Funny how a high profile knife attack makes everyone hate living in Tasmania

So something really weird happened today, and luckily that was something weird that you can spin into an anecdote and not someone dying from stab wounds in the middle of a relatively cheaply priced rack of plain white T-shirts (I was going to say "Ts", but lets not speak of that band again). Incidentally, our ever vigilant police force have been on hand to say don't worry, you won't be stabbed by strangers in the middle of Hobart, the stabber knew the stabee, so those plain white T-shirts are still OK to buy. Phew, says Hobart. I'm still not getting on no bus fool, say I. Anyway, so I was wandering through my day, wondering if I should rip up my party photos because I look a bit mental, and I caught the eye of this girl - she had a blouse on that looked like paper mache to be honest, and we exchanged an unremarkable glance, but as I turned away, she's let out this massive squeal, and when I turn around, she's done her knee in the middle of the mall. Now, I'm thinking, did I do that, did my unremarkable glance at the paper (I know it's papier incidentally fans of spotting prose errors, but it's a homage to how a kid at my school used to call it "payperrrrrrrrrr mashie" in his Wynyard accent - old school represent y'all) mache blouse startle her and cause knee ligaments to collapse? Luckily, she sort of limped off unconvincingly, but I did wonder what had happened to make her knee collapse and buckle in the three intervening seconds. As it turned out, there was an even stranger and more bewildering trap for the shoppers today, no, not leaflets (I saw those promotion models off, don't you worry about that) but...wait for it...a cheap and cheerful Salamanca style stall, run by two Asian businesspeople in red T-shirts selling cheap socks off a grubby varnished table. I thought Glasgow was the home of the "sports sawks, two for a pound" cheap sock stall, but there it was in Tasmania. At one point, I'm sure Mrs Asia was staring at my unremarkable black and blue socks, thinking she had a customer. What is going on lately? We're one step away from people setting up a curtain rack stall with clothes hanging, selling those knock off AFL tops with "Colinwood" and "Hawforn" on them...and people will buy them, you just know they will...

Anyway, away from the incredible high octane blogging action around socks and knee joints (good name for an album that), for some reason I've had to today, in my menial real world, deal with a lot of people hating on Tasmania. You'd think the fact that Sam Mitchell mentioned us for 0.3 of a second in his Grand Final speech would have boosted morale, but no, surprisingly, it hasn't resonated. One woman launched into an entire strange rant about how she should have stayed in Manhattan and how she should never have left and moved back here, the weird bit being we were chatting amiably about her dog, and then out of nowhere she turned into the Manhattan tourist board...then she had the misfortune to say that she also lived in Canada, which meant I could say, well, at least no one here gets stabbed and eaten on a bus...which she didn't know about so I looked a bit mental. Obviously with the incident, there's been some feedback too, with one woman telling me Hobart was like an alligator swamp and she was a piece of pork...do alligators eat pork? So this didn't do much for my usually high feelings of local pride, everyone saying they'd rather live in places with David Letterman taped down the road or places with a less toothy crocadillian feel when you are buying Sara Bareilles CDs in Sanity. However, I did see something that made me feel proud to live in Tasmania - a kid called Tyson getting a swift boot up the arse for his troubles after knocking over an old lady who was sipping a lemonade. His bogan mother did warn him in fairness, and then waddled over with her mesh black tracky daks struggling to keep up with her movements, and as promised, give him a good old fashioned kick in the arse, just like the old days of Penguin. Even my friends sounded downcast about going out on Saturday night, which I put down to getting old and tired and inevitably preparing to not get in anywhere after 10pm...again. Me, I plan to try and lift morale around Tasmania at a down time in our history by belting out a drunken tune at Montgomeries...something from the Bananarama collection maybe? Nope, it was still no good, my friend simply texted back the word "shit" - Tasmania, my singing, "Montys" (where even knowing the 9x tables isn't proof of sobriety) or Bananarama? The mystery went unsolved...

