Just another beautiful Sunday in the city that's nothing like Middlesbrough

Hobarts Food Court in the middle of the shopping mall is deserted. It's early morning and aside from the odd stray and those pressed into service in the search for shoes sit miles apart at deserted tables. I had arrived into the shopping mall early, the car park deserted, travelling back to humanity in a lift under construction, where the lift voice gives Ground Floor a sexy elongated twist. I imagine lonely men hang on that voice for ages, as they buy their toothpaste and while away the hours until senility. My beverage of choice is a badly frozen coke that drips disdain for the laws of physics. Around me, small Asian teenagers fitfully pick at early morning concoctions simmering in vats, somehow becoming things of promise and disappointment at the same time, almost Buddhist in their complexity. The smell of stew overwhelms them as they rub their sleepy eyes and drink water by the gallon. 1ne girl is smiling a tired smile in my direction while she clutches a bottle of iced tea in her shaking hand, while a cleaner pushes around a cart smelling of Ammonia with no sense of direction, banging it into table legs and chairs and cursing the inventor of the trolley wheel loudly and furiously. It's an unromantic and desperate setting, as vendors arrive to unpack boxes and look busy ahead of a meagre Sunday trade. I've got Bomb The Bass on my IPOD and have shut out most of the worldly distractions. The only other person still eating when I throw my Coke away is a burly Samoan man - my racial profiling is only sound because he has a Samoan rugby top on - with a coke gripped tightly in his clenched fist. He sits his large frame entirely on the edge of his chair, ready to spring off it at the slightest ethnic slight, and I'm certainly not going to give him an opportunity to unfurl his tension on me. As I leave, his mobile phone rings - his ringtone is a Justin Timberlake song, 1ne of the camper 1nes, hard as that is to pick. He grunts Samoanly into the air, and says in a stern lifeless voice the phone belongs to his girlfriend. I believe him, but I feel sorry for the poor coke can, which suffers for the ringtone by being dispatched with a hefty rugby style kick into the bin, as the Samoan walks off steaming, which is more than can be said for the average dim sim coming out of stall no 5...

I take my drink away from the scene of the crime. I wander for a bit past a hot dog stand. I used to eat a hot dog every day from this particular establishment, and still don't quite no why. There's a girl with early morning hair and a black netball skirt draped over the counter of the hot dog stand like a trade show model would drape herself over the bonnet of a car, face down on her elbows smiling sweetly. I suspect she's simply decided to be wacky and outrageous, and she shoots me an arched eyebrow and a wink which suggests as much. I'm not in the mood for wacky and outrageous though, and when I walk off she's trying to show a bit of thigh to an elderly passing gentleman who's holding a pack of Band Aids and walking at a glacial pace. He doesn't even stop to look at the rogue thigh, or if he does, he's used more subtle perving techniques than the average passer by. He's very protective of his band aids though. He holds them in the palm of his hand and hisses angrily at any passer by who comes near him, his tight jeans, his slicked back poster boy for brylcreem hair, but most of all his Band Aids. The girl on the counter of the hot dog stand is undeterred at being turned down and continues to try and throw sexy shapes underneath an illuminated cartoon boy holding a hotdog who's smile and expression never changes. The old man with the Band Aids pushes a baseball cap tightly onto his head with all the care and style of a true Syrup patron trying to look young under a strobe light and begins muttering to his companion about what a terrible day he's had. She holds up her left hand, a wrinkled stop sign, and asks for the Band Aids. It breaks the old mans spirit to be nagged and dismissed, his face and standard of hair care visibly wilting, so he looks back for a glimpse of thigh, and then turns in the direction of the sexy lift, condemned to a life of Sunday shopping until death do them part...

