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Season's bleatings...
5 Days Ago

This is all about nothing. Or, to put it another way, it's a record of what's going through my mind on 23 December 2009. It's the day before Christmas Eve, or to put it another way it's Payday Eve. Now, there's an event to get excited about.

My beer just got excited. Froth everywhere. That'll teach me to swill it down fast and then slam the bottle onto the table. (Boag's Draught, if anyone really wants to know.)

For anyone who thinks I might be a bit drunk, or assumes I'm a complete boozehound because I've had two drink-related journals in a row - well I can still type, can't I? That's surely proof enough that I'm not sozzled. The real problem du jour has nothing to do with drink and everything to do with the weather. It's hot. Very hot. Not ing hot, just very hot - there's a subtle but important difference. So the garden's half-dead, I'm all sweaty, the aircon's off because the power failed a while back and I haven't reset the thingy yet, and I'm yet to decide what to cook this evening and if I leave it much longer it'll be too late to do anything about food at all. For those of you who haven't encountered truly hot weather before, I assure you that an ice-cold lager is sometimes the one and only thing that makes life bearable on such a day.

At least I've watered the surviving plants, this being one of the days when I have a legal entitlement to use mains water outside. I quite illegally watered myself at the same time - pointing the hose at the sky and standing under the stream as it fell back to the ground. It felt so good, even if I did squelch about a bit afterwards.

Today's achievement - well, there wasn't one in practical terms, but I did end up having a few drinks with the Big Boss at lunchtime. I think he has trouble with the concept of being a Big Boss; he'd much rather be one of the lads. So every so often he makes time to join us at the bar. I like him. He's a nice chap. If he didn't have to maintain a certain professional distance, I think we'd get along quite well. If I'd met him 15 years ago (give or take), I'd probably have fancied him a bit. (Tall, dark and et cetera, and rather witty...) But I try not to dwell on this. At any rate, it's nice to have a Big Boss who comes down from the ivory tower from time to time.

My direct boss is also a bit of a treasure. She has a way with words, which counts for a lot in my book. She won't be in the office tomorrow, so I'll be in charge - if that isn't too absurd a concept when only one junior staff member will be on the premises. We officially close down at 12:30pm and reopen on 4 January; most of us had the foresight to arrange to take the whole day off tomorrow. I didn't. But then, why would I? I'm not travelling, my entire family (both of them) is elsewhere and I have nothing in particular to do.

My junior has arranged to bring in a chocolate, cream and brandy pudding so we have something to do while we man the phones for half a day. I'm considering taking something to drink... This would be incredibly naughty, but on 24 December there's a certain amount of latitude available.

Now, to jab at the real problem as one jabs at a tooth that needs dental attention - on 24 December 1976 my mother's stepfather died. He was the only grandfather I ever truly knew. He was in all honesty a bit of a bastard, but he was kind to us kids. I remember him fondly even if he was dreadful to Mum. But I'll never be able to get into the spirit of 24 December while I can remember Vilis lying there dying in a hospital bed, by a strange coincidence in the ward where Mum tells me I was born, while a bunch of carollers were singing their hearts out down the hallway. Christmas carols make me feel sick to this day. They are, to me, the soundtrack of death.

So while I'm supposed to be all happy and cheery and hypersocial, I'm forever being reminded of something that's quite the reverse of all that twaddle.

I have surprised myself by posting this. I once vowed that I'd never post anything self-revelatory again, after an outbreak of mawkish sentimentality on a previous journal. But here it is. Please don't try to cheer me up, or express pity (or anything as maudlin as that). Please accept that some of us can't be exuberant just because the calendar says we should be. I think that's really what I'm saying.

(32 replies, Latest reply: 9 Hours Ago)

Absinthe - my new favourite thing.
Last Week

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.

(46 replies, Latest reply: Last Week)

I'm back...
4 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.

(52 replies, Latest reply: 3 Weeks Ago)

Vindication
4 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.

(27 replies, Latest reply: 4 Weeks Ago)

A brief 900km drive in the country
Nov 16, 2009

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.

(33 replies, Latest reply: 3 Days Ago)