Tomorrow morning my lovely girlfriend Iris leaves for ten days of meditation in the Blue Mountains. She’ll have ten days without speaking, without the phone, TV, and worst of all - INTERNET! Just meditation, all day.

I figure this could either be very very good, or very very bad. You might end up in triumphant a voyage of discovery, gaining inner peace and tranquillity… or you could be just completely bored out of your skull. I can certainly see the benefits of silence. I’m just not sure I could stand ten days worth.

It feels like it’s been a long weekend, even though it hasn’t.

On Thursday Iris and I went to visit Josh and Cathy and Catherine’s, to eat Josh’s infamous JoshBurgers(tm). Basically a JoshBurger(tm) is a humungous meal constructed to burger-type specifications, but much larger. So large that you really need to eschew the average burger bun and go for something of more generous dimensions. When all the filling - copious amounts of beef patty, capsicum, beetroot, tomato, lettuce, egg, bacon, that sort of thing - is piled up, the second half of the bun is placed precariously on top, and it’s hard enough to carry it all without it toppling over, let alone the contemplate the prospect of trying to eat it.

Isaac, myself and Jeremy take it easy on Brighton Beach

After some difficulty, I eventually managed to get my mouth around it, and quite a while later with some effort, had consumed it all, with frequent stops to reach for a napkin or to re-pack bits of it that had escaped onto the plate. Hard work, but well worth it.

On Friday night we met Josh and Cathy at the cinema and went to see The Dish, a great film. Afterwards we roamed up Glen Huntly Road looking for food, and eventually found some pizza, then went to Coles
and bought a packet of ice creams, a low budget but thoroughly enjoyable dessert.

Saturday night was the long awaited Paul Kelly concert at the Corner Hotel
in Richmond. The support to the support (Dan Brodie) was pretty good, and the support (Paul supporting himself with his techno-ish reggae-ish outfit "Professor Ratbaggy") and the main band were both excellent. We stumbled out at around 1am and found a delicious slice of pizza in a pizza place next door (mmm… more pizza), before wandering along Swan Street looking for, and eventually finding, a cab home.

On Sunday we hit the beach with Isaac and Jeremy, who had a marvellous time splashing about in the water, constructing mud sculptures, and collecting sea shells. Then I went to have my usual Sunday night dinner with the kids and their mum at Pizza Hut (mmm… more pizza).

Then Iris and I caught a tram over to St Kilda to meet up with a couple of readers from the States, Ruth and Drew, who turned out to be definitely not the type who send stupid questions into the Guide To Australia. We had a coffee, then retired to a quiet pub in Carlisle Street for some drinks and a chat about… well, whatever came up.

So it’s been a full weekend. Now it’s ten to twelve and I’m feeling pretty zonked. Bedtime for me. G’night.

Joining loads of tourists on the ferry to Manly Another ferry leaves Manly Less reliable than the Manly ferry: a Qantas jumbo with broken weather radar

Sunday started most pleasantly with a bus ride into the city, then joining the throngs of tourists on the ferry to Manly, which is a butch name for a suburb if ever I heard one. We wandered around, pausing occasionally to take in the tranquillity of the waves washing up on the beach, then went on a merry jaunt up a hill, up some steps, along a narrow road, down some more steps, down a hill, before arriving via a somewhat circuitous route at Manly’s main shopping and restaurant bit, the Corso. The guitarist from Paddington the day before and a bagpipe band were doing battle for the attention of the crowd’s ears, with the bagpipes winning. We found a food court to relax with a bite to eat, before continuing to wander around.

Ice-creams and a snooze on the grass near the ferry terminal seemed like the only sensible way to pass the time, before we met up with Susannah and Adrian who drove us back to North Sydney, taking a route almost (but not quite) as scenic as the ferry ride had been.

We relaxed with cups of tea, before heading to the airport about 6:45, which allowed plenty of time to catch an 8pm flight. And this was where the real fun of the day began….

