Holy Ship!

Yesterday decided to go down to Circular Quay and the Bridge to retake the photos I lost when my USB drive went walkabouts.

Completely forgot about the "Rhapsody Of The Seas". Don't know if you saw this is in the news, but it's the biggest ship ever to grace Sydney Harbour and only cleared the Harbour Bridge by 2 metres when it arrived a few days back.

So as well as grabbing some good images of the bridge, I also snapped off a couple of the ship. And, yes, it's big. Very big.

And embarrassingly, even though they were moored in Circular Quay, the still decided to hold an evacuation drill. This meant those on the quayside could watch and snicker while various blue-rinsed septugenarians in luminous orange lifejackets trundled out to line up along the side of the ship like the world's longest police identity parade.

Look at these photos. I am the new Patrick Lichfield.

Blame Canada

One upshot of living in a hostel, or indeed travelling, is that your preconceptions tend to be challenged. That's quite a heady statement to kick-off with, but it's true. I am a big believer in speaking as you find. But also it's important to find out as much as you can before you speak about it.

The case in point: The perception is that Canada is a sensible country; less coarse than the States and devoid of their neighbour's hopelessly overly-schmaltzy, highly-commercial Coca Cola culture.

But, so far, and against type, the cleverest man I have met was American. And the biggest idiot, a Canadian. The American was a 25-year old Cornell University graduate who resembled a cross between an Arabian Vizier and Ming The Mericiless, was gay, and was engaged to Paddy Ashdown's son. I am not joking about the last part - intriguingly, he knew that Ashdown was some kind of English politician, but didn't quite appreciate how prominent he was.

Conversely, however, we are currently in the midst of an invasion by Canadian Idiots. Or as they now known around the hostel, Can-idiots. These are the kind of bellowing, baseball-capped doofuses parodied and loathed the world over, although more readily associated with USA. When they are not wearing said baseball caps at a jaunty "rap" angle, or punching the air and going "Wooh, Yeah!", they are busy displaying a startling lack of geographical knowledge, saying things like "Ryan, you are, like, so awesome, dude" or drinking heavily until one of them "barfs". It's like watching some cheap, straight-to-DVD knock-off of American Pie, or some other risible "frat-com".

Furthermore, the pre-existing Canadian contingent have now become mortally embarrassed about the presence of these new, loping jackasses. Yesterday, my friend from Montreal, Etienne, was giving me a Canadian geography lesson and, amongst other things, describing the differences between Provinces (eg Saskatchewan, Manitoba etc) and Territories (eg Yukon) before going on to discuss that the joke amongst Canadians, from British Columbia to Quebec, is that people from Toronto are idiots. And where are this new lot from, I asked? Yep. Toronto. Thus confirming all of Etienne's suspicions.

They had everyone's backs up on the first night when, after neighbours had complained about noise coming from the hostel courtyard, Miranda's continual bout of late night shushing seemed pass through one Can-idiot ear and out the other. "Seriously. Shut up!" said Miranda "We could get fined $600 because of the noise". "Well why don't we all chip in, and then we can make as much noise as we like" bellowed the drunken Canadian. "Shhhhhh!", shushed Miranda before adding "Doesn't really work like that, Ryan", knowing the council can close down hostels with just the stroke of a pen.

Meanwhile, I was on the sidelines tutting disapprovingly and wondering which unlucky person had to share a room with them that night. Turns out it was me. And is their behaviour in the bedroom any different? Well, if I told you they came in at 2am, turned the big light on, whooped and brayed at full volume, snored and then in the morning woke everyone with their alarm at 7am, even though they didn't hear it and didn't need to get up, I think you'll understand why I hope a mysterious and agonising plague is released upon Toronto.


--------------------------
Since I wrote the above, there has been another development. I wearily plodded home yesterday evening after two night's continually interrupted sleep, and not looking forward to that night either, only to be met at the front gate by the Can-idiots, fully backpacked up and steaming out towards the airport shuttle pick-up point. "Are you leaving?" I said, barely disguising the optimism in my voice. "Yeah" whooped one, before adding that uniquely North American goodbye, "Peace!". Well, actually, for me, peace and quiet.

I instantly hugged Miranda and Etienne and Dan before Miranda told me that even if they hadn't left, she wouldn't have extended their rent past Wednesday anyway. As a result Etienne, Matin and I celebrated by going to bed at 10 o' clock for a good night's sleep. Not all in the same bed, obviously.

No Light At The End Of The Tunnel

Last year I wrote a blog entry about the piss-poor performers in Akabane town square and, actually, seeing as Lou is over there at the moment, I've half-a-mind to ask her to just swing by to see if that "modern dance" prat is still there, whirling his arms around like a windmill on crack.

Anyway in the meantime, in lieu of the demented Japanese street "performer", I have the ones in Sydney to keep me entertained. Unintentionally entertained, obviously. Every day I take the pedestrian tunnel leading under Central Station to my office, and every day down that tunnel I run the gauntlet, darting between slow-moving pedestrians and busted-up buskers.

Most are bog-standard. Two or three are good. Two or three are so bad, they're good. So then, the ones who immediately spring to mind:


1. The Fortune Teller:

Ageing, bearded, floral-skirted Orc, clearly pushing triple figures. She sits on a small foldaway seat at the side of a dinky table scattered with all kinds of dog-eared paraphernalia. I have only ever seen her have one customer: a large Afro-Caribbean woman in an equally bright frock who, in fairness, looked as batty as she did. Perhaps they were friends. "Alright, Glenys...can you tell me my fortune?", "Course, Rita, but I doubt it will have changed since I saw you this morning...."

Most of the time she sits perched on her little seat reading at the newspaper, gurning elastically at passers by like something out of Bo' Selecta. If she really could see the future, she should perhaps find out what days she's likely to receive any customers and then only turn up on those days. See? She's not thinking ahead.



2. The Chinese Puppeteer

Ageing, Oriental prune with a permanent rictus grin, clearly pushing triple figures. The actual puppet itself is a rather splendid Oriental doll complete with embroidered Kimono-esque dressing gown, porcelain face and also is meant to be playing some kind of flute-like instrument. Similarly, attached are multiple strings from every conceivable body part, tied up to two crucifixes above the puppet's "stage". In theory then, you have so much control over it, you could make it alternate between the Moonwalk and the Macerena, in between getting it to pick out the raisins from a bag of Revells.

