The Lost Friday

There was no one arrested for stealing today, no atmospheric battle between security guard, bogan and ugh boot to get excited about. There was a dead calm as I shuffled through Big W. I thought for a moment it was being closed, such was the chaotic nature of the store with DVDs piled in sawdust and staff in casual clothes milling around with nothing to do, idly hammering nails into bits of wood whenever someone walked past as if we were going to dob them in for doing nothing. I had Ayria turned up loud on my IPOD, so I wasn't concerned, but I presume it was some sort of refund. In the piles of sawdust were a million little cheap CDs slashed in price, hopeful singers who hadn't made it big looking up with imploring eyes from the cover of their CDs, asking to be turned up loudly on a stereo from behind the mask of a 4our 99ine sticker. I didn't stop, but it wasn't like I had anywhere to go. I was just wandering around 1/2lf eating my sandwich and trying not to spend money. I wonder sometimes where the reckless, carefree spender of cash went, the throw the money on the counter at Brashs guy who would almost let the storekeep recommend a CD. Nothing says maturity like a savings plan and less stuff piled up on the floor I guess. Somewhere around the pile of sawdust as Panda Eyed Girl tries a few metres away to look busy simply by blinking every 2wo seconds, two employees are discussing one of the employees necklace. 1ne of them is pretty, and stuck up, with her nose pointed in the air and her smile bitterly insincere, although jewellery obviously is her forte because she's passionately excited about the piece, while the other, the necklace wearer, is a Kathy Najimy clone with darkly dyed hair and wrinkled otter like skin who isn't especially interested in the necklace debate, but joins in out of a sense of workplace harmony as Lily Allen swims delicately in the background, humming over the PA System with her usual grace and elan. To get out of the conversation, Kathy says to the stuck up girl that she bought the necklace at Target and it doesn't mean anything significant. Eventually the stuck up girl loses interest and goes off to talk about The Presets with Panda Eyed Girl, which leaves Kathy to stare at the necklace, to hold it and ponder it's meaning. I suspect it does have a meaning, because her intensity as she stares at it is palpable. If it does have a meaning, it's not being betrayed easily, and I leave her idly standing by under a rapidly spinning air conditioning fan that whirrs so loudly, no one can hear a word, let alone an intensely private and isolated thought in the midst of a suburban hell...

Mist rolls in over the bridge on a cold Friday afternoon. The newspaper has some woman in it who did something wrong but got away with it or something, a milking it smile illuminating the front page. It's so foggy I can barely read the paper and I pull a miserable old man squinty face as I try and I'm bored and cold and without much to do, trying to fill in an hour or so in a place where the stories I see every day have already unfolded a million times. In front of me is a bromance couple - 2wo boys in animated discussion and matching T-shirts who can't quite decide whether or not Syrup is a better nightclub than Barcelona and who's idle slack jawed shuffling is simply delaying me from doing whatever the hell it is I'm supposed to be doing in my lunch time. It's a wonderful symptom of Tasmanian society that we're all impatiently huffing and puffing to get to nowhere in particular in a desperate hurry. 4WDs wizz through roundabouts and almost plough into fields in a rush to get chips from Mures that won't be any hotter or saltier if 20ty seconds elapse in the meantime. On the ATM screen a girl pops up with a cheerful resolute smile, forever encased in her perpetual advisory smiling pose, never aging, never upset, never flustered as she points helpfully to a selection of buttons. One of the boys breaks from his conversation, which had gone into a tedious rant about motorbikes that made me want to get over by 1ne, to casually mention he had slept with this smiling model of tolerance - he's very proud of this revelation and he tells his friend this in tremendous detail, until even the smiling woman in the paper is desperate to get back to her foreign alleged so called hell just so she doesn't have to listen to this vulgar descriptive rant which is so obviously macho posturing I fully expect both guys to give each other a chest bump in the middle of the street. Bemused, I flip to a sports page and bury myself in the paper and another story about heroes and villains written in a black font with all the relevant emotions the writer expects us to feel underlined in arrogance and presumptions, and when I look up the boy is staring at the ATM screen as if struck by guilt for his comments and stares for so long his card is swallowed up by the machine, beeps for a while and then breaks down, and he wanders off without noticing, and as I'm forced to wander off to another ATM machine as the girl in the plastic bubble squints from her broken screen, not a hair out of place and a not a single part of her reputation sullied by the comments that have floated up and been lost in the mist...

Lunchtime drifts to a predictable and pointless end. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the sandwich I'm eating, but I've eaten it for so long it's lost all meaning and all taste, like a piece of bubble gum chewed nervously through an exam. All around me are pleading, imploring sale signs, 1/2lf price, 75% off, free car with every tracksuit top sold, the computer games store so covered in red stickers you can't see the nerds and a store manager in shirt and tie is telling the head nerd that the mass of stickers isn't shifting any product - it looks like a meeting of commerce vs free spirit, because the nerd is blinking nervously in the light as if he doesn't understand, as if he's selling computer games out of a labour of love and doesn't need a lecture. Either that or his contact lens is hurting him. Shoppers shuffle around the conversation without buying anything, a collection of hurriers and scurriers with no where to go, but going there full pelt. For some reason, blue eye shadow girl has a mobile phone strapped to her skirt that's the size of a radar gun, a proper old school 80tys monster which you could use to beat down muggers in an emergency. I wonder if blue eye shadow girl is some sort of Gordon Gecko figure industriously plotting to overthrow her bosses. My mobile phone can't compete, not since some vacant bubblehead at Big W told me I had bought the same phone as a Big Brother winner. The nerd meanwhile is trying to convince the corporate overlord that the signs are working - I think the store might be closing, and he's making some sort of plea for re-organsation. He says something about selling a few more golf games, and makes a lot of pleas about how the signs can be re-organised and maybe a new location can be rented out, but the suit is bored and staring vacantly at his shoes, not really listening, his mind adrift in a blizzard of lost thoughts and fractured moments, the ideas room closed for repairs as he thinks of lunch, going home, everything except the possibilities of an imaginative nerd mind turning around a business and them both retiring to play ATARI in a golden castle...

When a clipboard pusher thrusts her way into my life a little later, rudely interrupting the last bite of my sandwich, to ask from behind a row of perfect teeth how I am, I really don't have an answer. It's that kind of day, everyone just seems to have drifted off, everyone seems to be lost in their own ideas and given up on work, mentally switching off like the lights in the book shop, which on it's last day made some sort of big drama out turning off the lights as it's final customers left with cheap books piled under their arms. I still don't know how I am when I pull in the video shop that night, my little car struggling through rain, and hail, and poor songs on the radio just to get there. I'm in another queue, behind a woman in a T-shirt with an elongated slogan, a black store bought T-shirt where the slogan is far too long to digest in a single session that winds around herself as she returns a giant pile of videos from a plastic bag. Her child, woolly haired and inquistive, sits on the video store counter while the clerk, who will be a devil with the ladies when he starts shaving, has nightmares about an impending health and safety disaster as the kid pokes wildly at the computer with a pen. In an instant the woman has gone ballistic, as she's missing 10en bucks from her purse and is swearing impressively into a Christian Bale video cover over and over again, leaving a rather portly gentleman in a tracksuit to ponder whether to step in or not. With a turn of speed not in keeping with her physique, she violently grabs the kid mid poke, and storms out, kicking the window of the video shop hard with her Doc Marten boot and nearly sending her kid plummeting to the concrete in the mean time. We all stare at her for a joined moment of mutual ponderance, and suddenly a well groomed clarks shoes wearing fatigued old man, a kid with a shaving cut on his cheek I didn't notice before and a portly gentlemen in a tracksuit who is hiding porn between 2wo more tasteful videos are suddenly very aware of how we feel...

Glad she's not our Mum for 1ne thing...

Exchange and KMart

Everyone, and I mean everyone, at the moment is bombarding with me cheap nostalgia - the conversational equivalent of an I Love the 80tys show where people hold up a can of Halls Lemonade and go ooh look at that. And I know I'm guilty of it, I mean if I can get a cheap laugh from a girl down the pub just by saying Darryl Braithwaite I mean that's all good, but I try and be good and a bit in the present and all my e-mails are piled up with Debbie Gibson jokes. So I'm in KMart wondering if the present has any value to anyone anymore and I'm weighing up what CDs to buy and I've got a store bought balancing act as I pile them up in my hand while chewing on 1/2lf a Snickers and avoiding the marauding presence of a pram pusher in a brightly coloured day glo T-shirt with a pink eyeline trail and a hammered in eyebrow nail who looks barely old enough to have learned how to colour inside the lines never mind have kids, although she's got a Lily Allen album in the pram, so I guess that's a sign of good taste. Do they have the Pramface joke in Australia? Or just the rougher parts of the Trongate in Glasgow? Part of the reason why people are doing my head in with nostalgia is that while I was listening to Lily Allen today someone was going on as if Rick Astleys comeback wasn't some kind of ironic in joke but a serious statement of musical credentials. So as this juxtaposition of moods and feelings and poorly constructed corporate chocolate, a voice rings out over the PA system to turn the cameras onto the sound and vision section. Now there's only 3hree people in sound and vision, me, Pramface and a staff member with poorly dyed hair that looks as if somewhere in the process of deciding between brown and blonde she had to take a long phone call and just couldn't be bothered finishing the job. I'm not sure which of us has aroused the most suspicion - me for walking around muttering something to my shoes about the current state of pop culture references, Pramface and her scary bolt that she bought from a less than scary shop in the mall or the shopkeep who they suspect of stealing little wrestling figures. And in a paranoid moment of suburban isolation, I obviously imagine it's me, that I look shifty - I mean, it happens to everyone doesn't it, when they walk past the little guy at the door doing security - until I see Pramface shuffling with hasty feet towards footwear, Lily innocently implicated in whatever act is taking place. Either that, or I've just felt mutually guilty with a concession card holder for no apparent reason, our lives interconnected in a moment of panic. Luckily, I realise that everyone looks dodgy on those CCTV cameras, and that in a moment, a moment unforseen when the day began, the footwear police will be after the pramface with vim and vigour while I'm stuck mutally staring blankly with the bad hair dye woman as a struggle ensues that harms pride, dignity, and an otherwise blameless left slipper...

