100DaysToOffload

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What I Did on my Holidays, Part Two

Published by Matthew Davidson on Tue, 15/02/2022 - 3:05pm in

Part one here.

You would think there'd be somewhere open for breakfast in Chinatown on a Saturday morning. You'd be wrong. What are noodles for, if not for breakfast?

I wanted to pick up a hat from Paddy's Markets, just behind my hotel, before setting out. Apart from fruit and veg stalls, they're not open till ten o'clock, so I and my bare old bonce brave the ultraviolet unprotected.

At the north end of Chinatown is Sydney Trades Hall, nowhere near as grand as the Melbourne one. The ground floor used to be the Trades Hall Inn, but no longer. I love political activism that you can do from a pub. In here I used to sip beer and nod earnestly in the cause of stopping the introduction of the GST (Australia's VAT), and the Iraq War (or at least Australia's involvement therein).

On the heels of these stunning triumphs for the mildly-organised left, I remember somebody asking Ian Rintoul what he thought the next urgent issue would be, and he said it was refugee rights. I found this hard to credit. Who on earth could object to taking in a few refugees every now and then? In my defense, it was a slightly more innocent time.

Further up (latitudinally) and down (geologically, as the land descends to meet the harbour) Sussex Street, things get grimly prosperous.

It's all grand gaudy f-off facades, designed to destroy the streetscape, plus the grimy parking garages of posh hotels disgorging their contents with a clanking of grates and barriers. It's as ugly as sin. From my own much more modest hotel, you at least step out onto a living street. Nobody walks down here. It's death by wealth.

Nothing to see but the occasional ghost of a more productive past. I wonder what these buildings were for. I used to work down in this part of town thirty years ago and probably walked past them hundreds of times, but I can't remember.

I get to Circular Quay to meet my family with enough time to purchase/regret a breakfast snack at McDonalds. By the water, the buskers have yet to set up, but there are huge plastic tigers which I just realise I've been seeing all over town. Oh, right; it's Chinese New Year. I don't think I look at the things you're supposed to look at. Quite pleased about that.

The family thing works out as family things do. It's nice. I'm not used to seeing all these people without my dad in the background, either benignly amused or becoming tetchy about things not progressing according to schedule. From here on, it looks like I'm standing in the background by myself. I miss him.

Formalities done, we've enough time before lunch to wander round the Rocks Markets, which seems to be suffering from Covid. Not a lot of international tourists, and pretty slim pickings from a reduced number of stalls. Can't find a hat.

There's a stall selling coins. I expect to find a selection of pennies, ha-pennies, and shillings — Mum says she still has a huge jar of them at home — but holy cow! Vespasian! Trajan!

If I had a few hundred bucks I had no use for (ha!), I would be tempted. But then my inner Indiana Jones kicks in: These belong in a museum! Ideally, in a huge glass pickle jar.

My family is chemically gaseous. That is to say they expand to occupy the available space. We've a booking for lunch, but now it's down to my brother's teenage girls and their mobile phone skills to corral everybody. I notice with some envy that a couple of nephews have been lounging in the Mercantile Hotel for a while.

We have lunch at the German restaurant which nearly twenty years earlier hosted my wedding reception. A bit of icing on top of the grief cake just for me. Still, sausages and sauerkraut and a couple of glasses of quite agreeable rosé later, I'm feeling bulletproof.

Half the party head for market stalls promising gelato and chocolate, and the other half head for the Orient Hotel. I'm with the latter, sipping beer at a picnic table on the street, getting sunburnt. Wish I had a hat.

They're all going to miss their express train back down to the Shire. Not everybody makes the rendezvous point back at the quay at the appointed time. My sister volunteers to find/join her two errant sons at whatever pub they happen to be holed up in — no rush; still plenty of time. My father would be beside himself at this stage. Greatly amused, I give the assembled remnants of my family a cheery wave, and I'm free to enjoy a whole afternoon and evening in the big city, Mary Tyler-Moore style.

I just need a hat to fling in the air.

I make a beeline for the Paragon Hotel, the former public bar of which is now the McDonalds where I had my self-inflicted breakfast. A quarter of a century ago I went in there on a Sunday afternoon and was surprised to hear Bix Beiderbecke playing as muzak. There was a jazz band setting up in the back corner, so I stayed.

They were blistering. Hard-edged 1920s/30s Chicago-style jazz. Absolutely magical. I was mesmerised by the clarinet player, a strikingly tall, thin, grey, birdlike fellow who didn't seem to register that he had an audience at all, and just fidgeted away in his own little world. He's surely long dead now, like the pub. So it goes. The half of the back bar where they played is now for gambling zombies, and the tiny slice of pub remaining between that and McDonalds is pretty dismal. I sit outside and watch the Sydney Bin Chooks going about their business, all thin and birdlike with long black protuberances.

At the Matrix Woman In Red Fountain in Martin Place, there are white limos reversing off the street and up to the fountain. A bunch of burly blokes in white suits get out and prepare for photographs with the cars. There's also a young woman, in a big white dress. Not sure why she's there. She's holding a bunch of flowers. I expect a bit of skin and a posy is a nice counterpoint to the manliness of the cars and the blokes. Very tasteful.

  At my old beloved Edinburgh Castle on Pitt Street, I employ the soon-to-be-fashionable medium of the pub lavatory selfie to immortalise the harrowing (for even the most firm-footed drunk) stairs leading down to the gents. Once upon a time I opened the door at the top of these stairs, saw a crumpled body at the bottom, concerned people gathered around, and heard approaching sirens. Even I, dim as I am, almost immediately clocked to what had just transpired. Thought I'd best go back to my beer and give it a minute.

I take some more self-consciously zany selfies (are there any other kind?) on my way back up to Haymarket, as I'm now feeling the Mary Tyler-Moore vibe.

It doesn't even occur to me that I should plug myself into a podcast, lest one or two of my remaining brain cells get accustomed to slacking off, which I can ill afford. There's enough to see and hear to keep my synapses crackling.

There's a vast, interconnected floating world of clean, gleaming shopping malls running the length of the inner city that I don't enter. In the nineties I became concerned about the state of dereliction that the city appeared to be falling into. As I only ever went into pubs, bookshops, record shops and newsagents, I didn't really notice the metastisizing private-public space below, above, and beside the public space. I was conscious of it insofar as it all linked into the underground railway station concourses, but at some point I realised that it was possible to walk the roughly eight kilometres from Central Station to near Circular Quay without ever seeing daylight, or a homeless person. Now I suppose there are several routes.

So many homeless people, obviously long term. The mattresses, tents, etc. are new to me. Fortunately there are so many derelict shop doorways and alcoves now that the beautiful people live in their floating world. One could get really settled in as a homeless person in Sydney, were it not for the roaming packs of Nazis in the wee small hours. Damn. There goes that Mary Tyler-Moore feeling.

Finally get back to Paddy's Markets, thinking I'll pick up a hat and maybe some cheap clothes. It could always be relied upon for a Bob Marley t-shirt, or something similarly subversive.

  Woah! Okay, well. I'd never say never, but not for everyday, and certainly not for visiting my mother tomorrow morning. Apart from the range of mild fetish gear, which is new, Paddy's Markets is a shadow of its former self, but then it always was.

I did however find a hat. It hurt to put it on. Definitely sunburned. Went upstairs (through the mall) to the Market City Tavern, which I should hate because it's so artificial and built for — rather than just retrofitted for — gambling, but I do love the balcony and its glorious view of nothing in particular. I shall have to carry on up George Street to Broadway to get some cheap clothes, because unlike all the teenage boys I work with in my supermarket, I cannot bear to wear the same shirt two days running.

On the way out I take the time to pose for another pub lavatory selfie.

These are the hottest new thing, honestly. I'll be selling NFTs shortly.

If that's not a natural cliffhanger, I don't know what is. Will he get the shirt, or turn up for morning tea at Mum's a bit whiffy? How bad is the sunburn, and what will the morning shower feel like? (Spoiler alert: it really hurt.) And will the latex Wonder Woman costume fit comfortably?

Continued in part three.

 

 

What I Did on my Holidays, Part One

Published by Matthew Davidson on Wed, 09/02/2022 - 4:11pm in

TL;DR: I drank. A lot.

We begin on Friday morning at Sawtell station. Yes, that's all of it. No bustling phalanx of porters, no guards or ticket collectors, no dining room serving Devonshire teas, no passengers apart from yours truly. This is not a consequence of Covid; this is normal.

In fact I'm astonished to find that I'm actually able to get the train, rather than a replacement bus service, as was the case for my last trip down to Sydney. That was a nightmare. A tin can full of hillbillies, knees hard up against the seat in front of you, a dozen excuse mes, sorrys, and thank yous between your seat and the stinking lavatory. Thank God I don't have to go through that again.

The train arrives dead on time, stopping for nobody but little old me. I'm drunk with the power to halt an entire train single-handed.

There are some cows to look at. Which is nice. You don't get cows from a car window now that it's all motorway between Coffs and Sydney.

I catch up on podcasts. Really enjoyed this one with Bill Mitchell wandering off core Modern Monetary Theory into politics a bit more than usual.

Not that many people in my carriage, so I'm not bumping elbows with anybody. No screaming babies, and the only yammering hillbillies are some distance away and only going as far as Port Macquarie for a music festival. No prizes for guessing what genre of music it is.

The situation appears altogether too good. I'm prepared for the nine hour trip: a packet of pork scratchings and three plastic soft drink bottles. One is cool from the fridge, another cold from a few hours in the freezer, a third frozen overnight in the freezer. Your classic alcoholics' Goldilocks strategy: take each one in series when it's just right.

My patented blend: cardboard box wine, a splosh of fruit juice to disguise the fact that it's box wine, and if I'm feeling fancy perhaps some herbal tea but otherwise just water to get it down to somewhere approaching beer strength. I hear that in Mediterranean countries it's common to drink watered down wine with meals. Obviously not good quality wine, but with the horrible stuff I can afford to drink, there are no rules.

Well, there is one rule: no BYO drink on NSW Transport vehicles. But that rule obviously only applies to amateurs, not responsible professionals. Moreover, as I trust I need not stress with too much stressiness: nine hours! There is too much Australia. We need a good tailor to take it in. It's really quite baggy.