Why then does the old gimmer only make it turn left and then turn right in time with the music, which incidentally is some generic Chinese pan-pipe music crackling through a ghetto blaster at the side. Christ, you could make that thing do anything: solve a Su-do-ku, rewire a plug, write a letter to the Radio Times. But no, just left and right for me. And all the while, the man as this permanent look of amazement, as if to say "Look! He's dancing in time to the music. Watch this.... Left!.... Amazing. Now watch this..... Right!...... Can you believe it?"

It's still better than Thunderbirds though.



3: The Fake Rolf Harris

Ageing, Aussie one-man band, clearly pushing quadruple figures. The best one of the lot can be found right up the top end of the tunnel - yet for him, alas, I don't think there's any light at the end of it. He's a grizzled Aussie Cowboy-type figure armed with a guitar and a didgeridoo which he attempts to play simultaneously and fails. Usually (and I will have to get a bit technical here) he tunes his guitar to an "open chord" position which means he doesn't have to use his left hand to fret any notes, rather he can just strum/flail away and get one decent chord from the guitar.

His other hand which under normal circumstances would be on the fretboard is used for holding some Aboriginal woodblocks. Then on top of that he has a didgeridoo resting on his chin but, as his other two hands are busy, he faces the wall of the tunnel (with his back to the audience) to props up one end of the didgeridoo against the tiles.

Trying to describe the combined effect is quite difficult, but if you imagine a man dressed like he fell into the props cupboard on the set of Blazing Saddles, facing a wall with his back to you, farting through a didgeridoo, thwacking out one single monotonous chord and rapping some woodblocks on the tiles, and hopefully you'll come to the conclusion that, really, you should carry on walking.

"I", Said The Fly

The mosquitos are back. And so are the flies. And the flies here are arseholes.

Here they bathe in the light of an Insect-o-Cutor when they fancy topping up their tan. Here, when they smash into the window for the third time, the window usually breaks. Here the flies don't say "bzzzzzz", they say "what are you looking at?". Here when you swat them with a newspaper, they grab the newspaper, tear it into a fetching paperchain and hand it back to you, together with a precis of the main stories.

A few of us had decided to go to the Fountain Cafe for breakfast - so called because it's a cafe and it's by a fountain (presumably, the same theory was employed when they named the Snowy Mountains). Within moments we were being divebombed and aerially bombarded by what seemed to be a whole swarm of flies, but in reality turned out to be about 3.

The persistence and aggression of these little buggers is impressive and as we peppered our conversation with the frequent "bugger offffffs" and "piss offfffs", angular elbow movements and absent-minded swatting of brows, I realised the development of the traditional Aussie corked hat must have been a boon for the early settlers. It certainly wasn't a fashion statement, anyway.

Running On Empty

Is this the most boring email ever to grace an inbox?

---------
Paul,

In a situation where:

* we have been to the RailCorp panels of professional services providers (P07001 - P07005) to secure a Type 1 professional services resource but have been unsuccessful, and

* we now propose to go to the State Procurement 881 panel,

do we need to prepare a separate submission for approval to invite a tender from the 881 panel or will it be sufficient to go straight to the 881 panel explain and explain this in the submission for approval to award the contract?

Peter
-----------

I don't know who Peter is, but he sounds like a lot of fun. Yes, never a dull moment with the P-Meister. He is Krazy. Yes, Krazy with a "K".

Every now and again, despite his wife's advice, he wears his navy tie, not with his navy suit, but with his cornflower blue suit. What a rebel. And sometimes on his way to work, he plays his INXS CD out of sequence - just to mix it up. Man, someone stop that guy - he's out of control.

This place continues to amuse me. The last thing I want to do is come across as snide or unjustifiably vindictive, but I there's something amiss here. I could be afflicted by a terrible naivety, but I just don't know if what these people do has any point to it. Well, it has a point in that it buys them a cornflower blue suit, and pays the Foxtel bill, but I mean what does it actually do?

Most of these people are contractors, hired management consultants who sit in silence, all day, updating documents, chuntering in a subdued yet overly-businesslike fashion down mobile phones which, incidentally, double as PCs, cameras and TV remote controls.

Listening in on their conversations and talking to them about their tasks, it almost seems as if they are trying to build some kind of castle from thin air, vaguely waving their arms about as they direct where the invisible bricks should go. And to the casual observer, the result is a still an empty plot of land. I'm reminded of a famous Goon Show sketch where, whilst in the desert, Eccles, Neddy and Bloodnok encounter a house which they find to be mirage, only to see Eccles fall out of the sky, remarking "I went upstairs".

Was that a useful analogy? Probably not. But, in short then, I am saying that any minute now I expect people to start falling from the sky, realising their job doesn't consist of anything tangible; nothing they can hold, see or touch. Today's charts relay and condense the results of the last set of charts, which were in fact a forecast of what was to be in today's charts, anyway. This spreadsheet is a spreadsheet about other spreadsheets, all of which referenced this spreadsheet. "Maybe we should touch base and have a discussion about what needs to be discussed next time we discuss how previous discussions have gone"; "We're currently undertaking a Stage 2 feasibility study to discover whether the Project Management Team can effectively forecast for Contingency Budgeting, so we can go straight ahead with implementing a Solutions Matrix to address the issues raised in the Test Summary Report. I think you'll agree, that's pretty exciting. Also my wife's left me and I feel so alone....".

The whole thing is so circuitous, so self-referencing, so tautological that you wonder if any work has any influence on anything in the real world. Like a self-contained, Mobius-strip-shaped little universe or a snake eating its own tail, until it feeds itself into nothing.

Yes, I worked in the advertising industry, which is not exactly the most laudable of professions, but the end result was for all to witness; on TV, on the radio, in a magazine, on the internet. And I'm not knocking them . They have kids to feed and Audi's to fuel, but I remain fascinated by the fact that what they do is so artificial, so invisible, so ethereal that no one has ever noticed their output doesn't actually consist of anything.

No "Non-PC" PCs

Received this email today:

HOW CAN I AVOID BREACHING RAILCORP’S ICT POLICY?

