Absinthe - my new favourite thing.
Yesterday
This is going to be closer to a bar review than anything else; I won't be able to capture in words exactly how I felt. Strangely, this has nothing to do with absinthe or any other substance, but that intangible and elusive sensation of being perfectly serenely happy in a single evanescent moment.
And that's the sort of pretentious twaddle one generates while drinking absinthe in pleasant surroundings in the company of a person who matters to you. 
So - back to basics. This is the place in question: http://www.absinthesalon.com.au/ It's in Surry Hills, one of the shabbier, grittier, formerly-a-slum-now-yuppified central districts of Sydney, tucked away in a tiny little terrace on a corner. D and I went along just to see what it was like. The idea of a bar serving no alcohol but absinthe was intriguing, as was the three-drink limit per customer that is apparently one of the conditions of the licence. One rings the doorbell to gain entry to the premises; I was afraid we might be vetted and turned away on account of looking generally shabby after a fairly rackety near-sleepless weekend, but we weren't. The controlled entry is part of the security measures which are a condition of the licence and let's face it, this adds to the mystique. There's only room for 30 customers (with tables set for two or four), the decor is heavily reminiscent of the 1890s without actually being painstakingly authentic (sort of a modern, stripped-back reinterpretation of the period), the background music is appropriate (fin de siecle French) and somewhat muted so conversation remains possible, and the staff know their stuff. He's the bartender and general supervisor of the revels, while she's the greeter and cashier and general hostess in a velvet and ribbon gown which also echoes the 1890s.
I can't recall exactly which of the couple of dozen options we drank, but I stuck to the green Swiss absinthes because I like green while D stayed mostly with white French absinthes. I added slightly more sugar and rather more water than D did. The water drippers were lovely objects, with a reservoir for ice water and little brass taps to fiddle with. I arranged the tap so it dripped slowly onto the sugarlump (grainy powdery French sugar, not the hyperprocessed sort we usually see here) and then ino the absinthe... There's a meditative feel to watching the absinthe changing colour and releasing all the essential oils; it's a mesmerising process, a key part of an ancient ritual, and a brilliant excuse to use the word 'louche' in general conversation. 
As D is also a word nerd we exploited this to the hilt. Then we drank. 
And drank some more.
Yes, we enjoyed our three-drink quota. I think three is just enough, to be honest. It's enough to warm the throat and numb the tip of the tongue and relax the mind and make all things seem possible but nothing especially important in the great scheme of things. It's also not enough to start hallucinating. Modern absinthe simply doesn't have enough thujone in it to produce that sort of mind-trick; not from three glasses at any rate. The absinthe available here has no more than 10 milligrams of thujone per [some volume or other]. That's also part of the licencing conditions. (Incidentally, the absinthe which is legally available in the US is required to have undetectable levels of thujone, which makes me wonder why one would bother. Without that, it's just an anisette with herbal essences, not a real absinthe. But maybe I'm being unnecessarily pedantic about that.)
As a drinking establishment goes, this one is expensive - between $12 and $20 a glass. But it's fresh, and different, and not an everyday thing, and so very nice. 
And D paid the bill so I'm feeling no financial pain. (My birthday, you see.)
I want to do it all again. This time I'll probably pay. I'd better start saving up now. We decided that this will be a ritual when I'm in Sydney in future...
Ivan.
I'm back...
2 Weeks Ago
No, I wasn't on a five-day drinking binge or anything exciting like that; I was simply waiting for a phone line fault to be rectified. 
This was a problem owing to dial-up internet...
I'll spare you the details of repeated arguments with the phone company about what they needed to do to fix the fault. I'll just cut straight to the bit where I told them to shove their phone service in an anatomically inadvisable location.
Or to put it another way, I went and got a prepaid wireless broadband thingummy. I've spent the evening getting broadband set up and cutting off the dial-up acount. Then, most enjoyably, I cancelled my home phone as well. So I've gone all modern - wireless broadband and a mobile phone, no landline, no answering machine. My email addresses remain unchanged.