I'm in Harris Scarfe. 1nce Fitzgeralds, a jewelled hubbub of Xmas decorations, strangely piled up toys and things with horribly incorrect price tags - look ma! A kettle for 4c - it's now just a glorified cavernous warehouse, sale signs stuck to the floor and middle aged mothers swishing cougar like through the rack of affordable but fashionable jumpers. 1ne of them, glammed up to the 9nes, proudly holds up a kimono style nightgown, audibly saying Ta-Da in the direction of some confused Indian students who had hopped in for batteries. Do they say Ta-Da in India or is it just her shimmering middle aged silver eyeliner that has confused them, who could say, but they are entranced at the gaudy display regardless. She hams it up of course, saying in the direction of no-1ne in particular I'll take it, and then putting her hands on her hips like Anne Maree Cooksley would have done on the fringes of a Price Is Right set, straddling the showcase. Trouble is of course, there's no staff to ring up the purchase. So we all form 1ne elongated queue, the Indians at the back arguing about why he didn't just buy batteries at the garage, me, rocked by an ice cream headache as the Frozen Coke kicks in like anarchy at a rock festival, the silver woman, who I realise has a tattoo on her hand in Japanese writing that bends and twists and sags through her wrinkles, that unfortunately I stare at a little bit too long until she catches me and almost, but thankfully doesn't, engage me in conversation about. At the head of the queue are a party of elderly English grumblers, all tweed, grey hair and walking canes, hunting the biggest game of all - a shopkeep. The senior member of the hunting party leans on his elbow at the counter like they he's propping up the bar and says it was never like this in Middlesbrough. As I like at the queue and a red faced puffy girl in tight black pants sprinting from the remnants of homeware to serve us, I can only, albeit quietly, concur...

The lift back to the car is sadly voiced by an aggressive, sullen German sounding woman who sighs audibly at the arrival on Car Park Level 3hree. I only share the disembodied voices disappointment because my car is still there intact and not taken by urchins for scrap - the insurance payout is surprisingly tasty. I left most of my melancholy behind at lunch anyway, picking and nibbling at a cold chicken parma while 2wo bogans broke up behind me and a barmaid of a nervous disposition let out an audible obsencity when she dropped a glass. My mood is not especially bouyant on this particular Sunday anyway - sports are not your friend my son and neither are the encroaching black eyes of middle age. A barmaid who missed her calling to play a panto dwarf makes amiable mid lunch conversation as she wipes the crumbs from a previous occupant off the table with a sweeping motion of her jaycloth. She tells me about her life, as if I asked, as the crumbs, when I look closer, aren't swept at all, but huddled in the corner like naughty schoolchildren late back from lunch. I haven't been so penned into a corner since I was offered a screenplay by a crazy man on a bus. She isn't in a particularly cheerful mood either, all bangs and curls and incomplete sentences that end in that Australian way where it sounds like a definitive statement is somehow also a question. She isn't happy with her life, she isn't happy with her jaycloth, her chunky bangles clang off the edge of a table as the steam from my chips threatens to fog up her glasses. Most of all she isn't happy about Hobart. She begins tearing the place to shreds as she wipes nothing in particular. I think about my morning and wonder if this is what I sound like to my particular sounding boards, but in the end I say nothing other than to tell her Hobart has it's flaws, but it's nothing like Middlesbrough, and she disappears into the kitchen confused as the bogans eat a make up chip, reconciled as quickly as they broke up, the issue of what the lead singer of Nickelbacks real name is finally and utterably settled...

I would like to go to Middlesbrough 1ne day for what it's worth...if I'm stuck in a queue, I'll know they are lying...