The ICT policy prohibits you using the RailCorp email system to send sexually explicit or otherwise inappropriate material.

In considering whether material is inappropriate, you can ask yourself:

“If I printed out that picture, would it be acceptable to pin it on the wall in front of all my fellow staff, my managers, and in public view as representing the image RailCorp wants to present to the NSW community?”


Examples (not an exhaustive list) of inappropriate items are:

· Nudity, both male and female
· Swimsuit, lingerie and underwear pictures
· Images/text/videos/jokes/cartoons which may offend on racial/ethnic grounds or on religious grounds

. Pictures/cartoons:

o which show or concentrate on human genitals/sexual anatomy
o of animals apparently engaged in sexual acts
o involving bodily functions (eg: vomiting, urinating, defecating)
o of medical/surgical procedures or of wounds/injuries

All of these items may cause offence and/or discomfort for someone in our workplace, and therefore they are not appropriate.

You should have no expectation of privacy in relation to your use of email in the workplace.

Bloody spoil sports...........

This Sporting Life

Now I'm not a fan of sport as you know.

In fact, I'd rather spend my Sunday watching the Antiques Roadshow and then Last Of the Summer Wine because, even if Henry Sandon had undervalued a particularly nice teapot, and even if Cleggy failed to launch a rocket made from a bathtub, the combined duration would still be shorter than a football match.
But this last two weekends have been big dates in the Australian sporting calendar and I thought it only fair I celebrate this with my post-colonial cousins.


AFL

First up, the Aussie Rules (or AFL.) Grand Final which myself, Lou, her Melbourne friend Jude, Brian, Franc, Claire, Etienne and Martin all headed down to a bar in Darling Harbour to watch. Obviously, I knew next to nothing about the sport and even with an Aussie, Jude, attempting to explain the rules I was none the wiser.

So how was the game? Well, allow me a digression. Imagine this: when it used to rain at school, we would be confined to the classroom for a "wet-break" where dinner ladies would wheel out reams of blank paper and big stubby Crayola crayons in an attempt to keep us amused for an hour.

If the rain let up, the kids would be let back into the playground and the joy upon being free from the inside of the classroom would result in every child hyperactively zooming around in an impossibly tight turning circle as if just having received an intravenous injection of Kia Ora. From the air it no doubt looked like the physical representation of 2 dozen catherine wheels, spinning wildly and chaotically.

Now, if you'd chucked a ball in while you were at it, you'd have yourself an AFL game.

It's unfathomable: some people are running this way; some people are running that way; there's someone running diagonally for a bit, then back this way. Players dart over there for a while then come cow-tailing it back, then they get tackled and hare it back round and head off in other direction. What's going on?
The whole thing looks like a 22 sprint races being run simultaneously, one for each player, and each with their own unique criss-crossing start and finish point.

And this goes on for ever. 4 quarters of 30 minutes each with a 10 minute break in between means the entire game is pushing 2 and half hours. And that's a long time to be racing around like you've taken an entire packet of Pro-Plus washed down with Red Bull.

I tell you what though. I'll readily admit that even though the game appears an indecipherable hyper-steroidal free-for-all, those players are very, very physically fit. They have to be, being forced to spend two hours of legging it about like they're on fire. They run more than footballers do, and for longer. And, even though tackles are far less brutal than rugby, they run more than rugby players too.

At the end Geelong (near Melbourne) had beaten Port Adelaide by 119 points clear, the biggest ever margin in a Grand Final. Back at the hostel Alex (or Mr Tumnus) was sulking. He's as Australian as drinking Castelmaine XXXX from a billabong, and is a die-hard Port Adelaide fan and little did we know at the time, he was to be disgruntled yet further by an even bigger sporting humiliation........


Rugby

The following weekend was England vs Australia and, despite everyone expecting a thrashing, we headed down to Darling Harbour again to watch the match. This time, however, the bar we had visited the previous week had turned into a meat market complete with gyrating slappers with belts for skirts. Clearly not showing the rugby then.

So we ended up in an old man's pub round the corner, together with a healthy gathering of Aussies and Poms alike. To be fair the Aussies were very gracious singing God Save The Queen as well as their own national anthem, and banter between opposing supporters was light-hearted. The only dissenting voice came from a 70-year old git who looked like he'd been kicked awake in a shop doorway, who routinely barracked the screen with chants of "Break their hands, boys" and was so obnoxious that the other Aussies in the room told him to shut up.

He later fell into conversation with two of our party, Chris (now fully recovered from the train vomitting incident) and Claire. He told them both he had a phD in Econometrics despite looking like a pin up for The Real Ale Drinkers Calendar circa 1974 with his chunky lambchop sideboards and pot belly. Clearly a bit mental.
In fact, after speaking to him for 4 minutes Claire had started surreptitiously kicking me as if to say "rescue me". Martin (from Koblenz) and I wondered how best to do this. "Perhaps I should just go over there and kiss her" he suggested. "Don't think Claire would like that" I responded "Perhaps you should go over there and kiss him".

The game was very exciting, as you no doubt know. So much so that the two German girls, Alischa and Julia, who had never seen a rugby match before, were instantly hooked. The tension built towards the end and the final victory sent the English contingent diving for their mobile phones to send text messages to friends and enemies across the world. The Aussies didn't make a fuss and slunk away quietly, until only the English were left.

I arrived back at the hostel to see Alex (Mr Tumnus), freshly-miserable from Port Adelaide's defeat the week before, being harrangued by three drunk Englishman. "Your team lost at Aussie Rules, and now your rugby team lost as well....dear oh dear oh dear" barracked Noel from Nantwich. "You didn't even score a try" countered Alex, barely containing his rage. "Doesn't matter" said Noel "You still lost". "Yeah, well stop going on about it" retorted Alex "If the Aussies won, I wouldn't have been taking the piss. At least we're modest in victory". "What?!" said everyone in unison "Are you joking? You'd have been banging on for weeks".

And, for someone who doesn't like sport, it was all rather entertaining.

Helter Swelter

It's October. And today it is 36 degrees. I'll write that again - this time in words for the deaf aids - Thirty-Six Degrees.