While looking for an unoccupied lavatory, I find that the front two carriages are completely empty. It actually is a wonder that I'm not on a bus.

It's gone noon, and the entertainment value of the cows is diminishing, so I crack open bottle number one. Bracing, but not technically abusive. You would be within your rights to demand your money back, but no court in the land would award you damages.

We stop to let a northbound passenger train go past. There's only a single track running along the East coast of Australia, and few sidings where trains can pass each other. Accordingly, everything is very tightly scheduled. If your train is more than a few minutes late, it's missed it's "window" and is obliged to make way for everything else. So you get later, and later, and later.

As a natural pessimist, I assumed that in the unlikely event that the train turned up at all, that this would be the case (as it had been on previous trips). From which it logically follows that the scheduled eight PM arrival time in Sydney could only be the product of pure unicorns-and-rainbows thinking. So I had the perfect excuse to book a hotel room rather than change trains for a further fifty minute suburban trip down to the family estate in the Shire.

The ostensible purpose of my journey is to partake in a solemn ceremony involving scattering my late father's ashes from the deck of a Sydney Harbour water taxi. I'm not entirely convinced that feeding the fish of Port Jackson is the sort of thing he'd have been enthusiastic about — at least not in this capacity — but my mother seems to think it a good idea.

I really haven't a clue about the propriety of such things, so I'm more than happy to go along with whatever wiser heads than mine consider appropriate, but I would rather not go back to the old house. I stayed a few days there on my last Sydney trip a couple of years ago as a sort of dare to myself, wandering about the unpaved suburban streets where I spent my childhood, thinking that as a forty-[mumble] year old grown-up I was by now surely immune to the enervating effects of that nasty, violent, ignorant, bigoted environment. (Not the house itself, mind; my parents are/were almost entirely harmless. It's the ghosts milling around it that I cannot exorcise.) I ended up in a massive funk which persisted for weeks afterward.

Also I'm now of a certain age, and I appear to have gone through The Change. I get terribly emotional about things. I must say it's quite unexpected and embarrassing. In this condition I couldn't stand spending even a couple of nights in a house where my father would now consistently fail to be where I expect to find him. I'd be a wreck. So I told my mum that, on the grounds that I would be feeling very much like just flopping into bed on arriving at Sydney Central, rather than embarking on a further long commute, a hotel made perfect sense. I'd meet everybody in town the next day, and pop down for a visit the day after. She seemed satisfied with that excuse.

In fact things are going altogether too well. The train remains stubbornly on schedule. As we get into Wauchope, mobile phone signal returns, and I get an SMS. The train for my return journey has been cancelled and replaced with a coach service. Ah, equilibrium has been restored.

Quaint little country towns flash by, as do the podcasts. The Something About the Beatles podcast has a few episodes of first reactions to the Peter Jackson doco based on the footage and audio recorded in January 1969 for the vague project which the following year became the film/album Let it Be. Titled the Musician’s Get Back, I expected the podcast to be a trainspotter's guide to vintage musical/audio equipment and a complete yawn, but it's (mostly) about group dynamics and those four (or five, or six, or seven) guys who love each other, despite and because of everything. I get quite teary (The Change again - and maybe the wine).

The country around the Hunter Valley is gorgeous. You don't see any of it from the motorway. Rolling green hills which put one in mind of James Herriot and the brothers Farnon rolling up their sleeves and startling a cow or three.

There's a limit to how much of a fifty gram bag of pork scratchings one should consume in one hit if one is to avoid nausea (for the record, it's about ten grams), so I go to the dining car for a sausage roll fresh from the drawer it's been stewing in since dawn, and a can of alleged beer.

It's 330ml of mid-strength lager. Australia likes it's beer flavourless, but this is really the apotheosis of the antipodean brewers' art. To all intents and purposes, the can was already empty when it was sealed. I'll refrain from citing the brand so as to avoid a stampede of connoisseurs rushing to not experience it.

Eight dollars! Eight flipping dollars! Just for the zero point nine standard drinks, then another five for the sausage roll!

I love the name Fassifern. I think it should be a term of mild rebuke. i.e. "Oh, don't be such a fassifern!" You instantly understand what it means by the way it sounds. Never been there. The place, I mean; I've probably been a fassifern for most of my life.

Appear to have mobile signal for most of the time now, which was definitely not the case on previous trips. I briefly wonder if it's because of all the Gates/Soros 5G microchips in my bloodstream, but my old phone is only 4G. Did they stealthily vaccinate my phone as well? The bastards!

So I exchange a few texts with Ruben, which helps pass the time.

Newcastle appears to be encroaching on Gosford, or vice versa, as there is now rather little open space between them. From here on you're essentially in the outer suburbs of Sydney. I used to work with people who would commute into the city from this distance.

As there's more built environment, I'm getting more alert my my surroundings. Multi-story buildings! Public transport! Pedestrian crossings! Pedestrians! All the sinful delights that are foreign and abhorrant to the denizens of Coffs Harbour.

Indulge me for a moment: Imagine being confronted with a vista of the most glorious natural splendour. Gravity-defying geological formations. Waterfalls, ravines, rivers and streams. Lush, luxuriant plant life of unimaginable variety; herds of gigantic herbivorous mammals, placid and graceful; gorgeously sleek and agile predators; eye-wateringly colourful birds soaring and swooping to pluck impossibly bejeweled insects from mid-air. And just off to one side a single squalid shack in the distance, with a thin wisp of smoke rising from an open fire.

I've tried several times, in conversation with self-avowed misanthropic nature lovers, to persuade them that in that situation they could not stop their eyes being drawn to that shack. They refuse to concede this, but I am certain that we are attuned to seeking signs of the presence of other human beings. It tickles us in a way we cannot resist. We are homo sociali. I say this as the most introverted person I know. (Not that I know that many people, what with being the most introverted person I know.)

As a lifelong socialist and an amateur macroeconomist, I should abhor metastasising high rise and construction cranes on the horizon as indicators of neoliberal welfare-for-the-rich and impending economic collapse, but my eyes widen and pulse quickens at the sight of them.

Then suddenly Sydney. Oh, Eddy Avenue! How I've missed you!

A block and a half away from Central Station is George Street and the art deco Great Southern Hotel. They gave me the perfect room for a web developer who doesn't like to be found.

If I ever own a place to live, I'm having hotel carpeting throughout.

Now, about that plan to collapse straight into bed… Sod that!

I drop my bags and head up George Street, or "SYDNEY'S STREET OF FEAR", as the Daily Telegraph memorably characterised it on a front page thirty years or so ago. Utter poppycock! I used to practically live on George Street when it was a solid strip of pubs, bookshops, junk food outlets, and video game arcades, and I've never felt so safe anywhere before or since.

A lot of pubs are now derelict due to the current crisis, or the previous crisis, or in anticipation of the next crisis. The first promising target from a nostalgia point of view is Cheers. In the late 80s it was a modest subterranean dive for people who wanted to avoid going to work or going home, but now it occupies several levels with huge sports-screens for vaping gamblers.

I buy a beer on the ground level and head downstairs to the den where so many of my brain cells sacrificed their all so that I might… well, "live" is perhaps too strong a word. At the bottom of the stairs there's a table with a couple of smiling callow youths who explain that the venue is closed to the general public for a private function. Spread out before them are a few open binders full of things in plastic pockets which appear alarmingly collectable. The youths are anxious to explain the nature of the function, saying that for a nominal cover charge I would be most welcome to join them.

It's at this point that my friend Ruben would have leapt eagerly into the fray, spending the whole night having a whale of a time, aquiring an exhaustive knowledge of a hitherto unfamiliar subculture and a bundle of lifelong friends. Alas, I am not that kind of person, so I make my excuses and head back upstairs.

I carry on uphill, past where there are no longer book liquidation stores, video game arcades, and junk shops all blaring the same tape loop of this one guy bunging on a cockney barrow boy accent, promising "You'll never pay full price again!"

Still, it's home.

One block east of the town hall is the Criterion. I remember in the 90s flicking through a guide to Sydney pubs which said it was the place to go if one happened to be a connoisseur of bulbous red noses. Is that supposed to be a bad thing? It's since been acquired by a particularly noxious pub chain who turned it into just another sports bar, but at least they haven't (yet) smashed out all the tiles and bricked in the leaded windows. Also, it's gone quite pink. Which is nice.

In more affluent times, I would never dream of staying out in town to drink on a Friday or Saturday night, these being the nights when the amateurs would spoil the atmosphere with their uncouth behaviour. However I've only a few days and want to make the most of it.

It used to be common for big hotels to have a number of bars in the one complex. I used to quite like the Tudor Bar on the first floor of the Hilton Hotel in Sydney. As the name suggests, it was all vacuum moulded fake timber and horse brasses, but easy on the eyes and a surprisingly cheap no-nonsense boozer for those in flight from reality.

Alas, there is no longer a first floor of the Hilton Hotel. It's been blasted away and replaced by a vast, glass-fronted empty space saying in effect "We don't need to make money from this real estate, but it amuses us to prevent others from doing so. So if you enjoy setting fire to hundred dollar notes in front of homeless people, this is the place for you." In that respect, it's like the similarly cavernous and glazed Apple store across the road containing a sparse smattering of lecterns with elegantly designed flat things propped up on them.

The one bar which the Hilton Hotel still appears to maintain is the Marble Bar. As the name suggests, every surface is at least faux-marble. It's like swimming in a Jackson Pollock kaleidescope. This is not a place for drinking in. It's a place for briefly gawping at and promptly fleeing. In my day it was pretty consistently empty. I supposed it was kept on as a gaudy monument to 1970s excess. Perhaps middle managers and their secretaries found it useful as a place to meet unobserved, I don't know.

Tonight it is packed with coked-up Hooray Henrys and Henriettas.

If ever there's a portent of an economic bubble about to burst, this is it. In my Sawtell finery, which to the untrained eye is indistinguishable from Sydney hobo rags, I feel distinctly unwelcome. As tradition demands, I gawp and flee.

