Blow The Millennium Part Two

In spite of my race, and the predictable references made against us by dreadlocked hippies on kids TV shows, I am not a massive fan of New Year. I am a massive fan of New Years Day, but anyone who has spent time on the Hobart docks with a dreamy look of indifference at pashing teenagers while to the right their friend crawls along the ground with mini skirted cheeks pressed towards the cold cloudy sky, decorating the pavement with their own essence, will appreciate that a night in watching unfunny comedy reviews of the year or listening to Girls Aloud songs on the IPOD is, if not dis-similar, at least better on your shoes. Besides which, the rather namby pamby excuse of dehydration is a good way to turn down the gentle initial advances of anyone convinced that this year, this year, honestly, the Hobart docks won't be overcrowded and depressing. If I'm honest, I'd quite like to be drunk, but that's basically impossible with Hobarts imposing Maori bouncer collective and Irish Murphys sarcastic horrific frontline of consideration in which open legged fourteen year olds who can't spell their own name as they stumble up the steps are let in as long as they are hot, while the ugly are rejected on the grounds that Superdry, inoffensive makers of inoffensive UK clothes, might be a terrorist organisation. Can't be too careful. I tend to think of New Year as one of those parties the daughter of a prominent local businessman in Burnie would throw which would be built up to resemble Satyricon, but which were only a satire of their ambitions. The only one I went to had more oranges than orgies, a neat pile of sandwiches in the corner, and one of the sloppiest teenage pashes I had ever seen. Luckily, in the face of such a dispiriting let down that wasn't advertised in the brochure, I left after an hour, swiping a 1972 bottle of port as I went, only to miss a nerd being dumped over the side of the balcony. Given the size of my glasses, I left at the right time to go and drink the port on the Stella Maris Caterpillar while several discombobulated hobos wandered around in the cold picking through the bins. It felt like quite a wonderful introduction to the world of drinking since the hype and promise of sophistication and maybe touching teenage boob had ended with a nap under a flimsy cover in the cold surrounded by hobos eating garbage. Someone was telling me something, but I don't think it has sunk in to this day. New Year has always ended up a bit like that - the images in my head of romantic fumblings under fireworks somehow always end up giving way to being turned down by Bridget Taylor lookalikes in less exotic than they appear frocks and queueing endlessly for taxis until my brain explodes...the time, it seems, drags on until Easter...

My own New Years experiences boil down to the recounted story from before of wandering through the Irvine snow in a funk and ending up in someones house at 1 in the morning listening to Blackbox, and a particularly ugly morning after when no one at the party recognised each other, but Blackbox were still against all odds playing on the TV, and my Russell Robertson and video store war in Penguin in 00/01. A year after the Penguin snow I was on Penguin beach listening to one of my more tedious friends telling me endlessly about his love woes. This particular friend didn't ever appreciate just how liked he was, and would later respond to being dumped by a ninja like girl who's horns were obscured by her beanie with a 3 in the morning fit where his entire uni house had to wrestle him down until his face was just a mask of embarrassment, grass stains and shoe imprints. And that was before the cops got there. This year he had simply and somewhat jovially been talked out of a suicide attempt after a different break up (from a girl with huge boobs but wind through the brain) but his wounds were still raw. I distinctly remember sitting with my carefully nursed can of pre mixed happiness, only to find that for whatever reason I and he had been assigned an entire area of the beach to, ahem, talk. I still don't know how that came about, but my own behaviour post Kylie rejection hadn't been impressive, so maybe we deserved each other. He spoke at immense and poetic length about how much loss he had suffered while the waves crashed and lapped along the beach in rhythm with his self pity. Eventually I fell asleep (I wasn't drunk enough to claim a pass out) and when I woke up everyone, including him, had gone. The sunrise was ridiculously beautiful, as through tortured eyes and with shut down ears ringing with a hundred variations on the word I had all of my senses focused entirely on the sunrise. I wish I could explain the vividness of the colours I saw, and the beauty of nature and how small and insignificant I felt at the moment, the sheer vulnerability I felt of being just one man with a pile of problems in a crazy mixed up world...and I would have come up with a cogent similie had, at that exact moment, some people in a white combi van hadn't decided to blast out 7BUs 100 greatest songs with rock in the title at a million decibels, with Eagle Rock apparently their anthem. In the midst of some serious questions about my life, and a moment of beautiful natural beauty, akin to Bridget Taylor, I was forced to accept that I had been given a sign and the sign was the Eagle Rock. I had to get myself up out my little sand fox hole and go home while a girl who looked like Lorinda from Girlfriend loudly proclaimed to everyone how good a root her boyfriend was...welcome to 97 kid, yer gonna love it...

Nothing though compared to the horror of the Millennium. I should point out that, somewhat against the advertising of the year 2000 that was promised by Prince and Jarvis Cocker, I had no friends as I was in the middle of my triangle of years where a mobile phone was simply a prop in my life with no actual value. As a result, I spent the passing of time that ticked into 2000 with my Mum, my Dad and my adopted Korean cousin, who in the interest of accuracy, once said that the problem with Melbourne was too many Asians. In fairness, my Dad was a bit of a pisshead who was up for a bit of mischief, but it was still my Dad. It wasn't a bad night with the exception of three distinct mis cues. The first was definitely my own fault. I can't remember if Dad and I had an argument, or I had decided to just have a wander around the magic of Salamanca, but as I passed the corner of that little concrete bit just before the Law Courts (one of my projects was to see how long a copy of Rolling Stone I left littered outside the law courts was still there for - two years, without a word of a lie, when it was removed I almost cried) there was a beautiful girl standing all on her own with big hooped earrings and a tight mini skirt, not to mention the classic hows your father pose with one leg against the wall said in a husky voice happy New Year. Now, idiot that I am, I said Happy New Year in return...and kept walking. It was only later I realised this is not the right track to take in this situation. In fairness, there is every chance, and in fact a very real chance, she was a prostitute, to which most of my friends would say so, you have cash and spare time don't you? Instead of using my time to get Salamanky (Scottish joke) with hooped earring girl I had raced back to the pub to drink pints of vodka with my Dad, who was telling me all about just how much he loved the Manchester United football Ole Gunnar Solksjaer, seemingly a lot more than he loved me. All around us people were trying to join us at our table to try and scav drinks off us without buying their round, and Dad took this in stride, calling everyone pal and using flinty Paisley charm to keep everyone off balance. It was then that I saw the famous Hobart promotions model that I use as my basic drunken template, crawling up Salamanca oblivious to dangerous taxis heading in her direction, looking for her keys as he cheeks pressed daintily against the fabric of her mini skirts, a hair extension left as evidence in the gutter, as she blithely chased a set of keys that seemed perpetually out of reach, before the denounement of a casual but emphatic vomit that she took entirely in her stride. Somewhere, faintly, some venue or other was playing Prince, of course, but looking out it hardly seemed like some momentous event...it just felt like Friday in Hobart...

Of course, this failure to pick up had yet to register, and to the slight worry in my head that maybe the Y2K bug (which with young people today seems as problematic as rickets) would kill us all, I stood on the docks shoulder to shoulder with excited happy people watching and expectantly counting down to the hallowed event that was the year 2000. Trouble was, at 5ive, the countdown over the PA abruptly stopped, and 10 seconds later there were fireworks. So much for that idea, although in fairness when the countdown stopped at 5ive there was a genuine frisson of panic that just maybe that Y2K thing was real, articulated in the three second scream of a girl in a mustard coloured top who just yelled a swear word really loudly and threatened to jump in the water and swim for it - the things I've seen in that water love, wouldn't advise it. And that was it, a new millennium had begun with an almighty stuff up, and with me not having picked up, but shaking hands with my now drunken to the point Mum had to tell him off father. In my mind, I am sure they had a fight, but there is no question this is just a composite memory of a million I didnae use the butter knife sure ye didnae arguments that went nowhere. To get home, we had to all pile onto a Hobart Coaches bus - on the way down, a guy had tried to pick a fight with everyone not over forty until he was thrown off, so we were tense, especially when no buses came for a long time. Eventually, a bus driven by the Tasmanian equivalent of Manuel Uribe pulled up. Somewhat against the spirit of the occasion, Manuel had a Santa hat on, and his massive gut was struggling against a nylon brown jumper, so he looked like a drunk geography teacher with a specially modified capsule to fit his giant unmoving legs into. It's fair to see he was absolutely disgusted with humanity, with life, and with the quality of his sandwich, and he hated everyone who came onto the bus, even those who tried to hug him. Under his mirthless watch, with his little beady eyes sunken behind thick rimmed glasses flickering to and fro from his rear mirror to the road, everyone was afraid to move, his tyranny as spread as his legs, and that's how I spent the first embers of this brave new wonderful milennia - trabbed in a fabricy seat with my shoulder pressed against window glass, aware that I had made a social mistake but not sure yet what it was, with a fat bus driver glaring at me from his little disrupted world. As we swept up the Southern Outlet though, he stalled, and then swore, and I knew, at least, somethings would never change...

The GOB Bug would always, always affect grumpy old bastards...

The Princess and The Pump

Kingston Doctors Surgery has had a refit - it has the feel of an airport departure lounge down to the hardbacked seats and the inefficient staff and over anxiety and desperation to get the hell out of here. In the corner, a TV flickers with a patronising Kids TV show purporting to show children how everyone lives and behaves in Scotland. Shortbread tin shortsightedness is not Scotland anymore. Not a ned or an unwed mother with a tattoo over stretchmarks in sight. My patience fades about the time someone in stringy Aussie dreadlocks is making haggis - try making Haggis in downtown Glasgow, see how you go these days. I'm here with the flimsy disease of exhaustion and dehydration, which isn't a manly injury gained through knocking bits of wood together or using a chainsaw. I'm just some divvy that didn't put a hat on in the sun. I try and dress down when I go to the doctors, so I've got my best tracksuit trousers on, the good blue ones with the tassles. As I look around the room, I realise I'm overdressed. There's a plain girl (plain as a bar of Bourneville as my Dad might say) harassed by lifes burdens behind the counter, typing blindly on the computer, aware that one half of the room is being looked after by Dr Speedy Gonzalez, who moves people in and out with a deft hand, while we are are being looked after by a doctor who may or may not be using 45 minutes to, well, provide a much more thorough examination of his female patient. The TV continues to flicker endlessly, a piper comes on, time passes, some bogans in a triangular bogan support network harass the Bourneville girl behind the counter, determined to see Dr Feelgood as soon as possible. She types blankly into the computer and makes something up. Fat sweaty girl from Big Ws older bigger sweatier cousin is in the adjacent office, seemingly without a responsibility other than drawing concentric circles on a medical pad. Time passes slowly - I briefly, only briefly, consider getting a magazine off the table, as minor and inconsequential celebrities jog endlessly for position as they sell their wedding to the highest bidder - and eventually the yoof TV presenters stop patronising my culture, but the Doctor still isn't available. Just for a moment, I consider a dramatic overdrawn slumping fall on the floor, so perhaps the ranga doctor with the giant glasses or the in and out and shake em all about doctor might add me to their list - but for me, there is no doubt that my flight has been well and truly cancelled, and like a desperate jet lagged traveller, I sit with my eyes rolling, my body unable to move, and stare hopelessly at the loud ticking clock, envying the outside world, and their freedoms, while the burden of time has rendered us stuck in this waiting room, across from a flapping chubby arm pit going around and around as the concentric circle grows ever larger...