It's like being in a wind tunnel with a blast furnace. If I was on a beach I think I'd be mopping at my brow with me hanky like some Midlands Pavarotti.

I'm so hot I'd wrestle naked with Eskimo in a freezer full of icepops.

No duvet for me tonight, then.

All's Well That Ends Whale

With only a few days to go until she returns home, Lou, my lovely missus, decided to arrange a mystery trip for us.

Despite my constant questioning she refused to give me any clues as to where we were going, and it was only when she hinted "You need a jumper and a camera" that I guessed correctly; it was pushing a sweltering 27 degrees and in this weather only the sea could be that cold. Turns out, we were going whale watching. Good stuff.

I immediately began brushing up on my Moby Dick quotes - "To the last, I will grapple with thee" and "From hell's heart, I stab at thee" - ready to deploy them in case I became accidentally entangled with the harpoon and found myself trussed to the side of the beast. Obviously, that wasn't likely to happen, but I just wanted to show Lou how cultured I was.

So after I'd been put right on the differences between whale watching and ....well, whaling .....we set off. At Darling Harbour we loaded up onto a double decker boat about the size of a small corner shop, and buzzed-off Eastwards out to sea, passing under and past the ubiqitous opera house and bridge. About 1 hour 30 minutes later, Sydney's skyline was pencil-feint in the heathaze, and with the boat pitching and buckling in the Pacific, I began to feel rather queasy. Lou had taken her travel sickness tablets and so was zonked out on the back seat, but other people were surreptitiously making use of the windsock-style honk-bags distributed at departure.

Just when the sweat was beginning to pool in the small of my back and my mouth had gone dry, the driver - who was an Englishman and a Christopher Ecclestone lookalike - spotted two blowhole sprays and made off for a spot about 200m away. Predictably, there was a mad dash for the top deck where several people were already poised with their digicameras, together with one big black American guy and his missus, who had some kind of proper super-duper, hi-tech, ground glass, long-lensed Olympus effort.

With the engine off and drifting aimlessly, the whales began breeching closer. Now we could see them arcing and curling through the waves, the instantly recognisable Y-shaped tail signalling their departure from the surface. At was at this point, however, people who were attempting to take photos were beginning to discover all they had was a series of snaps featuring just the ocean; it was impossible to know where they would surface next, and when they did breech, in the time it takes to fire off a shot, they'd surged off in another direction. Usually down.

Nevertheless we did have one very close encounter. About 20 minutes in one whale pierced the surface metres from the boat, eliciting a chorus of oooohs and aaaahs from the throng. I scrabbled for my camera but completely bungled it - first by turning it off and, then, after I'd turned it back on, by accidentally selecting the wrong mode. Bugger. To my right I heard the big American with the expensive camera chuntering as well ; he'd obviously missed the moment too. Luckily, Lou got off a few shots from a crouching position with her old-style Nikkon, but as she's a photographer and uses good old-fashioned film, I don't know yet whether the encounter exists on record.

Then it was over. We'd had our allotted time and so turned tail and made for Sydney, now obscured by a brilliant blast of late-afternoon sunshine. Actually, it wasn't over. About 40 minutes out of Sydney, a fellow passenger descended the stairs to announce: "look....dolphins" and again there was a mad scramble to the top deck, and to the front of the boat. We peered over the edge to see a dolphin just feet in front of the bow, scything through the foam at incredible speed. To the casual observer it could have looked like we were chasing it down, but we most definitely weren't. No, the dolphin was playing. Apparenty, they often join the returning boats, racing along with them across the ocean. And, sure enough, after a few moments they had peeled away and disappeared.

Another great trip, then. But next time I'll need to be quicker with the camera.

One Day My Prints Will Come

Last week I was charged with printing out 720 CountryLink training manuals (CountryLink being the OZ equivalent of, say, Intercity). Truly, a job worthy of my talents. Each print run had 84 pages, so that was 60480 pages. It was 122,398 seconds of my life I wasn't going to get back.

So I invented a new game to entertain myself.

If it was a Japanese gameshow it would be called (adopts shouty/grunty Oriental voice): "Super-Printout-Treasure-Hunt-Charrenge!!!!!!!!!!!", accompanied by epilepsy-inducing flashing limegreen captions.

The game is thus: because it's too much for one printer to handle, and because people waiting for one piddly printout are held up by what appears to be an entire tree's worth of paper, I have to stagger the workload.

This means finding other random printers in random parts of the building, installing them on your PC and then sending your Bible Of Dross to print out possibly across the other side of the building. Of course it's not always obvious where these printers are. And so when your print is complete you can go on a little treasure hunt around the labyrinthine corridors looking for any printers with a two ton wodge of paper sat in its out tray.

Strictly speaking you shouldn't do this. Each department has been assigned a printer and has a discreet budget for paper and toner etc. and so today I got rumbled:


"Hi Philip

It appears that what you have been printing has turned up at our printer – level 4 south side facing the tracks.

As this is a large document can you please pick it up instead of reprinting the document.

In future please try to double side print large documents

Regards,
Ellena"

Note how the email is poilte, yet subtle in its recriminations.

"CountryLink"? More like "Cunt Really, Inc."

Vomit Comet

Interesting night last Saturday.

I was invited to a barbecue over at my old mate Rob Beard's house. Hadn't seen Rob in a while and used to spend time with him in his Brighton flat in '98 and '99, so a mini-reunion was in order. He had now taken up permanent residency in the leafy suburb of Turramurra with his (expectant) wife and so together myself and Chris, Rob's old Brighton mate, made out way out of the city centre, across the harbour bridge and into the wooded avenues of the North Shores.

It wasn't long before Rob was demonstrating his new-found barbecuing prowess, including his piece-de-resistance - sticking a beer can up a chicken's arse to prop it up, and then, whilst rearing and rampant, closing the barbecue lid for a good 45-minute sizzle. The food was fantastic and a few drinks later we decided to go on a late-night bush walk involving beer, a big torch, bats, a chorus of croaking frogs and lots of tripping over tree-roots.

However, it was when I came to leave Turrmurra for Sydney Central that I realised that Chris, who also lived in the city centre, was extremely drunk. Half way through the return train journey he stopped talking, turned green, dropped his head between his knees and started to gurn his way through a series of barely-suppressed gags ; the unmistakeable signs of someome trying very hard not to be sick.

