A past full of landmines and safety cards

It's cold where I am. Cold enough that random strangers feel the embedded need to tell me it's cold. Embedded in their routine, they don't stray from strict caricature, and I don't see them enough to flesh them out into 3D forms. They exist in anecdote, a fleeting moment stripping them of richness, and reducing them to, say, woman in grey coat, who tells me it's cold. She then gets on the bus and I'll never see her again, unless of course it's hot the following day, and she'll emerge with hankie on head to perchance mention it's warm. I saw an air-stewardess at Manchester Airport passing me by once. She walked in a perplexing way. Her upper body was perpetually moving, animated, swinging arms, taking orders, giving orders, her mouth never halting. However, her legs were moving like an old woman. For all her animation, it took her about an hour to get across a small stretch of airport. She was also ridiculously gorgeous, a mane of blonde hair cascading across her uniform like some character from the a romance novel, for a change was drawn well. I knew she was beautiful because the guy across from me, a sort of Nudge from Hey Dad a like when Hey Dad was a fond nostalgic memory and not a cesspool of disgust, was hypnotised. I don't know he she saw him looking, but he was entranced, he watched her arms swings, her legs barely move, he might even have let some burger dribble onto his jeans, his eyes were wide with wedding plans...and just like that, they were all gone. She finally made it across the airport, he went back to his book, and I went back to listening to badly compiled mix tapes with endings and starts all a jumble. The thing was, this entire movement of eye to stewardess took what, 1ne minute - theres members of my family I don't feel I know as well. And I could have could it all wrong, sketched these strangers wrongly, judged their movements incorrectly. It frustrates me sometimes I can see these interactions and then they pass - like how we used to blow dandelions in the wind and watch the petals scatter onto the horizon. My Dad was with me on that flight, and he just remembers how delicious the bacon sandwiches were. I try and engage on whether that trip to Manchester had any consequence to him since it was an exciting adventure. I mean, remember, you drank with the New Zealand Cricket Team, remember the belly dance...no, bacon sandwiches. Fine. Guess I got this observational detail from Mum then...

I can't really remember whether anything I did in London had consequence or not to be honest. If it involved more than a cute story or too, I'd have felt it by now. Sure, I had to vote from the Gothic weirdness of the Andaz hotel, trying to convince a camp Arab guy from reception that it was possible to fax Tasmania and yes it was a real place, but there was a faint air of dis-satisfaction that gnawed at me all weekend. Even at somewhere as grandiose as the Tower of London, I was more distracted by a noisy group of Bosnians than any rich and rewarding conversation. I felt fitful. It's hard to explain, and yet at the same time it's very easy. There's a girl I used to like, and every time I have drinks I espouse her name as if I'm going to do something about, even though the ship has not just sailed, but it's been sunk, retrieved, and then sunk again once it's been fossicked for scrap metal and historical purposes. And yes, when I'm drunk, it comes up again...I wish I could stop. There's a Japanese guy at the Tower of London - he's part of a crew of strange orange jacket wearing Japanese people, clad in the same garment, muttering around the edges of the Yeoman Warders speech about Anne Boleyn. I know I'm at least in 1ne of his photos because he apologized, shooting over his shoulder to take his girlfriend standing in front of a big spear while I shuffled around in the background in a Bangles T-shirt trying to not giggle at one amusingly named torture implement. And all weekend I weighed up in my mind whether, when he prints that picture, I'm smiling because of the amusingly named torture implement or frowning because through a hangover haze I realise I've just talked the same rubbish I always talk and must be a crashing bore after all this time. I guess I'll never know unless I accidentally find myself on a Japanese Facebook page, pondering why I had that expression on my face. The Noisy Bosnians have a much better, less stressful, more youthful day than I had. They neither drank mulled wine nor had any kind of angst. In fact, such was their joi de vivre, I imagine that it was all forced somehow, a strange contrast to my own sulkiness. As it happened, my mood was picked up somewhat by a Japanese girl and a Pret A Manger sandwich, but that's possibly too boring a story to expand...I think in her picture, I'm smiling? Can't be sure...

Stansted Airport isn't the airport for lovers of fine architecture. A sort of homeless vagrant had paced up and down the train for a bit, being hassled by security for his own failure to distinguish one train station called Stansted from another. Up the alleyway, up the escalator, bag sprawled smugly across my bronzed (ha) shoulders, I knew my airport, I had been here before, I was ready, a traveller on the move. I casually adjusted my watch, and sat at an Internet cubicle to kill some time. A Facebook popped up on the screen from the girl I used to like, but I ignored it. Not out of spite, but because the flinty flickering screen would eat my words and make me sound like, well, someone who couldn't tell 1ne part of Stansted from the other. A hassled looking couple were bickering next to me endlessly. She was blonde, in a camel coat that made her look like a detective or something, and he was French I think. They couldn't cope with the complicated interface of keyboard and booking system and were in danger of missing their flight, not to mention the complicated interface of pound coin to slot. Oh to be young and innocent as a traveller again, to feel as through such things were marriage breaking hassles. I decided to intervene to stop the small child next to me hearing such filthy language. I pressed a pound coin of my own money into their internet kiosk slot, flicked the buttons to help them print off their boarding card, and solved their problems under a disgustingly broken Stansted Airport light and next to a kid pumping out some JLS on his IPOD just to get away from the swearing and the angst...yes, I was feeling good, I didn't care what I had said in a drunken state, about anything angst related, in fact, I was a healer, a repairer of marriages, an experienced international traveller with wisdom to pass on. At least, I strolled around the corner, looked in my bag, realised i must have left my own printed out boarding pass on 1ne of the freaky spiral desks at the Andaz, and had to make my own trek all the way back round to where the couple were just finishing up their boarding. They kindly offered me my pound back, and it was lucky the little boy had his IPOD in, lest he hear several words that in days of yore would have got me thrown in the Tower of London...

It was cold on my flight from London to Glasgow. I know it was cold because the air-stewardess - not breathtakingly gorgeous on RyanAir, it would blow the budget - decided to use it as break the ice small talk. I have a horrible nightmare that 1ne day I'm going to be on a budget airline that gets the passengers involved in some sort of mid flight game...duck duck goose or something horrendous. The head stewardess is fierce of face, a sort of older, broken in head stewardess, ground down by routine and constant RyanAir flights hither and tither. She's terse, her tea pouring skills generally slapdash. I felt bad staring at her and waiting for outbursts. My own at work demeanour could do with a touch up probably, and I don't even make tea for Little Englanders slapping the front of their Suns and speaking proudly of their hopes for David Cameron. I said to my friend when I left Melbourne how odd it was that Virgin Blue play Kate Miller Heidkes "Last Day On Earth" just as the plane takes off in a rather disturbing juxtaposition of song title and potential disaster, but here, I'm sitting on my own, and any whimsical observation about the James Nesbitt voice over that pipes through the plane 6ix times a flight would be lost on the Little Englanders sitting next to me. The wife is a sort of Pat Butcher from Eastenders blonde bouffant headbutt (yeah! yeah!...no one gets that...) clinging old woman with a botox forehead, her husband a living breathing Jeremy Kyle visiting caricature of a man who says what he likes and likes what he says. Mid flight, she pretends to fall asleep. I know she's pretending because she keeps turning away from him and looking at me, but any time he presses her on the shoulder, her eyes clasp tight. Her husband instead engages the man in the row next to him in political debate, and she looks at me like the weariest woman in the world. I am, as it happens, no help to her. Not politically minded, and not particularly awake to offer a re-assuring glance. I read my Bill Walsh book from cover to cover and didn't even tell her she'd soon land at an airport with tartan "bunnets" painted on the toilet doors, the phrase Pure Dead Brilliant painted in a purple mantra across the walls, and some of the most incomprehensible wee men doddering about an airport you could ever hope to find...