Hands up everyone who thought I'd never join the 21st century? *raises own hand*
But before you all send me your favourite videos and so forth, please note that although this broadband is the best currently available here, so it isn't all that fabulous really. Besides, I have less and less time these days... The main thing is that I can get here at all.
My next target: Skype. 
Sometime soon. Soonish. Within a year, maybe. I'll get around to it. Honest I will.
Vindication
3 Weeks Ago
Just a quick note, this. I need to record the fact that the position I've been acting in since January is now officially mine, permanently.
It's just over three years since my vile former boss tried to have me dismissed from the public service on the grounds of incompetence. This was the culmination of a campaign of homophobic bullying.
As I now have a permanent position at this level, I am at the same level as the position held by the vile former boss three years ago...
Game over. I win.
As someone once pointed out, the best revenge is to live well. 
A brief 900km drive in the country
4 Weeks Ago
Well. Where to start with this lot? At the beginning, probably.
Saturday morning, my friend N came around and put me in her car and off we went. The aim was to go places we hadn't been before, just to see what we'd find.
We went to Boorowa first. A small town - a village in European terms, really. Clearly the place had done well in the 19th century and up until about the middle of the 20th, but now it's struggling a bit like so many small towns in this drought. Two pubs, or maybe three - I can't recall. The cavernous courthouse and the old church halls all argued for there being a much larger population in the past. The bakery was good. The craftwork on sale in the old courthouse wasn't especially. The place sells itself as a place to see the superb parrot - a blue/green bird, about the same size as a budgerigar or a little bigger, with an orange underbelly. We didn't see any.
Then Cowra. This is a bigger place. Five or six pubs. Slightly lived-in rather than shabby; I think it's doing beter than Boorowa. Cowra's current claim to fame is its Japanese Gardens. http://www.cowratourism.com.au/Japanese_Garden_p117.aspx These are here essentially because of something that happened in 1944. http://www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/cowra/index.asp The Japanese inmates of the Cowra POW camp staged a mass breakout, preferring to die in battle than be held prisoner. More than 200 of them did die, along with four Australian soldiers. Many of the others were recaptured after a while, some being sheltered by local people in the meantime. (They had sworn not just to escape or die, but not to harm any civilians in the process.) So near the town there's a Japanese war cemetery - the only one outside Japan, I think. Decades later, the Gardens were a gift from Japan in gratitude for the care Cowra had given the cemetery. (Japan's still trying to make amends after all these years...) The Gardens are lovely, the ponds are full of the most enormous koi carp, and the superb parrots we didn't see at Boorowa are much in evidence.
After lunch at the Gardens we headed to Canowindra (the 'i' is silent; no idea why). Three pubs, or maybe four. Everything needs a bit of paint and some freshening-up, no conspicuous wealth on display anywhere, but I think maybe it's always been like this. Dry and dusty, even when there's no drought. The main attraction here for nosey tourists is a heap of fossilised fish, on display in the Age of Fishes Museum. http://www.ageoffishes.org.au/ The museum shop sells glow-in-the-dark dinosaur skeleton glove puppets, which N found irresistible. (Not that I can sneer at gift shop purchases; I'd bought a small ceramic figure of an ancient Buddhist/Shinto sage at the Japanese Gardens.)
The scariest part of the entire trip came at Cudal, a shabby hamlet (one pub and a bowls club) north of Canowindra. I was just about to comment on the drunk rabble hanging out of the bowls club when two cars came around the corner on the wrong side of the road and almost smashed into us. The driver of the second car gave an apologetic wave. Her passenger giggled. Clearly it's the sort of place where the locals don't bother too much with road rules and things like that. About 2km further on we were almost hit by another vehicle which was at least on the proper side of the road but the driver might have been distracted by his passenger having his legs out of the window and his head on the driver's lap (when not grinning inanely at tourists). N and I decided that Cudal was too strange for the likes of us.
It was late afternoon by this stage so we headed for Orange where we'd booked motel rooms. The place was named after the Prince of Orange in the 1820s (Why him? I couldn't find out) and it's a real city with about 35 000 people and a couple of dozen pubs. It's a lovely place. Neat, tidy, good food, good beer... It's building itself up as a gourmet food place. (They don't grow oranges, but apples. This amuses me.) So we ate and drank and then flaked out in a classic 1950s motel.
