Taff Down Under 17
It was sad leaving my job at Belconnen Community Services. It was a job I could do reasonably well, the kids loved me, (you may find that hard to believe, but strangely they did), and it gave me most of the day to skive and post stuff on the Cybersoapbox. J
But all things must pass. Anyway, they gave me a great sending off party, lots of booze and grub, and a copy of Frank Zappa’s amazing autobiography as a leaving present. For some reason my boss had become convinced that I was a big Zappa fan. Ok, like most blokes my age, I can quote some of his more funny / crude lyrics, but I’m no obsessive about him.
But it was a nice gift, and the speeches were very complimentary, and I got kissed by a lot of women and a few men. (As I was waving good bye I’m sure I heard someone say, "lets get down to the serious celebrating now", but I may have been mistaken?)
I had a few days off before starting my new job, so Lee-Anne took a couple too. She had to get dressed and pretend she was going to work in the morning, to get Bethy off to school, but once she was gone, we…relaxed.. together. And very nice it was too.
The new job is a gas! I’ve been put in charge of OT and been given carte blanch to organise the OT system as I see fit. This involves putting as much of the work onto the other two as possible, and spending as much time doing sod all as I can get away with. Nice.
The unit is well equipped, and the OT dept has a load of useful toys. I get to do fun things. Like take a guy, who’s on one-to-one watch in the secure unit, shopping, knowing full well that he’s in there for trying to stab a mate and his kid to death while he was undergoing a psychotic episode.
So all told I’m very happy.
Today I ran a barbecue, for twenty-six people, who, not to put to fine a point on it, were not exactly able to cooperate fully. Still I got away with only minor burns, and they did get to eat. Not that many of them would have noticed if it were barbecued lemons with goat turds they were eating.
The other day I had to attend one of those mind numbing "induction" days. It was all very boring, but then we had a chat off a guy who runs the psychiatric SWAT team. This is a team that does intensive work with people who are cracking up in the community, undergoing real bad episodes, aimed at keeping them from getting admitted. I used to work in the Penzance version, so I was a bit interested. He gave us the gen, and asked for questions.
I told him I was interested in how they worked, and then asked why they had no OT in the team.
This is how it went…
"Why do you not have an OT in the team"?
"When people are experiencing a bad episode, basket weaving is the last thing they want to do’.
"Well, you have a psychologist to bore them into complying, a social worker to patronise them into submission, a nurse to keep jabbing them with hypos, and a psychiatrist to keep upping the drugs, so why not an OT to really make the buggers suffer"?
He was a nurse, so I guess I hit the right note. J
Oh, the inevitable has happened.
I’ve been driving around on my Brit license since I got here, with a print off of the e-mail I got from the licensing people saying it was legit for me. When I got the new job I had to get signed onto the list for the cars there. The girl in charge took one look at my license, and pissed herself laughing. I hope it was the ludicrousness of me trying to get on the list with it that set her off, not my picture. Some chance.
So I had to sit my driving test again. Fortunately only the theory bit. My bad habits are far to ingrained for me to pass the practical. I spend a night learning the Ozzie Highway Code, or road rules, as they call them. And set off the next morning. And got lost.
I found the bloody place and was all in a fluster. A nice girl sat me in front of a computer, and talked me through what I had to do. Essentially I had to answer 35 multiple choice questions, in five categories. In some of the categories it’s mandatory to answer all the questions right. Shit.
I blundered through it, taking educated guesses at a few, and at one point doing "eeny meeny miny mo".
I got 34 out of 35. Whee whoo…J
Then I had to drive to what they call a "government shopfront". This is like a one stop call for all government services. Paying your bills, whinging over parking fines, getting licenses, registering your dog, housing problems, paying taxes, asking dumb questions, killing a politician, you know the stuff.
I waited for hours, then I got to the counter. I showed my Brit license and my pass certificate to the girl behind the counter. "Oooh, never done this before", she said. Nor had the girl in the booth next to her, or the supervisor. Anyway, they got the idea sorted eventually. I nearly got accredited for a full motorbike license as well, by mistake. Bugger, that would have been handy.