She'd have to find that out for herself...

Back to saying nothing, but the location is different

(You'll have to forgive my long 3 month absence sans explanation. I'd love to be enigmatic about it, I just lost my way, began to think all my writing was awful and repetitive, and er...discovered Sporcle. Nothing too fancy, no time, plus tedium of the brain. Just the need for a break as a result of paucity of ideas. Oh and I'm in the UK right now...so saga, begin...)



I have no idea sometimes how to articulate the ideas in my head. It's 3pm on a Manchester street corner. It's cold, it's bitter, a porter at a 5ive star hotel is kindly looking past my sloppy combination of Bangles T-shirt and black Adidas trackpants to sycophantically wish me a good day. My head hurts, and even more complexly, my ribs do too, although how that happened I don't know. I'm expecting tension, maybe that's why. The cold seeps into my tired eyes, forcing them open like some Clockwork Orange stunt double showing Mal McDowall how it's going to be done. The porter is looking at me like I'm an idiot with a fixed rictus grin on his face, wondering why he's been holding the door open for 5ive minutes without me going through it. I shrug, and exit anyway. I'm dreading the beggars. I'm dreading the self serve Mancunian supermarket counters. Last night I'd stood bewildered for a good 10en minutes while a burka wearing shop assistant and her aggressive boss, moustache twirled, draped and luxuriated across his face, tried to figure out how to process an 89p Brownie, and not even the animated Sainsbury JPEG women with no thumbs on the display screen could help. I thought when I got back to my hotel about my obsession with nothing, with strangeness in life at the expense of meaning. I can notice an animated woman repetitively showing shoppers over and over again on a computer screen how to process Vimto and random Murdoch newspapers doesn't have thumbs, and yet, beggars, I pretend they don't exist, especially given their cruel homeless juxtaposition with my 5ive star hotel. I walked past one last night of course, a proper homeless person, not a Manchester scally with a flash watch trying to hit you up for change. I was eating my aforementioned brownie - it was unwrapped, and probably a health risk, but watching a fight in Arabic for the sake of 89p became peversely entertaining after 5ive pints of Guinness - heading for a room roughly the size of Monaco, and on the way had to bypass a shivering homeless man, with a nary a care for the personal difficulties he must be able to articulate in HIS blog. Not only that, I had walked past the same porter with nary an acknowledgement of how crappy it must be to open the door for someone so clearly drunk he can't put a brownie in his mouth for love or money, and past a cleaner overloaded with vacuum cleaners to point of comic impossibility who still had to stop and say in broken English good evening Si...like I said, I can't articulate the ideas in my head all too well, but it must all add up to something...

My breakfast in this hotel had been both invigorating and clumpy. They had poured all their ideas into the bacon but failed horrifically on the toast. I like to think the chef in charge of foods A-M had been great but his N-Z sidekick couldn't cut the mustard, which starts with M so he'd have to...across from me is a portly businessman and his shorter, thinner haired, jowly cheeked companion. They both look like the kind of men who sit in hotels all across the United Kingdom lamenting a culture where you can't pinch the bums of secretaries or call them darl anymore. The more portly man doesn't mind the horrendous toast. In an instant, a curly haired girl will sweep at a million miles an hour across the breakfast bar, picking everyones toast up whether they want it or not, a juggernaut, a go-getter, if what's she's going to get is toast. I don't know if she's the expert on all things bread, if rolls is a step too far. Pre that moment, I suspect the jowly cheeked man, between sloppy, ugly attempts to devour his egg without making his mess, is about to discuss his previous nights adventures, given the way he is leaning forward, desperate to speak. I sense from my own hardbacked chair that this adventure is going to be exaggerated, and the black bags under the eyes of the portly gentleman have been gained from years of sitting awake having to listen to these overwrought stories. Instead though, the jowly man lets his face sink a bit and says his wife might be leaving him. There's no build up to this statement, it just comes out, hangs in the air, bounces off the ceiling fan whirring over enthusiastically above all our heads, and lingers like the smell of last nights garlic bread still coming from the kitchen. The portly gentleman sits up in his chair, is about to offer something...sympathy? Indifference? Coldness? Warmth? He puts his hands to the side of the table, puts down his paper with the latest scare about killer drugs on it to 1ne side, and takes a deep breath...only to be saved from an uncomfortable conversation by the clearing of toast and the sound of desperate apologies that grown men in a 5ive star hotel couldn't bake bread. The 2wo men don't mention it again, and leave in typically English uncomfortable silence puncuated by bouts of strained breathing. They even leave before the 2nd bout of toast. It's not just me, then that can't articulate the thoughts in my head...

My brownie, by the way, was delicious, well worth the 89p. I had spent most of my drinking - not in a problematic get me on Jeremy Kyle type way of course. In fact, I'd mostly drunk chocolate milk to be honest, but what the hell. I stood outside some trendy record shop clutching a bag full of vinyl and trying to chat up some girl from Northern Ireland with my knowledge of Sky Ferreira songs. She in turn began to articulate a tedious series of problems within the advertising industry that made my mind wander free and over imagined hills far away. Across from me was a small child, no more than 6ix years old. She had on a white dress, white tights, and wore the smile of the perpetually bewildered. She held in her hand a small snow dome, the kind exchanged between relatives who hate each other. She's looking at it with contempt as she shakes it, and holds it up to my eyeline, clearly disgruntled by this gift she's been given when up until now, she had been relatively gruntled, all the while her over burdened mother struggles with shopping bags and her inability to smoke and txt at the same time, not to mention her struggle to carry off the same haircut Lindsay Buckingham had in the Holiday Road video clip. I shrug in the direction of the kid, as if to say we all got problems, since in my lughole I'm hearing things about the advertising industry even Wil Anderson would say were trite and boring. We exchange glances and move on, returning to our respective tedious worlds, and while I would ponder the benefits or disadvantages of discussing life non verbally with a 6ix year old, I don't have time to get thoughts in while I'm being assaulted verbally with advertising pitches and tales of Dave the Religious bigot in her office. The only way out - to be fair, she looked cute, she had a smile that could light up a room, but sadly communication skills that could black out New Jersey - of her web of advertising conversation is to say something thats been on my mind for quite some time. Have you ever noticed, I say while she pauses for a drink of Volvic, the lady from the Sainsburys demo cartoon doesn't have any thumbs...

