Amali Ward, Pension Fights and flats I never moved into

So today at work, two pensioners got into a fight. It marginally fell short of fisticuffs, but only marginally. This old bloke was telling all and sundry about his travails buying a used car, when he dropped the f bomb, at which point the other old bloke asked him not to swear in front of children. At which point, the first old bloke worked himself into such a fury, he was actually frothing at the mouth. I love any argument that boils down to "why don't you go and live in Russia"and he was really angry that his free speech and right to bag out used car salesmen with a range of colourful adjectives were impinged. As he drifted into his rant, I drifted off into the ether, and suddenly remembered in my last post I forgot another reality TV star from Tassie- Amali Ward, 10th place getter on Idol in 2004. Amali is the only person I've ever voted for in a reality TV show, and I can't remember why - but I do remember hearing once from a mate of mine that she was spotted in Target by two girls who loudwhispered "Wow! It's Amali Ward! That's amazing!" at which point Amali turned around and went "No, what's amazing is bras at these low prices!" and held up a bra with a big smile. Of course, that didn't stop her big homecoming concert at the DEC being spoiled by clearly visible nipples on the big screen, but that's another story. By this point in my musings, the old bloke was suggesting that the second old bloke would benefit from some national service. I always thought it was only lousy damn kids and hippies who still believe The Harrad Experiment was a documentary were targeted by old blokes as being desirable for a stint being called a variety of names all of which implied that the person was gay, but old blokes suggesting old blokes for national service? I don't know what madness this suggests, but I like the thinking. In fact, if the two old blokes want to line up for a foaming mouth version of Dads Army, I'm the first person on board...

So being nearly 30, I've been thinking a lot about things that might have happened in my life had things gone the way I had intended or had planned in my head (oooh, get you, like, deep, like an episode of Quantum Leap). The catalyst for this was finding a lot of school friends on Facebook - there's something really jarring about seeing someone you went to school with posing with a kid on Facebook, never mind if it's someone who the last time you even heard their name, it was in relation to a terrible bout of...er...let's just say when a Mummy and a Daddy love each other very much, sometimes there's a virus...one of our great dreams when we left school was that about six of us would all get a house together, and live in Sandy Bay with the man who held the fake parties and we'd all go to Regines and be like Friends forever! This plan began to unravel one day when one of the girls out of nowhere decided that I was really horrible and sent me a letter in furious red pen to tell me so - the reason according to her was that I didn't make a special trip to Burnie for her 18th birthday party. Now, that is true, although it was only my theory that I couldn't make it, I did say I'd see (male code for don't expect me), but I don't think it quite warranted a red pen letter (incidentally, green pen indicates nutcase fact fans). I think she'd have been angrier if she knew that the real reason I didn't go to Burnie on that particular day was that two of my other friends had decided to have a billy cart race down Mt Stuart hill, and one of my friends was amazingly unco and crap and building and I thought it would be quite funny to see him in his billy cart smash into something. Luckily, he didn't let me down, not quite attaching one of his wheels properly and ploughing Jackass style into the door of a parked car, and then getting told off by a small girl for his stupidity. His not unreasonable response to the little girl was to tell her the tooth fairy wasn't real. As he lay on the pavement struggling to get to his feet, tracksuit pants torn, knees skinned, his indignity was compounded by having a plastic bag blow ever slowly in his direction, and then landing on his face and stubbornly refusing to move - and to be honest, I could have made a four hour trip to Burnie to drink Midori and punch, but could it compete with a man in pain facing up to the righteous angry of a four year old in a Wiggles T-shirt? Frankly, it could not...

