Sven's life in Oz

Since I got back from the US, I have been rushed off my feet. Work has been mad thanks to the sudden departure of my boss and the merging of my team with the media team. This is a great opportunity for me, but it has meant I have been busier than ever. I’ve barely had time to catch my breath. Of course, this merge means I get more opportunity to move my career in the direction I want, i.e. more writing and less communications strategy, so I’m happy to do it. That said, I was recently told that I take things a bit too far.

“How do you have any fun?” I was asked when I entered into the very rant I am about to transcribe here. I was so perplexed that it was all I could do to stammer out a response with a puzzled look on my face that really didn’t make things any clearer. “Don’t you understand,” I said, “that this is how I have fun?”

Airline grammar

It has long been said – and when I say that I mean: “Every time I go out to eat I say” – that restaurant menus are where the English language goes to die. Every noun has an adjective, every adjective has an adverb; the very worst have verbs in their own right, as though your dinner is capable of performing some activity other than simply being, which is the kind of extant position you would have thought we could assume when placing our order. Whilst nothing can be worse than the lamentable state of the modern bill of fare, there are other places where our language is, if not gasping its last breath, at least clocking off early and taking a breather. I speak, of course, of the airline industry. At the prospect of crossing a border – and I’m including you in this as well, America; you’re as bad as anyone else – English seems to break down, and airline personnel are willing accomplices.

Now, I know several cabin crew members for various airlines very well and they are among the cleverest, most informed people I know. (See also: ’some of my best friends are gay’.) International languages trip from their tongues like Austrian children in outfits made from curtain fabric. They talk like natives of places that I would have to look up on a map. And yet, whenever I am in an airport I can guarantee that I will hear at least one of the following:

• “This is the last and final call for…”
• “If I could have your full and complete attention…”
• “Ladies and gentlemen, at this time…”,
• or sometimes all three together: “Ladies and gentlemen, at this time I would like your full and complete attention as this is the last and final call for…” *head explode*

Tautologies abound! If it is the last call it must be final; if you want my full attention, it must also be complete. As for “at this time”, it is wholly redundant. Re-read that sentence and tell me that it doesn’t make sense without those three little words. What annoys me is not that people use them. I can understand that it helps to distinguish between advance notices such as “in five minutes we will start selling you duty free and robbing you of all your loose change for an unspecified children’s charity”. What annoys me is the way they litter airline announcements like grammatical dog turds on an picturesque linguistic village green. Sentences that begin with: “At this time…” frequently also end with “…at this time”! Sometimes there’s even one in the middle!

I have no doubt that this little phrase is an air steward’s version of an “ummm” – the pleonastic symptom of an attack of stage-fright or a mental blank – but please, for the love of sanity, think before you press “page”. Good planning is the key to successful public speaking. And while you’re at it, put a comma in this, and a question mark at the end:

Thanks ever so much.

Since the show itself is delayed in Australia, so are my thoughts. The time difference is not your friend when the event takes place on a Saturday night in Europe; and Facebook and Twitter are your mortal enemies when you’re trying to spend the day NOT finding out who won. I only had to open my eyes and some clown had bemoaned it on his Facebook status. I actually quite liked the winning entry, even if she was singing in a cockney accent despite hailing from Hanover.

The show was one of the best ones I’ve seen in recent years, where “best” means “thankfully the novelty entries have been kept to a minimum and the cheese factor is high.” Sarah and I enjoyed two bottles of wine and a healthy serving of fattoush and dukkah (traditional Eurovision party fare if ever there was some) while we mocked the entries mercilessly and wondered aloud at the sexuality of most of the performers.

Since I already knew the winner the only mystery for me was where the UK would end up. Britain put in a sterling performance, of course. So great was our entry that we finished 25th out of 25 entrants. What a success! For a nation that simply doesn’t take this show seriously I can only assume that was the plan all along. Of course we all moan about it and decry the political voting, but next year we’ll send in another Ten Good Reasons-reject song from the Mike Waterman Hall of Forgettable Pop Mediocrity and repeat the cycle. We’re nothing if not consistent.

And so that’s it for another year. I shall be humming the Romanian entry for the next week, and no doubt when I get to Stonewall on the weekend the drag routine will be set to Albania’s rousing number. Enjoy!

In my never-ending quest for random crazy shit to fill my time before I die, I have accrued a highly skilled team of like-minded weirdos who are always up for the same kind of antics as me. (By ‘random crazy shit’, I mean legal random crazy shit, of course: the kind where people say “how did you find out about that?” with mouths agog, as opposed to “what the fuck where you thinking?” with eyes rolling.) One of these side-kicks of fun is my good friend and colleague, Sarah, who seems eerily on my level when it comes to almost anything, including my theories on humans as giant walking tubes, cheap gin, and why lesbians hate everyone. Picture my face when she strolled into my office and told me that she had bumped into two guys who had convinced her that roller derby was the greatest show on Earth and she should book tickets now or just kill herself.

I have known that roller derby is the hottest shit around since I saw Whip It one Saturday night when I was sofa-bound with a hangover. I immediately googled my local roller derby league and liked them on Facebook, followed them on Twitter and subscribed to their RSS feed. I was actively searching for people who would come with me to the first interstate roller derby showdown right here in Sydney not two weeks later. You’re excited now and you’re just reading it: imagine how I felt! We were agreed: it was on.

