Charlie Don’t Surf

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.

Well, we’re going to be doing it tough from here on in. The pacifying foil to the M.I.L.’s endless bitterness is on a plane to Singapore en route to the U.K. Yes, dear old Aunty Jean (Carrion’s older sister) has flown the coop and by now is probably enjoying some distance from the streak of pure evil that is her sister, my wife’s mother, my mother-in-law, satan’s fucking bride.

All the old traits that we’ve come to hate over previous visits are back in evidence. Of all her many delightful qualities, I think the main one is her over-arching sense of her own self importance. This evidences itself in many ways, but without doubt the most annoying is the way she constantly talks over the top of everyone else. And god forbid you try and raise your voice in return to make yourself heard, she’ll just get louder and louder and louder until that horrendous pretend-posh voice with its jarring nails-down-a-chalkboard clipped edges is drowning everything out, up to and including any jet engines that may be running at full power nearby. If she’d been a bit older during WW2 I reckon it would only have taken a couple of broadcasts to the Germans before they surrendered en masse. She talks over the top of TV shows and films too – not just background TV mind you – but shows or films we’ve all sat down to watch. She just can’t keep that flappy fat gob of her’s shut for more than a nano-second.

Another of Carrion’s charming traits is total knowledge about everything. She was having a conversation with Liz this morning and my wife mentioned that I suffered from acid reflux. “Oh no, don’t be silly, that’s just heartburn.” My wife looks at her querulously, “So when he wakes up in the night gagging on his own bile and has to take a pill every night to suppress this, that’s heartburn is it?” Because of course Carrion knows all about everything.

An artist’s rendering of my M.I.L.

The sprog has begun fighting back. Yesterday he was on the toilet and Carrion knocked on the door and said she needed the loo, to which Jack replied in a forthright manner, “Well you’d better go downstairs then, because I’m going to be some time.” At this precise moment the poor sod is out with his grandparents at the air museum in Nowra and Liz has advised him, in order to make the day go as smoothly as possible, to pretend that he’s on a trip with his strict school teacher.

I’ve been escaping to the beach or, when the weather’s shite, my office. I have done more patrol hours this year than anyone else in the club, because sitting on a beach, even one blowing NE 40knots and getting sand in every orifice is preferable to being around the soul-sucking battleaxe.

Other than that, things are going great.

Another one’s come and gone. Xmas day, that blip 7 days  before the end of the year when families reunite in order to give each other presents they don’t want and to have a row. Or maybe that’s just my family. Maybe your lot are all sweetness and light and you get presents of exquisite quality. But somehow I doubt it. Doesn’t everyone have an argument, even if it’s some minor tiff about political affiliations?

In my extended family the arguments usually start in September. It is then that Liz will start pestering me to decide what I want to do on the big day. Do we want to do our own thing? Do we want to go to my parents? Do we want to go away? Do we want to stay here? I don’t care much either way because I don’t think Xms is about grown-ups and so it doesn’t really matter what we get up to. But that’s not a good enough answer and decisions must be made. So there’s phone calls and emails and a load of to-and-fro and in the end we do what we always do, which is Xmas day lunch at my parents followed by whatever blockbuster movie I’ve managed to acquire from the torrent sites.

This year there has only been minor skirmishes in my family – not outright war. My M.I.L. and her sister are staying with us at the moment and there’s plenty of sniping going on there. And my sister made this big deal about oysters and produced some authentic stuffing from a 17th century recipe and got in a piss when I asked if there was any real food. And the M.I.L.’s been slagging everything off as per usual. But there hasn’t been the trench-based Somme-style blood letting warfare of previous years.Sorry.

Kangeroo Xmas …
There’s a great article here about the British and their love of Xmas telly. This is an unusual article for an Australian newspaper in that it’s a) accurate and b) discusses the English without slagging us off. The press seem to love slagging off the ‘poms’ any chance they get and I hasten to add that in this regard they certainly don’t represent popular opinion if the friends and acquaintances that I have are anything to go by.