A stroll past more shuttered venues once dear to my heart, and I find myself near the harbour, in the financial district. Knowing there's little joy to be had here I turn around and head back south up Pitt Street. There's a new pub on the corner of Hunter Street that looks enticingly empty. The girl behind the bar asks whether I want a pint or a schooner. I opt for the latter, and she pours me a half pint, which - not to be pedantic - is a hefty gulp or two shy of a schooner and charges me nearly ten dollars for it. A steady stream of beautiful people coming through the door and heading directly upstairs indicates that I'm just in the foyer of a far grander venue, not meant for the likes of me.

There's always street art. This piece is about as old as me. I used to roam this manor professionally back when mail boys used to carry high-denomination cheques from one place to another. Do digital mail boys meet to skive off in electronic pubs?

You must be this emaciated to shop here. Blimey. I'll stick to KMart.

Now, this is more like it. The Hotel Downing in Castlereagh Street. My ex-girlfriend used to work across the road, and I would occasionally wait for her in the other half of this pub which is now reserved for button-slappers. Thankfully, you can't see any of that from this bar, and the mandatory sport screens cover only two of the four walls, so you can keep your back to them and pretend they're not there. Also most of the customers appear to be staff, so there's a lovely family atmosphere. This pub I like.

And about time, too. There's a time and a place for dancing, and it's at the kitchen sink while doing the washing up. Anything else is an abomination. I can't remember which pub this sign was in…

But apparently I thought a distressed selfie in the mirror of the gents' lavatory would be sufficient to jog my memory later. Clearly it was time to revert to Plan A and flop into bed.

Continued in part two.

A Quiet Day In

Published by Matthew Davidson on Sat, 23/10/2021 - 1:24pm in

I'm back to work on Monday, after two months off recovering from surgery. I'd been overdoing it a bit on the exercise front, trying to make up for months spent flat on my back, so on my todo.txt under "Wed 20 Oct" I'd written "quiet day". It was cloudy, with a little bit of rain, so a perfect day for catching up on light chores and a bit of reading.

Then, as I was doing the washing up, this happened:

I couldn't record more than a few seconds of the storm at its' height, as it required some serious Marcel Marceau work to prevent being immediately blown back from the doorway.

I've never seen hail like it. Normally when a cold front hits moist air, you get a few minutes of hail before the storm loses it's sting and settles down into heavy rain. But on this occasion, the hail just kept coming. Before long, the Aloha carpark was at least four inches deep in it.

As usually happens in anything but the gentlest shower, the storm water drains immediately backed up, and runoff from the hills behind us started to etch a channel through the pack ice.

If you can overlook the shredded foliage and shattered lamps, the neighbourhood began to look positively festive.

As things began to settle down, my phone started pinging. The shopping centre where I work had been closed down until it could be cleaned up and structurally assesed.

Oh, great. I've been off recovering from surgery for eight weeks, and was due back Monday. My imminent return appears to have jinxed the building to the point where the roof caved in. It (the collapsed roof, not my return to work) made the national and international media.

The messages from work continue: Part-timers like myself may be needed to help clean up, or else at the store in town to deal with the overflow demand. Implied: casuals can go hang - no work for you.

(There's a few dozen on the payroll in my department: one or two are full time employees, the rest are part-time - with minimum contract hours that would not cover the cheapest rent available in the area, or casual - with no minimum hours. This arrangement guarantees a satisfyingly desperate servility from the labour force.)

As my friend Ruben observed, the universe is telling me I need a career change.

The next day I set out for a sticky beak around the neighbourhood. There's still plenty of ice wherever it's been sheltered from the sun and the wind. State Emergency Services are swarming about, clearing ice from roof gutters, throwing tarps over shattered skylights and solar water heaters, and demolishing collapsed awnings.

Nature has turned suddenly Autumnal, except that it's Spring, and none of these trees are deciduous.

Nothing like a walk on a carpet of shredded eucalyptus to really clear those sinuses.

The beloved workplace is indeed closed for the duration.

I went out of my way to bump into some of the less laddish of the lads from work. Incredibly, as best as I could make out from the hyper-masculine grunting, it appeared the plan was that we'd be up and running for home deliveries and click 'n' collect within days, and ready for in-store customers soon after.

I had assumed we'd be out of action for weeks, at the very least, while centre management fixed the roof. Silly me. Centre management have no intention of actually fixing the roof, because they have never fixed the roof. In the lightest of showers it is up to the individual stores to position buckets as needed. In extreme cases, where the sodden interior ceiling gives way such as in this staff lavatory earlier in the year, workarounds will be implemented like so:

Disaster preparedness for the twenty-first century: expect the unexpected, but expect the unexpected to occur long after you personally have moved on to another scam, so it will be somebody else's problem. This from the ideology that also brought you a global pandemic. Thanks, neoliberalism!

Meanwhile, there are plenty of opprtunities for freshening stale brands with a logotype makeover.

There's a pleasingly novel copper hue to the countryside.

And water views have never been more open, if unnervingly overlaid with a Brothers Grimm vibe.

Still a couple of months left in 2021. Can't wait to see what's coming next.

The Saga of F-bomb Freddy, Part One

Published by Matthew Davidson on Mon, 11/10/2021 - 1:49pm in

My neighbours, here at the Aloha Home for Deadbeat Divorcees, are a colourful lot. As a rule I've ried to keep out of their way for the last two years. I'm not actually rude, you understand. I smile and nod. I just don't talk, beyond the occasional "good morning", etc. That polite aloofness is how F-bomb Freddy came to suspect me as an obvious snitch.

As I generally don't talk to them, I rarely learn my nighbours' names. When I have to think about them, I use the names I've given them myself for internal reference. As tenancy here is overwhelmingly a matter of unfortunate circumstance rather than choice, a lot of people have come and gone: Boom Box Barry, Zen Ken, Breaking Bad, the Care Bear Kids, Surfing Steptoe, Thumper and Boyband, and so on.

The most memorable, by sheer dint of his desperate need to make an impression, was F-Bomb Freddy.

Freddy was one of those farking people who farking says farking farking all the farking time. His body language strongly suggested that he'd spent some time in prison; that or, less likely, an elite boys' school. Ever-mindful of social rank, he spent half his day swaggering and strutting about like a cockerel, and the other half slinking, glancing nervously over his shoulder as though fearing that he was about to be caught out for whatever past imprudent act was currently preying on his mind.

He occupied what had been the manager's lodgings back in the days when the Aloha was a motel, and had absorbed some of the proprietorial manner appropriate to the tenant of the largest unit in the facility. He always seemed to have a flatmate, but the cohabitation rarely lasted more than a few months before disintegrating into a fistfight in the carpark, followed by a shower of personal effects from the balcony. Yet somehow another flatmate arrived to take the last one's place before you knew it. Each had a shaved head, little in the way of teeth, and a baroque efflorescence of tattoos.

His only constant friend was Mayor McWheeze, who occupied the unit directly below mine. When Freddy wasn't patrolling/slinking about the perimeter in shorts and thongs, or skimming leaves from the common swimming pool to (in his mind, at least) earn his keep, he was holding forth to McWheeze.

Mayor McWheeze was a stupendously unhealthy man; one of those who prefer to approach the art of not dying at the highest degree of difficulty possible. He was almost perfectly spherical in shape, with a voice which started low down - somewhere about his navel - before rumbling up a congested windpipe, doubling back in frustration at a slack, toothless mouth plugged by an omnipresent smouldering cigarette butt, and at last gently seeping out of his nose like politely-suppressed flatulence.

In order to keep a firm footing on the wobbling tightrope which was all that separated near-death from actual death, McWheeze rarely left the table he'd set up at his front window. From behind flyscreen, he had a magisterial view of the only entrance to the complex, and took a keen interest in comings and goings, cheerfully saluting all in a manner which made one feel disconcertingly like Patrick McGoohan in the Prisoner.

In his own mind, Mayor McWheeze was the bright shining star at the centre of a seaside Bloomsbury set. In reality, his days were overwhemingly occupied in dispensing homilies to soothe the wounds from whatever slings and arrows F-bomb Freddy presently felt most outrageous. From upstairs I was mercifully spared the details, receiving only the gist via the to and fro of bitterly spat obscenities and mollifying emphysemic rumbles.

At the start of my tenancy, I wasn't much bothered by Freddy's alarmingly powerful stereo system. As a rule, Australians don't like to know more than a few dozen songs, any of which you can hear any time of the day in any suburban shopping mall. Conspicuous consumption often manifests as hi-fi equipment, so having one's bones rattled of an evening by the bass notes of the same songs over and over again must be accepted as merely the price of entry to suburbia.

However the verve with which Freddy enjoyed the Great Australian Songbook was somewhat disquieting. It had never occured to me that it was possible to whoop and yee-haw in exuberant joy along to the works of Billy Joel, Dire Straits, and the Eagles. Yet somehow Freddy managed to do so. With, it seemed with each passing week, increasing frequency and intensity.

I like to think of myself as a tolerant sort. I thought it not unreasonable to surmise that perhaps Freddy was nursing a broken heart and, having been spurned by some lady — or indeed gentleman, he was proving to himself that he had much left to live for, including slapping a thigh and hooting like a klaxon whenever Greatest Aussie Pub Rock Favourites Vol. 1 worked its' inevitable way around to Working Class Man.

Out of this desire to make allowances for a little high-decible self-care, and also a keen interest in finding a reason not to provoke someone who appeared considerably less reasonable, and more practiced in pugilism, than myself, I sought inside knowledge from Mayor McWheeze. One evening, as the keening strains of Sweet Child O' Mine etched visible ripples in the asphalt of the Aloha carpark, I stood by his window and asked, as casually as I could whilst shouting over the din, "What's the story with your mate over there?"

The hitherto relentlessly genial McWheeze turned dour, even going so far as to remove the cigarette butt from his mouth and stub it out. Possibly in an ashtray. It was impossible to tell through the flyscreen at dusk. "He likes a drink. Enjoys a bit of music," he pronounced at length, before lighting another cigarette to signal the end of the matter.

Ah. Jolly good. Just an obnoxious arse, then. "Is there anything you could do about it?"

