The Great White (Surfer)

Did you catch the news stories about the shark attacks here over the past few days? This one has been one of the most popular stories on the Guardian for the last few days, and there was another on Sydney's Northern Beaches, with video.

I went surfing on Boxing Day evening at just after six, at Maroubra. At half six the lifeguards pull the flags up and stop patrolling the beach, and they gave a tannoy annoucement saying as much, advising people not to swim anymore but if they did it was at their own risk etc. It was roasting so there was still loads of folk swimming, and probably about 20 surfers. A couple of minutes later the tannoy came on again and I thought they were repeating the same thing, it's hard to tell when the wind's blowing and you're in the water. My hearing got a wee bit sharper when I heard "Would everyone please get out of the water, a shark has been spotted in the water near the beach". Cue loads of folk getting the fuck out the water rather sharpish. Luckily (especially given my skill level) I managed to catch a wave that I surfed pretty much all the way in to shore. Quite the motivator so it was... from hearing the message to being on the sand took less than ten seconds, though that was plenty time for all the wee snippets of info (like sharks don't like the taste of humans but they often mistake surfers in black wetsuits and the shape of boards for seals, that sharks hunt at dawn and dusk, punch them on the nose and poke them in the eye if you're lucky enough to get that close to them...) to go tearing through my mind.
After a somewhat short but 'invigorating' session I found myself suitably 'pumped' and took myself home. I hope that's as exciting as my Aussie-themed stories get! (Unless I meet Warney or summat, but you lot have more chance of that seeing as he's buying a gaff in Brighton and spends most of his time when he's over here in Melbourne).

Merry Christmas Harj!

I was shopping in town the other day and outside David Jones (the big 'House Of Fraser' posh-style department store) were these pair of eager young kids filled with the spirit of Christmas, selling foam antlers for charity on a balmy Christmas afternoon. Not something you'd normally expect to take you back to a flat in north London where one of your best mates is spending his days bouncing off the walls with boredom, dreaming up get-rich-quick schemes, and eating his weight in potato croquettes on a daily basis.

Merry Christmas chaps.

Merry go round

There's one bus on my route that's all done up in deccies for charity, with a wee collection tin at the front to encourage you to give generously to the local kids hospital. Done up inside and out like a Sheppey family's idea of four wheeled festive fun, it's a weird feeling getting the thing home: everyone's slightly caught off guard, and it brings about an air of cheery amusement that is certainly not usual for a commute, but then up creeps the feeling that these are pikey decorations, and you start to think that big blankets of cotton wool spread all over the place, thread-bare tinsel, half blown sets of fairy lights and wrinkly ballons on public transport doesn't feel like the most hygenic thing going.

On the decorations front this year, I myself have opted for wooden representations of tribal Christmas spirits hand-carved by blind Somalian orphans, which I feel saves this post from making me sound like a pompous middle-class twat.

Get hold of this...

If you want to waste an afternoon with a grin on your mooey check out the rest of the videos the lad (23Daves) has posted, absolute quality. you can find most of the crackers by typing in 'indie chart show' in the search box. (skip to 3.02 to go to the start of the chart countdown)

Why does The Beloved tune remind me of a Mansun song? I've googled it but it doesn't say they covered it. One of their songs does the same thing of namechecking a load of celebrities and sounds the same, but I can't find it or remember, maybe I just always thought it was a Mansun song because they sound the same.

Anyhow, on the other side of the scale, but still from the Chart Show, check this out, jesus christ... I think this might tickle some surpressed memory from this period when having a ponytail meant you were the George Best of snooker.


have a good weekend lads

HBDD

Bay 8 lads! BAY 8!

It wasn't my first choice but Universal are twats and have removed the ability to embed the video I was originally going to stick up, but that's made it a 2-for-1 Brucey so click here and let it all come flooding back once again...

I'm currently under the speaker in the meat room pretending to do my laces up, but I'll see you up the fish room for the tikka bites in a minute. Dave, no doubt, is in the khazi with the latest Andy McNabb.

What's your favourite current method of skiving? No one can see my screen and thankfully long gone are the days when the boss/chargehand could tell if you were working or not just by looking at you, so most of my loafing consists of looking at stuff online. Unsurprisingly enough, today has been mostly about looking up old videos on Youtube. I've got an absolute stormer coming for you soon...

Up to here

Well, The Charlies played their first ever gigs down under, and according to this review, Friday's Sydney show was a stormer. (Weird that the lad dong the review has probably never seen them before, and probably doesn't know they always finish with Sproston Green).

