Charlie Don’t Surf

So there’s been a tsunami warning. It’s all over the news, it’s the lead story on the radio. The government websites (Bureau of Meteorology and the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre)  have all the details and they’re forecasting that most of the east coast of Australia will be affected by it. How would you treat this information? Well let me tell you, if you’re the average Australian your first instinct apparently is to rush lemming-like to the beach and wait for the impending tidal wave.

Amongst my duties with the local surf lifesaving club, I am the local tsunami officer. We have a preparedness plan in place and we put that into affect today when the tsunami warning first went out. We then monitored the radio and were advised by Surfcom (the local radio centre) to close the beach and advise all beach goers to get to higher ground.

So first we got in the IRB and let all the surfers know. We knew they wouldn’t give a shit, because surfers are, like spiritual individualistic creatures of pure energy and they’re unaffected by anything as trifling as a tidal wave. So anyway – we let the 100 or so surfers at the beach know there was a tsunami warning and one solitary boogie-boarder left the water. We then let everyone on the beach know. We told the fishermen, we told the mums and dads, we told the couples out walking the dog. Nobody left the beach. In one case, a mother with two pre-school age kids even got in a piss with us because the beach was closed.

These poor fuckers didn't get any warning.

There’s a line in Aliens where Sigourney Weaver’s character Ripley comes out of a long cryogenic sleep and is told that her company want to return to the world of the aliens and engage in battle with them. Dumb-struck by this suggestion she asks, “Did I.Q.s drop while I was away?” I was wondering the same thing today.

Okay, so on most occasions when there’s a tsunami warning, it turns out to be little more than a ripple. Indeed when the dust had settled today, our nearest wave height buoy had registered a massive 0.1m increase in wave height at the time the tsunami was due. But surely that’s not the point is it? When you’re told that a massive 8.8 scale underwater earthquake has triggered a tsunami in the pacific, it’s not the same as announcing that Elvis has been found alive and well and is at this moment paddling a canoe towards Australia.

I mean one day, all those arseholes who think they’re bulletproof will find out the hard way that nature doesn’t always play the tease. One day these people will ignore the warnings yet again and rush down to the beach to watch the tsunami. And they’ll watch the tide go out and out and out. And they’ll notice in the distance the fringed cap of a very large surging wave. And they’ll stare a bit longer just to get a good look at it. And then they’ll all think, “Oh shit” and start rushing off the beach and the same idiot mothers who ignored the warnings today will struggle up the sand with their children and the old people will creak slowly up the sand and the surfers will tuck their boards under their arms and they’ll all rush to get in  their cars and the wave will pick them up and in one deft movement, remove them forever from the gene pool.

So the wife’s parents well and truly bolloxed up the summer for all of us. They came over in mid December and squatted in our house until the end of January. They weren’t very interested in doing anything that cost money up to and including actually hiring a car rather than constantly taking Liz’s, thus leaving us with only one set of wheels.

During an ordinary summer holiday we would of course have gone away somewhere. Probably nowhere exotic, but a short break, maybe in Sydney so that the sprog got a bit of time out of town. But since Shylock and the Dementor didn’t want to go anywhere that might entail the opening of a wallet that particular annual trip didn’t take place.

So Liz suggested that we head down the coast for a weekend away after they’d gone. After a thorough search she found a cool looking holiday park just this side of Batemans Bay and booked us a lake-side cabin for two nights. It is of course out of season but (supposedly) still summer, so we got pretty good rates on the cabin.

We set off from Barefoot Bay in bright sunlight and, as per the forecast we’d checked before we left, by the time we were an hour south down the Princes Highway, it was pissing it down. Funnily enough it pissed down with rain the last time we came to Batemans Bay as well.
We have come prepared for the shite weather of course. I mean, we’re English for god’s sake! I have my Macbook Pro with me along with the portable USB drive from the media PC which contains just under a terabyte of movies and TV shows. And of course I have my iPhone. Liz has her book and her phone. The sprog has his DS Lite, Scrabble, Lego and books etc. And if all that fails we could, like, talk to each other or something similarly crazy.