I always feel uneasy in KMart anyway - there's something about those narrow passageways and the pumped in store music blasting endlessly through the PA system with cheery intermittent jingles and overly suspicious promises about their bargains that I just feel distracted by. When I worked in Coles, and I won an extra 15teen minutes on my lunch break, I would have to kill time wandering around with my hands in my pockets and head down hoping that I wouldn't see someone I knew - I know this may seem hard to believe if you read this but I was distinctly mute and lacking in verbosity as a teenager, I couldn't talk to girls at all, and probably my conversations were thus much more profound every single time in 1995 because I only had about 6ix of them. And 2wo of them were about DIY with a monosyllabic monobrowed old man who used to walk down the street picking faults in peoples fences. I bought my first CD there, the first Garbage album from a punky hair gum chewing slacker who would judge every single CD with a grunt of approval or disdain. After a while her posturing got really old and boring and people would avoid her judgements and left her standing chewing gum until her jawbone cracked and fractured sometime around 1999. And it was always cold when I was in there - a chilled out breeze blowing in through the fans as the teenagers, me included, would wander around idly kicking time into the distance, sure of a better tomorrow but too bored to comply with a better today. My rebellion, if it was that, was equally postured - I mean, I was wearing a nicely pressed shirt and tie and some Clarks shoes my Mum had neatly polished and I knew the difference between a tangello and a mandarin, so it was hardly Anarchy in the Biscuit Aisle as far as I was concerned. Like a thousand raindrops on the windscreen, my days in KMart all ran together, became indistinguishable and then faded away unlamented. A year later, I would have friends, a sense of purpose, and a much better CD collection, but this was the nuclear winter of 1995, a confused time in my life when my thinking was muddled and lacked cohesion. I mean - buying a Garbage CD? It makes me grunt punkily just to think about it...

To alleviate my idle year of complaint, angst and only being happy when it Pinky and The Brained, I When I was serving 1ne day at Coles local cheap junk pitchman Crazy Charlie came in to buy rice and water and looked so profoundly depressed it felt like the crazy in his name could possibly be taken away in a false advertising class action. In KMart something different happened with a local footballer, with a reasonable name and reasonable profile and a reasonable ability to procure a meaningful 1ne night relationship with bored housewives from varied locations like Natone and Riana. Sure they looked the same, but completely different general stores. He was drunk, I think, at the service counter leaning over clutching a plastic bag and trying to return a childs tricycle which was in bits, and there was something quite pitiful about the whole scene as he tried to ask all and sundry if they knew who he was and swore the lights out, before slumping with his back against the counter and then sort of shuffling out with his trike between his legs. I felt awful when I saw it for some reason, it just seemed so sad, and it was sadder still when someone told me that he was rudely turned out later that same night by one of the car park prostitutes on account that he turned rudely up to the car park demanding a special hug. I guess that was 1ne of the 6ix conversations I had that year. Maybe it was the weird Lisa Loeb fan in the record shop who smelled of milk that told me. The staff didn't really mind, or seem to find anything despairing or hopeless about the whole situation - they were too busy laughing at the fact his shuffling off was soundtracked by some happy song that was playing on the PA, like Kylie Minogue or something, while I was coming up with some poetic metaphor about the decline of western civilization in the 3hree minutes before I had to get back to scanning big hunks of meat over a scanner. I was sure it all meant something, but I didn't have the articulation skills, mad or otherwise, to really come up with an explanation. In the fading light of my winter, and I mean that literally, it really was winter, I wasn't that poetic at the time, I was just cold, I tried to write a story about a man who seemed to have it all but couldn't hold it together until he had a nervous breakdown in a shop - but I lost it in the middle of a blizzard of Halls Lemonade references, and by the time I sat through a real blizzard in a real Scottish winter with a mad Grandmother doing the vaccuuming at times I wanted quiet just to annoy me, I was pretty sure I had at least learned to articulate one phrase, where the second word was off...

I saw some Halls Lemonade in a shop recently - I think so anyway, I didn't have my glasses on so it could have been a tin of Glen 20ty - which was closed sadly, and all that was left oddly was a vending machine. No furniture, no staff, nothing except a vending machine. There was a drunk slumped up against the store door - not the same one, which would have helped combine nostalgia, been amazing, and brought back the pungent smell of urine from that day - asleep that we almost had to step over to look into the window, but I didn't have the heart to do it and so had to walk into the city. That night I spoke for ages to a girl in what you could only describe as a flippy summer frock. Her boyfriend was lurking nearby with a lurky smile and a drinkers elbow and a T-shirt Todd Sampson from Gruen would turn down for being a bit too trendy, and it was just one of those end of night conversations people have around a pub table where you promise a complete stranger that you'll keep in touch via Facebook - I rebel against Facebook every 2nd day - or something. Her 1995 was amazing, she met her boyfriend, or a boyfriend, or someone she slept with, the distinction wasn't clear, she travelled the world, she sailed the 7even seas before watching 7even with Brad Pitt in 7eventh heaven with her boyfriend and did the Tango in Tierra Del Fuego while I boxed bananas out the back of a Burnie supermarket. She was quite vehement that she had the best year of her life in 1995, and paused in a meaningful for me to agree. Obviously I couldn't - I didn't want to bring the mood down, I mean the pub was playing The Presets, I mean that always sets the down for joy right? Right? What could I say, I spent most of it shuffling around KMart chronciling broken relationships, talking about Lisa Loeb and marking all 6ix of my conversations in a diary that my Mum no doubt stole off me and read down the phone to her sister? No one spoke for a moment, and seized by indecision and not wanting to listen to the Presets banging on in my ears, I finally found the articulate voice I didn't have back then to sum up my thoughts. Where once I couldn't explain Burnie and all my feelings, to this stranger, it was all going to come out, all my KMart and Coles experiences, all my...

You were right - I said do you remember Halls Lemonade, and an hour later she was my Facebook friend - sometimes, that might be lazy, but it's just easier...

And then a smug sports reporter rounded off the day with a smirk and a pun...

Since my football team are now utterly terrible, I've been a lot more sociable with my weekends and have been pretty determined to stride out into the cold Hobart air and do something with my winter. It's probably not going to last, and the down side is that I've been up and at em with trying to clear up my room, and there is piles and piles of old junk in my life never mind lying around my room. Since I was hungover from sitting in a pub last night drinking endless shots of vodka while having a lovely chat with a New Zealand couple about how Underbelly is a national comedy in NZ, and a little bit reeling from a pile of Facebook requests from old school friends that I thought were long consigned to the dustbin of historical anecdotes, I really didn't have the energy to clean my room up, and so basically had tremendous intentions that I couldn't fulfil, which I sometimes imagine will be chiselled on my tombstone. Maybe with a picture of Snagglepuss. In truth, one of my main failings in life is that I'm terrible at re-invention. Somedays I feel entirely like the same person who crawled out of bed in Grade 12elve, took a look around the pokey wood stained room I slept in, flicked the switch on the radio and listened to Triple J until Sunday had past, only alternating my routine to have arty discussions about Tazo design over the phone with my friends. However, I do feel different in one way, which is old age is creeping up on me like some horrible bounty hunter dishing out summons that require me to pay in creaky joints and old bones. Sure I have my moments, my Ladyhawke CD has been passed around the trendy young things where I work and the fact that they've taken the pole out of Syrup, much to the devastation of all Dave Dobbyn fans, has enabled me to pass on some sage nightclub wisdom to the kids and feel both trendy wise and dismayed - no pole, where will fat male accountants pick up now - but ultimately I can listen to Back Of The Van on repeat and have an intimate knowledge of popular culture and Kelly Clarksons sexual preferences, but I still feel old today. It seems as though I've come to quite the strange age bridge in my life because I feel asleep like some demented old fan having an afternoon nap on the carpet with achy breaky joints and a headache, while in the background an achingly trendy pulsated in the background, it's little LCD display hypnotically transporting me to sleep, one numbered track at a time...and I had the most wonderful dream as it did so, and like many people 30ty or so, there was nothing I could do to set it all right...

When I worked in Coles in Burnie, it was one of the last businessess that paid in cash - you had to walk up a big flight of stairs and linger around until the woman in the pay office deigned to get up from watching Oprah to pass you a small brown envelope with a meagre allowance in it. Generally they would do this wordlessly and quickly, but 1ne day the little woman inside the booth invited me in with a wave of her hand and the promise of cake and even more cake later. Since to get into the cash office required you to unlock 3hree doors, slide 4our bolts and correctly spell Elmaloglou on an entry form I was pretty suspicious of her generosity. She was an older kind of middle aged lady - jet black hair in a tight librarian ponytail, all dreams set aside for her kids, and she lived in a messy office full of crumpled up magazines with Kym Wilson or Jo Beth Taylor on the front, a mug that had a suitably inspirational slogan on it to perk her up in the good times, Worlds Greatest something, and a jacket hung on a shoogly peg for early exit on Fun Time Fridays. Without saying very much, she sat me down in a chair that was across from her chair, motioned as if she was going to get the cake, and then left. It was all very suspicious as I looked around the office at the piles of magazines and broken dreams wedged into the corner. It was then I realised that I had left more or less alone in the crawlspace with about 500ed dollars sitting on the desk, all in 50tys, and realised I had been set an honesty test. Either that or she was just an idiot and really wanted me to have some cake because she was proud of baking it and went to get some plates without realising the money was out there, I haven't ruled that out. I've never stolen anything in my life - I was genuinely mortified when my mate Martin stole some Blackjacks from the Pakistani shop keeper in Ayrshire and became a hectoring don't steal harpie for the rest of the day - so there was no way I was going to steal the money. My harpie conscience wouldn't have allowed it. After a while though it became clear the whole thing had become quite a strained exercise in parody, because rather than a 10en minute test, it became a 2wo hour test of nerve - simply because the lady forgot that I was in the office, and I couldn't leave to do any work, and proceeded to have a lovely restful day sitting in an office watching Television and eating Tim Tams from a robust tin that wouldn't break no matter how hard I threw it off the wall...come to think of it, she might have been watching me on CCTV and wondered why a robust and upstanding 18teen year old boy wasn't reading Ralph but instead was eating Tim Tams and arguing with the TV...it's just Oprah, she's always annoyed me...

