Up and down mountains
I woke up yesterday morning to find that only half the newspaper had arrived. The newsagent lady said that they’ve had other sightings of the newspaper thief prime suspect. I really must get my film developed and hand over the photo.
Anyway I met up with Josh and Pete and we drove to a spot near Mount Macedon, for a spot of masochism, I mean walking. The plan was to leave the car near the towny bit, walk along the road, up the mountain to thegigantic cross at the top, then across the ranges and back down another mountain.
We got out of the car around 10am, walked up the road, and then started up the mountain. The path was a mere 1500 metres to the top – how hard could it be?Fucking agonising, that’s how hard it was. Maybe we’re just not as fit as we think we are. It was a huge effort to get up that mountain, and even with half a dozen rest stops (generally on the pretence of admiring the view) we were still worn out and very sweaty by the time we got to the top.
We found the cross, and we took a bunch of cycling tourists’ picture, and one of them reciprocated in taking ours (must get that digital camera). Then we sat at the base of the cross for some morning tea, and started eating and drinking our way through our backpacks. It wasn’t particularly warm, and a combination of the wind and the sweat meant that within minutes we were not only cold, but freezing, and regretting not having worn warmer clothing.
Fortunately most of the rest of the walk was far more relaxed, with few really challenging bits until the end. The mist and fog (and I’m not entirely sure what the distinction is) lifted, and the sun came out, at least for a while.
At one point we found ourselves on something called the
Forest Eco-tourism trail. At the start was a display with brochures about the park, and I noticed the picture of the ranger was the same as the one for Croajingalong, which I visited in January. Either he gets around a lot, or he’s the Parks Victoria poster boy for the year. Mr Parks 2003.
The trail also had displays every so often telling us about the local flora and fauna. One point worth noting was that the local fauna love to leave their droppings on top of things on the paths. On top of rocks, primarily, though we also saw one on the base of a fire hydrant by a road. Yes, the wombats like to boast about their excremental achievements. After all, why hide it away when you can have it out on prominent display?
The other local fauna of note was the leeches. I managed to avoid them, but Josh and Pete got bitten up a treat, the only thing left behind by the leeches being bloodstained white socks. Ewwww. I was wearing green socks. Obviously leeches like white socks better. We also saw a wallaby, and an echidna. Actually the echidna was very still. Unnervingly still, and thinking back, I’m wondering now if it was actually alive.
And of course as we walked, our usual standard of Men Behaving Badly-esque conversations ensued. Highlights were pondering geographical terms (Such as "What’s between a hill and a mountain?" "A valley!" "Har har, well done… Beware the man with Geographical Powers"), the leeches ("What if there’s a giant leech queen waiting for us!") and after hearing a two stroke engine on a nearby road, and discussing Star Trek, pondering how it would be if the Enterprise were powered by a two stroke engine. That discussion inspired me to mess about with Flash that night.
The last leg of the hike (and by this point we were on our last legs too) was coming down the side of Mt Towrong, back into the town of Mt Macedon. The view from the top was spectacular, but it was quite some drop, and at first it looked like hanging around until after dark and then ringing the police to come and rescue us could be a real option. "Hello officer? Yes we’re stuck up the mountain. We don’t have any food left! I think I can hear wolves coming! Come and help us, please! Yes, a helicopter would be ideal."
But we followed the path, and somehow made it down in one piece. Our bones and muscles aching, we reached the road and walked back to the car. After an appropriate amount of time to collapse and recover, bless our favourite deities for making it back to civilisation in one piece, and get some well-earned soft drinks from the local shop, we drove back to Melbourne.
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Excerpt
Every once in a while I’ll read something that speaks volumes to me. This excerpt is from Ben Elton’s "Blast From The Past", which I’m reading at the moment:
- Every golden generation, every fresh-faced group of friends, must statistically contain those who will fall prey to the sad clichés of life. The things they never thought would or could happen to them. Divorce, alcoholism, illness, failure. Those were things that happened to one’s parents’ generation. To adults who no longer had their whole lives before them. It comes as a shock when the truth dawns that every young person is just an older person waiting to happen, and it happens a lot sooner than anyone ever thinks.
I should note that I’m not feeling particularly down about being 32, divorced and single. But thinking about my life, and the people I grew up with, and where we all are now, it did strike me as ringing very, very true.