As I wait, arms folded, brow furrowed, tracksuit trousers pristine, a princess comes in. She's got a grey work shirt in, for a store I should recognise and in the interim while Highland Dope raps up his summation of Scotland land of Twathearts. Just for a moment, we exchange glances. She's got her hair in a loose fitting blonde configuration borne of a days menial graft, but her eyes glint with preciousness, with indulgence. The glances are meaningless, until I realise I'm someone for her to impose her hatred of this situation, a blank canvas in her direction in which she can roll her eyes, puff out her cheeks and show how even 5ive minutes of her precious time being taken up by the burden of having to wait. Like me, she looks perfectly healthy, so perhaps it's another case of exhaustion. She draws me in again - she certainly isn't ugly, but there's a hatred in her eyes of everyone, an invitation to mock the poor with her, a casted glance towards the bogan three (like the IRA three but with more interest in Monaros) who are telling a loud and poignant anecdote about their cat being unable to control it's bladder. For whatever reason, I lose her eye contact for a moment - maybe it was in the opening part of the news, when Ricky Ponting was making the same sorrowful princess like gestures in his press conference, or maybe it was in making sure the Bogan Three weren't stealing my wheels - but when I look back, her gaze has drifted to a labourers apprentice, and they are in full non verbal conversation, her as the waiting room princess with disgusted eye rolling and a posture crying out for someone to balance a book on her head, him too dim to work out what he's supposed to be disgusted out but thinking wahey that's a nice rack. Ricky winds up his press conference, and the news is now on one of those cutesy isn't life hilarious stories, something about a crocodile and a duck that are friends. I even think his disease is more manly than mine, maybe a real manly disease like asbestos poisoning or over exposure to race car fumes. When I look back, he's gone, and she's reading a magazine about gardening. Her only action now is to cast one last disgusted glance at the bogans for elongating the cat bladder story into a tale that now incorporates the cats antics on Xmas day. With no audience though, she retreats to her plants, as I work out the grey shirt might just be from Priceline...a store which advertises that you pay less...in spite of her attitude, I don't believe at Priceline they dole out tiaras...they do dole out sponges sometimes for staff to scrub some errant lipstick off the floor...

She reminds me of a Melbourne nightclub girl a long time ago the grey shirted princess. We went into a nightclub until about 4am, and there were very few people there. I believe, even though I was drunk, I could pick the distinct sounds of the Ministry 2007 Annual, which suggested the DJ had buggered off and hoped a single CD would pass the time for the stragglers. I was really drunk, and not in that oh god how drunk was I way where you tell your friends every detail because you weren't drunk at all way, I mean in that I'm susceptible to someone pretending to be a wallet inspector level of drunk. In the corner of the club danced a blonde girl who tradition would dictate may have been hot, but liquored up she was Claudia Schiffer, and in the other corner sitting on the edge of a couch was a brunette girl with an angel tattoo on her arm which in my less than wonderful state seemed to be staring at me trying to pick a fight and a pair of tights which strangled her legs into a rope around a bull like submission. I had no self confidence, hell, I had no balance to begin with, so I decided that I wasn't likely to be able to pick up either of these girls, and my loyalty to blue eye shadow girl nipped at the back of my vodka addled mind anyway. My friend though had no such problems, and made a beeline to the brunette angel who was sitting minding her own business, staring idly out of the window towards the McDonalds across the road. She had immaculate teeth that sparkled in the mirrorball, and she was receptive to my friends initial enquiries. Well, receptive to a point, the first thing she asked was what team he played for. Stumped, he stumbled over a reply and she waved him off with a wave of her unringed hand. She was waiting for a footballer, no other level of society would do, and I felt as though if she sat there long enough one night, even if it was only for fifteen minutes, she would find true footballer love. Meanwhile the blonde had left with a sleazy looking used car salesman with a falling to the ground toupee, arm in arm, tongue in tongue, not a care or standard in the world. We left the nightclub not long after, just as Sneaky Sound System came on for the 25th time that night, and brunette girl was still sitting there, the only one left in the whole club, too proud to admit defeat, too princess like to go out with a mere accountant...not that I blame her...it must have cost a lot to maintain those pearly whites...

Eventually, I get into to see the doctor. I check the female patient that went in before me to see if she's hitching up her skirt or showing signs of tiredness. It had been a long consultation after all. The doctor looking a bit tired was all that I could gleam. Such thought were cast aside once the constriction of the blood pressure machine was applied - I'm terrified of the blood pressure pump machine, so it's no surprise my blood pressure is high when it goes on. I don't feel fit, but I'm accutely aware of the fact that there's a morbid fear in the back of my mind that living alone I could collapse one day and never be found, so I want to get fit. He gives me the doctor equivalent of a Mums talk, all take more care and drink more juice. There's an old Scottish joke about everything being cured with Dettol that he seems to be reworking to me, only with juice. I leave to spend time in the company of my own insecurities, and a woman behind the desk unable to work the computer. The female patient who was in the consultation for ages is outside on the path smoking - she has a chunky buxom body poured into a black work suit but is kind of attractive if you don't pick faults. She throws me a suspicious but coy glance, and I'm not in a position to judge. The computer is proving to be like a space shuttle for the woman behind the desk. I look around and see a woman in a wheelchair being thoroughly patronised by her carer, even though the ladies mind appears to be accutely sharp - I'm sure she could work a computer. I'm terrified of this kind of care, I remember seeing a clip from an old BBC fitness show called Boomph with Becker when I was little where old bewildered men and women were forced to stretch next to a chair and dreading such awful treatment. Eventually the lady works out how to make a mouse go click and I'm able to leave the airport lounge and those penned in still waiting. The bogans are still waiting to be seen, the blonde bogan with the cleavage defying T-shirt on has her arms folded, she's muttering to the ceiling fan, and outside the girl in the work suit is still smoking, still glancing, still surely uncomfortable in that skirt. She throws her cigarette on the ground, pouts in no particular direction, and gets in an expensive car, the kind a princess would consider a weekend car. She sits down, tries to blister and bludgeon her way out of the car park, but crunches the gears and is left idling in the car park as a series of much less flash motors sidle slowly past her...if you look closely enough, you can see the tiara slipping...

That's the problem with Tasmanian princesses...in a very real sense, you can't be a princess until you leave Tasmania...the place, it kind of gets you in the end..

Worthy Of Websters

One of my oldest friends is performing - it's audience participShaun, and he's been dragged up to hold a unicycle and have his hat turned, TLC style, to da back, while a clown at the Taste of Tasmania is going through a lot of the basic tenets of clowning. He doesn't want to do it, but he has to, and I can't move for the whole hour of the performance, as I don't want to get involved in the performance myself and I'm stuck near the front in prime join in the fun position. I don't want to be the middle aged woman who through a series of happenstances now sits tied in the clowns rope. He's not happy the clown, he's already showed us his knee injury from a past performance, his eyes are joyless and his performance is over familiar to him to the point of self loathing, he's bemoaning how the wind has reduced his act to where it is now, and now he's being upstaged by a cute kid in a red dress who's primary talent is an ability to skip on cue. Across from the other side of us is a bogan heckler, with a biker beard and an overbearing John Blackman attitude, who's making a series of heckles based on incest and the size of his drinking manhood, who will not be silenced in his quest to be part of the show. We pray he won't make an inappropriate comment about the skipping child, given the lack of laughter all round, we don't need to add inappropriate child jokes to the unheady unfunny mix. It's not the clown so much as me - I mean I'm sure in a better mental state a man balancing a cycle on his chin would provoke the kind of hilarity not seen since the heady days of Toni Pearen - because I am deeply uncomfortable in the midst of desperation stripping all dignity. The clown, and I don't like clowns to begin with, is continually apologizing for his poor display, can't get a trick right where he has to catch something, is continually being upstaged by opinionated heckling children, and doesn't even get to the unicycle leaving my friend holding it for an hour without moving, and then, in a final moment, is left scrabbling for gold coin donations and for a painful, agonizing moment, as the masses flee to the shipping container showing short films, it looks like no one will give him even a dollar. He stands in the breeze that he's used to bemoan his lack of ability, holding a flapping cap out like a man offering breadcrumbs to ducks, while at the same time a plumpish dark skinned get the boys out with a low cut top singer with a guitar is making a similar plea for funds, invoking all her Tasmanian references to try and get someone to dip into their pocket and reward her songs, all of which are fine crafted but ultimately tuneless minutae observations on kitchen sink life, with a donation that she might eat. By the time she's on a long winded speech about how much she enjoys the Tasmanian people and the Tasmanian seafood, I fully expect her to claim she is personal friends with Errol Flynn in a bid for a measly five dollar note. As with the clown, I don't slink away to see the aftermath of these pleas - I know they are made to the backs of haughty Germans, to the fronts of indifferent oyster scoffing Tasmanians, and to sides of uncomfortable staff, forced to chase leaflets hither and tither to the four corners of the winds because they couldn't hang onto them when a gust came. It all feels so uncomfortable, it detracts from the majesty of the pancakes, and the surrealism of the way the stall advertises their lack of size as a positive virtue. Well, that's what it said on the leaflet that blew past my ADIDAS...