My Dad, he found Tasmania really weird when he first moved here - I don't know, I may have mentioned before, he's quite an amiable person to strangers. When he was teaching, he tried to engage one of the school bus drivers in a conversation about the different qualities of recycling bins vs the different local councils, and the bus driver responded by grunting and turning up his Noiseworks CD. Still, he does keep trying. When he first moved to Tasmania, he asked a local what the best thing to see while he was living in Tasmania, like, the best local landmark (he was a fool to himself, the Big Penguin was right there) and after about 10 minutes of deliberation the local said "Well there's this nerfuckin paddock in Latrobe...nerfuckin beautiful it is...better than that Pyramid shit!" - Dad didn't know if that pyramid shit meant the ones in Egypt, the little green ones in a Quality Street box or the kind of money making schemes that always go bad, but whenever he thinks of Tasmania, he's sure to mention "that paddock in Latrobe". About a week after that, he was in the fantastic local meat emporium, Lethborg Smallgoods in Scottsdale, where the bacon was Lethborgianly good (so the sign said). He engaged the Lethborg (the Cyborgs were busy) shopkeep in some idle chit chat, mostly about Scotland, and the proper way to make fruit pudding and he was being his usual quite chatty self, a skill he never really passed on to me. Someone told me a story at work yesterday about rosary beads that made me lose the will to live. Anyway, at the end of this chat, Mr Lethborg has said something akin to "You know fella, yer alright!" and as Dad has gone to leave, Mr Lethborg has said something like "Oh, and if you come back again, don't buy our sausages!" - now, Dad has turned around and gone, er, what was that? "Oh, don't buy our sausages, they aren't very good - just telling you now! So you don't buy them! Cos I like you!" and continued, I don't know, mincing a small vole (PETA just don't care about the Vole). Dad was a bit taken aback by this, and has to this day pondered just what was in a 1983 Lethborg Smallgoods sausage that could possibly have caused such self sabotaging sales tactics...I suspect it was ground up vole, but Dad was so rattled, he never went back...

Of course, we still live here, sausage related foibles aside and I guess since we've been here for so freaking long there must be something good about the place. I made it my mission when I thought about the lack of pride in Tasmania today to find something genuinely good about the place. It was really difficult with all the unease about, not just because of the incident, or the fat bogan kicking her kid up the arse, or the continued bewildered procession of old people getting in my way. I did see blue eye shadow girl and consider her a tourist attraction, but that would be too easy. I was really struggling to capture any kind of positive sentiment out of the day, and then I saw her. A small innocent child, in a clean white dress, smiling serenely as she waited for the bus, so pure, so cute. That was my positive sign - sure, there might be knife fights, the economy might be in strife, and the quality of Banjos sausage rolls might continue to plummet, but as long as there are children with innocent optimi...luckily, as I even sickening myself, the girl gave the bus driver the finger, so I was happy with that, as it stopped my Olympic opening ceremony mental sentiments. Instead, my bliss today came from two old women who were talking at the bus stop quite happily about the world economic crisis. For whatever reason, Old woman #1 was quite excited that the economic crisis was happening, and old woman #2 couldn't understand why as her Terry had said that it would mean people would lose their homes. OW1 was even more excited..."yes! that's good!" she said, dementedly..."all those Gagebrook ferals! They'll be the first to lose their home! That'll teach the ferals!" - OW2 was a bit upset about the lack of compassion OW1 was showing towards the admittedly somewhat undesirable ferals, but OW2 was cackling with glee just thinking about it. "One of them stole my Jeffs Boags out of the esky on the back of the ute...and when they lose their home, it's my payback!" - OW2 didn't quite seem to agree that an entire community losing their homes was equitable to losing a slab of beer, but OW1 had her position and she was sticking to it. "Hey, when Jeffs drunk, at least he's asleep! When he's sober, he bores the arse off me with his football talk...I hate ferals! Send them out on the street!" - and with that, she got on the bus, no doubt about to launch into phase 2 of her Gagebrook final solution...

That's what I really love about Tasmania...everyone really rallies around in a time of crisis...