Sven's life in Oz

A few months ago I blogged about how I wasn’t paying for my power at home. We all knew it wasn’t going to last forever; inevitably the power company realised that I was lighting my home, washing my clothes and living my digital life with zero capital outlay; and sent me a bill. Thankfully it wasn’t as astronomical as I was expecting, but it was from the wrong company. I had instructed AGL to supply my power but the bill came from TRU. Quite the mystery.

AGL were very helpful: they said they would talk to TRU, sort out the problem and bill me retrospectively. They also said they would let me settle up over a few months rather than pay for a whole year’s energy in one go. “Leave it up to us,” they said, so I did. Six weeks later TRU threatened to cut me off. I rang AGL again. “We have no idea why we read your meter but didn’t transfer the contract,” they said, “and we have no way of finding out.” I went apocalyptic on them, but to no avail. Apparently AGL don’t (a) keep records or (b) chase up potential business contracts. I guess (b) is a logical result of (a), but it’s no way to run a business. “It really doesn’t matter whether it’s our fault or TRU’s,” said AGL, “you’re still going to have to pay that bill, then we can take on your contract.” Au contraire, AGL. I’d rather power the whole place with batteries than give you my custom in future. Your dreadful service has cost you my business.

I love Australia, but I wonder how we are so wealthy with service like this. Businesses in any other country would simply go under. AGL is still trading because everyone else is exactly the same. The customer service bar here is so low that the most derisory, patronising, unhelpful call centre worker can sail over it with ease. Telstra, the single most awful company I have ever had to deal with, remain the national telco despite their abysmal service reputation. I suspect the number of complaints is actually spectacularly low: anyone calling to raise a concern would wizen and expire long before they got through the queuing system. Similarly, Strata – the ubiquitous property management company – seem to have based their service philosophy on “The Stalinist guide to keeping your tenants happy”: by-laws abound and their staff are ruthless, tyrannical martinets; like a military junta running a helpline.

Life in Australia is a extant case for the minimum wage and performance-based commission. Luckily for businesses here, we have glorious weather, beautiful beaches and an amazing standard of living instead. When we finally reach the unsatisfactory end of our disappointing customer experience, at least we can conclude that it wasn’t a total loss: three hours on hold in the sunshine can give you a marvellous base tan for summer.

In exactly two weeks I will be checking in at the airport for my flight to New York and a fabulous eleven days of American summeriness which should help (a) beat the winter blues and (b) top up the tan. Time seems to be flying and I haven’t even thought about packing yet, which is quite out of character for me. Perhaps I am becoming a well-adjusted individual after all this time. One swallow does not a summer make, so let’s reserve judgment on that for now.

This will be my first time flying over the Pacific and, as a Brit, it feels like I’m about to go the wrong way around the world. Living in England, you get used to thinking that London is the centre of the world (it is zero longitude, after all) and everywhere rotates around the flight paths out of Heathrow. Despite living in Australia now I still think of it as a country on the very edge of the world, as though we are clinging onto the map and just beyond the shores there be monsters. New Zealand is literally dangling over the abyss. I’m a secret flat-earther and I never even knew it.

Three things excite me about my upcoming flight. First, I will cross the international date line. I’m going to try and stay awake as we go over it: I know it will pass completely without event it will still be a little thrill for me. The second thing is linked to the first, in that I will get to see the same sunrise twice. I leave Sydney at 10am, so I will see the sun come up as I head to the airport to check in. As the sun travels through the sky in one direction, my flight will go the other way around the planet and catch up with the same day as we approach LA. I know that it’s just a flight and it happens every day, but it still blows my mind to think of it like that. Living in the twenty-first century is just great. Finally, and perhaps most stupidly, my return to New York means that I will have gone completely around the world once. I left New York after my last holiday there in 2004, and although it has taken me six years with lots of stops, side-trips and doubling back, it marks the end of one complete circuit. I don’t care what you say: I think it’s pretty awesome.

Of course, all of of this is merely the beginning: I haven’t even started on the holiday itself! Not only am I hoping to meet the fabulous New Yorkers from my circle of bloggery, but Emma Blonde – beloved friend and university housemate extraordinare – will be in town; New York Gay Pride kicks off on the second weekend; and the rugby team will all be flying in after their Bingham Cup tour concludes. It’s just too exciting, so to ease myself into the fun we’re having an afternoon in the Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park on 19 June. If you’re in the city, come join me – I’ll be the one drinking champagne and exuding fabulousness.

See you there!

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.

Australia is an arid, parched land most of the year. Not that we city-dwellers would know it: I turn on the tap and water comes out, so I don’t ask any questions. I seldom think that only a few hours drive away there’s a giant desert the size of Europe where every drop of water is trapped and reused three times before it eventually evaporates away. But the idea that we live in a paradise of perpetual summer is not entirely accurate. It may not ever freeze in the Red Centre, but Sydney gets cold in a hurry when winter arrives and I am never prepared for it.

