Christmas Part Two - Unchangeable

I love Tassie for some very confused reasons. Originally my love for the Apple Isle had much more to do with visiting my grandmother than with appreciation for rolling scenery and fresh fruit. My best memories are of having morning tea in Nanna’s tiny flat before racing off down the streets of Ulverstone to play in the space park, which was a rotary park nearby with play equipment all done up like spaceships.

Nanna passed away in 2007, and for quite a while after the funeral I was happy never to go to Tassie again. But we have been back a few times for Christmases and weddings and I seem to be growing into a greater appreciation for what a nice place it is independent of my family.

The day we got into Launceston was horrible.

It was clear and sunny enough while Kim and I walked down the main street to find some food, but by lunch time our early departure from Sydney had caught up with us and we needed nap. We took one, aiming to check out Cataract Gorge when we woke up, by we woke to discover that it had come over all rainy, cold and rubbish. This once again was Tassie’s idea of a heat wave.

We did manage to get to the gorge the next day before driving over to Devonport to meet my parents and my sister and her husband and checking into a delightfully quaint cabin on the coast. Normally quaint is a good adjective, but it doesn’t go well with ‘room for six people,’ and with good reason. There really wasn’t.

We had a lovely dinner that night in a park in Ulverstone just around the corner from where my Grandmother used to live. Well… it was Ulverstone. Everywhere is just around the corner. There’s really only two corners. I was distressed to see that most of the space park had been taken down and replaced with injury proof vanilla climbing frames. I’m sure there’s a really potent metaphor for my perspectives on life there, but I’m not quite sure I like where this line of thought takes me.

It was only for a couple of nights, which we were able to pass by playing mental card games and watching the Muppet and Lady Gaga Christmas special. It was great being able to watch Lady Gaga being accompanied by Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, and not being able to figure out which one was the most funny-looking. My favourite is still Animal, but I’m not really in favour of any human performer who manages to make him look positively normal.

After a couple of days on the North coast, we headed once again for Scamander for Christmas with my uncle and aunt, but not without visiting the chocolate shop, the cheese shop, the bakery, the cherry shop and two different raspberry farms on the way. The weather remained resolutely horrible, but we got by with the help of my sister’s barbershop Christmas album.

And then we had Christmas day in Scamander. I’ve written about Scamander before and I won’t bother to do it again. I don’t think much has changed there in the last twelve months. Or the last twelve years. Or ever. And that’s not a bad thing.

We spent Christmas Eve night in a lovely little chapel in St. Helens. We were a little worried that we would be the only ones there when we arrived at ten past eleven for a quarter-past service, but the locals all rolled in the door at fourteen minutes past and we took off into a determined rendition of Once in Royal David’s City. The service was nice, with the usual carols and readings. And then I managed to leave my hat behind, meaning I had to go back for it early the next morning. Well… I always do like to get to church on Christmas morning, even if I didn’t stick around this time. We opened presents and had a traditionally huge lunch at my uncle’s house before spending the afternoon at the beach. After another couple of days of driving around and taking lots of photos of white beaches with orange rocks, we packed up and were on our way back to the mainland. It was a lovely week, but a strangely introspective one. Every time I go back to Tassie, I end up leaving with the sure knowledge that Tassie never changes.

But I sure do.




Garry with 2 Rs

Christmas Part One - Clever Girl

Earlier this year at a Happy Yess Comedy gig, I threw a few saucy velociraptor references into my insightful and side-splitting discussion of the role of chivalry in twenty-first century masculinity.

It didn’t go very well.

I was concerned that my sociological discussion was perhaps not quite as funny as I had believed, but was later relieved to discover that the problem wasn’t so much that I wasn’t very funny (I’m freaking hilarious), but that a disturbing number of audience members - to say nothing of fellow comedians – had never seen Jurassic Park.

Those few of us who had had the knowledge and fear of raptors instilled in us during our formative years regarded it as our moral responsibility to address this cultural deficit, and set about planning a Top End Comedy Jurassic Park Christmas Party. We waited until one of our number had left Darwin, and then invaded her house, set up a Christmas tree and decorated it with small plastic dinosaurs. This is what we do for fun in the Top End apparently. Once the tree was appropriately bedecked, it was time for the main event: A full length viewing of Jurassic Park on the second biggest TV I’ve ever seen.

As much as I love it, as a film Jurassic Park hasn’t aged well. The animatronics, which were astounding at the time it was released, don’t really stack up against the computer generated miracles we can create these days. The computer systems in the ‘state-of-the-art’ facility left us laughing even harder than the multimedia demonstration of how DNA works.