Anyway, the angry red pen letter set off quite the chain of events - and it really showed the fact that while the year before was the best year of my entire life, things moved on so fast, it was like it never happened - the least of which was that our plans to all live together fell immediately through the cracks of life. What I didn't do was ascertain this until much later - after all, later in the year, I did go up to Burnie, and went to the Tuesday night thrill, indoor rock climbing in one of the draughtiest school halls with some of the most exciting underground passageways (will it lead to a porn stash? Will it lead to a janitors closet? Why not find out!) in all of Australia, never mind just Burnie. This was always a really important meeting point to us, for reasons that had nothing to do with indoor rock climbing (my ego never recovered from seeing an 8 year old skim straight to the top of the wall - at that point, I figured I'd just go and play cards) and more do to with a pivotal conversation point for my group. When one of our friends answered the door and said he wasn't in, we discussed it. When I shot a three pointer at basketball after stripping the ball off a 6 year old, I was chastised at the conversation table. When one of the best kids I ever knew and it's a damn shame I can't remember his surname told me Arkarna were shit, I...agreed, but the point was, it was at rock climbing. It had become our Peach Pit. However, following the red pen letter and subsequent fight, when I entered the high school gym in the same way that I always had, I didn't seem particularly welcome (my friend who had slept with the writer of the red pen copped a lot more frost). One girl, who I didn't really know very well, has snapped in that sort of sixteen year old girl "oh you heard me accidentally on purpose way", making sure that her hands were firmly on her hips, "oh, the southerners are here!" - it took me a moment to realise that she was talking about me. We had become the Sharks in the land of the Jets. My comeback was to peg a piece of chalk at her - it slipped. Naturally, I was a little dis-orientated, but set about setting up our old card school. The girl who sent me the red pen letter apologized, and she meant it, but in such a way that I still knew that everything had changed, and we'd never be friends again. This was depressing, but not as depressing as the fact that the final time I ever saw her, she was walking away to her car in the rain with my money, having cleaned me up at go fish...

I actually remember the bus journey home after that particular trip. I realised that within six months, within the release of Spice and the recording of Spiceworld, I'd completely moved on from Burnie, and I was really sad about it. The last party I went to with everyone together as a group, and the writer of the red pen, it was in a flat that was really dark and dingy, and I can't remember who owned it, but it was hardly a laugh fest (someone, not me, had an unrequited love and insisted on playing Foolish Games by Jewel at really loud volume, which is hardly party music). I felt dislocated at that party, never mind all this time later, knowing that I had nothing really left to go "home" for. We had all moved on, and much as we said we'd be friends forever, it was already all over. When I got on the bus to go back to Hobart that night, it was pelting with rain, rain that was bouncing jumpily off the ground, so I sat down in the chair, with my book illuminated by the bus reading light in the dark, made sure that I avoided the bus nutcases and sat on a seat on my own, and as we pulled out of the street and I was just about to go to sleep, I saw two bogans standing outside K-Mart, one in an AC/DC shirt, the other with folded arms and a cigar between his teeth. I put down my book, an illustrated history of Brazillian music, took a deep breath, and said a silent goodbye to Burnie, and thanked it for all it had given me. As I sat there like a little overly poetic wanker, the bogan with the cigar took his own deep breath of cigar smoke, nudged his mate in the ribs, looked me dead in the eye, and gave me the finger, and held it up until the bus finally pulled away, into the night...

Frankly, both of them should be up for national service...

Netball, a beloved sport, a chronicle

So I'm at this party today - now when I say party, I mean a BBQ, which was enough to have me relapsing into childhood, especially at someone making the unmistakable mistake of brining coleslaw, reminding me of the offensive NW Coast mantra, meat for the blokes, coleslaw for the poofs - and I end up talking to a girl in a netball skirt. This wasn't her having the same quirky fashion sense that makes portly white gentlemen wear Thundercats T-shirts, but because she was on her way to play netball, which made sense. She was a great talker, however, she quickly brought her fascinating boyfriend up, with his fascinating career and his fascinating work on his fascinating bike. You'd have to say, as soon as a girl brings her boyfriend, the male in the conversation loses interest. Still, I was actually acutely sociable for me, which was weird. OK, so midway through when she was talking about her boyfriend putting episodes of Entourage onto a DVD for her, I was humming Santogold songs in my head to try and escape the seventh circle of social hell, but I was thinking in the car home, why was I talking to her? Why didn't I do my usual dismissive dis-interest? Why is Santogold on that horse? Oh yes...I know now, she was wearing a netball skirt, and it's a particular love of mine, girls in netball skirts. In fact, I composed this blog post in my head during the second part of her discussion of her boyfriend...