So then she said, "put your eye’s against the viewer in front of you". An eye test? I shat it. My eyes are good enough for driving, but not for tests. Fortunately they let me keep my glasses on.
So, after punching a hole in my Brit license to stop me having two licenses to play with, I got an Ozzie driving license. J
Right! I headed out to the car for my first "proper" burn as an Ozzie driver, and found I’d left the lights on, and the battery was now flat. Fuck my luck.
I stopped an elegant woman in a big Lexus. "You wouldn’t mind giving me a jump start would you, I’ve got all the cables, it won’t take two ticks!" I don’t know if it was the accent, the desperation, or well… me just being me… but she reversed away at some speed.
I got a jump-start eventually, and drove home slowly.
The work cars are all automatics. What the fuck? Have you ever driven an automatic? They are all shite! The fucking car is fighting you all the way, and they all have a phantom clutch. I drove the Toyota "big as a fucking truck, people worrier" the other day, with 9 clients on board, and nearly killed the fucking lot of us. But it wasn’t my fault, it was the cars.
Why do they all have a coded regime for getting the key out? It’s like joining the masons trying to extract the ignition key. "Put the vehicle in park, depress the hand brake, push button Y except on Fridays when you push button Z before 12 noon, and align button X with card C, do not attempt to extract key if your birth date is divisible by 9 on Thursdays, only in a leap year". Fuck me pink! I ask you?
And they are slow, and brake badly and ARE JUST FUCKING AWFUL to drive. But they are free, and I get a petrol card, and can thrash the arse off them if I don’t have any clients on board. So not all bad then?
We went to see a singer/songwriter the other night. I’d heard good things about him in the music press, and thought him worth checking out. Here you go:
http://www.ronsexsmithonline.com/
Yes he does go by the name of Ron Sexsmith. Up to him I suppose.
He was playing at our favourite Lesbian Club, "Tilley Devine’s". (See past TDU’s d nauseum)
Tickets were a bit steep, but, as I’d been a good boy, Lee-Anne agreed to go. We got there, ordered grub, the vege grub there is wonderful, and I ordered my usual vat of wine.
The support act came on, just a guy and a guitar. His first song was wonderful, a sad tale of love lost, lives torn apart, regret and longing. The second was the same, and the third. By the time of his fifth I was ready to slit my wrists. So I heaved a pint mug at him.
Then Ron himself came on, a short fat guy, looking a bit like Rodney Bewes circa 1968.
And he sang, and played, and was fucking wonderful. The same sort of stuff as the first guy, tales of loss and broken hearts. But each one was a mini kitchen sink drama in itself, and each tale had some hope, or at least a definite conclusion.
He’s a Canadian our Ron, but he could have been Nick Drake’s younger, and slightly, ever so slightly, happier brother.
Anyway, after the show he was hawking his latest CD, so I bought a copy off him, got him to sign it for me. I also told him I loved him and wanted his babies. He seemed rather amused, interested even, although as I was very very pissed and speaking Wenglish, he may have been a bit confused.
We’ve made a point of hitting some of Canberra’s nightclubs. Our next door neighbour, Ruth, is a DJ, and has been clueing us into the scene. It’s fun, not as intense as the UK scene, and we’ve had a couple of very good nights out. If we can find a club for "older" clubbers, that plays "Trance" or "Uplifting House" we’ll be sorted.
While we are talking of music, well at least while I am talking of music, me and Lee-Anne were at the local mall the other day. As we were walking towards the main entrance, I heard some music. (I probably heard it about three minutes after everyone else, as you all know what I deaf twat I am.) It was Bing Crosby crooning.
"That’s an odd choice of music for a mall", I said to Lee-Anne. "Nah, they play that here to stop the kids clogging up the entrance".