These days there probably isn’t a better way to enjoy the film than in a room over crowded with slightly intoxicated stand-up comedians. The night ended with those of us who had already seen the film grinning and remembering our childhood and remarking to each other how awesome Jurassic Park was, while those who had just seen it for the first time seemed comprehensively underwhelmed. I felt a bit like Sam Neil’s character trying to explain to the scoffing child that velociraptors are much more than just over grown turkeys. And no-one except me seemed to agree that “clever girl” is among the great lines of English literature.

In the end it was a great party with great friends and a great film. It’s just a shame that they never made any sequels.

Ever.




Garry with 2 Rs

Christmas Spirit

I’m a little mixed up this morning. I try to keep on top of headlines and opinions, and this morning, just a few days after the darkness of the Sandy Hook massacre, I’m reading stories and articles about how people are angry about being encouraged to give to charity.
It’s a week before Christmas. Matt Young is telling us he won’t be giving to charity to because his inner-Sydney urban lifestyle is too expensive. And also in Sydney, a bar in Surrey Hills has banned the Salvation Army from entering its establishment because apparently the homeless people at the Salvos shelter up the road are often intoxicated, and the pub doesn’t hold with that sort of thing. And to top it off, someone is trying to kill Oxfam Girl, whose only crime is being too imaginary.

I don’t mind people having a go when the charities get a little too cheeky. I’ve been known to have the odd crack at them myself. But the Christmas season is not the time to start whining about people asking for money on behalf of those less fortunate, especially when the only reason we’re complaining is because the cost of living is going up, which, while it’s a nuisance for us, is likely to be catastrophic for those who are struggling to get by as it is. And not struggling in the sense of “I’ve no money left at the end of the pay period," but struggling in the sense of “I guess I can go live in my car for a while.”

Okay, so groceries are expensive. Petrol is insane. Electricity bills are set to go through the roof. The point we all seem to miss in this is that even when they’re expensive, we still have ready access to food, fuel, electricity and roofs. There are plenty of people, even in Australia and in the centre of Sydney who struggle even for these basic things. Not just struggle to pay for them; they don’t get them at all. Thank God for organisations like the Salvos who are prepared to stand in the gap and speak for them.

It’s fine if you don’t like their religious stance. And it’s fine if you want to criticise their corporate structure. But if you can’t spare some change for the homeless while you’re enjoying your nine dollar apple cider, then I don’t care what your philosophical or economic stance is: you’re doing it wrong.

So in this season of giving, try to find a little bit of extra light in your heart, and buy a sandwich for an inner city wanker who might have to unplug his plasma TV for a while to manage his electricity bill.

To the rest of you: Merry Christmas!



Garry with 2 Rs

O Come Some Of Ye Faithful

I have a confession to make: I really like Christmas carols.

As a musician, and especially as a church musician, traditionally I’m supposed to hate them. They’re really old and the same ones get dragged out every year, and no matter how creative you get with them, there’s really no way to do them except in the traditional style; almost every attempt to update them, jazz them or rock them ends up destroying them. Like most people, carols drive me around the twist when they start coming out in shopping centres in October, because those are usually the versions that have been killed by one of the aforementioned attempts to modernise them.

But I still have a soft spot for a good hearty rendition of the old favourites. I've written before about how inherently powerful they are and I still stand by that.

I think some of the reason is that I’m a pianist. The ones who really hate carols are usually guitarists who spend the whole time complaining about how many chord changes there are in old style carols. This has always struck me as kind of wussy. Honestly, if you’re going to insist on playing an instrument that is all about chords, surely the ones with lots of chords are going to be the most fun, if possibly a little more difficult than playing normal church music, which tends to have no more than four chords, in a predictable repetitive pattern. Here’s looking at you, Hills.

Meanwhile, this Christmas has gone a little strangely. Normally it’s a time when I’m run off my feet getting from one carols service to the next for a full fortnight. This year due to Earnest I got as close as Christmas Eve without playing or even hearing a single one. I missed out on Darwin carols by candlelight and accidently slept through the Melbourne one that they always put on TV. I usually like that one, except most of my memories are of trying to listen to the music while my mother and sister, after a glass or so of wine, have arguments about whether the singer’s dress is showing more or less leg than is appropriate for this time of year, and how much weight she might have put on or lost since the last time she appeared on Australian TV, which was probably in Sea Patrol.

Actually, probably not. I don’t think that’s on Channel Nine. Come to think of it, I don’t know if it’s on at all anymore.

I don’t watch much television.

The point is, I didn’t really get a chance for a big nostalgic sing along this year, and although I’m prepared to accept that I have only myself to blame for that, I found myself feeling more than a little hard done by as I read Facebook accounts of the massive carols services being put on by my old church in Kirribilli. That thing has only gotten bigger since I left. It’s out of control I tell you.