It's not, when the tourists are in, and the place is crowded with people scrambling for position, the most dignified day on the Tasmanian calendar. As people shuffle past desperate vendors, seeking a table, trying to get a chair from people who are pretending they have six extra friends due back from the pancake parlour any day now, the most minor incident can provoke a serious loss of dignity. A middle aged woman in silver spangly lip gloss with over made up eyes is standing to the right of me forming a one woman queue to pay for her bottle of water. Her white jumper clings limpet like to her body, her breaths agonized as she strains in the sway of the crowd. An Asian tourist gets served in front of her, a particularly bossy tourist indifferent to the social mores of a queue, with a brassy oversized camera pressed to her chest like a family keepsake. The harshness of her Thatcher do is only matched by her ruthlessness in making sure she gets her pinot noir before I can get my Pepsi or Ziggy Stardust can get her water. The staff member who makes the designation of who gets the royal service first is blameless, coming to the situation late, but Ziggy is disgusted, she pulls a disgusted face and looks, nay, implores me to join in some kind of protest, but I'm casually indifferent, and she turns the full force of her glittery glare onto the Asian tourist, who of course is blissfully idnignant since she's unable to speak English and simply wants to get a wine as quickly as possible. For an ugly moment, it seems as though she's about to launch the full Manning, a series of racial invectives that could be as ugly as the guy behind me's lime green Lady Godiva T, but instead she settles for a full flounce with pike, slamming her water down on the metal counter, and leaving with a full puff of the cheeks and loud angry exhortation to the sky of indiscriminate determination, but just as she goes, she loses her balance, not fully, but just enough to render her anger as farce. She grabs onto the metal counter to pull herself back up to a vertical base, and then retakes her water in her meaty hand, as if she had no intention to leave at all. Her Asian rival meanwhile has long ago faded into the crowd, sipping her wine, taking her pictures, not a care or a single frighteningly sprayed hair out of place...

Not that I have emerged well from the day with an inordinate amount of dignity, not least of all because of my pasty Scottish complexion going from white to red in the same time it takes the average plump singer to get to her first chorus of dissected kitchen sink minutae. The crowds and the clown have already made me feel edgy, and pining for the AUSTAR box. Socially, I can be awkward - I can be good too, I got a big laugh in the cinema that made me feel like a regular Adam Hills - but sometimes I feel like a minor addition to the line up, a back up who doesn't really need to be there. This shows itself in an argument about sunscreen. My best friend can poke at me and my insecurities sometimes, but only in that way that spending too long in the company of someone can. One crack too many gets through - what it's about, sunscreen, almost seems irrelevant. Before I know it I'm on the road to a sulk, which were it not for the presence of other people would result in an undignified strop. It is, for what its worth, a self aware sulk. I do it entirely to stop the digs, and I feel justified doing it, but digging myself out of it is nearly impossible. In too deep, I have to go through with a fully fledged sulk that threatens to ruin everyones day, and I'm aware that putting the sunscreen in the napsack means I will end up sunburned before I can finish the application, but I don't care, I've made my point. The awkardness of our position to each other continues into a newsagent, where I want a paper but the staff are pretending they aren't open and are trying to hide behind the counter. When we see them and make eye contact, they pretend they are stacking newspapers on the ground and are wreathed in fake smiles and gosh happy to see you here jollity. It's such an undignified scramble to rescue the situation, it digs me out of my sulk, and I forget that I'm angry. I only remember that I'm supposed to be angry far too late, midway through a flirtacious conversation with a female parking bay attendant, and recourse into sulking by now requires something else bad to happen, perhaps a return to the Taste of Tasmania for another round of Audience Participshaun with the clown...if I had to hold the unicycle for an hour, there's no way I'd be happy...

Eventually though I let everything go - I begin to enjoy my day as we head off to Bellerive oval to watch the cricket, which, the happiness, makes for less potent anecdotes, obviously, but at least I can enjoy the merits of drunk cricket fans and the aftertaste of a particularly bad Bellerive saveloy. A cheerleading troupe storm onto Bellerive oval to warm up the crowd with a slinky work out to P!nk, and my attention is drawn the heftiest of the 12 year olds, who is given nothing too strenuous to do in case she hurts herself. Later, the 12 year old cheerleaders will walk past us coated in lip gloss and eye liner and short shorts, so old before their time it's patently frightening. One of them, a blonde girl texting on a mobile phone, seems to be heading to a nightclub even though she doesn't look old enough for a pen licence. We leave much later, streaming through the late night past several not that bothered that Tasmania lost local patrons. We pass a friend who's friendship with us is, by choice, rapidly nearing it's sell by date, like the orange wafers I found in my cupboard. His girlfriend patently hates us, her social chill curing my sunburn almost on sight. We try not to talk to each other, but eventually we do, an awkward strained conversation full of platitudes made to each others backs. I'm not worried by this anymore, I'm more interested in the same twelve year old from before, the one who's lip gloss is so thick and shiny you can see your face in it, is getting into a car with a much older man who's clad in a flannel shirt and a look that seems incredibly ill intentioned. I hope that's a misjudgement - I hope it's just her Dad. I realise that while I've been worried about the social safety of the pom pom waver, I've still been talking to the power couple, which shows how much I've been listening. Since they've kept on walking and haven't stopped either, they are obviously not paying much mind to the verbage either, and eventually, we hit a corner where we part ways. It isn't even the final conversation we'll have with these people, there's no overwhelming sense of finality that they've gone one way and we've gone the other, but it's pretty obvious, and there's no anger, no mourning, it's just the nature of life...we walked up the road together at one point, and now, they just won't follow us to the Fish Bar...

And in lacking anger, it's probably the most dignity anyone has shown all day...

Claim your right to Milo, claim your right to see it through

Xmas for me doesn't end officially when the last window in the Hannah Montana advent calendar is opened, or when it's Boxing Day and I can yell at the cricket team, or when I leave our conversationally stymied lunch, or even when I pocket the cash that's coming my way and return from an overpoliced night out with a hangover or a punch in the mouth. No, Xmas is officially over for me when the last Morbo in the Favourites chocolate selection is eaten, and suddenly there's nothing to eat in the house. Dragging myself out of the hammock to go and buy something to eat is probably the hardest part of my post Xmas lazy glow, not only because it means I have to get up and move again, but because there's a tradition certainly in Kingston of early morning single people shopping that seems a little awkward, and at certain times it's single live alone men. We gather as a cult some days, all untrimmed unkempt stubble and tracksuit trousers in a line with one loaf of bread and an individual fruit cup each. Two women outside Bakers Delight were having a long and animated discussion about death that seemed to unsettle the boy in the hat, who unlike the ad wasn't dancing and writing slogans in the baking flour, but was rubbing sleep out of his eyes. I wouldn't say, with the possible exception of my greater attention to credit card spending, that I've noticed a massive amount of attention to the world economic problems in the Kingston shopping mall, individiual fruit cups are certainly keeping the local supermarket in green shirts and price check microphones, but today, a small boy in a Cookie Monster T-shirt was pulling on his mothers stretchy silver top demanding that he receive not only attention but a Freddo Frog, but she broke her dream like gaze to tell him that she simply couldn't afford it. Times are tough if you pay enough attention I guess, although I guess that 50c in the pocket is still a valuable asset if it keeps the Mother in silver spangles. When the Mothers attention was distracted by the whys and wherefores of her day dreaming for a better life, the kid, as undeterred in his goal as his T-shirt character was in his, simply reached down, took a Freddo Frog and put it in his denim pocket with the speed of light and he simply stared at me with an angry Gallagher like defiance, daring me to dob him in. I had too many angry texts to send about Brett Lee to worry about his staring, but his Mum busted him in the stare to thump around the air interim, and I had been called over by that stage anyway for a series of probing Parkinson like questions from the check out girl in the green shirt in size denial...did I have a frequent shopper card, at that time in the morning in the fog of mental confusion, is a little like asking a junior government minister a pointed question about leaked documents. It takes me far to long to reply with a no, by which time her attention had drifted onto other matters, or maybe even onto other buttons on her shirt which had an equally short life span as her focus. Still, there was something not in her stare, I know a blank dis-interested piece of customer service when I deliver it, but in the kids. I couldn't place it, where had I seen that look before...and no, I don't have a frequent shopper card...don't interrupt the narrative flow tight shirt girl...

It's funny how my memory works - specifics and definites are often replaced by prosaic moments of interconnected or otherwise lines or moments or colours, a single sentence just as evocative as someone telling me a specific story. That said, I do specifically remember one of my first household sleepovers. No, it wasn't the one where I had to hid in a cupboard when axe wielding Daddy wanted to have a friendly chat about the Hawke government, or the one where I lost a friend forever because instead of playing volleyball outside I stayed in his basement playing C64 FA Cup soccer. It was at my friend Steves house. We all loved Steve, because his house, get this, was within walking distance of school. He was a nice guy with a tremendously freckly face and one of those wonderfully indecisive 1980s haircuts. We had made excited plans to not only get out some BETAmax tapes and make our own lunches or some such nonsense, but also to run to school from his house as late as possible. You certainly made your own fun in the nuclear winter of 1984. Entire days were wasted wondering what Streets would bring out as the next ice cream flavour or who would be the new TAB Cola girl. Steve was a wonderfully enthusiastic sports player, so we spent all night at the school oval playing cricket. I think about this a lot because we had a massive argument a few years later when I hit a shot into the weeds and instead of running for a hundred I stopped running to keep the strike and he was going to bash me up for my idle feet. I was very excited to be sleeping in Burnie as it was, since it wa the big city, home of Fitzgeralds and the 7BU record store. I'm sure that it would have been quite excitedly discussed that I was staying at Steves house - I had still to get socially over the rebuff of not being invited to Bradleys party, so this would have made up for it in some small way. I think Grade 1 was a much better year for me socially than Prep - I knocked off some of my more eccentric edges, I chewed far less Lego, stopped my opinionated stance on Duplo, and calmed down a lot. The endorsement of Steve that I could be trusted with a sleepover was an important breakthrough, almost as much as when I swapped my first cricket sticker. Every single part of our day in Grade 1 was spent on an awkward social precipice - something as simple as a bad haircut or a failure to wear a tracksuit on the right day could set the social tone for the rest of your school days. Similarly though something as simple as getting a shiny marble in a two dollar bag or being in charge of the lunch order bags could rocket you up the social ladder, and we were becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of social popularity - not least of which, the chance to rummage through a better class of other peoples cup...no wait, that's not right, or at least, it's not if my Mum asks. If she does, it wasn't me that made the mess, it was the dog...

