Ah, who gives a fuck?

We went to Tetsuya’s last night. Japanese/French fusion cuisine that is simply -WOW-.

We had the degustation menu with matching wines. I would have taken photos of each course as it landed on the table but I’ve got a few hangups about actually living in the moment and not spending a significant proportion of the moment trying to document it for posterity/anecgloatal Facebook photo albums, etc.

I did keep the menu (it’s personalised for you based on any preferences or eating fads/disorders/pickiness you mention when you arrive).

Personal highlights were the ocean trout and the shiraz, but frankly, it was all bloody great.

You’d be a bit fucked if you didn’t like seafood though.

 

 

Sitting at the gate waiting to board my flight to Shangri La. A.K.A. Brisbane this morning, I overhead a young couple sitting behind me earnestly discussing the plot of a Terry Pratchet book.

I resisted the urge to turn around immediately, instead I savoured the moment to truly test out a long-held prejudice (I know it’s hard to believe but I do have them). A blind test of my hypothesis awaited me; all readers of Tewwy Pwatchet books are white, overweight gimps in supermarket denim and sci fi t-shirts with poor personal hygiene.

It was an exquisite moment as I slowly turned around to see a short dumpy girl with dank, greasy hair tied back in a “Croydon facelift”, snacking on a large double chocolate muffin sitting next to her even heavier, even greasier-haired, stinkier boyfriend.

Bingo.

I’m sure Sir Tewwy writes damn fine books but, rather similar to the way that Born Again Christians repulse me from ever attending a church service where there’s any danger of an acoustic guitar being wielded by a long haired woman in a Laura Ashley dress and random congregation waving their arms above their heads out of time to the beat, I refuse to read any of his books for fear of being thought to be associated with his fans.

“ooh, I thought it was weally iwonic the way the chawacter fwom book two of Discworld came back in book five as the ghost of his bwother”.

Cunts.

Oh yeah, if you haven’t spotted it, I’m in a shite mood because I’ve got to spend 24 hours in Brisbane.

At least I’ve got a booking for Tuesday night at a really great restaurant for when I get back to Sydders….. If you’re reading this, Charlie, only kidding; I’m taking you to Oporto and you can have any chicken burger meal combo that takes your fancy.

Another tick in the mid-life crisis category today. Nope, I didn’t take my 20something lover out to a Rush concert on a Harley Davidson, but I did take a surf lesson.

Surfing is not an entirely new experience for me; there were a couple of summers in my late teenage years spent on the northern beaches of Cornwall but the memories seem to be littered less with images of feet firmly planted on a board and more with a lot of experimentation with LSD, Lebanese cannabis resin and the corruption of a convent school-educated girlfriend.

Ah, halcyon days.

So today I went commando in a well-worn wetsuit (probably best not to dwell on that thought too long) and took a massive foam board from the Manly Surf School out on a mill-pond-esque ocean with mates Magic and Sofaboy.

Big Wednesday this was not. More like On Golden Pond in fact, but without the Fondas.

However, the sky was azure blue, air temperature about 18 degrees, water temperature just a couple lower and the microscopic waves were perfect to learn on. All three of us had mastered standing up (for more than 3 seconds) within 15 minutes of getting wet.

The only disappointment with the morning was that the instructor was a pleasant chap from San Sebastien in Spain. We were sort of hoping for a dickhead bleach blonde twat who spoke in the vernacular, all “dude” this and “rad” that with a few “awesomes” and “legendarys” chucked in for good measure.

We were bobbing up and down waiting for the next “wave” around 9.30am this morning with the taste of salt water and sunscreen in our mouths when it struck all of us that this is a week after the mid-winter solstice. Fuck, winters are rough here, eh?

Nope, living can be mighty easy in Sydders.

Except unless one has to spend two days in Brisbane this week. Oh hang on, that’s where I’m going tomorrow. Be still my beating heart.

Picture today is a self portrait from the esplanade at Manly. Look closely, I’m there.

Come back later to this post and I’ll put a link to a great Belushi and Ackroyd sketch about surfing once I’ve had chance to use the computer to find it.