There’s holiday parks dotted around the entire coastline of Australia, but this part of New South Wales has more than its fair share. For the most part they’re nice places, although all of them have a section devoted to owner-owned blocks. These blocks usually contain a caravan (circa 1972) that has made its last trip that has had one side hacked off and an extension built on it. They look about as welcoming as Belsen, but I guess they’re fucking cheap and that’s why you see so many of them.

This particular park is located in a little village called Durras situated on a very nice bit of coastline. Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman have a place a few K’s south of here, but we haven’t seen them in the IGA stocking up on pies yet, so I’m assuming they’re out of town.
The cabin is very modern and clean and has all the things you need in it. It sleeps six (two on a sofa-bed) and has air conditioning, a full kitchen and bathroom along with a telly and DVD player. There’s an undercover deck out the front and a barbie/brazier for each cabin – although it’s not really the weather for barbecues.
We have brought all our bikes with us for the first time this year. This is mainly because the sprog has a very funky new mountain bike that his other grandparents bought him. It has proper big wheels, a load of gears and suspension and this means that Jack can now come with us on bike roads.

This morning we took advantage of the fact that the rain had eased to a mere persistent drizzle to go for a ride. We rode to the shop in town and then explored one of the many cycle tracks in the Murramarang National Park. It was pretty easy going, there being no hills, but by the time the track split into two anonymous looking paths we were totally soaked and decided to head back to the cabin for a shower.

We had lunch in Batemans Bay (inside table because it was still raining) and then drove further south to Moruya for a bit of shopping (on account of the rain). I got a new pair of fins and Liz got some new togs. We drove back along the coast path (in the rain) and had a home-cooked evening meal.

The plan for tomorrow is a slow drive north back home, stopping off in Ulladulla for a spot of lunch at a superb home-style Italian restaurant on the harbour.

Anyone who ever shows even the remotest interest in becoming a politician should immediately be banned for life from holding any such office. Instead it should work like jury duty where you have to serve for a certain period of time by law and when your term is up, you return to your old job. I think these are the only circumstances under which we’ll end up with a half decent politician or two, instead of cluster-fucks like Stephen Conroy.

For those of you who aren’t in Australia, Conroy is our ‘minister for broadband’ in the national (Federal) government. Conroy might have a fairly modern job title, but in attitude he is about as backwards as it’s possible to get – a pro-censorship dinosaur who treats the population of this country like bed-wetting three year olds. This English-born Catholic was on a trail-blazing highway to mediocrity when he saw a chance to create a little publicity for himself by bringing Australia into line with those other well-known bastions of free-speech, democracy and human rights – China and Iran. He decided to introduce a system of filtering at an ISP level, blocking sites that don’t conform to the dogmatic politically insular views of papists like himself. Oh sure, they claimed it was about stopping child pornography, but the blacklist was in the hands of politicians and could be expanded to include any site they wished.

So, not content with censoring the Internet because there are some sites that “offend against the standards of morality”, Conroy has now taken things a step further and is asking Google to censor YouTube in Australia. Yes, that’s right – us grown adults are incapable of thinking for ourselves and must adhere to Conroy’s definition of morality, lest we see a video on YouTube (I shit you not) on how to paint graffiti on walls. Well fuck me, Stephen, I must just take up tagging and graffiti – you’ve inspired me.

Google thankfully isn’t playing along. They have said that they will not voluntarily censor YouTube videos. This is a company that already blocks certain videos containing sex, violence, bestiality and child pornography. But that’s not good enough for Conroy and his fellow god-bothering idiots. They won’t be happy until the only sites you can find on the Internet are some ghastly government approved propaganda sites. Oh and obviously anything to do with that pedophiles club they call the Catholic church.

Can Conroy’s measures be side-stepped? Of course they can. VPNs and the better proxies can sidestep anything the government employs.

But that is not the point.

We supposedly live in a democratic country. Our rights are being trodden on by politicians from the religious right whose idea of governance is interfering in every facet of our lives. It was absolutely brilliant to see Anonymous stepping into the breach with Operation Titstorm. I only hope this is the beginning of direct action – not the end of it.