I hacked all these thoughts, conflicts and ideas into a hashed up mixed up e-mail that I wasn't happy with, and then slept the sleep of a restless man surrounded by pretty things who would trade them all for respite from ribache, old man ribache. Back in the present, the cold is agonizing. I've eventually negotiated the tricky man holding door open - exit the hotel matrix without too much difficulty on my end. I still feel as though my sunglasses are an un-necessary extragavance though. My taxi provides a swirling addition to my hangover, festooned with spots, bright colours and an out of sorts cockney taxi driver who ends every sentence with the word proper, even when the original sentence had ended with proper to begin with. His head is shaved to the bone - his face a strange mash up of other faces I've seen before, resembling several people but looking like none, and his shirt has 1ne sleeve longer than the other, as if to cover some crass back alley shoulder tattoo it's best not to talk about. After we dine out on the conversational snacks of immigration talk, he loses interest in me and begins to talk on his phone to another cab driver I presume, stopping only to adjust the volume up and down on the radios Tinie Tempah song and - as with all cockneys - discuss the price of fruit and ask hows yer favvah? Eventually as we pull toward the scrap iron garage that passes for my cousins house, he begins to soften, shrink in size, begin to speak in a poetic articulate voice that sounds as if he's had a Cockneyectomy. All he says softly is I've put myself out, don't let me down. No more, no less, but it's said in a voice of such genuine poignancy, it's strangely hypnotic. Of course, it passes in an instant, the moment he bumps over the latest piece of scrap iron accumulated by my cousins gypsy village, but I wonder why a gruff poorly shirted Cockney taxi driver is able to take 8eight words to say something meaningful, when I'd take all night. When I get out, a guy working on his car hisses in the direction of the taxi driver, the taxi driver hisses back, and all beauty is lost under a grey sky. I scurry off to my cousins, stepping in a puddle of what I pray is rain water, and leave them to it. It's time to turn my brain off, eat curried sausages, and watch bad DVDs without ever telling them I truly hate wine, please stop pouring it...

It's a privilege I feel I may have earned...

The Observatory - Mans Worst Friend

The Observatory, Hobarts third best nightspot with a y at the end, isn't feeling like a magical wonderland as I stand in the corner. It's a farewell party for someone, technically a friend, but someone I kinda sorta stopped thinking about at some in 2005, but we're kept together by the chords of fantasy sports games and jibing e-mails that refer to long gone incidents far too tedious to recall. In a moment of eerie presience the DJ seems to be fixated on playing that Brittany Murphy song from a few years ago over and over, which is the first time I've thought of her since my DVD of 8ight Mile got stuck in my Mums player and I had to pull it apart with a screwdriver. The bouncers don't even care anymore, they stand in a semi circle around the dancefloor talking about Manny Pacquiao while a minor disagreement threatens to spill over, and in the far corner, a man with a ruddy complexion and a nose you can use to cut cheese is standing up against the wall, asleep while standing up, long beard flowing across the dance floor, drink precariously hovering in mid air about to crash down onto the ground and scatter glass at the feet of idling school leavers awkwardly sharing a 1st kiss. 1ne of the bouncers pokes him with a fat Samoan finger, but it doesn't stir the man, and he gives up after a while, going back to his discussion and making ribald suggestions about Rihanna that he would never have the self confidence to assert if he actually met her. My friend is tired, and I realise I should say something profound about our friendship - but there's not much to say, and so I just buy him another drink as he begins to talk idly about how the barmaid won't accept his gift vouchers. It's 2wo in the morning, when such things really matter. The 2wo guys who were fighting are now being ticked off by a bouncer, and shaking hands like naughty school kids caught in the playground punching on and made to apologize by the teacher.

The barmaids name was Carmela. She was younger than I ever remember being, the kind of young where every birthday is still exciting and lifes horizons are no broader than finding out the latest sparkle to stick on your mobile phone. She has a tattoo on her arm that snakes and cascades, and she says it's tribal. I say it's shite, because cocktails provoke forthrightness. She giggles in a corporate way all service staff are required to and pours me a cocktail. It's my final drink, and I indicate as much. I'm miles away from being drunk, having drunk water for most of the night in a follied attempt to stay up for some soccer later on that night. My knowledge of popular culture allows me to talk openly about the band of youngsters cavorting around the stage. It's lucky I'm not drunk, I'd think she liked me, but I can see she doesn't. Since her eyes trail 1ne of her co-workers around the bar and back again, and our chat, while brief, is meaningless, and I don't think I'm 100 times cooler than I actually am. There's a thumping dance beat on the video screen, but no thumping dancers. She's peturbed by the empty dance floor, the lack of business tonight, and in the middle of her chat drops in the word perspicacity, which you certainly don't get from the tiny blonde hairdresser barmaid at Customs House. That 1ne couldn't spell perspex. Her co-worker wipes some spillage off the bar though, and she turns into the hairdresser barmaid, speaking in short, breathy sentences in his direction, and saying no words longer than cat for the whole conversation. She finishes by tossing her hair and giggling like an idiot. When he leaves, she tries to pretend nothing has happened and return to normal, but I must have an expression on my face of surprise at her suddenly beimg dumb struck. She shrugs, says like you've never pretended to be something to get a girl, then goes off to tell 1ne of the bouncers the girl with the angel wings on has vomited again. The girl with the angel wings, I can confirm, is vomiting, although it's short, struggling gasps rather than anything significant or messy. She has 3hree colours in her hair that don't conform to nature, a big hole at the top of her tights, some hastily created angel wings, and she's vomiting on the floor of Hobarts 3hrd best nightclub that ends in a Y. She looks plaintively up at a bouncer who's about to kick her out and 2wo of her concerned friends who are stroking her wings in consolation and says she's too old for this shit. Whatever this shit is, I'm afraid I can only concur, but I've some well worn anecdotes to recount over my final expensive cocktail of the evening...

I don't know that I've ever pretended to be something to get a girl, I can't imagine wandering around a nightclub saying I was a spy or a merchant banker just to impress some1ne. I don't have the presence, I don't have a great ability to lie under disco lights. My cousin, the 1ne who died, used to buy sports tracksuits from his local market and pretend he just signed for whatever team tracksuit he had bought. His attempt at a New Zealand accent 1ne night was Guttenbergesque, but he still picked up a Blackpool barmaid. I tell this to my friend, as another of the travelling party we're hanging out with - who earlier bought me drinks and said his wife was his "better ho", Stephon Marbury style - has decided the girl with the angel wings is his perfect pick up, and he nods but he's not really listening. The girl with the angel wings somehow managed not to be thrown out despite her stomach troubles, or lack of support from her store bought Kayser Platinum. My farewelling friend looks quite sad to be honest, which for a man of exceeding self confidence is surprising, but then it is his farewell. I can only hope at this point he doesn't put his arm around me and say I'm his besht mate. Luckily the man asleep in the corner wakes up and causes a kerfuffle - I love that word so much - and is dispatched into the street with pretty aggressive kick. It is, in the words of Christian Bale, fucking distracting, but in a good way. My friend had wanted to say something I'm sure, a thankyou for coming or something like that, but in the end it was all lost in the kicking up the arse, appallingly sloppy pashing on the dancefloor, and the fact that the kerfuffle allowed him to simply go with the tried and tested conversation - remember that time at work with the water bottle. Oh yes...see I'm male. It's far better this way. When my Dad is proud of me, he doesn't tell me, he just puts a cup of tea on and breaks out the good biscuits. It's better to leave on these terms quietly and quickly with a short wave...and far better than awkward morning regrets when you stay out too long and see, and I mean these on both sides given the pashing going on on the dancefloor, exactly what you've picked up the night before...