I'd like to say that I was a great house guest, I really would, but, and this is harsh on a 5ive year old, I was incredibly emotionally immature. Steve was working at an 8 year old level and was capable of such things as packing his own lunch and making a rudimentary cup of tea for his Mum, where as I couldn't tie my own shoe laces, although I could due to my intellect being used in other areas, like naming the Hawke cabinet and the reporters on 60 Minutes, hold my own in polite adult conversation. My Mum, a terrifying presence in my early childhood due to her common sense Glaswegian approach, always had me on my edge in other peoples houses when I was a kid, making sure that I obeyed the orders of anyone who was the head of the household. When we used to go to my Aunties (not really my Aunty but you called her your aunty) house and I was locked in the rumpus room, I was specifically told not to rummage through the cupboards, which were a treasure trove of activity and lost 1960s and 70s relics of popular culture. Behind the towels and what you could only describe as the good linen (the bad linen was out robbing banks) were old 45s, piles of football cards with exotically named beers stamped over the front, and a Monopoly set with so much character it was frightening. But we at least knew that my Auntie would be good about it if I, say, stole a dart and had to return it. We had no such frame of reference for a stay with Steves parents. I was given a pretty stern lecture on respecting the boundaries of other peoples homes, one which left me patently and naturally terrified. Somewhat inevitably, she delivered her monologue in such a strict and straightforward manner that it terrified me - I certainly didn't want to cause any kind of disturbance, and so when they asked me what I liked to eat I was petrified to answer. When his older sister bowled me a dolly of a delivery in the backyard that should have been smashed into neighbouring Yolla, I didn't have the stomach to upset them and in my indecision I had a tentative off drive was caught on the boundary fence by a well placed flower pot. My biggest issue, if you can call it that, was that they had a disgusting flavour of cordial, a painful mixed fruit concoction that wasn't even Cottees, and which burned my throat as if I was drinking sump oil every time I had to swallow out. Worse, Steve was obsessed with it, and we had to have it with every meal. I'm sure they thought I was a strange child given how little I said about anything even when I was asked, and even worse, at one stage I needed help with tying my shoe laces and didn't like to ask, and so I probably looked completely mental as I walked through the back yard, shoes coming off at every step, until his Mum, a woman called Susan, had to intervene, put the washing down, and perform some kind of Special Olympic style lace intervention. I really liked her, she had peppermint breath, and excellent social skills. She was also the first person I can ever remember swearing, but luckily, that wasn't my fault...this time, it really was the dog...

Still, it was an amiable enough couple of days, poor quality of juice aside. Certainly we got over each others mutual awkwardness around each other and by the end we sat almost as one big family watching A Country Practice and drinking Milo out of a tin (finally not juice!). I had relaxed to such an extent that one of my earlier terrors, getting up at night to use someone elses toilet, had completely evaporated, which was lucky because I really did drink a lot of Milo that night. It felt incredibly exotic and exciting to be up at 2 in the morning at the best of times, never mind in someone elses house in the travel pyjamas. My over confidence though meant I misjudged the length of the hall, and stumbled for a bit in the darkness trying not to trip over a stray dog bowl. I realised my misjudgement in the morning, I had gone two doors too far and almost gone into the linen cupboard (I wasn't rummaging, honestly) but my real misjudgement was to use the living room as a turning point. I put one hand on the living room door for balance and was just about to turn around when I saw, just through the slightest crack in the door, sitting in the same clothes she had on to sit and watch the hilarious antics of Cookie, was Susan. With a slow deliberate pace, she was putting a pile of clothes in a suitcase. Obviously I was too young to realise what was going on, but I knew when someone had been crying, and when someone was agitated and really not in the mood for a little travelling companionship. That of course, is when just like the kid today, she turned out mid fold and pack, and stared defiantly and angrily in the general direction of the little blonde face in the hallway. I'll never know if she saw me, but I always remember that look, and how confused I was that this happy go lucky woman with minty fresh breath and a patient manner had been reduced to such a despairing, worried mess, why she was preparing to sneak out of the house and I'm amazed to this day that I didn't say anything, that I didn't even mention it in the happy go lucky ambience of the next morning when there was bacon and smiles and all the kitchen family decorum that I had previously come to expect. I left the house confused at my first little taste of real life, that not everything was easily explained. That not everything could be easily understood. As I prepared to run to the line for morning assembly with the prepared merry jape that we had talked about for ages, I took one final look at her, trying to find a clue as to her unhappiness, but all I saw was a smiling face and the best wishes. It's only know I realise that just as I took one final look back, she was taking a slow, agonised sip of her coffee, her shoulders were slumped, and she was staring into the middle distance, with far more adult concerns than not having the right marble...

I never told anyone about it, I simply turned the weekend into an amusing anecdote about not being able to get the top off some jam, and left it at that. Further intrusion into the world, much like their taste in juice, would just have been very wrong...

Here to take us out tonight is our favourite ending of the year

Many years ago in Ayrshire, I was sitting outside Black Mamas chip shop at the bus stop when an old lady in a hat with an ostrich feather that was just unnecessary told me that conversation was dead. Sadly for any music hall comedy buffs, I didn't ignore her, the usual punch line, but agreed, and then got the bus home. She sticks in my head not just for the ostrich feather but her desire to spread her most passionate opinion with the world, or at least one small pasty part of it. Today, she stuck in my mind even more because conversation over Xmas was strangely absent today. Normally we head down such conversational culdesacs as hows work, hows school, and sometimes just for a change, hows the food, but there was no real effort or emphasis on anything at Xmas dinner - it was a weary scenario, with none of the over the top chatty set pieces that I've come to dread. And of course, since no-one made the effort, I had a much better time. In the corner of the party sat a red headed step dad, nice guy, rolls his own, usually a little too certain of his facts. However, even he was muted, since someone had given him a book and he wouldn't engage in any party based activities as the book was endlessly fascinating. An old man at the party at one stage went to lift a table, part of the get this place cleaned up and get everyone out effort, and this is a genuinely old man who every Xmas gets a new ache or liver spot, with a big ruddy red drinkers face, and he was straining to lift this table onto some bricks, while the step Dad sat nursing his indifference to everyone through the form of less than great endorsed by David Letterman literature. Right at the end of the brick vs table conundrum, a conundrum which has puzzled man since the first rudimentary creation of tables, superdad, having checked everyone was looking, got up and suddenly started becoming some sort of table guru. He gets away with a lot like this, and at one point he was reading his book while his daughter plaintively tried to show him a present she had got. It's one of the reasons why Xmas dinner is a struggle, there's just too much disconnect in my head. I see these peoples so few times, I can't judge mood, I can't judge states of mind, and I can't judge where everyone sits with their relationships. I realise that they do the same with me, they know nothing about me, and by the time they've worked out just what the kid in the Zaire retro top is all about, we're in the car on the way home and I'm having an afternoon nap in the hammock with Michael Parkinsons book somehow having made it from the table to my lawn next to a discarded bottle of water. The irony of the king of chat staring up at me smiling from the lawn on a day when I couldn't wait for the chat to end is not lost on me...

I'm always reminded at times like this of a sterling piece of advice given to me by a long lost attendee of a North West Coast BBQ in about 1984 as I sat on a concrete step shivering in the fading Penguin Sunshine. I'm sure given it was 1984, he had a big handlebar moustache and a jumper of questionable taste. He told me the key to any BBQ was to sort out the food and make sure there was plenty of meat of the men and plenty of coleslaw for the poofs. It was a theory that had it's holes, sure, he excluded all women and children from the equation, and he was a borderline psychopath anyway two steps away from renaming himself Barry Pudding and running amok in the streets, but I understood the basis of what he was saying. Get the food right and the party takes care of itself. However, when the food is eaten, it still leaves a void that is either filled with drinking or back yard cricket. My back yard cricket skills have long since faded along with my eyesight, but as an observational tool to work out where everyone sits, it's invaluable. There's a classic middle kid of four who's perpetually in need of attention. Not that I blame him, he was the last kid in a dying marriage and as a result his Dad used to take the two older kids away for trips and leave him behind. The two older kids are now independent, especially the older girl who turned up in her low cut pyjamas yesterday, a disconcerting declaration of independence for someone trying to eat some store bought pudding to be confrontation. It's not surprising that middle kid brings to any party his latest accomplishment, be it a prize book or a certificate, and also that he is the one sitting patiently waiting for his presents at the end of the gift giving. I tend to find Tasmanian gift giving a little strange, as proportions are different - I know my people have a reputation for meanness, but no one I know, if they get a Xmas card with cash in it would be looking at less then 20 pounds - and everyone ends up with a lolly snake and a five buck note from most of the aunties. Not to mention the Xmas I got two comics I'd already read. His patience at being the overlooked child snaps during back yard cricket, or maybe it's because one of the aunties bought him a Caramello Koala. He gets out to his littlest sister to make her feel better, but then has the bat taken off him, and he's trying to point out he was doing it just to make her day, and after he is universally dismissed by common opinion, he goes away in a huff. Trouble is, no one chases him, a perpetual philosophical question, if someone storms off in a huff and no one plaintively asks them back is it really a huff. He is forced, eventually, to come back and field, because no one has noticed he has gone, seemingly except for me and I'm hardly important to the party atmosphere as it is. He slopes against a wooden rampart as the action goes on around him, as the tennis ball goes near and around him, and even though it's over a relatively minor dispute, I feel bad for him and the world he is in. As for me, I've never had to worry about any kind of insecurity in my family place. The nearest we came to family dischord was when we had to go and get Mum from outside Mitre 10 when she left during Wilessee one night when her and Dad were fighting and she stormed out. Such ruminations on the nature of family though are disrupted by an immediate need to snag a tennis ball from the mouth of a slobbering white dog, a burden that falls on me because one of the spritely elderly women in the slips cordon has fallen over in a tomato garden, and my battle with the jaws of slobber are a welcome distraction from the fact that the only thing hurt is her dignity...