And she was right; I even stood around for a few minutes to watch the effect. Groups of three to five young lads and lasses would turn up, stand around for a minute or two, grimace as if in deep pain, stub their fags out and bugger off inside. Neat trick!
The next time we were there, they were playing Matt Monroe. J
We went for a days skiing.
I’ll say that again, just in case you didn’t get the jist.
We went for a days skiing.
Here I am in a country that in mid winter is as hot as the warmest summer day in the UK, a country where if we get a day’s rain a month it’s called a "wet’n", I go skiing for the first time in my life.
Some of you may find that odd, that such a daredevil, rough, tough, mountain man as me has not been skiing before. It’s just one of those things I’ve never got around to. It looked fun. And I will admit I had visions of me hurtling down steep mountains at break-neck speed, waving happily as I overtook Franz Klammer, or whoever is a good skier nowadays.
Anyway, we decided to go.
Lee-Anne, and how the fuck she does it I’ll never know, found us a place to stay in amongst all the $700.00 a night and "fully booked out for the next 1000 years" places, on the weekend we wanted and for $50.00 a night.
So we drove up there on the Friday night after work. Unfortunatley it was dark all the way, but it’s only an hour and a half from Canberra, so not too bad.
We found the digs;
http://www.traveldownunder.com.au/New_South_Wales/Snowy_Mountains/Hawaii_Motel.asp
and to be fair, for the price we paid they weren’t too bad. Basic, just a room with a bog and bathroom off it, but warm and cosy. It was a twin bed room, but they let us put a foldaway camp bed in for Bethy, nice of them.
So the next morning we set off for the Snowy Mountains.
There’s that Ozzie sense of naming going on again!
"What shall we call these mountains with all that snow on them Bruce"?
"Let’s call them the "Snowy Mountains", Bruce".
"Fair dinkum! And we’ll call the peak with the skiing on it "Mount Perisher" ‘cos it’s fucking perishing on the top".
"Sounds good to me Bruce"
We got to the tube station. Yes, there’s a tube train to get you to the top of the slopes, and hired all the clobber. By Christ it’s not a cheap sport is it?
We also booked ourselves in for half a days lessons.
Fortunately I didn’t go with my original plan of just going to the top of Australia’s highest peak, Mount Kosciuszko (2,229 meters), and throwing myself down it with gay abandon. (Gay Abandon, good name for a porn star that?)
http://albany.virtualave.net/kosi.htm
We had biting cold wind, hail and sleet to contend with, but we had such a laugh it was all worthwhile. I had a lesson with a rather "jolly hockey sticks" Ozzie girl, and found out I was shite at it. Ah well, it was fun.
The rest of the day was spent on the beginners’ slopes using my new found technique. Ski diagonally across, fall over, get up, point myself in the opposite direction, ski across, fall over, get up…. It pissed a lot of people off. So not a complete waste of time then.
After a very quiet evening that night, all we could manage, we got up the next day to go mountaineering. We decided to climb Mount Perisher so I could indulge a new hobby of mine, making 360-degree photographic panorama’s. (More on this later)
We got the ski tube up, then a long long chair lift, and managed the 50 or so metres to the top. When I say managed, I mean managed, as all our legs were fucked from the day before.
It was wonderful, and I got a great pano out of it while Bethy and Lee-Anne tried to kill each other with snowballs.
All good things must end, so we drove back. We drove back in the day, and the countryside around there was fucking wonderful, shame I didn’t do any snaps of it to bore you with. J
Oh, we saw some twat bump into a Roo and carry on driving. The wanker. It got up and shook itself off fortunately, otherwise Lee-Anne would have had to do a tyre iron job on it.
Talking about panoramas, as I was, I’ve log been impressed with the work of a guy called Paul, who run’s a website of his panoramas. I got into them as he’s done more than a few of Sennen, the loveliest place in the UK.
So I wrote and told him so.
And he replied.
So we struck up an Internet friendship.
