Level Up

It’s a Tuesday morning. You have one objective to complete: Pick up your fiancés friend from the airport when she comes to visit. Sounds simple enough, right?

Right.

Unfortunately, I apparently live in a computer game where every simple objective has to come with two or three annoyingly trivial sub-objectives. Nothing that would take a normal person any extra effort, but still dastardly effective in their purpose of ensuring you can’t get to the next stage without them.

To make it to the airport, I first had to learn the time, origin and flight number of Holly’s connection from Brisbane. Fortunately in a previous level I had acquired the Smartphone of Knowledge from a wise old Samurai. This would allow me to communicate directly with the traveller and unlock the passage to gate 4A on the first floor.

Unfortunately my Smartphone of Knowledge had run out of mana. I needed to use the legendary Phone Charger of Power that I acquired from the crazy old shopkeeper that apparently wouldn’t take money for it, but wouldn’t give it to me unless I traded it for the Sword of Blue Silvery Sharpness. But that was like four levels ago now, so once I applied the Phone Charger of Power to the Smartphone of Knowledge, I could get the access code for gate 4A and pick up Holly. Tragically I had left my Phone Charger of Power at Kim’s house.

No problem. I can fast travel to Kim’s place easily with my Hatch Back of Focus, pick up the Phone Charger of Power, charge the Smartphone of Knowledge and get the code for gate 4A if I leave early enough.

Error: You can’t fast travel to Kim’s right now because your battery is flat. The night before all the running around has to happen, this could be game over.

Oh hell no: I cast the emergency AANT spell and summon a level four mechanic. I get one +1 to Focus, but then I’ll be stuck wherever I travel to and it’s already half past midnight. I fast-travelled to the spaceship parts vendor and walked home from there. Fortunately it was only a couple of blocks.

So the following morning I walked back to the spaceship parts vendor, purchased a replacement power unit for the Hatchback of Focus, then fast travelled to Kim’s office to pick up the Phone Charger of Power to re-equip the Smartphone of Knowledge, looked up the access code to gate 4A. I went through the checkpoint and camped outside the passenger spawn point. I was greeted by a small anthropomorphic mushroom who informed me that the Princess was in another castle. I punched him right in the face (1up! Yes!) and went back downstairs to find Holly. She was at baggage claim waiting for me.

Achievement unlocked.



Garry with 2 Rs

Spaceship

There’s a lot going on at the moment. It’s difficult to know what I should be writing about. In fact I would go so far as to say I don’t want to write about any of it, largely because I don’t want to think about it. But sometimes you just have to sit down and write your way through the important issues of the day, month, or year, depending on how much time is ganging up on you all once on this particular occasion.

I downloaded a new computer game this week. It lets you (among other things) design and fight your own spaceships against giant alien pandas. And given the amount of time I want to spend not thinking about how I have no job, no car and no clue what’s going on, it’s highly likely I’m going to spend a fair bit of time wailing on said pandas with my supercharged spaceships of destruction.

Besides, it’s clear I’ve been flagrantly abusing the “spaceship” tag on this blog for far too long now. It’s about time I actually wrote a post that fits it properly. So here we go.

How to make a spaceship for Garry

General hull shape

Anticlimactically, this is probably the most controversial choice of them all. Naturally I decided to lead with it, in this very thoroughly researched and carefully thought out post. I’ve spent a stupid (and rather embarrassing) amount of time checking out everything that Google images throws up when you search the word “spaceship” in order to decide which spaceship design looks the sexiest. I couldn’t really get past USS Voyager from the Star Trek universe in the end.

I mean in the vacuum of space, the general sleekness of a spaceship is completely irrelevant. But Voyager still wins. If you’re going to find yourself lost on the other side of the galaxy, you want to at least look good, with reliable drive shafts while you’re doing it.

It would also be cool if it was orange instead of grey, made out of unobtainium instead of the traditional titanium alloy, and bigger on the inside.

Propulsion

Again, Start Trek’s warp nacelles are probably the standard here, although the hyperdrives from Star Wars would also work I suppose. Basically anything that’s going faster than light is going to be okay. It’s going to need it over the next few months. I’d also be interested in an improbability drive, or alternatively a temporal distortion drive from the soon to be released Samantha Triton novels.

Soon to be released, that is, if my friends ever send me my freaking feedback already.

It would be nice if you could fuel it with pasta rather than minerals or fossil fuels.

Armoury

“Damn yokels can’t even tell a transport ship ain’t got no guns on it”.

Yeah, well my ship is going to be able to blow your stupid transport ship out of the sky. Sorry Mal. I can take the sky from you. Bwa ha haaaaaa!

The planet busting laser from the Death Star would be ideal, but might be a little impractical, not to mention expensive. I’m thinking of a nice tasteful combination of photon torpedoes, EMP cannons, a picture of a bear holding a shark and a big old dalek gun mounted right up the top. As long as it makes that awesome bwoooooh-piiiuuuuuuuu noise. I don’t care if you can’t hear it in space. I’ll know.

Special Effects

Well, obviously when it lands you want the organ music from ET. And it would be cool if you could hear Darth Vader’s mask in the corridors every now and then. Oh, and I want it to glow blue and leave a trail of fire when it takes off, like the De’Lorean.

