If you believe that TV has no influence on kids, then I would invite you to look out your window and see what kids are up to. I think the first thing you’ll notice is the number of kids on bikes, wearing Lycra and travelling in packs, like a junior peloton. Those not on bikes will be finding empty spaces across which they can sling a rope and engage in some back yard tennis. And the reason for this? The Tour De France is on telly and Wimbledon has just finished.
Kids are not the only ones influenced by the Tour De France. I saw my first Astana cycling top on the way to work this morning. I guess its owner, a portly Gentleman in his forties who was taking the term ‘figure-hugging’ to a new level, was wearing it as a tribute to Lance Armstrong. Or perhaps he realised that Astana is the capital of Kazakhstan and he was making a Borat/Bruno fashion statement.
In any event, it made him fit in with the other Lycra wearing fanatics who gathered at the traffic lights at the top of St Kilda road. They had the wrap around glasses, clip on shoes and shaved legs of true professionals. Except these were office workers on the way into the City. I ambled up beside them in my ill-fitting fleece and baggy shorts and drew the occasional sneer in the way Michael Schumacher would if somebody pulled up beside him on a Honda 50.
There is a caste system in play and I was down with the street sweepers while the Lycra boys were Brahmin. I soothed my social inferiority by silently mocking the advertising that adorned their shirts. Why do people pay good money to advertise Saxo Bank, Bbox Bouygues Telecom and other European brands that they’ve never heard of? I refuse to be a mobile advertisement even if I could fit into the clothes.
The lights changed and we were off, speeding towards the City while trying to avoid speeding motorists and badly timed door openings.
A howling Northerly was in our face and everybody wanted to tuck in behind someone else, just as we had watched the riders do in France. Unfortunately, the cycle lane on St Kilda road is narrower than a duck’s backside, so we weren’t able to do the fanned formation as seen in the team time trial. Instead we quickly formed a long line and thanked our lucky stars that we weren’t the guy at the front.
By the third traffic light, the guy at the front had realised that he was dragging 20others up the road and he was pretty bitter about it. We had neglected our team duties and failed to take our turn at the front. I felt a pang of Catholic guilt and decided it was time I discovered my inner domestique. I wasn’t going to be a hero however and I let the Lycra boys take off first. I then stepped on the pedals and presented myself as the leader of the baggy shorts and baggy jumper’s brigade.
Cycling into the wind was like clambering through soup. And not a nice clear soup either but a thick and creamy one. I glanced behind to see how many of my colleagues had joined the train. It wasn’t a pretty sight. My baggy friends were scattered down the road like sprinters trying to make it to the top of Alp d’Huez. Only one guy had managed to stay with my manic pace and was desperately hugging my back wheel as though we were connected by an umbilical cord.
Half way along the road I started to fade. The wind was sapping my energy and the small bowl of cornflakes I had consumed before leaving had long since worked their way through my metabolism. I looked behind and my passenger was still clinging on. I’d seen this on stage 14 of the tour. George Hincapie had done all the work in a break away and was anxious that someone else should take their turn at the front. George flicked his elbow furiously at them which I took to be the international symbol for “get your arse up here and do some work”. I tried it with my passenger but had little luck. He knew he could get a free trip if he ignored me.
I tried going slower and weaving in and out like a drunken sailor but to no affect. He stubbornly stayed on my back wheel until we crossed St Kilda Road Bridge and came into the City Centre. Then like a Tour de France stage winner he clicked into a higher gear and passed me in a sickening blur. I tried desperately to take his wheel but the exertion of giving him a free ride was too much for me.
My honour had been slighted and I felt the bitter taste of defeat. The finishing line was close at hand but ahead one wobbly cyclist seemed to be struggling even more than me. I set my sights on overtaking her before the finish and summoned up one last push. I caught her just before the line, straining my neck and raising a pumped fist in triumph. I looked across and noticed that she had a basket on the front of her bike, was wearing jeans and high heeled shoes and was riding one of those small wheeled machines that could best be described as the bike for people who hate bikes.
In a sliding scale of cyclists with skinny Lycra fanatics at the top, girls in high heels with baskets on the front of their bikes would be at the other end. But no matter, like Alberto Contador in this year’s tour, I’ll take my victories wherever I find them. And as for that guy who stole a ride from me this morning, I hope you get a flat tyre on the way home tonight.
Thursday, 23 July 2009
Sunday, 12 July 2009
A Broken Pedal on the road to Woodford
The sun only seems to shine in Ireland during recession years, as though God is trying to offer some compensation for the vagaries of the market. In the ten years of the Celtic Tiger, the summers were damp and chilly, which gave people an extra excuse, as though one was needed, to head off for two months to their villa in Spain, bought from selling shares during the dotcom bubble.
This year as the economy has gone south, the mercury has been rising and my peeling arms are testament to the power of the Irish sun. Rather ironically, I have lived in Australia for two years without developing a tan. Three weeks in Ireland and I’m like a ripe plum.
It was also like that back in 1991 in the days before the tiger was even a glint in the Mammy tiger’s eye. The only job opportunities were at the end of a boat or plane ride and college summers were spent washing dishes in Martha’s Vineyard or pulling pints in an ugly Irish theme bar in Munich.
Ray was a college student back then, but his ambitions didn’t even stretch to dishwashing. He was happy to sleep for the summer and let the big world wait for his graduation. He worked occasionally in his Dad’s hardware shop, helping out when old Jim was unwell with his heart and when the cattle fair was in town. On those days, a steady stream of farmers would visit the shop to stock up on bailing twine and pungent pesticides and Ray would earn enough to keep him in beer and curry chips for the week.
Our paths crossed one sunny morning in July 1991. I was on a cycling holiday down the west coast of Ireland, criss-crossing the back roads of Galway. We came to a small incline and I climbed from the saddle of my bike to attack the hill like Lance Armstrong in the Alps. I weighed a lot less then than I do now, but it was still enough to exert unbearable pressure on the pedal and it snapped violently, providing my testicles with an unfortunate introduction to the crossbar of my bike.
I dusted myself down, expressed some choice swearwords and studied my options. The bike was clearly unrideable and I was in the middle of the countryside with only some curious cows for company. Luckily a van passed and took me and the stricken machine into Woodford and pointed out the hardware shop. I walked in full of confidence that my dilemma was about to be solved. But Ray’s Dad was quick to bring me down to earth. Rural hardware shops service the farming industry and don’t tend to stock cycling equipment on the off chance that a passing cyclist might need a spare part.