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Fun for the whole Family
An interesting dream last night. One of my ex-girlfriends (which one I don’t know, the dream didn’t reveal it) turned out to be related to one ofthe Sopranos, but it was like the Sopranos set in Melbourne. The cops were closing in fast on her, and she’d decided to skip the country, to move to New York and start up life there, to avoid them. For some reason I was not only helping her in a bit of very rapid packing, but I was seriously considering going with her. Hmm.
Then my mother turned up with dozens of kids’ shoes. Why, I don’t know, but it reminded me that there’s no way I want to go and live anywhere without my kids. So I decided I’d just drive mystery woman to the airport, though I was worrying if I might therefore be implicated in any police investigation into her disappearance.
The real world then intruded, though indirectly. I usually turn off my mobile phone at night, to save a few hours on the battery, and because I am loathe to interrupt my sleep for a phone call. This week this has been somewhat re-inforced by my starting to read "Blast From The Past", which revolves around a latenight phone call. But last night I forgot to turn off my mobile.
And it rang. At 4:54am – and 41 seconds. I didn’t hear it, though it would have got reasonably loud. It’s not one of those godawful jingles like some people have, and not one of those wanky polyphonic rings. (No doubt in a year or three they’ll be the norm, but right now they sound like the owner is showing off what an expensive shiny new phone they have.) No, mine’s just a fairly standard ring, which starts off quiet and gets steadily noisier, then by about the fifth ring, stops and diverts the caller to voicemail.
It didn’t wake me. I think it did, however, nudge my kids just slightly out of the land of Nod. Perhaps just across the border from Nod, to some Tijuana-like resort town. They were sleeping a room and a closed door away from the phone, and I remember being awake, hearing them coughing (they have colds at the moment), and glancing at my clock and noticing it was just after 5am.
So, who rang? I don’t know. The bastards didn’t leave a message on the voicemail, and as for the phone, well it helpfully recorded the time of the call to the nearest second, but as for the identity of the caller simply recorded "(no number)". Very bloody helpful.
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Soaking up Moomba
Last night, after lazing much of Saturday, I headed into the city to soak up some Moomba atmosphere. Okay, so I really only got off my arse to go in because of the freeWhitlams andPaul Kelly concerts, but any excuse will do. Neither disappointed. I haven’t seen The Whitlams play before. When I first saw them on Rage many years ago, playing their signature tune "Gough", I assumed they were a flash-in-the-pan joke band. Maybe that’s how they appeared at the time, but they seem to have lasted, and they bashed out a few songs I knew, a few I didn’t, and certainly seemed to put plenty of energy into the performance.
Paul, of course, I’ve seen many times before. As the sun set, he and his band moved through a great set. From where I was near the front, the crowd seemed appreciative – better behaved than some crowds at paid venues in fact. They didn’t harangue him for singing some new (relatively unknown) songs, and nobody seemed to talk during the few quiet bits. Even a bunch of terminally D-demographic slobs near me, who had somehow managed to smuggle an entire slab of beer into the supposedly alcohol-free events precinct, were obviously loving it.
And I got to sing along to a bunch of my favourites -Door,Gravy, and a rendition ofDeeper Water
that (as always) totally went off – so though it all wrapped too soon, in time for the fireworks, I was a happy man indeed.
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Zoooom
On Thursday night I went through the small pile of stuff from the insurance people. Most of them were bills for the one amount, the last couple with increasingly desperate and/or threatening sounding cover letters. The last one was for $110, and claimed that debt recovery procedures were about to commence. I finally paid their damn $110, and thought no more about it until I got home tonight and found another demand for money.
Okay I know it’s my own fault for not getting organised earlier and paying them their money, but it’s pretty funny really… an insurance company going to such lengths for the premium. Though I suppose it’s a little different from your average car or house insurance where they can just refuse to pay a claim if you haven’t paid. Being WorkCover there’s probably legal requirements that cover be in place.
Meanwhile, it’sGrand Prix time again, and from where I work on the 28th floor of a dull grey CBD office building, yesterday I could see various bits of airforce equipment zooming around (no doubt at my expense) in honour of the Formula 1 circus that’s in town for the weekend. Unlike when I worked on St Kilda Road, I haven’t been able to actually hear the cars, so it’s caused meminimal distraction.
I won’t be going – I’m not much of a rev head myself. If I could handle the inconvenience, I’d probably get rid of my car. But I might tune in for a bit on Sunday. At least with therule changes (I don’t follow the sport that much, so I don’t know what they are – just that there have been some) hopefully it won’t be another "ho hum, M. Schumaker won again, what a surprise" race.