The man asleep in the corner at the Observatory is 1ne in front of me in the queue for the taxi on the way home. He's doing an involuntary Tassie 2wo step, hopping from foot to foot, at any moment likely to snap in the kind of violent outburst the Mercury warned me about. He folds him arms, then unfolds them, then puts them by his side, then folds them again, perpetual motion, all leading to a grievance of some kind. He also has a cut lip, and the taxi driver at the front of the queue won't pick him up, instead driving off and leaving both of us standing there. I know the grievance look by heart - my Dad has it all the time when he's drinking. It's usually about how his Dad never loved him. Sadly for me, I've got 1ne of those retro New Zealand cricket tops on, the beigey 1ne Richard Hadlee used to wear. Mums right, I shouldn't wear it out, but it's so damn comfy. I think for a moment he's going to racially abuse me, but instead his gaze falls on the girl with the angel wings and my earlier Stephon Marbury aping friend, who are walking along the path engaging in a quite open, but utterly wrong display of open mouth pashing. He stops moving and narrows his eyes as he watches them disappear down a lane in Salamanca, his entire body leaning forward, as if the weight of the world has been lifted from his shoulders. He then swears really loudly into the air, and begins laughing. Out of nervousness, I laugh to, as if to say, hey, yeah, that's pretty messed up those 2wo huh, now please don't stab me. He then begins to walk all the way towards to Irish Murphys, on unsteady legs, just yelling something that I think is supposed to be get a room, but ends up being geratraotoon, and he collapses giggling face down on the path, where he still may be for all I know. I look up at the Observatory as I get into my taxi, and my farewelling friend is now on the top deck. At least i think it's him, sitting on 1ne of the couches, talking to a girl I know works in the ANZ bank who manages to mix the hotness of the average 60tys model - big beehive look, very Longet - and somehow the earnest sadness of a suburban poet as she stares across the counter. At least, that's what I think I see, I can't vouch for it. I hope that's what I saw anyway. Farewell my friend - we will always have the water bottle...good times...truly, good times...

As for me, I go home, put some Megan Washington on, and go straight to sleep, having picked up nothing but fatigue...

Solipsistic Postings from Burnie - If I can't be a star I won't get out of bed

It's 6ix am on a sunny mid December morning. I'm somewhere in the middle of Tasmania spooning beans onto toast, having realised my complaints that the Angry Angus advert was racist wasn't providing enough fodder or interest to turn random words in a conversation which would henceforth kill enough time for me to fail to notice I seemed to be eating beans which tasted like eggs and vice versa. My Mum on the way up to Burnie had told for the umpeenth time about how I stood at the bottom of Mission Hill in Penguin and said Australia sure was a beautiful country. I don't recognise that person of course, how optimistic they were, before slow moving Volvos and batteries that always seem to cut out at the wrong time broke me down tiny grudge by tiny grudge against the world. As part of returning to Burnie for a family re-union we pieced together a large group of photos on card to put on the kitchen wall of the party venue, like the kids from Why Don't You, and I got obsessed and maudlin with all the 1nce youthful faces frozen in photographs that were going to be at the party withered and depressed, although I didn't apply that standard to myself of course. I just saw 9ine year old me at the Irvine Magnum ice skating rink in a top I would kill to own now. You don't communicate any genuine thoughts or feelings though while spooning beans onto toast in the middle of Tasmania surrounded by your parents, truckers, and someone elses kid you've squeezed into your car at the last minute. It doesn't help that the owner of this retro fitted truck stop style diner has decided to blast Kid Rock at full volume, as if his Alabama tinged party invocations have any relationship to this setting. Trying funny things? Yeah right pal - these beans are hilarious, and if I smoke any funny things, my Mum will give me a clip around the ear. That's the thing with these weekends, if I ever get into a car with my Mum and Dad it's instantly like I've regressed into a small child. I even sit in the back, and even though I'm reading a Malcolm Gladwell book and trying to make intellectual conversation, objectively if I applied memories of past behaviour to this situation of being trapped in the back, I should be shuffling a collection of Mercantile Mutual Cup Cards and praying Mum doesn't find out I haven't done my homework. It's the straggly kid who makes the most attempt at conversation. The last time I saw this kid he didn't understand object permanence, now he's talking about his girlfriend and his new job. He says new job with such confidence, I think he's going to start working as a junior associate at Jackson-Steinem. Instead, he's handing out cheese on sticks in a mall. He calls it a career opportunity. Maybe he's right, but my Dad has already started giving him "the rubber ear", and has drifted off into his own little world. Come to think of it, he had that expression on in the ice skating photo, a world where fuzz and static replace the pain of thought, and a man can comfortably chew on a lukewarm 3hree day old diner sausage without hearing a word, and pretend to himself it's quail on a cracker...

My local shop in Burnie still, just about, stands to this day, although it is noticably run down, the shop traffic seems to be low, and I'm sure the same Bubble O Bill I didn't have enough money to buy after the school cross country championships in 1994 is still in the freezer next to the faded Peters standee, probably from the time Wil Anderson advertised Maxibons. Or was that Rove? I see someone out of the corner of my eye I went to school with. He used to write letters to WWF wrestlers in primary school, but hardly any of them wrote back. He wrote to a lady wrestler called Desiree Petersen 1nce. She wrote back. I think only her and Bobby Heenan wrote back now I think about it. He had asked her about why she lost all the time, and she wrote back a ridiculously nice letter on fancy notepaper that explained a win wasn't far away and she was working really hard in practice. I was thinking about him the other day because I saw a picture of said lady wrestler still lady wrestling in 2009, and she has Queen Mother teeth now. I realise that I've boiled down what is now no doubt a 31 year old man with all the complexities, subtleties, highs, lows and life experiences that age brings down to a glib anecdote from 1985, but he would just remember me as that kid that cut his knee and needed stitches after we ran down the hill following the school fete. I'm not sure what type of conversation we could get out these mutual memories, but I'm not sure it would be meaningful. He's got a basket full of baby food and flavoured milk, and argues with the shop keeper when his change comes back piled up with coins instead of notes. He makes a gesture that indicates he has no pockets, but the shopkeeper is un-moved. He turns around to me, grunts, and says service at this shop has gone down hill. I say something incredibly like I hear that or something, and he nods as if to say this guy gets it. He obviously didn't remember me, but there we are, now stuck together in a 2nd glib anecdote about change, milk and the decline of the service industry. It's only as he walks away I realise something about his T-shirt. It's a John Cena T-shirt, and if you don't know, John Cena is a wrestler. I have a feeling this whole thing, this whole incident is some sort of manufactured welcome back to Burnie set up, and would have reflected on this moment a bit more had, at that moment, the shop keep not called my wrestling fan school mate a very rude word, handed me change in notes, and said he does it every day to wind him up but don't tell him. Don't worry mate, your secret is safe with me...