I remember being told about them coming here but then I forgot and by the time I remembered it had sold out. The Forum is a new venue next to the SCG at Fox Studios and holds 1500, though it feels like less. There were hardly any tickets on ebay or Gumtree (though plenty of 'tickets wanted' posts from Brits now living here) but on the Thursday I got a call from the one lad who had a spare and was taking offers, my $100 offer was a winner apparently (they'd cost $61). I arranged to meet him outside the venue at half seven the next night so was over the moon when he phoned up at half five on the night and said there'd been a mix up and there weren't a spare.

Suffice to say I did not have the last laugh and was not loving the Drake. Mind you, I managed to go home and not lose the rag at the missus for something/anything, so there ya go, I'm growing as a human.

The Artic Monkeys are playing side shows to the Big Day Out in January, they go on sale December 1st, and whilst I'm not overly fussed, I'm feeling the pain of missing out on seeing the charlies so there's a good chance I'll be at my computer come 8.59am on the first of next month.

God complex

Wee fat men who've seen better days, wearing tracksuits and sporting mullets, getting off planes from Spain - not an unusual sight at Glasgow airport, and if he had been cluctching a duty free carrier bag and a massive hangover (as well as third degree sunburn) he might have slipped unoticed onto the coach... then again, as the reports mention, he did cheat Engand out of the opportunity to crash out of the '86 world cup one round closer than they did, and that's always going to be celebrated by Scotsmen who care less for the upholding of the beautiful game's good name.

GAAHHHN YURSELL BIG YIN!

Movember

I've got an obvious reminder that I've been here a year now: it's Movember again. When I got here last year I thought the whole gaff had gone Hoxton when everyone was kicking about in shockin' mowsers. It was about two weeks before I learnt it was a charity thing. A charity thing which unfortunately gets hijacked by all the whoppers and numpties, so it gets a swerve.

Invicta rules the world

First thing, apologies for the slackness, got back straight into the new job, and with two seasons of The Wire on the go an'all something was going to suffer...

It means unvanquished in Latin, and apparently there's a bus company in Melbourne called Invicta, but as it's mainly the motto of Kent, along with the white horse of Kent on the flag, it's weird to see this across the road from my new office. It's the entrance to the old Fosters brewery (on Broadway in Ultimo, near Central Station), which they've recently flattened and the ground is currently one big demolition/building site (it's pretty much in the centre of town and presumably the land's worth a ton more as something other than a brewery, probably sexy offices, the 21st-century equivalent of a factory).

I saw it for the first time last year when I was down at the uni (UTS) for a job interview and thought I was seeing things.

I'm guessing Fosters have some link to Kent? Whatever it is, it's a nice reminder that I have plenty of links with the garden of England too.

UPDATE: I've found the reason - it's on this wikipedia page

MD30

Oooossshh-ah!

A lad at my work took this picture on Monday morning, this truck was seen scudding round the CBD ushering in a cheerful start to the week for the ex-pat community in Sydney. There's slightly less of them here than there are arsed-off Aussies, which made it all the funnier. (click on the pic to get a bigger version, this was taken on the corner of George Street and Bridge Street). The story's on The Current's website here

Big licks & scissor kicks

Went to see Paul Weller at the Enmore Theatre last night and he was stunning. Best gig I've been to in a long time, which ain't saying as much as it used to as I ain't been to tons since Arcade Fire at the same place in January, but he banged out the classics and the gaff was going potty. Played That's Entertainment, Eton Rifles, Shout To The Top and Town Called Malice as well as all the solo staples, of which Whirlpool's End was probably my pick.
Needless to say the place was 80% British lads, and when I say lads obviously I was one of the youngest there. The last time he was in Australia was 23 years ago so there were quite a few Aussies who'd never seen him before. As an experience of British culture it was better than going to the football on Saturday, the mighty A-League starting with the 'big' Sydney vs Melbourne clash. Needless to say it was 0-0 and a dire match, but there was a bit of aggro both in and outside the ground before the match, so things are slowly improving! 16,000 ain't a terrible crowd either considering the Swans were playing at home against top of the table Geelong at the same time in the Aussie Rules.

DB31

The Aussie media's opinion...

"He's had the most dreadful luck of any top golfer in the history of the game"... is how the Channel 9 news tackled the 'he choked' viewpoint. I can't wait for the Olympics...