Once Oprah finished and some weirdly trendy kids Jen on The Big Arvo style show came on, I was bored and restless, waiting for the test to end. So I jumped on the then nascent and new Internet, since I hadn't really had much of a play around on it. After all, all I had ever done on a computer was play Kick Off on the Amiga in my neighbours attic and some boring flight simulators which put me off being a pilot long before my eyesight ever did, like a shortsighted candle in the wind so to speak. I pottered around the usual suspects, solitaire and horrible Tripod addressed websites, but as happens with most potters not called Harry, I stumbled upon something I shouldn't have. Not porn, I don't think they'd have invented that yet, maybe someone photoshopped Emma Georges head onto someone elses body or something, but there was a 1/2 composed letter typed on the computer, a love paeon to someone that clearly the office lady had typed up in a flustered hurry. It sounded tragically like a farewell letter, all dots and dashes and weird in jokes and names but utterly poignant in tone and resigned to fate, it's uncompleted status and cut off final paragraph - Dear John in Verdana and resignation - leaving the future of this womans world delicately poised. The harpie voice in my head - and it is truly a harpie voice like Ena Sharples or something - felt immediately bad for having seen it even for a moment - I felt like I'd stolen after all, some privacy off her, something like that, and I flicked off it and sat back down in my chair until she came back, saw the money was still on the table but that she was down several biscuits and someone had drawn a big frowny face on the mission statement - I personally blame Janie Jane - in texta. I never said a word as I got up, but I noticed the strangely slumped way she sat back down in the chair, clicked a few things on the computer and stared straight ahead. I never found out if the typed out letter was posted with stamps and despair, but I sort of didn't need to know I guess. I went back to my scanning, packing, staring and moodiness, for all of about 5ive minutes which was all the time I had to fill before going home, walking up to the car past the gaggle of prostitutes and broken trollies, sure that 13teen years later I would remember it in a dream enlivened by the additional presence of orange seagulls and a sunset of a colour no wordsmith in the world could ever describe...

I must have been asleep for about 5ive hours - I came to as Celtic Legend rolled around for the 20th time, Gwenno must have been annoyed to sing the same song so many times - with what people would call a start, but what I called an end. The dream was incredibly vivid - even more vivid than my Lily Allen dreams, and no, they aren't those kind of dreams...often - and colourful, and my brain scanned vigorously for a million little moments of indecision. Eventually, the lady in the office disappeared, replaced by a woman look was slim but facially looked a bit like Drew Carey because she had big glasses and a crazy mad frizzy perm, we all had to open accounts at Bass and Equitable, and the world kept on spinning as one relationship starts and one ends every single minute of the day. There's so many little tiny things I wish I could change, but I can't, and there's so many million things I wish I knew, but I don't. I ended up pottering - there's that word again - around my deck at about 3hree in the morning in the freezing cold air. My brain was more animated than the Hanna Barbera offices, my body itching for a night out at Syrup. There was a party over the fence that was just dying out, the fading strains of techno or some badly remix Ministy album grinding to a halt. My instinct was to shake my fist at them for disrupting my thoughts but there was a minor fight broke out in the garden, someone stormed off in a huff and a car door slammed while several girls who were surely about to catch a death of cold - that would be the old side of my life odometer - in skimpy tops stood around slack jawed and bewildered. Their slack jawed bewilderdness was soundtracked by the fading strains of the Ministry album, and lifes eternal how, what and why rolled on as if perpetually looped. Unsent e-mails, bewildering fights, CDs that sound the same, the confusion that happens when you have to engage with other people, I laughed at them all as the cold continued to chill everyone around me, and I fell once again into a deep sleep, determined that the next day, I would learn my lessons, and not make the same mistakes everyone else does, encased in Dean Solomons wisdom...one orange seagull dream at a time...

It would have been a great end to the story if the unsent e-mail was written to me, but I only tell the truth - it was to Bill, the fat janitor, and if you knew him, it's hardly a Night at Rodanthe in the romance stakes...but maybe it is, who am I judge...

...you might think you're ordinary, but you're quite the opposite to me, just because you like to sing and dance along to R&B...

At some point in the middle of Grade 3hree, in the middle of marbles season in fact when relatively fit and strapping young kids would unveil the finest bag of marbles KMart could possibly afford and spill them onto the lawn in a fit of macho bravado - you could say it was balls out, but that's too John Inman - we went on a school trip. It wasn't much of a school trip, it was more a picnic to Burnie Park, and we had to walk down a long and winding road to get to the swings. I was telling my friend Mark that on this walk if you looked high into the trees there was monkeys, which he wasn't buying at all, and it was a cold grey Burnie mid winter morning with a strong north westerly likely to mitigate that all monkeys had to and have a snooze somewhere warmer, like Launceston maybe. I turned around to continue this monkey based chit chat when I suddenly realised everyone had gone. Teachers, parents with nothing better to do who behaved like teachers, the woman with the dodgy haircut who made the cheese sandwiches, other kids, monkeys...all gone. I was completely alone in the middle of the park, cold, skivvied, and even though I imagine I knew the way to the park - it wasn't exactly finding the way to Amarillo, you just walked in a straight line until you got to the climbing train or saw a swan - I panicked a bit and sat down on the ground, mucking up my little King Gee trousers as I did so, plonking into a puddle. When I did that, I noticed that I had 2wo companions on my journey through the wildnerness, a kid called Adam who I don't remember at all outside of this particular day, and a kid called Kasey. We were all as mutually lost as each other, and not sure what had happened. It dawned on me much like the horrible night at some club in Hobart where I lost all my friends in a 10 foot room but made up for it by hugging a girl in my drama class for an hour, a moment of overthinking and daydreaming had caused me to leave the group behind and there I was, confronted with 2wo children to escort down the road to freedom where I would eat cheese sandwiches and we would all laugh hysterically about the time we got lost in the park. Well, that was the plan - as someone in the school leadership group I was supposed to take charge of the situation, be a leader, be a man...but I was 8ight, hungry, cold, dis-orientated and worst of all had a wet arse...they wanted Churchill, they got Downer...whatever line 9ine of the school leadership pledge was, the one about looking out for people was, I couldn't remember it, and Kasey was looking at me like I should hand my badge over...

So we sat on the ground for a while looking at each other. Adam spoke first. He had apparently got lost from the group while trying to tell a swan off for being boisterous. As I said, I don't remember Adam at all. In my school photo he's looking conspiratorially to the left as if he's seen an escape route or a different coloured skivvy, and he has a toothy grin that seems to suggest evil intentions. Since Adam lurked in societys shadows toothily grinning and looking to the left, as I now imagine he did every day, he was certainly enjoying the captive audience experience that being relatively lost in the middle of the day brought him. He wanted to talk about one thing - what he wanted to be when he grew up. This was not a conversation I wanted to have - still don't to be honest - so I wasn't really listening as Adam splashed water around joyfully wiwth his Clarks shoes and espoused several theories about his future life. For some reason I tended to attract a lot of people who were obsessed with growing up, my later girlfriend Debbie for instance who was obsessed with robots. Adams vision of his future was relatively prosaic though - he was going to work in the toy division of Fitzgeralds - a local department store in Burnie that I mostly remember for their parade of quite creepy mid 80s Santa Clausii - testing out toys and making sure they worked properly. The reason for this, according to Adam, was because he had seen someone in Fitzgeralds playing with a Transformers toy while at work, and he was completely convinced that whoever he had seen was radiantly happy and thus it would be a perfect job. I didn't understand the concept of work myself, but he made it sounds awesome, and so Kasey and I agreed this was a tops dream to pursue. What was odd though was that Adam, having got his big idea out in a toothy burst of excitement, really had nothing else to say. He was spent, he was done, and he plonked down to the ground as if the air had gone out of him. It's why I don't remember him for anything else really - he got everything out in one go, ambitions, Transformers, toothy grin - and that was it really. There was an awkward silence because after you are burned out at 8ight with nothing left to say, it's fair to say you should at least the poor guy in peace, with a moment of respectful silence...