There is, when I get to the party venue - when I say venue I obviously mean someones unmowed back yard - an inordinate amount of cheese on sticks. There is some cold meat cut into little circles, but there's so much cheese it's lucky I'm not lactose intolerant. I would bring out my lactose intolerant joke I stole from Greg Fleet 1nce upon a time, but not yet, save something for the twilight hours I say. As it turns out, this proves to be a prescient decision, the kind of divine omniscience you don't expect to have in a backyard full of cheese and small children kicking you up the arse like you have the Toyworld Bear costume on. My cousin, 1nce stout of mind and robust of prank, has decided that I'm the person to divulge marital and family woes to. I wonder on the Sunday why me, by the Monday I've been invoked as the cause of a row and then apologized to profusely for incorrect interpretations and by Tuesday it's like it never happened and I've done nothing more offensive than eat too much cheese on a stick. My cousin doesn't blink for 10en whole minutes, his beer is undrunk and untouched, his brow is furrowed and there seems no escape for me. The girl with the large breasts who seemed to agree with me Powderfinger sucked seems to be slipping further and further away from my follow up chat we had promised each other, and here I am playing a Celtic top wearing Docca Phil. Ah Docca Phil, curse you and your need for everyone to talk about their problems. You want problems? I can't get a Samboy chip for love nor money at this party. Plus I can see my old house from this backyard and seems to now be being used for drug deals. My cousin and I aren't especially close, but I'm nothing if not a good nodder. I know I'm old now because I'm attracted to conversation. This isn't the conversation I wanted to be attracted to, and later when the girl with the large breasts sort of lead with like don't you find like the rise of like Lady GaGa like really amazing...like I have to go now, there's a drug deal being done in my old back yard. Damn you Samoan "quick purchaser"...I think my cousin is ready to belt someone, since his wife has been ignored for about an hour by everyone here and really isn't welcome at this party. I think I would like someone in my life I could just e-mail 10en conversational topics to per week, and then just bat and forth ideas with. Fat chance right, it would break down immediately when 1ne of us cracked and fwd a picture of a cat wearing a santa hat with "OMG CUTE" in the subject line. No wait, he is going to punch someone. And then I see out of the corner of my eye a big plate of cheese, make the joke, and he calms down, laughs and sips his beer. As he does so, his wife runs her fingers through her hair and looks so desolate, I would feel sorry for her were she not kinda sorta evil. I'd pass her some cheese on the way past, but the girl with the large breasts is over by the drinking fountain...



It's still sunny when I'm drunk anyway before all that happens, fading sunlight, but still bright, a typical Burnie day where the sun is out but you need 3hree coats on. I'm narked I haven't had a chance to go into town yet, narked that they only have Perroni beer and 28eight types of cheese to pick at...the kind of concerns that could comfortably be picked apart as trivial by a war veteran. I'm sitting on a plastic bucket seat, my tracksuited self is pushed forward on the edge of the seat, and I'm agitated. 1ne of my traits I hate about myself, other than my addiction to wearing a Celtic "Bogan" top from 91/92, is that when I'm drunk, I'm likely to find a particular aspect of popular culture annoying and feel the need to tell people about it. In this case, it's an otherwise innocuous sentence at the end of Tadgh Kennellys book where he says he watched the Hangover and it was really funny. Why is that in a book? It just seemed such a terrible piece of writing, like the worst kind of hackneyed Twittering. I'm saying his aware that no one is listening to me but I don't care. Someone across the fence across the way has turned their sprinkler on and my auntie gets a tiny bit of water on her blouse, and everyone is paying attention to her and no one is paying attention to me. Except for 1ne wrinkly old 1/2lf blind lady with a reasonable stab at a mullet that like all 1/2lf blind old people at a party gets the most comfortable chair and first crack at the fudge, much to everyones secret chagrin. She says something about me and my books...I didn't know there was a me and my books, but that's what she associates me with. A learned man, a man of letters and words destined for higher educations highest peaks. Or just a book about cricket, I don't know what the reference is. She says it again, and I shrug aimlessly. Burnie is making me uncomfortable, all these references and faces with more wrinkles and bits of trivia that don't quite make it into an anecdote. It's only on the way home I remember this old woman and I had a conversation at Burnie market (loosely described, a rather feeble attempt in the Roelf Vos car park 6ix weeks into 1993 that didn't catch on) where I had used the word solipsistic in a sentence. She had simply said "you and your books" then said are you buying some of my jam or not? It was a fair point, and I bought 6ix jars for a fiver. I was 8eight. Yes, me and my books...and my jam...and the old house where I snuck a girl in 1nce and then nothing happened because we ended up watching Rage...

Solipsism is the philosophical idea that one's own mind is all that exists, or to put it Glaswegian the idea that you are the centre of the fucking universe...after 1/2lf a bottle of rum, it's entirely possible to feel a whole town stopped when you left and never moved on...ah, philosophy is wasted on the drunk, pass me another slice of Edam...

Jack Frost nipping at your Internet Kiosk

Xmas, or as I call it hell on earth with Bing Crosby songs, is upon us. I'd like to say it's on the faces of people walking by, but all it's meant lately is more people wandering around slowly clutching bags and turning left when all indications are they should be turning right. The boxes in the book store are still all over the floor, although in a nice festive touch there was a 1/2lf eaten Xmas cookie on top of 1ne of them. I think parking is a major problem at Xmas. No wait, I know it is because a woman told me today even though our only established relationship had been to sit back to back with each other on 1ne of those mall couches so beloved of the infirm and elderly and the lazy and bewildered who need somewhere to sit down and read the latest antics of Brynne Gordon in a newspaper. I don't know what this woman expects me to say. She's got a veiny, ruddy face, which is scrunched up in festive anger - her cheeks are the colour of the fire engine that used to roll down the street in Penguin and spray the kids with water, which is ironic because she spits when she talks. Is that ironic? I hate mis-using the word, and my linguistic mental muddle is enough to keep me from fully engaging in the problems she faces making her car fit into a space. She trails off in the middle and turns her attention to a passing elderly gentleman, and he understands instinctively. He has a passionate response which seems to involve blaming David Bartlett for everything not nailed down. I leave them to it, having their mutual bitch fest outside of Big W. A young girl with a horrifically botched pony tail - and 1ne eye going to the shops while the other 1ne is coming home with the change - just stares at them. I think that's what she's staring at. It's so fantastically Deliverance to watch a skelly eyed youngster opening up Big W while 2wo old people have duelling bitches over the issue of car parking, I completely forget I'm supposed to be at brunch...and that's even before Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer soundtracks their moment in my eyesight, and I feel as though my human observation day is going to pan out so richly, I might just sit here, miss brunch, and maybe even miss flupper...

There's no getting away from the Xmas music wherever I go. The only break is a mild Lily Allen interlude, although since it's selling her needlessly repackaged album, I think even that's in the Xmas spirit - the spirit of tat flogging. Sorry Lils. Even the appointed venue for brunch has got into the Xmas spirit, if you call giving a bartender younger than the scotch a red nose the Xmas spirit. Poor girl has to keep pushing it back on every 5ive minutes when she isn't overburdened with steaks and chips. She's so young, I feel compelled to ask her for ID. I don't really, I suspect on this particular day she wouldn't laugh, and in fairness, she's not having the best of days, since a very large, very sweaty man has taken it upon himself to flirt with her in front of his friends. He's decided the best way to go is to stick out the gut Russ Hinze style and start a dialogue about his summer home in Queensland. His eyebrows are raised to the ceiling in perpetual animation, moving and twitching in time with his anecdote. He speaks in a thick pompous accent, letting his steak cool and congeal as he elaborates on the fabulous porch and the anecdotal evidence that he's a tosser gather for everyone to hear. She's frozen in a mix of pity and distraction, and to be honest, a need by the terms and conditions of her employment to wait for his drinks order. After a nervous tap of her pencil, she walks back to the kitchen while the man with the beergut chuckles uproariously at his wheeling and dealing, his fantastic ability to woo a lady. Sitting entirely in tight pants and self indulgent laughter, I wonder if he notices that a large and ugly slab of tomato sauce - so thick it would take your eye out - has slowly and utterly landed on his shirt. It's dribbling down, but he hasn't noticed, and is busy telling an ever bigger lie about some girl he picked up at Syrup...but she's noticed, and stands behind the bar with a big smile on her face as she stares entirely at the sauce stain, and points it out to a fellow waitress. And all is well with her world. A little too well of course, because no 1ne seems to want to bring me my toasted whatever the hell it was I ordered. Instead, I sat back, stuck in my own conversation about cloud computers or some such nonsense, emperilled to watch a clock spin around, maybe until the end of time...or the end of toasting, whatever comes sooner...