19:20 Check in

19:30 Go through security and look at shops. Note boarding time for 20:00 flight is showing as 20:10

20:00 Boarding time shown as 20:30

20:15 Susannah and Adrian give up and head towards home to find a supermarket before they all close. Very wise.

20:30 Boarding time shown as 21:00. Airline makes apologies, problems with weather radar

20:45 Settle in the departure lounge, play some Snake and Memory on Iris’s phone and watch a bit of a pretty bad but almost compelling telemovie, before wandering around the shops again.

21:15 Aircraft announced to be unserviceable. Alternative aircraft will be available at 22:00. We are advised to present our boarding passes at Burger King or Velocity for refreshments

21:30 Settle down to hot chocolate and brownie. Stare up at TV, and try to figure out what we missed of the movie, before realising after a couple of minutes that this TV is tuned to a different channel and we’re watching a completely different movie. (Actually not completely different. Both are American and feature male psychopaths with guns.)

21:45 Ring sister to whinge about the whole thing. Happily whinge to her voicemail instead.

21:55 Board aircraft. The serviceable one, that is, which is probably just as well.

22:25 Captain announces tractor to push us out has a flat battery! Hmmm… it takes me back to an incident back in 1995…

22:35 Push out, to applause from passengers

22:40 Take off, trying to ignore odd creaking sounds coming from outside the plane

23:45 Arrive Melbourne in one piece

23:55 Wait for baggage. For ages, the only thing going round is what looks like an engineer’s glove, and a Qantas Priority tag. After they’ve been around a few times I decide to unite them, to chuckles from other passengers.

00:20 Baggage starts flowing, to more applause from passengers, most of whom don’t look too keen to fly Qantas again

00:25 Get bag, queue for taxi. Shortage of taxis, but they’re pretty quick in getting more

00:35 In taxi. Taxi driver hears story and commiserates. He seems confident the taxi won’t break down.

01:05 Home. Zzzzzzzzz…

Paddington Market, on a Saturday around lunch time

While Adrian went off to indulge in his weekend love of windsurfing, Iris, Susannah and I headed down to Paddington, for a stroll around the groovy streets of Sydney’s inner-east. For a little while it felt like we were walking through an anthology of Australian music: we saw a bit of Darlinghurst, went past South Dowling Street, and quite close to Taylor Square. Eventually we reached the Paddington Market and munched on some lunch while listening to a busker play some very good guitar music, while a steady stream of visitors ambled up, put $20 notes in his box and took away a CD.

Then we wandered around the market, before munching on some ice-cream and beginning the long trudge back to the car. After all that walking it was time for a short snooze when we got back, followed by some TV, some phone calls, and then we headed over to The Oaks to meet up with some happy mailing list readers. In retrospect we should have been on time, and should have nominated which of the 257 bars in The Oaks to meet in, because absolutely nobody turned up.

We made the most of the place, and had a drink and a delicious meal and hung around for a couple of hours just in case, then left, feeling a little miserable and swearing never to step foot in this Godforsaken town of philistines again. No, not really, actually I thought it was pretty funny. Instead we had a bit of a walk around Neutral Bay, and strolled through St Leonard’s Park to the top of the hill to look at the marvellous view of the Harbour Bridge and city skyline by night.

Adrian and Susannah needed to work, so they gave us some basic directions on navigating into the city and back by bus, and we did just that. We strolled around looking at all the touristy sights, as one should do when one has rarely or never been to Sydney: The Rocks, The Quay, The Bridge, The Opera House, that kind of thing. We ate lunch in The Plaza, before heading for Centrepoint and ascending The Tower and looking at The Amazing View from the top. High-power binoculars had been thoughtfully placed around the viewing deck, and what was even more surprising for an enterprise run by a three-letter financial institution, they were free, or at least, included in the overall price of admission.

Hooray for the Bridge!

Pointing out the Bridge. It’s actually bigger than me - it was a long way away.