The trouble with other peoples parties

Cooksleyplusone
Originally uploaded by JungsPN

OK, so Mary Livesey news is obviously thin on the ground, but this places style icon, the champion of the cheese plate, the filly of the function, the legend of the launch and lunch, Anne Maree Cooksley, was in the paper with a new boyfriend. It was awful that they pointed out she looks like Suzie Wilks, I hate that, she doesn't need to look like anyone else, she looks like AMC and AMC only. She's dating former Mimco owner David Briskin. I have no idea what Mimco is or was, but they seem a lovely couple. There was a reference to the "in crowd" going to some bar called Fog in Prahan, which obviously isn't as good as that bar in Sydney where you sit on milk crates after you get an SMS entry code, but it still seems pretty "in" - I mean, it's got black lacquered columns, gift vouchers and cocktails. I can't imagine it plays Dave Dobbyn at 2am like Hobarts own Syrup, but if it's good enough for my girl, it's good enough for me. I love AMC, because her job, as far as I can tell, is professional partier, and I would love a job like that. I'm amazed more people don't champion her fantastic work. Stephanie Rice this, Leisel Jones that. How did Sonia "they are just getting me to play the dumb blonde, honest, tee hee" get to be famous while AMC toils in relative obscurity. It's a shame I tell you, a damn stinking shame.

Of course, the parties I go to really have relation to those the goddess of the free glass of champagne goes to. I am a really bad party guest, I always have been, particularly at other peoples parties where I have to show an interest in the event. I'm also someone who likes to be home by 2am, which doesn't always endear me to people. And when I say home, I mean my own home, I don't like staying at other peoples houses. I tend to freak out a bit if I'm drunk and can't work out how to get out of a room. As for my own parties, when I lived in Penguin they were always really popular - my Dad would cook sausages, we'd go over to Penguin football oval and kick a football, and my Mum and Dad would play this horrendous vinyl (remember that kids?) disc that you could only play if you put coins on the stars on the disc, and it was an alien singing that it was my birthday and they'd zoomed from the moon. It was just absolutely horrible, and I used to run away whenever it was played, which is an elixir to Scottish parents, who just play it more and more. Then they would run dancing competitions, and give me the prize even though, as we've discussed, I danced like Tamsyn Lewis runs. Crap. There was always a big fight from someone who felt gypped they didn't win a prize, and I'd usually end up in a big huff. My main fear though was, and it is to this day, that no-one would turn up. It's the party equivalent of having no one laugh at your stand up show, of dying on the toilet, of running like Tam...oh you know what I mean. I tend to find in Tasmania, 12 means a Tassie 12, which is about 12:20, so if you don't know that, 12 rocks around, and you're standing there looking down the path thinking no one is turning up and you've made too much fairy bread for one person to eat. Of course, the Tassie 12 wasn't something my parents adhered to - if we had to go a party, a Tassie 12 became a Scottish 11, and we were always there before the setting up had even begun. The number of times I sat alone in a cold rumpus room, watching TV or throwing darts until the other kids came along, it was almost every week growing up. I think my Mum just had a thing for helping set out fairy bread...

However much my own parties were a mass of will they-won't they-how did he win the dancing competition emotions, it was other peoples parties that always seemed to be weird, alien and foreign. I went to school with this kid who's parents served oranges during a break in the sports and games. No cake, just oranges, which was like stepping onto Mars for weirdness in early 80s Tasmania. They were friends of Grant Hackett I think, and they had all the Classical Composers magazine set, even the composers no one knew, unlike us who gave up after Chopin. I stayed with another friend of mine for a week (this was a different friend to the axe wielding family), and he had a Commodore 64 in his basement, and a soccer game on cassette. Naturally, I spent the entire weekend playing the computer and really annoying him because it was his birthday week and he wanted to play volleyball. Crazily, outside in the sunshine volleyball - what a fool. I'd like to think I was selfish and learned a valuable lesson, but obviously, I didn't, I'd do it again if I had to, those soccer games were fantastic. The main thing I remember from other peoples parties when I was growing up was the varying quality of cordial - no one ever got a glass of champagne, just cordial in a paper cup - which would always set aside the future social standing of kids. Kia-Ora was vaguely acceptable, but any kid with Cottees was feted and beloved. Home Brand was a source of death. No one I knew ever threw a fancy dress party, although I was once in the paper, through circumstances I can't explain, dressed at a fancy dress party as The King Of Hearts. Mind you, whatever the theme or quality of juice, I was never a good party guest, I was anxious and nervy as a child, thinking that if I wasn't getting attention or spoken to, I was doing something wrong. Mind you, sometimes being lost in the mix was quite a good thing - this one time, I stayed overnight at this kids house, and all the kids staying over decided that it would be nice, at 3am, to cook the parents of this kid a little breakfast as a thankyou for their generous hospitality and lashings of fairy bread. It was only many years later I realised that when we delivered it to them in their room after a lot of effort, we actually disturbed the process by which a mummy and daddy loved each other very much. When I actually realised that, many years later when I was sitting on a bus, I thought how bad it was that I had disturbed them, and how bad it was that this other kid went back 10 minutes later to ask them if they enjoyed their breakfast...