Oh freak me sideways. What was I thinking? A Flux Capacitor. Definitely we need one of those. Even if time travel turns out to be against the laws of physics and easily comprehensible plot lines, we can just have it installed on the wall, right next to the name plate that looks like a serial number but is really a bible verse.

This is going to be awesome.

Crew

Captain: Me, obviously. Why would you even ask that?

First Officer: Hmmm… would you go with Malcolm Reynolds or Commander Chakotay? I would… what’s that? Really? Well… okay.

First Officer: Kimberly Webster

Pilot: Samantha Triton. Yes, okay she only exists in my head. So does this whole spaceship. What’s your point?

Chief Engineer: The Doctor(s). All eleven of him. The ship will never go where it’s supposed to, but at least it will always get there. And if it ever explodes, we’ll take the whole universe with us.

Chief Science Officer: We don’t need one of those. We’re already on a freaking spaceship. How much more science do we need? … no we don’t. … I don’t have to do anything. … No we don’t. … Okay! Fine.

Chief Science Officer: Dr Sheldon Cooper.

 I'm hoping to have the GSS Velociraptor commissioned and ready for departure sometime before the end of June. I have no idea where I'm going, but since when was that any reason not to run away in a spaceship?

Make of that as little as possible. Or just make me a spaceship already.




Garry with 2 Rs

Some Thoughts on Temporal Mechanics. Sort Of.

I spend a lot of my time pondering the great mysteries of the universe. Sometimes I sit and ponder the relationship between causality, free will, divine predestination and chaos. Other times I ponder my persistent inability to get my chicken burgers right.

This week I’ve been considering time travel. I mean, not considering it in terms of whether I should do it or not, but more in terms of which literary expressions of it make the most sense to me. This is largely Kim’s fault. She made me read the Time Traveller’s Wife. I enjoyed bits of it, but as far as plot lines go it was one of the girliest science fiction stories I’ve ever read. I shouldn’t complain too much. It was a lot better than Jane Eyre.

It’s important that you understand that I really do take my devotion to this subject very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that I recently finished editing my second novella on the subject. I wrote it in November for Nanowrimo and I’m planning on doing a third at some stage, just as soon as I can find a spare plot and an extra November lying around.

And I’d hate you to think that this is just some rubbish I made up while I was bored at work because I wanted to get an extra post in for April. No no no. This post is the culmination of weeks of meticulous research. You can find my sources here, here, here, here, and here.

See. I totally know what I’m talking about. I’m planning on having awarded myself an honorary doctorate in the dual fields of temporal mechanics and goofing about on the internet at some point last week. Wish me luck.




Garry with 2 Rs

The Write-Me-Back Falls: Episode 1

So Nanowrimo is going well. You can see the progress metre on the right side bar showing you my journey to 50,000. I’m about a day behind schedule, but there’s plenty of time to make that up.

Strange things start to happen to your brain when you start investing this much mental energy into one pursuit. The other night, somewhere between choreographing a space-age bar fight and staging a daring escape from a locked cargo hold, I had a visit from an old friend. Someone I hadn’t seen for many years, and to be honest, hadn’t expected to see again. I certainly never expected to hear her knocking on my door at two in the morning.

What followed was complete and unadulterated nonsense, but by now you’re almost certainly not reading this blog because you’re expecting it to make sense.

Gw2Rs: Oxfam Girl? What the hell are you doing here? I’m supposed to be writing a science fiction novel in a month, to say nothing of the other side projects I have on the go. I haven’t got time to waste writing made-up adventures for some imaginary girlfriend I haven’t seen since I was in Europe.

Oxfam Girl: Shhh. I need your help, Sugar.

Gw2Rs: I am not your sugar. What’s wrong?

Oxfam Girl: I think someone’s trying to kill me.

Gw2Rs: What makes you say that?

Oxfam Girl: The last three nights I’ve been visited by a mysterious stranger who does nothing except say “your time has come” and then disappear.

Gw2Rs: Wow. That is mysterious. What does this stranger look like?

Oxfam Girl: Sometimes she’s wearing a jet black robe with a dark hood.

Gw2Rs: Sounds about right.

Oxfam Girl: Other times she’s wearing red bathers.

Gw2Rs: Eh?

Oxfam Girl: I don’t know. You have a weird imagination.

Gw2Rs: Me? I’m not the one who… yeah okay, whatever. Why is she trying to kill you?

Oxfam Girl: That’s what we’re going to find out. Follow me.

Gw2Rs: Where are we going?

Oxfam Girl: Wherever we have to. Just hold this quokka and think of home.

Gw2Rs: … ? … No.

We teleported anyway. Next thing I knew we were standing on an ominously jagged cliff top in the middle of a thunderstorm. Very dramatic. A bolt of lightning out over the ocean revealed the woman in black standing a few feet from us. Before I even had a chance to start writing a witty and internally asynchronous introductory monologue for her, she calmly walked over and pushed Oxfam Girl off the edge.

“We’ll always have Paris!” yelled Oxfam Girl as she vanished into the blackness. I don’t think I ever wrote about her in Paris, but that’s women for you.