Meanwhile, I was so desperate for a piss I thought my bladder might burst and the ensuing tsunami may take out half the carriage. I looked up from concentrating on not exploding to see Chris had spewed lightly on the floor. Luckily we were approaching Wynyard, his stop, and we alighted there only to witness him hurl violently on to the platform. At this point I couldn't walk and waddled off like a crab to find a toilet and had the longest and best tinkle of my entire life. When I returned about 8 minutes later he'd gone, but he lived only a minute from the station and so I figured he was probably home by now.

"Phew" I thought "Glad that's over". But the worst was yet to come. When I arrived back at the Pink House, I found the hostel in chaos. Marco, a previously unassuming Beckham-alike from Milan, had spray-vomited our room from the convenient vantage point of the top bunk. I couldn't believe it. I was like some Chunder Magnet. As Bruce Willis said upon encountering terrorists for a second time in Die Hard 2: "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?". Indeed, Mr Willis, indeed.

Miranda and Fran had borne the brunt and, marigolding up, broke out the industrial-strength Domestos and proceeded to scrub harder than anyone had ever scrubbed. But the stench remained. So, with room 1 out of action, some room juggling was the order of the day. Or night, as by this point it was 12.15. And so people were shifted and shunted, bumped up and pushed across, swipped and swapped and some people even offered to bunk-up with their recent "acquisitions" in order to free up extra beds.

My sleeping companion was away for the week, or else I would have offered to do the same, and so I was to have Raj's bed. Not, I hasten to add, whilst Raj was in it. No, he came back at 2.30 a bit worse-for-wear and came steaming into his/my room only to wrench back the curtain to find me in his bed. "What. The. Fu[k. Are you doing in my bed?" he demanded wild-eyed. "Shhhhhhhh" I responded. "What do you mean shush. This is MY bed" he retorted before adding, with glee, "Bodyslam!" and with a fully-extended, "der-der-der-derrrrrrr!" Superman-style airdive, threw himself on to me. Luckily, I sausage-rolled to the side before we grappled with each other's wrists trying to get the other into an armlock.

A quiet night then. And all problems caused by the demon drink.

Je Ne Regrette Rien

This job is feast and famine. One minute it's update a spreadsheet this and cone-bind a document that. And then the next minute, there's nothing. A glorious, incalcuable black hole of absolute nothing. More often than not I'm given less work than an Iraqi Santa but it pains me to admit - because I know your incredulous reaction - that doing nothing can actually be rather difficult.

Seriously, it's harder than you think. Here are my constraints: Internet quota of 30 minutes per day (except selected sites such as bbc.co.uk and wikipedia). No reading of magazines. No wandering off for a walk. No talking to the person next to you (because they are over 3 yards away). Your task, should you choose not to accept it, is to find the most productive way to do sweet FA.

If no one gives you any work to do, here are some of the things you might like to try:

* Puff out your cheeks and make a noise like this "Pwwwwwfffffffffffffffffffff" whilst placing your hands behind your head in a rather nonchalant manner. This can be repeated up to 10 times a day, but they must be spaced out lest anyone thinks you are having an asthma attack.

* Spin round in your chair. Maybe anti-clockwise first, then clockwise after. If you're a real mentalist you could try clockwise first, but that way madness lies.

* Go to the toilet. Let's face it a pee takes, what, 2 minutes? A poo could take, I don't know, potentially 10 minutes. Always go for the poo. I have sat on the toilet a couple of times, lid down, trousers up, sending abusive/amorous/random texts. No one knows you're not opening your bomb bay doors. Relax and enjoy your toilet-based hiatus.

* Go for a walk. Except don't look like you're going for a walk. George Costanza from Seinfeld has a golden rule when at work: never walk down a corridor without a folder in your hand. Then, even if you're going nowhere, it looks like you're going somewhere

* Peruse the internet sites that are not blocked. eg Wikipedia. Their "random article" function is useful. So far I have managed to read up on the Suez Crisis, Benigno Aquino's assassination, The Counter Reformation (featuring the Jesuits and The Index Of Prohibited Books), Mebeverine (an antispasmodic hydrochroride-based pharmaceutical), an earth leakage circuit breaker, Romanian despot Nikolai Caucescu, Neasden Town Hall and "Gong Farmers" (Medieval Toilet Attendants who mucked out latrines and privies during the Plague)

I am fountain of knowledge. Well not so much a fountain as a squirt under pressure (a fitting description for me, I think).

Even with these five potential escape routes, inactivity can be draining. The point is you're always a little bit on edge in case someone actually does give you something to do. It's difficult to reconcile, as whilst doing nothing and getting paid for it is ultimately everyone's ideal job, you still find yourself secretly wishing you'd been charged with some menial task.

Yet, conversely, when the boss man starts approaching, you do feel like "oh, he's going to ask me to do something....Damn....and I'd just started a daydream about me playing an epic guitar solo onstage at the New Wembley Stadium...bummer"

Nevertheless, though it's like sitting in a doctor's waiting room for EIGHT FRICKING HOURS, I can think of worse ways to earn my money. Being a Gong Farmer for one.

Gabby Bogan

Bogan is the term Australians give their less fortunate, lumberjack-shirted, soap-dodging, educationally sub-normal, mullet-sporting, Jerry Springer-watching, dentally challenged trailer trash. They can usually be found polishing a rifle on a porch whilst drinking tins of beer and then, after, shooting at the tins of beer with the polished rifle. And today I met one called Carl.

I was tasked with taking an EFTPOS machine, which is a hi-tech cash register with a touchscreen and a barcode scanner, to a rail depot in the middle of nowhere. The machine weighed an absolute ton and after two of us had manhandled it into the back of a taxi, I set off for middle-of-nowhere suburb Sydenham, so close to Sydney Airport's Final Approach that if you flipped a coin too high it would probably ricochet off a QANTAS jumbo.