He drew on his fresh cigarette for as long as his severly compromised lung capacity would permit, and gazed into the delicate tracery of burst capiliaries at the back of his drooping eyelids. "You could try writing a letter to the strata body."

"Right." Thanks for being so helpful. I will indeed correspond with a handful of people empowered to say "Stop it at once, or we shall be forced to ask you to stop it once more." I went back upstairs and shut all the windows.

Later that evening, Neil from the Young Ones, residing a few doors up the first floor landing from Freddy, had the temerity to slink over and knock on Freddy's door. He was tossed back like a leaf in a gale of full-throated farks. As Neil, on his heels and suddenly finding himself back at his own door, slipped inside, trembling, Freddy came out onto the balcony to address the gallery of twitching blinds.

"ANY OF YOUSE OTHER LOWLIFE FARKERS WANNA FARKING GO AT ME, YOUSE FARKING MAGGOTS?"

And thus mollified by the comparative silence of nothing but passing vehicular traffic and the lazy trotting of A Horse With No Name, Freddy returned to his lair.

After an hour or so, with no sign of the festival of easy-listening rock abating, Mayor McWheeze, motivated by some glimmer of community spirit, left his customary seat and waddled across the carpark.

He had no hope of ascending the stairs to the first floor landing, so he stood below, calling with increasing volume and urgency "Freddy… Freddy!"

I couldn't hear much of the resulting conversation over the J. Geils Band's 1982 smash Centrefold, but it was clear that Freddy transitioned from curiosity to shock, to outraged betrayal, and finally an explosion of fire and brimstone farks that had McWheeze skipping back to his flat as though peppered by buckshot.

At this final egregious violation of the sovereign Aussie male's right to feel the bassline of Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer reverberating deep in his substantial loins, Freddy seemed fit to rend his garments, had they not been pretty thoroughly rent already. Instead he spun on his heels, and bellowed one final, desperate "FAAAAARK!" to nobody in particular before slamming his door behind him.


The next morning, Freddy was back on McWheeze's doorstep, the two exchanging politely convivial farks like characters in a Jane Austen novel.

There's something deeply disquieting about the aloof cameraderie between Australians who consider themselves mens' men. There's a sense of things understood but unspoken, seeming to hint at dark, soul-eating secrets; of tramatising initiation rites, pacts, threats, and decades-old unspeakable crimes. At least that's how it appears to me.

A few days later, I was sitting out on the landing with my laptop. Kitty, my darling fluffy grey feline familiar, had got it into her head that it was dinner time at two-thirty in the afternoon, so in the face of her implacable entreaties, I had no option but to put myself on the other side of the lounge room window in order to get some reading done.

Zen Ken, a petite, tanned, and alarmingly fit gentleman who eschewed shirts and footwear, and was in the habit of rising early to sit out on the back lawn cross-legged to greet the dawn, stopped by on his way downstairs for a spot of impromptu mindfulness among the stand of banana trees behind the pool. He asked me how I was settling in and what I thought of the place.

"It's fine, apart from…" I glanced in the direction of Freddy's flat, "the odd colourful character."

"Oh, I think he'll be pulling his head in from now on," he smiled, "After that letter to the strata body."

Oh, dear God no. I couldn't imagine anything more calculated to elicit Freddy's ire than a window-faced envelope and the use of the menacingly passive voice ("All residents are reminded that…"). Still, it was nothing to do with me.

"Your cat seems to want your attention," Ken observed, and went on his way, accompanied by the hum of finely-tuned chakras. No sense in wasting the best mind-emptying hours of the day in idle chit-chat.

I love a reasonable degree of uncertainty. I'm miserable out in the suburbs, because in the city you feel that at any moment anything might happen. Nothing ever does, but the potential is electrifying. However that's a different kind of uncertainty to the knowledge that you have an explosion coming, and you just don't know when it will arrive.

One morning, while getting ready for work I heard a knock on the door, shortly followed by the unmistakable "whomp" of a sheaf of paper hitting my doormat, and seconds later the beeping of a reversing delivery van, long gone by the time it took to walk the length of a very, very small flat.

The contents of this A4 window-faced envelope were at least a hundred pages thick and it was addressed to Freddy at unit 21. Mine is unit 20, where the line of rooms runs out, so it wasn't at all unusual for lost postmen (and once, a pair of police officers in armoured vests) to ask for the location of 21, over at the opposite end of the landing, next to unit 12.

I had so far managed to avoid any interaction with Freddy beyond nodding hello, but in the circumstances there was no alternative to being neighbourly. At least it clearly wasn't from the strata body. No consortium of landlords would take the time to devote over a hundred pages to anything.

The door was answered by a young man I'd never seen before. Did Freddy keep him in a cupboard?

"This is for here. Postman left it at my place."

"Oh, right. Thanks."

Crew cut, tattoos, crumbling teeth: Freddy definitely has a type. I never saw him again.


Freddy had just bought himself a new ute (the Australian term for a sedan-sized truck Americans would call a "pickup"). Gleaming white, like something out of the 1970s TV series Battlestar Gallactica. Lord knows how he could afford it; Freddy didn't seem to work.

I grew to love the absence of that vehicle. Freddy's unit being at the entrance to the complex, it was parked at the very front, and could be seen from a hundred metres away. When returning from work of an evening, my heart always sank to see it. I don't know why. In retrospect, it's clear that as he had no need, or particular desire, to go anywhere, it's absence could only mean that he was out purchasing a carton of cans of rum and cola, prior to filling a rotisserie of CD platters with the fruits of the bargain bin, cranking up the volume, and hitting the "shuffle" button.

Returning home one evening about a week after my little chat with Ken, I heard Freddy already in full swing before I saw his ute. I didn't know if Freddy was partial to any drugs other than rum and coke, but at the very least he was definitely one of those people who use alcohol to get wound up rather than to wind down. Quite apart from giving we mild, decent alcoholics a bad name, that class of drinker scares me.

I hurried up to my flat, keen to remain unobserved, though I'd hardly made it through the door before robust exchanges of opinion began echoing across the car park. By the time I'd served Kitty her dinner, the arguments that Freddy was simultaneously conducting with multiple interlocutors, like a chess grand master, had reached record-breaking intensity.

I drew the blinds. My neighbours all had curtains and/or venetian blinds, but my unit was kitted out with roller blinds. These were wonderfully low-maintenance, but had to be raised to at least half-mast if one wanted any fresh air or natural light. Positioned as I was at one end of the top row of units, with three big windows, it was rather like living in a giant illuminated fishbowl. When signing the lease, I reasoned that if somebody had any desire to watch me doing the washing up, or to stand out on the landing, nose pressed to the glass to enjoy the spectacle of an old wreck sweating and snoring though a humid summer night, that was very much their problem. This opinion had been under review for a while now.

The agitation outside was starting to sound as though an element of physical contact had worked its' way into proceedings. Concern for the welfare of my neighbours led me to open the front door and take a look.

Freddy was standing near the top of the stairs leading to his door, and I was relieved to see that it was unlikely he'd just pushed someone down them, as he was vigorously summing up his assessment of the character of Boombox Barry, for the latter's moral edification.

On noticing me framed in the light of my doorway, resplendant in business socks, boxer shorts, and burger-flippers' polo shirt, he swung round and thrust out an accusing finger.

"And YOU! If you've farkin' got something to say to me, whyn'tya come over here and farkin' say it to my face, ya cat-farker!"

The customary colour (a kind of mottled green-grey) drained from my haggard face. Oh, brilliant. He thinks it was me that made that farking — sorry, I mean that blasted — complaint to the strata body.

Freddy leaned over the railing, and dropping his vocal pitch for dramatic effect, announced in a low rasp, "I've got my farking eye on you, ya c**t!"

Unlike most of my neighbours, I lack any of the zest in my emotional repertoire that would enable me to respond with matching vigor, and so somewhat at a loss, I took a step back and closed the door. Freddy moved on to his next target without missing a beat.

Kitty had finished dinner, so now it was cuddle time. The fact that Freddy had chosen to make a point of Kitty's existence (and also, in passing, his unsettling explanation for why he thought anybody might want to keep a pet) unnerved me.

Being six foot two, and typically sporting pretty threadbare attire, I've had the luxury of living my adult life without much regard for my personal safety. I've strolled merrily late at night through some notorious precincts with blithe unconcern about being singled out as a target for assault and/or robbery, and am well aware of my privilege in that regard.

By drawing attention to Kitty, Freddy had struck at the heart of that complacency. After nearly fifty years on the planet, my major moral obligation was to that adorably vexatious ball of fluff. She was also my sole motivation: after a number of very difficult years, I was managing to keep it together for the sake of Kitty. And we were very happy in that condition. We were very nearly one person, except that no one person, at least in my experience, cares for themselves as Kitty and I cared for each other.

And that dim, foul-mouthed, petulant man-child was somehow cunning enough to identify her as my critical vulnerability. In doing so he had upset everything.

Continued in part two.

RMS FSF

Published by Matthew Davidson on Tue, 13/04/2021 - 8:26pm in

I've occasionally described my experience of life as like seeing everything through the wrong end of a telescope. For some reason, things that ought to have affected me just didn't, and conversely I couldn't see any way of influencing what went on way over there in the little dot of light at the far end of the telescope.

As a child, I quickly discovered that my peers consequently found me offensive and ridiculous. I worked around this by climbing trees and living in a pretty solitary fantasy world.

As an adult, I discovered alcohol and - BOOM! - the telescope collapsed and suddenly other people were right there around me, for the most part perfectly comprehensible, and indeed I became rather fond of some of them.

Sitting in the pub after work, with my ever-present pile of magazines and books, I read about this hot new thing called "High-Fuctioning Autism" (later "Asperger's Syndrome", then demoted to merely a position on the "Autism Spectrum"), and also much about the supposed introvert/extrovert dichotomy.

Whenever I suggested to somebody that I might be a bit introverted or "Asperger's", this suggestion was met with incredulity: "What? You?!"

I'm a better human being when I'm drinking a lot. Not, I must stress, when I'm drunk. Rather when whatever my brain does to keep me distant from everything around me has been disabled by regular doses of alcohol. I understand what people feel. Occasionally I even know what to say to them. I can be relatively sober and be overwhelmed by Platonic love. It's extraordinary and wonderful.