What did surprise me though was unexpected poignancy. Normally, as I've documented, these are straight forward affairs with party hats and flippant jokes extracted from Chickenfeed crackers. However, on this occasion, someone, it wasn't me, I was still trying to get the joke about the chicken and the walrus, someone else pointed out that behind us was a photo montage. I have one of myself on my own wall that my Mum made a few years ago, as she put it, from thousands of photos I ruined by pulling a stupid face. I never look at it because I hate seeing photos of myself and my big stupid face, and that's not even with a pout or a tortured glance. Luckily this photo montage contains no photos of me, but it does contain a photo history of this family who luckily are more receptive to the wants of a flashing Kodak than me. However, in the corner of this hand crafted montage of memories is a picture of the aforementioned ruddy faced drinker in a suit when he was 20enty, all hopeful promise and unmarked facial features. Even though conversation moved away from the photo, when I looked over, the old man was still looking at the photo - it's just me though, he probably wasn't that arsed, he's not arsed by many things that aren't beer, Essendon or cricket - but I did think his face betrayed the slightest regret that those days of smart suits and tea dances are long gone. The first person I ever knew who had regret in her life was this girl called Claire-Leonie, who despite one day calling me ugly and me saying that was rich coming from a future Ayrshire hooker (discourse of the playground can get to that) was unremarkable except one day around the bubblers she said to me, wasn't 1987 brilliant. Now, this was 1989, and she was only just into single figures of her life, but I remember thinking, yeah, it was, things were so much better then. I spend a lot of my time these days in nostalgic conversations from people who have let things slide far too much to repair their lives, and it's always something that gets me right in the throat...no wait, that's a chicken bone. The photo montage is the intellectual high point of the conversation, and it soon descends back into god we hope the kids do something cute soon. I'm really thrown by how little effort has gone into this year and how soon it is over. The main conversational starters of years past leave even earlier than normal with barely a can of beer drunk. I can't help but feel something has happened, some incident I will never no about - Xmas was never this freelance round here, never so unconversational or unstructured. Perhaps the nostalgia for Xmas past is all the keeps us coming back, a routine, a tradition, something that once had meaning and is now lost. Or maybe no one could be arsed this year. What I will take from this Xmas though is my Dad trying to prop up the conversation with one of his my school is terrible anecdotes, and being helpless to stop him, even though he's boring the arse off everyone. Sometimes silence, like the hair of blue eye shadow girl, is much better golden...

As for me, escaping this Xmas lunch is now a perpetual ritual of itself. There are times I feel a bit bad about my desire to get back to sitting listening to Santogold on my own. They are very nice people, but they aren't my people - those people are in Scotland, obviously, where the disconnect between us grows each year - and I move on back home with a sense of relief. Across the road from me a family is celebrating Xmas and a stray green Xmas balloon sits on the road for a long time undisturbed like a Jessica Mauboy CD in a shop until eventually a tearing round the corner doof doof mobile flattens it leaving Santa with a ho ho hole in his cartoon drawn design. I go for a walk later just to get rid of the turkey and the sense that some of my prepared get out of jail anecdotes had been un-necessary. I walk past a house in Kingston that's gone to a lot of trouble. There's Xmas lights that flash and whirr particularly the flashing whirring reindeer that rather unfathomably appears to talk amidst the whirring and say something in French. Probably a faulty wire. I walk past the house and am glad they've gone to so much effort. I wish no harm on the season, but living away from my real family, it can never be a true celebration for me. As I go to walk away, out of the corner of my eye near the fence there's a shoe, which draws my attention immediately as it is attached to the rest of a very large man napping in front of everyone on his lawn. His house is full of Xmas cheer but his gut is full of Xmas beer, and he's slumped face down on the lawn, with just a tiny hint of what my gran would call tunnel showing out of his jeans (if you saw the train coming out the tunnel, put the kids to bed). There's the remains of an unlit and unlamented BBQ just behind him, some old copies of the Mercury and a well intentioned pile of charcoal off to the left just idly un-used. His wife came to the door, looked over and went back inside so quickly she was like a mirage in a meringue dress, and certainly he didn't realise the trouble he was in. As I went to move on away from the scene of the crime, he sat up, and there was I staring at him, so I tried to move on quite discreetly, but luckily like the eyes of a newborn he had not adjusted to his surroundings quite yet. Instead, he sat up just for a brief moment, squinted into the fading sunlight, pulled over a copy of the Mercury, put it under his mulletted head as a pillow, and went back to sleep. As his head rested peacefully on a story about Kim and Dave leaving Sea FM, I realised he had stumbled onto the true meaning of Xmas...

Sleep. Always sleep.

When Xmas frames a fringe

Under the illuminated flickering lights of Big W, in a festive frenzy so buzzing with activity that even panda eyed girl has to pitch in and push a trolley around with her little princess hands, two bogans are arguing over a book. This is a serious argument, one that takes place early in the morning, as the two badly dressed bogans prey on each others emotions all on the relative merits of a James Hird book or a Wayne Bennett book. Xmas continues to spiral around these parts in a series of indecisive set toos - the bogans do not realise they are merely continuing a tradition of disintegrating universes and flawed human relationships being exposed merely through one party wanting one present and the other wanting a slightly more expensive gift. I do not intrude on their argument, it's too close to the Xmas bone for me, too much like my own Xmas of 89 when my auntie came over for dinner and sat watching TV with her back to us. It's not the place to be anyway, there's a lingering sense of desperation in the air, last minute friends stuck with Andre Rieu DVDs because no one remember to buy them a present. So there they are, trapped, at the mercy of Big Ws limited range of choices hopeful for a few seconds recognition and appreciation tomorrow when the gifts are unwrapped. The gifts don't really matter, the mutual recognition does, I thought enough of you to give you a gift. Whether you like it or not, well, what's it to you. In front of me in the queue as I buy a pile of last minute chocolates and a Tony Martin DVD, there's a woman hunched over in a blue coat, no smile, very musky smell. The girl at the checkout is in dreamy conversation with a to her eyes hunk, she's chest on to him and she's more than friendly as she scans an item and casts a Xmas spell all in the tone of her voice. We drift in their orbit, milling around like stragglers at a swingers party, and it gives the woman a chance to tell her anecdote, the one about her husband and the fluid gathering in his legs. I find this a curious feature of Tasmanian life, the willingness to blurt out the most personal details for any Bad Eggs purchasing queuer to hear - we don't do it in Scotland on pain of death - but I am a little saddened by her tone. She's telling her friend, bad perm, Andre Rieu DVDs overflowing from her arms, that her husband will be fine, but there's concern in her tone, almost panic, that even the defiance can't hide. I worry sometimes about the pace of life, particularly my life, as I rush from Xmas to Xmas, as I rush from year to year, as I stalk behind prams and old women that won't get out of my way. And then one day, it's gone, all that mobility, all that concern, or you have people worrying about you because you aren't yourself and are stuck in bed, and you never saw it coming. The woman eventually gives up on both the story and any hope of getting her affordably priced chocolate stockings scanned by flirtacious D Cup, and we shuffle into a queue where the girl behind the counter is far, far less attractive, but outstandingly efficient, and at this time of year, sometimes, beauty truly is useless...efficiency and robust manly scanning fingers, that'll do me nicely...

There's chocolates on my desk - the desk, as it were, where the wood now ingrains my soul as someone once said - from the automon, a strange human gesture that seems so out of character I assign it an ulterior motive without blinking. Still, a strawberry choc is a strawberry choc regardless of backstory. The girl at work who's brain is far sharper than her ditz crackers persona and cleavage accessory would have you believe is arguing with an old man, who's calling her stupid and a liar just as the Xmas tape plays Jingle Bells. The argument is one sided, for he doesn't know she could care less about his problems - that in her head, there is only a countdown clock and the clock is counting to the holidays and he is but a speedbump in her busy day of counting down. I miss the work Xmas breakfast, the one in which a woman plays Santa and dispenses what you can only describe as single entendres, because I don't know or like anyone I work with anymore on that we'd all hang out and have cocoa level. It's a strange irony of the workplace that they load you up with food, presents and even drink, it's the time of year when everyone is at their nicest but ultimately you can't wait to get away from it all and just fall on the floor asleep at home miles away from everyone. At Banjos, they give me a hedgehog slice wrapped in a Xmassy wrapped setting, and talk to me about their day, their dreams, their plans, two counter staff, all eyes, as 2Pac would say, on me. It seems a strange conversation to strike once it goes beyond hows your day been, and an affordable franchised bakery doesn't seem like the place to strike it anyway, but strike it they do like a big kettle drum, and soon a full three minutes have passed with a full holiday and future plans update. Tomorrow, at Xmas lunch, it will be like this all day - hows work, hows school, hows that bloke we don't mention who dumped you. Small human conversations without meaning, little polite bits of chatter from people much nicer than I am. I'd be lying if I said this pleasant badinage isn't without it's merits, at it's not a Yahoo chat room, but I find it difficult and sometimes I feel like I should have accomplished something meritorious through the year that I could bring up. At least this year, as both with Banjos staff and today, I have fall back plans during lulls in the conversation - I went to Scotland and I've got two days off in January. I leave Banjos just as a girl with beautiful lush hair and a skirt three sizes too big for her takes a swig from her water bottle three seconds after her final word has tumbled indifferently onto the pavement. Her boyfriend and his slogan riddled green T-shirt have long ago tuned out, and there they sit, either in comfortable silence or uncomfortable conversational drought, or like every single relationship I've been in, platonic or partnery, a bit of both with neither quite knowing which percentage is which...

Work ends with a Xmas whimper, the exchange of pleasantries being efficient and prompt and a pile of Xmas food thrown, nay, hurled back into the fridge in a desperate stampede for the door. I walk idly to the bottle shop, a less than glamorous destination. I'm struck by a massive pang of deja vu whenever I go into this bottle shop, because it's where I got my alcohol before my ill fated less than impressive friendship voyage to Eggs and Bacon Bay, where I was such a valuable and wonderful friend I just wanted to sit on a beach and read my book. As I walk idly past, I look into a dimly lit alcove and blue eye shadow girl is there, on her own, smoking. She looks wounded to be honest, stressed, arms folded, eyes distant and focused. Her Xmas doesn't seem to be going well, although this may just be persona. There's always that moment with someone on a pedestal when you get a glimpse of reality - but she is worrying me, she doesn't look happy at the moment. I walk on as she disappears from view, fringe in it's usual immaculate face framing beauty, and in the car park across from me is the grumpy man from the book shop, with his wife. The man who sits all day at his desk with his neatly trimmed beard and his Mozart playing IPOD, until someone has the temerity to flick through a book without buying at, at which point he has to set down his IPOD and make a point of letting you know that he knows that you know it's not a library. His wife is wearing a black and yellow tracksuit that makes her look like an oversized bee, but the buzz they get from each other is very real as the walk hand in hand through the treacherous will they won't they stop for the pedestrian crossing car park. I think, maybe too much, about when people at work go home at night. My Mum says I go out to work a man and come home a boy, as as soon as I'm home I've got a football shirt on and am usually in my hammock drinking a lime spider listening to Catatonia on the IPOD. And yes, the change in season affects me without reason. With each sunrise we begin anew our little daily personas, but at night there's another one waiting to be unwrapped. Survival is the key during the work day, at least for me. My phone buzzes with a text message, from a friend I don't talk to nearly enough - he's good, which is good news, although he over uses smiley faces. I look back over my shoulder and blue eye shadow girl has returned, to throw her cigarette on the ground, take a deep pained breath, and walk back to work. I know how she feels. Substitute cigarettes for a copy of the Herald Sun and an immaculate fringe for a messy shaved head, if you must, but the personas, well, it's twin like...