When I arrived I was greeted by two "security guards" one of whom was sat lolling on the gate. I explained who I was and what I had to deliver waving my Railcorp pass about like it could earn me a free lunch or something. "Carl?" called the guard over the walkie-talkie "There's a guy here called Phil who has an EFTPOS machine for you"

"What?!" came the strong Aussie accent through the handset "I don't bladdy know anything about it".
"OK" said the guard "Well, can you come round?"
"What?!" came the answer again, and then "..... but I don't bladdy know anything about it".
"But can you just come round?" repeated the guard
"But I don't bladdy know anything about it!" said Carl again.

This was going to be hard work. The taxi meter was still running at this point, luckily on expenses and I waited for what seemed about 10 minutes when all of a sudden a figure appeared about 30 feet and away, and like Omar Sharif appearing out the desert in Laurence of Arabia, loped towards me. Carl was in his mid 50s with a baseball cap, luminous safety tabard and straggly grey hair flowing out behind him like some pissed wizard. He greeted me with a "What?!", which was a good start, before I attempted to explain to him I had been asked to deliver the ETPOS machine so it could be installed into the buffet car ready for tomorrow's journey.

"What?!" he said again, and then "But I don't bladdy know anything about it!" "I work in the stores. I'm Carl".
"Yes I know" I said "and I was given your name, and told to ask for you".
"I work in the stores. I'm Carl. I don't bladdy know anything about it".

Oh Christ! At this point with a waiting taxi, a mad-eyed Bogan and a impossibly-hefty, $6000 computer I began weighing up my options. At that point Carl announced "I'm going to speak to my supervisor. I'm Carl. I work in the stores" and stomped off in a huff. Luckily I had a phone number, and so rang it. I explained the situation to the chief electrician who chuckled to himself as if he was expecting it, and phoned another person whilst I was on the line to tell him Carl was "not having any of it". Again, his tone suggested this wasn't the first time Carl had got a bit riled.

Carl returned a few minutes later with another bloke who was clearly more switched on. He took a look at ETFPOS machine and said "It's like a till Carl. It's so passengers can buy their food". His tone was as if he was speaking to a child. Carl looked at the machine as if he was looking at an annotated diagram showing how black holes are formed, before saying "I don't bladdy know anything about it". He grabbed a trolley, loaded it up and trundled away, chuntering to himself.

I think I can guess what he was saying.

There Were Two In The Bed and The Little One Said

I am reluctant to go into detail here, but I am currently re-acquainting myself with difficulties of fitting two people into a single bed.

Single beds are made for one person - that's why they are called single beds. Spooning is all very well, but I've never found it a particularly useful analogy considering spoons have no arms or legs, and if they did they certainly wouldn't find them such an obstacle to a decent's night sleep.

For example, what are you meant to do with the arm crushed underneath you nearest the mattress? If you place it under your partner you're asking for a serious, industrial-sized case of pins and needles, and if you trail it behind you, you feel like you're in some kind of wrestling hold. Similarly utching up the bed is problematical if you're perilously close to the edge and she's fast asleep. And what about bed sheets? I don't want the duvet up to my chin, I want it up to my armpit. God I'm hot. God, I'm cold now. And then there's the snoring. I mean right in your ear:
"Snnnnnkkkkkkkkhkhkhkhkkhk......breath........... Snnnnnkkkkkkkkhkhkhkhkkhk........breath"

But what am I complaining for? All these things pale into insignificance when you wake up to find the sun streaming through your window and a person fast asleep at your side, their arm slung across you and their warmth beside you. How glorious.

Christ, that's all a bit girly isn't it? I should probably start talking about cars and guns and fighting to balance it up or something.

Robbery, Assault and Battery. And Memory Card and Camera

So my camera has been stolen. Annoying for two reasons. 1. the expense, especially on a restricted budget 2. there were still photos/films in it which I hadn't had chance to download. And if I'm honest, I think I'm more pissed about reason 2 than reason 1.

I can't do without a camera. It provides me with an opportunity to record "the event" and document my own personal history. Though they can never take away your memories, and though photographs don't record the smell, and the feel, and the mood of a place, they do act as a trigger and can capture the little details: your hire car's registration plate, those outrageous shorts you were wearing, the pattern on that bar's carpet. So I bought another, and my parents graciously agreed to help me out. Luckily, I got a great deal and my new camera is under lock and key.

The trip to the police station, however, was as futile as I'd anticipated. The officer behind the counter was clearly about 14 and also the most dim-witted policeman I'd ever spoken to (not that I've spoken to many, admittedly). He appeared to be on Work Experience or something, asked me the same questions repeatedly, and gave a slightly confunded "oh yeah" when I told him he'd already written that bit down.

Towards the end of his snail-paced transcribing of the events (which was punctuated by him furrowing his brow and chewing his pencil as if faced with a complicated P11 Tax Form) I looked down and noticed he had a handgun holstered at his side. Good lord. Could I really trust this man to make the right decision as to whether to draw his firearm when I can't trust him to record my details correctly?

Direct Line weren't much help either. I looked into the policy small print and found that it might as well have said "This policy does not cover you for anything that might happen that we might have to pay out for".

Luckily, with regard to my photos from the road trip the previous weekend, Louise had taken some belters which I grabbed copies of. Here are a few examples.

The Grown-Up Road Trip

The Great Escape

My new frugal and pie-less lifestyle seems to be working out - tentatively at least . Last Thursday some mug deposited $636 in my account (I think it was RailCorp), thus giving me my first paypacket since November 2006. And seeing as I had already enough food for the week stashed under my bed - mainly consisting of instant noodles and tinned Korma - I was happy in the knowledge that financial consolidation was only a few more rotations of a microwave turntable away.

However, this weekend was APEC. And if, at any stage, Sydneysiders forgot this, they were reminded by the 30ft high wall and the tsunami of police inundating every public nook and cranny (incidentally, police here really don't look like police. They wear blue boiler suits, baseball caps and what looks like Batman's utility belt. It looked like they were there to install a Sky dish. Or else marshall a paintballing weekend).

APEC meant that, first, lots of shops and roads were very, very closed indeed. And second, that if you went within 1 mile of the city centre you were likely to be obliterated by an orbiting laser, or something. Kindly, to compensate New South Wales for the upheaval, the Australian government decided to give everyone Friday off. Long weekend! Super.

Time to leave the city, I think. So with $636 to my name, I began umming and aaahing as to whether to join Louise and Lisa on their "grown-up road trip" up North. After costing it out, I decided that $125 or 50 quid for a weekend int bad, especially considering that included petrol and accommodation. So I said yes.