“That wasn’t very sporting,” I said indignantly.

“Who said I was going to play fair?” asked the woman in black, as with a nonchalant flick of her head she slipped back her hood revealing…

TO BE CONTINUED

Because I’m really supposed to be working on my Nanowrimo story right now.

Standard Australian English

I like words.

I spent five years studying linguistics, and I still get a kick out of the way humans can use language to impart so many different shades of meaning. And, at the risk of sounding like a crazy old man (indeed, I increasingly am one) it makes me mad when I see linguistic expression being squashed to make way what is supposed to be easier communication.

I’m always being asked to simplify my language use at work. A lot of the time it’s because the people I’m writing for have low literacy level, or a non-English speaking background, or both, and that’s fair enough. But this week I co-wrote an article for publication in the NT Law Society bimonthly magazine. My boss sent it back to me for editing because apparently I was using technical language that wouldn’t be accessible to the readers.

Language too complicated for lawyers?

The thing is I wouldn’t have said I use particularly complicated English. The odd sentence does get away from me every now and then. But seriously, we’re talking about a profession that produced the following:

For the purpose of smooth transmission of legal cultures and legal thoughts and avoiding unnecessary misunderstanding and cultural conflicts, it is of great importance for us to carefully study the textual structures of laws and especially accurately comprehend the long sentences in the English legal texts, based on which this article attempts to take linguistic characteristics of legal English as the starting point to explore the features of legal translation, especially the difficulties in translating long sentences.

And speaking of legal English, for some reason I’ve started watching Boston Legal again. Last time I got stuck in this series, I started producing language that really was incomprehensible. I’ve managed to avoid that this time around, and instead I’ve started giving some thought to what will happen to me when I do finally cross that hazy line between ‘delightfully eccentric’ and ‘bat-crap crazy’. It’s often assumed that I’ll wander around like Denny Crane, spouting right-wing nonsense and shooting people. But I think, in the end, I’ll end up more like Alan Shore, stalking the halls with all the appearance of a man in control, all the while gradually becoming more and more unstable and yet more and more unstoppable at the same time.

In fact there’s some circumstantial evidence to suggest I may have crossed that line last week some time.

Anyway, I’m sure it’s all perfectly safe. Next weekend Doctor Who comes back. That will be just the balancing influence of sanity I need to get me centred again. I can go back to being a mad man with a box. Without a box.

Alternatively, I could do something other than watching television. But I still have two episodes of Burn Notice waiting for me.

What was I on about again?

Oh yeah: Standard Australian English.

I speak it, bitches. Make of that what… hey look! An anti-cancer themed plush volley ball!




Garry with 2 Rs

Greater Things Than These Shall Ye Do

How awesome was February?

I swear it was so good, they had to give it an extra day this year just to fit in all the extra awesomeness floating around the place. It would have been enough that I was finally able to get a One Body service going, and then got to spend two weeks playing journalist at the NT News. But there's more and it’s about time I shared the news that can even top all that.

I was out with friends last night for dinner. We were discussing the merits of various TV shows, because apparently we have no actual life, when the woman sitting next to me made the most amazing revelation:

“I don’t really think David Tennant is attractive.”

The room went quiet. The pianist stopped playing and started staring. Somewhere a baby whimpered to itself in the night.

“What’s the matter with you guys?” she asked.

“”You’re being absurd,” I explained. “Nobody thinks David Tennant isn’t hot. Hell, even I think he’s hot.”

“Yes,” explained the strange woman, “But that’s just because you’re a geek.”

At this point I’d heard enough. Normally I’m not given to overt signs of outrage (I just post them on my blog like the good little product of my culture I am), but I felt I could not let this slide, especially in the presence of ladies. I felt it was my cultural and gender stereotypical obligation to correct the error by tipping the thoughtless wench out the window into the marina. So I did.

Also I got a new job this week. I start in a week and a half at the Aboriginal Interpreter Service. Farewell credit union, hello governmental bureaucracy, but at least this time I’ll be working on something I’m interested in. I’ll let you know how I get on once it all starts in March. I’m sure you can’t wait for that one.

Be kind to foxes.

Garry with 2 Rs

The Rule of Three

Blog posts, much like sermons, Hollywood witch covens and Super Nintendo boss fights, operate according to a very strict established convention: the rule of three. Sermons always have to have three central points, with bonus points awarded if the headings all start with the same letter. Hollywood witch covens always have to have three sisters, with bonus points awarded if they are actually sisters. Twins and/or triplets is the ideal here. And it’s well established that you have to jump on Bowser’s head three times to kill him. Or grab the hammer. Whatever.

And so it is with blog posts. Before you can take some aspect or happenstance of your week and inform everyone on the internet (or your mum and a few friends) of how worthy of their attention it is, you need to have three items that you can write about, ideally with some thematic link.

As you know, here at Cum Tacent Clament, we’re very careful about the way we value inherent structure, respect established conventions and stick to a finely defined line of argument. This is why it has been a little longer than it should have been between posts this month; I’ve just been so flat out trying to find a set of blogable experiences that are simultaneously appropriate, memorable and threefold. But this afternoon I managed to do just that.