Pope's in town

It's one of the world's biggest Catholic knees up this week in Sydney. The pope's in town, as are about 500,000 nutters pilgrims, swarming round the city and having whole sections of the gaff shut down so that they can celebrate fairy stories told by paedoes. It's virtually a pincer movement on my gaff, with Centennial Park on one side holding a huge weekend rally and mass, and a load of other religious tosh going on at the racecourse on the other side of me.

Your average punter isn't loving the commuter chaos, the quater of a billion dollars that it's costing the tax payer to host the god-botherers, nor the new laws that have been drafted in to surpress any vocal opposition or protest of any kind. And with the rather large and (quite literally) fruity population of alternative lifestyle types that call the city home, there's been a few rows about them classing homosexuality as an abomanation etc

I work on George Street, the main street in the city centre, and that's the one that's been closed to traffic, there were tens of thousands of them walking past the office today banging drums, strumming guitars, singing, and generally acting like they were on the way to the Municipal Buildings having just beaten Wigan in one of the greatest play-off finals ever. Madness.

In a way, it must be quite cool believing all that pony, 'cause it's off to Sydney for a holiday, getting blessed by the top man, and generally thinking that everything in the world is wonderful and right. Apart from poofs, obviously. They're with you on that one Handa.

That's the end of Big Brother here

That's the axe fallen on Big Brother over here in it's current guise, which as you can imagine is quite a big story in the news and industry circles. Is this the first country to sack it off? The other networks are having a sniff, but it's the first I've heard where someone's gone "nah sod it, we ain't doing it anymore, it ain't worth it."

They paid Pamela Anderson seven figures to go in for a while last week, but that must have been a last roll of the dice, and they've now got 190 hours of air time to fill next year.

Rich or happy?

Inspired by some of the people round here who strive for highly-paid jobs that would make any sane man weep, I'm wondering what you chaps think about money vs. happiness. Now obviously up to a certain point money creates happiness, but would you choose a job you liked doing and paid you enough to live on, go on holiday, have a pint a couple of nights a week etc, or a job you didn't like doing that paid twice as much? Say 45k a year or 90k maybe? It doesn't matter how much you currently like your job or earn - in this scenario you'd be getting twice as much for a job that made you unhappy over a job that made you happy and paid enough to live on. I'm going to pre-empt the "I'd do the crap one for a couple of years then buy a pub" answer by saying you can't, you'd be too far down the career path to switch, you'd have bought a big house and a flash motor on tick so couldn't leave. Bit like real life in that respect maybe...
I was thinking about it because here it's all 'thrust' this and 'achieve' that, and all the jobs above me look worse than the one I've got whilst a couple of weeks ago I was offered a cool job at Universal Music, looking after artist websites, updating the news and info, interviewing the bands, sorting out downloads and merch, all the free gigs and CDs you can carry... which paid pretty much half of what I'm on now. It wasn't a tough decision because half of what I'm on now wouldn't be enough to live on in Africa, never mind anywhere else, and presumably only some recent graduate still living at home can afford to take it (if they were a bit more forward thinking they'd up the cash and attract someone who was shit-hot at this internet caper, but that's anther story), but it got me thinking.

One of those ones / Glasto

It's a sit in the toilet sort of day. I properly can't be arsed. Dunno what it is, I haven't got a hangover, but I'm muchos underwhelmed with this whole work thing today. Still, that means I'm updating this thing, which makes a change.

Is anyone going to Glastonbury this year? The best they can do with the weather report is that 'it won't be as bad as last year' ?! Fook me, they'd have to cancel it if it was looking like it might be, no? Which raises an interesting question – when would it be? Personally it'd be when the Kaiser Chiefs were headlining and The Fratellis were on just before them. The Fratellis are playing here in August and there's a lot of chatter and excitement about said gigs. Yep, they still like their rock very uncomplicated here, mind you when I went to see them at Brixton Academy last year, at the start of a three night sell-out run (free tickets, the worst gig I'd seen in a very long time), the crowd there were going bananas an'all, so there y'are.

I'm much more into the new one from The Music. Took me a couple of listens, and I thought it was a bit straight ahead and electronic to begin with, which it is compared to the old stuff, but it's a grower and there's some cracking tunes on it. My favourite at the moment is 'The Price', which is an extra track on the digipak/special edition. I've only read recently about his drug and booze grief, and his stint in rehab, though with tunes called 'the spike' and 'drugs' it's not too subtle.
You know his problem of course? He's never done a propers days work in his life. A few weeks down ADL makes men of us all. Or stick him in an office for years and let him flirt with the ecstacy that it reading the Metro in the shitter.

