night by talented chefs and waited on hand and foot by nymphs.

Until the age of 22, most of my meals were cooked by my dear old mum. She has many wonderful qualities, but conjuring up high class cuisine is not one of them. As the old saying goes, she could burn tea and is the only person I know who could make curry taste like apple tart and vice versa.

And yet I never took the logical step of taking up the pots and pans and doing it myself. I had three sisters but that wasn’t much help. In Irish culture, you have to be in your seventies before spinster sisters will cook for bachelor brothers.

When I left home I moved in to a flat with two mates. One of them lived on nothing but sausages for the first year, while the other thought that yogurt and bananas provided all the necessary food groups and give you all your daily requirements.

It wasn’t haute cuisine, but by then I was living in London and was surrounded by thousands of Indian, Italians and Lebanese who would happily cook for me for a small price. Thus began a life long love affair with take-away food.

Then there was the lost years when I questioned whether I was up to it or not. Would my chicken give you (or more importantly me) botulism? Would my pies implode, my trifles disintegrate into a thousand constituent parts, my sausages take on the consistency of soup and my curry, through some genetic curse, taste like apple-tart?

I lost what little confidence I had and stopped completely. Even old staples, such as my world famous garlic bread and scrambled eggs went by the way-side. I sold my soul and stomach to the consumerist, disposable age and happily let it feed me a cocktail of salt and sugar fuelled stodge.

I decided all this had to change and searched my conscience for motivation. Some people are motivated by dreams of glory, financial reward or sheer competitive drive. For me, only shame will work. It is only when I’m exposed to a mocking world that I can rouse myself from years of slumber.

Australia provides such a mocking world. St. Kilda beach is packed with bronzed Adonis’ while the roads of the city are filled each night with joggers, cyclists, roller bladders and various other forms of healthy transport.

And then there are the public displays of cooking. Every weekend the parks, beaches and balconies of Melbourne hum to the beat of a million singing BBQ chefs. Even more gallingly, most of the chefs are men. It’s a right of passage thing here that blokes have to be able to cook a steak, some fish and two fried eggs on a barby before they can graduate from primary school.

My shame being complete, I finally found the motivation to change. It helps when you have a girlfriend who is not only a master chef, but is also someone with great patience and a low fear of being poisoned. She volunteered to teach and supervise me, perhaps not realising that the task she was about to undertake was akin to Robinson Crusoe teaching Latin to Man Friday.

We started with a pasta sauce which was a delicate mix of roasted tomatoes, red wine vinegar and olive oil. It was damn tasty, but I think the thing that most impressed me was that this was the first time I’d ever made something that looked completely different when it was finished to what it looked like when I started.

I’d managed to go all these years eating tomato based sauce and never thought to think how it got to that state from a fully formed fruit.

But a pasta sauce is a pasta sauce after all, so this week I thought I’d branch out into something more substantial. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have had a long and often beautiful relationship with curry. It’s been tough love at times. My stomach hasn’t always thanked me for pouring 3 curries into it on weekend trips to London. I was a connoisseur of Chicken Tikka Masala when it was still trendy and hadn’t overtaken fish and chips as England’s favourite dish. But my curry fetish wasn’t monogamous. I liked up Thai Green Curry and queued for hours in the rain to get a Vietnamese curry chip in Dundalk after every visit to the pub in the 1980’s.

So I consider myself an expert on spicy Asian foods. I know my Szechwan’s from my Nepalese and Rogan Josh’s from my Bombay Aloo’s. But my expertise falls heavily on the eating side of things so it was a daunting task that faced me as I arranged the ingredients neatly on the sideboard.

Eggplant curry was my challenge. I haven’t branched into chicken or beef yet. But this is not because of any vegetarian bent. I had toyed with the idea of becoming a fully signed up tree hugging vegi. But I looked to God for guidance and one night over a juicy steak he came to me and said “If I wanted you be vegetarian, I wouldn’t have made animals out of meat”. I’m still a bit scared of cooking that stuff to be honest.

The eggplants needed to be roasted first. And I thought ovens were only for heating up pizzas! While you’re doing this, you chop up your veggies and get your spices ready. I went heavy on the cumin and ground coriander and light on the chilli powder. Chilli is such a cop out for curry chefs and I wasn’t going to fall into that trap first time up. Fry your onions until your kitchen smells like an Irish chipper, then peel and mash the eggplant and lamp the whole lot into a pot, spices, vegetables and all and cook for ten minutes.

And surprise, surprise, out comes something that is not only edible but bloody tasty to boot. I don’t think I’ll ever be Jamie Oliver (I don’t have the hair) but I really could get into this.