First off on this morning’s thematically consistent Saturday was another trip out to Berrimah Correctional Facility. Prison ministry is still going strong, and continues to be an enlightening, enriching and engaging experience for the prisoners, the officers, and us.

Next stop was the very first practice session for One Body NT, which turns out to be a worship service and intercongradenomenagalactical church network rather than a discount gym franchise. We’re still putting the play list together for the first time, but I’m really excited to be finally getting the idea off the ground, even if it is going to start small. Next Saturday promises to dynamic, lustrous and cutting edge. It may or may not renege on that promise.

Thirdly and lastly I called in at my old church, Darwin Memorial Uniting, to get re-acquainted with the organ there, since they had asked me to play for them Sunday morning. It’s got some nice sounds on it, but the user interface always takes me half an hour to get used to. I mean, obviously the keys and stops and things are the same, but the settings to turn the reverb down and get some kind of decent volume out of the swell needs some experimentation in order to get your head around the confusing, uninformative and thoroughly non-intuitive settings menu. It’s the only church organ I’ve ever seen that has a remote control. It would be really cool if that meant you could play the processional from outside in the car park, but unfortunately all you can do is turn the  reverb on and off, unless you want to start mucking around with the tuning, which given the tone of an organ in the first place, probably isn’t a good idea.

And fourthly I had Portuguese chicken for dinner. Make of that what you will.

Garry with 2 Rs

Things You Don't Expect To Be Woken Up By

So waking up the morning after the first night of a show is always interesting. In my case, I’ve almost always stayed up into the early hours of the morning after the show, waiting for the opening night euphoria to settle down enough for me to be able to sleep. Consequently, the next day I usually wake up some time mid morning with an applause hangover and some vague confusion over the idea of turning around and doing it all again tonight.

Usually, I get woken up by my phone vibrating on my bedside table to alert me that I have sixteen text messages and five missed calls from eligible young ladies’ mothers who have been to the show and wanted to say how much they enjoyed it and that they would definitely be bringing the rest of their families along for the show the following night because they’d all, on hearing their respective matriarchs’ glowing revues of the show, been dying to come, live the experience for themselves, meet the cast and get lost for an hour and half or so in a little bit of theatrical magic of their own.

I say “usually,” but the fact is it hasn’t happened like that the last three times. Or ever, actually. But it strikes me as the sort of thing that should be happening more often.

No. what happened this time around was I woke up to discover a sagely looking mandrill had snuck into my room overnight and was nibbling on the edges of my Back to the Future poster. I threw my pillow at him to make him stop, but he simply dodged to the left, turned and blew me a raspberry, before boldly exclaiming “you follow old Rafiki! He knows the way!” I had to admit, the crazy old primate had a point, so I followed him out the window onto the front lawn where I found Oxfam Girl and Biscuit Lady having a light sabre duel, accompanied by the theme from The West Wing. It was at that moment that I realised I was a seahorse.

Okay, that one didn’t really happen either.

I was woken up by my phone ringing. It actually was a young lady on the other end, but the young lady in question happened to be my sister, which took some of the excitement out of it. That is, until she said this:

“I’m just ringing to tell you… I’ve been cast in the lead role in an Italian version of the Sound of Music, and I’m moving to Florence to follow my…”

Stop it!

…

That is, until she said this:

“I’m just ringing to tell you… I’m engaged”

My typically eloquent response was the product of severe shock, recent awakening and applause hangover and basically came something like:

“WHAT?”

After some incoherent babbling I think I managed a ‘congratulations’ in there somewhere. But honestly, if you’d put all the previous scenarios in front of me two weeks ago and asked me to bet on the outcome, I would probably have picked the monkey one. It’s strange, and possibly a little disrespectful to my sister, not to mention her fiancé, but that’s where I would have put my money.

I’m not really a gambling man. Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

The Death of Stroganoff

Wow. Two weeks without a CTC post. What a breach of trust. Ah well. The plain fact is the last fortnight has barely afforded me time to think, let alone write anything. All of a sudden my life is just a little bit out of control, but not in the good “anything could happen at anytime” way. More in the “stumble from one commitment to another and try not to drop anything” way, which is fun but brings into uncomfortable focus the fact that I’m really not getting any younger and can’t keep treating my mind like this or it will start to triangulate. I mean snap.

Mondays I work until five (usually five thirty) and then attend opera practice from seven thirty to late. I try to grab something to eat in the two hours in between while I’m getting over the stress of starting a new week at work and figuring out how all the vocal parts I’m supposed to have learned during the preceding week go.

Tuesdays are timesheet day at work, which means we do everything we normally do, but we do it with the HR ladies ringing us up every four minutes to ask us why the records being disparately faxed in from communities across several hundred kilometres aren’t perfect and in exact concordance with what the HR ladies think they should be. Then we have to change them to make them what the HR ladies think they should be. Milkfish. Then on Tuesday evenings I have some combination of cricket training, bible study and sepak takraw training, although they tend to overlap a bit, so invariably something gets dropped. Sometimes it’s bible study. Sometimes it’s catches in the outfield.