In the morning - Ophir. This is now a reserve; it's the site of the 1851 discovery of gold, which is what made this country viable. (It also made it unappealing as a place to send prisoners...) Ophir is about 25kn from Orange, at the bottom of a very steep gravel and rock and dust road. It's very pretty in a harshly alien sort of way. We bypassed Byng, and Lucknow, and kept moving on.
Millthorpe is somewhere I never want to go again. It's a dreadful tourist trap. Lots of kitsch junk/antique shops, monumental Victorian architecture and nowhere to eat except the sort of restaurant that has minimalist decor, no indicative menu and a young man looking quite frightened by the bill he's just been given. The pub looked just as pretentious. So we kept moving on.
Blayney didn't appeal much. It looked real, at least, and made a nice contrast to the prettified horrors of Millthorpe, but there was nothing to detain us. Three pubs. We went back to Cowra, passing at least one kangaroo and an emu, and a place called Carcoar which has a gun museum and various tourist traps, on the way.
In Cowra we stopped at a nice-looking pub and ate and had some beer - desperately neeed, as it was about 36C and very dusty outside. The menu was simple but appealing and the beer was cold. There were Japanese-themed paintings on the wall and a local couple (him European, her Japanese) was just too blatantly symbolic of local history and the decades of reconciliation.
Then we went on to Grenfell, via the one (dead) horse settlement of Bumbaldry. What splendid names these places have. Gerrybang was another one, and let's not forget Kangarooby. As a rule - the sillier the name, the smaller the place.
Grenfell's a nice place. It's had better times, but it's still there. I liked the garden of locally endemic plants at the edge of town. But it was Sunday afternoon, and about all we could do in Grenfell was leave and continue on to Young.
Young's in a cherry-growing district. There are also lots of religious groups in evidence, and a completely unwelcoming old trout (I bet she was called Helga or Dorcas or something like that) on the desk at the information centre. We ate ice cream then set off again, quite keen to get home by this stage. We were too tired to consider the Chinese gardens, which are by way of atonement for the anti-Chinese 'Lambing Flat Riots' of the goldrush days. Next time, maybe. (There are a lot of Chinese restaurants in this part of the country - every town seemed to have one or two - I suspect they're run by the descendants of the 1850s Chinese miners, and I also suspect their dishes will be somewhat non-authentic by now, five generations on.)
There's a place called Wombat near Young. There was a poultry farm selling Wombat Eggs, which I found alarming as a concept. In the distance there were hills that can only be extinct volcanoes, looming across expanses of velvety-looking grainfields.
By this stage I was failing to take in more details. I'll just note that there's a really good secondhand bookshop in an old church in Harden, and that Bywong and Bowning look like nice, slightly shabby, slightly hippy villages. Then we were back on the Hume Highway, only 60km from home...
That's only the sketchiest of sketch outlines of the weekend. We covered about 900km, got hot and dusty, saw lots of nice places (and Millthorpe 
and Cudal 
) and decided that we must do something like this again. Getting out of the political/bureaucratic bubble that is Canberra is higly necessary sometimes, just to stay in touch with the reality of this country.
In which Ivan and Tartaronne go looking at Art with Tanzen
Oct 29, 2009
It was tremendous fun, seeing Tartaronne in Melbourne. Being stuck down here at the end of the world, it's always a bit exciting when someone makes the effort to come all that way and visit. It's even nicer when I can get a couple of days off w*rk at the same time.
I started having fun the day before I met Tartaronne, as it happens. I arrived in Melbourne, checked into the hotel, went shopping for a while then met my erstwhile colleague for a couple of drinks. That was at 6:30pm. After spending time at places including Trunk, Movida and the Melbourne Supper Club (which reminds me of a 1920s speakeasy, right down to the lack of a sign on the door) I got back to the hotel at 2:30am... 
I must admit that I didn't feel all that well when I woke up on Sunday, but I had all day to recover before Tartaronne was due to arrive. Tanzen helped me pass the time on a pub balcony overlooking the Queen Victoria Markets and Batman's grave, which is strangely located in the market carpark. (What a strange place to put the body of the founder of the city. Yes folks, Melbourne was founded by Batman. Make of that what you will.)