And the best part of it all was, it didn’t taste anything like Apple Tart.

Stress - That uncomforable feeling that you are about to be found out

I guess that Australia used to be remote from stress. The time zone difference means that the rest of the world is working when Aussies are asleep. So if Head Office in London is getting annoyed about something, they can't just pick up the phone and yell at you. Likewise, in the days of sea travel, post would take a few weeks to get here. So the news that your lamb was unsold and you faced financial ruin would probably have been made redundant by the outbreak of World War II.

Unfortunately, we live in a globilised, electronic age now of mobile phones, blackberrys, the Internet and E-mail. We are contactable and downloadable twenty-four hours a day and as those devises are awake all day, we are supposed to be too.

My day kind of sums this up. Before going to bed, I checked the blackberry, (or crackberry as it known by the geeks in Financial Services who try to laugh away their addiction). An email from my solicitor in Ireland caught my eye. I'm trying to sell my house in Dublin and my attempts to do so are like trying to collect confetti in a hurricane. Property prices are falling like a Man United forward in the opposition penalty box. I have a potential buyer, but my solicitor is doing everything in his power to frustrate matters. He is either an unreconstructed Marxist and believes that all property is theft, or he is desperately trying to justify every stereotype that people have about lawyers. A bad lawyer can drag a case out for months. A good lawyer can drag it out for several years more. But no more legal profession jokes. Lawyers don't think they are funny and the rest of the public doesn't think they are jokes.

So I toddled off to bed with extra pressure on my addled mind. Instead of counting sheep, I'd be counting how many needles I'd like to stick into that solicitor's eye. But unfortunately, you can't sleep on an empty stomach or a full mind and I was up to 3 million needles before I dropped off.

When you work for a global organisation and are based in Melbourne you can more or less judge what your day will be like from the morning email inbox. This includes the overnight tirades from the US and Europe as well as the endless rubbish that is churned out by end of day systems around the world. I like to read a book and listen to some angst ridden female vocalists on the tram into work. But increasingly, I'm drawn to the little red flashing light on my crackberry. I tell myself I'll only look at the personal mails, which will tell me football results and rude jokes about dead celebrities.

But once you're in of course, you can't help looking at the business emails screaming urgent and critical. Senders know that they have to include these words in the heading in order to attract the attention of readers. But they take the English language to extremes. Critical to me means that somebody is about to lose an eye, or that a meteor is heading for your house in the next 10 minutes. But in business it is used for anything that is vaguely outside of the ordinary. A fax that had to be sent twice because the line was busy the first time. An internal report that printed on yellow instead of white paper. An email to a client that didn't say regards at the end. These are the sort of mundane issues that fill up inboxes on a daily basis but are given greater importance by the language used. As a result, it's difficult to filter the real issues from the make believe ones.

Except this morning that is.

When you see 64 emails on the same subject, you know that fun and games have been happening overnight. A quick perusal tells you that your day will be miserable and you haven't even reached the office yet. An overnight computer job had failed. This job sends a report to a bunch of people who have no interest in receiving it and don't read it when it arrives. Today they got it four hours late. In the greater scheme of things, you would think that's not that important. But in the big business world, we set ourselves useless goals and targets and then beat ourselves up when we don't meet them.

So I spent the first two hours soothing angry souls and providing explanatory emails to the world and his brother on a subject I didn't understand. Then I had to start the normal day. This consists mainly of conference calls, which are a means by which lonely people can have conversations. They serve no other purpose. In any normal conversation (save perhaps domestic disputes), only one person talks at a time. While they natter on, the other nineteen or so people on the call will dream of lunch or stick the phone on mute so that then can surf the Internet. Conferences calls prevent you from doing any normal work, so the Internet is the only alternative to listening to the mind-numbingly boring statistics being discussed. When it comes to your turn to speak, you have generally forgotten what you were going to say and most of the listeners have lost the will to live.

Then it was off to explain the day's issues to the boss. Churchill once said that the three most difficult things for a man to do are climb a wall that's leaning toward him, kiss a woman who's leaning away from him, and deliver a good speech. I would rather attempt the first two than explain an ugly days issues in a speech to my boss. But as there were no walls or ladies present, I had no option.

Outside the sun is shining and all the benefits of living in Australia await me. Unfortunately, to live here you have to work and to deal with the stresses that work brings. But there is some comfort to be found in leaving the office after a long day and knowing that once again, you have managed to avoid being found out.

Anyone for Tennis?