Wednesdays are hump day and I tend to be waist deep in paperwork by this stage, so after recovering from my customary Wednesday coughing fit, I, in keeping with the theme of the day, am usually fairly comprehensively humped. Wednesdays evenings are a bit nicer as all I have on are a couple of games of indoor beach volleyball. Unfortunately the game times vary each week, so I never know when it’s going to be until Wednesday afternoon. And if it’s really well timed, sometimes I make it home in time to watch Spicks and Specks, new episodes of which are becoming increasingly precious.

Thursdays are a bit of a pickle, which is okay if you like pickles. I don’t. I prefer ice cream. I’m supposed to cram in cricket, sepak takraw, church music practice and opera practice in the same four hour period. So far that’s not going so well, but that’s okay because every second Thursday is pay day. So sometimes I get to have ice cream.

No pickles!

By Friday afternoon I’ve generally had it with my job and I can be heard muttering to myself about finding a new one, or observed posting violent or despairing status updates to Facebook (posting them to the Governor General doesn’t have the same effect, and usually involves a day or so’s delay, plus an inquisitive email from the federal police). So on the one night of the week when I can get out and spend some time not being told what to do by anyone else, I tend to spend my time sitting calmly alone in a dark, quiet room and enjoying having absolutely nothing to think about, at least for one evening. Milkfish. Then it really get’s crazy.

Every second Saturday is prison ministry, which involves getting up on a Saturday morning and pretending to be cheerful, wise and loving. When I get home from prison, there’s usually about an hour before I’m supposed to be meeting someone for lunch, or checking in on the Tease production. Thankfully I’m no longer appearing in that as Phil has also pulled out due to Science. We found two other local guys to play our parts. I use this time to do laundry.

Saturday afternoons are consumed by full cast opera practice, which seems to be gradually expanding to be (milkfish) slightly longer every week, despite the fact that the performance is still three months away. When I catch myself singing the act two finale at my desk at work I’ll know I’ve truly lost it. I estimate this will take about another week and a half to occur.

Saturday night is theoretically sepak takraw again, although this is supplanted more often than not by a wedding, birthday party or quantum analytical chemistry symposium. That last one doesn’t come up that often, but does actually turn out to be a real thing, however ridiculous it might sound, and however doubly ridiculous the idea of my attending it might be.

Sunday is, of course, a day of rest. So all I do on Sunday is get up early for music practice, do church for a couple of hours and then back up with five or so hours of cricket. Fortunately I spend at least half of that time not batting, although not batting in the batting side generally means umpiring or scoring, which requires a level of concentration slightly higher than music practice, but not as high as a kite. The other half I spend not bowling, which just involves standing around in the sun for two hours and occasionally not catching a ball.

At some point on Sunday I call my mother and attempt to convey to her the fact that everything is fine. This is about to become significantly more difficult, as my mother is one of about five people who actually read this blog. Oh well. Yes mum, I’m fine. I ate nearly a whole tomato today. It was a really big one.

By Monday morning I’m ready for a rest to recover from my weekend. So I hit rewind and start the week all over again. It’s getting to be a vicious spiral, and at some point in the next week or two something is going to have to give. Either I’ll triangulate… I mean snap… at work and start singing lines from Princess Ida instead of answering members’ balance enquiries or I’ll start attempting to cover drive a volleyball through the gap between the worship leader and the Governor General. Or maybe I’ll just schedule some time off work.

Make of that what you milkfish.




Garry with 2 Rs

The Whole World Revolves Around Meme

I’ve been memed again. Jess has sent me a “one lovely blog” award.

The "rules" are:

1. Choose five other people who deserve this award and pass it on.
2. Tell 7 facts about yourself.
3. Let the people you gave the award to know.
4. Thank the person who gave you the award.

Now I’m really in a pickle. I have to find a combination of sentiments that can, while retaining my trademark aloof disinterest, convey both how grateful I am to be considered for this award and also the extent to which Cum Tacent Clament is way too cool for internet chain letters.

Also, apparently I’m supposed to write seven things about myself. So here we go:

1. I am extremely grateful to have received this award, even though my blog has nothing to do with child rearing, botanic photography or hipster book reviews.

2. I am way too cool for internet memes.

3. I am of the opinion that, while there are a myriad of adjectives that might be applied to this blog, “lovely” probably isn’t one of them.

4. Sometimes I dress all in green and wander the night, fighting crime and planting horseradishes.

5. I am afraid of sopranos

6. I like self referential sentences, such as this one.

7. There is no way on God’s Earth that I am passing this on to five other people.

I think that about covers it. Make of that what you will.

Garry with 2 Rs

Hump Day Blues

Wednesdays are usually the time when we celebrate reaching the mid point of the working week. The “hump day,” as it has come to be known, is a time when we start to see compelling evidence that the weekend might get here eventually. What a time to be alive.

For me, the last three Wednesdays in a row have bought on chronic coughing fits. I don’t know why. I’ve eliminated diet, environment and lifestyle as factors, so I’m left with some rather untenable conclusions about what might be causing it. As the great leader of men once said:

“If we eliminate the impossible, then whatever remains, however unlikely, will probably eventually show up on Garry’s blog”.