EDIT: Here’s the video. The backstory is that Brian Wilson had spent much of the previous 3 years as a recluse in his bedroom taking cocaine and generally suffering from mental illness. It was quite a coup by the Saturday Night Live crew to get him to do this sketch.

 

Bingle insurance paid back our excess this week after the shunt from behind by Miss SMS. They paid us by cheque. We paid the excess by credit card, why can’t they refund the credit card instead of sending a cheque? No, I don’t know either.

Anyway, I wandered into HSBC to cash the damn thing and while I was in the queue, I picked up this leaflet.

I’ll save you the bother of zooming in and reading it and give you a summary; HSBC paid for a survey of about a thousand Australians where they asked two questions;

1. Do you like being paid money?
2. Would you prefer to pay a $5 account fee for your bank account or be paid $10 a month?

And the results; most people preferred to be paid money and most people preferred to be paid $10 rather than pay account fees.

Obvious, right?

Well, the problem is, HSBC have completely misjudged the Australian psyche here. They’ve been way to subtle in their advertising campaign.

What they are saying in a very subtle way is, “if you bank with one of the big four Australian banks, you are paying fees just to keep an account. Why not move to us and, not only NOT pay fees but get some money back too?”.

Except they didn’t say that, they said a whole bunch of subtle stuff about 2% of people being daft enough to not understand the questions being asked of them.

I showed this leaflet to my colleague, an Australian I respect who is generally really commercially savvy and she said, (I quote), “I don’t get what they’re saying here”. I would suggest that she’s in the demographic that HSBC are aiming at and yet the message has completely gone over her head.

Australian banks charge fees to keep your money in your account. Australians think that this is acceptable practice. When I cancelled my account with ANZ Bank, I struggled to get the message across as to why I was leaving:

Me: “well, you charge fees for keeping my money yet you don’t pay interest. That just seems wrong”

ANZ: “we could waive the fees for 3 months”

Me: “but then you’re going to charge me fees from month 4, right?”

ANZ: “yes”

Me: “so why don’t I just overpay my ANZ credit card and use that as a free way to pay merchants and withdraw cash, as you don’t charge fees for that if I spend more than $10,000 a year?”

ANZ: “Erm, I suppose you have a point there”

Me: “Indeed. Just cancel the account, thanks.”

To any Australian consumers or Australian retail bank CEOs reading this, here’s a catch up on how banks will work in the late 1990s (i.e. the future):

Customers who keep their accounts in credit get to bank for free because the interest you pay is paltry so it funds the account overheads.

Sometimes I wonder whether Kurt Cobain is still alive and well and about to play the Enmore Theatre…..

Whilst walking between meetings today along Ann St., Brisbane, I witnessed the world’s worst magician plying his trade to a bemused crowd of onlookers.

The trick: 3 balls and 3 cups.

As I recall this staple of the Magic Circle’s apprentices, the balls are placed under the cups, the cups are moved around and the punter is asked to select a cup. The cup is lifted and there is no ball.

Variants can be performed where one ball seems to magically move between cups.

The Brisbane version has a subtle twist where a 4th ball drops out of a cup and is hurriedly stuffed back into the secret compartment.

The best part: apart from me, nobody else laughed at the mistake.

I reckon an easier magic trick would have been to spark a cigarette lighter up in front of the locals and shout “I am the God of lightning, give me your money, mortals”.

If there is a god, I pray that my flight is not cancelled.

Day tripping today, destination Brisbane. Why a day trip? Because, unless there is an extremely compelling reason to the contrary, I cannot contemplate staying any longer than strictly necessary in the place.

Now maybe I’m being unfair to Brisbane but I tend to judge a location on a mixture of its physical aesthetics, the available facilities (restaurants, cafes, etc.), cultural opportunities and most of all, the inhabitants.

The cab ride or train journey from the airport takes one through some pretty grim suburbs, including an oil refinery and several car scrapyards. Not inspiring.

The city centre consists of a grid system of streets with some uninspiring shopping malls, plenty of franchise fast food joints and a stinky and muddy brown river flowing through it (sometimes right through it).