Did anyone go to the Isle Of White festival? Apart from the obvious examples (Ian Brown), I thought the line up for that was a total shocker an'all. Are festivals trying to discourage people these days?

Heard the new Verve track? Pish. It's the soundtrack to buying a well designed yet reasonably priced Swedish coffee table.

How're the Euros going?

How's the football going? I'm reading about the results online, and I saw the Holland goals the other night, but apart from that, I've seen nowt. The games are on normal telly here, but they're slap bang in the middle of the night, where a late night or an early rise are no use. In a piece of scheduling genius that I can only put down to some dark commercial pact I'm unaware of, the highlights package on terrestial channel SBS is on at 5.30pm every night, surely the exact time when most normal people are right in the middle of their commute. The swines. It finishes at half six, which is normally when I walk through the door.
I could Sky+ it (Foxtel IQ it) if I had Sky+, but in a move that'll shock you, the fuckers are as bad out here as they are back home and we've been trying to get them to come and install it for weeks. They came wih the wrong stuff the first time, didn't tell us they were coming the second, and trying to book a third that suits all parties is... well, you know the drill.

The big sporting news here tonight is that Queensland pulled their socks up from the first best-of-three State Of Origin clash and murdered NSW in the second. All to play for in the decider on July 2nd.

MF31

Swan Dive

Went to my first AFL game on Sunday there, and saw the mighty Sydney Swans take a commanding lead in the first quarter against the Western Bulldogs (from Melbourne, as most of the Aussie rules teams are), only to fall apart and get hammered for the remaining three.
I'd been wanting to go for a while, as loads of people go on about it, but watching it on TV I thought it looked absolute pelt. But that's exactly what everyone tells you - it don't work on the telly, you've got to be able to see the whole pitch and get involved live to capture the full flavour. They were right, it is much better than say, watching rugby league live, where the little hand-offs and shimmies are easier to view on telly than they are from the thirtieth row of an 80,000 seater stadium (I went to see the opening game of the NRL at Homebush Olympic Stadium/The ANZ with Ste. It was the Rabbitohs Vs Roosters and wasn't much cop live). The Swans play most of there matches at the SCG, there was 29,000 there, and it's a bit like watching a weird mix of table football and ping pong played by 16-to-a-team giant nutters. Each quarter is half an hour long and with half time and breaks games last about two and a half to three hours. There's an Irish lad who plays for the Swans who used to be a Gaelic Football pro, and next year they're doing a cross code game, with the Swans playing Dublin at Aussie Rules in Dublin, then coming back to Sydney and playing them at Gaelic Football. Weird, but there's so many micks here it's not surprising. Go down Coogee at the weekend and all you see is pissed up, lobster-pink micks generating huge volts of static electricty in those nylon gaelic football tops. In a recent report the Coogee Bay Hotel was the second most violent pub in New South Wales (after a Hells Angels pub in in the middle of nowhere).

Read the match report here. I went with Luke, who's a Leicester fan. Quite fitting then that the Swans took a beasting and stood proud next to the Gills and the Foxes in failure.

Boris Johnson? Marvin Gaye?!

...What is going on? I leave and two minutes later all hell's breaking loose! Seriously, tell me none of you actually voted for the clown? Dave, I don't want to single you out, more just make sure that you definitely didn't? Maybe being so far away I missed the subtleties of the campaign, and rather than being a right-wing, retarded, mentally unhinged Eton Old Boy, Boris is actually a man of the people with his finger on the pulse. Big Ken's a bit of a crook an'all, and the congestion charge and the price of the tube's a joke, but still, who'd have thought for a minute that the 21st century's Screaming Lord Such would beat him? I'm spewing, it's like it's going back to the '80s when Essex boy cab drivers from Chingford used to love Maggie and all the wonderful things she'd done for the country. And he's going to be in charge for the Olympics eh? Christ.

Can one of you shed any light? What's the theories? I'm at a loss, and I guess it is because I'm way over here.

