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.

Some days I forget that the Earth is just a giant ball hurtling around the sun at 25,000 miles an hour; that tricksy force called gravity fools me into thinking that the UK isn’t that far away and I can just scoot home for the weekend at the drop of a hat.  It’s not all gravity’s fault, of course: Sydney feels quite homely now and it makes sense that my two homes would not be inconceiveably far apart.  By and large I’m quite happy in this little daydream, but every now and then something rudely shatters it for me and I am forced to exact a terrible revenge.  I justify this not by simple retribution, but in defence of public health.  In England, we don’t get spiders and mosquitoes and cockroaches: in Sydney the buggers are everywhere.

Spiders
I should start by saying that I have a very limited experience of spiders in Australia, and though I am not a believer in fate I have just nonchalantly rubbed my hands over my laminated MDF desktop and hope there’s enough wood in there to appease the gods.  However, there are more deadly arachnids roaming the streets than I am comfortable with and it’s only a matter of time before one of them crosses my path.  To date, my closest encounter with anything dangerous has been by text, and I’m happy to keep it that way.   James sent me a message telling me not panic, but he saw a redback spider on the way out of the apartment one morning; he also sent the message to my sister.  Before you could say ‘over-reaction’ she had the balconies shut, the windows sealed and an escape route mapped out on a post-it note.   By the time I went looking for the deadly creepy-crawly, someone else had killed it off.  We didn’t even get to see it.  I’m not normally scared of spiders, but the really big ones do make me feel a bit nervous.  It turns out this is no help at all in the survival stakes.  The bigger they are, the less harm they can do you.  It seems that if you are the size of a house, you don’t need super-powerful venom to kill off your prey: you’ve got brute force.   Evolution rewards the smaller guy – the one I would be more likely to encourage out the door with my finger – with poisons to rival ebola.  Neat, eh?

Mosquitoes
You learn something new every day: mosquitoes are nectar drinkers.  Don’t believe it?  Yeah, me either.  Turns out that the men are docile, placcid flower-loving beatniks, but the females are the work of Beelzebub.  Apparently nectar just doesn’t incubate the eggs like the warm internal juices of an unsuspecting mammal.  Every time you get bitten and shout “Bitch!”, you can be confident in the knowledge that you are linguistically accurate: only the girls bite.  Mosquitoes are my pet hate: they are devious, patient and tenacious.  They bimble around in the area, trying to look nonchalant, and approach you quietly before alighting imperceptibly on the only bit of skin you forgot to Aeroguard.  (I thought they were supposed to buzz: someone forget to tell the aussie mozzies that noise was fair warning.)  Then, they use their anaesthetic-tipped stabbermajig to pierce your skin and drink your blood.   Anaesthetic!?  We’ve only had it for a century and the mosquitoes have been using it for 150 million years?  Where’s the justice?  Even the insect repellents aren’t without risk: reading a bottle of Bushman’s the other day, I was surprised to learn that daily use for more than four months can have serious side-effects like skin-poisoning.  You’re screwed either way.  The only way forward is death.  Kill them all and leave nothing to chance.  Mercy is for wimps.

Cockroaches
There are only two things that must be killed, in my book.  Mosquitoes, of course, but above them and at the top of the list are these wonders of evolution.  Cockroaches are without a doubt the creature least likely to make it out of my apartment alive.  Part of it is my Britishness: you only get roaches in England if you are dirty.  Not so in Australia: EVERYONE gets them and no matter how hard you try, they keep coming back.  If I see you, you carapaced spawn of Hades, I’m coming for you and sending you back to the depth of Hell from whence you came.  I’ve got sprays and traps and an arsenal that makes the Red Army look like the Girl Guides.  This is WAR.  I suppose it is a bit of an over-reaction: I mean, what harm can they actually do?  They don’t bite, they aren’t poisonous and they don’t play their music loud when I’m trying to sleep.  They should be the perfect neighbour.  But they don’t wipe their feet, they never wash their hands, they rummage around in my cupboards looking for food and they don’t pay any rent.  Well your freeloading days are over, you disease-riddled miracles of resilience.  I’m over it.  You are DEAD.  I’m going to be fighting you from now until the day I die.  But it’s a just war and you mark my words, it’s only just begun.

You know when you watch that awful advert in the UK, where Gloria Hunniford is flogging an adjust-o-matic bed with some homely advice on having good beds and shoes, “because if you’re not in one, you’re in the other”, and you want to hate her but it actually sounds like quite a handy tip? Well, however much it sticks in my craw, I can say without fear of contradiction that Gloria is right on the money: shoes matter.  And all the ladies in the room, let me hear you.