My big chance finally came on Christmas morning. All the guitarists had gone on holidays, or fled in wussy fear of multiple chord harmonies. I was just me, Samantha, a drummer and a singer. This was going to be awesome. I conducted an online poll to find the most popular carols (yes, it was on my Facebook wall. Shut up), picked the least obscure verses and came up with whatever harmonies I damn well wanted. A Christmas miracle!

Unfortunately the cliché of Christmas being the only well attended service for the year doesn’t seem to hold true in pentecostal churches. The twice-a-year mob all seem to go to the bigger congregations in town, and all our regulars were on holidays, sick or frantically running around trying to organise a nativity play which was supposed to be put on by people who were on holidays or sick. By the time you took all the kids out and put them in the nativity play, the congregation had about a dozen people at most. But that was alright, we still sang with joy  and gusto. We didn’t exactly lift the roof. We didn’t exactly know all the words. But we had fun, and we got the service through in under forty minutes, which left just enough time to go home, open presents, finish getting lunch ready and start writing Christmas blog posts. Or whatever.

Merry Christmas!

Garry with 2 Rs

An Unremarkable Evening

We had our office Christmas party last weekend. For reasons I don’t fully understand, this year we decided to break with our tradition of taking a harbour cruise for the Christmas party (which has always been fantastic) and to hire an open topped double decker bus to take us on a pub crawl around the city.

I had originally intended to write a blistering exposé on my impressions of the party bus, but to be honest it wasn’t remarkable enough to warrant more than a paragraph or so. We visited a few bars, had some drinks and finished up at Monsoon’s in the city. My distaste for Monsoon’s is well known, so I didn’t stay long. Besides, it was what happened after I left the party that makes for the better story.

I walked out of the pub at about ten o’clock and started thinking about the best way to get home. The night bus service wasn’t going to run until one o’clock and a taxi was going to cost me forty dollars or so. Right at that moment, before I’d even had a chance to walk more than half a block, a white car came around the corner, ran out of petrol half way through the intersection and coasted to a stop about a metre in front of me. A friend from church jumped out and said

“Garry! Thank goodness. I need your help”.

I happily agreed to walk with her down to the service station and fill up a jerry can with diesel, and in exchange she very kindly offered me a lift home. She also asked if I minded stopping by the school where she worked so she could pick up some work she needed to finish up over the weekend. While we were there, she also picked up her bass guitar and offered to help with the worship band on Sunday morning.

And then I found ten dollars.

Okay, so it’s not a really interesting story after all. But after finishing up with Earnest last weekend, I’ve really been enjoying having a week where I haven’t done anything that required too much thinking. It’s been good, but unfortunately it doesn’t lend itself to staggeringly interesting blog posts. Shut up. I’ll write a Christmas post next week. That’ll be nice.




Garry with 2 Rs

Not So Everyday Rewards

In this week of North American ceremonial gratitude and North Korean certifiable lunacy, I thought it would be nice to take a look at the historical background surrounding why I get so annoyed when I walk into supermarkets.

I got this new rewards card thing set up at Woolworths the other day. Basically, when the computer reminds me to scan it at the checkout, if I’ve spent over a certain amount it gives me a cheap petrol voucher or enough frequent flyer points to get from Darwin half way to Mandorah. I only ever spend enough in one hit if I’m buying a fortnight’s worth of groceries or a year’s worth of T-shirts from Big W. The cheap fuel saves me maybe five dollars a fortnight, and one day I might accrue enough FF points to splurge on a flight to Katherine and back, but my basic assessment of the card is it’s completely useless.

Naturally Woolworths are keen to encourage me to scan it, because it’s an automatic source of market research, building over time a picture of who I am and what my shopping habits are. As a man who is resistant to participation in such corporate systems (and as a man who just likes to be difficult) I resent being a faceless statistics generator, and have begun a silent campaign to throw as many spanners in the works of their research as possible. I’m out to see how far off I can throw the averages.

So that’s two litres of coke, a loaf of bread, five hundred grams of pasta and a travel edition game of hungry hungry hippos.

So that’s two litres of coke, a frozen pizza, an onion and a pair of fluorescent green lady’s bike pants.

So that’s two litres of coke, a packet of frozen peas, five dozen wire coat hangers and a packet of batteries.

Take that , Mr Corporate Research!

And another thing…

It is a well documented matter of public record that the founding fathers of America, cognisant of the gaping celebratory void between Father’s Day and Advent, instituted the festival of Thanksgiving as an intermediary holiday in order to stop department shops putting up Christmas decorations in October. There’s also some gobbledegook going around about a bunch of religious refugees and a boat, but something tells me that wouldn’t carry much weight around here.