[Kea - I reminded Tanzen that she'd promised to return to hootoo one of these days. She didn't rule this out. Here's hoping.]
As it happens, I was just walking back up the street to the hotel when a taxi pulled up and Tartaronne got out. So that was good timing.
Over the Sunday evening and Monday we walked around town a lot, ate at a reasonably pleasant restaurant at Southgate, had a couple of drinks, looked at architecture and streetscapes and things, and visited the offices of an organisation with which I have professional dealings so that Tartaronne could interview someone while I went incognito and read a book in the reception area. Later that day we met up with Tanzen by arrangement for further drinks at Young & Jackson's. 
Then we wandered off to Docklands and a rather good Indian restaurant.
The next day, Tuesday, we all spent time at the National Gallery of Victoria's Australian galleries in Federation Square; I particularly appreciated seeing the Aboriginal art galleries, which are well-curated; this is worthy of comment as Aboriginal art is often just hung on a wall with no context supplied. The NGV is a praiseworthy exception. (The temporary fashion exhibition was, by contrast, laughable.)
Soon after that, and after a few last drinks and much laughter, I had to go to the airport to catch a flight back to sordid reality. 
Tartaronne had another day in Melbourne after that. She's probably *almost* home by now, jet-lagged no doubt. She can record her own impressions of Melbourne; let's see how good my memory is...
Here Come the Brides
Sep 9, 2009
I'm going to try to do justice to a great day, but I'm not sure if words can capture exactly how I felt. For a start, there's a problem of vocabulary. When two women marry, is it right to refer to them being brides? Maybe the language will evolve over time as same-sex weddings become less unusual. The law, of course, is an ass: I'm using the terms 'wedding' and 'marriage' even though this ceremony had no legality under the laws of either the State of New South Wales or the Commonwealth of Australia. This is a situation I hope to see resolved one day.
(I should probably also say at the outset that anyone who thinks that marriage is the exclusive preserve of heterosexuals, or that it ordained by some non-existent god thing - well, anyone who wants to rant on along those lines can do so outside my journal, or can just go 
themselves with a fish-fork, for that matter.)
With that off my chest...
I w*rked with M for several years, back in the last century. She has since become one of my closest friends. For many years she was trying to resolve her sexuality, one way or another. But then she met K, who in some way makes M feel complete. It seems the reverse is true, too. So they took a step most people take for granted and became engaged; this wasn't a political statement (even if it is a political act in some senses) but just a logical progression towards marriage. While they live in Adelaide they chose to marry in Sydney, near where K's parents live. M's father grew up in that area too, as it happens. In the event, it turned out that some of M's relatives were friends with some of K's relatives and had been for decades. So for the convenience of lots of people, Sydney was the place to marry.
The venue was unlike anything available in Adelaide, too. http://www.jonahs.com.au/index.html Great food, great staff and an air of everything being perfectly normal, which is what M and K wanted. The view takes in everything from Bilgola in the south to the Barrenjoey lighthouse and the Pittwater entrance in the north. Surfers on the beach, sailing boats a bit further out, a genuine schooner beyond them. Not a cloud in the sky, the gentlest of breezes, perfect weather for a wedding.
There were about 40 people present, which is a nice size for a wedding I think. This kept it down to the people who matter to both parties and it made me even happier to have been invited. Everyone who was there wanted to be there - I think that's another reason why I enjoyed this wedding so much. As my ex-partner and best friend, D, was invited in his own right, my day was almost complete before we even got to the venue. (Considering it took two hours to get there by public transport, that's saying something.)
K wore a very feminine Prussian blue velvet suit with an oyster silk chemise. Think of the sort of thing Katharine Hepburn liked to wear in the 30s and you won't go far wrong. M wore a slinky full-length powder-blue dress (think Jean Harlow or similar) with an off-white bolero jacket. Neither of them was given away. The celebrant was a rather nice Persian woman, who kept things running smoothly and kept the obligatory legal statement that this was not a legally-recognised ceremony to a bare minimum. (She also contrived a certificate which looks like the official version, but with 'Commonwealth of Australia' replaced with 'Nation of Australia' instead. One day we won't have to resort to these measures.)