Amazingly, he actually did have a pedal, but it was the British variety and I was riding a French bike. It seems that in the time of Napoleon, he not only decreed that Europeans should drive on the right hand side of the road, he also said that bicycle pedals had to have a different thread to those pesky Brits.
I was crestfallen, but Ray’s dad suddenly had an idea. Ray apparently had a French bike and we could take a pedal off that, attach it to my bike and bob’s your uncle. It seemed like a great plan to me but I was slightly concerned at how Ray would feel about having one pedal thereafter. Ray’s Dad didn’t think this was a problem as they could pick up a spare pedal in Galway City later that week. He thought a bigger problem would be getting Ray out of bed at 11.30am on a Tuesday morning.
I waited outside until a sleepy Ray appeared, not looking the least upset that his rest had been disturbed by the need to give a complete stranger a piece of his own bike. He led me round the back so that he could examine the problem through sleep filled eyes. He noticed a flaw straight away. The pedal had snapped off just above the thread and it was impossible to get traction on the broken stump to screw it out. He stroked his bum fluff covered chin before nodding sagely. I stood there helpless like the pitiful accountant I am, unable to offer any help apart from holding the bike upright while he examined it.
“I have a lathe in the shed and that might do the trick”, he said. I nodded, pretending that I understood what a lathe was.
Two hours later, he finally extracted the broken pedal, having worked the lathe with all the care and attention of a Waterford crystal maker. He then looked mournfully at his own bike and removed a pedal as though he was extracting one of his own kidneys. Minutes later, I was all set and ready to hit the road again. I reached for my wallet and Ray shuffled uncomfortably.
“I can’t take money off you”, he said. “Sure I only gave you an old pedal off my bike”.
It was my turn to be uncomfortable. “Listen, you got me out of a big hole here and it’s taken you a lot of effort, not to mention the fact that you now have to buy a new pedal and travel into the city to get it”.
“You’re on holiday”, he said. “And you’ve had a bit of an accident. It would be wrong for me to take advantage of that”.
I tried arguing with him for another ten minutes but he was not for turning. In the end, I worked on his old man. He was also mortified that I wanted to offer money and tried to pretend that it was their problem for not having the right product in the first place. Eventually, I left twenty pounds on the counter and implored him to treat his son to a few pints. I raced out before he could object and climbed back on the bike with a renewed faith in the strength of human decency.
That incident became the highlight of my holiday and made me proud to be Irish. Later on, as I lived in Ireland through the Tiger Years, I always thought of Ray when I was being ripped off by shops and tradesmen. That afternoon in Woodford seemed to belong to a different age, when decency and kindness were more important to us than profit.
I’d like to think that Ireland is regaining some of that decency and the Irish tourist board is launching a campaign to try and harness this, so that tourists feel more welcome.
They could start by trying to track Ray and his Dad down and to ask them for advice. I still have the broken pedal and perhaps they could use that as symbol for the country we once had before we sold it to the devil.
This year as the economy has gone south, the mercury has been rising and my peeling arms are testament to the power of the Irish sun. Rather ironically, I have lived in Australia for two years without developing a tan. Three weeks in Ireland and I’m like a ripe plum.
It was also like that back in 1991 in the days before the tiger was even a glint in the Mammy tiger’s eye. The only job opportunities were at the end of a boat or plane ride and college summers were spent washing dishes in Martha’s Vineyard or pulling pints in an ugly Irish theme bar in Munich.
Ray was a college student back then, but his ambitions didn’t even stretch to dishwashing. He was happy to sleep for the summer and let the big world wait for his graduation. He worked occasionally in his Dad’s hardware shop, helping out when old Jim was unwell with his heart and when the cattle fair was in town. On those days, a steady stream of farmers would visit the shop to stock up on bailing twine and pungent pesticides and Ray would earn enough to keep him in beer and curry chips for the week.
Our paths crossed one sunny morning in July 1991. I was on a cycling holiday down the west coast of Ireland, criss-crossing the back roads of Galway. We came to a small incline and I climbed from the saddle of my bike to attack the hill like Lance Armstrong in the Alps. I weighed a lot less then than I do now, but it was still enough to exert unbearable pressure on the pedal and it snapped violently, providing my testicles with an unfortunate introduction to the crossbar of my bike.
I dusted myself down, expressed some choice swearwords and studied my options. The bike was clearly unrideable and I was in the middle of the countryside with only some curious cows for company. Luckily a van passed and took me and the stricken machine into Woodford and pointed out the hardware shop. I walked in full of confidence that my dilemma was about to be solved. But Ray’s Dad was quick to bring me down to earth. Rural hardware shops service the farming industry and don’t tend to stock cycling equipment on the off chance that a passing cyclist might need a spare part.
Amazingly, he actually did have a pedal, but it was the British variety and I was riding a French bike. It seems that in the time of Napoleon, he not only decreed that Europeans should drive on the right hand side of the road, he also said that bicycle pedals had to have a different thread to those pesky Brits.
I was crestfallen, but Ray’s dad suddenly had an idea. Ray apparently had a French bike and we could take a pedal off that, attach it to my bike and bob’s your uncle. It seemed like a great plan to me but I was slightly concerned at how Ray would feel about having one pedal thereafter. Ray’s Dad didn’t think this was a problem as they could pick up a spare pedal in Galway City later that week. He thought a bigger problem would be getting Ray out of bed at 11.30am on a Tuesday morning.
I waited outside until a sleepy Ray appeared, not looking the least upset that his rest had been disturbed by the need to give a complete stranger a piece of his own bike. He led me round the back so that he could examine the problem through sleep filled eyes. He noticed a flaw straight away. The pedal had snapped off just above the thread and it was impossible to get traction on the broken stump to screw it out. He stroked his bum fluff covered chin before nodding sagely. I stood there helpless like the pitiful accountant I am, unable to offer any help apart from holding the bike upright while he examined it.
“I have a lathe in the shed and that might do the trick”, he said. I nodded, pretending that I understood what a lathe was.
Two hours later, he finally extracted the broken pedal, having worked the lathe with all the care and attention of a Waterford crystal maker. He then looked mournfully at his own bike and removed a pedal as though he was extracting one of his own kidneys. Minutes later, I was all set and ready to hit the road again. I reached for my wallet and Ray shuffled uncomfortably.
“I can’t take money off you”, he said. “Sure I only gave you an old pedal off my bike”.
It was my turn to be uncomfortable. “Listen, you got me out of a big hole here and it’s taken you a lot of effort, not to mention the fact that you now have to buy a new pedal and travel into the city to get it”.
“You’re on holiday”, he said. “And you’ve had a bit of an accident. It would be wrong for me to take advantage of that”.