The cultural opportunities seem to consist of a local run of Lloyd-Webber’s “Cats” and a concert by Miley Cyrus, both of which are about as appealing as biting a tramp’s toenails. Incidentally, if that is an appealing prospect to you, Brisbane is the place to come; there’s loads of dodgy characters walking around the centre carrying open bottles of super-strength alcohol in brown paper bags.

Finally, the locals. It almost seems like the act of a bully to take the piss out of Queen’slanders, rather in the same way one shouldn’t point at folk with extreme Tourette’s Syndrome when they are gesticulating wildly in public.

Let’s call it as it is though; The residents of Brisbane are statistically much more likely to have poor dentistry, ill-fitting clothes, hockey-haircuts and talk slowly with mono-syllabic, grammatically incorrect “sentences” than even the average citizen of Tennessee.

No. I’m here for the day and then I’m getting the hell out of Dodge before the sun goes down.

“stay on the road and keep off the moor…..”

We live in rented accommodation here in the Socialist People’s Republic of Balmain in Sydders. The rent isn’t cheap by any standard, not least if you make the mistake of converting it back into British pounds, US dollars or Kiwi rupees but what you get for your money is surprisingly shit. Seriously, I know this blog could at times be re-registered as www.whingingPom.com but the building materials used are shoddy at best and mainly just completely ignorant to the weather conditions in this part of the world.

The climate here is very similar to that of much of the Mediterranean area, Eastern Spain, Southern France, Italy, Greece, etc., hot summers and mild winters, 40 degrees down to about 5 degrees. Take a wander through any Mediterranean town and have a look at how the houses are built for these conditions; whitewashed thick stone walls, small shuttered windows and terracotta roofs. Keep the heat out in the summer and insulate the place during the winter.

Compare these centuries old lessons with the building materials and styles used in much of the housing stock in Australia; “weatherboard” walls, big windows in aluminum frames and all topped off with a tin roof for good measure. Net result; the interiors are like the Black Hole of Calcutta in the summer and draughtier than Dresden Cathedral in the winter.

In addition to this, those houses that aren’t made with glorified cardboard often have brickwork that looks like it was a result of a bricklaying committee meeting where the tea was spiked with mescaline and then someone suggested a game of “consequences”. A case in point is our neighbour’s house (in the picture); two types of brickwork, a bit of stonework, a strange tin foil layer of separation between the ground and first floors and all with cracks running through it along the scale of the San Andreas faultline. Oh, and the obligatory tin roof, of course. Want to hear the the punchline? The place is “worth” over a million bucks. I shit you not.

Of course, property prices is the subject that dare not speak it’s name here in Australia. The Anglo Saxon genetic predilection of desperately needing to “own” property must have arrived with the First Fleet. The old mantra that “you can’t go wrong with bricks and mortar” is almost a religion here; the Sydney Morning Herald ramps property prices shamelessly and many of my colleague are balls-deep into the market with investment properties forming 99% of their investment and pension portfolios, which seems a little eggs/single basket-esque to me.

There was never the crash in values here that most of the English-speaking world suffered post-2008. Two linked reasons seem to explain this; firstly, China avoided a meltdown by Keynesian government spending on building airports, bridges, roads and cities that no-one actually needs using minerals dug out of Western Australia which funded the second reason, that is the government gave first time buyers a wedge of cash to stick in their mortgage deposit. I wonder if any bright students can guess what happened to the prices of the houses that these first time buyers bought? That’s right; they went up by a leveraged version of the government gift. Brilliant. Even Bernard Madoff wouldn’t have had the chutzpah to come up with that one.

China is slowing down at a rapid rate now, so the government revenue available for further stimulus is drying up and the comparatively high interest rates here result in the Aussie dollar being strong, ruining the market for all non-mineral exports. In the meantime, the Euro experiment is unravelling and Ben Bernanke is struggling to persuade Congress to allow him to print more money for “job stimulus” seeing as how the other two attempts failed. I wonder what that all means for Australian house prices?