My current job was a lifesaver for us (if you’ll excuse the pun). We were in very bad shape financially and came pretty close to losing our house. We managed to cling on thanks to a mortgage ‘holiday’ that Westpac gave us and a bit of creative financial reorganisation of our debt. My job isn’t the best paid in the world, but it’s regular money every month that covers the mortgage and the major bills and it has stopped that gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach when I used to wonder where we’d find the money to keep our heads above water.

Anyway, things have changed fairly dramatically in the five months since I started working in Sydney. The first change is that Liz’s business has really taken off in Australia and she’s currently beating off prospective clients with a stick. She has more than enough work to sustain one person and is farming increasing amounts of work out to trusted freelancers. All of which is superb news, particularly given how the exchange rate drop GBP-AUD effectively lopped a third off the value of all the work she does for her British clients.

My job’s changing at the moment too, hopefully in a big way. An internal vacancy came up that was right up my street. I had a word with my boss and he said I’d be nuts not to go for it. So I submitted my C.V. and have an interview next Wednesday. It’s actually a couple of steps up the ladder and would of course mean better money, but the main reason I want to do it is that it’s far more in my arena of past experience (journalism/marketting) than my current job (100% geekosity) and because I would have no immediate boss – I’d just report to various committees.

If I don’t get the job then I’m going to reconsider being with SLSA completely. My days have just been ‘adjusted’ and I now have to travel up three days a week rather than two. This is a bit of a deal breaker for me as I’d always maintained I wanted the bulk of my working week to be at home. So I have another meeting on Wednesday – this time with my boss. At the meeting I’ll say that I’m not happy with my days being adjusted the way they are, he’ll listen, sound managerial, say he’ll think about it – and then press ahead with it anyway – the meeting’s a formality nothing more and we both know it.

If my job had entailed commutting three days a week I probably wouldn’t have taken it in the first place. If there was a viable train service from here to Sydney then I’d be happy to commute every day, because you can do other stuff on a train and it’s cheaper and (everywhere else in the world but here) quicker. But sitting in a car for two and a half hours twice a day three times a week is not living. And that doesn’t take into account the increasing number of ’special’ days when I have to travel into Sydney anyway.

So I guess the question is – what do I do if a) I don’t get the new job at surf and b) my boss refuses to reconsider my days in Sydney? Well actually, that’s pretty simple – I’ll pack in the job and work for/with my wife. Like I said, she’s up to her ears in work at the moment and her job as it exists now is far closer to my own area of expertise on the web. She needs someone to free up her time to actually make websites, someone to visit clients, attend meetings, to do uploads and data entry and stuff. It’ll be a bit of a gutter to leave surf, as pretty much everyone except my boss is great and I love the organisation, but the job’s changed from what I signed up for. New opportunities exist now. All will become clear by Wednesday.

Today is a day I used to dread when I was a kid – the last day of the long school holidays. Six weeks previously those long summer days were stretching before you like an eternity; but now that ignorant shithead time had caught up and the new school year beckoned. My son cannot wait to get back to school; in this regard we are very different.

I revelled in every second I wasn’t in school – building dams in the river, falling out of trees, going camping in the nearby countryside (at the age of 10!), shoplifting in Woolies, skinny dipping down the local lido, vandalising building sites, getting visits from SO19, trying to cop off with girls who’d sooner catch a disease than snog you, making endless mix tapes from the top 40, getting the train to London and spending all day in Hamleys or Harrods toy department, playing ‘war’ with the local kids or even simply just knocking a tennis ball about the local municipal courts.

When I was kid in the late ’70s, the first skateboard craze happened. I had a pimped out 32″ wood deck, AC-90 trucks and a set of (hell yea!) Kryptonic wheels. Having graduated from some shitty Woolworths special, that skateboard held a fond place in my heart – I can still hear the noise those bright red ‘Kryp’ wheels made over the flagstones of my street.

I credit my dislike of school to the Catholic religion. In their infinite wisdom my parents sent me first to a Catholic primary school and then to an all boys Catholic secondary school. By the time I left St Michaels (since sold off, knocked down and combined with the Catholic girls school because it was built on valuable green belt land) I had absolutely no idea how to socialise with girls, I’d become a die-hard atheist and I’d got a B in my R.E. o’level and an E in physics. Apart from the middle outcome I suspect that’s just the way the Catholic church and their circus of bullshit wanted it.