Of course, by the time I grew up, in mid 90s Burnie, alcohol was thrown into the mix. I was still a terrible party guest, still nervous, but now drunk, and a little bit more relaxed as a result. Instead of being inside eating fairybread we were now outside around a campfire, drinking and doing some rather ungentlemanly spews in the back garden. Completing the circle fully, I was often chastised for sitting inside watching TV instead of going outside and getting smashed. There were girls at the parties, often huddled around the fire singing Alanis Morrisette songs, and there was always something really dramatic going on - I don't know exactly when the drama at parties changed from quality of cordial to X and Y broke up because Y was found on top of Z, but it was a fairly sudden lurch, almost overnight. Burnie being a small town, you had to tread carefully at these parties, lest some kind of scandal get out involving the daughter of a prominent shop owner, a boy, a bathtub and slatherings of baby oil, just to pick something at random. Nothing like this ever happened to me - mores the pity. Although, I did once go to a party with Burnies social elite, in a downstairs part of a nightclub, for one of my friends birthday. It was so exclusive, I was the only person from our little social group to score an invite, and to this day, i have no idea why that is. Given my previous adventures in Ayrshire with the weird downstairs poker den, I was incredibly excited to finally make it past the velvet ropes and see what was in the VIP room of a nightclub. As it turned out, they had kitted out the entire room to look like this persons bedroom, with My Little Pony posters. Naturally, I was freaked out by this, and really didn't have a good night, and it wasn't my kind of demographic. It was a lot of rich people, snobby families and people into Air Supply. I struck up a long and tedious conversation with a used car dealer (that might make it sound common and earthy, but it was used BMWs, and I still remember how bored I was, and how much my head hurt) and his son, who I think fancied me. Anyway, I was just about to go home, when for reasons I can't quite explain, someone (well, obviously the DJ, but someone requested it) put on the Nutbush, and all the old uncles and aunties got up and danced around, and I realised you can set up a party as snobby as you want, you can put on the fanciest parties, but at heart, people always want to do the Nutbush and get pissed and pick up. I felt better about my social standing at that point, and as I walked home through the cold Burnie air, I thought, you know what, if I could just a lucky break, get some confidence in myself, maybe, just maybe I could get invited to the Fog nightclub in Prahan...

Of course, my dear AMC, I could never fit in your world - I went to a club in London and was thrown out, a club that two hours previously had ejected Peaches Geldolf...I know that you would never go somewhere so common...no free champagne for one thing...