It started way back when I was on my last week away in Wadeye before starting my new role which leaves me in the city more or less permanently. I was still battling the cold I picked up on my epic weekend of unadulterated awesomeness in Queensland, so when my lungs began a concerted effort to turn themselves inside out after work on the Wednesday, I took it in my stride, hacked up half my trachea, curled up in a ball and cursed my own existence. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

Last week, after a tragically unsatisfying game of indoor beach volleyball, I drove home, showered, and then coughed for a steady half an hour before eventually spitting out a couple of hundred grams of sand.

It’s not unusual to find sand in unexpected places following a volleyball match, but two dilapidating coughing fits in a week left me more than a little concerned. I booked in to see the doctor for a check up. I had some juvenile Asthma when I was… a juvenile, and I’ve always dealt with the fact that I have unusually shallow lungs (not to mention my personality).

Doctors always seem to me to be much more interested in just about anything else than in what their patients think might be wrong. We spent a good twenty minutes discussing my diet, lifestyle, blood pressure and family history, which was all fine as I asked for a general check-up. My body mass index suggests I’m still slightly overweight for my height, which I already knew, but did reveal to me that I’m approaching the solution from entirely the wrong angle. I’ve been putting all my energy into losing weight and eating properly. What I should be doing is concentrating on growing taller.

We chatted for a few more minutes about how I probably don’t need to be worrying about cholesterol, blood pressure (mine was slightly high, but apparently that could be accounted for by the stress of meeting a new doctor. This strikes me as a little odd, not to mention a violation of the Hippocratic oath) or various types of cancer at my age.

Finally the doc told me off for not eating breakfast, instructed me to eat more fibre, do more exercise… and gave me a clean bill of health. According to her I was the healthiest person she had seen all week. Of course, it was only Monday lunchtime, so that’s not such a big deal.

“What about the Asthma?” I asked, helpfully.
“Oh yeah, I forgot about that,” replied the doctor, encouragingly. “You probably don’t have that.”

So there you have it. Or not, as the case may be.

Last night before volleyball I had another coughing fit. If the doctor is to be believed, there’s nothing wrong with me. So I’m left with only one viable conclusion:

I’m allergic to Wednesdays. Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Word Salad

Insomnious raffles dedicate a quantum barrage plant in the direction of quiche.

I got a little bit bored last week and resorted to hiring old seasons of Boston Legal from the video shop.

Crackles can’t ever be elected to guard vapid chromatographs, or else the flying capsicums are mute.

One particular episode entitled “Word Salad Days” captured my imagination on a profoundly useless level.

Be not obsequious while flagrant pandas are twining.

In that episode our anti-hero Alan Shore is afflicted with a disorder known as ‘word salad syndrome,’ which garbles his speech faculties in such a way as to produce nonsensical gibberish without his realising it.

When general horticulture sprinkles a gamey bison with an all-too-glorious decision not to skip, it heralds the overbalance of chutney.

And it just looked like so much fun, not least because of James Spader’s delightfully deadpan portrayal, that I felt I just had to give it a go myself. So…

All at once a narcissistic pan will leave a skittled Christmas on the trousers of ironic angioplasty. Notwithstanding the luminous boulder hockey, children avoid the gregarious goose pies with such banal cummerbunds that have taken no joy in dancing with binoculars. And if that’s a ganglion, ground the milkman’s hurricane.

Vertical!

Still, fabulous oaks will ovulate for a time of coffee whilst zealous protagonists envelope a non-binding lamington for the cousins of outrageous tooth decay. Vanishing at the mound of opportunism, she gargles upishly in the manner of an underwater ironing bowl. And we all clip the oscillating factoid.

Yours in plumbing




Garry with 2 Rs

P.S. As soon as I get over the mental stress and – though I say it myself – concentration that went into last week’s post I’ll try to get around to posting something more worthwhile. In the meantime, cast your favourite political ion dispenser a boiled car crash.

Poets, Librarians and Me

Last week I was invited to an awards ceremony at my local library. I was a little bit surprised to receive the invitation, but I figured that my tireless work in support of… libraries was finally being recognised at an official level. They would probably unveil a plaque that said

“In grateful acknowledgement of occasional visits, this plaque was unveiled by his honour the Lord Mayor of Darwin, Graeme Sawyer on the 19th day of March 2010, and dedicated to the memory of Garry with 2 Rs, in whose name his beloved Andrea hath erected this monument.

“Sometimes he came here to borrow books.”

It seemed like a huge honour. I’ve always wanted my own plaque. Never mind the fact that I’m not dead yet. And who the hell is Andrea?

Okay, so the presentation was actually for a poetry competition. I was surprised to get invited because I didn’t really think my entry, which I only put in on a spur of the moment decision, would be in the running for anything. And with good reason.

It wasn’t.

I got invited because anyone who had bothered to enter got invited. It turns out Shakespearean sonnet writing contests don’t actually attract that many competitors, so they just invited the whole lot of us so that the winner would actually have someone there to cheer for him.