The bottle shop, incidentally, is the final port of my Xmas - we go for lunch with a family that in that Tasmanian family way aren't your real family but you call them uncle and auntie anyway and I barely consider Xmas. Not, of course, but it's anything but pleasant fare, but it's got a grinding feel to it, a hard work feel to it in which the conversations are foreign and rehearsed. I can't explain it, there's nothing wrong with where we go, but it's a little bit three act performance piece. I'm in another queue by the time I coherently gather this incoherence into something tangible, and a woman reverses blindly into me and tuts loudly that I have the temerity to be standing minding my own business. Three in front, a gregarious old man with a shiny bald head is making gregarious conversation about the nature of his purchase, with full and frank disclosure of just how much alcohol he is going to drink. Reversing woman is now at the back of the queue complaining, and there's an argument breaking out between the staff, the fetch and carry junior boy Jeremy (so his badge says) arguing about what he's been sent to fetch and carry. Jeremy spoke in the bottle shop today, and the word was unpleasant. As we switch our gaze away, a woman in a tight mini skirt picks her undies out from inward of herself, so that's a distraction. Conversationally, the boss, who's sent him to fetch the items he disputes, tries to lighten the mood with a joke, which awkwardly he repeats a second time with a smiling hopeful face, but Jeremy ignores him and the bosses round happy Mr Bounce face falls and he returns to his serving. It's the same scene I saw at the computer games store where the head nerd tried to placate his staff with a joke and they dungeoned his dragon, so it throws me a bit. Seniority, it can be lonely. Two Xmasses ago, I should have told people when I was senior rather than playing with Senior Bagpuss (my toy cat, don't ask) I was struggling, but I didn't. That said, I am resillient. I don't worry about work the minute I'm in the car. The automon does, the bottle shop owner clearly does as when I look over my shoulder with Mum and Dads "swallae" he's still crestfallen, but I don't, ditz crackers doesn't and obviously Barry Bookshop doesn't, and I suspect Jeremy will be taking ice within minutes of going home. I hope blue eye shadow girl, once she gets in her car at night is OK and remembers not to worry. Tonight, I speed down the road to Mum and Dads, the people who really matter to me, and a million stresses melt away, and not just because I'm liquored up within seconds, and my Mum doesn't skimp on the quality of the kebabs...

Whatever the worries of the day, they are there for me, and that, truly, is Xmas to me...so keep on talking...

Merry Xmas

A contrary place that has it's own face and smells of chips

Thankyou to the lovely Bimbimbie for my 2nd ever blog award, dedicated to services for people observing. Although that in certain 1/4s sounds like stalking, I prefer to call it selective walking. What is interesting is since I created this little true to life narrative, the people within it seem determined to live out their roles in it with far more elan. For instance, today fat sweaty girl from Big W, who if you remember is despite eloquent diction perpetually out of breath, was walking around today eating a giant souvlaki and a bag of chips, spreading work place morale and cheer throughout her work day while breathing on people souvlaki breath. I've never had a job where I've been able to wander around with lunch just unobserved and fancy free, well, apart from my job at the ABC where a one hour lunch break was described as "skimping". Then, blue eye shadow girl was in Sanity, but I was running late, and I couldn't discuss her musical choices with her in a lightly flirtacious way. I'm so picky with peoples music choices, so meeting people in a CD shop isn't going to work for me. I don't know if I mentioned before an attractively perky female Sanity staff member responding to my request for Catatonia CDs by saying "No, but we've got Shania Twain!" - not the same. Anyway, to get back to the 2nd award for a moment, people observing, yeah, I guess I do that a lot, but it's more just the fact that, especially now, I have absolutely no work related discipline when it comes to writing. I am cursed with both a relatively creative brain and the attention span of Sarah Jessica Parker. I should be working on my writing exercises, but I'm more interested these days in the little emotive dramas that play out in front of me every day - although today I will admit that, while I was watching dramas play out, I did stop to wonder about the accuracy of such fleeting glimpses into peoples lives. The one thing I always look for these days is the average couple - not the beautiful dreamers, not the smoking couple outside the newsagent with the gooey eyes and perfectly gelled hair and the flirtacious laughter at each others every word, or those parents with a beaming childs hand in either of theirs, strolling through with utmost confidence. I'm talking about the pram pushing couples who linger around the bus mall, the ones in poor quality tracksuits, the ones who are a bit flabby and worn out, the ones who push the pram really slowly for lack of anything to do, the ones who's every second word to each other is a rapidly spoken swear word. Sometimes, just sometimes in the fading sunshine of Rosny, you can see the outline in the face of a once beautiful person who had faith and dreams, but their faces are now coarse and harsh and emphatically riddled with acceptance. I wonder sometimes what the story is, because those couples never seem happy. Like my friend who has a husband who had an Internet dating lady round to their house, I can't see the join, I can't see the wonderful parts of the relationship that I should see, I don't know where the happiness is in standing in the mall swearing at each other while a hapless kiddes sits strapped in tight in a pram chewing a Farleys Rusk, looking up without a care in the world from the confines of it's secure and snug world. Did the hope die out before they met or during? Or was there no hope there to begin with? And are the happy families so happy at home, or is it a front? I wonder, because my only concern is trying to get a computer off a kid who's only using it to draw concentric circles on Microsoft Word when I went to check my Fantasy NFL score, if when those people walk away, truly, my observations on them are entirely correct...

My cousin, the one who died in 2006, he had a girlfriend - I might have mentioned this before, but she was perfectly nice, although afflicted by Ayrshire face and the lesser known condition of Ayrshire hair in which you can tell that patently there's no part of the hair that is naturally blonde but you aren't sure what the original shade was. With the insurance money that my cousin left her, she's started a business with her new boyfriend, and she tells everyone about it, including my cousins grieving burdened with the eternal duffle coat of sadness mother. I don't think this is a case of poor morality so much as poor judgement, as she think she's doing the right thing, keeping his memory alive, and were I to make a judgement on her having never met her, I wouldn't be so morally ambivalent. I'd probably be on a Phar Lap sized high horse. His sister went to marry this bloke who was really nice to me, he let me stay at his house and play his Amiga (how boss was Manchester United in Europe...when you went the other team) and then just before the wedding he got cold feet and ran off with a stripper. And his other sister married this bloke who was also really nice to me, sat up with me until 4 in the morning drinking one night, diamond...ran off after a midnight flitting. In each of these cases, all the people who left my cousins have stories to tell we never hear, maybe even blogs with new families and bright eyed children in them, but to us, we went from liking them to hating them in the case of one phone call. At school, there was this kid, called Gary or Glen or something, and we all thought he was great, then one day one of our other friends said that GlenGary had robbed him, stole money from his wallet, and that was it, he was cut out of our friendship group. In all of those cases, the future echoers clambered out of the woodwork telling me they always knew they were no good, the way they ate their Violet Crumble was incredibly suspicious, but it's mostly nonsense to say that. Observation is potent and powerful but in all of those cases, I've let those people into my lives, I've drank their beer and played their Amigas and made them laugh and they've cut the crusts off my toasted cheese sandwiches...and you don't pick it up, although in the case of GlenGary, moral ambiguity was not a particularly big factor in it until much later, because the person doing the accusing was suspect and prone to gross exaggeration...if you don't trust anyone, you live in a basement obviously and never emerge blinking into the sunlight, but it scares me a lot to make that initial call to trust someone, and even with relatively potent ability to distinguish physical characteristics of someone or come with a cogent lookalike for them, sometimes you just have to doubt whether you really are observing anything properly at all...

The pram pushing couple are back, or at least, identical clones of the previous couple. Bad baseball caps, bad stringy hair, child in a pram with a bewildered stare screaming at the top of it's lungs, man with tattoos swearing at the child, moral superiority coming from all around them as they head straight into Chickenfeed to buy pegs and cheap tins of baked beans. Little voice comes into my head, a training course voice from a flickering VHS cassette hissing with tracking, saying never presume anything. Expensive car pulls into the car park, couple storms out, arguing in the sunshine, as I sip my expensive energy drink in polite gulps. The clothes are better but the language is uglier, and soon everyone is watching them. Same car park I was offered crack by a sweet 16 year old private schoolgirl who was washing cars for Amnesty International. There's a text message on my phone, an elongated and difficult morality tale in txt spk about someone we all knew heading to court later next year. I'm only sure of myself today, I'm only sure of my own self and my own lack of physical fitness, nothing else. The rich couple storm off into the distance, furious as they head to the petrol station, where they are served by the perennially wistful and melancholy stares out the window, goes through her routine sales pitch, and then is back to her self doubt and desire for a better world, once the Chokito is bought. I think a lot about how people see me, about whether anyone is making an observation on me based on the way I wear my brightly coloured Chelsea top or my choice of energy drink. I remember there was one kid at school, oddly not me, who was just roundly laughed at for wearing shorts. I have no idea why, he didn't look any different to anyone else in shorts, but that was what he got picked on for. Any chance to join in someone else being bullied. The well dressed couple, and now they are getting closer to me I can see he's had work done, his face is stretched like a nailed down tarp on a windy day and his hairline just has too emphatic an end point like it's been sewn on by a Grade 9 home ec class, disappear into the distance but their voices echo. Had I made a judgement on them on appearance, they would have been seemed very pleasant, like a middle aged couple driving a nice car through the boulevard of life, a nice couple who host a nice civil evening of conversation and canapes, but then, as it happened, when you leave the house, they hook into each other the minute your moderately priced car leaves the driveway and turns the corner. And you never know they do it, because they smile and put on a great spread and dress well and your kids like their kids and they play together in the rumpus room...you observe them, you talk to them, you sip drinks with them, sometimes you call them a cab because they are too giddy to drive, and all you can go on, even with potent observation skills, even when you know that they like Blur and you like Blur and none of you like Phil Collins, is the bits of their life you see. I still don't know what the girl in the petrol station sees as she stares wistfully out of her frosted glass prison...it's certainly not, from my perspective, interesting thoughts on the ups and downs of petrol prices...