One of my earliest purchases in Sydney was a new pair of flip-flops.  They’re called ‘thongs’ over here, but that just makes me laugh so we’re sticking with the (only slightly) less loony English name.  Within a fortnight of landing I had learned my first lesson about sensible footwear:

“Always buy your shoes in the climate you will wear them”

Just like you wouldn’t buy a winter coat in Australia, nor should you consider your British flip-flops appropriate for everyday wear down under.  British flip-flops are not designed to be worn for longer than 30 minutes, which gives you five minutes to dig them out of the wardrobe, five minutes to gently peel them off when they start to rub, and twenty minutes in between to enjoy the British summer in its entirety.  Unless you bought them in Dune, in which case you will have blisters at the mere thought of wearing them, although they will match your outfit perfectly.  Within a fotnight, it was either buy some new flip-flops or cut my feet off.  Since I was fresh out of ether, I went with the shopping plan.  Fortunately, I knew exactly what to do.  My sister had taught me the second important rule of appropraite footwear:

“Wear what the locals wear”

When she arrived in Sydney a year ago, she made the same mistake I did, and thought that her glitzy, trendy Brit-flops were going to do the job.  Oh, I believe she too was in some agony for a short while, before she admitted to herself that you can’t look good with trendy footwear and a face like you’ve been kicked in the genitals.  After some enquiries she discovered that if you want to look hot in sandals, you need to buy yourself some Havaianas.  She was an immediate convert and I too have followed in her wake.  They are like walking on clouds.  They are like having two little lambs throw themselves underfoot with every step you take.  They are, well, just ordinary flip-flops.  And this is where the third rule comes in:

“Keep it simple”

Havaianas are just one step up from the good old-fashioned flip-flops your parents bought you at the shop on day trips to Weston.   It’s two foot-shaped pieces of foam and a plastic thong to hold them on and that’s it.  There’s nothing to rub your skin; there’s nothing that won’t immediately give way to the deformities that have caused you such agony in conventional shoes; hell, there’s practically nothing to them at all.  Which begs the question, why are they $30 a pop?  Well, it’s because they know they are good, and everyone buys them so they have become a mega-brand.  That’s the free market for you.  On the other hand, the benefits of being so popular are that they come in a range of colours and, although they aren’t cheap, they’re not so expensive that you can’t have five or six pairs to go with the entire spectrum of your wardrobe.  I’m not there yet, but it is my ambition to have a rainbow of flip-flops before long.  In the meantime, a final rule for summer footwear style:

“A classic never dies”

I have worn my flip-flops every day since I arrived, and they’re only wearing out because they go with everything.  Flip-flops: I love you.

Gnightgirl asked what I was doing with masking tape recently, and lamented the lack of embiggening on the photos.  It sounds like a cheap and easy way to keep the posts coming and the hits up, so here’s an explanation.  Anthea Turner, Perfect Housewife recommended using masking tape and a Sharpie marker (other fine-point permanent markers are available) to create cheap labels for things you stick in the fridge, like this mayonnaise:

Being a resourceful chap I adapted this to suit another need: my inability to plan my writing using conventional systems like brainstorms and outlines.  This is how it works.

You will need:

• 1 roll of masking tape
• at least two Sharpies in contrasting colours
• a wall/whiteboard/kitchen cupboard/desktop
• paper and a pen/Word (because isn’t that the twenty-first century notepad?)

Method:

1. Stick big strips of masking tape over your whiteboard or equivalent.  In this example I am using the kitchen cupboards because they are easier to clean if I stray off the tape, but you can use your walls if you don’t care about the paint job and have no deposit to lose.  Write all your ideas on the tape in whatever order they come out.  Don’t worry about structure or form, just get them out: phrases, references, research, whatever.  Write it all down any old how.  This article was about the sexual preferences of cartoon characters but yours may look slightly different.

2.  Looking at these, loosely plan your article.  Take your inspiration as the starting point and think about what you want to say, how you want it to develop and where you want to end.  Hopefully while you were throwing out ideas connections starting forming which makes this part a little easier.  I did this part on Word and summarised each paragraph or topic with a few words.  If you only have three paragraphs and your goal is 3,000 words, you can take action now – that’s what plans are for – but don’t worry about the word count too much here, and certainly don’t divide it up amongst the paragraphs: you don’t need more rods for your back.

3.  Write your paragraph summaries on masking tape in a new colour (I used blue but you can choose whatever you like) and stick them up in order, leaving space underneath each one – you will need this in a moment.