By my mid-twenties I moderated my alcohol intake. It now waxes and wanes, but to be honest, I wish I could do without self-medication altogether. I look in the mirror and see somebody simultaneously much younger and much older than I am. Brings to mind William S. Burroughs' phrase "borrowed flesh". I wish that there was some way that I could be close to people that doesn't involve blasting my brain with a toxic chemical.

I don't have many heroes. At last count it was two, maybe three. (You only acquire heroes when you're young, and some of them quickly lose their lustre.)

One of them just said this:

Ever since my teenage years, I felt as if there were a filmy curtain separating me from other people my age. I understood the words of their conversations, but I could not grasp why they said what they did. Much later I realized that I didn't understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to.

Richard Matthew Stallman changed my life. Previously I understood all paid work as transactional. You do something you find distasteful, but you're compensated for it. The idea of pursuing a trade ethically, with dignity and self-respect, was astonishing.

I can't imagine what it's like to be born looking at life down the wrong end of the telescope, and not to have alcohol to fix it. RMS doesn't drink. I am not ashamed to admit that collapsing the telescope by sheer intellectual effort is beyond me.

That doesn't excuse several instances of inconsiderate behaviour, but I'm standing in a very shaky glass house, so I'm not going to throw any stones. Motes and beams and all that.

2020 Mixtape: Strings, Lockdown, Strong Women, and Whales

Published by Matthew Davidson on Tue, 02/02/2021 - 10:26pm in

Probably about [squints a bit, rubs chin] four years ago a friend of my [then-]wife invited us to a nineteen-eighties-themed birthday party. For the previous few years I'd been assembling playlists of music videos, mostly from YouTube, to play during the traditionally festive bit at the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Together with getting out the turntable and dusting off the vinyl, jigsaw puzzles, Trivial Pursuit, Uno, and insane amounts of food and booze, a splendid time was generally had, under the circumstances.

So as we were too skint to shell out for an appropriately lavish gift for a round-numbered birthday, my wife suggested I put together an eighties-themed video playlist on a USB drive. It was tremendous fun finding and downloading the videos (for any young people who may be reading, "downloading" is just like streaming, only deleting the data you've just downloaded isn't mandatory). Where previously I'd just played the videos through my RaspberryPi plugged into the telly, this time after downloading with youtube-dl, I edited (most topping and tailing) the clips when necessary in OpenShot, checked the audio in Audacity to see how much it should be amplified to keep each track at more or less the same level (no, I've not found any satisfactory way of automating this), then applying the amplification and transcoding to H264 MPEG with HandBrake, so that you could stick a USB stick into any telly made in the last ten years and it would play.

It was so much fun that I extended my remit beyound the eighties and started doing the same thing every year. I'm less fussy about the format/codec now, as I don't have a telly (these days nobody does; they're just computers you don't really control, with a huge monitor and a very bad UI), so I just leave it in the format/codec I found it wherever possible.

This year — no relatives, not much food, still plenty of booze — I set about doing the same. Having exhausted the obvious back-catalogue stuff it's a smaller show than in the past, and I'm a month behind schedule. It's mostly little novelties that I've stumbled across in the last twelve months, plus nostalgic things that they brought to mind. You can download the whole thing here, for as long as I have the server space, or follow the YouTube links below until the sources are taken down.

Here's the list:

The Pogues: Dirty Old Town (A Snippet Thereof)

Can't start without the Pogues. Found a few old clips while down some rabbit hole or other last year. Would love to know the source of this one, beyond "somebody's VHS collection". Really encapsulates MacGowan's punk attitude to music at a point in the Pogues trajectory where the success they'd had didn't interfere with his preferred lifestyle; no barriers between performer and audience, and a sheepish indifference to his own talent.

The Trashcan Sinatras: Obscurity Knocks

In the late eighties and early nineties, my old school chum Paul used to drive up from his family's semi-rural property to my family's utterly-suburban home once a week. We'd order pizza and consume vast quantities of cola to the point where I swear I could feel the sugar slurry moving through my veins. Until the not-so-wee hours of the morning we'd talk nonsense and watch Rage, where this video was one of several on high rotatation at the time. A gorgeous song and a video that perfectly suits it, but doesn't define it.

Courtney Barnett: Pedestrian at Best

Stumbled across the official video for this single on a forum somewhere and immediately thought "This is great! Simple, relentless, like the Fall!" As it happens, this song is a bit of an outlier, and most of her stuff is more in the standard Oz Alternative vein. Still, I like that as well, so no harm done. This live rendition is a bit nearer Nirvana than the Fall. Which — also — is nice.

I'm fascinated by the way she plays guitar, since the way I play (well, used to play) is to treat the whole enterprise as mainly an aerobic workout, and if all the frantic thrashing about sounds okay, that's a bonus. Seeing her get that big sound out of lightly brushing the strings, and realising "Oh, yeah. Electric amplification…"

The Stranglers - Golden Brown

Some transitions between songs are because one naturally follows from another. Others are because it's a jarringly discordant wake-up. Still others are just your brain telling you "I want to listen to this one next".

This song was on the EMI (Australia) various artists compilation album 1982 with a Bullet, which we had in our house as kids. In the nineties, when I was living in Oscar's Palace, I was messing about on my guitar with chord progressions and suddenly thought "Oh! That sounds like…", and did the same few chords in waltz time. And yes, my entire life is basically nostalgia for times that don't really warrant it.

Putting together the original 80s playlist, I couldn't find a source for the official video, so I used a far less satisfying Top of the Pops mime performance. This will be not the last callback to earlier playlists (which I may also put online if I'm ever less work-shy).

Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over

Spirit-raising remote lockdown renditions of beloved songs: didn't you love these in 2020?

Maybe not entirely, but still it's Crowded House. Well, it's Neil and Nick. Plus fun fact: the "catch a deluge in a paper cup" line was a conscious nod to Lennon's "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup" from Across the Universe. Bet you didn't know that. Read it in the early nineties in an interview with Neil in one of those music papers that used to give you black fingertips.

Steve Martin (with The Philadelphia Orchestra): Office Supplies

Spirit-raising remote lockdown renditions of things you've never heard before…

I think The Jerk is one of the greatest films of all time, and I'm delighted by Steve Martin's quite substantive musical career in recent years.

I bought a banjo about twenty years ago, hoping to emulate Jem Finer from the Pogues. Turns out it's a very loud instrument, with no volume control. Not quite as bad as bagpipes or the saxophone, but not recommended for anybody who likes to reach a certain level of proficiency in complete privacy.

Still have it. Barely played. Make an offer.

The Dick Cavett Show: Little Richard On Discovering The Beatles

Good golly, Miss Molly. RIP, the king and queen of rock and roll.

The Beatles (Live At The Festival Hall in Melbourne): Long Tall Sally

Ringo had just recovered from a serious bout of tonsilitis. Thought you might want to know that.

Using FFmpeg, you can fix the aspect ratio without re-encoding and losing quality. Which is nice.

David Byrne (Live on Saturday Night Live): Once in a Lifetime

This has already been yanked from YouTube. It's a performance from the American Utopia stage show which Spike Lee filmed and you can probably get from various informal distribution channels. How on earth taking this off YouTube might be to the benefit of Byrne, the producers of SNL, the stage production, or anybody even remotely associated with all the above, is a mystery to me. Monopolists got to monop, I suppose.

Happy Mondays: Sunshine and Love

The Mondays' last proper album is an unappreciated gem. The conventional wisdom about it is total bollocks.

They didn't bankrupt Factory, Factory bankrupted itself and was waiting, unreasonably, for the Mondays to come to the rescue.

The Mondays were always a producer's band, and after a cracking couple of albums with first John Cale and then Martin Hannett producing, they had their mainstream hit with Paul Oakenfold, which to me landed like a wet sock. It was so of its time that it was dated by the day of its release, and so polished that you can listen to it over and over and not feel a thing.

Yes Please! was a return to form, with Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth (from Talking Heads) putting the welly back into the mix.

Unfortunately the NME and Melody Maker, having decided how music was going to go in the nineties and finding that the Mondays no longer fit, elected to put the boot in. Because obviously Northside was the horse to bet on.

Divinyls: Hey Little Boy

Did Chrissy Amphlett make sexy scary, or make scary sexy? Anyway, an Australian band that broke into the mainstream without losing brains or edge.

My friend Paul and I saw the Divinyls at the State Theatre in Sydney about thirty years ago. Brilliant.

I love the State theatre, but it was the wrong venue for that band. The seats were totally redundant from five minutes in.

R.E.M.: Nightswimming

Fediverse chum @andyc brought this clip to my attention last year. It's a beautiful thing.

This song is occasionally on the musak playlist at work. I don't care. It won't spoil it. I could listen to it every day, and it would never fail to fascinate me.

The Sundays: Here's Where The Story Ends

There are no words.

Modern English: I Melt With You

Another lockdown video which is also a callback to my eighties mixtape. The song hit that sweet spot of one you'd remember but not too familiar, so that you'd get that Proustian remembrance effect.

Also, the original version makes one think "Christ! What a bunch of wankers!" I can't say that the update entirely rids one of that sensation, but as a general rule, getting old is a blessing.

Dicey Reilly: The Dubliners

Now, to be honest, I don't know why I included this. I was probably drunk. It's off the first Dubliners album I ever bought, which was kind of a reunion album (with an accompanying TV special I've still not seen), made in the banner year of 1988.

Siouxsie and The Banshees: Killing Jar, Burn Up

1988 was my last year in school. Beginning with pocket money record purchases, and accelerating when I got my first job the following year I mined that year for everything it had. And what riches it had! The children of punk came of age in that year. The Pogues and Billy Bragg released albums of staggering brilliance and beauty, and the Banshees gave us Peepshow.

I'm a sucker for a cello. Love this video for the eighties music show presenter awkwardness and the VHS artifacts.

Also, as far as I'm concerned, Siouxie still looks and dresses like this. I will not accept any evidence to the contrary.

Electric Light Orchestra: Can't Get It Out Of My Head

Okay. The cello thing can be taken too far.