So in the absence of Thanksgiving and Halloween, Casuarina has had tinsel and reindeer hanging from the ceiling since some time in that netherspace between the AFL grand final (both of them in this year’s case) and the start of the domestic cricket season that we like to call mid October. And now the freaking music has started up, well outside the officially ordained borders of Advent (which I confirmed earlier this week by consulting my mother’s liturgical calendar). I’m over it already, and it’s not even December yet.

On top of the plastic Christmas gunk, there are those new automatic checkout devices they’ve installed. You can walk up, check out and pay for your own groceries without the need to wait for a checkout operator. That sounds like a great idea, except that it doesn’t make the slightest difference to the customers, who now just have to line up to use a machine instead of a checkout operator. The only people taking any benefit from it are the corporate owners, who now only have to pay one or two people to run around whenever the things breakdown or have a system error or over charge someone or run out of money, instead of paying people to provide any kind of service.

And the machines can only talk to you in pre-recorded voices, making their sing song chorus of “thankyou for shopping with the Fresh Food People” enough to induce me to punch the thing in its face. Fortunately it doesn’t have one. Any minute now I’m going to announce a boycott of supermarkets altogether, except that then I’d be one of those people who shop at outdoor markets, and if I combine that with being one of those people who whinges about society on his entirely-irrelevant-to-anyone-but-him-and-his-mum blog and being one of those people who works in the finance industry, I might just have to go and shoot myself.

And so I wish my American friends a happy Thanksgiving. I wish my compatriots in Australia a happy Valentine’s Day, since apparently getting in three months early is the thing to do these days and I wish my friends in Adelaide my sincerest condolences on having to live there. Oh, and in case I don’t get around to it later…

Happy Christmas!

Garry with 2 Rs

Hark The Herald Angels Sing

I don’t know, is it too cliché to post a Christmas blog? Well… whatever.

It’s weird, but it’s taken me twenty five and a half years to figure out how powerful Christmas carols can be. I’ve always just sort of acknowledged their presence as a sign of the times and sung along with them without realising what’s actually happening.

It starts sometime in mid October when you first hear some old fashioned crooner singing Silent Night in a manner that suggests that he doesn’t actually know where the right note is, so he’ll just slide up and down the scale until he finds it. Shortly thereafter he’ll be joined by Boney M singing Mary’s Boy Child and then whichever pop diva happens to be hot this year murdering O Holy Night.

It’s a crazy time to be a church musician. I’ve played three carols services already, and we haven’t even got to Christmas Eve yet. If I wasn’t nicking off to Tassie for Christmas, I could probably rack up the half-dozen before the season is out without trying too hard.

Playing carols is very different to normal music. With normal music, you’re always looking for a way to spice things up and keep it interesting. With carols, it’s almost impossible to do them any way except the ‘traditional’ way without completely destroying them. It makes them very frustrating to play sometimes, but it is, I think, one of the sources of their great power. Everyone knows how they go, even if we don’t know what half the words mean anymore.

Shepherds, why this jubilee?
Why your glorious strains prolong?
What the gladsome tidings be
Which inspire your heavenly song?
Gloria in excelsis Deo!

We did one service in an old folks home just up the road from our church, and it didn’t seem to matter that some of the words were completely opaque (although, some of the residents looked like they might have been around when Latin was still in common use), because they knew the tunes and had a vague idea what they were about. And that was enough to get them all perked up and smiling. Either that, or someone had slipped something into their tea.

The most random service I’ve done this year was to help out a friend of a friend who was running a community church carols night in Wollstonecraft. All the musicians from that church had gone off on Christmas holidays, so we were the last minute ring-ins. We rocked up about and hour before the start, practised the songs once through and then did the service. Nothing to it, but the locals were so grateful that each of us left with a six-pack of locally produced beer and a giant toblerone bar. Church musicians aren’t usually looking to get paid, but somehow the term ‘precedent’ did come to mind.

But the best one this year was definitely last night. Our church puts on a big community event with a jazz concert followed by a carol and readings service on the north shore under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Somewhere in the region of 700 people came down to join in. The set-up was great, with the harbour and the Opera House as a backdrop, lights, a big sound and a fresh breeze to blow your sheet music everywhere. When our minister got up to give his Christmas message, I reckon they could hear him saying “God is with us” from North Sydney train station.

I don’t think you could get 700 Australian randoms together for a religious sing along at any other time of the year. But chuck in Oh Little Town of Bethlehem and find some sopranos to do the descanty bit of O Come All Ye Faithful and it’s on for young and old. That’s powerful.

So from all of us here at Far From Home, here’s hoping you have a very merry Christmas, and a safe and prosperous new year.

Far From Home



Garry with 2 Rs