4.  Returning to your whiteboard (or kitchen cupboard), cut up all the ideas into individual little sticky labels.  I fold over the ends to make them easy to remove and re-stick, but I’m anal like that: you can choose to make your life as difficult or easy as you desire.  Stick these labels in the spaces under the paragraph summaries as you like.  You can stick and re-stick each one as many times as you like.  I used a two-stage approach, sticking them into categories first, and then into what I thought was an order I could use.  You should end up with something looking roughly like this:

5.  And there you have your plan.  Now write your article.  What?  This is a recipe for a plan – I can’t do everything for you.  Sheesh.

The festivities are over and everyone is heading back to work, but since I am not currently burdened with gainful employment, I have time on my hands and memories to reflect upon.  Here, for your entertainment and information, is my guide to enjoying Sydney Harbour Fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

How to enjoy the Sydney Harbour Fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

1.  The devil is in the detail.
The Sydney Harbour Fireworks are the biggest show in town.  They are the standard by which other fireworks displays are judged.  Half the world turns out to watch them.  If you want to go, you need to pick your spot.  Some things to consider: all the best venues fill up early and the central ones are ticket-only, alcohol-free zones.  Heavy drinkers and cheapskates, head further out and BYO everything.  Despite my fitting firmly into the latter category (and arguably, when the party gets going, into the former) we decided to eschew anything free and fabulous – Balmain has a cracking view and a pub crawl, not to mention some brilliant BYO locations – in favour of the clusterfuck that is Mrs Macquaries Point.

Entry to Mrs Macquaries Point is free but, being a fully licensed venue, taking your own alcohol is forbidden on pain of the embarrassment of having your liquor confiscated in front of the entire queue.  Still, you have to try, don’t you?  And this is where the devil resides: smuggling in your booze.  It’s you versus the inspection routine and only one of you will emerge victorious.  Whatever you do, and I speak from experience, do not hide three bottles of Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay Pinot Noir Brut Cuvée in the bottom of your eski and hope that the ice will stay frozen long enough to hide it.  DO hide it pretty much anywhere else though, because the only place they bothered to look was exactly where I had hidden the afore-mentioned stash of fizz.  Sadly I chose and additional philosophy AS-Level instead of ‘Smuggling 101′ at college.  For those of you with extra pirate in you, disguising half a bottle of gin as a bottle of water and hiding it in the false bottom of your camera will definitely not get discovered.  Overkill?

2.  Arrive early
I don’t like to use expletives as I think they betray a paucity of adaptable vocabulary, but sometimes all you can say is “Fuck me, is that the queue?” and eloquence be damned.  We arrived at 1.30pm and the queue was already snaked around the cattle-barriers, up the street, around the State Art Gallery, past the Domain, down the hill, looped around the outskirts of two football fields, back up onto the street and down past the entrance of the car park.  None of these locations is particularly shady and the weather was ideal for a fireworks display, i.e. clear and cloudless at the height of summer.  We were in that sun-baked queue from hell for nigh on four hours.  James was under doctors orders not to stand in the sunshine in case the antibiotics he was on made him pass out, so we sat him under a tree with the booze-laden eski and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

3.  Be patient
Because we waited some more.

4.  Pick your spot
At about 6pm we made it past the entry tent, sans contraband, and into the compound that is Mrs. Macquaries Point.  The Point, for the uninitiated, is a narrow spit of land that juts out into the harbour just east of the Opera House, the ‘point’ of which is almost directly in front of the bridge.  There are fewer finer views of the scene and that photo of the view you remember seeing online somewhere was almost certainly taken from there.  That spot was taken by the person who started queuing at 4.30am.  Johnny-come-latelies like me and my band had to take what we could find though there really isn’t a bad view on the point.  We ended up in a prime location near to the exit (for a quick post-show getaway), a stones-throw from the bar and within reasonable walking (and mercifully not smelling) distance from the toilets.  Roll on, midnight!

5.  The fireworks
There are two sets of fireworks: one at 9pm (for the kids) and the big one at midnight.  We stayed put for the first lot to test out the view and, when we discovered that our photos were all going to be marred by a giant streetlight in the middle of the shot, we moved down the point for the main event.  No one thanked me when I made us pack up the picnic, rugs, kit and caboodle at 11.30pm, but by 11.50 we were ready to get in, watch the show and get the hell out of Dodge.  Fireworks are one of my favourite things and I’m a pro: no crowd is a match for me.  We had a prime view well in time for zero hour and all we had to do was look up and enjoy it.

6.  Getting home
The minute the fireworks end everyone has the same thought: get home as quickly as possible and don’t let anyone stand in your way.  Buy your return ticket before you arrive: you only have to fight through the queues for the machine and not get in them.  Also, it helps if you live two stops from the city: every train is rammed and the less time you have to spend rubbing up against a total stranger the better.  And there’s a sentence I never thought I’d type.

Happy New Year!