Anyway – I thought it was a good article. It ends like this, “And Britain watches telly on Christmas Day because it’s what Britain has always done. It’s not right or wrong, it just is. It’s a tradition that is inclusive and celebratory and as close to universal as exists in a nation of more than 60 million. And that in itself makes it a wonderful, wonderful thing.”  When I read that I chuckled to myself because the wife, me and the F.I.L all watched the Xmas edition of the Royle Family live via a FilmOn stream this morning and laughed hard.

There is no equivalent of the British telly tradition over here in Oz. No Bond movies, no Great Escape, no The Snowman, no Eastenders, no Carols from Kings. As the article suggests, that’s partly because the weather here around Christmas day is usually 28 and sunny and on such days the last thing you want to do is sit in front of the goggle-box and try and guess who Peggy Mitchell’s going to slap this year and partly because, well, the local telly’s shite.

So in the UK our Xmas day went like this. Woken up by sprog, watch him open presents, drive to my parents/the wife’s parents, watch the sprog open further presents, watch a Bond movie, drive home at 4:00pm when it’s dark, watch that year’s event movie on the telly, sleep. Here in the Oz it goes more like this, watch sprog open presents, drive to my parents, watch the sprog open further presents, have swim, drive home at 5:00pm, go for a swim, watch a downloaded TV show or a movie, sleep. Except this year, because all the outlaws are here, I left my parents right after I’d eaten, drove to the beach, put on my patrol uniform and clocked up a couple of hours. Choice is a great thing.

Well now this *is* embarassing. I have woken up at 5:30am this Christmas morning and my eight year old son is still sound asleep. In my defence I can only say that I’m not excited for myself, but for him because I know he’s getting some presents he’ll love. Still, it’s quite a funny situation but one that in many ways sums up the sprog (and, ermmm me, I guess). He’s the one that eats a grown-up and varied diet, echews sweeties for fruit and will strip a lamb chop or drumstick cleaner than a piranha fish would – while I eat reformed chicken pieces in the shape of dinosaurs and gorge on sweet things of all kinds. He’s the one that embraces the touchy-feely bits of films, while I skip through them in search of more explosions. He’s the one who gets genuinely upset if he thinks he’s pissed anyone off, while I get genuinely upset if I haven’t.

So time for an update I guess. We’re now, ermm, two weeks in with the in-laws and as many of you have observed, there haven’t been any major ructions yet. There are a couple of reasons for this – firstly, up until yesterday I’ve been working and secondly when I haven’t been working, they’ve been out and thirdly if by some strange conjunction it looks like we’ll all be in at the same time I either go patrol the beach or visit friends. But thanks to the largess of my employer I am now off on holiday until the 11th of January, which is cool, but is highly likely to start messing up the teetering equilibrium we have in the house.

Carrion has come out with some classics already this year, helped along by the fact that her big sister (Liz’s Aunt Barbara) is here, a big sister with whom she rarely sees eye to eye. We were round at my parents the other day and Carrion said, “You always monopolise the conversation, Jean,” (she calls her Jean despite the fact that her name’s Barbara and prefers to be known by that), “and you always talk over other people.” I snorted my coffee straight up my nose and had a painful coughing fit when she said that. It was akin to Pol Pot accusing the Dalai Lama of terrorising people.

David has been alright so far this year. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still makes Ebenezer Scrooge look generous – but he’s been busy doing stuff around the house. We now have a new hob (or old one died 18 months ago and we’ve been too skint to replace and so have been cooking on a camping stove) and a new cooker which we bought, but he fitted. He has removed the old cooker, fitted the new one in its place and fitted our convection microwave above it, freeing up lots of lovely worktop. He did nearly fuck up the recently replaced pool pump mind you, by attempting to copy the procedure he saw me do when I was vacuuming shit off the bottom of the pool, but he didn’t a very good Bart Simpson, “I didn’t do it!” impression. I gave David a sim card for his phone (I bought an experimental $30 sim from voda to see if their coverage had improved round here) and he practically fell at my feet in gratitude.

So anyway – today we’re having Xmas lunch round at my parents. My sister and B.I.L. will be there, but my younger brother will not. We are having a mixed menu of traditional and Australian because, as per usual, nobody could agree on what to eat. Once we’ve done the present thing, I will be donning the red and yellow and heading off to the beach for a couple of hours to patrol. Not that I’m trying to escape or anything you understand.

Bondi bakes…