Kasey took up the conversational slack while I was busy seeing mandrills in the trees where none existed. Kasey had got lost when she bent down to velcro up her trainers and taken far too long to complete the velcro matrix. Technically Kasey was the first girl I ever kissed, under the big yellow caterpillar after a less than frantic game of catch and kiss. Unlike a lot of playground ground games we played, catch and kiss was incredibly sensible and well organised, with all the explanation of the games rules in the title. I don't know who was chasing who on this fateful first kiss Tuesday after school but the rules of the game suggested we had caught each other and pecks were exchanged. Kasey was also a good runner - in that self evident way were you don't yet know there's a million Kaseys out there who are the fastest person at their school so you just presume Kasey is going to the Olympics because she can run to the shops quicker than you. Boy could she run though. She swept the tomboy fringe from eyes and began a time killing story about the time she had to run to the shops to get a Violet Crumble for her Mum - for some reason, it sounded like quite a sad story, it wasn't told with any real joy or panache so it sounded like her Mum was horribly obese and housebound and couldn't get herself to the shops because she couldn't fit into a car. That's how I took it anyway, because when my Mum wanted chocolate she'd get in the Torana and get some, and in that self evident I don't know how the rest of the world works but I'm right way an 8ight year old way, I knew I was right and she was wrong. Something about the story must have struck Kasey as a bit sad, because having told it, she also stopped talking suddenly and sat down in the puddle also. So there we all sat, quietly in the gloom, no-one speaking, no-one even moving or doing anything other than getting more wet and cold...by the time I realised 2wo pairs of little eyes were on me, waiting on me to say something to illuminate our predicament, I knew what to say, what to do...I was ready, poised...

Which of course wasn't true, since I not only didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up nor had any kind of parental horror story masked with coded humour to pass the time. So to get us out of the puddle, I suggested that the only way out of our plight was simply to run like crazy in a random direction and hope for the best. It was all I could think of in a crisis situation, but it didn't work, because they both sat there staring at the ground. It was time for the blue badge wearer to show his leadership skills, and so I got up, with my wet arse in tow, and began what you might call a slow trudgy jog through the park - through the puddles, round the corner, past a grumpy swan, round the corner, back to where I started because I took a wrong turn at Alberqueuque, and then off again with my arms pumping like less than impressive untanned pistons. I've no doubt that I impressed no-one with my running technique, but it had the desired effect, because Kasey was soon running behind me, then next to me, then in front of me, then a long way in front of me, then a skivvied dot on the horizon, then she lapped me and then probably the angry swan lapped me and you get the general idea. At least until she stood on the footbridge waiting for me to catch up and we could see cheese sandwiches and teachers and the creepy woman in the distance. She was walking and talking as we made our way through the mist, and we were patting each other on the back, because we had survived, and in our own way we had all helped each other get over being lost. We were met at the footbridge by a teacher who was pretending to have been concerned but like being confronted by a dodgy Cockney rug salesman selling dodgy cockney rugs, we just weren't buying it, because he was eating a kebab slowly as he allegedly fretted. It was then we realised Adam wasn't with us. We looked at each other, we looked at the teacher, we looked at the kebab, we realised we had failed to stick together as a group...until we looked over and saw him eating sandwiches at the top table, not a care in the world, and while we had no idea how we got there, he was eating a Twistie, grinning conspiratorially and staring to the left, not a care in the world, at which point I collapsed on the grass exhausted, ordeal well and truly over...

It was a hell of a 10en minutes, that's for sure...

Dissimulation is almost habitual round our way (from TAFE, 2002, edited a bit)

The town of Penguin was staggeringly simple in the mid 80s - 2wo TV channels, shops that shut at 12pm Saturday, and not a minute later, so everyone could get on with their lives and prepare for nanna naps and sporting pursuits, and my father would have plenty of time to sit in a purple armchair in our living room, a living room from a 1970s catalogue packed with strange hues of orange and darker orange, and sleep until February snoring away happily. My Mum would drive around to her sisters to drink Halls Lemonade in her sisters cavernous kitchen with all mod cons including a breakfast bar with stools propped up against them, and they would discuss why 1ne husband was a lazy bastard for sleeping all day and one was a terrible husband for working all day - hint being, mines was on the couch dreaming of his hippy youth - and I was left alone in my room, a spectacular room with cotton sheets of green, much better than todays sheets, and a bookshelf groaning with all the Mr Men books a boy could want. Other than every 4th week when I would fold myself into a Brown Torana and my parents would bet me 5ive bucks I couldn't sit quite for 2wo minutes without talking as we drove to Burnie, most of my weekends were spent pottering around the house playing with my He-Man figures, or rolling down the hill outside so I could run and play in the pampas grass. I'm pretty sure that I hid a fortune in toys in that pampas grass and such was the sudden nature of our eviction - Mum and Dad called it a move, but it felt worse than that to me - to Ayrshire that I'm sure the next family who moved in just paid the rent from the proceeds of the inevitable clearing junk up garage sale. That was all before me of course, and as I rolled over hill and dale - poor Dale, he never did get out of the way - towards the pampas grass, listening to the snores or having a craving genetically for Halls Lemonade I couldn't explain, I couldn't help but feel overjoyed with what I imagined my life would be like forever. In fact, ennui simply didn't exist - if it did, it came in some horrible playground rumour that Leisure Sales and Rentals was going to the wall, which luckily seemed to be a temporary horrible rumour spread by mean people...there's no way a small business in Burnie could possibly fail...I wouldn't even let the the thought cross my mind...

Despite this glee, and even though Grade 3hree represents a cultural high water mark for me personally as it relates not just to the quality of Bananarama albums but also my own personal happiness, there were dangers that lurked throughout the playground on a daily basis. Not just mean surly dentists on a mission to stamp your hand violently, but things like a less than NWA gang rivalry based on whether you ate sausages or hamburgers, the embarrassment if you stared at the clouds and came up with the wrong conclusion, the shame of being caught stealing someones lunch order bag out of the big blue basket or the horror of being caught having a sneaky blub during a sad movie in the assembly hall. As much as playground isolation was a bad thing, to be honest such was our ethos that I don't remember anyone, other than the poor hapless kept behind ginger kid Daniel who had to sit alone in his Grade 2wo class while we cavorted in the Grade 3hree classroom waving to him through a screen door on the last day of school, being genuinely isolated and bullied. The only thing no-one wanted to be was a dobber - a teller of tales to the teacher - and we had a kid in our class called Emily who I mostly remember for rocking a truck stop lesbian style butch cut and forever claiming that she was slighted, and responding in a Kylie Mole style voice that she was dobbing on us all, but I don't think she ever took it beyond the threat and in the end she was like all I never really meant it and we were all like shut up we're trying to watch Never Ending Story. More or less, we looked out for each other, made sure that if the teacher said fingers on lips those fingers were not up noses but where they were supposed to be. What's very strange is that I can't for the life of me remember some days from last week, I can't remember what film my Dad was interested in taking me to and he only said it 5ive minutes ago - but give me that school photo from Grade 3hree and I know every single nuance and every single thing about everyone in that photo if you imagine that they never progressed in life and stayed perfectly still in character and taste in skivvy. And to be honest that's just me...I think everyone else progressed to designer T-shirts the fools...

Even though I had a best friend called Mark who had strange stretched eyes like he was an early casualty of botox and a girlfriend called Sarah who was incredibly impressed by every single leaf she found, it was my relationship with Pippa that was the strangest, the Plato with Pigtails of the monkey bars - except while thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters have traditionally been ascribed to Plato, Pippa only ever had about 8eight sentences in 5ive years, but all of them seemed profound and appropriately timed. I wonder to this day if she ever was compelled to go to glass because her back was always pressed against the ladder to the monkey bars while the world moved around her. She had achieved an almost buddhist like serenity at the age of 9ine, and if he was an awakened teacher who shared his insights to help sentient beings, she was just awakened every 4our weeks by rays of sunlight to say something profound. And I don't know if I was a sentient being, I just liked Coon Cheese sandwiches and thought the Ju Jitsu He-Man character was vastly under-used in the cartoon which wasn't the most enlightened thoughts but they impressed most 9ine year old at the time. Except my mate Brad who was more of a Kobra Khan man. I mean that was just a snake that spat water, you crazy fool - an average conversation with Pippa would just generally be something like this...

"Alright Pippa?"
(Staring at the sky) "Times moving on slowly"
"O...K...do you like cheese sandwiches?"

Pippas greatest contribution to my Grade 3hree memories involved a new girl called Ally. Ally was from Samoa, was tanned and self confident with a radiant smile, but she was different to us, smugger, more boastful, more flirtacious, if you can be more flirtacious in a skivvy or a paint stained smock. I know if I saw a girl at a nightclub in a paint covered smock I'd be handing out my Facebook address, but that's just me. Ally was great at sport, had an excellent 3hree point basketball shot, and would say things like, say, a painting that a boy was doing was wonderful and stroke his arm as she walked past, and then strut off like Tyra Banks in a smock - sorry, I'm a bit obsessed with smocks at the moment. Anyway, Allys flexibility and radiant smile were mere sideshows to her proclaimed abilities in the art of swinging from the monkey bars. On day one in her school debut she took one look at our flimsy metal contraption and said that she could do a sick trick, which was not only the first time anyone we knew had used sick in the twisted tense whereby sick meant great - we had just got our heads around the use of the word bad in a similar vein - but also we weren't used to such boastful behaviour. I wouldn't learn the lessons myself of course when I told my high school I was a champion softball player and bunted the ball into my nose many years later....Pippa, shimmering as always by the monkey bars, simply told me in her usual way there was no way Ally could pull off any kind of trick, sick or otherwise, and sure enough, when the big day came, Ally folded like a cheap tent, cracked under the pressure like the pavements in Penguin when they were being dug up by lazy Hawke government era council crews, and fell off two bars in, landing with a thud in the sawdust. She wasn't bothered by it, she laughed it off, where as I would have just died, but the trick she promised, well, we never found out if it was sick or not....

6ix months later, having forgotten all about it, and been engaged in a fierce debate as to whether Grimlock was better than Megatron - and he SO was - I walked past Pippa who was eating a Chokito.

"Alright Pippa"
"Told you she'd fall...could see her grip was inept...she's got bad fingers..."
"O...K...Chokito's...they're good..."