I tried arguing with him for another ten minutes but he was not for turning. In the end, I worked on his old man. He was also mortified that I wanted to offer money and tried to pretend that it was their problem for not having the right product in the first place. Eventually, I left twenty pounds on the counter and implored him to treat his son to a few pints. I raced out before he could object and climbed back on the bike with a renewed faith in the strength of human decency.
That incident became the highlight of my holiday and made me proud to be Irish. Later on, as I lived in Ireland through the Tiger Years, I always thought of Ray when I was being ripped off by shops and tradesmen. That afternoon in Woodford seemed to belong to a different age, when decency and kindness were more important to us than profit.
I’d like to think that Ireland is regaining some of that decency and the Irish tourist board is launching a campaign to try and harness this, so that tourists feel more welcome.
They could start by trying to track Ray and his Dad down and to ask them for advice. I still have the broken pedal and perhaps they could use that as symbol for the country we once had before we sold it to the devil.
Saturday, 4 July 2009
Where have all the signs to Muff gone?
Muff is a small town in Donegal in the North West of Ireland. One of the things you notice when driving into it is that there are no sign-posts pointing towards the town and nothing within the town itself to tell you where you are. This may be due to embarrassment on behalf of the local council or it could be because the signs keep getting pinched and now reside in Irish bars from Manhattan to Mandarin.
The petrol company “Top” have a garage on the edge of town. Apparently, they used to provide their staff with sweatshirts that said “Top Muff” but it led to complaints from the female employees. The village doesn’t have an airport but if it did, the signs for “Muff landing strip” would bring a chuckle to the hearts of Irish teenagers who must be bored with the joke about the annual Muff diving championships.
Muff aside, (as the Bishop said to the actress) Donegal is a pretty well sign-posted place. In fact all of Ireland now is, as the change from miles to kilometres a few years ago coincided with the country having a few bob to throw around. Ireland finally had a chance to dress up all those roads that the Germans unwittingly paid for in EU grants.
The blog went on holiday for a few weeks (as you may have noticed) and travelled back to the Old country. I felt like one of those returning yanks that Irish families used to entertain in the 1970s. All I needed was a Stetson hat and a condescending attitude to complete the picture. My uncle used to visit us from Boston when I was a kid and we’d drag him around all the relatives and plague him for money. Well, it turns out that they do that to people returning from Australia too.
I came with several objectives. The main one was to indulge in some Guinness for the first time in eighteen months, to sample some of the culinary delights that can only be found in Ireland, such as Curry chips and Tayto crisps, and to see if the death of the Celtic Tiger had made Ireland liveable again.
I’m pleased to report that all objectives were met and a fine time was had by all. The Guinness tasted like mother’s milk, the curry sauce was thick enough to stand a spoon in and the absence of obscene wealth has made everyone normal again. Before I left, it was impossible to hold a conversation in Ireland without it veering off into a discussion on property prices, what to spend your Special Savings account on, or what size of bouncy castle you were renting for your kid’s Communion. Thankfully, the recession means that conversations have returned to their normal status of football and Michael Jackson jokes.
I apologise to any of my Irish readers who have lost their jobs or found that their Romanian investment property is now in negative equity, but I really feel that the recession has been good for Ireland. There was a vulgarity about the Celtic Tiger that reminded me of Dell Boy in “Only Fools and Horses” after he had made his first million. One thing everyone seems agreed on is that we had really lost the run of ourselves. Now it’s possible to a chat with people in shops and to book a hotel room on the day you want to stay in it.
And the tiger has at least left a few toys behind. All that decking won’t disappear overnight and if the worse comes to the worse, it can at least be used for firewood. Everyone seems to have an “08” Sports utility vehicle, which assuming you can afford the petrol and insurance, will last until at least 2015 and the bouncy castles have to be used somehow and could be turned into cheap fitness centres for unemployed teenagers.
But the legacy of the tiger is pernicious in other respects. During the boom years the Irish government did everything in its power to help the building industry for reasons that are unclear. However, the large bribes paid to numerous government members probably helped. As a result, the country is now littered with ugly holiday homes in areas that used to be called “places of outstanding natural beauty”. As a child, my Dad used to take me to the beach at Baginbun every year. It was a pretty remote place on the Hook peninsula in Wexford and for years was marked only by a few nosy cows and a sign noting the spot as the original invasion point of Ireland by those perfidious Brits in 1169.
Now the beach is surrounded by hundreds of identical houses, standing empty as a silent memorial to the psychotic obsession with property that consumed Ireland for the past ten years.
Thankfully, it’s possible to find places where the blight of the tiger didn’t reach. I have seen many great places in the world. But few compare with the trip from Louisberg to Clifden. As you head towards Connemara, the landscape becomes rockier and the mountains higher. The wow factor increases and just when you think you’ve seen it all, you sweep round a corner into Killary Harbour. The evening sun was shining directly up the harbour towards the picturesque town of Leenane and there was not a sound. A little graveyard stands at the nexus of the harbour and the poor souls buried there are washed each night by the soothing nectar of the setting sun.
Carry on towards Clifden and you pass Kylemore Abbey, nestling at the end of a lake and offering itself selflessly to a million holiday photos. The West was not awake but it was all the better for that.
That is the real Ireland. A country of wild and natural beauty. Go there before the tiger recovers and somebody builds Spanish style hacienda villas all over it.
Friday, 5 June 2009
The View from the 15th Floor
We're coming up to the shortest day of the year in this neck of the woods and darkness comes calling earlier each day. I've finally managed a window seat with a view after all these decades of working and yet for most of the afternoon all I have to look at is my own sad reflection against a murky background.
Last week I moved desk to the 15th floor and the thought struck me that this is the highest point I've reached in my working life. My early working years were spent on the first floor of an Accountancy practice. It was over a clothes shop and my abiding memory was the six weeks before Christmas when the shop owner would stick on a tape of Christmas Carols and play them in an unmerciful loop. The speaker was just below my window and the experience has left me with a trigger impulse whenever I hear "Jingle Bells". It makes me want to club somebody with a calculator.
I made it to the giddy heights of the 6th floor when I worked in London. It was in a building in Croydon which had been rebuilt after the war. If they had left the pile of rubble there, it would have been more comfortable and more aesthetic from the outside. My lowly status at that point did not qualify me for a window seat and I was consigned to the dark interior, between the pungent aroma of the toilets and the rattle of the lift shaft. The only time I got the sensation of working above ground was on the regular occasions when the hum of the lift shaft stopped and we were faced with six flights of stairs to climb.