Moran

As far as famous people go there was Kevin Moran in the '80s, but in real life I don't think I ever met anyone else with the same surname. That's not the same here, as Australia's most famous crime family in recent years were the Morans (second ever only to the Kelly family of Ned fame, for a double barrelled coincidence). From the late '90s and up to a couple of years ago there were gangland wars in Melbourne with that family in the middle of it, seeing as they had a lot of the drug trade tied up, and Aussies still love their pills (and then some… there was loads of kids mushed at Interpol when I went to see them!). The biggest show by far on the box just now is called Underbelly, a drama with loads of old Neighbours bods in it about the Morans and the gangland murders. Because there's still trials happening from all the naughty business that went on then it's been banned in Victoria, but everyone else is lapping it up (and there's a roaring trade in pirate DVDs in Victoria). The Aussie word for a chav is Bogan, and Underbelly's been nicknamed the 'Bogan Sopranos'. Until now every time I made a booking or call centre phonecall I'd be going "Moran, m-o-r-a-n" but everyone knows the name now. Obviously at this point I’d like to say I also get treated with a new degree of respect and fear, but when you give off such an air of understated menace like I do there’s no where left to go…

DS31

HH31

Got A Drum

G'day chaps. Apologies for the lack of updates on here, work's been requiring me to do actual work and time away from the desk has seen us fighting round Sydney trying to secure somewhere to live. But! We've finally settled on a shabby, bright pink dump in the middle of nowhere! I jest... it's a nice little detached house in Randwick, five minutes from Bronte Beach, five minutes from Coogee, and about ten to Bondi. Work is half an hour on the bus in the morning, which ain't half as nice as getting the ten minute ferry across the harbour, but then living on the north shore brought with it the promise of regular visits from the mother in law so that was ruled out at a very early stage. Whittling down our options from the 300+ Sydney suburbs wasn't easy, and at first I was all about getting a sexy flat on the harbour and being able to walk to work, but we got this gaff in the end because: Sexy flats on the harbour are small, you can get a lot more for your money if you head towards the beaches a bit, and because there's a housing shortage here, it's a bunfight for every one of them. We saw this tiny terrace in Paddington, which is probably one of the best areas to live, but it was tiny, expensive, and had an outside toilet. No joke, the crapper was in a shed in the back yard. It had a bathroom, with a bath and a sink, but if it's three in the morning and you've had a skinful, you were either peeing in the sink or unbolting the back door and walking face first through a load of fresh spider's webs to get to the dunny.

This didn't put many people off. There's so few gaffs to rent here they do it like buying a gaff - they have a fifteen minute 'open inspection' time on a Saturday, when someimtes (again, no joke) there would be thirty couples outside a gaff waiting to get in, and as soon as they were in would start offering up huge budles of cash and start to get into bidding wars with others about how much over the rental price they were willing to pay. You know me, I thrive on that stuff, offering to pay a hundred dollars over the asking price per week for a gaff with an outside shitter is right up my Straße.

Another factor after living below the Thai mail-order bride and her mad family for the last year in Islington was neighbours, so when we saw that we could get a detached house that was near the beaches and centennial park, we were all over it. It's a bit quiet and residential, I dunno where the nearest decent boozer is, but I reckon it'll be a sound. The gmail map is here

Listen Up...

It's still there! This is only going to matter to Mick, Harj and Dan, but I was going down Liverpool Street the other day on my way to the Darlo Bar after the cricket and saw the record shop you chaps used to live next to. Still going in these days of downloads, but it had a sign in it's window that made think: I didn't know if it meant the shop was for sale, or if it was a sign playing on the name of the shop and advertising a record collection for sale - what do you reckon? Oh to run a record shop and just hang out eh! Proper High Fidelity stuff.

Test-y Indians

Went to the SCG at the weekend and saw Australia vs India with my cricket-mad mate Luke. This test got me properly sucked into the cricket, it had the lot: majestic centuries from Tendulkar as he bows out of playing in Australia, Andrew Symonds pulling a Beefy and scoring runs and taking wickets, winning man of the match and copping racist abuse for his trouble, and then Michael Clarke pulling off a pretty unbelievable win with three wickets in five balls to snatch the victory with eight minutes and seven balls left. Thank christ then, that I went on Saturday, the fourth day being easliy the most boring of the whole test. Matthew Hayden got a century by playing some very average cricket, and whilst Harbhajan went potty when he got Ponting out for 1, and Anil Kumble should have had a hat trick, I turned up after the first and was on a piss-and-beer run for the second! Had good seats mind (I took that photo when they were at tea). The Bhaji Army were sitting just below us and to the right, though the majority of their singing was being led by a pissed-up fat white lad with a northern accent who copped plenty of "piss off home pommie" comments. Predictably enough he wasn't really white either, more a deep shade of angry pink. The ticket also gets you in free to see NSW vs Queensland in the Twenty20 tomorrow night at the ANZ Stadium in Homebush (formerly the Telstra Stadium, and the Olympic Stadium before that). Glenn McGrath's playing his last game for the Speedblitz Blues and I've never been to a night game or a Twenty20. Apparently everyone just gets leathered. Brilliant.