Salt and corrosion

I've been to Brisbane, f-list. I'm back now.

The way the flight worked out, I ended up landing too late to go to either the ballet or the play that I had you vote on. Only when I checked in, Qantas' automatic checker-inner thing offered me an earlier flight, which I took, wishing I had bought a ballet ticket after all. Only then we were delayed for fifty minutes before leaving Melbourne, and for another fifty minutes before landing at Brisbane, so I ended up landing more or less when I was originally meant to. The plus side, though, was that my original flight was also delayed, so at least I landed earlier than I would have.

The bit of Brisbane that I saw seemed very nice. My hotel room overlooked some sort of sports ground. The restaurant where I ate my breakfast overlooked the river. I went for a walk along the riverside pathway, which is apparently an unusual thing to do, as I was the only one doing it. Just me and a lot of white ibis. I have a poor sense of direction, so I never dare go far in a strange city if I have to be somewhere by a particular time. I got cocky after walking in a straight line along the river and back again, so I decided to get a bit fancy and go around the block. It turned out that the block was weirdly shaped, though, so after walking in what I thought was a square, I wasn't back on the road I was expecting to be on. Then I noticed that I was standing near the sports ground (actually race track) I could see from my hotel window, so I used that to calibrate my inner compass and arrived back in time to clean my teeth, check out, and get to my accounting meeting. Phew, hey?

The reason the flight there was late was because Brisbane had had heavy rainfall that day, then I landed in Melbourne last night in time for the heaviest storm in years. It rained all the way home this morning, too. I don't want to sound paranoid, but I think the rain is following me. Novel as it was to wake up to daylight in Brisbane and spend the day working in short sleeves, arriving home to dark and wind and rain did make me think, this is weather.

When my flight home was boarding, after I was seated, a middle-aged man in a business suit got on and found his seat. He blocked the aisle to put his bag in the overhead compartment, the way everyone does. He lifted his bag above his head, only to find there was already a bag in the spot for his bag. He put his bag down and looked around, stunned. He lifted his bag again and started to put it on top of the bag already there. He realised that the bag already there was soft and would be squashed by his hard case, so he put his down again. He started to lift the other bag and slip his bag under it, then he stopped and put his bag on the ground and looked around, shocked that he had touched someone else's bag. He looked in the locker across the aisle from his. He looked in the locker in front of his. Eventually he found a space in the locker behind his. He went to his seat and started to sit. The man behind him stopped leaning on the seats and started to move. But the first man wasn't finished. Just before he made contact with the seat, he jumped up and went back to his bag. He unzipped a compartment and felt for something. It wasn't there. He unzipped another compartment and felt around. He unzipped a third compartment and found what he was after: his complimentary headphones, which he could only have picked up on the way onto the plane. He went back to his seat. He looked as though he was about to sit, but he didn't. He turned around and went back to his bag, this time to zip up the three compartments he'd just opened. Finally, he sat down, and the queue moved on with no-one telling him to hurry up or anything.

The bus from the airport stops at the train station, and my hotel for last night was directly across the road, the better to catch the early train home this morning. A wild-eyed man was standing outside the train station shouting how there was a woman in the Bible, he couldn't remember her name but she had homophobia, and then she met Jesus and he cured her of the bleeding that hadn't stopped for years. Someone walking past said to him, 'You mean haemophilia, mate,' and the man said, 'Yes, he cured that too.' I was waiting to cross the road to my hotel when a man stopped me and asked the way to Collins Street. I'd like to know what it is about me that gives the impression I know the way to go, because it's sending the wrong signal. Then again, the choice was between me and the wild-eyed Jesus fan, so, yeah. Anyway, even though I have a poor sense of direction, I *can* read street signs, so I sent him in the right direction. Job done.

I organised my mother to look after Percy while I was away. I though she was just going to pop in now and then, but she and John actually came in and stayed for two nights. 'We had to stay, to put the heater on for him,' my mother explained, 'so he didn't get cold, poor love.' Also, she's been heating his dinner in the microwave, 'just to take the chill off it'. What a spoilt cat.

( May books )

Happy New Year, f-list.

Yesterday I went to an exhibition called Invasion, which was props and costumes from various science-fiction films or TV shows. I saw an Ood and the Alien and discovered the answer to the age-old question: Am I taller than a Dalek? ( Answer )

There was also Matt LeBlanc's costume from Lost in Space. The internet tells me that Mr LeBlanc is 178 cm (5'10") tall. I don't want to suggest that the internet is wrong, f-list, but… it is wrong. I am 162 cm (5'3") and I was shoulder to shoulder with that mannequin. Granted, the costume may have been made of stretchy stuff, so perhaps it would also fit a taller person.

I meant to say, when I went to see The Hobbit, I stood next to a woman in the ticket queue who was telling everyone: 'You'll see there's a bit where they ride some shaggy horses, well, my friend owns them. I've ridden them. Thorin's pony!' She was quite excited by that.