My quest for a corner office with sweeping views of a City landscape continued however. My next stop was Luxembourg, a city of gleaming sky scrapers and an eye catching vista. I made it to the 7th floor this time but was again banished to the interior of the building. My desk faced a featureless wall with a locked door at its centre. In my three years there, I never found out what was behind that door but it did lead to me to learn my first sentence in French. Every night without fail, the cleaner would try to get through that door and when it refused to yield, she would turn to me with the sort of sad face that all office cleaners have and garble something in French that I took to be a request for the key. She may have been expressing her undying love for me, but each night I would answer “je ne pa le cle pour la porte ici”. For my non French speaking readers, that means “I don’t have a key for that door”. For my French speaking readers, I apologise for any misspelling, but I did German in school, so bite me.
After Luxembourg, I went back to Ireland, where the buildings are as vertically challenged as the men. Regulations in Dublin prohibited buildings of more than six stories. Ironically, this made land close to the City highly valuable which led to large bribes being paid by builders to the people who make building regulations. Funny how the world works, isn’t it?
I worked on the first floor, but was at least beside the window this time. This allowed me a great view into the cheap hotel next door, where on Friday afternoons groups of English hen parties would flock to the City and undress in their hotel room under the lusty gaze of horny bankers in the building opposite. It wasn’t as much fun when the stag parties would do something similar.
My first impressions of Melbourne were hopeful. Every small town in Australia has a CBD (Central Business District), as though you’re only allowed to have a bank or solicitor’s practice on one designated street. In Melbourne however, the CBD deserves the title. Collins Street is a majestic boulevard of gleaming towers and shimmering glass. The building I work in was once the tallest building in Australia, so my hopes of finally achieving a view were high.
To my horror, I was initially consigned to a converted, windowless meeting room on the fifth floor. This became known around the building as “The Fish Bowl”. That was unfair as fish have a 15 second memory and so the room looks different each time they look around. We had no such luck and it was like being trapped in a Samuel Beckett play.
Thankfully, Australia is a young and fast moving country and so last weekend I moved again. This time to the 15th floor and the highest peak of my working life. I moved into my sixth desk in the two years since I’ve been here and the process was pretty flawless. Due to my inherent laziness I still hadn’t got around to unpacking from the previous move and was able to lift everything on mass. It took me ten minutes to create the required Fung Shui required in my new space. My phone now faces due North and points at the sun at midday, thus deflecting all evil calls. My calendar is angled at 45 degrees which allows the past to slip quietly away while the future rushes towards me.
Fung Shui however can do nothing however about the fact that I am now sitting in what amounts to as shoe box. Our office move was premised on the need to save space in these economically threatening times and so we’ve been squeezed into an area that was previously inhabited by Pygmies and circus dwarfs. I do however, have a cracking view. To my right, a bunch of eager builders are working on the latest addition to Melbourne’s skyline. To my left is a City Apartment building of the sort favoured by short stay businessmen and high class hookers (often in the same room!). It has a roof garden and every evening some of the more exotic residents come out for a stroll.
Last week I moved desk to the 15th floor and the thought struck me that this is the highest point I've reached in my working life. My early working years were spent on the first floor of an Accountancy practice. It was over a clothes shop and my abiding memory was the six weeks before Christmas when the shop owner would stick on a tape of Christmas Carols and play them in an unmerciful loop. The speaker was just below my window and the experience has left me with a trigger impulse whenever I hear "Jingle Bells". It makes me want to club somebody with a calculator.
I made it to the giddy heights of the 6th floor when I worked in London. It was in a building in Croydon which had been rebuilt after the war. If they had left the pile of rubble there, it would have been more comfortable and more aesthetic from the outside. My lowly status at that point did not qualify me for a window seat and I was consigned to the dark interior, between the pungent aroma of the toilets and the rattle of the lift shaft. The only time I got the sensation of working above ground was on the regular occasions when the hum of the lift shaft stopped and we were faced with six flights of stairs to climb.
My quest for a corner office with sweeping views of a City landscape continued however. My next stop was Luxembourg, a city of gleaming sky scrapers and an eye catching vista. I made it to the 7th floor this time but was again banished to the interior of the building. My desk faced a featureless wall with a locked door at its centre. In my three years there, I never found out what was behind that door but it did lead to me to learn my first sentence in French. Every night without fail, the cleaner would try to get through that door and when it refused to yield, she would turn to me with the sort of sad face that all office cleaners have and garble something in French that I took to be a request for the key. She may have been expressing her undying love for me, but each night I would answer “je ne pa le cle pour la porte ici”. For my non French speaking readers, that means “I don’t have a key for that door”. For my French speaking readers, I apologise for any misspelling, but I did German in school, so bite me.
After Luxembourg, I went back to Ireland, where the buildings are as vertically challenged as the men. Regulations in Dublin prohibited buildings of more than six stories. Ironically, this made land close to the City highly valuable which led to large bribes being paid by builders to the people who make building regulations. Funny how the world works, isn’t it?
I worked on the first floor, but was at least beside the window this time. This allowed me a great view into the cheap hotel next door, where on Friday afternoons groups of English hen parties would flock to the City and undress in their hotel room under the lusty gaze of horny bankers in the building opposite. It wasn’t as much fun when the stag parties would do something similar.
My first impressions of Melbourne were hopeful. Every small town in Australia has a CBD (Central Business District), as though you’re only allowed to have a bank or solicitor’s practice on one designated street. In Melbourne however, the CBD deserves the title. Collins Street is a majestic boulevard of gleaming towers and shimmering glass. The building I work in was once the tallest building in Australia, so my hopes of finally achieving a view were high.
To my horror, I was initially consigned to a converted, windowless meeting room on the fifth floor. This became known around the building as “The Fish Bowl”. That was unfair as fish have a 15 second memory and so the room looks different each time they look around. We had no such luck and it was like being trapped in a Samuel Beckett play.
Thankfully, Australia is a young and fast moving country and so last weekend I moved again. This time to the 15th floor and the highest peak of my working life. I moved into my sixth desk in the two years since I’ve been here and the process was pretty flawless. Due to my inherent laziness I still hadn’t got around to unpacking from the previous move and was able to lift everything on mass. It took me ten minutes to create the required Fung Shui required in my new space. My phone now faces due North and points at the sun at midday, thus deflecting all evil calls. My calendar is angled at 45 degrees which allows the past to slip quietly away while the future rushes towards me.
Fung Shui however can do nothing however about the fact that I am now sitting in what amounts to as shoe box. Our office move was premised on the need to save space in these economically threatening times and so we’ve been squeezed into an area that was previously inhabited by Pygmies and circus dwarfs. I do however, have a cracking view. To my right, a bunch of eager builders are working on the latest addition to Melbourne’s skyline. To my left is a City Apartment building of the sort favoured by short stay businessmen and high class hookers (often in the same room!). It has a roof garden and every evening some of the more exotic residents come out for a stroll.