They've plonked an internet pay kiosk in the middle of the mall. Pasty faced youths were clamouring all over it today like prisoners would attack their last meal, lost unyielding souls in need of something to do between cursing out poor Sharon. I don't know who Sharon is, but the people at the bus stop really don't seem to like her. I wish that there was a stylish way to spend some of your lunch break sitting in the middle of a shopping mall with a gold coin Internet session entirely yours to enjoy, but needs be as the e-mail must. The kid next to me was entirely engaged in his session, failing to turn around when his Mum wanted him to take some perilously balanced yoghurt off his hands. He was an interesting fellow, long sleeved, stubbly and stubby, sort of Movemberish in a whispy sort of way, laughing in between long sessions of typing, clutching an entire six pack of Honey Banana Up and Go in his paw. Mans reduction from hunter and gatherer to Up and Go drinker has possibly been a disappointment to any would be but as yet unproven God and creator, but what have I hunted and gathered in my life - M&MS? DMCs? Bubble O Bills? His laugh is airless, and a woman in a pink overcoat tuts as she walks past, click clacking her heels on the ground in a show of disappointment that anyone would dare to make noises. She is so busy looking disapproving she almost bowls over a tinsel clad child pretending to be an airplane. Eventually the kid got up and left, kissing his fingers and pressing them to the screen. I presume he has an Internet girlfriend, such was his ardour towards to the screen when he wasn't engaged in reading the ingredients of his nutritious breakfast drink. When I walk past his screen though after he hasn't logged off, and left the little clock on the screen frowning as the time runs down, I can't help notice the picture in his little Internet chat window isn't a picture of him, but of a much better looking person with a much less patchy beard. I wonder if they'll ever meet, and why there's such over-use of the word schnookums. The person after him doesn't notice though, logging off and then engaging in a violent set to with the coin slot that ends with so many curse words, the kid who was pretending to be a airplane stops, asks his mother what a certain word means, and probably ruins any chance he has of getting of that Monopoly game in his Mums bag any time soon...

At dinner my friend tells me they closed Sirocco's, the big nightclub in Burnie, a relative term I suppose, but I wonder what people do up there now. I spent a Xmas there once, back against the wall in an empty warehouse while people I went to school with pashed each other to festive tunes. To say the night lacked opulance and decadance would be to undersell it. Some girl was sick on the DJ. Maybe it wasn't Xmas, maybe mobile disco style all he had brought was Xmas music in a crate filled with vinyl. A crate he later turned upside down and sat on in utter misery while a fight broke out around him, a fight between ho and ho and ho, somewhat fittingly. Such a fragmented moment in my life. I pick at my chips with fitful restlessness, aware that nightclub anecdote is wasted on my friend, a Sunday napping, DVD watching girl who never goes out and is well on her way to being crazy dog lady at some point in her future. I don't think I could sell her on a story about nightclub fights, it's clumsy of me to even try. Across from us a family sit in utter sullen silence. The dad stares at his pate as if he can turn it to ash through baleful staring, the mother is craning her neck to stare over her own shoulder out the window, a piece of chicken on her fork utterly unconsumed, a solitary piece of jewellery on her finger glinting in the fading sunlight, a terribly hair dye job rounding out her misery. The kid is gingery and freckly, trying to smile, but aware something is terribly wrong - he wants to talk about whatever piece of paper he has in his hand, thinks about it, then shoves it back in his pocked lest he melts the familial frost with some good news. They sit like that for an age, not eating, not really doing anything, just stabbing their food then refusing to eat it. My friend doesn't really notice - she's spied a state cricketer in the corner of the restaurant and is trying to flirt entirely through the flirty eating of a carrot and a raised eyebrow or 2wo. I at least get to enjoy some peace and quiet as I nibble at my chips, and let Paul McCartney sing me into a sort of late afternoon nap, while the family at the table across compete in a never ending staring contest with their meals that somehow seems to me to so authentically Xmas, I can only wish them the compliments of the season...

My own house hasn't got anything Xmassy up at all...a terrible Xmas album, but at least I can sleep peacefully without the rustle of tinsel...

Writing Exercise #2 - TAFE 2001 - Illuminations in Cherry

Neneh Cherry - Manchild
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I know where I was. I didn't know where I was going, but I know where I was. Passenger seat of that damned red car, several days, maybe even weeks, before it was smashed by a bread van that zigged when it should have zagged. I know what I would have been doing. The seatbelt would have been tight, it was always tight. Right up around my chin, it clicked into itself with a satisfying clunk, then proceeded to strangle me. Strangle me like my own increasing sense of failure. I would have been drinking Fruitopia, that weird mid 90tys iced tea drink with the inspirational hippy wording on the side - we drank that because no one told us to drink bottled water yet I think. Innovate. Challenge. Dream. That's what it would have said. In swirling letters. Bollocks to it. Not in Burnie we don't mate. Innovation? I've been kicked up the arse by the Toyworld Bear, you tell me who's dreaming hippy. It would have been hot - I can't say if it was hot enough that we got TV from Melbourne via fuzzy satellite imaging, just faint enough you could see Anke Huber in all her glory. Womens tennis players in the mid 90s, we took who we could get. I would have inevitably have some concocted scheme that would blow up in my face, some spun lie about Maths homework designed as if I was some kind of Del Boy of the Algebraic Market. I sold exam answers 1nce, don't tell anyone. I would be staring out the window as we drove into town, down the big hill, past West Park, past kids looking shifty or sometimes sticking their finger up at the car. A teacher did it 1nce, right in my face, standing at the lights, just flipped me the bird. He went missing later, it was on the 7:30 Report. We would only ever go to 2wo places on these trips - Coles or Indoor cricket. Ah, Indoor Cricket, what a failed and miserable chapter ye were. Played with horrible people - awful people, middle managers drunk on the last days of jobs for life, talking about their cars and their sex lives and their sex lives in cars...drunk before they played chinless wonders, how dare they fail to acknowledge my scratchy but valuable 12elve run contribution, all the while attractive Burnie middle climbing women hung around smoking and disparaging the lesbians on pitch 6ix. Maybe that's where I was going - I had a burst of enthusiasm for playing, but that was only because I had discovered that lazy conversational irony was easier to forge than anything meaningful. After all, 1ne simple mention of Neneh Cherry had allowed me to chat 1ne of the wives up for ages, without resorting to my usual nervy mid 90tys stock standard rubbish about the weather or what I would be when I grew up. Challenge. Innovate. Dream. Stuff that. Drop in something from the past, and let the good times roll I say. Shame what eventually happened to her - nasty business that failed perm. Still, all that was before me as I would have let the window roll down, and my mind wander over the football ground and out to sea, far, far away...