Actually, it was interesting to see the sort of crowd that would rock up for a sonnet competition presentation ceremony. Mostly older folk, but with a smattering of slightly younger English teachers and one extremely out-of-place twenty-something year old training officer/stunt linguist. In the end I was grateful not to have won. If I had walked out the front and read my entry aloud, I don’t think I could have absorbed the combined hatred of a dozen or so retirees all at once (I could totally have taken the English teachers though).

I’m pretty sure my poem came dead last. It was a Valentine’s Day competition, and my views on romance aren’t what you’d call universally well received. Nonetheless, I still got a free drink and meal out of it, which is more than can be said for most amateur poets.

Today’s episode was bought to you by the letter C and the number 17. Cum Tacent Clament is a production of the Children’s Television Network.*




Garry with 2 Rs

*Not really. They should probably keep children as far away from CTC as possible.

Flueber's Theorm

Okay. So I’ve settled into my new life in Darwin. I’ve landed a job which, while not the most stimulating or challenging role I’ve ever filled, is keeping me out of mischief (or at least, forcing me to concentrate my mischief on weekends). I’ve bought myself a car (and then smashed it into the beast from Marlow’s Lagoon – still waiting on the quote from the insurance assessor to come through). I’ve come to grips with the fact that I live in Palmerston. So I guess it’s time to come clean on what I’m really doing here.

In the spring of 1976 a Dutch mathematician named Hans Flueber theorised that for all X where X is acted upon by an exterior force (let’s call that force “Garry with 2 Rs”), the probability that Garry with 2 Rs would act upon X was inversely proportional to the number of well meaning friends telling him he should totally act upon X.

Obviously old Hans faced a few challenges when it came to proving his theory. Firstly, it didn’t have any numbers in it, so all his mathematician friends started laughing at him. Secondly, I (Garry with 2 Rs) wasn’t born until 1983, which, while proving how far ahead of his time Flueber was, made it difficult to define a meaningful set of testable variables. Also, he was mute, invisible, a pirate and made of grape flavoured jelly, so people tended not to take him seriously.

The point is (yeah, believe it or not, there is one) I’ve decided that while I’m here and not suffering from the same shackles and obligations that many of my friends do (spouses, children, a social or biological imperative to grow up and act responsibly, etc.) now is the perfect time to launch a theory of my own (this time it’s real. I’m not made of jelly or any other sort of desert as far as I know. I do really like ice cream though).

Wait… I just read back over the second paragraph. I think I should clarify; X is not a woman. X is more abstract, and basically stands for the stuff everyone tells you that you should do, because it’s established social convention, or popular ‘wisdom’ dictates it as the appropriate choice.

Where was I?

Yes. My theory is that in a city the size of Darwin, for a citizen of that city as well known to many of its other citizens as I am and for someone who’s been bouncing around the Christian scene for as long as I have, it is not necessary to limit one’s abilities and influences to the service of just one branch thereof. If that didn’t make any sense to you, don’t panic. It’s only just starting to make sense to me. For now, I’ll just introduce you to my first running total for this year. It’s over there on the right hand side of the blog, under my profile description (maybe I should update that too… although I think all that stuff is still true).

I had my first conversation with someone who told me I needed to get planted last weekend. While I respect the opinion of the man who told me this, he’s completely wrong. I'm convinced that it's possible to be a functional member of the Church of Darwin without confining myself to membership of just one congregation. This year, I intend to prove it.

I aim to misbehave




Garry with 2 Rs

(Yeah, I know I can’t actually use that as my new sign off, since it’s already been done by Captain Reynolds. It would be awesome though…)

Happy New Year

It’s been far too long since I celebrated New Year in Darwin. It’s always an event marked with excitement, sobriety, flair and sophistication. This year was no exception. A group of mates and I had arranged to car pool into town with Macca, who doesn’t drink. It’s always a good standing plan to have a non-resentful designated driver onside.

So there we were, cruising townwards along Tiger Brennan Drive; me, Macca, Davo, Obi-wan and Brian. We weren’t really looking for an overly wild night. We were just heading into the foreshore to catch the fireworks, before possibly grabbing some celebratory brews at one of the local pubs to toast the New Year and indeed new decade with style. Or at least what passes for style in our social group.

The foreshore, of course, was packed. Fortunately we were able to grab a spot on top of a hastily constructed Taj Mahal which some of the local girl guides had built as a fund raiser for a new stealth bomber or something.

The fireworks were pretty good. Obviously it wasn’t quite the same as watching a wall of fire undulate off the Sydney Harbour Bridge or celebrating the destruction of the dalek fleet deep within the Medusa Cascade, but for Macca, Davo and Brian this was just as good as it ever got. And the looks on their faces was enough to keep Obi-wan and I smiling. Davo said it was like someone had set the whole harbour on fire.

It was the first time any of us had been out to town with a fictional character for years. Davo claimed to have been on a blind date with Lady Macbeth a few months back, but we were pretty sure he was full of it. I had forgotten how prejudiced some of the local people could be towards people of non-reality background. We were constantly aware of the looks from people, and the whispers behind hands. Fortunately no-one made too much of a deal out of it, and Obi-wan didn’t seem to mind.