Of course, this is speculation, experience talking, or possibly an ice cream headache - I have friends I trust implicitly, or at least, ones that haven't let me down yet. Across the road from me today at Gloria Jeans was three second school leaver theatre - one skinny girl, one big girl, one girl who would probably have to sit at the skinny girl end of the see saw to balance it out, on the periphery on the conversation. As I walked past they were toasting each other, all decked in un-necessary hair extensions and wrapped in their own mocha world. I like little bits of life like that, I like the certaintly in that moment, that trust that people have in each other that they truly will be friends forever. It's sweet, and it deserves more appreciation sometimes than my own cynicism. That said, there is a restaurant in Burnie which has a picture of me and my friends from the times on it's wall swearing the same allegiance, and well, ya know...there was a girl in Ayrshire I remember called Sarah, who had a big face and murky blonde hair and a voracious appetite for shock in her language and a best friend called Joanne who looked like Rocky Dennis who would say that she had equally as much sex but it must have been with the visually impaired. I thought she was pretty gangsta as it happened, because I was a very naive farm boy (not that I lived on a farm or anything, I lived in a very comfortable house, but if you went from Penguin to the Wild West that was Kilwinning, well, stack on the hat bumpkin, your life is about to change). Anyway, so Sarah would always talk about how great her life was and how much drugs she iz taking and since my scopes of reference were always to believe people with wide eyed optimism and smiling countenance, I thought, well, she probably does run the west side of Kilwinning with her saucy quips (Rocky Dennis hopefully run the south side, where the guide dog home was). She certainly dressed the part, she talked the part and she had mad eyes, which just clinched the deal. One day though, I was walking through the playground, probably on my way to buy some Polo Mints or something, and she was slumped up against one of the concrete blocks (one thing about Ayrshire, we're mad for concreting) just in tears, just completely collapsed and in tears, head and badly dyed hair in hands. No one else was around, and I was certainly not in a position to lend a sympathetic ear as we had never really talked - she had talked, I had listened and wondered just how easy it seemingly was to buy smack at an affordable price - but it was one of the first real times I had seen through someone. It sounds stupid, but I stopped believing in her at the point, for I had made my observations, I had learned as much about her as she let me, I had bought into this image that she was an untouchable bad arsed gangsta with an army of ugly movie lookalikes at her disposal...and it was just all rubbish. For there she was, desolate and hiding, and just as vulnerable and weak and scared and nervous as the rest of us. She never knew I saw her, and by Technical Drawing two hours later she was back to telling us all about her wild sexual adventures on a swing, but I had drifted off by then, wondering what else was image, what else was hidden, what else was store bought...and to be honest, I still do wonder...am I right about...

Of course, as you would have observed, one thing about me, awards and prizes just make me doubt myself even more, which is, strangely, the west of Scotland way...damn Ayrshire...it's a contrary place that smells of chips...

With great power comes greatly maintained lawns (searching for contentment in a one bus town)

So as it happened, my friend, the one on the descending side of our friendship, didn't show up to the BBQ. So the group was small but rowdy as we watched some cricket on the Teev and sizzled our hamburgers, but it was noticably smaller to be honest since he didn't turn up. There's no surprise in that, you might as well be sad and shocked that Hobart Taxis take 92 minutes to show up and write a letter to the paper about it. I'm thinking the narrative structure of 2009 won't necessarily include this person, so I guess there's nothing I can do about, although the alternate take on this is that I should be more supportive and consistent in my own intentions and make sure he's OK. I wish everything in life was as easy as, say, watching an HR PuffNStuff movie and being able to identify Mama Cass in a cameo role. What was a little surprising was that he didn't show up because he was babysitting his kid. This is something of a confusing wildcard as he has two kids that I'm aware of and I thought he had no relationship with them. I don't have any kids myself - I can't grow sea monkeys never mind look after kids - but I can accept an ascent into parental maturity as a reason why someone won't come out of the house and play. Maybe. It's definitely an interesting paradigm shift in our friendships because give or take the occassional Xmas party melt down and change of job, we've been relatively solid friends because of things like sport, or music, or a hatred of the Veronicas...now there's maturity to consider, the age gap between potential pick upped paramours, financial implications burdening reckless trips to Melbourne, kids in the mix, and impossibly over bouncered night clubs with dress standards and breathalysers and snippy comments. That said, I do enjoy living alone a lot, I feel much freer to pursue simple Sundays without having to worry about keeping my room tidy or not having the particular type of bread I like bought for me. Sunday is a free day, a day to pursue anything or nothing, to go to the park or mow the lawn, unburdened by any responsibility other than my own personal care and attention. In this way, I have let most of the last few weeks simply pass me by, attending to minor details and gathering popular culture details from mindless VJs, so in my own stunted personal growth I shouldn't be surprised that the world has evolved, that people change, that life changes and I of all people should know that. It's just a difficult balancing act at the moment, with reliable friends becoming recluses and recluses becoming party animals late in life, and the perennial question in my own mind being less a question and more a continual restless discontented monologue as to whether the world I have created is a good one or a bad one, and to be honest it's a perennial question most West of Scotland born people face since our natural state is slight discontentmen and whether Stevie Nicks really...you know...the taxi driver last night said yes...

There's a kid over the fence with a plain grey T-shirt and a neatly maintained bowl cut and a trampoline. I had a trampoline when I was a kid, but it always gave me electric shocks off the metal bits so I went off it. He was bouncing up and down on it today as I was mowing the lawn, and he kept, not chipping, but certainly he maintained something of a commentary track on my lawn mowing. At least he didn't remark on the way a baseball cap makes me look like a make a wish kid for whom every day is a bonus or the complex starting mechanism that makes my lawnmower go from a Fisher Price lawnmower to something more capable of cutting grass. Instead he continually asked, until I eventually had to answer, whether it was an electric lawnmower. Bounce, ask, bounce, ask again, juice box, ask again...such a simple uncomplicated Sunday for him as I toiled away convincing myself that I had done a good job. I think in fairness my Sunday has been equally uncomplicated, even with the dishes and the lawn and the complex interpersonal relationships, I realised that I had watched a DVD and drank a juice box and hadn't really accomplished much more than the kid bouncing around on the trampoline. The kid kept asking if the lawnmower was electric, and when I confirmed that the lawnmower was indeed leccy, he was delighted and bounced with extra vim and vigour. I was impressed by his simple optimism on basic details and his choice of fruit box, passionfruit, was an intellectual choice. I think when I was a kid this was just the type of kid I was, I would have been trying to have my say - although I was a little militant in my outlook and quite mouthy. I once at about 7even years old berated a postman because he hadn't delivered some free stamps from the Post Office that everyone was supposed to get. I didn't realise they had come the day before and Mum was saving them for a surprise later in the week and I got a hiding for my temerity in dissing a be shorted motorbike riding employee who was minding his own business. Sitting on my deck a little later the same kid is gamely bouncing around on his trampoline and waving gamely while I was doing the far more intellectual pursuit of reading the Herald Sun Confidential pages. I wonder if he has a blog which is just a series of things he finds fantastic with a smiley face next to them and some odd tales about his grumpy hammock bound neighbour. I was ready to write this off as an example of seizing the day or the blissful summer of a child until his big brother bounced on the trampoline with him and he started whinging about how it was his trampoline and demanding his Mum come and sort the situation out while running around screaming life was unfair. His blog entry tonight, you would imagine, will now see the emoticon bracket be shift and 9, rather than shift and 0, and that in itself is not a positive thought...

His (initial) contentment was in contrast to a girl I only ever saw once, this little kid at a farewell party I went to for someone who ended up not being that farewelled at all(circle of life, farwell parties to welcome back parties isn't it) for he ended up at different junctures having three farewell parties in about two years. She was about, oh, six or something, in a little floral formal party dress that didn't suit her at all and she was grumpy about everything, especially her divorce from her portable DVD player. She wasn't a princess since her parents were only king and queen of the trailer park hire business (Rosny and surrounding areas only, beyond that the kingdom was manned by others) but she was far beyond her years in emotional baggage. The other kids gambolled freely like spring lambs but she wasn't interesting in any gambolling, as she had already committed to a sequential series of life is pain internal monologues based on no more evidence than the party had no cocktail sausages and her parents never listened to her when she was distressed or lacking in nutrition. She just sat for the whole party not even whinging like a child but like a young adult, one already soured with life. At one point I rolled her the cricket ball and she demanded that I throw it to her as she wasn't a kid. I don't remember any such age applied boundaries clouding my own judgement at that age, I was certainly aware that immaturity would get me out of doing chores such as lifting things though so I played a little on my own childhood for a bit too long, unlike her who was already likely to spend this party talking about her HECs debt and how Dad wouldn't buy her a car. When I threw her the ball instead of rolling it though, she dropped it, and since I was drunk and I don't like mouthy children, I laughed at her, which was immature and silly but come on, if you are going to step up the plate, hit the ball I say. What was interesting about this little meeting in the back lot of an unmowed lawn while smoke billowed over us both was that she had no response, no come back, no child hood smart alecy comment or quip about what would you know grandad...instead she just went back to picking flowers, as if accepting that life was pain and there was no point in debating this. I felt bad that already this was her worldview and it appeared more set than the so called magic topping all over my ice cream (that thing never works). I wondered, with a little hesitation, as to what trauma or upset she had already seen by age 6 to make her so contempt bearing. There was nothing anyone seemed to able to do to shake her out of the funk she had chosen to wore, since I presumed the floral nightmare dress wasn't her choice. Maybe it was just that her Dad had chosen on one of the hottest days of the year to wear a cravat and a suit..