Gold medal no, free chicken yes

AMCdoingherthing
Originally uploaded by JungsPN

Since we all need something to look at during this difficult Olympic time when everything shuts down for Tae Kwon Do, I thought another picture of our hero, Anne Maree Cooksley, with Miss Poland no less, would be a treat for everyone. She even has her free glass of champagne - god she's brilliant. So, let me be perfectly clear on one thing - that Miley Cyrus live clip is the greatest thing in the world...um...oh yeah, the other thing is, I hate the Olympics. I hate the Olympics for many reasons. My Dad hates them because he never gets to see anyone Scottish competing, just Australians winning bronze. I'm pretty much annoyed that Garry Wilkinson, the Coogee Bear, never gets to front our coverage here. In one of those legendary moments everyone remembers but no one ever actually say, Garry was asleep at his desk during a morning shift at the 92 Barcelona Games, and had to be poked with a stick to wake him up. As you may have gathered, I'm also far more into the machinations and fascinating interplay of local pride, national pride is a little bit militant to me. All that flag waving and anthem singing, and the opening ceremony, what's all that about? Nothing will ever beat the AFL Grand Final the year the goal umpires all did a choreographed dance. Oh, you can put a whale in the top deck of the stands all you want China, but if you don't have streamers and balloons and kids in footy tops, what's the point? And that's before we get to how hard it is to see anyone hot for two weeks - I just struggle to see what's attractive about Amanda Beard (nowhere near as hot as Bronwyn Eagles), in fact the only funny thing was Ian Thorpe was dating a beard (funny gag) - shallow, but true, the best you can get is the really small womens weightlifters. Actually, that comment just came because I have a copy of FHM in the house, it's making me sexist...

My hatred of the Olympics though really stems from two seperate incidents - the first was back in 1984, when I was in Grade 1, and we sent our young hopeful athletes off to Los Angeles, and somewhat inevitably, my school decided everyone had to do a school project. I hated projects, due to my inherent laziness, and desire to do something far more enjoyable, like playing with my Ju Jitsu Heman figure or pretending to be Rod McCurdy in the back garden. In my school, projects were never judged on content, but on things like colours and presentation, my absolute weaknesses in life, especially with my pen licence defying bad handwriting. As you can imagine, there wasn't exactly a lot of information in Penguin on the small African country, and it's not like outside the US Army anyone had ever heard of the Internet, so I had to go to the library and do proper old fashioned research. Now, Penguin library was many things - a wonderful shelter for the homeless, a place for mummys and daddys who loved each other very much, and a place where you never quite sure if the librarians hated you or not, but what it wasn't was a rich source of research material on Botswana. Despite a frantic one night cram session with the parents, all we could find was one paragraph in the dictionary - and so, we did the only thing we could do, we made it up. We got about 6 paragraphs out of maize being the chief export alone, made up the presidents name, made up the anthem, every fact apart from a drawn by my Dad flag was completely made up. And of course, I got an A because it looked shiny. And so, that's the first reason I hate the Olympics - it taught me to lie, lie like a homeless man in the gutter. It's appropriate, given 1/2 the athletes are on drugs...wait, who let Tamsyn Lewis write that last bit?

I guess the second reason I hate the Olympics is because it's just a lot of pointless sports that you are supposed to care about when the rest of your life you wouldn't give a toss about them. Lauren Burns winning at Tae Kwon Do or that bush pig girl who won the shooting gold medal last time for Australia are suddenly national heroes because they won at sports that, be honest, if they were on TV you wouldn't watch except they are on at the Olympics. Do you watch the womens weightlifting normally? Of course you don't - but if we load some Aussie girl up with carbs and put her in the super heavyweight judo we all get the flags out and cheer her on. When the Sydney Olympic opening ceremony was on, we were watching the Royle Family on the ABC. In Scotland, I don't remember the Olympics meaning anything to anyone - except for Tom McKean in Seoul, that was the one person we all got behind - and then the stupid bloke got boxed in by 6 Kenyans in the heats and was stuffed. We lost interest after that, mostly because it's impossible to unite all of Scotland behind one person, given we tend to find out their religion before we decide if we like them or not. I love here in Australia we have elevated a modern pentathlete (meh, I liked ancient pentathletes way better) to a national hero because she's fighting some pesky Greeks just for a place in the team. Who cares about modern pentathlon? Anyone? And the inspirational montages set to Coldplay...bring back 1988s One Moment In Time by Whitney Houston...now that was an Olympics song...all of my dreams are a heartbeat awayyyyyyyyy...