I was really thrilled when George Harrison had his late eighties renaissance, and the Wilbury thing, with ELO's Jeff Lynne. So as a gormless schoolkid, I started shoplifting ELO records and cassettes (shoplifting pro tip: the cassettes are easier). I tried to like them, but my god, they were awful.

For decades afterward, I tried telling myself that actually, the first — budget-constrained — album was pretty good, what with the overdubbed raw scraping of bows on strings. A few Christmases ago I put that record on the turntable, and no, it's just bloody awful.

So this video is just self-flagellation, and a reminder of what punk fixed, however temporarily. Enjoy.

Madness presents - Two Mad Men and a String Quartet: Night Boat to Cairo

More lockdown. The only song I included in the mix was the first, as it later becomes apparent that Suggs is just phoning it in. Jesus. You had one job to do! Be a nutty boy. That's not an unreasonable request for a sixty year old man, surely? Look at Siouxie: she's still stunning!

The Smiths: Accept Yourself

Oh, Morrissey. Look at yourself. You poisoned it all.

Sleater-Kinney - You're No Rock N Roll Fun

Another one I got from some bonkers forum site. I knew guitarist Carrie Brownstein from Portlandia, one of those Lorne Michaels catchphrase-driven sketch comedy shows that are never quite as funny as you want them to be. I'd heard that she was in some band called Sleater-Kinney, but I never felt sufficiently motivated to investigate.

This song is good, inoffensive guitar pop. What's not to love?

I'm working my way through the back catalogue, The first couple of albums are a bit raw, but the ones after that are in the grey area between offensive and inoffensive, otherwise known as my comfort zone.

Son House: Death Letter Blues

I never heard of Son House, can't remember how I got to this video, by my god this is the real stuff.

Hat Fitz and Itchy: Miss Mabel

Back in about 2002 my wife and I were in Annandale on a very important mission to get a pot of some specific colour of paint, and after securing said item and dinner at McDonalds, we wandered across Parramatta Road to the Empire Hotel for a beer. This was the inner west's premier blues venue, and as we sat down, a young blond-haired, blue-eyed boy started setting up on stage and I, in a terribly racist way, thought "Hello, get ready for some Eric Clapton."

Turned out he was actually quite good, and we stayed to the end of his set. By then we were a bit tipsy, and game for the next act on the bill: Hat Fitz and Itchy.

Good golly, Miss Molly. Never knew that it was possible to make that much sound out of a single guitar. Literally pinned back to the wall by the force of it. Never mind the malevolent glare Fitzy gave the audience as he sent them into paroxysms of pleasure. He was playing the audience as much as playing the guitar.

He announced that he accepted tips in the form of Jameson, and by the time they were done, the front of the stage was covered in little glasses. He's settled down now, and his current musical/life partner told me on a recent visit to Coffs that he doesn't drink at all any more. Which is nice.

I'm a couple of albums behind at the moment, but he's the kind of artist where it doesn't feel right to buy a CD anywhere but out of his suitcase at a live gig.

Neil Finn - Don't Dream It's Over

Yes, I know. All I want from life now is a cure for baldness and a string section that will follow me about on a cart.

Trashcan Sinatras: Best Days on Earth

Not the most prolific band on earth, but thirty years on still the most adept at tugging on heartstrings. I've a personal vignette I can't help but associate with this song, but it's a matter for another occasion.

The Pogues: Greenland Whale Fisheries

Okay, the whole concert video is mesmerising. I just included the whale one because it's such an oddity of a song, and so weird that Shane included it on the Pogues' first album. He has a logic that defies logic.

Shane here is just magic. He's a very capable guitar player, and possibly rivals Lydon as the best punk vocalist. That original simple lineup, the selection of traditional songs, and of course the glorious original compositions are pure genius. He engineered it all, but a few years later it crushed him.

Obscurity is underrated.

That 1 Guy - Whale Race

Not long after we moved to Sawtell, my brother-in-law and his girlfriend came down from Queensland and lived with us for a while before heading off again to Goondiwindi (sounds exotic, but don't go there unless you have a thing for red dirt). They'd seen That 1 Guy in Queensland, and insisted we all had to go see him at the Planto in Coffs.

(There's a doctoral dissertation to be had on the syntactical rules around Australian colloquial abbreviations. The Plantation Hotel is the Planto, while the Toormina Hotel is the Toormi and the Sawtell Hotel is the Sawty. The Park Beach Hotel/Motel is the Hoey Moey. Nobody feels the need to ask why.)

I was so impressed that when I bought a CD from him after the gig I positively gushed. In those days he and the magic pipe mostly stuck to a pithy three minute pop format, and I said he reminded me of the raw, percussive thing that Tom Waits does (I don't think I was any more eloquent than that, sadly). He seemed genuinely flattered and said he knew some people who had worked with Waits, and would really love to do so. I was chuffed to learn a few years ago that he eventually did.

He's become a bit more symphonic in recent years. It should offend my punk sensibilities, but this holds one's attention for nearly ten minutes. Plus it's about whales.

The Undertones, True Confessions

You have to. You just do. Two minutes, in and out. Thrashing guitars, no whales, no violins, just pure mischieveous joy on BBC2.

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I'm on Holiday!

Published by Matthew Davidson on Tue, 02/02/2021 - 6:57pm in

Today was a day off from work after five long, tiresome days in a row. Slept in till 10am and skipped breakfast so that I could justify the indulgence of a pizza picnic down at Bogan Bay.

So, on my day off I walked back up to work and bought a five dollar cheese-smothered flatbread and a six dollar bottle of bubbly. I was planning on a five dollar bottle of red, but this is the kind of wild extravagance I'm now allowing myself.

You see, I'm on holiday.

I had an epiphany last week (sitting down; I always sit down when I'm having an epiphany as it's less potentially messy than standing up). I don't need to live in this awful place any more.

I have enough savings to get me back to Sydney. There is nothing I have here that I can't get in Sydney, and plenty there that I can't get here. Yes, the latter includes Covid, but Covid is going to be with us for another couple of years (at least - on and off), and while it's nice to have the luxury of not having to wear a mask, and feeling free to cough without burying your face in your armpit, it's not worth the rest of what living in Reejnal Straya entails.

I don't want any of this. I don't want to trudge to and from my part-time near-minimum wage job over pedestrian-de-optimimised terrain in permanently mouldy safety shoes and mud-spattered trousers. I don't want to deal with squat, stout old men, who wear shorts and thongs all the way through winter as a declaration of cultural identity, and greet me with a toothless grin and "G'day, big fella!" before asking where the eggs are (aisle 11).

I don't want to feel I have to sleep with a kitchen knife by my bed when one of my neighbours who has been simmering for a while seems to be approaching boiling point. I don't want to have police in body armour, bristing with holsters containing implements of varying lethality wandering up and down the landing outside my flat/cell.

I don't even want the things that I could get here if I had a socially-inclusive wage. I'm a Dickensian street urchin pressing my nose against the shop window and being slightly revolted by what's inside.

In the dying days of my marriage, my wife insisted on taking me and our joint credit card out for a weekly "date night", at one or another restaurant in Sawtell. This consisted of her buying the most expensive cocktails on the menu and I gingerly sipping the cheapest beer on the menu, while she gleefully recounted all the personal failings of, and wrongs done to her by, people most of whom I'd never heard of. Then the vodka would kick in, the snarl would settle on her pretty face, and she'd move on to the main menu of my own inadequacies. Not wanting to Make A Scene, I just just sat there and took the abuse and wondered "How is this fun for you?"

On the rare occasions I walk down First Avenue of an evening I can't see how the majority of the conversations in the self-consciously funky cafes and restaurants are any less mean and rancorous. It's some consolation, however, to know how many of the local restauranteurs buy their exotic and expensive delicacies in kilo bags from the frozen department of the local supermarket.

Anyway, that sort of negativity is now a thing of the past. I will be out of here at some point in 2021. I can do it at any time. It would be nice beforehand to get some ducks in a row, peas in a pod, pecks in a bushel, etc., but none of that is strictly necessary.

So that frees me up to look at this place anew, as someone with no skin in the game. I'm just passing through, on a working holiday. Maybe Sawtell will again, as it did in 2004, appear charming.

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Things we learn at school

Published by Matthew Davidson on Sun, 27/12/2020 - 2:24pm in

For the last few years I have been working at a local supermarket. Because there are three of them within walking distance, and provided I don't specify which one it is, I believe I can talk about what it's like without violating any confidentiality agreements I may have made during the "yeah, whatever" signing-on-dotted-lines stage of the hiring process.

I was happy enough to do the job for a year or two, but then 2020 happened, so let's make that three or four.

As one of those people who push a trolley round the shop picking online orders, I'm basically paid to get in peoples' way. The maddening thing about it is that when I am in somebody's way, it's they who apologise. Stop saying sorry, people! You haven't done anything wrong!

There's the occasional exception to this rule, memorable for it's rarity. Recently an old fellow grunted "Can you move?", not even prefaced with "excuse me". (Witty response that came to me five minutes too late: "Can I move? You should see me on the dance floor, grandad!")

However by and large, the job is utterly uninteresting, if physically taxing, which comes as a relief to this middle-aged burnout case. If one has to choose, it's far better to punish your body than your psyche.

A while ago my GP asked how work was going, and I replied that over time, the range of things I've been asked to do has expanded. "Oh good," he said, "Intellectual stimulation. You need that."

He's a queer fish, my GP. He makes so much money from treating sneezes and sniffles, and the various diseases of suburban despair, that he's on holiday most of the time for tax reasons, drifting around the world in a little bubble of affluence. I don't think he's quite grasped how much intellectual stimulation is involved in any aspect of running a supermarket — or indeed in most jobs. Which is to say, none whatsoever.

There are points of interest to the experience, mainly derived from observing what various people bring to it. I've seen a lot of people come and go in a few years, which is not unusual down here near minimum wage.

On my trolley is a little computer which, when it's not malfuctioning, leads me about the supermarket by the nose like a pack animal, telling me what to get and where to get it. When you are new to the job, in the process of being broken in, it is emphasised that if you can't find something quickly you should "out of stock it" and move on. Of course the little computer is surveilling you and extracting performance metrics at all times, so speed is of the essence.