Enter the third member of the cast of madness: my partner in dog bites and pyjama-clad dining, Nicholas. Back from Atlanta for a limited time only, he was excited long-distance at the prospect of watching teams of butch women race around a track in roller skates and try to beat each other up. Who wouldn’t be? Sarah roped in a couple of her friends, Adrian and Ivana, and the five of us rocked up last Saturday to watch Brisbane eat Sydney’s wheels.

The derby was like an awesome instruction manual in what-the-fuck: no one under 18 could sit trackside in case a skater broke loose and charged into the crowd, I read the programme and the rules were still a complete mystery, and the fans came from every walk and stage of life imaginable. To my left a bunch of skinny emo girls sat patiently watching the action; to my right a group of middle-aged housewife-types were out of their seats and screaming like banshees. There was a Mexican band playing on stage. The half-time entertainment was a pole-dancer. Adrian had been drinking since lunch, Ivana and Nick were conversing in Serbian (what are the chances?) and Sarah and I were getting slowly addled on Bundaberg rum-and-coke out of a can. It was trippy.

After the match (Sydney 106: Brisbane 86. Sucks to be you, Queensland!) we all bundled into cabs and made for the nearest (only?) Baltic restaurant in town. Nick and Ivana could barely contain themselves as they explained to us just how much meat we would be eating. They failed to fully explain the amount of onion that we would be eating with the meat: enough to give you breath that could give a man a stroke from twenty paces. Nonetheless, the prospect of working our way through the equivalent of an abattoir’s daily output was too good to refuse; and, I might add, utterly delicious.

As we sped our way towards our impending meat feast, Sarah suggested that we do something completely out of character every month. I’m buggered if I can think what could possibly beat this, but if I find out, I’ll let you know.

I think I’m going crazy. I mean: crazier. Ever since I locked myself out twice in as many weeks I have been on a slow decline into abject madness and it ain’t pretty. In my defence, the first time wasn’t my fault, but I let it happen again a fortnight later and I don’t have anyone else to blame.

To get into my flat, you need a swipe card and two keys. The swipe will open the communal door to the building and the keys will admit you to my humble yet fabulous abode. The first time around Nick locked the keys in the flat, but the second time, after a night at a Drag Queen competition, I discovered I had forgotten to take the swipe card. There are places I would choose to be at 2am; locked out on the street in the drizzle is not one of them. I investigated all the options available: jumping into the car park to see if the back door was open (it wasn’t), trying to work out the numbers of the flats with lights on so I could ring their bells (I got it wrong), and trying to reach through the gate to open it from the other side (I couldn’t). I had resigned myself to ringing James and telling him I was on my way over because I was an idiot, when a miracle appeared. When I say miracle, I mean little Asian lady with a swipe card.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when I began to approach her. I think I was at my least threatening wearing my $10 Cotton On scarf wrapped around me like an old woman’s shawl for warmth, but when you’re a 5ft-nothing single female and a 6′4″ man lurches out of a doorway towards you at 2am their wardrobe choices are probably your last concern. My story about being locked out seemed as preposterous as it was, but after I produced my driving licence and proved I was as big a clown as I appeared, she happily let me in and laughed at my stupidity as we climbed the stairs together.

The very next day I resolved to get a spare set of everything, but that was more difficult than it seems. First: one of the door keys is a security key and cannot be cut. I have to travel to Bondi to get a duplicate, but only between the hours of 9am – 5pm and not on a weekend. Taking the morning off work to get a spare key seems a tad excessive, don’t you think? Second: getting a duplicate card requires a trip to Annandale (the opposite direction to Bondi), an application form and a $100 deposit. In short, a spare set of keys will cost me about $175 when cutting and travel expenses are all included. Not to mention a day’s holiday from work. Does all this seem like a waste of time and money to you, too?

Enter the craziness. Since I am clearly too tight busy to get a spare set of keys together, my latent OCD is making a comeback. Whenever I am in a hotel I only ever close the door with one hand when I can see the room key in the other. It’s learned behaviour I now apply to my daily routine: I only shut the front door after I have physically seen that the swipe card and both keys are OUTSIDE the apartment. Even then I dither in the doorway, mentally running through the unlocking process before committing and pulling the door shut. It can take me a good few minutes to cross the threshold on the way out these days. I just don’t trust myself.

On the face of it, that’s not so bad, but it’s not just the front door. OCD function creep is starting to ruin my life. This morning I noticed that I count the train stops on the way to work, and check the station names as we approach to make sure that I don’t miss my stop. Then I check them as we leave again, just in case – what? How stupid can I actually be? When I finally get to my station, not only do I check the name on the platform, but I check the screens on the opposite platform going the other way to make sure I’m in the right place.

Tell me I’m not the only person who does this kind of thing. Or tell me that I am, and $175 is cheap compared to the therapy I’ll need if I don’t sort myself out soon. Somebody, please, save me from myself.

Exciting news, US readers: I’m coming to New York in June. Yes, your fabulous nation is about become even more amazing for ten days as I grace your spangliest city with my presence. (I’m also trying to slip in a few days in Montréal if I can. Canadian readers, you can rejoice too!)

So far my plans are pretty flexible. I’ll be arriving on 17 June and leaving on 27 June, and I’ll be staying with my friend Nick (he of the sick-covered flip-flops) throughout. Currently the only firm engagement I have is to hang out in Central Park on 19 June (weather permitting) and enjoy the sunshine. Come join me! And email or comment with your suggestions for other fun blogger meet-up ideas. They don’t all have to include drinks, more drinks and dancing, but if they do I won’t complain.

See you all soon!