Monday, 25 May 2009
My Emigrant Life, in Two Parts
I read an article recently by an Irish journalist. I can’t remember his name and I can’t be bothered referencing him anyway. This is blogland after all and if I’m not being paid for this, I’m buggered if I’m going to follow journalistic ethics. But he was about my age and said that our generation was cursed by having to emigrate twice in our lifetime.
I have of course lived up to this prediction, as I’m now experiencing my second emigration. However, describing it as a curse is slightly over the top. I left Ireland for the first time in 1988 as a callow youth desperate for the bright lights of London. We were smothering in the dank stench of depression at the time, but I have to say that the economy was low on my list of departure reasons. I had a need for adventure burning within and a desire to escape from my Mum’s cooking.
Besides, 1988 was a year when everyone seemed to be getting out. Apart from being poor, Ireland was a place of puritan Priests, corrupt politicians and awful weather. The Government imposed a departure tax to suck some final revenue from its fleeing population. This was the last straw for me and like some Vietnam draft dodger; I slipped across the border into Northern Ireland and left for London from there.
My parents saw me off at Belfast Airport. My mother had been stoic until then but she cracked when my flight was called. Throwing her arms around me, she made one final plea. “Why are you going to that God forsaken nation of Child Molesters”?
I had no answer. I couldn’t tell her that I hoped that English girls put it out a bit more than their Irish counterparts, or that I had the possibility of eating food that hadn’t been boiled for four hours. Of course I should have said that she had little right to question the morality of England when our puritan Priests were topping the world charts on molestation. But that was 21 years before the Ryan Report on Child Abuse in Ireland was published and we were largely oblivious to the degenerate cess pool in which we lived.
I stayed away for eight years that time and came back in 1996 as Ireland seemed finally to be catching up with the world. We had figured out a great wheeze for making money by selling the whole country to the Americans who used it as a vast assembly plant for the import of goods into the European Union. We then hitched a ride on the great Euro bandwagon and realised that we could live on credit provided by German and French pensioners to buy hacienda styled mansions and bouncy castles.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can now say that I always knew it was a charade. A bubble of South Sea proportions that would eventually come crashing down. If I’m honest of course, I have to admit that I enjoyed some of the fruits of the Irish boom. I bought my first house for example and watched giddily as it leaped in value. I migrated from a ten year old VW Golf to a slick two litre fuel injected monster and I developed a chicken curry fetish that expanded my waistline and left me addicted to MSG.
In my defence, I did see the crash coming from a long way out. I put my house on the market and noticed that no one was camping in the driveway to snap it up, as they had been two years earlier. Much as I wanted to come to Australia for the sun and relaxed lifestyle, I was also aware that my homeland was about to crash, even without the help of Lehman Brothers.
The rest of the country seemed to be in denial. One of my final outings before coming to Australia was to attend the General Election count in Dublin. I had hoped that my countrymen would come to their senses and elect a Government which cared about ordinary people. The ruling party however, created a mirage whereby everything seemed dandy and changing horses in mid stream would be disastrous. The long procession of victorious government candidates being chaired from the election centre sent a chill down my spine and was as good an incentive as any to get out.
Through the wonders of the Internet, I can now watch Ireland’s descent into doom and gloom on a daily basis. I didn’t have that luxury back in 1988. Occasionally, I’d pick up a copy of “The Sunday Press” if I happened to wake up in an Irish suburb of London (which happened a lot in those beer soaked days) and read about the latest factory closure in Limerick or Galway and how interest rates had rocketed to 25%. My only other source of economic news came through my weekly phone call to my mother. She measured all progress by the price of petrol and whether people were heading North or South to shop. Ironically, she was a lot more accurate than “The Sunday Press”.
But the Internet isn’t the only change to back then. The recession of the 1980’s came on the back of a pretty miserable 1970’s and the 60’s weren’t very clever either. So when the recession hit, it came on top of a very low base. People didn’t have two pennies to rub together and certainly no property to fall back on.
The current recession feels worse because we are falling from a much higher point. The reality is that most people have something to fall back on this time. The ones who bought several properties in places like Bulgaria and the Ukraine will suffer. But it’s hard to feel sorry for them. If you only own the house you live in, then you’re probably sitting on a nice piece of equity from previous houses, even if your current home is worth less than you paid for it.
If you manage to keep your job, then you can probably hold onto the car and the big TV. If that’s not enough, then there is always your internet connection which will allow you access to as much gossip and pornography as you want and the chance to email me. The poor boy who had to emigrate twice.
I have of course lived up to this prediction, as I’m now experiencing my second emigration. However, describing it as a curse is slightly over the top. I left Ireland for the first time in 1988 as a callow youth desperate for the bright lights of London. We were smothering in the dank stench of depression at the time, but I have to say that the economy was low on my list of departure reasons. I had a need for adventure burning within and a desire to escape from my Mum’s cooking.
Besides, 1988 was a year when everyone seemed to be getting out. Apart from being poor, Ireland was a place of puritan Priests, corrupt politicians and awful weather. The Government imposed a departure tax to suck some final revenue from its fleeing population. This was the last straw for me and like some Vietnam draft dodger; I slipped across the border into Northern Ireland and left for London from there.
My parents saw me off at Belfast Airport. My mother had been stoic until then but she cracked when my flight was called. Throwing her arms around me, she made one final plea. “Why are you going to that God forsaken nation of Child Molesters”?
I had no answer. I couldn’t tell her that I hoped that English girls put it out a bit more than their Irish counterparts, or that I had the possibility of eating food that hadn’t been boiled for four hours. Of course I should have said that she had little right to question the morality of England when our puritan Priests were topping the world charts on molestation. But that was 21 years before the Ryan Report on Child Abuse in Ireland was published and we were largely oblivious to the degenerate cess pool in which we lived.
I stayed away for eight years that time and came back in 1996 as Ireland seemed finally to be catching up with the world. We had figured out a great wheeze for making money by selling the whole country to the Americans who used it as a vast assembly plant for the import of goods into the European Union. We then hitched a ride on the great Euro bandwagon and realised that we could live on credit provided by German and French pensioners to buy hacienda styled mansions and bouncy castles.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can now say that I always knew it was a charade. A bubble of South Sea proportions that would eventually come crashing down. If I’m honest of course, I have to admit that I enjoyed some of the fruits of the Irish boom. I bought my first house for example and watched giddily as it leaped in value. I migrated from a ten year old VW Golf to a slick two litre fuel injected monster and I developed a chicken curry fetish that expanded my waistline and left me addicted to MSG.