Mind you, the Olympics did give me my one moment of true sporting glory - 1988s parade of nations at my school in Burnie. We all had to pick a country and benny around for a day representing a country in sport with the winner getting a trip to generic chip and chicken restaurant downtown (McDonalds was an Olympiad away) - a much better way to celebrate the Olympics than making the Tanzanian flag in glitter glue (I love glitter glue). It was also a wonderful way to legally play catch and kiss under the guise of Olympic spirit. Our bit of the school represented Germany, a country which at 10 years old we didn't know a lot about, other than Hogans Heroes and Allo Allo (oh Renee, you and your antics). However, I did want to win, as there was this other kid on the Greek team that I really didn't like. So I absolutely caned him in the most traditional of all Olympic events...the 100m egg and spoon race, beating him by about 20 metres after he tripped over his own big trendy shoes. As it turned out, my victory on that cold, grey Burnie afternoon won the event for our team, and I lapped up the attention and wore my little blue first place ribbon, not even noticing that the quality of chicken was slowly rotting my liver due to it's 1980s "treatment" via chemicals. I felt like a winner in a way that I just haven't managed to since. I guess I understood why people give their lives in dedication to sport, just for that kind of attention, to go back to their home town and know they are loved and that they never have to pay for chicken or chips again. I guess I should try and appreciate all the modern pentathletes and male synchronised swimmers, they are in it for the glory (and the chicken)...but I know I won't, I'll be yelling at the TV what happened to the good programmes...I know I will...

Still, if it stops Southern Cross showing Collingwood games...

Tommy Hafey, he sleeps with the bogans

There's this book out at the moment that I saw in Angus and Robertson - not the one in town with the really grumpy woman who shuffles magazines next to anyone who browses, and not in a certain store where a certain girl with blue eye shadow works either - which is called Billys Book for Blokes by Billy Brownless. Just so you know if you are a furrener, Billy Brownless is a "colourful" ex football personality who makes a good living out of having gentle fun poked at his weight on television and travelling all over Australia visiting local football clubs spinning chocolate wheels and drinking bars dry. I think a lot of blokes would quite like to be Billy Brownless, since he played football, has a wife roughly 200 times hotter than him, and never has to pay for a beer. So it makes sense for him to write a book - much more sense than scumbag Andy Mahers "book of jokes" anyway - all about blokes. I haven't read it, but I'd imagine it's got chapters about drinking, fighting, mateship, cards, pool, cars, changing a tyre...all the usual things that real blokes are supposed to like. I'm sitting staring at a Hannah Montana poster and I spend most of my days wondering how anyone could possibly fancy Gabrielle Climi. Even knowing who she is probably DQs me from the real bloke category, although I do have a lot of opinions on what Mick Malthouse should do next. I've tried to look at a couple of times in a certain store, but I could probably guess the contents from here. If only the woman in that shop didn't keep walking past with her security intercom...

Anyway, thinking about Billy Brownless and the role he's played in local football (and by extension, local pride) got me thinking about two things important to any local community. And certainly I could write a very good post about being a bloke. In fact last nights news probably was something of an inspiration. Apparently Kevin Rudd stopped all the funding for community groups (such a sexy two word phrase, up there with smart casual and day off) until he had a review (get out, that doesn't sound like Kevin) of whether the funding model was viable, or summat. Anyway, the heads of the community groups got together to discuss this, and how to get their funding back, and they were all on the Tasmanian news, chatting about this over Tim Tams and weak tea. This is definitely going to be my future career path, helping out the local community in some way around a pot of tea. Mostly, I'm just going to sit in a room and pay out on everyone. Maybe it was just the community groups and CWA in Penguin, but I've always found that community groups are massive bitchfests. Between bitching about how little funding you get, bitching about respective governments, bitching about the quality of the cake that committee member X brought last week, and of course bitching about how here you are giving up your free time to plan a big event and damn punk kids/local council/senior citizens etc won't support it, you can pretty much spend your days just having massive sprays at everyone. Sounds like terrific fun, throw in my love of local pride, and it's amazing I never do it.