Thelma and Louise

Louise and Lisa agreed to share the driving between them, and planned out the route accordingly. My contribution was to take up position in the backseat, eat from a jumbo bag of crisps and say "are we there yet?" a lot. If Thelma and Louise, instead of driving off that cliff, had picked up Terry Christian and taken him on a road trip, this would have been the result. And the fact that Louise's name sounds a bit like......er....Louise, only sought to reinforce the analogy. I was hoping we weren't going to bump into that Bradley Pitt.

We blasted up the motorway for a good four hours, and by the time the torrential rain started, we still had a bit to go. The distances involved here are difficult to get to grips with. Case in point: scale on maps. Our map had the same amount of pages as your average AA Road Atlas, but because England is so much smaller, the distance between two points on the page is also smaller. On an Australian map, however, a couple of inches on a page could mean miles and miles and miles. If the Australian map was the same scale as the British map, the atlas would have to be the size of The Daily Telegraph and as thick as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. All this just meant that I started asking "are we there yet?" and "how many more corners?" with greater frequency.

We called in at Bathurst, and pushed on to Cowra, the location of a famous Japanese POW breakout in the war. 400kms or so outside of Sydney now, we were really beginning to get a taste of small town Australia. And in many ways it's similar to smalltown America: wide, gridded streets; diners; low rise shopping arcades; run down bars - and the space between those towns full of creakily-turning metal windmills, railway crossings and wooden-porched houses with trucks rusting in the garden.

Yee-ha indeed.


Star Wars

Our plan was to move on to the Observatory at Cowra - apparently the darkest place in Australia and therefore the best location for viewing the stars. But the clouds had socked in and a phone call to the man at the observatory revealed they weren't going to even bother opening it up that night. A change of plan later and we were heading for Forbes and to our digs for the night.

About half an hour out, however, we realised that the clouds had rolled back and the some stars were out. Then we realised that, actually, ALL the stars were out. We pulled the car into a laybay and turned the engine off. It was black. Pitch black. And steadily, we ventured out into the layby and turned our heads skyward.

You have never seen stars until you see them in Australia. The sky was awash with a billion pinpoints of light - cascading and falling, pooling and swirling, convening into patterns that I'd never seen before. It was like someone had emptied a bag of sugar on to a black bedsheet. The Milky Way was clearly visible too. I don't ever recall seeing it before, but here it was: a billowing, yet feint blue cloud arcing icily over the sky.

After we had stood staring for a while, making appropriate noises of "awe", Louise suggested lying on the bonnet of the car, Wayne's World Style. It was a sturdy motor and she's only a dot, so we clambered up.

"Do you reckon you could get a photo of this?" I asked, knowing Louise is a photographer by trade. Stupid question, clearly. "Sure..." she said, and then added good naturedly, "...I just need to go and fetch my tripod out the boot in the pitch black, and then leave the shutter open for about 40 minutes on maximum exposure while we freeze to death....."

So no photo of the sky then, but thanks to Wikipedia, this is what it looked like.......

The Shining

We got to our lodgings about 10pm. The Albion Hotel in Forbes is a pub, hotel and underground museum. The building has a real history, former home to the disreputable bandit and robber Ben Hall, a kind of cross between Butch Cassidy and Ned Kelly. The catacombs, where he and his gang masterminded raids on gold prospectors, has now been turned into a museum complete with yellowed newpapers and muskets behind glass cases, whilst the vast upper floors contained the accommodation.

This place was spooky. The moment we arrived on the top floor we were greeted with an impossibly long corridor that disappeared off into a dimly lit vanishing point, and a thin strip of paisley carpet which lay along the floor and, also, disappeared into the middle distance. This was The Shining. This was the Overlook Hotel. "Heeeeeeere's Johnny!" and all that jazz.

My room was no less unnerving. A sparse russet coloured room with a single 1970s bed, a single 1970s wardrobe and a sink with a rusted brown stain underneath where the cold tap had been dripping. In true The Shining style it appeared as if my doorframe had received a bit of a pounding at some stage and the eerie silence helped to heighten the "axe-murderer" atmosphere.

I thought this photo summed it up, really. That's my arm of course. But wait.... this photo was taken in 1922 .....so it couldn't have been my arm.......aaaaaaarghhh!


The Dish

The next day we were over to The Parkes Radio Telescope, instrumental in the Moon landings and also the location for the film The Dish, starring Sam Neill, a light-hearted comedy based on those events in 1969.

The stargazing the night before only sought to make this a more involving visit and halfway through the afternoon, after staring at the dish for a while (it is good to stare at), we were all treated to a clanking and rumbling as it moved a few degrees to the left, presumably to have a gander at Betelgeuse, or something. I was tempted to buy up all the rocket-shaped pencil sharpeners and meteor-shaped erasers in the giftshop, but I'm an adult and don't do that sort of thing now.


Close Encounters

From Parkes we were on to Mount Canobolas, just outside Orange. It's an ex-volcano with a peak that commands stunning views of NSW. When we arrived the sun was beginning to set and we were soon joined by some very nosy kangaroos. They're wild up here, but let us get quite close nonetheless. The sun and the wildlife provided us with some great photo opportunities. Pity, then, that by point my memory card was full and my battery was flat. So as the lithium died I went snap-happy trying to capture the moment while I still could.

The Fat Controller

So it turns out that it int that bad here after all. Yep, it isn't exactly an episode of TISWAS in here, but there's a kind of stately predictability to the proceedings which mean that, whilst it's unexciting, it is, at least, consistently unexciting.

So far the work has been fairly straightforward: cone binding 40 documents, taking minutes from meetings populated exclusively by men with mortgages and moustaches, and arranging travel for people testing trains in hick towns 5 hours out of Sydney.

The environment is still unswervingly corporate, however. We work in veal fattening pens, latticed across the open-plan floor like some ultra-tedious Su-Do-Ku. The white plastered walls are adorned with A4 printouts of dislocated managementspeak. Isolated paper islands, attached to nothing, a propos of nothing, with stark phrases blasted across the front in Times New Roman, font size 45. "Feasibility" says one. "High Complexity" says another. "Eh?" says me.