“The thing about this new surface”, Darren said,” is that it fluffs up the balls”. Then he leaned in conspiratorially so that the ladies at the table couldn’t hear, “and you thought that only happened in the porn industry”.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or not, seeing as how I’d only met him thirty seconds earlier. But it was corporate entertainment, so I chuckled quietly. “Have you watched much of the tennis” I asked. “Are you mad”, he said, “I got tennised out after Henri Laconte retired, I only come here now for the free drink and food”. With that, he tucked into his salmon fillet and quaffed into another glass of Chardonnay. He’d been doing this corporate hospitality thing for ten years and was getting a bit fed up with it.

The Melbourne Cup in November is supposed to be the highlight of the entertainment year. Not only do you get fed and watered on somebody else’s time, but you have the chance of winning some money too. The AFL final in September comes next, if only because Victorians would give their right arm to be at the match. The boxing day test at the MCG is popular as cricket is the means by which Australians can parade the cloak of their national pride on the wider stage.

So Tennis is a bit of a poor cousin and the corporate hospitality carries little lustre when you can pay at the gate. The Australian Open is also an opportunity for cloned Russians and Serbians to grunt at each other for two weeks before one of them walks away with a shiny cup and a ridiculous amount of cash. The Australians tend to bow out pluckily (after being brave battlers, as the national stereotype requires) in round four or so. They hanker for the days of Pat Cash, Pat Rafter and Yvonne Goolagong, when the plucky locals sometimes won. Now they only have Leighton Hewitt, a man so disliked here that you’d swear he was English.

Proud people that the Aussies are, they don’t particularly like hosting a tournament for pampered Europeans. But they go along anyway, watch a couple of games and retire to the bar. I lasted nine games of a Leighton Hewitt match before the heat and boredom got to me. Centre Court in Melbourne gets up to 50c and our seats were smack under the blazing sun. A little man moved around the crowd squirting sun crème on spectators whether they asked for it or not. At least he didn’t try and rub it in, because tennis is camp enough without that.

As the sun beat down and Leighton bored his opponent into submission, my mind wondered and I found myself counting the ball boys and line officials. Tennis must be the only game with more officials than competitors and most of them seemed as fed up as me. One particular line judge sat with his head on his chin until the very last moment when his skills were required. He would then shout “out” or not shout it as the case may be, before returning to his pose of Rodin’s The Thinker and dreams of fluffy balls in other contexts.

The little man with the sun crème was heading in my direction with a manic grin on his face, so I beat a hasty retreat to the bar. I met Darren there and he was amazed at my fortitude. “It’s too hot in there”, he said. “Your beer warms up coming out of the tap”. I’m not one to argue with someone about the merits of warm beer, so I retired with him to the relative coolness of the corporate beer garden. Some of the ladies from our corporate invitational group joined us and we took to chatting about who was the hunkiest male tennis player. I took a back seat on this one, not so much to protect my heterosexuality from doubt, as to cover up my complete ignorance of tennis. The ladies agreed that Andy Roddick was the cream of the crop. “What about Nadal?”, Darren suggested. “Is he the one you fancy most?” one of them asked. Darren didn’t blink before he replied, “Oh, I’m not on that side of the fence. I’m married with three kids. I just find it easier to socialise and do business when you’re a bit camp. You might say I’m gay in the am and straight in the pm”. She didn’t look convinced. So he leaned towards her and winked. “I’m not gay, but I do help them out occasionally when they’re stuck”.

They had a large screen in the beer garden but few people seemed interested. As day session drifted into night session, we wandered out into Richmond and the lure of its many pubs. Leighton had made it safely through without requiring our support. From the grunts eminating from the Rod Laver Arena, it was clear that another Eastern European clone was progressing smoothly in the competition. We wandered into the City which was happily getting on with things as though the tennis never existed. One of the benefits of Melbourne is that it’s many sports facilities are within easy reach of the City centre. It’s easy to walk to them and it’s easy to walk away from them.

In the bars of Richmond, most people were watching the Cricket, a sport in which Australians can expect to excel. The only problem was, India was hammering them. Darren wasn’t happy and this made him more determined to squeeze as much free beer out of our compliant hosts as possible. “Australians are split”, he said, “between the 1% of the population who are elite sportspeople and 99% who like drinking beer while watching them. We keep our beer drinking side of the deal up. Why can’t they keep their bloody elite athlete side of the bargain up?” As somebody who has always been firmly in the 99% of the equation, I could only agree and raise a toast to socialising. The best game of all and one you nearly always win.

The Lazy Days of Summer

Yuri came to Australia in 1971 from the Ukraine or the Soviet Union as it was known then. He said he spent 5 years studying English back in Kiev, as well as French and German. The only problem is they were all taught by a 70 year old woman who couldn’t speak anything except Russian. That was the great thing about the Soviet system. Everyone had equal opportunities, even mono lingual language teachers.