Netball was always one of my favourite sports, although very rarely did I say it out loud, it wouldn't have gone down well in Paul Keatings Burnie. I found from an early age that netballers seemed to have an alien power to them - Kathryn Harby for instance, had she been a check out chick, would still have been desirable, but in a netball skirt, she was the hottest woman on the planet, despite a voice that could grate carrots. I'm absolutely stoked that she has re-invented herself as a sort of New Zealand based Anne Maree Cooksley. However, my early interest in netball wasn't all just adolescent risible perving. I earned a reputation at my school as a netball supercoach - two of my good girlfriends were coaching a struggling team, and asked for my advice, more in jest than anything else, and I said it was incredibly simple, at every single opportunity no matter how slight, cheat and accentuate the contact, make it really noticable, especially in the centre. I don't know where this came from, but it worked, as they won their last game of the season easily, and their tactics sparked a crowd pleasing brawl. To the best of my knowledge, the opposing team didn't have the previously mentioned staple of North West netball teams, a girl built like Tony "Plugger" Lockett (who, oddly, was always the one the crowd secretly fancied) - if they did, she'd have cleaned up in the brawl, but still, it was win win as far as our team was concerned, and I applied my theory whenever I could to other netball teams.

I did, once upon a time, play netball, but I wasn't very good at it. I could never master the stepping rule. It did at least give me an appreciation for playing the sport rather than just making up rules and coaching ideas. I probably hoped that the courts would be filled with girls in netball skirts, but it wasn't the case. I still don't know why I decided to play the game, but it really was an important part of my life, it really helped me get close to my current friends. However, the best moment of the entire time was our post game chats (not least because I am a terrible loser, and once get sent off for fighting a girl, so the actual game was an unending nightmare) because they were a wonderful insight into the human condition as we chewed the fat before going home. One girl on our team though, she was always trying to impress with tales of her rootin, shootin, and bar fights. None of us took any notice of her, until one night, she invented her own swear word. Cunting. As in, I hate my usual cunting taxi driver. I've never heard this word before, and have never heard it again, but I remember it to this day far more than any game we played or any of our scores. She was the exception, a girl who played netball who wasn't sexy whether or not she had a netball skirt on. I guess even I had my limits.

I think the mecca of Tasmanian netball is the outdoor courts in Moonah, where girls of all ages gather on a Saturday morning and afternoon to compete in sporting contests. Moonah is one of my favourite places, since it always seems grey and miserable their, but there's a fair bit of local pride, because they always try and tidy what's essentially a town in one street into something special - where else could you get a Reggie Big Brother biscuit that won an award? I also like Moonah for the mini golf course where every single day, a fully grown male spits the dummy trying to putt up the hill on the 18th. One night from the netball centre I drunkenly stole a BP sign (sticking it to the man huh) and it was also where, one day, my life went in one direction when it could have gone in another. I was at the netball courts one day, luckily noting one of the teams had a Plugger, but also very happy to see the other staple of NW sport - old 50 year captains shouting at everyone to do better. When I was taking in the match, through a lot of circumstances too long to explain here, I ended up sitting between two people who had both invited me to parties that night. One, a slightly sleazy and dodgy sounding schoolgirls party in North Hobart, the other, a safer night out in town, and it was really awkward moment as I tried to decide where to g. I guess looking back, had I chosen the sleazy party, I wouldn't have one of my best friends in the world right now, so I took the girly option - friendship over depravity. It's just funny to me that somehow, this sport has played a big part in my life - far more than football. A sport that I harmlessly derided and adolescently perved on had become something around which I had built a relationship, picked a path in life in regards to friendships, and cemented those friendships. And it all started hoping to see Natalie Avellino in a pretty skirt...skirt...she's wearing a skirt...oh...right...better nod and look interested...

So, what were you saying? Oh, your boyfriend... fascinating...