No wait, actually, I was going to the pool. Why was I going to the pool? Burnie Pool? Was the grafitti that said "Bad Dues" on there at that time, the 2nd D left off the same way chlorine was usually left off the pool attendants to do list? Why was I going to the pool? It'll come to me. Dad would have been driving. He wasn't to be fobbed off with Neneh Cherry references. He didn't even like Manchild. He was a poker and prodder, determined to know what I wanted to do with my life. Get out of this car and scratch out a quick few laps of the pool. Why was I going to the damned pool? I can't remember, it'll come to me. It was after work, he picked me up outside Maggies Bizarr. Or Bizarre. Or Bizar. Depends on how much paint Maggie had during a refurb. Initially Maggie was represented by an old gypsy lady on TV advertising, but they dropped her 1ne day to focus entirely on selling snowcones, and the shop lost a lot of lustre. He wouldn't have said much when he picked me up. He'd have asked how my day was, I'd have said good, and that would have that. It was an interesting time in our relationship. They felt - perhaps justifiably - that a lazy son lying on the floor doing nothing all day was perhaps a concern. Not much of a concern to me I must admit. I think on this particular day he was in a good mood, engaging in converation about Manchester United or something like that. Probably Mum had made a delicious meal of mince and tatties, and he was feeling good about life. He was a simple and honest man my Dad, a straight shooter, but I could deflect his probing simply by proclaiming Robbie Fowler a genius and watching him sort. Oh I was quite the evasive talker. Picking and choosing, that's all it took. I mostly remember Dad wouldn't mind if you cranked up the radio where as Mum would forbid it, saying it distracted her from driving. I still swear Mum hit a dog 1nce, right round the corner from her friends house. She denies it. I say sometimes she must have had the radio on. I know since Dad was driving the radio would have been turned up to 11even, but I wouldn't have understood that reference. Mum drove slower than Dad, and I had enough time to change into my Pakistani cricket jumper after work. Why Pakistan? Don't know, thought it was rebellious. Dad was swearing at a stray Volvo, he was always doing that swearing at Volvos and cars that were holding him up. 1ne day a guy chased him all the way home because Dad had tapped the horn and made an idiot gesture towards a Prius driver. Dad said he had raced home to get Mum, since Mum would have solved the problem and sorted the angry driver out. I could write a lot of words about Mum and Dads relationship, but somehow, that's all I ever need to say...my relationship with Dad, especially at the time, I sadly can't accurately sum up in such a simple short anecdote...best to talk about Robbie Fowler...

Why was I going to the pool? I really can't remember. Was it a date? Not with the pre bad perm wife? That's implausible even for me to believe. I know I didn't have friends - well I did, but I wasn't interested in talking to them. They were all high achievers, grade getters, sporting champions, nightclub hangers out. Apprehension was my enemy, I couldn't feel comfortable around people with plans. I wonder if I had told them about the Toyw...oh right, I had. I wish I knew then they were just louder than me, their lies more believable. Most of them were off their heads on drugs anyway, living in basements, studying with as much anxiety as any regular Joe. Who was good at conversational spinning after all? Maybe we were doing something for him, maybe we were picking something up. He was a teacher, what were we picking up from the pool? Why was he dropping me off then? Now I remember - I was getting fit for indoor cricket. It was a short lived phase, the sheer ick of public pools eventually got to me, and that's why Dad was in a good mood, he was happy I was doing something. It was our 6ix weeks of Blisstopia. Innovate. Challenge. Dream. Swim 6ix laps in a crappy pool and hope the girls don't laugh at how white you are and by the way mind that suspiciously coloured patch. I was eating an ice cream I think - a big chunky mint Cornetto - in the car so I suspect my commitment to getting fit was already waning. Coles in Burnie - it had such a culture of theft. You were supposed to get this little label put on what you bought so they knew you had purchased it legally, but no one cared. I never stole anything, I suspect they used it to fire you if they didn't like you, and I wasn't really the most popular member of staff. I had just had a blazing row with our Kathryn Harby a like night supervisor, something about tangellos or oranges - oh my woes with orange based fruit, will you ever end - in front of a customer. Had I been a better son, not only would I have offered him a bit of my honestly bought Cornetto, I probably would have articulated some of my fears and concerns to him in our car based travails, but it was too late for all that. We had, I've come to realise, the kind of relationship a cab driver has or had with a passenger. All he needed was a hefty flagfall rate and more right wing views, and that's all our relationship would have amounted to. At least he was proud of my newfound interest in swimming...

We never found out his name. We never found out if he lived or died. He was just sort of lying there, blocking the entrance to the pool. He didn't look well, I know that much. He looked a horrific colour, lying on the ground in a nylon tracksuit, just staring up at the sky while a crowd of ambulance chasers gathered around his wispy bearded face and gawped. There was an old woman in a cardigan, 1ne of those garish Jenny Kee numbers that died off in about 1986ix, she was doing some sort of oh the humanity over the top hand gestures, smacking her head over and over again like the Ayatollah had died. Our car was thus impounded by faux grievers, who had taken it on themselves to surround the collapser, although none of them seemed to be doing CPR or anything useful. Someone rather un-neccesarily tapped on our car and told us to give him some air. I failed to see how we were depriving him of air, while we minded our own business in some sort of hastily convened pool driveway, and certainly if someone has a bad toupee that keeps sliding off their head at every single point of their rant about giving someone some air, you better listen. I'm not sure anyone deserves to die, or certainly collapse, in the midst of a crowd of Burnie pool goers, some of them shrieking like wounded bears, others waving their arms around and trying to keep their syrup from falling in the pool and alarming children. All under a blue painted fence that said Bad Dues on it. We drove home, n swimming was done on that day, the rain fell on the ground, and if it was a date, she's still sitting there on the hill waiting for me. I'm sure I made some sort of attempted glib remark on the way home about kickboards just to try and lighten the mood - I'm absolutely obsessed with kickboards, they formed such a big part of my childhood - while Dad tried to be earnest about making sure each day was precious and to make the most of every opportunity. He would, I'm sure, have hung the keys up on our key rack, a piece of wood shaped like Tasmania his soccer team gave him, and tried to relate the death of a man to me not doing my maths homework. I'm sure I wouldn't have listened. The 2nd those keys hit the map of Tassie - matron - I would have been straight into my room, with nary a reflection on the fickle and temporal nature of life, but instead Anke Huber was probably playing Amanda Coetzer, and popular culture is and definitely was always a more interesting thing for me than big questions and big decisions...

There may have been innovation going on somewhere in Burnie that year, but it definitely wasn't going on in my house...

It's Xmas time in the city...in November

It's Xmas time already where I work. My desk is now officially covered in a designated amount of Xmas tree gingerbread biscuits, biscuits that sit idling in a green bowl until such time as the dieting worker will succumb to temptation. We haven't got to carols on the CD player yet, but we will, doubtless. There's an invitation on my computer to my works Xmas dinner, but no nightmare shall ever come close to being squeezed into an Indian restaurant - nothing says festivity like a curry I guess - in a party hat with people I see all day long. I've already got my excuse lined up, something about having to go to the airport, something like that, something no-one can really check. Feign illness and you can be caught pushing groceries around a supermarket. There's a horrifically Xmas themed advert on TV right now for an online dating service, cloyingly attempting to poke and prod at the lonely. I certainly won't be lonely, that's for sure - my house will be full over Xmas, full of transient visitors and aunties from home, only some of whom will require me to lock up my valuables. Curse having a house with space. Xmas has got to the girl at the hand lotion table. They've stuck her with antlers, and every day we share a mutual look of woe, although she might just want my Smoosh T-shirt. She has to work every day with a man happy and toothy - a man with curly frizzy hair and a core of values from a self help book. He tries to flirt with every woman that passes, while she sits idling at the cash register, flicking through a magazine, surviving another dreary day. When they first pressed themselves into the mall, he was trying desperately to get her motivated, but he's long since given up and now they only talk in short 1ne word sentences. He's started adding Xmas themed words to his greetings, or at least he did until a woman in a heavy blue coat struggling with her groceries responded with 2wo well chosen swear words. He's been much less bouyant since, chastened and less likely to stand with hands on hip eyeing middle aged women to swoop and lotion, but she's been smiling and glowing, even with the antlers on. She's barely turned the page on her story about Nicole Kidman all week, and sits at her desk in a perpetual glow, smiling and nodding in his direction every time I pass. I smile back, but not too vigorously. She might be setting me up for a hand lotion demonstration. You can never be too careful...