Fortunately, the sprog is attending a public school which doesn’t labour the god angle too heavily. There’s a scripture class every week, which is opt-out (and believe me, we have), but apart from that they don’t ram it down your throat. At my primary school the place was run by nuns with the chief penguin Sr Veronica brainwashing the kids. I can remember standing at the bottom of the playing field at that school, watching the trains in the near distance on the Cambridge-Kings Cross mainline and wishing like only an eight year old kid can that I was on that train with those lucky people, going somewhere, being somewhere other than the oppresive shit-hole I had to show up to everyday. So I guess it’s fair to say that *my* love of summer holidays began there. And so I guess I’m actually pleased that he’s eager to get back to school, because it means they’re not shit-heads there and that he’s getting some enjoyment out of his days.

Incidentally – check out the note at left. I found this on the sprog’s desk and I love it. In case you can’t read his hand-writing it reads thus:

Chores

1. Breakfast.
2. Check mail for missions.
3. Go on mission.
4. Report back to H.Q. and tell your boss you finished.
5. Have brake.

Anyway. The wife’s parents are now thankfully a distant memory, but the fact remains that they well and truly fucked up our summer. In order to fix that a little bit, Liz, Jack and myself are off down the cast in a couple of weeks time. We’re spending the weekend in a cottage next to the beach and we’ll be doing nothing of cultural or educational value, whatsoever.

Praise whatever cosmic space fairy you believe in – the inlaws are nearly out of here. They arrived in mid-December, they’ve been here for the whole of Xmas and New Year and tomorrow (I love you, tomorrow) is their last day. At best, it has been bearable – at worst it has been enough to drive me from my own house. Perhaps the highpoint of their current stay, was Carrion appearing in my office doorway asking me for anti-diarrhea pills. I wondered idly if she required them for her gob, rather than her arse.

So yes, they’re nearly out of here. I will be free once more to walk around my own house stark-bollock naked if I so choose. I will be able to skinny dip in my swimming pool. I can begin putting the pots and pans back in their right places and the plates, bowls, mugs and knives where they live and not where she insisted on putting them. I can speak my mind again. I can invite people round without fearing that they’ll be scarred forever after meeting her. I can put the milk on the middle shelf in the fridge door instead of the 5gallon sized bottle of cranberry juice she keeps there to keep the old bladder ticking over. I can play my music at whatever volume I want, gorge myself on crap instant food and eat my meals in front of the TV if I so choose. I can stop worry about the sprog being picked on. I can fuck my wife (for some reason sex goes off the menu when her parents are in this hemisphere). I can shit in the upstairs toilet and shower in the upstairs shower. I can sit on my sofa and scratch my balls.

I can get my life back.

The sprog does not like his grandparents much. In fact things got so tense early on that, prompted by my lovely wife, I had to bribe him. If the sprog was civil to his grandparents during their stay and refrained from pointedly telling them how much a) he disliked them and b) how much I hated them, then he could have some Lego. He has already traded up from Lego to a new game for his DS Lite. So on Tuesday I will purchase him – Zelda: Train of Spirits and he will learn a valuable lesson in human behaviour – that lying isn’t just acceptable, it’s preferable for the most part.

Fucking hell how much longer is this tortue going to go on? Yesterday we had a meal. My parents were invited over (they haven’t had much of a look-in since the harbingers of doom arrived) for a sit-down originally arranged for midday. Except I had to go patrol the beach due to a couple of no-shows and so it was re-arranged for the evening.

When I got back I asked if there was enough food for two more people – there was – so I invited some surf club friends over here whose house I’ve been using as a bit of a bolt-hole. So we sat down to eat a full roast pork meal – despite the fact that it was 33 in the shade.

Over the table Carrion begins her assault on the ear-drums and the senses, holding forth on the same subjects she always holds forth on. Her discourses invariably fall into one of the three camps:

1) What it’s like in England.

2) What it was like in Singapore in the 1960s when they lived here.

3) Royal history.

Of these, particularly given the audience last night, option 1 would be a peculiar choice given that only two of the nine people at the table weren’t born there. Yet that was an opening gambit, “Yes of course in England … ” this and “Yes of course in England … ” that. Really? Is that fucking true Carrion? It gets cold in olde England does it? It has seasons does it? It has supermarkets does it? Fucking hell! Those 40 years I lived there I must have been sleep-walking, this is all new to me!