Eventually, you realise that the system's little database of stock is chronically incomplete and inaccurate, so you develop workarounds. You also work out that the people who stock the shelves are likewise evaluated by crude metrics, and that it's not in their interest to take care in their work if they will be punished for it, so (for example) a tin of tomatoes is a tin of tomatoes. Whether it's whole, diced, or crushed tomatoes is not a distinction they'll be rewarded for honouring; just get it all on the shelves as quickly as possible.

Once you've amassed a catalogue of all the managerially-imposed perverse incentives relevant to your task, you can start to reverse engineer from these a mental map of the ways that things will inevitably go wrong, and graduate from following a precisely wrong model of how the place works to a fuzzily right model.

The practical upshot of this is that, for example, you don't "out of stock" so often, yet you still get round the shop relatively quickly. Can't find something where your computer says it will be, though there's supposed to be plenty of in stock? Is the amount claimed to be in stock plausible, or likely an artifact of the periodic farcical charade known as "stocktake" (where every item gets counted, but as the item that is supposed to be in that position rather than the item it actually is)? Is it on special this week (in which case it is likely to be on prominent display somewhere else not know to the system, as it's not worth being too fussy about updating the location database week-by-week; that degree of accuracy is not easily measured, and is therefore not incentivised)? Have a look a couple of inches or feet away where there's another product with quite similar packaging. Peer right to the back of the shelf. Insert your arm, James-Herriot-style, up to the shoulder and have a good rummage. When your fingertips make contact with something, grab it, and give it a good yank, bloodying knuckles in the process. Aha! Beep it, bag it, move on…

Now none of that is intrinsically interesting. What is interesting is how long it takes for people to surmount the blind faith in the flawless way that things are supposed to work. Now after a few years, I believe I've identified a statistically significant age-related difference in the attitude that one brings to a new job, which generalises beyond this particular example. It can be summarised like so:

  • Teens/twenties: How does it work?
  • Thirties: How should it work?
  • Forties and older: In what ways is it f**ed up?

You'll be slower and less effective for longer the younger you are, and more likely to be leaned on (which in a deregulated workplace includes being given fewer and fewer hours) till you quit. There are exceptions of course. Personally, I was wandering about in a comically innocent daze until I was in my forties. But in general I've found that the strength of this childlike belief in a world which is pretty well ordered, by grownups who know what they're doing, is proportional to one's degree of, and temporal proximity to, formal education.

So it's not strictly age related. If you're on the sort of career track where you're enjoying "lifelong learning", then clearly reality is not for you. You've taken the blue pill. You're paid to push an arbitrary sort of accountability down the hierarchy by measuring the easily quantifiable, and your only worry is the smaller degree of whimsical discipline imposed from above by those even deeper in cloud cuckoo land.

There's an interesting body of academic work on this, which I'll write about when I get round to reading it. It basically all boils down to Goodhart's Law.

The general cause of the problem is a neoliberal shift from academic education, concerned primarily with how the world actually is, to vocational education which, whether the practitioners know it or not, is about how this or that group of people believe the world should be. In extreme cases, such as mainstream economics, there's no recognition of a possible distinction between the two, since we live in a Panglossian best of all possible worlds, and one can not only derive ought from is, but also go in the other direction. Fault therefore lies not in our systems, but in ourselves. Therefore, it makes sense to measure our virtues using the simple numerical targets of our broken systems: in a word, meritocracy.

My whole working life I've heard conversations among exasperated colleages that run something like "Why do they still not get it? What can we do with them?", often in rooms I've just entered which suddenly fall silent when I'm noticed. To be functional in a fantasy world is to be able to practice the doublethink necessary to insist that the system is fundamentally sound, while intuitively implementing baroque workarounds for the fact that it is fundamentally broken. This phenomenon is fractal, and scales up to the global level, which might give one pause as we "return to normal" in 2021.

I've no conclusion to this…

The Cornell Effect: Being a Fan

Published by Matthew Davidson on Mon, 21/12/2020 - 12:22am in

Never Mind the Magma Creature, Here's the Caves of Androzani

I have on several occasions unsuccessfully tried to explain the virtues of fandom to my friend and occasional acting coach Tony Wickert (director of, among other things, numerous episodes of Z-Cars but no Doctor Who; Verity Lambert approached him, but he turned it down!).

It is vital that the object of your fandom is not uniformly excellent. It should be occasionally excellent, mostly good, sometimes bad, and every now and then absolutely atrocious. Such variation encourages the development of the cultural literacy necessary to explain it, and contributes to the depth and richness of one's appreciation of any work of art. A consistent work of unalloyed genius would be absolutely useless to this end.

By this measure, the mid-1980s was perhaps the best time to be a Doctor Who fan, regardless of how we felt at the time. When thinking about this period, I can't but recall an excellent article written at the time by the frighteningly prolific Paul Cornell (writer of Father's Day for Christopher Ecclestone's Doctor, and Human Nature for David Tennant, as well as being a one-man industry of print fiction including, but far from limited to, titles within the worlds of Doctor Who of varying levels of canonicity).

Titled "The Androzani Effect", it absolutely nailed what had gone wrong with Doctor Who to produce the appalling first full series of Colin Baker's Doctor in 1985. About five years ago, I was looking for a copy of this article online, and found there was none, but (of course) I had a cardboard box in the cupboard full of fanzines, so I asked Paul via his website if it would be okay if I preserved it for digital posterity, and he very kindly agreed. A few personal developments in the meantime meant that I didn't get round to it until recently. However, before the casual viewer of New Who has a very rewarding read of it, I feel obliged to add my two cents worth of context.

Firstly, one must consider the average age of fandom in 1985. A decade earlier, then producer Philip Hinchcliffe established, in his own mind at least, that the core audience for Doctor Who was "intelligent fourteen-year-olds". I was fourteen years old in 1985. Current Doctor Who showrunner (as far as I can make out, "showrunner" is a merging of the old roles of producer and script editor) Chris Chibnall was fifteen. Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Robert Shearman — basically the authorial class of 2005 New Who — were all teenagers. Emeritus showrunners Russell T. Davies and Stephen Moffat were in their early twenties. When you are fourteen (if my own experience is any guide) you're suddenly taller than your parents, there are hormones raging, and you feel intensely passionate about the oddest things. For some reason the The Famous Five and the Tomorrow People lose their allure, and you're desperate for something that will stretch your imagination and flex your intellectual muscles, because you have an inkling that something big is about to happen, and you need to be ready for it. (Sadly, I'm still waiting.) Suffice it to say that this is an audience you disappoint at your peril.

The aforementioned Hinchcliffe, along with script editor Robert Holmes — a tall, urbane fellow, perpetually wreathed in pipe tobacco smoke, who had been writing for Doctor Who since the 60s — presided over what (to hell with it I'll give up on qualifiers) was the programme's Golden Era. It's this period that most people think of when they consider classic Who. Tom Baker was dazzling and working incredibly hard, rather than phoning it in or sending it up, as he was later inclined to do. Elizabeth Sladen as the indefatigable Sarah Jane Smith was an acting masterclass in every episode; the difference between what she was sometimes given on the page and what she delivered on screen is just amazing. And beneath it all was the work of Robert Holmes, writing, or more often heavily re-writing, the majority of the stories.

Nobody knew the soul of Doctor Who like Holmes. To be sure, other writers have equalled him in one way or another. Stephen Moffat can write dialogue to equal Wilde, but too often Moffat writes his characters from the outside in, and sometimes not very far in. With Holmes, the wit bubbles up from from the core of the character. Often it's when two characters realise they are just fundamentally not on the same page and they are going to have to muddle through as best they can; for the initiated, think Litefoot and Leela's supper in Talons of Weng-Chiang, or Harry and Vira in the Ark in Space.

[I, and I realise I may be in a minority here, love Harry Sullivan. Conventional wisdom says that he was devised to cater for the casting of a Doctor older and less partial to physical action than Jon Pertwee's, and upon the casting of a younger Doctor was relegated to the role of buffoon. I disagree; he was a character who functioned extremely well in a very particular and familiar context, and taken out of that context he adapted in ways that were sometimes sub-optimal, but still revealed his fundamental decency. He ought to be regarded as a template for how to do a companion, not an aberration.]

The point of all this waffle is to say that the story of what went wrong with Doctor Who in the 80s begins with what went wrong with Doctor Who in the 70s. After Hinchcliffe and Holmes left, the program cruised along under the momentum they had given it for a while. At some point, possibly due to the existence of a subsidised bar at the BBC, somebody thought it would be a ripping wheeze to hire the notoriously deadline-averse Douglas Adams as script editor while he was also supposed to be writing the second radio series of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This worked to the detriment of both programmes (despite providing the delightful Adams-penned romp City of Death).

At the same time the second oil crisis of the 1970s hit the UK, causing devastating inflation, the winter of discontent, and strikes such as those which terminated the production of Adams' next story Shada. Due to inflation, budgets planned at the start of a series' run dwindled to nothing by the time it came to produce the last episodes, and the programme, never blessed with the money necessary to realise its ambitions, began to look decidedly cheap. Nobody was at the wheel, and the programme's charismatic star had become lazy and petulant. As commentators subsequently put it, Doctor Who had become, at best, "The Tom Baker Comedy Half-Hour".

Enter a saviour in 1980: John Nathan-Turner, or JN-T to fans, having worked his way up the BBC ladder from floor assistant on shows such as BBC's Doctor Who to the rank of producer for the eighteenth series.

JN-T sincerely loved and believed in Doctor Who; he just didn't understand it.

Fortunately he had new script editor Christopher H. Bidmead, with a history not just as a scriptwriter, but also as a science journalist, and by heavens Bidmead worked himself as hard in that year as Holmes had done previously. The scripts were tighter, and there were thematic threads of varying degrees of subtlety that ran through the series, prefiguring New Who. The errant star, despite being "ill" much of the time (of the kind of illness you might catch in the public bar of the Coach and Horses or the Colony Room) delivered some of his best performances, "reined in" as they say, but still utterly beguiling.