Thinking about other peoples contentment though, it's an issue with me, because it can distract from my own need to make risky mature decisions rather than just let life take me wherever. My cousins baby is already born into the midst of a family feud and a discontented mother who is already planning to take January away from the kid to go and work and I wonder what he will think of life and it's many forms across the years. I've sent them two stuffed toys from my ironic mid 90s stash, an Eeyore and a Humphrey, but whether the kid ends up getting them or they vetted and thrown out only time will tell. From my own perspective, sure, we moved too many times across countries when I was growing up, but it's done and I can't change it. The most contented I can ever remember being was sitting on the end of Penguin beach in a tracksuit on a school trip in about 1987, watching a group of friends playing cricket in glorious sunshine and giggling my head off as an Egg Flip Big M dribbled down my chin. Within six months though I had been moved to Scotland and life was completely different and I never got my contentment back. As I went for a wander today there was, as there always is, a dis-enchanted girl in stripey socks with her hair one of those spray can shades of red sitting at the bus stop, as she always does waiting for one of Kingstons rare and frankly dis-interested in stopping buses, and since her expression never betrays the slightest interest in looking happy or interested, I find her very attractive because that's the Ayrshire face. That said, she was laughing today, which threw me because she's never laughed before. She was laughing at the Andrew O'Keefe drunk video story, and I think she was inviting strangers to comment because she laughing in a strange and bizarre way. A little too loudly. It had made her content to feel morally superior to the host of Deal Or No Deal, and I won't look at her the same again. Once again, my life and judgements on people had proven off the work, natural suspicion kicking in...and then when I got home, Mum, bless her, had put on my doorstep a little Xmas present, a DVD box set that I wanted, with a note of love and care...my judgements on my parents are always the same, and I appreciate them...frankly, I should do it more, it's my main source of contentment to know who I could have ended up with, and who I did end up with...

Mind you, silly woman left the price tag on it...

Contentment will always come from

Not watching Milo and Otis

Although the address book sits on my sideboard unopened and surrounded by a force field of naked terror, it's not really been in my thoughts today, even though it's now directly under my poster of that bloke from Sesame Street who was always on about ten banana cream pies. My mood hasn't been especially good today, it's been cloudy and stressed and rather immature. It wasn't helped by the expedential growth of prams and school leavers throughout the shopping centre today, and by a confusing incident outside Sanity today where a woman chased me down to give me something to take back to work, this woman I didn't know, while I was wandering about with no thoughts and was minding my own business. I felt like a pit pony, and she was so emphatic. The concept of customer care really didn't extend from me to her and I had to lug it around like a messenger of yore. The paring knife frenzy, which today resembled, well, not quite Beatlemania, but certainly Bay City Rollers mania, now extends to a fifteen minute demonstration about the knife, which just means the prams linger in the middle of the shop, and are hard to get around without physical contact or a well planned out route through the school supplies section. And who chases people down to hand them something to take back to work anyway? She was so sunken and evil...it probably says a lot about me though that in the midst of my horrible everyone is in my way mood where I was just arked up about everything, I looked across on my wander around and blue eye shadow girl was looking equally stressed and despairing, and I immediately felt far worse. She has a good dilligence about her, so I feel bad if she looks stressed. Maybe someone gave her a parcel. Tomorrow, I have to face a sausage trial. a BBQ where my friend with the debt problem may or may not say goodbye to us all and choose a life of domesticity which would inherently mean that I have to spend at least some of 2009 looking for a new friend, which is slightly undignified at 30 since I can't just mutually accept someone into my life at 30 based on them having the same kind of favourite crayon colour (aquamarine represent y'all) or knowledge of what 21 Jump Street was. I find it a bit re-assuring that throughout my life my friends ebb and flow but I tend to stay (more or less) the same person. The same things (more or less) annoy me now as when I was five - ignorant people, bad music, bad manners, and equally my sense of self nervousness has never left me, and I always feel like things are about to dramatically shift under my feet. I told my Dad in London I suffered from suitcase syndrome (I just made it up) but it seems to stick with me. Everywhere I go I feel like cool kids are in one corner, I'm in the other, and I can't bridge that gap, even though I know it's a patent nonsense. I know though that I'm cooler than anyone in my address book from yore...god help me if I'm not, none of them have a pair of Hi 5 Deely Bopp...OK, when I see that, all of them are cooler than me...

Of course, since I lived in Burnie, the concept of a cool kid was somewhat relative -our school "hot girl" for instance ended up, allegedly, having sex with our PE teacher in a bath tub, which rather dimmed the bulb of her electric coolness. When you think about it, she wasn't really that cool, and what gave her the right to tell people off for sniffing in an exam was only an assumed moral superiority that, well, I still can't see. And yet she got the top table in the lunch quadrangle to eat cheese sandwiches and lord over us all. As I've mentioned before though, my arrival in Burnie in FILA boots and my rather ahead of it's time grungy sense of desolation and hopelesness (although it wasn't called that in Ayrshire it was just called real life and if you were remotely happy chances are the drug dealers would tell you to pipe down) and accented knowledge that everything was shite made me a playground sensation. At one point, in a fit of somewhat poetic but downright downbeat philosophy, the future school captain said in breathless awe that I was the coolest person she'd ever met. My coolness was emphasised after I had taken with reasonable grace a rare F in English from a crusty dried up bag (I'm letting it out know) in need of a good iron across the face, after I had applied the long lost art of satire to a writing exercise. We were given pictures from the Advocate and mines was of some bloke holding a big scarf, and in a fascinating exercise we had to come up with our own story based on the picture, so I made up a story about how it was a scarf for a giraffe and sixty seconds later it got caught in the machine next to him, and choked him and he had to be rescued. An F. Honestly. I thought it was genius. I took my F and her wittering old in my day we took a Penny Farthing to a Smithton and wrote stories that made sense and by the way I used to peel potatoes for tuppence a skin ramblings with a grain of salt and shrugged and thought well you'll probably be dead by 1996 anyway but the good news was, when I read it out to the class, it got huge laughs. It was, as one might say, the ways I tells em. It was also, and I was well aware of this, my accent, and I had no doubt that at least some people were playing the lets laugh at the dumb foreigner card, but a laugh is a laugh, and when I followed it up with a sort of Ian Curtis style wander round the playground with head down and furrowed brow. I was a conundrum wrapped in a hypercolour T-shirt, and of course it was all overacted bollocks that I wouldn't have got away with in front the drug dealers, but it was a crazy new locale, and I was free to be a made up version of myself until the truth that I was just some dork who couldn't cut a straight line with a pair of scissors through some crepe paper came to everyones attention. It was a convincing act though because through the medium of my old girlfriend Sarah came a handwritten note passed in class inviting me on a date with a girl called Katrina...well, it said date, four other people were coming...the last note I'd been passed in Ayrshire was swing your chair back I want to kick it, so this was definitely a golden moment for me. Notes with no threats of casual violence, what paradisical Eden is this? Oh sorry, I'm meant to think everythings shit...what a confusing meeting of moods this is...

This was a slightly awkward moment for me, as I did have a crush on a girl who was a little out of my league but who had shown me plenty of interest. I realised we weren't meant to be together when a cute little trick I used to do to make her laugh (an impression if I believe, oh yeah, form an orderly queue ladies) was played out one last time...and she called over a much older boy to come and hear it. I certainly didn't want to be that guy, the stand up comic before the stripper comes on, so she was out of the picture from that moment on. It was therefore somewhat spirit lifting that I had been asked on a proper date, to the movies no less, and since even though the movie in question that was planned is lost to my memory banks, I know it was piece of rubbish like Milo and Otis which meant that we weren't going for the movies if you know what I mean...you guessed it, hot buttered popcorn it was all the way. The details of the date did confuse me though - there was a girlfriend and boyfriend going, Cloud (no really, of push Kayla in the mud fame) and Danny, and then me, Katrina, and this other friend of mine called Jarred. This was a bit strange as it felt like it was going to be an episode of perfect match. Why were 5ive people going to see Milo and Otis? And why was it clearly labelled a date when someone had to be spare wheel? Why not find a mutually beneficial date - that Jenny girl who sat up the back and the class and said bugger all, she must have a lot of spare time? I never really questioned any of this, but the logistics of it seemed a complete nightmare. Someone would have to watch the film quite clearly. There was suddenly a sense of dread in me that I was sort of the additional jester to the day, the Rodney Dangerfield if you will who was expected to crack wise with observations about the films ineptitude while the couples took breaks in between breaking their virgin lips in. The additional pressure me of course was that, all going well, and if I cut Jarreds lunch and left him eating the big bag of Maltesers on his own, and got we in the trade called action, then this would be my first Tasmanian kiss, and I would be critiqued for the school to hear. Debbie, my Ayrshire girlfriend, said that I kissed like I had things on my mind sometimes - yes, mostly, if we kiss this will hopefully mean she won't talk about robots talking over the world - and I thought nothing will ruin my cool like a bad kiss...it was far too much confusion and pressure for me to try and work through, and besides, I had episodes of Red Dwarf to watch and serious homesick sulking to do...it was even scheduled in my diary...

Of course, none of this ever came to fruition and the riddle was to remain a Nik Kershaw song. Mainly because my Mum and Dad drove a complete shitbox, this grey silver car that used to not only electrocute you every time you tried to touch the door handle but that really wasn't reliable to make the elongated 17 minute journey from Penguin to Burnie. Not least of all in a thunder storm, which turned the door handles into electrical generators...the day of the date came and went without me arriving in Burnie, because a giant thunder storm meant the car broke down outside a garage that I believe was later burned down by the owners for insurance purposes. It was at this garage that I used to enter the Classic Catches competition with no winning results, and now I think they took my money and threw the entry coupon in the bin. So, we had to turn back eventually and I had to slink into my room soaked and dejected without ever finding out how a cat and a dog can be friends. Would have got some action too, as Jarred poured butter on Katrinas lap by accident. The resolution of all this was a slip into everyones friend zone, especially Katrinas, and the faint sense that I was an unreliable friend. My Mum, bless her, decided to make it up to me by taking me to the local video shop to get any movie I wanted, which wasn't quite the same. Sitting in a dark room watching Summerslam 89 or Weekend at Bernies is great, hell I still do it now, but that faint sense that I could have got some act...as I stood there though pondering a moody lamentation or ode to the rusty car (it didn't get me so far...yes, poetic) I looked across through a diabolical rain storm outside the frosted glass windows of Penguin video store, and there in the rain arguing with her boyfriend was a self defiant beautiful girl with hooped earrings and if I'm honest an overuse of the middle finger, just letting her emotions pour out in a moment of undiluted rage. I watched her for about five minutes, just amazed at her anger, her passion, and most of all, the way she seemed totally above everyone else, and to be honest, she was way cooler than anyone I went to school with, whether they ate cheese sandwiches at the top table or not, or couldn't get butter out of a dress...she dwarfed them, stylistically, passionately, and she seemed like she realised it...

And that, that was Vicki, who became my pash buddy for the rest of 1992...and not once did I have to watch any movie with a cat to achieve that particular status...