It was then Pippa said something mumbled under her breath...which wasn't like her...she normally spoke so clearly...was it really that'll teach her to fuck with me? Or was it something else? I'll never know...

The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Upper Video Burnie Shop

I've mentioned before that my primary school was one of the first to really move away from belts around the head - although there was a mythical cane in the principals office we suspected that was as mythologized as the Green Bubble O Bill Rebecca said she saw on holiday - and embrace the more hippy ethos of teaching. In fact in my own mind I remember entire afternoons of cloud shape selection and music sessions that never ended, mostly because the music teacher would bugger off and we'd be left a capelling Peter Coombe until the bell rang. I'm not sure that I learned a lot, except how to watch Never Ending Story so many times in an assembly hall that it really began to lose all meaning. As the schools resident intellectual I was given a fair amount of freedom in my afternoons to wander around eating Golden Gaytimes and pondering the nature of existence. Although a lot of my thoughts were how can I get my jacket on and is the big yellow caterpillar free and what is the true reasoning behind catch and kiss, my proficiency in doing my times tables meant that the teachers presumed whatever I was thinking about must have been pretty deep and I was given free run of the school, where as some other kids were treated like back up members of The Pussycat Dolls and more strictly supervised. By that, I mean they actually had to paint and sing and be accounted for, where as I could wander off on a 1ne hour errand to find the paint. It's fair to say that my thoughtful nature meant I couldn't truly appreciate the wonderful gift of a mid 80s Penguin childhood - my collection of stamps and football cards couldn't just be owned objects, they had to represent facets of my personality and be valued and catalogued for instance - but in most of my childhood memories I'm smiling like the woman in the KMart ad who's trying on clothes for her family. Only I wasn't as cute as her. I've searched my brain for any kind of childhood angst, and it must be there, but it really wasn't. Sometimes they didn't have a copy of British Soccer Weekly at the newsagent, and sometimes Upper Burnie Video Store was closed for renovations, but really I had a wonderful first 9ine years of my life. I wish I could get that time back, just milling around drinking lime spiders in Upper Burnie with 50c in 2c coins in my hand, but I don't want to go back to typing stories on the BBC Micro...the lag time would, like the proverbial steering wheel down the pants, drive me nuts...

Grade 3hree was a testing time though - as much as our hippy ethos that filtered down from lazy nuns and Miss Lennon in her sundress tried to eliminate competition, there was no real way they could stifle the growing sense of boys trying to be boys to impress girls but pretend they weren't, or stop the growing sense of loyalty we felt to our school sports colours. Even though our coloured skivvies were randomly assigned, it was probably somehow defining to us when one of us got green and one got red from the big clothes hamper. I tried to be above all of this - I figured races had a corinthian spirit, that we were all at one school, so why don't we get along? I had seen the destructive nature of competitiveness every time a kid called Scott went out to bat, and threw his bad into Mrs McGlumphers back garden when he was clean bowled trying to hit the ball into Mrs McGlumphers back garden, and I didn't want to go down that path. I had also taken extra precautions to make sure I didn't replicate lobster Sunday, where a bad case of sunburn had left me stuck in a cold bath for 24our hours one Sunday while life went on without me, and I smelled like a coconut so running wasn't on my mind that particular day. That was until Pippa, who I had a vague attraction to in the days before I knew what a vague attraction was supposed to be, told me that she wanted me to win as she shimmered around the monkey bars - she was always shimmering around those monkey bars, I'm sure in winter she caught a death - one hazy summers afternoon. Without entirely knowing why, I really wanted to win my race all of a sudden, and when I did win, for once winning a race that didn't involve neither egg nor spoon, she said I had run well. In hindsight, she spoke about as much as Yoda Pippa did, but what she said seems somehow more profound even in retrospect than the combined works of my bookshelf. Yes, Grade 3hree was a great time, the sun was shining, the bread was somehow thicker, I had Pippas congratulations, free run of the school, and a pass to sit up and watch WWF Superstars on Tas TV...who, as they would say, could ask for anything more...

The only fly in the ointment in any of these recollections from Grade 3hree, apart from the horrible time I experimented with a spike, was my twice yearly visit to the school dental van. I'm sure that like the last few pages of Fungus The Bogeyman that my fear of the dentist has been exaggerated over time, but I didn't like going to the dentist at all, and became convinced that she didn't like me. She was youngish, and had a bogan attitude with a pout that threatened to crack at it any moment, and who could blame her, as she had to plough through an entire schools worth of mouths just to get enough money to head out to a grim concrete mid 80s nightclub to be chatted up by yuppies in thin leather ties. I think she found me a bit too much to deal with, as in my intellectual role, I questioned everything, especially when it came to gnashers, so our chances of bonding weren't great, and we had no relationship at all by Grade 4our. This was based entirely on 2wo specific incidents. The first involved an argument that we had about exactly why I had to wear sunglasses when I was staring at the light when I had my head tilted back. In what was to become a foretaste of most of my relationships with women, we didn't progress much beyond the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I level of arguing, and I was willing to put up with being blinded just to prove a point. After our argument, I was given a stamp on the hand like all the other kids, but I swear to this day my turtle was imprinted on my hand with a vicious strike. I still claim to this day my turtle was frowning from being stamped so hard. I emerged blinking into the light like Ulrike Meinhoff after her solitary confinement, and vowed that I would never have my teeth checked in those cramped conditions again. I'm sure all of this is exaggerated, I'm sure that the argument was one sentence long, I'm sure the stamp was actually a cat not a turtle, and I'm sure those leather ties were thicker than I imagine, but by the time the seconds on my chunky 80s stopwatch had rolled around to lunchtime, I had sworn vengeance on the dentist lady, just as sure as soon as I figured out how, and that was just as soon as I worked out how to win the biggest marble in Keiths bag, a shimmering blue one the size of a gold nugget...somehow lifes complications just seemed easier in Grade 3hree, but they were no less vexing...

My revenge, and this is a sentence I can't say very often, came in the lunch order bag queue about 6ix weeks later. We had a school fat kid, and I can't remember his name, but I know he was fat. Part of our hippy ethos school creed was a big commitment to sport - I think if I could have nailed a 3hree pointer from down town they'd have moved me up 2wo grades - so it was the wrong place and era to be the school fat kid. Poor guy couldn't even chow down on a Violet Crumble bar he was Kato attacked from behind the beanbag and told to jog around the playground. It was no surprise when they virtually had an intervention for the poor guy, and by modern standards he wasn't that fat, a little chunky around the legs, bit of a gut, no worse than the average suburban dad. Hell these days he could call it a lifestyle choice and demand respect. He took it reasonably well, and he and I had gotten on OK in the past, we'd discussed sports and cricket cards and so on, so I should have known that when I was walking past with my head full of thoughts, I'd be roped into the intervention. He was sitting quite quietly in a beanbag looking a bit perplexed as 2wo teachers and the school dentist were gently poking him, encouraging him to put down the mallows and swim in the shallows, and I walked past at a difficult moment in the conversation when it seemed all was lost. They shouldn't have pushed the dentist forward as the spokewoman, because she was promoting the benefits of cheese or vegetables or something, and with a plaintive smile and an attempt at the kind of debonair devil may care wit she used to chat up the thin leather tie brigade at Siroccos, she looked at me and asked if I liked cheese. No doubt meant to endorse the healthy lifestyle and provide a simple back up to their attempts, I instead looked at my bruised hand, said nup it's horrible, and has a racially offensive brand name, and walked off. I swear to this day the fat kid produced a Kit Kat from behind the beanbag, and chomped away happily while the dentist lady eyed me coolly but knew that we were somehow even...and I got to wander away to the monkey bars to hang around Pippa in the hope that she'd let her blonde hair billow in the wind and say something so profound that I'd only understand what it really meant 20ty years later...

Then again, maybe the whole thing never happened, but why do I have a large blue marble in my wardrobe....why indeed...

I learned how to read a book, I learned how to do the cha-cha, but nobody taught me, how to fall in love...

One of the things I always notice about Hobart, when I'm walking through the main city mall with my head down lest the bogans of death make me a statistic in the Mercury, is that lack of neon glare, the lack of high profile important flashing signs other than the new one outside the Centrepoint Arcade. When I'm in London, some parts of it, I feel like I'm bouncing around in a hypnotic glowing video game, but the only illumination that seems to show in Hobart sometimes comes from mysteriously lit up offices where workers toil in strange hours of the night, which just provokes curiousity in me as to what is so important it absolutely positively has to be done at 11am. We used to work with this woman who had a couple of quite bulky daughters. One of them, the blonde one, I last saw trying to make my friend jealous by slobbering over a Pancho Villa lookalike in a seedy North Hobart pool hall, which if not a sign from God you should be calling a taxi then certainly at least a nudge in the ribs. For one reason or another, we were hanging around work late one night, eating the last slices of pizza from a box and talking about what football coaches should do when we saw the woman lurking awkwardly in the shadows, somewhere furtive around the vending machine. It was such a shifty glance in hindsight, but we didn't think a lot of it, as there was still some pepperoni to scoop up and devour. It was only as I shuffled out with all the double crust I could manage floating around in my stomach that I noticed that the 3hree of them, mother and chunky daughters were all huddled on the carpet, sleeping in a medium sized office under a pile of duvets and blankets and discarded pairs of jeans, with not much room or oxygen to share and the gentle hum of the photocopy machine to soothe them all to sleep. Someone asked me what I was looking at and I said nothing and moved off, never to mention it again. I'm always reminded of that in my haste to wander through the mall as lights flicker on and off in high rise buildings and police station windows and cafes with one lingering patron polishing off the last of the late night beans from a plate - all the little stories I'll never know, all the people working through. I still don't know what the bearded guy in the newsagent is doing though - he's dragged his wife out in misty drizzling rain to point to something in the sky, something I can't work out, and as I sip my Red Eye gold and let it sit painfully in my stomach, I leave them to their shared reference point and head off to a heavy metal assault course inside JB-Hifi where loud guitar music assaults my senses from all angles, turning off one important light, the light inside my brain that helps me think...