Fitfully making it through the Xmas rush has become my annual event. That and weeding and guttering on the weekend before I get invaded. In Big W they've narrowed the aisles for Xmas, packing much more junk in, with the side effect that you can't walk anywhere bar some horrific pile of bogans stampede you to get near the new release of Nobleism. They've cranked up the Xmas music as well, to ear splitting levels, levels at which you can only form some sort of Reiseresque routine about Xmas music because all other thoughts are drowned out by Crosbyism. Panda Eyed girl has responded to the changes by wandering around saying everything is shit, although conversely she hasn't stopped smiling for weeks on end, an evil smile with thin lips and silver lip gloss to the fore. I try and think for a moment about, oh I don't know, the last Xmas I enjoyed, try and work out exactly what I'm such a miserable bastard every December, and how maybe it's just because of that Xmas in Scotland where I had to care for the elderly and sat in a pile of snow while my friends had all moved on. Maybe that's it, or I'm just a miserable bastard. Panda Eyed Girl is poking and prodding the packaging of a wrestling figure and calling it flimsy. I feel as though she was doing this last year, and the deja vu is striking. Time keeps on passing I guess. There's a kid in a South African cricket top doing zig zags in front of me, until I have to stop because the temptation to boot him up the arse is driving me insane. I used to be like when I lived in Penguin, I used to sprint and zig zag everywhere. 1ne day I was just sprinting in the middle of the road, and a kid was running in the other direction. It was Penguin, so it's not like there was any cars. As I ran past the kid, he said Penguin was just like Workington. I can neither confirm or deny that. I don't think this kid was likely to come up with anything profound. He was just running directly in blind zigs unsupervised. Eventually he plows directly into a pile of unsold Ray Martin books, and falls down on the ground hurt with some tinsel on his head, and a Ray Martin book on his leg. He lies on the ground for so long, staff rush from everywhere to help him, but his parents are completely unseen and unsighted. Panda Eyed Girl looks interested for the briefest moments, then returns to her rant about the wrestling figure, before swishing off to find something else to complain about. The kids parents meanwhile emerge and pick him up without even looking, propping him up under both arms while casually keeping up a conversation about crazy paving. Somehow, it really does feel Xmas...

We never make it to end of 1ne year from the previous year without at least 1ne farewell dinner. They all pile up to an inconsequential series of nights out, the same speeches, the same ill thought out gift and same card thrown in the bottom of a drawer. This card was baffling - that's all I took out of the whole evening. No one could figure it out, all it had was a woman in a bath on the front. I think it was supposed to signify relaxation in retirement, but it looked strange and ill thought it. I became concerned for this person that they had worked here for so long without making a single impression, until on their final day they got something that made no sense because no one could remember what they liked, but if I expressed that thought, it was only in a desire for them to hurry up with the mint ice cream. In an adjoining room, a much more upbeat party was in full swing - people in suits singing Xmas songs on karaoke under flickering lights while some1ne walked past our gathering with a stuffed reindeer under his arm. I was uncommunicative and sullen I must admit, the most peripheral figure in what was a solemn ocassion. No-one wants to go to work functions anymore, they don't have the time, and the ice-cream has a prohibitive cost. At the end of our table, 1ne of our younger, perkier and drunker members of staff is pontificating between nights out at Syrup about how her friend would be perfect for me. Such things bounce off me now, as my friend would be perfect for you seems to be code these days for my friend has a lawn she needs mowing or hasn't been out to dinner for a while because she's poor. It's only when she says her friends has a collection of Care Bears and cheerfully describes them as "vintage toys" that I even flicker. Vintage toys? It makes them sound like antique cup and ball games or something carved out of wood by a blacksmith. Time is passing. Too quickly. And I'm sitting around eating mint ice-cream. She doesn't realise she's just made me feel old, and continues blythely onwards without even stopping. The reindeer ends up sitting propped up outside the bar, unloved and unlamented, and the karaoke party ends up in a swinging and violent fistfight, apparently because someone wanted to Parton and got Rogers. They are thrown out past some wealthy dowagers sitting picking fitfully at a rotating shelf of chocolates and saying things like I never. I leave early, pretty much as soon as I've devoured the last piece of my mint ice cream. 1ne day this will be me, making the platitude speech, getting the platitude card, glibly annotated onto the end of some new employees welcome to work speech. When I step outside to get my taxi home, something brushes up against my foot, and it's only after trying to shake it off I realise it's the card the departee was given, thrown away as soon as they had left the building. To think, I came for the pistachio, and ended up with poignancy...and feeling about 100ed years old...

The card disappears down the gutter and vanishes, and since there's no cabs around, and it's probably the right time to get a talkative cab driver bemoaning the state of the nation anyway, I wander into a bar, somewhere that used to be my local, just to kill time, just I don't have to watch my terrible football team embarrass themselves again in living colour. There's no-one around in the entire bar, the barstaff discussing ethics in sport with the passion of those who can never change anything but think they can, except for a girl with a badly tattooed arm - the kind that looks unfinished and drawn by a hypnotised and dizzy 3rd grader - draping herself drunkenly over a man in a Nirvana flannel shirt. The man barely looks up from Guinness, his face cracked and craggy, like a road map of a thousand nights out. The band try and crank up some enthusiasm, running through their standard routine of Powderfinger covers in terrible warm up fashion. The beer is flat, but it kills time, time until something else happens, no better way to describe these nights. The girl, I realise about 1/2lf way through my 3hrd sip, used to work at Coles. She looked a lot more lively at Coles - she was our Xmas funshine girl, the kind who brought antlers in a box and planned outings I never went to because I couldn't be bothered. Or wasn't invited. I can't remember which. She used to always sell raffle tickets and hum happy tunes. Now she just looks exhausted. Her man is practically asleep, practically resting his head on a phalanx of Keno pencils and beer mats. I'd suggest she add antlers to her outfit, but it wouldn't go with the ennui. Everything just takes like mint ice-cream, even the beer, so my stay is short and pointless. I get up to leave, at which point a voice in the corner says didn't you used to sell oranges? Given anything else is likely to confuse and befuddle her sleepy little head, I shrug, say maybe, and leave the band still lost and running. When I turn around, both the girl and the man are fast asleep on the table, about 6ix seconds away from being thrown out by a grumpy Samoan bouncer. I've been there, I've seen that, I've been barred for wearing the T-shirt. There's a weekend to fill in yet, before the circus of my worklife continues to roll on for another week...

Time, as they say, continues to pass...