In my defence, I did see the crash coming from a long way out. I put my house on the market and noticed that no one was camping in the driveway to snap it up, as they had been two years earlier. Much as I wanted to come to Australia for the sun and relaxed lifestyle, I was also aware that my homeland was about to crash, even without the help of Lehman Brothers.
The rest of the country seemed to be in denial. One of my final outings before coming to Australia was to attend the General Election count in Dublin. I had hoped that my countrymen would come to their senses and elect a Government which cared about ordinary people. The ruling party however, created a mirage whereby everything seemed dandy and changing horses in mid stream would be disastrous. The long procession of victorious government candidates being chaired from the election centre sent a chill down my spine and was as good an incentive as any to get out.
Through the wonders of the Internet, I can now watch Ireland’s descent into doom and gloom on a daily basis. I didn’t have that luxury back in 1988. Occasionally, I’d pick up a copy of “The Sunday Press” if I happened to wake up in an Irish suburb of London (which happened a lot in those beer soaked days) and read about the latest factory closure in Limerick or Galway and how interest rates had rocketed to 25%. My only other source of economic news came through my weekly phone call to my mother. She measured all progress by the price of petrol and whether people were heading North or South to shop. Ironically, she was a lot more accurate than “The Sunday Press”.
But the Internet isn’t the only change to back then. The recession of the 1980’s came on the back of a pretty miserable 1970’s and the 60’s weren’t very clever either. So when the recession hit, it came on top of a very low base. People didn’t have two pennies to rub together and certainly no property to fall back on.
The current recession feels worse because we are falling from a much higher point. The reality is that most people have something to fall back on this time. The ones who bought several properties in places like Bulgaria and the Ukraine will suffer. But it’s hard to feel sorry for them. If you only own the house you live in, then you’re probably sitting on a nice piece of equity from previous houses, even if your current home is worth less than you paid for it.
If you manage to keep your job, then you can probably hold onto the car and the big TV. If that’s not enough, then there is always your internet connection which will allow you access to as much gossip and pornography as you want and the chance to email me. The poor boy who had to emigrate twice.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
The Australian Budget Fairytale
Milton became chief of Soco Island when he was 21. Not because he was the smartest or the son of the previous chief. The Five hundred people who lived there voted him boss because he was the fattest and on Soco that’s how they did things. They had no Television, so they weren’t influenced by the body fascism of modern media which celebrates skinny models who look like a good feed would kill them.
Milton enjoyed the free fish that came with the job but he was weighed down by the responsibilities. The islanders were having lots of babies and there was only so much fish to go around. And it wasn’t only food that his people were interested in. The braver ones had been to the big island 50km away and came back with wide eyed stories of four wheel drive trucks and mobile phones.
So Milton got into a boat himself and travelled to the big island to meet the chief there. He wasn’t crazy about what he found, particularly the fish which arrived on his plate covered in batter and rectangular in shape. Milton didn’t get his feet wet much, but he reckoned he’d never seen a fish that shape.
Nevertheless he realised that if he wanted his island to develop, he’d have to embrace some of the nastiness of the big world. The big island chief offered Milton a loan. “Money”, he said, “makes the world go round and if you don’t have it you’ll fall off”.
The big chief loaned him $1,000,000 and said he could pay it back in ten years. But in the meantime, he’d have to pay $100,000 a year in interest. Milton reckoned that would mean paying back the money twice, so the big chief sat him down in front of his wide screen TV (something else that was new to Milton) and showed him a DVD of the Sopranos. “If you don’t like my offer, you can borrow the money from those boys.”
Milton got the message and took the cash back to the Island. He called a tribal meeting and told the elders to split the money between their families and to invest it wisely. The elders scratched their heads. They had never seen money before and the word “invest” didn’t exist in their language. They were nearly as confused with “wisely” until one of them remembered old man Lopopo who could tell if the rains were coming. He was considered wise, but only because nobody knew that he had rheumatism.
Milton saw their confusion and said, “I don’t know. Build things. Houses that tourists can stay in, landing strips that the American air force can land on. Massage parlours for the air force personnel and maybe a garage in case someone buys a car.” The elders shrugged and went back their villages. But money burns a hole in whatever pocket it is placed in and pretty soon the island had a new jetty where expensive tourist boats docked and cafes and restaurants were they ate the fish the islanders used to use for fertilizer.
A year later, Milton had to travel to the big island to pay the first interest instalment. He called the elders together and asked for contributions. They grumbled about having to give up their new found shiny God, but Milton threatened to ban alcohol which had recently become popular on the island and they were happy to cough up.
When he got to the big chief’s house, he found that another visitor had gotten there first. “This is Mr. Reagan from the International Monetary Fund. We’ve been a bit loose on the big island Milton and it looks like we’re bust. We’re handing everything over to these guys including the debt you owe us. So he might have a few questions.”
Mr. Reagan studied Milton for a moment with the cold eyes of an assassin. “How much does your island owe to the outside world?” he asked.
“I guess we owe them $1,000,000”, Milton answered as he glanced at the big chief for support. The big chief was busy studying his own feet however and was clearly embarrassed at having dragged Milton into the sorry mess of Capitalism.
“And how much did you pay out to your people this year and how much did you collect from them”.
“Well I gave them the $1,000,000 and yesterday they gave me back $100,000”.
Mr. Reagan pulled out a calculator from his briefcase and furiously punched numbers into it. “I’m afraid your situation is quite dire Mr. Milton. You have a current account shortfall of $900,000 and a deficit of $1,000,000. If you’re looking for support from the IMF, we’ll have to insist on taxes of 50% and all public servants getting sacked, as well as hospitals being closed down and pensions being abolished.”
It took Milton a moment to digest all this. The words being thrown around were not common in his village. “The thing is Mr. Reagan, we don’t have a hospital. Old mother Kidolo is good with herbs and she can normally fix you up. We don’t have a pension because old people get looked after by their families and the fishermen give them all the fish they can’t sell. I don’t have any public servants, unless you count Bidolo the village idiot who bangs the gong when I want to summon the elders. I could sack him but I don’t pay him anyway. He just likes banging the gong.
“Anyway, Mr. Reagan, I’m not looking for your help. I just came to pay this year’s interest. My people are prosperous and we’ll pay back this debt in no time”.