When I need glare and gaudy neon though, I can always rely on the Casino to help me out though - I find the place just hypnotically awful when I wander around there. I'm not sure if it's just because of my first visit there. I've written before the Casino is the last bastion of don't ask don't tell, a place where ID is never questioned and young teenagers can book a hotel for a quick but totally nervewracking weekend away hiding from Mum and Dad. I found myself there once when I was sickeningly drunk in my own early teenage years - my own need to book hotels for said weekends away being about 2wo years away still - and it was the only place where we could still get served, perky bouncy barmaids quite happy to irresponsibly serve alcohol as long as they could avoid conversation with you and resume one with idling diffident monosyllabic footballers. The only reason I remember the evening is because one minute I was drunk, and I know I was drunk only because I found the phrase green dog so completely hilarious it was as if all comedy had ceased and been dissolved by state system into a single phrase. For some reason though, the alcohol in my system enhanced my concentration into the repetitive, dour way that everyone stuck in this casino at 3hree in the morning was monotonously and repetitively pulling on handles or queuing for change with plastic cups outstretched, and it made me quite philsophical, utterly sober in an instant and in need of a cheese toastie and a bus home. I know that for ages as I munched on that cheese toastie I was quite the musing muser without being amusing, such was my melancholy as I sat at my little plastic table pontificating on the way a pensioner was spending all their coin on such a depressing existence, pull, feed, pull feed...luckily, my friends were on hand to pull me out of the slough of despond, repeating the phrase green dog over and over again until they could shut me up by the power of laughter, not to mention being kind enough not to mention if I was so anti-casino why did I carry a Federal Casino chip for good luck, and shove me in a cab back to North Hobart just to get some peace and quiet...

North Hobart, in those days, was where I lived, where I strolled around, where I did everything but study - when I say everything it probably implies quite a rock and roll existence, but in truth if I had ice, it was in my coke or came from the freezer full of charity ice creams that somehow never made it to the charity intended. I was at least fit from all the poor student can't afford the bus walking home, but flabby from all the good food I would eat. I was happy in the winter, when those walks home were cold and bracing, but I enjoyed being responsible entirely for me, even if there were cultural differences along the way of that walk like having to walk past topless bar staff or a shoot out at a sleazy hotel that made me duck behind a Ford until it passed, on police orders. Good times. I had to adjust to a lot of different things, not least of which was my first awkward post pick up morning when over cornflakes and stilted conversation I had a less than enthusiastic host. What I mostly remember was my struggle to find a good newsagents. I didn't like the one in North Hobart, and felt overly judged for buying the SI Swimsuit edition by the woman in town, so I settled for an out of way cards and papers and junk on a 1ne dollar table. I didn't know Kevin Bacon made so many movies. It all seemed fine until I had to buy a Mothers day card, although unlike today it was at least not accompanied by people pawing over my shoulder to get the one with the monkey on it. To this day, I'm sure I set something off in the emotional background of the shopkeeper, because he took the card, looked at it with a depressed expression, even going so far as to read the words inside with aching poignancy. It seemed impolite to interrupt, but it took an eternity to get the card scanned and in that moment of silence, I would have rather been sitting eating cornflakes and getting grunted responses. I don't think I went back there, not that I can remember, although that might have been because new owners cleared away the 1ne dollar table, and poor Kevin Bacon not getting his royalty cheques just didn't sit right with me...

Of course, the Plenary Room being illuminated by gentle harmless comedy is enough to shut out the despair of desperation. It's sealed off from the poker machines, the doors shut, the lights dimmed, the vomit from the girl who spewed up at the Pete Murray concert all those years ago mopped up by determined staff with spot remover. The post comedy analysis takes place in the fading gloom of the Victoria Tavern, a pub in Hobart that I always associate with Coyote Ugly Fridays and the time they made all the barmaids dress up like 17th century wenches. Not an easy gig working there. Once the last drink is drunk, once the last joke is repeated from the comedy, I wander through the mall early in the morning. It's dark, the taxis turn their headlights on to attract attention, and it's cold, bitingly cold, like some reject from Twilight is chomping down hard on the slumped, post beer shoulders. There's a girl sitting on a park bench, crying with her friends arm around her. Her friend though doesn't seem especially sympathetic, as with her free arm she seems to be either texting or updating her Twitter status as she stares into the distance, eyes not moving from the screen as her friends one elongated tear splashes on the ground. Again it seems impolite to stop and stare, so I move on with a jaunty spring in my step and outside one of the long locked up fast food restaurants a single light is on in the back, all the stools are on the tables like it's the last day of school, but there is definitely a light on, and if there's a reason it's on, or if it's just the last action of locking up for the night, I'll never know because a taxi pulls up by the kerb like a saviour, although one not riding a horse so much as playing blindingly loud Croatian pop, and off I go into the night, into the dark of Kingston and another day ends....

There's no neon in Kingston as I go home, unless you count a discarded Syrup Glowstick, but that's another story...

The Queue, and how to survive it

Some people call Wednesday hump day - appropriate because I've got the hump. Not really, but I'd quite like to be a bit more wealthy, to be debating yacht choices in the Bahamas instead of flavoured milk choices at Banjos. I'm in a queue in KMart - there's not much going on, and in the interests of full disclosure I'm buying my Mum a Michael J Fox book, but don't tell her. The girl behind the counter is blonde and awkward, pressed into uniform service before her time - there's a women with a gigantic cardboard cutout something sticking out the front of her trolley, which is just seemingly purchased to comically bump into the back of shoppers with hilarious results, and the counter girl is just staring at her with weary disdain. By the time the girl asks me about the whereabouts of my frequent shopper card, I feel as though her performance is forced. Maybe she's stressing about the impending 24/7 opening of all the KMarts in Tasmania which will just give drunks somewhere to hang out and throw Miley Cyrus books at each others. I can see an escape route as she wafts my purchase idly over the counter. It's then that, quite oddly, I notice she smells entirely of sandwiches. This is a disquieting notion to me, but it's definitely there - white bread if I'm not mistaken. It's quite interesting to me that my brief relationship with Vicki the baker girl back in Penguin has for some reason made it possible for me to tell the smells of individual breads baking. Is that even possible? Or is it some sort of strange nostalgic flashback? I know I don't look at jelly slices the same way...anyway, by the time I remember the story about the jelly slice, and realise that I've had a nostalgic sandwich influenced flashback like I've probably grinned inanely for long enough and jolt back into the present with a thud, at which point I realise that inane grinning to no one in particular is probably not a sign of rich mental health. The girl behind the counter is now grinning at me widely and broadly in return, and emphasises that I have a great day, and she's within an inch of putting the coins in my palm with the kind of flirtacious manner reserved for drunken London barmaids. I'm not sure what happened in my brief moment of mental wandering, but it's definitely melted the frost in her, and I'd like to know what I did. It says a lot for my Scottishness though that rather than take this as a compliment, I instantly worry that since my own grinning was brought on entirely because she smelled of sandwiches...maybe it's best not to think too hard about what I smell like...

Behind me in the queue is a short, slightly hairy guy in acid wash jeans. Even in the midst of my sandwich hallucination, I had been aware of the guy struggling to breathe, short gasping wheezes floating up to the ceiling like the rasping death rattle of a wounded snake. When I look at him, I can see the remnants of a million long, hard nights out at the pub etched all over his face, little tangential wrinkles joined up all over his visage like a pub crawl road map. He looks like a rocker, like a man who's stood up at the front of 70tys rock band and belted tunes to indifferent milling crowds for many hours of his life, and his boots are sparkling, pointed and exotic looking, and I've sketched a short mental picture of him as a sort of love em and leave em bar singer with rock in his heart - so it breaks my heart that I then notice he's holding a Vileda mop and bucket. It just seems jarring somehow, not quite right. Maybe it's to clean up spilled beer, that seems appropriate. I'm sure he's noticed the mutual grin fest in the line of front of him though - he seems like the kind of guy who would complain if he was genuinely held up by too much conversation, since his bottom lip is twitching and his body is shuffling foot to foot with hyperkinetic energy. Maybe he's having an allergic reaction to Taylor Swift on the system PA, and is ready to storm the Layby section to demand some Rose Tattoo. I notice by the time he's served he's almost fully extended on the heels of his fancy shoes and is almost leaning over the counter in excitement as he puts his Vileda mop up for scanning. Having seen the smile of the girl at the counter, I get the impression that he's up for a bit of flirting, and he positively bounds to the counter to continue the good vibrations built up by the mutual meeting of sights and smells which we've just engaged in. It's then that I hear in the most disappointed, flat monotone voice a female voice respond to the cheerful g'day with nothing more than a request for a frequent shopper card. She's had her moment of people pleasing, and is back to business. I'm sure that the rocker will get over it, but it seems somehow a shame he didn't get a little courtesy. I see him later in the Wendys queue, and he seems a little bit better, chatting to the older woman with the mole and leaning like a cockney window cleaner with his elbow against the glass...I feel better for him, but I hope I never hear him sing...pub rock, it's not for me...