Anyone’s guess, obviously. Mine would be that there’s a big bad wolf coming along soon and he’s going to huff and puff and blow some houses down. Which reminds me, we’re chucking our notice in next month and heading to the Northern Beaches to find a house that’s not made of straw or of wood. I wonder what I’ll reply if the landlord asks me to stay?

“Not by the hairs on my chinny chin chin”.

 

 

I’ve steered clear of slagging off Australian TV for a while because it’s so shite that it feels a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. However, it’s a long weekend here (more about that tomorrow) and it’s not stopped raining so the TV was fairly unavoidable for parts of the last couple of days.

SBS (or “soccer bloody soccer” as locals refer to it) has a series of series about different cuisines of the world called “<insert country name> Food Safari”. The producer and presenter is a woman who goes by the name of Maeve O’Meara, someone who seems to have an unhealthy abusive relationship with a hairdresser who finds his inspiration exclusively in the music video of “Take my Breath Away” by Berlin.

I know little to nothing about this TV series or Maeve O’Meara but the channel plugs the show shamelessley at every commercial break.

Now I’m a bit of a foodie at heart so I will probably dip into the latest series where she’s looking at French cuisine. However, the experience for me will be tempered somewhat by the slight done to me and my fellow “Anglo Saxons” on one of the trailers for the show. I quote, “mmm, amazing flavours and colour. Thank goodness we Australians ditched the anglo saxon meat and three veg diet in the last few decades”.

Well, leaving my sensitive nature aside, this does seem a little racist to me. Anglo saxon cuisine may not be right up there with the dishes listed in Larousse Gastonomique and might not compare with the bold flavours and variety of Italian cookery but I would argue that it’s not that bad that it needs to be denied thrice before dawn by someone with a consipiciously, um, Anglo Saxon name.

Anyway, the national dish in Britian is chicken tikka masala, not fish and chips.

But this isn’t my main gripe with the Terri Nunn wannabee…… No. The big problem with Maeve is that she enthuses about one thing (artisan cookery, the slow food movement) and gets paid for advertising the opposite. Smoothie Cubes (TM)? Really? Just add milk and enjoy?

What’s next Meave, those nuclear blast-proof croissants (pronounced “cwa-sant” here, apparently) that one puts in the oven for 3 minutes? How about the Maccas extra special burger range?

Takes my breath awaaaaay.

A slightly shabby and hungover New Australian wandered into work on the ferry this morning. Last night was the head-wetting of our newest addition. Originally, the evening was billed as a bit of a pub-crawl around the pubs in The Rocks but in reality we decided that we’d be happy just propping up the bar in the rather imaginatively-named Australian Hotel.

The Australian Hotel has about 8 different beers on tap, all of which are produced by either Lion Nathan or Fosters. The funny thing is, there were two beers being sold that are pitched as being independently produced; Little Creatures’ Pale Ale and White Rabbit. A little research however, and one learns that both are actually part-owned by Lion Nathan.

For a country with such a large beer consumption (104 litres per capita per year – 5th in the world after the Czechs, Germans, Irish and Austrians), the lack of consumer choice is a depressingly poor state of affairs. The craft beer industry here is pretty nascent, there are a few here and there but the grip on the market of the big two is firmer than a teenage boy’s to a Katy Perry music video.

Of the beers we sampled, the Little Creatures was by far the most flavoursome. We drank a lot of it and, as always here in Australia, I knew it was time to get in a taxi when I hit the Point of Maximum Gas or POMG as it is known in the brewing industry. The POMG is defined “the moment when one cannot physically drink any more artificially-carbonated beer without first burping out the significant build up of CO2”.

For me, this is usually about 8 or 9 standard schooners into the evening. Luckily, this also coincides with the point where I start to get a bit loud and obnoxious (oh OK; louder and more obnoxious than normal) and is a good alert for me to go home.

But it got me thinking, why on earth do Australians like to drink such fizzy beer? What possible advantage can there be to having all that gas in the liquid? Does it enhance the flavour? Well, if it does I would hate to think how tasteless the beer would be without it.