Isn’t it funny how, due to the net, we can now have friends that we have never, maybe will never, meet? I’ve got people who I consider good friends, very good friends in some cases, living in the US, and I think my life is much richer for knowing them.
Some of these people have radically altered my perceptions of Americans. Ok, you may argue that my original perceptions were so skewed as to be verging on racist. Probably more accurate to say they were racist as I didn’t even consider Americans as a race.
How wrong I was.
In the US are some of the most kind, generous, lovely people you could ever hope to meet, along with their fair share of shitheads, as there are in most countries. Mea culpa.
But what is friendship? If I haven’t met you, but we have corresponded, and agreed on some subjects, and agreed to disagree on others, why should I not consider you a friend?
Does friendship necessitate shared experience? Does it matter that the experience is virtual? Don’t forget, I fell in love with, and committed myself to, a woman who I had never met. The fact that it is the best move I have ever made may colour my view somewhat.
I’d love to meet all these yanks someday, and see how we get along in "real" life. We may not, but does that mean we cannot consider each other a friend?
By fuck this vino’s good stuff, back to my drivel.
Anyway, me and Paul correspond every so often, so when I decided to have a crack at making my own pano, I wrote to Paul for advice. He gave me pages of useful notes, and so I had a crack at one from the hill behind our house.
It turned out ok, so I sent it to Paul.
He, being the lovely chap he is, played about with it, and put it on the net for me. So I got all excited and did a couple more. J
You can see them at;
http://www.paulspages.co.uk/taffspanos/
Just click on the image and wait for it to download, well worth the wait!
You may have problems viewing them if your browser isn’t set up right, I can’t open them with Opera, only Internet Explorer.
While you are there, take the time to check out Paul’s work, much better than mine, pano’s of some lovely places. The ones of Sennen are of course my favourites!
http://www.paulspages.co.uk/panoramas/index.htm
We got a parcel the other day from a guy in the States, one of the poor mugs that agreed to send Bethy something in return for a CD of my horrible music. It was full of lovely gifts, I won’t embarrass him by saying what, but he did include for me a copy of his local paper. I found this fascinating, such a great insight into another place. So I started a discussion on it on the Cybersoapbox, and asked if people from all over the world would lob me a copy of their local rag. Lot’s of them are too, should be great fun reading them.
Any chance of a copy of yours? The Llanelli Star, The Cornishman, Ivybridge News, or whatever would be most appreciated. I’m after copies for Saturday August the 2nd, as I want to compare and contrast local news from around the world. Thanks!
While I’m rabbiting on about newspapers, my local rag from back in Wales did an article on me the other day, just goes to show how desperate for news they are there.
I was chatting with my mate Jamesy, who I grew up with, just two doors apart, in Wales. Jamesy is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet, the best mate a guy could hope for. I was rubbing in the fact that we have tickets for all the Rugby World Cup matches being played in Canberra, and was thinking how great it would be to show Jamesy and his partner Rachel around here, World Cup or no World Cup. (This is a big fucking hint Jamesy!)
I thought it would be nice if I offered to show any geezers from my hometown, that were coming here for the World Cup, around in any case. So I wrote to the paper, the Llanelli Star, and offered my services as a guide.
They published my letter on the letters page, and the editor wrote back asking about how I got here, obviously smelling page filler.
I wrote back giving him a short brief on our internet romance, and he asked if a reporter could ring me. So one did.
The next week a nice article, with a few inaccuracies, (I never did rape that sheep), appeared in the paper, along with a photo of me. Nice.
No bugger wants to take up my services as a guide here though, they’re all to skint in Llanelli to come out for the cup. L
However, my cousin Dewi got back in touch with me. I haven’t seen him since my dad’s funeral, and it’s been great catching up with him, so not a waste at all!
I’ve thrown the article out, after me Mam going to all the trouble to mail me a copy, unfortunately, so I can’t scan it in here to bore you further with….
If anyone in Llanelli has it still, I’d love it again.J
Well that’s all from me folks, keep up your endless stream of in depth and interesting mails…As if…
Follow