Behind him in the queue is a girl, maybe mid 20tys, one of a cat food purchasing duo, with thick glasses and strangely coloured hair - not quite brown, not quite blonde, not quite anything really, just a colour, an indescribable colour of flatness, a messy colour unromantic and flat. She's wearing clothes that somehow feel the same, glasses that somehow feel the same...she seems entirely flat as a person, unremarkable to look at in a dowdy brown T-shirt and gray brown pants, her shape shapeless, her eyes joyless. Her friend is vaguely more glamorous, having spent some of the government stimulus money stimulating her lips with a fancy shade of lip gloss, a sort of dazzling silver that looks in this light the colour of a less than reputable piece of cookwear, and a T-shirt with a slogan on it too trendy for mere mortals to comprehend. They were in front of me in the queue at first but retreated like defeated soldiers when they realised they hadn't bought their trashy magazines yet and they stand stock still letting the queue pass them by as they pore over the front cover of one of the magazines, one of those horrible she's too fat she's too thin no one is quite right editions with close ups and helpful arrows...the lip gloss girl is making gesticulations towards one of the girls on the cover, a transformed celebrity who went from fat, and you could tell they were fat because they wore a black bra and looked a bit sad, to fab, and you could tell they were fab because they had been photoshopped and looked quite happy. I couldn't quite tell, but I think the implication from the discussion from lip gloss girl to the girl who wasn't there was that if this celebrity could shed some pounds and look fab, it could act as motivation for her to...I'm not sure KMart is the place for someone to point out you aren't looking the best, the magazine rack of a chain store not the best place for a chip at your self esteem. I'm not sure exactly which of the helpful arrows on the magazine cover was supposed to the most helpful, and I'm not in the mood to stop and work it all out...I've wasted too much time and I still don't have any food...

Vicki would often stick up for the underdog and whenever one of her less attractive friends would be down in the dumps she would tell them about inner beauty and how there was no such thing as out of their league...she was good at re-assurance, and good at making sure everyone felt good and was pretty philosophical about the future, to the point she'd pay more attention to these discussions and smoking than she would making hedgehog slices if I'm honest. She'd quite like KMart, it would give her scope to cheer people up I think. There were less people in there today than there were in the dodgy clothes shop - for some reason, the dodgy clothes shop squatting in the space where the foilament shop was is doing a roaring trade, although most of their clothes just seem to be the same, but different colours - and they all seem to have skulls on them. I leave it all behind to climb into Dads car and go out for tea - we don't so much talk now as just playfully bicker, bicker about football and music and a million little events from 10en or 20ty years ago - the time he got out of the car to get a scarf that had blown out the window and my cousin snuck up behind him and tooted the horn, or my awful attempt to throw a javelin - and I realise even in a KMart queue I can be reminded of a million things I thought I had forgotten, little bits of my brain fizzling and crackling, even for things as simple as a smell of sandwiches or a girl struggling with the way she looks...it's probably no surprise given the way the day has gone that when I ask the girl at the restaurant what desserts they have, she says they have jelly slices, and smiles blankly while I go back a million years to a time when the possibilities seemed a lot more diverse than ice cream or jelly...

Mind you, I'm happy where I am now...somewhere between bad acne and Vileda mops...the true middle age of man...

Distractions, Pretence, and Baseball caps 2wo for 5ive bucks

Like an out of the fog mascara clad dot on the mental horizon, Panda Eyed Girl was back today - I was surprised to see her, I thought Big W had had a clear out, and perhaps she had been shuffled out of the front door with the best wishes of all and sundry, but there she was in Lay-by today, and lest anyone think she had developed a work ethic, she stood with hands on hips, blonde hair billowing under an extractor fan as she chewed idly and fitfully on a sandwich, each bite so slow and deliberate any customer would have to wait until the last crumb was devoured before she would regally deign to get their pram off the shelf out the back. The reason for her deliberation - and I will be honest, as a student of her work ethic, I don't suspect she deliberates about a lot except for lip gloss, which may just be snobbery from someone reading a book about The Baader Meinhoff Complex - and her pause and chew view is the same reason that I've stopped my daily idling for just a moment as Taylor Swift poisons the airwaves with her teenage muzak dreaming. There's an unreconstructed boy in a turned to the side baseball cap, white tracksuit and eyebrows shaved into shape who is within inches of hitting his girlfriend. They are arguing in the book section, and we're all in a strange cosmic rhythm - swearing, placating, chewing, idling, lather, rinse, repeat. Every time she tries to placate him he gets more and more angry, more aggressive, and we're caught up in the moment as he turns and looks at a book to compose himself. When I look at the book, it's a kids book, dancing unicorns or something - which seems somehow appropriate given the immaturity and childlike way his eyes furtively shift from side to side in awkwardness when he realises he's being watched, like a child caught with a cookie. His girlfriend clings to his arm as he sulks, and time continues to pass, in awkward fitful seconds until Panda Eyed Girl has finished her sandwich and goes back to idle staring and gawping, and I resume idling through the books for something intelligent to look. Sometimes I think Panda Eyed Girl knows she's part of my daily narrative, and plays on it, her act is so studied and so predictable, her stance so completely without guile or any trace of work ethic it feels like pretence, as much as the big angry bear in the white tracksuit is all sound and fury, scrawny and loud but not worth the attention of shoppers. Taylor Swift keeps on narrating of course, and I wonder if his girlfriend dreams of prince and princesses, and wonders how she ended up with the duncess instead...and all I've ended up with is a vague realisation that if the argument got physical, I'd have to be the one to be, at the very least, yell out oi that's out of order, and I've ended up with a real craving for a brown bread sandwich...

They moved a new shop into the space the foilament operator squatted in - another squatter’s lease, clothes and baseball caps lined up neatly on tables. Snobbery means that any time I see baseball caps lined up on tables, I flash back to the Barras market in Glasgow. Street kids manning the gates telling the illicit sellers of such dangerous goods as sports socks - always 2wo for a pound as if anyone would buy 1ne - and trainers when the police where coming so the market could be cleared within seconds when a raid was on. I don't think anyone is going to raid the new squatters, but they seem to be doing a much better trade than the foilament sellers. They know their market I think, since most of the population is in baseball caps but no one seems to want a washbashin cat. There's an invitation on my e-mail to something I don't want to go to, and in the space in my brain that tries to get out of going, all the devious little reasons I run through my head to try and get out of attendance, there now only exists meandering thoughts about baseball caps that I can't get rid of. People filter through idly as the man behind the desk keeps a close eye on the merchandise, and he briefly looks so dodgy that I think he must have a kid on the door looking out for a raid after all. Maybe my judgements are totally off though - my brain knows why I'm avoiding the invitation, and fitfully it jumps from scene to scene like a skipping vinyl record that can't get from one Cinematic Orchestra track to the next because the needle is busted. No 2wo thoughts today seem to connect. At the muffin shop, a gaggle - and really, isn't it always - of teenage girls huddle around a newspaper, picking faults in the Logies frocks, in Gretel Killeens hair, in who the cutest Neighbours actor is. Those conversations are easy; I could pull up a pew and join them to be honest, without a lot of thought on my behalf. Ah, those wonderful conversations when you don't have to think, when all you have to do is sip a coffee and make an in joke every now and then...in the baseball cap shop, there's no room to think, the crowd is huddled tight, and the dodgy seller is grinning idly. Somewhere I think a washbasin cat is being made with a frowny face...

There's a fantastic photo on my Mums mantelpiece - it's her and 2wo of her sisters in London holding pigeons, and Mum is in the middle holding her pigeon as if it's made of a precious crystal while her 2wo sisters ham it up and hold their pigeons with reckless abandon and broad smiles. It's a wonderful photo because it sums up my Mum perfectly - someone obviously has given her a handbook on how to hold a pigeon and she's followed it to the letter. It's what she does, she listens, she concentrates, she replicates the instruction. I can't do that at all - my mind wanders at important moments, just when I'm being given the key reasoning behind a decision I'm staring out the window and down the road at people in a nearby house. I might not be able to tell you the key reason why friend X and friend Y aren't talking, but I can sure tell you in vivid colour what's going on at the next table. My pigeon I suspect would have been dropped or flown onto my head. The sandwich store today was such a moment - Sandwich White Female, who at one time held me sandwiches and was very vocal about doing so, but now who seems dis-interested as if perhaps life had ground her down the way the taste of her stores muffins have ground down my palate, has apparently picked up. I'm not sure if this is the repetition of a previous conversation, and they are talking about it again, but in my notice of that I don't notice that another girl with a fancy wrist band and an even fancier badge promoting, I don't know, probably muffins, is standing with an attentive but definitely creepy smile spread across her prematurely aged face. Middle managers before 2ty3hree just always look so old to me, so wrinkled, so desperate to please it curves the arc of their face just the way the how to manual tells them to. Mum would have been perfect for the job. She drops the smile for just a moment to re-iterate that it's my duty to be served by her, and then throws a glance over her shoulder at the non working girls behind her and rolls her eyes in a manner which suggest I'm meant to agree with her worldview that society needs more workers and less slacking. I'd explain to her, via the metaphor of a pigeon, that I'm not really in agreeance today and I've wasted an entire day listening to Ladyhawke on the IPOD and not answering an e-mail, but I'd hold up the guy behind me who's telling his kid about the big day they are going to have at the swing park once they escape this corporate bakery, and somehow, it just seems unfair, so I merely not, turn up My Delerium super loud and wander off, with a task in mind...