So Yuri came to Australia with only one sentence of English. “Cultural development will suffocate under Capitalism and can only flourish in the Soviet system”. It wasn’t going to get him a job on Australian TV, so he moved to St.Kilda which was essentially a Soviet exile suburb at the time. The only thing he knew how to do was cut hair, so he opened a small barber shop and charged $2.50 for a cut. He didn’t get to decide that himself, the Victorian barbers association did. Yuri thought that was a very Communist way of doing things but was happy to go along with it as he got to keep the money.

Yuri had really only seen barber’s shops in the old American movies that made it through the Soviet censorship system. So he decided to model his shop on something from a James Dean film. Red leather reclining seats, Formica tops and pictures of Marilyn Munroe and Rita Haywood adorn the wall. And like a James Dean crew top, he figured that if you find a look that works, why change it.

He charges $20 a cut now and $17 for a shave. I haven’t let another man shave me since 1992 when I walked into a Turkish barbers shop in Marmaris to ask for directions. I found myself pinned to a chair while the owner held a switch blade to my throat and murmured something that sounded like “damned Greeks”. But Sweeney Todd is being advertised everywhere here and for some perverse reason that give me the idea that I should let Yuri loose on my chops.

Getting somebody else to shave you is fantastically decadent in these days of Mach Plus and Sensor Excel shaving equipment. But that wasn’t how it seemed to me as Yuri swung me back in his high chair. He moved towards my exposed throat with a blade that looked like it had accounted for several Germans in the long winter of 1943.

It put me to thinking how often we place our faith in the hands of complete strangers. Take taxi drivers for example. I once got a taxi from Melbourne Airport to the City at 5am. During our 140kph ride along the freeway, the driver mentioned that he’d been working for 23 hours straight. This was just before he swerved across three lanes and at least provided some context for our flirtation with the central reservation. Cars are dangerous enough things but we happily let complete strangers drive us around. We do the same with bus drivers. I remember a trip around the mountain passes of Croatia where the Driver liked to dangle two wheels over the edge of the cliff as we rounded corners and stopped at a particularly treacherous spot to gleefully point out that this was where the previous week’s bus had gone over the edge.

But Yuri seemed like a perfectly nice chap, so I decided to lie back and let him at it. He insisted on talking the whole way through the process which perturbed me greatly. I thought that if I answered, my lips would move and risk being amputated by a passing blade. So it seemed better to save my counsel and I simply grunted in a high pitched voice for yes and in a low pitched voice for no.
Like most barbers, Yuri talked mostly about the weather. Melbourne had just experienced two 40c plus days and the City talked about nothing else all week. Shops sold out of fans, cinemas were booked out by desperate citizens in search of air-conditioning and blinds were drawn across the city by a population who shunned the sun. Yuri reckoned there was nothing new under the sun, which seemed strangely apt under the circumstances. It only happens a couple of times a year, so you just have to grin and bear it. He said it was a small price to pay for a decent summer. “A couple of 40 degree days and you get to walk around in shorts and t-shirts for six months of the year.”

Thursday night was the time everybody dreaded. The temperature was not meant to drop below 30c all night and people spent all day huddled under air-conditioning units in offices and shops and planned how to deal with it.

The beach was an obvious choice. Port Phillip Bay compares unfavourably to other Australian waterways, but despite the pun most Melbournians seemed to believe in any port in a storm. The esplanade in St Kilda was like a Mediterranean seaside village as multiple generations of families took a leisurely stroll under the moonlight. Every now and again they’d perch on a wall where granny would dream of similar nights on the Italian Riviera. The parents would sneak a bottle or two of VB while the kids weren’t looking and the kids themselves would revel in the novelty of swimming in the dark. There were so many people in the sea at 11pm that the sharks got the hump and headed for Antarctica for some peace and quiet.

On Friday afternoon, the “cool change” came through Melbourne. This is a weather phenomenon that Mr Brennan never mentioned when I did Leaving Certificate geography. Basically in the space of 15 minutes, the hot northerly wind changes to a southerly that comes hammering across the Bass Straits like a super hero sent to save the wilting citizens of the City. The temperature drops quicker than a stock market in a sub-prime credit squeeze. Melbournians are very much in touch with the weather. They can tell you the outside temperature and wind direction in the way Irish people would know whether it was raining or not. Yet none of them can explain the scientific basis of the “cool change”.

They just know that it is one of the most beautiful things in nature. And like all beauty it should just be enjoyed and never questioned.