God forbid anyone mentions anything even remotely related to royal history, because then she’ll get well and truly stuck into option 3. She’ll regale us all with tales of royal intrigue that even the most ardent republican already knows. He abdicated did he? For the love an American divorcee? Good golly.

But things only start getting wrist-slashingly dull when the atmosphere-sucking vulture gets onto the subject of Singapore. Yes, Carrion and David were in Singapore in the 1960s when he was an aircraft mechanic and she was a very slightly younger bride-0f-satan. On and on and on she drones, “Yes of course but back then all the natives wore traditional dress and lived in wooden shacks, but now it’s all sky scrapers and western clothing – you could be anywhere.” But watch out if David is roused from his slumbers, because he might chip-in with a Prince Phillip style quip along the lines of, “The black chappies that used to work on the base were Tamils and they were so very black that we used to call them Black Enamel Tamils.” Ahahahahaha. Hohohohohoho.

My invited guest Wes did me proud. We were discussing the cockatoos that make a mad racket as they prepare to roost. Wes told me that the nickname they have is Mother-in-law birds on account of the incessant noise they make. I didn’t dare look in Carrion’s direction at that point for I feared lasers would shoot out of her well-0f-souls eyes and reduce me to a smoking pile of ash and scorched Crocs.

Then some other friends of ours turned up too, along with their kids. The sheer volume of people in one place was too much for my parents who said a hurried goodbye and fled. By now I was starting to flake. I’d been on the beach all day patrolling and that, in combination with a bit too much sunshine and a few too many Coronas, I started nodding off in the living room armchair. So I sneaked off downstairs at 10:00pm and went to bed, alongside the sprog who had retired to our bedroom because it was a couple of degrees cooler than his.

We all woke up at about 5:30this morning, the temperature was still 29c and so we had a refreshing early morning dip and tried not to think about the witch in the front bedroom. Only a week or so to go I think, at least I’m back to work from tommorow and have an escape. Hurrah.

So where we live, there’s this bloody great hill called Mount Coolangatta. We’ve been here for three and a half years now and I have only just got the chance to go to the top. You may wonder why it’s taken so long. It hasn’t been for want of trying let me tell you. The problem is that the hill is ringed by private property, so finding a way onto it (it’s national park) is very tricky. We were told by plenty of locals that there was a path up to the top, but despite plentiful investigations we couldn’t find it.

This summer the winery at the foot of the hill decided to start offering Big Track drives up to the top. These used to happen, but they got shut down due to the insurance costs. Anyway, they’re back and, since we have the inlaws with us, we thought we’d book tickets and drive up. The view did not disappoint, but the weather did. We set off in bright sunshine, but as we approached the base of the hill an omnious black cloud blew up overhead and by the time we reached the top it was raining sufficiently for the driver to nip down qjuickly again without lingering in case the track turned into a mud bath. Still, now I know where the track is, I can walk up it and take as long as I like with the view.

Horribly, horribly flawed TV show though it is, I find it entertaining in a kind of road-crash TV sort of a way. Wanted Down Under flies a whole bunch of prospective migrant families round the planet to this brown and pleasant land in order to give them some taste of what life’s like here.

Of course, you cannot get any idea what a country’s like in a week, any more than you can get any idea of what France is like on a day trip to Calais. Yet still they persist with it. They send them round the harbour in a seaplane in order to “get some idea of what Australians do in their leisure time”. Because of course as soon as the weekend rolls around, Sydneysiders run to their cars and drive to the coast and then all circle the harbour in seaplanes until teatime on Sunday. Honestly, what a crock.

I don’t blame the families mind you. If some arse of a TV producer offered to pay the airfare and accommodation costs for me and my family I’d jump at the chance too. I dare say it’d be worth inventing an intention to emigrate just to get a free holiday out of it. Probably best to let your current employers know about it first though, eh.

Anyway – if you’re a member of UK-centric TV torrent site TheBox, the first episode’s ratio ‘free’ – http://www.thebox.bz/details.php?id=105036 – not sure if the rest will be.