The first thing important to any small local community is the visit of a celebrity. In Penguin, it was always Kevin Sheedy or Tom Hafey. I think those two are pretty much who goes and visits the place now to be honest. Can't imagine Rihanna and her 3 different expressions popping in for tea and scones. The visit of a Kevin Sheedy, particularly in the 1980s, was a cause for celebration and an 8 page special in the Advocate. The format for their visit was pretty much set in stone - funny speech, bit of Q&A, help out with a bit of fundraising via raffling off a couple of footy jumpers, then a few drinks at the bar. The best bit about this visit (and it was always a footballer who visited Penguin for our celebrity quotient, we never quite got Jason Mraz - even Burnie got Slim Dusty every 6 weeks) was that in preparation, the local dickheads would pump themselves up that they were going to confront Sheeds on why he wasn't playing a particular player or how they could do a better job. And then, they would melt like starstruck 8 year olds when they actually had a chance to ask their question. Eddie McGuire a few years ago yelled at the crowd at the casino to just buy the fucking jumper that was raffled, so tedious were these stuttering questions. I felt the spirit of these important local visits a few years ago when I did work experience for a company that was in a very rah rah phase with it's employers. The company booked Tom Hafey, who if you don't know is a very motivational old football coach famous for yelling at people and keeping himself in such amazing physical shape he could still outrun you all at age 80. Everything was all set, except our ditzy secretary had mistakenly booked Mr Hafey into a caravan park, and not a good one - one in Warrane (Tassies equivalent of Beirut). Naturally, this was easily fixed, but I thought the company went a tad far in firing her for her error. I mean, Tommy would loved the place - he could have yelled at lazy bogan slackers to get up and do some push ups. Who knows, maybe one of those ugly Warrane ducklings could have become a beautiful Anne Maree Cooksley (one in every post) type swan through Tommys rantings?

However, as much as there is lots of local pride in showing a Billy Brownless your town, there is one group of people who don't enjoy the visit of a celebrity - the existing local identities. These people spend roughly 364 days a year in exalted local status. I'm obsessed with old fashioned local identities, people spoke in awe struck tones because they bake the best scones in the village or something. I loved that in Penguin when Kevin Sheedy was in town, how personally they would take being marginalised. If Mr Sheedy asked for a particular type of tea or biscuit, he copped it right in the neck for being a snob. If Mr Hafey made a remotely off colour joke, he was bitched about for a week. They would patiently wait at the back of the hall until the celebrity left town and then seized control and attention back as rapidly as they could. One family in Burnie of a certain standing used to shove their daughter into the face of any visiting singer or footballer, and bitch about them based entirely on their response. If they didn't hit on her, they were gay, if they did, they were sleazy. I used to love when we'd throw a BBQ in Penguin seeing the more known families bringing a particularly posh beer or a salad because they didn't want to be common and just have a pork sausage. Their kids were always with us in the rumpus room, and we'd get them drunk or get them to do something embarrassing, just to keep ourselves amused. Even the kids would bitch about the footballers speech, and how lame it was, and they weren't even allowed in. This one kid I went to school with, he hated Kevin Sheedy, hated Tom Hafey, thought David Parkin swore too much, and yet, went to Melbourne and got about 20 pictures with David Dixon. And they gave him social standing? I'd have taken it off him just for that...

Mind you, at our school, we were definitely bitching, the only celebrity speaker we ever got was Jane Fleming, a woman who never got over the first hurdle at the Olympics, telling us to work hard and never give in. I'd only have paid attention if we got the sexy early years Melinda Gainsford...whatever happened to Mel G?