Centrepoint Tower

Also included in the price of admission was the Sky Tour, a 35 minute animation and simulation packed extravaganza, which was extremely cool. A little shopping and then we headed back on the bus, before going out to dinner with our hosts plus a friend at a nearby pub/cafe/restauranty kind of thing, which I wouldn’t normally bother mentioning but for its cool URL: www.belgian-beer-cafe.com.au. We drank Belgian beer, ate delicious food, and laughed a lot, before stumbling back to the flat by way of a video shop in Crows Nest for a copy of the very funny Galaxy Quest. (And doesn’t that alien
look incredibly like Rob Sitch?)

All our stuff packed into a borrowed backpack, Iris and I were ready for a weekend jaunt up to Syd-n-ey. Heading for the airport, we boarded a train which whizzed us straight into the city, where we came face to face with thousands of racegoers heading home from Flemington after a long hard day’s punt. We roamed around Flinders Street station for a few minutes looking for a cab, but found none, at least none that weren’t already full. Jumping onto another train for Spencer Street, where the airport bus
leaves from, and where there should be more cabs and less people, seemed like a good idea, so we did it.

Alas, there was a queue for cabs at Spencer Street too, but it seemed like a shorter one. The airport bus wasn’t due to leave for 20 minutes, and it was already 6:10, which was going to be cutting it fine for a 7pm flight. I was almost starting to panic, but I knew from having checked the Qantas web site before leaving home that the flight was going to be at least 15 minutes late anyway. And besides, we thought, what use would panicking be?

A mini-bus taxi pulled up, and the enterprising driver worked out that a few of us wanted to go to the airport. So we piled in with a bloke going home to Brisbane and drunk woman who had been to the races, and was flying back to Sydney without her luggage because she didn’t have time to battle the traffic to her St Kilda hotel before her flight. She did, however, have her mobile phone, which rarely left her ear. The driver also promised to give a lost woman a lift one block to King Street, to an address which she said was "opposite The Men’s Gallery". And that’s not exactly a place where you view art.Hmmmmm….

We got to the airport by about 6:45, and checked-in to hear it confirmed by the woman (who I suppose could be classed as a check-in chick) that the flight was indeed, delayed by a few minutes. But all went well after that, and we were touching down in Sydney before 9pm to be met by my sister Susannah and her hubby-to-be, Adrian, a thoroughly nice guy of whom my grandad once declared "she could do well with him." He’s happiest when everyone’s married, is my Grandad.

We went for a quick spin around the city before heading over the Harbour Bridge to their flat in North Sydney where we fairly rapidly dozed off.

One of my VCRs is on its last legs. Well okay, not legs… little foam thingies that it stands on… on its last… those. Despite regular service, it’s been playing up for years - almost since I got it, in fact. It refused to wind some brands of tape at anything approaching a sensible speed. Just occasionally it would refuse to deal with a tape altogether.

And now it’s started actually chewing tapes it doesn’t like, and believe me, it’s got no taste whatsoever. I don’t mind telling you, I’ll never buy a Sharp video recorder again. In fact, I’ll probably avoid buying a Sharp anything from now on.

So, I’m getting it replaced, and thanks to wondrous trends in consumer electronics, the replacement will have more features, be more reliable, and cheaper. But the best bit is, I get to dispose of this errant VCR. I get to extract my revenge on it for so many years of agro.

How will I do this? I don’t know yet. I’ve thought of a number of scenarios.

• hanging it by its power cord out of the window and dropping it into the car park
• running over it in the car
• dissecting it on the kitchen table, then trying to put it back together and seeing how many bits I have left over
• testing whether or not it will float
• planting it in the garden to see if a new one will grow
• experimenting to find out if it will bounce

And of course I could take AC/DC’s suggestion and blow up my video.

Does anybody have any better ideas? If so, send them along to killvcr @ toxiccustard.com. And keep an eye on this page, or subscribe to the mailing list to see the results sometime next week.

Postscript: Destruction of the VCR eventually happened in August 2001. Read all about it here.