The e-mail has sat all this time unattended. My e-mail at work not only makes a sound but flashes on the screen like a hypnotic grey square cursor. We used to have e-mail that you couldn't close until you had opened every last e-mail, even the ones that were just visual representations of the frowny face. I wonder if I could replicate panda eyed girls usual face as an emoticon...no, it's time to stop the time wasting and answer this damned e-mail. It's a difficult one, after all, I had so many examples today of pretence, that I feel a little uneasy about replying with some made up excuse why I can't wander off to a party. Especially given it's a while away. The strange thing about Tasmania is that a 1ne hour car journey is somehow a terrifying trip into an abyss, you are stuck there for the night, with all the implications that invokes. Whenever I go to this place, I'm uncomfortable, but then I'm always uncomfortable staying over at peoples houses, divorced from the Foxtel box and the Lily Allen CD collection stacked in the corner. I blame the posh kid I stayed with in Prep - he ate oranges and I did too because that's what they did and I got sick and broke out in a rash, which is such a perfect story for my whole life I'm surprised someone hasn't snapped up the film rights. Plus, I don't want to see someone I once liked but did nothing about - I should have, obviously, but I didn't, so shuffling about awkwardly, knowing everyone else knows I'm going to be awkward and drunk while listening to horrible music when I can't shuffle home...god help me if they serve oranges. Someone shuts the door, and I'm still staring blankly at the grey square, an entire day lost to indecision, to easy choices and plain boredom. To, thankyou Lily, The Fear. However, something springs to mind - a certain face, a certain attitude, a certain disposition...with the insouciance of a studied persona - and in fairness, hers is guileless and unthought about I suspect where as mine will have to be improvised on the spot - and a certain way to eat a sandwich, I click on the e-mail, say I'll go, and drift casually into the night, Lily Allen on the IPOD, not an expression on my face....

It might only last until I get into my hammock and resume thinking, but it's a start...

The big chill and swine flu over the cuckoos nest

It's cold around here at the moment, seriously freezing, the breaths of the passers by strained as they walk hunched through the streets dreaming of hot showers or warm embraces. It doesn't seem to upset one of our number though, a man of middle age and casual disposition who sits on a bench in the middle of the park drinking tea like an English country gentlemen, not out of a flask but out of a proper china cup. He's got his pinkie extended and no amount of haranguing bogans dangerously loitering nor cold snaps will hurry him back to the office, nor change his penchant for casual knitwear, the ducks on his jumper as uninterested in moving as he is. As he sips his tea unhurried, I'm walking past kicking a tin can along the ground, just as 2wo bogans begin a long argument that ends with one of them doubled over a railing clutching his stomach as if every word is bringing him physical pain. Since the foilament shop closed and had to take down their cheap hand made sign, and since Big W has become a big empty space where people go to huddle for warmth rather than shop, the place has lacked genuine character, and has become, give or take the odd stampede at the top of the escalator, desperately quiet - individual characters stand out against the gloom, a man drinking tea from a cup so noticable in the stillness, arguments resonating vividly so you can hear every word. I went out on a school night foolishly the previous night, so my head is thumping, and maybe I just exist without sharpness today - maybe there are lots of people about, and I just don't notice. We stayed so long in the pub, when we turned around to leave everyone else had left and bar staff were awkwardly watching us to see when we would leave so they could lock up and sneak home early. Above all else though, it's cold, to the point even blue eye shadow girl had to put a jumper on. I'm never sure about the onset of winter, it seems as though everyone just clings desperately on and hopes to get through it and the drives home in the dark and the rain with slow pondering turns of the tyres on the tarmac, but I quite like it. I like the space, I like the dark, I like the quiet, and I like sloshing my way through puddles on the way to nowhere in particular...I'm Scottish, it makes me feel a lot more comfortable than slipping, slopping or slapping...

Whenever it's cold, my mind drifts back to those Scottish winters, especially the ones in the late 80s where everything was new and scary and peppery with swear words and what the TV announcer would call in my head adult themes. Those scarred and wounded plastic shelters with graffiti all over them saying that Jane and Gary were together 4ever, or so and so was a nasty wee slapper. There was a buzz of anticipation around those poorly constructed plastic bus stops, someone certain to cop it as sure as the bus driver would glare beneath a grim nuclear winter face if you thanked them for their time. In the slow moving desperate Thatcherite winter of 89, it was anarchic to stand around those bus stops, to watch little sweet blonde haired 11even year old girls talking about sex like experienced sailors and watch the clinical dissection of personal faults by committee thinking, insults flying thick and fast through the air. It was no place for a nervous disposition, and any steps to regain composure were just seen as a sign of weakness, but having said that, once you got the hang of the discourse, it wasn't all that bad, standing your ground an Olympic sport. Once, a girl called Claire-Leonie gave me a spray as snow bounced off the ground, and I gave her a spray back about her acne, and although the exchange was cruel and harsh, I felt as though I had at least stood up for myself. As we argued though, a teacher with wild Doc Brown hair and a nice line in firm but unfair verbal discipline pushed past us and told us under union rules, it was too cold a day for anyone to be in school, and he gleefully jumped on the bus we had been too busy arguing to notice, throwing pens out the window in a fit of positive giddiness. So myself and my youthful but plooky and frizzy haired bête noire had to walk all the way home in the softly falling slow, exchanging insults all the way home. I had yet to understand that in actuality, this was a form of Scottish flirting, this strange bickering and arguing, the namecalling and the insults repeated in dark and dingy Irvine nightclubs in later years as a form of foreplay. I should have known when, having danced like a foul mouthed Torvill and Dean through sludge and snow, she turned to me and said in a chirpy voice that she would see me on Monday. Had I understood women better I would have known the intent, but what I did instead was simply stand at my door and watch the snow cascade down onto my doorstep and let the cold wash all over my neatly pressed school uniform. Oddly, given the primary school den I was thrown into and the loneliness I felt at times, it was as good as it got watching the snow fall down - it was alien and strange and discomforting, but also exhilirating at the same time. Not least of all when we went out and threw snowballs at the girl next door, which I now realised in this strange land was a form of signalling interest. Judging by the sheer fierceness by which she threw her own snowballs at me with a shot put like arm, she must have really liked me...

I felt cold in the New Sydney - an Irish theme pub which unlike Irish Murphys actually manages to feel friendly and you aren't going to get a clip around the ear from a surly Maori who can't abide anyone enjoying themselves - when I realised how much time had passed between drinks, how it was a full 7even years since I had stood inside the pub on the first night out I ever had with my new friends, awkwardly clutching a steam cleaner I had bought my Mum for Mothers Day and making fitful small talk with eyes fixed hard to the floor. Where has the time gone I wondered, and how many years ago was it I tried to steal a chip from someones dinner and a waitress slapped my hand and as I drank a pint of a mature persons ale from a clean glass, which was one step away from drinking a flagon of ale and discussing the economy. I spent about an hour in such a place on the weekend in Melbourne, an exclusive Liberal style haunt in the catacombs of Melbourne that my friend took me too, where old boys jowl in the corner over a glass of brandy and yearn for the corpse of Robert Menzies to be re-animated and no one reads the sports section of the paper. I was so uncomfortable as I watched the jowling and the scowling that I drank a beer at the kind of speed only reserved for darts players shaped liked barrels and fled at the speed of light. Back on my own turf with football and netball clubs idling at the bar, curses in the air and no one remotely ordering anything that came in a wine glass, it was only the march of time that made me feel uncomfortable, that and being eyed off by a netballer. Only once in a lifetime I think. As the night dwindled and dawdled to a low key conclusion, 2wo of my friends did their own awkward shuffle towards Customs House, off on a school night adventure, locked together in perpetuity. Sometimes they sleep together, sometimes they fight, and then the cycle begins anew. Sometimes when I watch them, they don't seem to have progressed beyond I did when I was throwing snowballs, and illuminated by the gloomy light as they walk off together, they seem as though they are insulting each other, and if the snow fell on the ground right now it would be an eerie 20ty year on deja vu moment for me - which keeps happening these days anyway, the world contracting into a series of flashbacks and repetition. Which makes me as comfortable in some ways as I do in the plush leather seat of the taxi when I climb in for some reason - at least now, I think, I know how to react to things...mostly...I at least know going out on a school night is destined to lead to trouble, to worrying messages on Facebook, and a staggering out of bed in the morning that makes you wonder just what they are putting in ale these days to make it taste so disgusting in the morning...

The sun came out today - it was gently warm, enough for me to feel good and saunter like my Dad does, although his gallus swagger is because he has to balance precariously on bunions. Apparently the lead singer of The Violent Femmes was in a coffee shop I walked past, but that might be nonsense, and if it wasn't Dave Pirner I'm not interested. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits, even the guy who had to give out leaflets dressed up as the original Joker from Batman, although he couched his happiness with uni student style sarcasm and flippancy, as the goths around JB HIFI threw things at him and laughed. There was an old man and woman outside Sanity who were obsessed with swine flu - well, she might have had swine flu, she looked a bit porky - as the camp Sanity sales clerk tried to make friends with me over the purchase of the Ladyhawke album. I didn't want to leave my house, I thought it would be too cold, which is such an old man concern I forced myself out the door in disgust for even thinking about it. The old couple are scanning the crowd for anyone remotely flu like for so long I begin to think they'll never leave, so terrified are they at the world around them where they can't wear matching tracksuits and look down their nose at everyone. I don't feel much like hiding today though, or worrying about mysterious diseases that may or may not happen. I feel good, at least, until I walk past a pub on the way to the football ground, having left behind the gloomy twins who are cowering in the shopfront in determination not to take a leaflet from the Joker, and in the window I see someone clutching a pint of ale similar to the one I drank in the New Sydney, and it's more frightening than a million conversations with my parents about my so called future. I know I'm doing OK when I'm able to avoid the disgusting reminder of the taste that trickles back through my throat, absorb it, and smile as I move on through the sun, not a trace of any kind of cold anywhere near me as The Joker fades into the distance - the last I see any of them, he's managed to rope in someone who looks like a bumblebee to give out the leaflets, and they skip along the footpath, smiling and terrorising foreign tourists as they go, while the old man and woman stay entirely frozen in their swine flu free enclave, backs pressed up against the wall and arms to the side, as I'd imagine the swine flu prevention booklet would prescribe...

Just a normal day in Hobart I'd say, but with more sunshine...