Milton got a receipt for his payment and made his back to his own island, basking in the glory of having seen off the big world for another year at least. When he got there, the elders were waiting on the new jetty looking excited. “We had a visitor while you were away. Some guy called Kevin Rudd was here. He said he’d heard about the money you gave us and how we all became rich. He said he has to write something called a budget this week and he will base it on us”
“That’s great”, said Milton. “I’ve just said goodbye to the big chief. He’s made a mess of his island. So he’s heading off to somewhere called Ireland. They have offered him a job as Minister for Finance”.
Milton enjoyed the free fish that came with the job but he was weighed down by the responsibilities. The islanders were having lots of babies and there was only so much fish to go around. And it wasn’t only food that his people were interested in. The braver ones had been to the big island 50km away and came back with wide eyed stories of four wheel drive trucks and mobile phones.
So Milton got into a boat himself and travelled to the big island to meet the chief there. He wasn’t crazy about what he found, particularly the fish which arrived on his plate covered in batter and rectangular in shape. Milton didn’t get his feet wet much, but he reckoned he’d never seen a fish that shape.
Nevertheless he realised that if he wanted his island to develop, he’d have to embrace some of the nastiness of the big world. The big island chief offered Milton a loan. “Money”, he said, “makes the world go round and if you don’t have it you’ll fall off”.
The big chief loaned him $1,000,000 and said he could pay it back in ten years. But in the meantime, he’d have to pay $100,000 a year in interest. Milton reckoned that would mean paying back the money twice, so the big chief sat him down in front of his wide screen TV (something else that was new to Milton) and showed him a DVD of the Sopranos. “If you don’t like my offer, you can borrow the money from those boys.”
Milton got the message and took the cash back to the Island. He called a tribal meeting and told the elders to split the money between their families and to invest it wisely. The elders scratched their heads. They had never seen money before and the word “invest” didn’t exist in their language. They were nearly as confused with “wisely” until one of them remembered old man Lopopo who could tell if the rains were coming. He was considered wise, but only because nobody knew that he had rheumatism.
Milton saw their confusion and said, “I don’t know. Build things. Houses that tourists can stay in, landing strips that the American air force can land on. Massage parlours for the air force personnel and maybe a garage in case someone buys a car.” The elders shrugged and went back their villages. But money burns a hole in whatever pocket it is placed in and pretty soon the island had a new jetty where expensive tourist boats docked and cafes and restaurants were they ate the fish the islanders used to use for fertilizer.
A year later, Milton had to travel to the big island to pay the first interest instalment. He called the elders together and asked for contributions. They grumbled about having to give up their new found shiny God, but Milton threatened to ban alcohol which had recently become popular on the island and they were happy to cough up.
When he got to the big chief’s house, he found that another visitor had gotten there first. “This is Mr. Reagan from the International Monetary Fund. We’ve been a bit loose on the big island Milton and it looks like we’re bust. We’re handing everything over to these guys including the debt you owe us. So he might have a few questions.”
Mr. Reagan studied Milton for a moment with the cold eyes of an assassin. “How much does your island owe to the outside world?” he asked.
“I guess we owe them $1,000,000”, Milton answered as he glanced at the big chief for support. The big chief was busy studying his own feet however and was clearly embarrassed at having dragged Milton into the sorry mess of Capitalism.
“And how much did you pay out to your people this year and how much did you collect from them”.
“Well I gave them the $1,000,000 and yesterday they gave me back $100,000”.
Mr. Reagan pulled out a calculator from his briefcase and furiously punched numbers into it. “I’m afraid your situation is quite dire Mr. Milton. You have a current account shortfall of $900,000 and a deficit of $1,000,000. If you’re looking for support from the IMF, we’ll have to insist on taxes of 50% and all public servants getting sacked, as well as hospitals being closed down and pensions being abolished.”
It took Milton a moment to digest all this. The words being thrown around were not common in his village. “The thing is Mr. Reagan, we don’t have a hospital. Old mother Kidolo is good with herbs and she can normally fix you up. We don’t have a pension because old people get looked after by their families and the fishermen give them all the fish they can’t sell. I don’t have any public servants, unless you count Bidolo the village idiot who bangs the gong when I want to summon the elders. I could sack him but I don’t pay him anyway. He just likes banging the gong.
“Anyway, Mr. Reagan, I’m not looking for your help. I just came to pay this year’s interest. My people are prosperous and we’ll pay back this debt in no time”.
Milton got a receipt for his payment and made his back to his own island, basking in the glory of having seen off the big world for another year at least. When he got there, the elders were waiting on the new jetty looking excited. “We had a visitor while you were away. Some guy called Kevin Rudd was here. He said he’d heard about the money you gave us and how we all became rich. He said he has to write something called a budget this week and he will base it on us”
“That’s great”, said Milton. “I’ve just said goodbye to the big chief. He’s made a mess of his island. So he’s heading off to somewhere called Ireland. They have offered him a job as Minister for Finance”.
Friday, 8 May 2009
And that's why they call it the blues
They say that sport is theatre. But I think it’s more than that. We all know that Juliet is going to die at the end of the play for example. But who can say with certainty how a sporting event will end? That’s what makes sport magic. That even the participants don’t know how it will finish.
I got up early (very early actually) some weeks ago to watch Ireland challenge for the Grand Slam. It could have gone either way and in the end it very nearly did. It came down to one last kick and as with penalty shoot outs, last minute corners where the goal keeper comes up and any time David Beckham stands before a free kick, half the watching public will be praying for a miss and half for a score. On the day of the Grand Slam, I was hoping for that last kick to miss and indeed it did. In my ecstasy, when that kick fell short, I jigged around my dark sitting room oblivious to the feelings of millions of Welshmen who were sitting with their heads in their hands.
Well fate got its own back on me last Saturday. Again, a kick fell short and this time I was the one to be found with head in hands while thousands of fans from the opposition were copying my dyslexic dance.
Australian Rules Football is a team sport with all the elements of catching, kicking and tackling that appeal to those of us reared on the unforgiving concrete of school playgrounds. I went to a game on my second day in Melbourne and was instantly hooked. I have a soft spot for Setanta O’hAilpin who plays for Carlton. He was a fine young hurler in his day and despite the fact that he can’t kick an oval ball properly or hand pass to save his life, he is a sort of folk hero among the Irish Diaspora here. The Blues were also bottom of the table when I got here, which appealed to my underdog sensibilities and also guaranteed that I’d be following a team that could only go up.
They finished 15th (out of 16) that first season and 11th last year. Their slogan this year is “They know we’re coming”, so expectations are high. I was sold and signed up as a season ticket holder before the season started. AFL is an amazingly democratic sport. Salaries are capped and new players are allocated to clubs on the basis of their lowly positions over the previous two years. Luckily for me, Carlton were crap for the five years before I got here, so they were entitled to a number of high draft picks. These superstars are now maturing into a half decent team and have started the season well.