Actress Slash Model

I really miss the North West Coast on days like this - it's freezing cold in Hobart, the rain is bouncing off the ground, the nights are dark by 5 in the afternoon, people are talking about road closures, and everyone is on edge and unable to go out. It's great for local football, because nothing is as exciting to people down here as a day in the slush and the mud, and it's probably quite exciting for farmers that after a drought we get a lot of rain, but everyone else is pretty miserable. School children are huddling in corners swearing with their hoods up, the hoods that hang outside my local store are nowhere to be seen, and when I landed last night on the Virgin Blue (only 30 minutes late this time - picking between Virgin Blue and Jetstar is deciding whether you want to lose the left testicle or the right) plane, the first thing visible out the window was the tarmac, that's how dark it was. What I was interested in though for the point of this blog (apart from being yelled at by a dickhead to have my bag scanned for bananas) was the woman in Melbourne Airport giving out free wine. A noble gig - except I heard her on her break, on her mobile phone, describing herself not as a wine seller, but as an actress slash model - my favourite phrase in the English language that isn't "smart casual" or "Fraser injured".

I haven't heard as much mention of actress slash model down here in Tasmania, but when I first moved here, it was euphemism for prostitute. I've never visited a prostitute, but I remember when the sailors used to come for shore leave in Hobart, the prostitutes used to hang around the docks handing out fliers and leaflets. To hide from the police, the leaflets would say "come to a party full of actress slash models" - the reason I know this is because when the sailors came to down the first time, we actually went out drinking with a few of them as a share house, and they showed us the leaflets. They were full of sitcom standard innuendo about putting their ship in dock and mooring at the house, I'm sure you know what that refers to. I wish I still had the leaflet actually, there were some interesting drawings on the leaflets done in pen - anyway, the point was, I think that was about the time that the phrase actress slash model sort of became a local jibe for, shall we say, a loose woman, although I've never heard the insult repeated in the same way interstate - maybe because it's not that difficult to find hookers on the mainland, particularly in Melbourne (or for that matter, a transvesite hotel, but that's another story).

In England, I think the phrase most used is glamour model, referring to a nude Page 3 "Cor stunnah", but my favourite English phrase is "writer slash waiter" (or waitress). I really that phrase, because a bit like actress slash model, it's got so much aspiration attached to it, that somehow despite the fact that life sucks and you have to face another cleaning tables, if you just stick at it, someone will pick up your script from out of the trash and give you your big break into show business. I applied this phrase throughout my short lived creative writing class in the Glass House here in Hobart a few years ago. The first time I went, I had the first hangover I've ever had in my entire life from drinking too many fishbowls at Tacos, and I had done no research or course preparation at all, so I made up a short story (the point was writing short stories for film) about a guy who was a writer slash waiter who ends up trying to get his script to a famous person through the course of a meal and just screws it up all the time. Hey, funny premise, as they say in the classics. It was really awful, but I think I spoke for an hour on the subject and I must have still been drunk because I spun this junk into the most wonderful story and I think everyone saw dollar signs. Oh, to have not been lazy and done proper work on it...

In the Advocate, the North West Coasts premiere paper, in about 1994, there used to be a lot of phone sex lines advertised - there may still be - and apart from hot granny action, the one I always remember was "lustful local actresses waiting for you". Now, that's brilliant, although the slash wasn't in there - lustful local actress slash models waiting for you would have been perfect. I always really wanted to ring it, just to see if after you got past the usual what are you doing, what are you wearing, despite your sexy voice can you assure me you don't look like Amanda Vanstone, you know, the usual - I wonder if at that point, they asked you to read a script or listen to their character voices or what was going on. Scarily, the only local actress I knew was about 70, had worked on a musical version of Chinatown, and to my knowledge, her voice was husky, not lustful. I think just knowing her put me off ever ringing just in case she was the one behind the phone line. And why actresses? Was there a casting couch fetish I missed in the early 90s? It wasn't quite as bad as busty Burnie cheerleaders (so specific), but it was still an interesting phone line.

And to think, I've done a whole post about actress slash models, and not one mention of Anne Maree Cooksley...for shame...