And there are layers and layers of management here and I don't really know what any of them do. All appear to be indistiguishable and interchangeable; there's a manager and a general manager and a group general manager. There's an executive officer, a project officer and an enhancement officer. There's a business intelligence specialist, a solutions architect and portfolio analyst. Readily, I'll admit I've never worked in an environment so corporate, but I can't help feeling that this company is like some kind of administrative souffle; pop it and it'll sag; let the air out and watch it deflate. It doesn't really consist of anything.

Everything is incredibly process driven, too. Last week I was tasked with creating A5 booklets that had to be stapled in the middle. The problem was, however, there was no stapler in the entire football-pitched sized office long enough to reach half-way across to the centre of the page.

"Shall I just go out and buy a longer one and put it on expenses?" I asked. That's what I would have done at Drum. Eavesie once sent me out to Hamleys on Regent St to buy a giant Scalectrix for a prize on the Guardian Sports Show without so much as a whiff of a purchase order or prior approval form. But my request to simply purchase one was met with a reaction of disbelief. I might as well have asked if I could borrow the company card to go on a bender involving limo hire, 8 Magnums of Dom Perignon and a high-class hooker.

No, instead, I spent my afternoon scouring the 56456 acre office floor looking for a long stapler. And when I finally found one its owner said, pointedly "Make sure you bring it back".

But, you know what, it's not all that bad. I've got an awful lot of time on my hands, hence my prolific blog authorship of late. And, hey, you keep reading it, then I'll keep writing it.

We'll Meet Again

It's been a week of goodbyes at The Pink House. A handful of long termers have done the off and headed their separate ways. During the day, Aidan and Hannah made their way to the airport, and by the time I arrived in the evening Richie and Dave were all packed up ready for the 12 hour Greyhound bus journey to Byron Bay.

Richie and Dave, two thirds of Team Rave, had been with us for 4 weeks and so were part of the family (God knows what that makes me at 5 months). One immediate upshot was that because of Raj's decision not to go on the road with the other two members, the "Raj-less" Dave and Rich had to be be renamed Team Ditch - something which the new duo accepted immediately.

As we all gathered to give manly pats on the back to men overloaded with backpacks the size of Hotpoint Dishwashers, leaning foward to stop themselves falling backward, we realised how much camaraderie there is in The Pink House, as the air was filled with the usual exchanges: "...cool, take care, yeah?"; "keep in touch, you've got my email, right?", and Franc's typically ascerbic, but not serious "....I never liked you, anyway...".

Usually goodbyes don't really have an immediate effect if the person leaving is still stood in front of you. It's only later you feel it - when the courtyard is one voice missing, or the conversation is one joke short. The silence that falls is not an absence of noise, but an absence of atmosphere, and of feel. The Pink House is essentially an empty recepticle coloured by the characters who grace its creaking bunk beds, and now we are five of our most vivid people down, there's no telling what hue The Pink House will adopt. It probably won't be Pink.

A La Recherche Des Lunettes Perdu

God, I'm a clever bastard, aren't I? Starting off with a reference to Proust. In French. I should be on QI or something.

For those of you who don't speak French, this means Searching For Lost Sunglasses - which is what I seem to spend most of my time doing these days. I am now convinced The Pink House is riddled with pan-dimensional anti-matter holes through which any object smaller than, say, a packet of Findus Crispy Pancakes, will always fall.

Where does this stuff go? I mean really - where could it possibly be? I'd like to think there's a TARDIS-like room somewhere containing everything ever lost - like Shergar, my Lando Calrissian figure or Chris Langham's external hard-drive.

The problem, you see, is not theft. It's because due to the sheer volume of objects in the room of a backpacker.......rucksacks, guidebooks, towels, iPod chargers, pants, shorts, trainers, cutlery, deoderant, instant noodles, international adapters...... the chances of you losing one of these objects in the melee of bric-brac increases exponentially. Socks go missing most often. Followed by phone chargers. Then toothbrushes. Then sunglasses. Occasionally stuff turns up, looking like it's a had a hell of a week jammed down the side of the bed, or stuffed down the arm of the wrong coat, but more often than not, you're left scratching your head.

I haven't done too bad so far. Whilst other people have lost passports and wallets and phones among the debris, the most precious thing I have misplaced is my sexy Samsung USB Drive containing around 200 photos. Luckily, some sets had already been burned to CD, some were still on Chris's computer, and the world beating, David Bailey-baiting photos of the SH Bridge I took can always be taken again.

Let's hope I don't lose my dignity. Actually, it's probably too late.

Rough and Tumble

When people get to know each other well generally they begin to open up, perhaps become more animated, broach subjects previously off limits, share more personal details.

When people get to know each other really well they start arm wrestling, play naughty Twister, have piggback races and bodyslam one another.

The Pink House currently home to a number of long-term residents who have known each other long enough to allow indulgence in the odd intimate caper. Thus, last night was Body Twister night where coloured blobs on the floor were replaced with body parts. Each contestant, then, labels up parts of their body with sticky numbers and hopes to be touched, or not to be touched there.

Some were braver than others, and whilst I stuck my number 1 to my belt buckle, Richie went the whole way and stuck it on his crotch. Meanwhile Goonie had stuck a number 5 on her tit, and so it wasn't long before I had someone's hand on my arse and my hand on someone's tit.

The evening ended with a piggy back race round the Potts Point fountain in full view of the Police Station.

There's also a rise in bodyslamming and pile-ons over the past few weeks. This usually involves waiting until someone is asleep before doing a Shirley Crabtree and belly flopping on their sleeping form. If you've organised it properly, there should be a queue of people behind you waiting to pile on and, as person after person dives on the next, the effect is a kind of human lasagne.

Occasionally it can go wrong. Last week, a decision to bodyslam Raj whilst he was asleep in the TV room resulted in Aidan taking a blow to the cheekbone. After scrambling out from amongst the pancaked, collapsed scrum, we saw his eye was cut - very much like a boxer. Within minutes a frozen bag of peas was strapped to his face to get the swelling down.

Throughout this an ageing Belgian couple had looked on aghast at such childish behaviour. But then again, they live in Belgium - I don't think they have much exposure to excitement.