The vows were rather touching. They'd both written their own and kept them secret until the day; this made it more remarkable that they both said similar things, sometimes even in the same words. Two women, one mind.
Then a couple of poems - K's sister read some Khalil Gibran, and then I read Shakespeare's sonnet 116, which I thought rather a good choice on M's part.
And then the conclusion of the formalities, with massed congratulations and champagne on the lawn on the clifftop.
Both sets of parents looked like they were having the best of days. Grins from ear to ear and genuine approval and delight. K's parents have had 20 years to get used to the idea that their daughter wouldn't end up with a man; M's parents have only had about 18 months to assimilate this sort of information. This is where I have to give them all credit for not just adjusting their world-view but for being so genuinely happy to welcome K as their daughter's partner for life. This can't have been an easy transition for people in their late 70s.
And then, lunch in a room open to the air on one side, with the sound of the sea and a breeze rustling the tapestries, and then an afternoon of drinks and chatter on the terrace, looking out at that view. The schooner came back, making M wonder if it was a sign of approval from her great-great-grandfather the Cornish sea-captain. But we were not at all sober by that stage.
At lunch D and I were seated at M and K's table, opposite M's sister and her fiance, who are to marry next month in Queensland. M and K are extending their honeymoon to include that occasion.
It felt good, D and I being treated as a couple, even though we're not. (I wish we were, but that's another story.) For the first time, we were treated as a couple without anyone even thinking twice. I do hope this is the way society is going as a whole. Progress is slow, but we're getting there.
In the meantime: here's to M and K. 
The koala and the taxidermist
Aug 7, 2009
Look, I really don't know how I feel about this one.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/08/2649936.htm
Sam the koala, heroine of the Victorian bushfire disaster, is to become a museum exhibit now that she's dead.
I need to think this one through. Please feel free to help...
On almost witnessing a stabbing.
Jul 4, 2009
Today was a lovely clear wintry day. My friend N and I went out to lunch, then raided a rather fabulous bookshop (in which I found half a dozen things I've been searching for, one of which I've been seeking for 20 years), then went to a small bar to sit down, have a drink and compare purchases.
We went to the bar at the Ainslie shops, around the corner from my old house. It's a strange feeling, going to Ainslie; I know the shops and a lot of the shopkeepers, and a lot of the customers by sight at least even though it's been years since I lived there.
There was a bible-bashing loon having a loud rant outside the takeaway joint as we arrived; we ignored his outpourings and went into the bar where it wasn't freezing like outside.
So we sat there, drank a bit, talked a lot, listened to music, had a mid-afternoon snack, and then suddenly there was a police car outside. Then another. Two ambulances. Another five police vehicles. Roadblocks. Police running and scurrying about. People came in, ashen-faced, saying there was blood all over the takeaway.
We had been about to leave, but it seemed best to sit tight for a while. The ambulances left - one with a blood-covered man in it, the other empty. The police were still swarming, clearly looking for someone. One came into the bar, quickly scanned the crowd then left. We couldn't have left; N's car was parked in by three of the police cars. What to do? Well we had books. To take our minds off things, N started reading Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop' aloud - this usefully started a discussion about different editions and whether the word on page 16 should be 'splashy' or 'plashy'. Thank heavens for literary minutiae; this kept us occupied for half an hour.
When we could get to the car to leave, we did so. The takeaway was cordoned off; a woman I recognised as one of the shop people was sitting outside, wrapped in blankets, being comforted by two of the police. The shop was a mess. (The number of times I've been in there...) A policewoman stopped our car and took our details as potential witnesses - but we'd heard nothing; the music in the bar screened things out.
The TV news has now reporthed that a man is in Canberra Hospital with multiple stab wounds to the head and neck. Another man is helping them with their enquiries - so I assume they found who they were looking for.
I'm sitting here drinking. It's something I can do...
Older Entries >>
Back to Researcher's Personal Space
Home