Yesterday I went to the annual book fair in Port Fairy, where I was Very Strong and didn't buy anything. Nothing at all! Oh, except a loaf of bread, but I would have bought that wherever I was, so that didn't count.

It's a strange place, Port Fairy. If you were to imagine a 'sleepy fishing village', Port Fairy is the place you're imagining. It's quite lovely, really: lots of colonial bluestone cottages and a jolly little harbour and a population of salt-of-the-sea fishing types. All very quaint.

About twenty years ago, though, Port Fairy was Discovered. Now there are regular arts festivals - books, folk music, classical music, indigenous music - and all those original cottages are filled with day spas and guest houses and tea rooms (the few that come onto the market sell for the sorts of prices that make even capital city property owners go pale). It's all a bit over-rated, really, although I may be biased remembering when I was at school all the bogan kids came from Port Fairy and the high point of their cultural calendar was the New Year's Eve parade of home-made floats. I sort of miss that.

On the way home I took a quick spin around Tower Hill*, which is full of water for the first time in ages. There were black swans nesting on the lake and emus wading in the shallows and a kangaroo bounded across the road right in front of me. I must go back when the weather clears in a few weeks and actually climb the hill.

(By the way, the person who felt like a dried-up piece of roast goat without his morning coffee, from my poll a few days ago, was J.S. Bach.)



* If you happen to click on that link, the 'game' in 'state game reserve' means that the animals aren't domesticated. Not that they can be hunted. It's quite a crucial difference.

It's the first weekend in September, and that means Port Fairy's annual book fair is on. I made my way around the bay after breakfast and spent a top hour browsing the second-hand book sale in the Port Fairy hall. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, just whatever grabbed my attention. And what grabbed my attention was a 1967 book called Australia's Music: Themes of a New Society by Roger Covell, which will come in handy for my paper about the national anthem debate. This book was written ten years before the vexed national anthem issue was finally decided; here's what Roger had to say about the song that eventually won:

( I don't think he likes it )

I also saw a shelf containing twelve pristine copies of Law on Water: A History of the Port Philip Bay Water Police (1838-1900) and its Administrators, but, oddly, I wasn't at all tempted to buy even one copy.

After the sale, I went to an exhibition of original illustrations by Shaun Tan, which were brilliant (mostly from Tales from Outer Suburbia and The Arrival, if you're looking at that website). The entry price to the exhibition included a ticket in a raffle to win a signed print of one of the illustrations, which would be nice but I won't hold my breath. Then I took a stroll down to the civic green to watch some of the Barbara Cartland Hurl, in which competitors dress up like Barbara Cartland (well... they put on flowing pink robes and dodgy wigs; lurid pink lipstick optional) and read a short passage from one of that lady's many fine works, before throwing the book as far as they can (winners judged on artistic merit and distance thrown). I got there in time to see one lady throw her book like a javelin; it went way off course and only missed the woman running the local primary school's fund-raising sausage sizzle because she saw it in time and ducked.

Between Port Fairy and Warrnambool is dairy land and I saw plenty of calves on the way there and back, including one that was so new it was still struggling to its feet. On the way back, I went for a quick flit around the Tower Hill State Reserve. Thirty seconds in and I saw Mr Emu with a flock of stripey emu chicks straggling behind him, which was very cute. There were also plenty of fairy wrens and firetails darting about the road. All in all, a good morning.

And it was made even better when I got home and read the paper. There was an improbable story in it the other day about a family that was terrorised by a possum. A woman and her three children were apparently trapped in their car for three hours and had to call the police to come and rescue them. Possums are small, shy, nocturnal creatures, so it is extremely unlikely that one would spend an afternoon 'threatening' a family without some sort of provocation. We had a fun morning at work laughing at it. And we weren't the only ones: today's paper had a letter from a man declaring that it was the funniest thing he'd seen in the paper since the time they illustrated an article about destructive winds with a photo of an overturned rubbish bin. I wish I'd seen that.

Gosh, look at the date. Has it really been eleven days since I wrote an entry?

Do you have people in your life who think they're so special that things work in the opposite way for them? As in: "Oh, I don't wear sunscreen because it makes me burn more"? Or: "I took the anti-glare screen off my computer because I found it increased the glare"? Or: "I don't use my spam filter because I got more spam with it"? Or (and this was my favourite): "I don't wear my reading glasses because they made reading harder". All those things were said by the same person, too. I find it hard not to say, "Well, you're a bit backwards, aren't you?" I don't though, because it would sound mean and I don't mean to be.

I've been on the road lately, jaunting about on either side of the state border, and I committed a crime. I stopped in Penola in South Australia and thought it was as good a place as any to have lunch. So I unpacked my little box containing sandwiches, a muesli bar and a (dun dun DUN!) mandarin. Victorian fruit! Across the border! I actually have no idea what happens if they catch you with interstate fruit, or how they would recognise it from local fruit anyway, but, my goodness, I gulped that mandarin down. I even put the peel back in my lunch box to take back to a Victorian rubbish bin; far be it from me to infect South Australian fruit with my eastern germs.