More pertinently, how much CO2 is being chucked out into the atmosphere each year from all this unnecessary fizz and what is Julia Gillard’s Carbon Tax going to do to the price of a glass of beer?

So, rather than do anything productive at work this morning, I got a big black coffee and I did the maths.

CO2 per litre of beer = 62 grams

Annual national consumption of beer = 1,853,000,000 litres (or about 104 litres per capita – including children)

Annual CO2 in Australia’s beer = 114,886,000 tonnes (or about the same as the United Arab Emirates’ entire annual carbon pollution – oh the irony)

Additional cost per litre of beer for Julia’s Carbon Tax (assuming $30 per tonne) = 0.2 cents

So conclusive proof then that Australia needs to switch to flat beer immediately otherwise the cute baby polar bears will all be dead by teatime. In addition, the carbon tax needs be pitched at around $30,000 per tonne for it to have any effect on people’s behaviours.

Try selling that in Parliament, Julia.

When I cycle to work, I park my multi-thousand dollar carbon-framed Tour de France capable machine (oh, all right; I got it for $100 off eBay and it weighs a ton) in the underground car park beneath the office. There’s a ramp from street level looping down two stories to the cycle shed that is fun to whizz around at the end of a brisk ride in. Not so fun on the way home, obviously.

On the way down today, I was slowed by a car that inconveniently entered the car park before me. As we passed the 1st level, a bloke in a florescent yellow shirt (everyone in Australia who does blue-collar work is issued with one of these – maybe the term should be yellow-collar) shouted out loudly and animatedly. Both the car and I slammed our brakes on in an attempt at an emergency stop.

Unfortunately, as recent tests have now revealed, the brakes on an Audi A4 are vastly superior to those on a 20 year old Raleigh commuter bike and I ended up face-planting the rear window of the car. The driver got out, probably highly traumatised by the sight of my splayed nostrils in her rear view mirror (“objects may appear closer in the mirror”, remember).

“What did you say?” we both asked floresco-boy in unison
“Ya can’t ride yer bike down here, in case of accidents” he proudly informed us, adding “it’s THE LAW” just in case his cheap yellow jacket wasn’t authority enough for us submit to his dominance

The law…..

This is Australia after all, so there is a slim chance that one of the three layers of government with jurisdiction over our lives may well have found time in their busy schedule to legislate against the riding of cycles in a public car park during the same session that mandated bike hats for all but, upon reflection, I somehow doubt it. I will admit to doing a quick blast of research just now to confirm that this is unlegislated for currently however, as my recent rate of accuracy on blog posts has been Ben Bernanke-esque in its credibility.

No floresco-boy, it’s not the law; it’s a condition of use. And you may want to consider SHUTTING THE FUCK UP in future “in case of accidents”, OK?

I have a bit of a confession to make about this blog post. I was originally going to write in my usual sarcastic and snobbish way about Australians and Champagne. Specifically, I was going to launch into a blistering critique of the domestic brand of sparkling wine known as “Chandon”.

Regular readers would probably be able to predict what was going to come next; a lengthy diatribe about the pathetic marketing gimmick of naming a sparkling wine, albeit one produced with the same varietals and cellaring technique, in a way that would confuse potential drinkers into thinking that it was produced by or associated with the French Champagne region. After all, Australia does produce some fine sparkling wines but, as a branded generic, they are a poor cousin to Champagne or even Prosecco and Cava.

I was also going to poke a little gentle fun at the regular mispronunciation of many foreign words, prompted by a recent conversation with someone about “Mo-ette” Champagne (Moët) and a discussion in the office about the new Quebecois film, Incendies, where I was labelled as pretentious for using the French pronunciation of the, erm, French word in its title.

Except….

Except….

I just did a little research at the University of Google and discovered that Domaine Chandon was established by French champagne house Moët & Chandon in 1986 and produces wines using the same expertise and techniques as the French wines produced near Reims.

So the entire point of this blog post has been sabotaged at the first paragraph by the perfidious French.

Which reminds me of my second favourite joke;

Q. How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris?

A. Who knows? It’s never been attempted.

“what a swell party this is”