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For sale
I discovered today that the block of flats I rent in is up for sale, by way of that most subtle of indicators, a "For Sale" sign nailed onto the front garden wall. The damn landlady must have been planning this for a while, as I seem to recall a month or two back spotting a suspiciously real-estate-agent-like person creeping about with a camera. I didn’t think much of it at the time.
So, what could this mean? Well if I’m lucky, someone will buy the block and keep things going the way they are – no huge rent increase, no kicking people out to do major renovation or demolition – but maybe with a tad more reliability when it comes to arranging ongoing repairs and things. There’s certainly a list of long-neglected items which I could point out to the new owners.
On the other hand if I’m unlucky, it will involve developers with plans to knock the whole place down, or do major renovations. Both have a habit of happening in this next of the woods. And either would involve me moving out, which would screw up my plan immensely. My plan (ever since Idiscovered in 2000 how much of a pain in the arse moving is) was not to move until I was ready to buy a place of my own, which I was envisaging would be towards the end of this year.
I suppose I’ll just have to see what happens. And in the meanwhile, I’d better stop mucking about with this diary and do some more real work to get some more moula into my house savings fund!
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Rain and hail and laksa
On Saturday I drove my sister Susannah and her husband Adrian to the airport. They’ve only been visiting here from London for a couple of weeks, alas, and already they’ve gone back.
The Melbourne weather put on quite a performance. As we drove up the freeway the threatening grey skies opened up, and it poured down rain. And then it hailed. And hailed, and hailed. By the time we reached the Western Ring Road interchange, there was so much hail on the ground that it resembled (to my mind, at least) a fall of snow. The cars had very wisely slowed to a crawl. Thankfully the hail stopped after a little while, and it appeared that it caused no accidents.
After we got everything organised at the airport, we went to have a sit down and a drink and on the way we noticed a bag. A bag left on its own. In the airport. On its own. In the airport.
![[Policeman from Tintin]](/images/2003/03policeman.jpg)
One of the Melbourne Airport security people resembled a Kurvi-Tasch regime policeman. (From Tintin) |
It looked like a kids’ backpack, and was sitting on front of one of those kiddy rides next to the international departure doors. Probably some kid had had a ride, then their family had merrily gone through the doors and realised too late that they’d left it behind.
We sat down, and kept a lookout for a security guy to mention it to. Yeah. ‘Cos they’d be alert, not alarmed, and would take it to lost property, right? Because it couldn’t be anything too scary. This wasn’t Europe – I couldn’t see them taking it gingerly outside to be blown up or anything.
The security guys (they all seem to be guys, I didn’t spot any women) have obviously been upgraded since I was last at the airport in 2001. There’s something about them that makes them look more threatening now. They don’t seem to carry any more weapons or other equipment than before, but somehow their uniforms have been tweaked, possibly to make them look a bit more like police. One security guy I had seen earlier strutting about was obviously quite pleased to be wearing a leather jacket. Adrian was later to suggest it (and his moustache) made him look like one of the Village People, though somehow he reminded me of one of the Kurvi-Tasch regime military dudes in Tintin and the Calculus Affair.
So while Adrian cheerfully explained how much plastic explosive could be packed into such a bag, we watched for security guys, but none came. By the time we spotted one, he had already found the bag, and was kind of examining it, while evidently trying to avoid touching it. He got on his radio, and within a few minutes, no less than four security guys, plus another Ubersecurity guy (he was wearing a different uniform) were all looking at it, standing around and talking about it. They were patently not evacuating the area, or taking cover behind a Duty Free stand in case it exploded, but they weren’t moving it, either. We jokingly wondered if we should take cover elsewhere in the airport – and more importantly, if we should have bought take-away drinks so we could have taken them with us.
It came time for Susannah and Adrian to go, and we said our goodbyes, as the security blokes were still standing around the bag. Perhaps they were waiting for an anti-bomb robot or a SWAT team to turn up or something, but as I left the airport, nothing happened, and I saw nothing about it on the news afterwards, so I guess it really was some kid’s backpack. Hopefully they were re-united with it.
The rain kept falling, though there was no more hail. I drove home, running a couple of errands along the way. It was wet and cold when I got home, and I got soaked a little later when I went for a walk down the street to the supermarket and got caught in a torrential downpour. But I made a laksa for dinner that made me feel better. Okay, so it was mostly from one of those kit things – I forget the brand name: Asian-in-a-Box or something like that – so not exactly a super-herculean cooking effort, but it was mucho delicious.
By the way, no more newspapers have gone missing.
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