Before I continue I should  define the term ‘cold’. I am not talking northern hemisphere cold. If it ever snows in Sydney I’ll eat my bobble hat. I don’t think I’ve even seen a frost in the city, although last year the temperature did drop to -1C overnight. The days usually peak at around 12/13C in the coldest period, which may not seem all that frigid to you, but when it’s 30C on an average day a 20-degree drop feels pretty baltic to me.

As usual I caught the first cold of the season, spread it around the office and got it back again with interest. I was feeling smug to have shifted it in two days, little suspecting my colleagues were just looking after it for me. I’m beginning to think I’m some kind of influenza incubator; a common-cold Typhoid Mary just waiting for the next wintry snap to spread my infection like a seasonal plague.

Last week I packed up the fans and rolled out the heaters as my aluminium-framed windows aren’t exactly built for the colder seasons and, this being Sydney, central heating is unheard of. I admitted defeat and accepted the summer was over when I dragged my duvet out of the cupboard and installed it on the bed. I dug my slippers out from the back of the drawer and wrapped myself in a blanket while I watched tv. I am a beaten man.

Winter in Sydney is horrible for two reasons. Firstly, it’s not Christmas. In the UK winter means the end of the year, a winding down from the summer and a ramping up of the party season as we race towards December. Here there’s nothing to look forward to but the return of summer. There’s no Christmas, no New Year and no party season. It’s just an inconvenient three-month interregnum between barbecues and pool parties. And secondly, nothing happens. Everyone rugs up, stays in and waits for the sun to come back. When you live in an outdoors-y nation like this one, you forget how to entertain yourself at home. By September everyone has gone stir-crazy and deathly pale.

At least this year I have three things to look forward to: my holiday in NYC, my birthday and my sister’s wedding. I’m sure that will keep the blues at bay. Now, where did I put that Scrabble?

It’s been so beautifully warm here lately that I’ve been able to hang my washing outside at around 9pm and bring it in the following morning, dry as a bone and still the same colour as when I hung it out. (As you know, the sun can damage your clothing, especially when there’s no ozone layer to protect it. It doesn’t just cause cancer, it can seriously damage your wardrobe, too.) This was all well and good till last week, when I had my first encounter with the scary Australian wildlife. Those of a squeamish disposition, click away now.

This particular weekend I had decided that the mattress protector was in need of a clean and, since I only have one, I had hung it out early in the evening and by 10pm it was ready to come in. I like a quick turn around where my bedding is concerned. Yes, I’m quite sure the neighbours think I’m crazy doing my laundry in the middle of the night, but I leave the house at 7am and I don’t get home till gone 7pm, so when else am I going to do it? Anyway, just as I was unpegging the mattress protector in the darkness, I noticed what appeared to be a crab on the corner of the washing line. “Is that a crab,” I said to myself, but no sooner had the thought crossed my mind than it ran forwards at lightning speed and across my hand, still in the act of releasing the mattress protector from the line. Clearly not a crab.

The following all took place in the space of about 30 seconds.  First, I didn’t have time to change the direction of my hand, and as I brought it towards me I was amazed that it was so light. This appeared to be the trigger my body needed to act on the fact my mind had been aware for, well, about half a second: this ‘crab’ was in fact a huntsman spider. Huntsmen are not particularly dangerous to humans but they have been known to bite and, when I tell you they can grow to the size of dinner plates, you can imagine that I’m not talking about a little nip. They hurt. A lot. More from surprise than fear, I squealed like a child and jumped away whilst it carried on its way quick as a flash, off my hand, along the washing line and into my mattress protector.

So, there I was, standing in the dark wondering what I was going to do about a spider the size of a small dog hiding in my bedsheets. It’s not the kind of situation you prepare for when you spent 28 years in a country where the greatest garden danger was falling into the stinging nettles in that patch your parents called a “nature reserve” because they couldn’t be arsed to fight the uneven ground with the mower.I’m a practical sort of chap – remember that time at university when I sat everyone down for a nice cuppa while our roommate was whisked off to hospital after her ’suicide attempt’. No? I guess I should blog about that one day. Back to the story: I quickly decided that I didn’t have the time for this kind of thing, and tentatively opened up the mattress protector, dangling from the line as it was. I say ‘tentatively’ – if flinging it open could mean an airborne mega-critter landing on your head you’d be tentative too. And wasn’t I glad I was careful! No sooner had  I lifted the corner than it dropped out onto the ground; but far from running away, it sat there in the semi-shadow as though preparing to give me a mouthful. Perhaps it had four of its legs on its hips and was thinking about what to say. I wasn’t waiting about to find out. I yanked that protector off the line, grabbed the washing and ran for it. Well, walked quickly. OK, ran.

Wikipedia has since informed me that huntsmen are also called ‘giant crab spiders‘ owing to their peculiar legs, giving them a crustacean-like comportment. Also, it turns out, they eat smaller spiders and cockroaches, so I’m pleased that I didn’t just crush it to death with all 82kg of my jumping weight and associated landing force while it was sitting there giving me attitude. And I hope it remembers that next time we meet. Or better yet, let’s never meet again. That suits me fine.