Last Saturday however, presented the biggest challenge to date. Hawthorne are the reigning AFL champions with a couple of forwards who stand as giants and scare me even when I’m sitting in the 4th tier of the stand. They also have the biggest membership in Melbourne so the chance of a bumper crowd was also on the cards.
The weather did it’s best to help. We awoke to the sort of crisp, clear autumn day that you find in novels about New England. The early winter had disappeared and tee shirts were rescued from storage. Melbourne has nearly as many major sports venues as Dublin has pubs. Saturday’s game was held in the daddy of them all, the MCG, which was only fitting considering the epic that was about to unfold.
Hawthorne had the better of the first half but it was still close enough to allow fans from both teams to enjoy their half time Pot and Pie. We came back suitably refreshed for the 3rd period, or the ‘premiership quarter’ as it is known here. Apparently good teams only start playing after half-time, as though the proceeding period was just a rehearsal. Carlton used it to pull within 1 point of Hawthorne and it seemed they had obtained what our American cousins like to call, the ‘Big Mo”.
The Hawks weren’t reading the script however and Premiership champions don’t just lie down and die. They came at us like a train and were quickly 25 points up. Time was running out but as with all great sporting events, the true drama came in the last few minutes. For the first time all day, the bounces seemed to be going our way and we hit 5 scores without reply. This left us 5 points down with a minute left on the clock. Team sports are psychological at heart. Fear and courage can spread through teams quicker than the flu in a Mexican pig factory. Hawthorne drifted back towards their goal line as Carlton marched forward. The final winning play seemed inevitable.
And then it came. A long, looping pass that hung in the evening sky for an eternity. A gaggle of Hawks defenders stood beneath it, surrounding Carlton’s star forward, Brendan Fevola. As in most sports, defence is easier than attack. The defence just had to punch the ball away. Fev had to catch it cleanly and claim a famous mark.
As the drama demanded, Fevola caught it and stepped back to kick the winning goal. It was from an easier position than the eight successful ones he had already kicked. 70,000 people held their breath. The ball has to go through the posts cleanly in this game to count and at the last minute it grazed the post and with it our chances of one of the great comebacks disappeared.
Half the crowd went wild and the rest of us were left to wonder about the agony and ecstasy of sport. Except Fevola. He lay on the ground for ages as the crowd disappeared. And he seemed to be thinking that if sport is theatre, he always seems to find himself acting in tragedies.
I got up early (very early actually) some weeks ago to watch Ireland challenge for the Grand Slam. It could have gone either way and in the end it very nearly did. It came down to one last kick and as with penalty shoot outs, last minute corners where the goal keeper comes up and any time David Beckham stands before a free kick, half the watching public will be praying for a miss and half for a score. On the day of the Grand Slam, I was hoping for that last kick to miss and indeed it did. In my ecstasy, when that kick fell short, I jigged around my dark sitting room oblivious to the feelings of millions of Welshmen who were sitting with their heads in their hands.
Well fate got its own back on me last Saturday. Again, a kick fell short and this time I was the one to be found with head in hands while thousands of fans from the opposition were copying my dyslexic dance.
Australian Rules Football is a team sport with all the elements of catching, kicking and tackling that appeal to those of us reared on the unforgiving concrete of school playgrounds. I went to a game on my second day in Melbourne and was instantly hooked. I have a soft spot for Setanta O’hAilpin who plays for Carlton. He was a fine young hurler in his day and despite the fact that he can’t kick an oval ball properly or hand pass to save his life, he is a sort of folk hero among the Irish Diaspora here. The Blues were also bottom of the table when I got here, which appealed to my underdog sensibilities and also guaranteed that I’d be following a team that could only go up.
They finished 15th (out of 16) that first season and 11th last year. Their slogan this year is “They know we’re coming”, so expectations are high. I was sold and signed up as a season ticket holder before the season started. AFL is an amazingly democratic sport. Salaries are capped and new players are allocated to clubs on the basis of their lowly positions over the previous two years. Luckily for me, Carlton were crap for the five years before I got here, so they were entitled to a number of high draft picks. These superstars are now maturing into a half decent team and have started the season well.
Last Saturday however, presented the biggest challenge to date. Hawthorne are the reigning AFL champions with a couple of forwards who stand as giants and scare me even when I’m sitting in the 4th tier of the stand. They also have the biggest membership in Melbourne so the chance of a bumper crowd was also on the cards.
The weather did it’s best to help. We awoke to the sort of crisp, clear autumn day that you find in novels about New England. The early winter had disappeared and tee shirts were rescued from storage. Melbourne has nearly as many major sports venues as Dublin has pubs. Saturday’s game was held in the daddy of them all, the MCG, which was only fitting considering the epic that was about to unfold.
Hawthorne had the better of the first half but it was still close enough to allow fans from both teams to enjoy their half time Pot and Pie. We came back suitably refreshed for the 3rd period, or the ‘premiership quarter’ as it is known here. Apparently good teams only start playing after half-time, as though the proceeding period was just a rehearsal. Carlton used it to pull within 1 point of Hawthorne and it seemed they had obtained what our American cousins like to call, the ‘Big Mo”.
The Hawks weren’t reading the script however and Premiership champions don’t just lie down and die. They came at us like a train and were quickly 25 points up. Time was running out but as with all great sporting events, the true drama came in the last few minutes. For the first time all day, the bounces seemed to be going our way and we hit 5 scores without reply. This left us 5 points down with a minute left on the clock. Team sports are psychological at heart. Fear and courage can spread through teams quicker than the flu in a Mexican pig factory. Hawthorne drifted back towards their goal line as Carlton marched forward. The final winning play seemed inevitable.
And then it came. A long, looping pass that hung in the evening sky for an eternity. A gaggle of Hawks defenders stood beneath it, surrounding Carlton’s star forward, Brendan Fevola. As in most sports, defence is easier than attack. The defence just had to punch the ball away. Fev had to catch it cleanly and claim a famous mark.
As the drama demanded, Fevola caught it and stepped back to kick the winning goal. It was from an easier position than the eight successful ones he had already kicked. 70,000 people held their breath. The ball has to go through the posts cleanly in this game to count and at the last minute it grazed the post and with it our chances of one of the great comebacks disappeared.
Half the crowd went wild and the rest of us were left to wonder about the agony and ecstasy of sport. Except Fevola. He lay on the ground for ages as the crowd disappeared. And he seemed to be thinking that if sport is theatre, he always seems to find himself acting in tragedies.
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