And then the wheels came off. Baker demanded more money, which gave JN-T the opportunity to wish him all the best for the future. Bidmead also left, and JN-T, with no real idea what he was doing, managed to coast along on scripts Bidmead had commissioned for series nineteen, along with no small amount of luck. The casting of Peter Davison as the Doctor could be considered genius, were it not for JN-T's own admission that the reasoning behind it was that he wanted to contrast an older actor with curly hair with a young actor with straight hair. #facepalm

Here's where we get to Cornell's critique. Halfway though series nineteen, a young writer named Eric Saward was taken on as script editor. Like JN-T, he didn't understand Doctor Who, but unlike JN-T I don't think he ever really cared about it.

Saward's universe was bleak, and its inhabitants were constantly bickering to no good end. Endless whining in the Tardis console room was, for Saward, the stuff of drama. It became painful to spend time with these people. Once outside the Tardis (and sometimes even inside), body counts and bloody vengeance were at the core of Saward's 80s Hollywood sensibility.

Davison deployed all his charm in consistently playing against Saward's version of the Doctor: melancholic, irritable, amoral. His successor, Colin Baker. on the other hand, took that brief and ran with it. But first there was the return of Robert Holmes.

JN-T was vehemently opposed to hiring old hands, but Saward, to his credit, felt that Holmes was the person to write the Doctor Who twentieth anniversary special. Holmes wisely refused to shoehorn five Doctors, every supporting actor that could be rounded up, and a grab-bag of old monsters whose costumes hadn't disintegrated while in storage, into ninety minutes. That job fell to his script editing predecessor Terrance Dicks, who did about as well as can be expected with Peter Davison, two other Doctors, a stand-in for one, and some location footage from the unfinished Shada in lieu of an egotistical Baker. Then, for Davison's final story a year later, Saward again turned to Holmes.

Here you should transport yourself back to 1985 and turn to Paul Cornell's insightful analysis. I'll be waiting here till you're done.

Good, wasn't it? I remind you that the author was at an age where many of his peers were still saying things like "Wouldn't it be great if the Cybermen battled the Daleks?". No Russell, it wouldn't! It would be very, very boring!

I desperately tried to enjoy series twenty-two and Colin Baker's Doctor. True, at the age of fifteen, I was probably at my most vulnerable to Saward's excesses (I was also watching a lot of James Bond at the time; a penchant I now find utterly inexplicable). Other criticisms of the show's direction failed to persuade me. Founding member of Australian Doctor Who fandom Antony Howe famously railed against "Doctor Whooligan" and basically quit all association with the program in protest, yet I was unmoved.

Yes, series 22 was, in comparison to its predecessor, a dud series, but it had its bright spots. Vengeance on Varos was at its core a clever variation on prior dystopic tales like the Sun Makers, somehow managing to critique reality television long before the term had even been coined. The Mark of the Rani was an old-school psuedo-historical which ought to have pleased the traditionalists. Holmes' the Two Doctors suffered from a mostly superflous, exposition-heavy first episode and flat direction which utterly failed to take advantage of much-hyped location filming in Spain (an example of JN-T's instinct to produce based on what would make for a good press release while being quite unconcerned by what ended up on the screen), still it is not quite without charm and Swiftian bite ("But I remember a dish… Shepherd's Pie." "Shepherd's Pie? Oh, a shepherd! Can't we walk faster?").

Saward created for the series 22 finale (here I perhaps damn with faint praise) his best credited work on the programme in Revelation of the Daleks. Cornell is of course quite right in identifying it as largely the product of lessons half-learned from Holmes. But on the other hand, Saward did at least bother to draw a wider than usual net of cultural influences including Evelyn Waugh's the Loved One and ripping yarns of the Knights Templar. And it is tightly paced, save for the by then traditional plot exile into which he sends the Doctor and Peri, who wander around aimlessly for the whole of the first episode, and in fact barely influence events at all throughout the entire story. Saward did not much like his regular cast, and prefered to do without them wherever possible.

It was Cornell's dissection of the way that Saward had learned all the wrong lessons from Homes that shook me from complacency, making fan commentary I'd previously dismissed suddenly salient. Certainly in retrospect it was on target in a way that hindsight has only vindicated.

Still, if there is anything Doctor Who does well, it's reinvention. Two troubled series later, once Andrew Cartmell, who both loved and understood the series as well as recognising its potential to break new ground, was firmly established as script editor the show was as solid, and certainly as innovative as it had ever been.

But by then Doctor Who was the only drama that the BBC was still producing in-house, as the corporation preferred to follow strict Thatcherite doctrine by becoming a purely managerial enterprise, and outsourcing actual production to companies without the merest sliver of the institutional expertise that the Beeb once had. It is doubtful that any programme could have survived in this environment.

However it is tempting to look at how well 1989's series 26 and (if one really must adopt new nomclementure) 2005's season 1 (really series 27) mesh together, and wonder what might have been. I know that Cornell, Cartmell, et al. were having fun writing novels, audio dramas, and so on, but oh! for another couple of years at least with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred…

Bondi Junction: A Quick Red Brick Tour, Part One

Published by Matthew Davidson on Tue, 15/12/2020 - 9:19pm in

I'd long assumed that the flat that I lived in a quarter of a century ago had been demolished for high-rise or retail. I can't easily get there to verify that, so I recently checked to see if this was the case, using a certain Evil service through which one may View a Street.

Here it is:

Ours is on the first floor; the two windows on the right. Having removed that element of suspense, I will proceed to tackle the biographical and geographical significance of that flat in a roundabout way.

One thing that definitely doesn't exist any more is Oscar's Palace, just around the corner from that flat. This is where I think it used to be:

I am not sure about this, as most of the surrounding landmarks have also been demolished, but this is the only block of land in the general area wide enough to have accommodated it.

In the early nineties, in what was to become a recurring motif in our relationship, my then-girlfriend thought it a very good idea that I lived somewhere she didn't. The reasons for this were utterly mysterious to me at the time, although embarrassingly, humiliatingly, mortifyingly obvious since. So she found an advertisement for a room in a boarding house in Bondi Junction.

It was a mere eighty dollars a week, which is a steal for a pretentious unemployed youngster intent on writing a great novel, despite displaying no previous aptitude in this area, and not even having a particular fondness for long-form written fiction. And of course she would be visiting at every opportunity, as would anybody offered the prospect of a miserable time with a drunk, know-nothing, self-obsessed bore, with a once-pretty face rapidly growing flabby in proportion to the rest of his body, with the exception of the thinning hair.

So, having visited said establishment and verifying that I could in fact live there, according to some broad definition of "live", I went along with this plan, signing a six-month lease for a single room with bed, tap and basin in the corner, two-ring cooker on the sideboard, and bar fridge.

Oscars's Palace was obviously once a rather grand three-story house, sufficiently far out from the industrial squalor of Darlinghurst and Paddington to be genteel, but still close enough to the city for an easy commute. I'm no judge of such things, but I'd say it may well have been built before the electric tramline along Oxford Street.

At some point, the residence fell from grace and was divided into two semi-detatched houses, and then into the final indignity of being a boarding house for those working their way down to homelessness.

Every floorboard creaked beneath the loose folds of fraying carpet, and the stairwell reeked of cat urine. The cats themselves were mangy, rail-thin, and hissed at everyone, including each other. I presumed they belonged to the couple upstairs, who also spent most of the day engaged in loud mutual verbal abuse. (However that was the most violence I ever experienced there, which from the perspective of my current neighbourhood, seems quite idyllic.)

The shared bathroom on my landing had a lavatory, a basin, a shower head sticking out of the wall, and a drain in the middle of the floor. So if someone had just showered, you had to splash across the room to get to the lav. The real challenge was the gent residing at the far end of the landing, in the room nearest the bathroom. He was a man of regular habits, the first of which was to throw up all over the bathroom floor, before donning his off-white linen suit and fedora, to go off and do whatever he needed to do in order to perform the same feat the next morning. So if you didn't want to tiptoe though a minefield of diced carrot to have your morning shower, you had to be an early riser.

The other thing was to give your luggage a good brisk shake before closing it and setting off anywhere. Because ideally, you want the mice to leap out of your bag before you get to your destination, unless you have the bravado to smile broadly and cry "Ta-da!"

The place was riddled with mice. The feral cats clearly felt they had bigger fish to fry, as they seemed not at all interested in something so petty as mice. They had so much stuff to hiss at or piss on; one simply cannot be looking after everything!

Within a couple of months, I was going insane. I had no idea how to look after myself. I had quit my job with the intention of writing the work of genius that had been sitting inside me, desperate to be delivered, yet the typewriter sat idle. I realised that without a job I couldn't carry on bouncing from pub to pub with occasional stops for junk food, so my solution was to buy Kentucky Fried Chicken in bulk and eat it over the course of a few days to a week, washed down with ouzo and lemonade, of all things. I can't imagine how sweet, sparkling, southern fried, liquorice-scented chicken, never made it onto the bathroom floor along with the diced carrot. It appears I did have some measure of self-control, after all.

The old chap who set up office every day in the shed out back was heavy set, but took your four twenties each week in a genial, grandfatherly way before slipping them into his cashbox, locking it up, and issuing a stamped and signed receipt. I was afraid that, at the end of six months, when I told him I was moving out, that he might feel offended. He smiled, took my eighty dollars, and gave me a receipt.

I actually met Oscar, in a manner of speaking, shortly before moving out. I was on my way somewhere, locking the door behind me, and turned around to see a couple of unusually respectable people coming up the stairs, and only then noticed a dapper little old man at about eye level with my belly looking up at me, beaming and waving a silver-topped cane, crying "Ah! Velcome! Velcome!" He continued on to the next tenant, coming down the stairs, "Velcome! Velcome!"

Makes the regal "And what do you do?" seem positively garrulous.

I surmised that, as a young man disembarking at Circular Quay and seeing all the potential for urban decay that Sydney had to offer, he realised that he would need to pick up a smattering of English if he were ever to become a successful slumlord, and with a shrewd businessman's knack for economy, decided that "welcome" was sufficently convivial to pretty much cover it.

Now, you may well ask, how did I know his name was Oscar? I didn't at the time, but I did a couple of years later thanks to my friends Chris and Dave, and an establishment called Billy the Pig's…