It wasn’t until we stopped in at a bar on Mitchell Street that we had any real trouble. One particularly drunk man from Karama started declaring to everyone how happy he was that the new year had come, how awesome the fireworks display had been and how much better off the world would be when we finally got all the stinking fictional folk out of our country. Obi-wan pleaded with us to ignore him, but it was more than Brian could stand. He grabbed a nearby claymore and brandished it menacingly, asking the drunkard if he felt like he was a real man, just because he was real and a man.

Unfortunately for Brian, the drunkard had brought fourteen of his friends, all armed with pictures of bears holding sharks. Fortunately for Brian, none of them felt like starting any trouble once Obi-wan started swinging his lightsaber in destructive arcs of pure energy. There are some things you don’t mess with, even if you don’t think they’re real.

After that, the night got much more light-hearted. We had a few more drinks at a different bar, Davo managed to convince a European backpacker to give him her phone number. He tried calling it a few days later, but no-one was home (possibly because she’s still in Australia). I got roped into playing tuba for an impromptu Edinburgh Tattoo that some guys put together on Mindil Beach.

Happy New Year!

Far from home



Garry with 2 Rs

Redirecting to something a little more relevant

Alright, alright. Enough useless chatter about what is and isn’t available in metropolitan menswear departments. Sorry about that. Not really sure what went wrong in my brain there. Fashion commentary? Really?

On with the real issues for the month; I’m back in Darwin! I’ve been working full time here for two weeks now, and I’m just about reacclimatized to the build-up conditions. I’ve done away with my filthy South Australian driver’s licence and got myself a shiny new NT one. I’ve changed most of my important contact details over to my new address in Woodroffe. I’m becoming all too familiar with the bus service schedule as it pertains to getting me from my house to work every morning (more on that later).

Yeah… I guess that’s why I’ve put off blogging about getting back into the swing of things up here. It’s not actually that exciting compared with writing up a description of a new European city every three days. Nonetheless, I did promise some of you that I would keep this up with details of my new adventures in the Top End. And just as soon as I start getting paid, thereby slightly alleviating my current social paralysis, I’m going to get straight onto cooking up some adventures to write about.

In the mean time, I’m fascinated by a new feature Google have added to the blog interface. Up the top along the menu bar there’s a button that says “next blog”. It’s always been there, but they’ve just suped (Sooped? Souped?) it up so that now instead of just picking someone’s blog at random from the (probably) tens of thousands on this server, it now uses automatic content analysis to send you to one it thinks might be on a related topic. I’m not sure how it figures out what the general theme of FFH is. Actually, I’m not sure I could tell you either, other than to say it’s broadly about me and stuff I get up to. I don’t know how many other blogs about me there are out there, but now we can all find out with just the push of a button. With any luck, it will be able to redirect you to something a little more relevant to … basically everything in the universe.

Far From Home




Garry with 2 Rs

The Way of St. James

A few posts ago I mentioned (amidst a bunch of otherwise irrelevant observations) an interest in Santiago, which is a city in North West Spain, and also the Spanish name for the apostle we call St. James in English. The city is named after him because the cathedral of Santiago is believed by some to contain the apostle´s remains. The story of how they got to be there is a pretty good one, but that doesn´t seem to diminish the appeal of the city. As a result, the city is visited by thousands of pilgrims every year, and the route through North Spain you walk on to get there is known as the Camino de Santiago, or Way of St. James.

Some people do the walk for genuine reasons of faith. Others, like me, just think going hiking for a week through Spain sounds like great fun. Unfortunately, when I picked my rucksack up when I left Madrid all those weeks ago, it became obvious fairly quickly that I wasn´t going to be carrying it 400km across the north coast, so I abandoned that idea. But I´ve also never let the fact that I haven´t actually done something stop me writing about it like I know what I´m talking about. So I hereby present my impressions of the Camino de Santiago.

What would have happened

As I lay in my hacienda in Barcelona, looking up at the stars and wondering what had happened to the roof, I had a sacred vision. I saw St. James walking over a field of sunflowers. I could tell it was St. James because of his pilgrim´s staff and his sea-shell emblem. He was also wearing a pirate hat and a kilt, but I suspect that had more to do with the extra chorizo I had with dinner than with liturgical iconicry. In any event, they were almost certainly non-canonical.

St James was beckoning me westward and offered me a stone tablet, upon which was inscribed "You won´t walk 750km to Santiago and visit my crypt".
"I will" I replied. And with that, I set off, armed with only the clothes on my back, a big stick with a sea-shell on it, my bible and my iPod. With only the stars to guide me, I set my face to the west. When I reached the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, I decided to buy a compass. Navigating by the Southern Cross gets a bit tricky in the Northern Hemisphere.

The first couple of hundred kilometres were lonely and perilous. I was plagued by visions of inner demons and of sirens, telling me they´d saved me a spot on the beach and asking me where the bloody hell I was. Fortunately as I made my bed for the night in an out of the way albergue in Frómista I happened upon a small group (although I believe the fashionable term these days is 'connect group') of pilgrims also bound for Santiago.

There was Nikolai and his charming wife Svetlana who had both walked all the way from St. Petersburg and were quite obviously completely nuts. There was a Kiwi girl named Ella and a big Frenchman named Claude who had come on the pilgrimage hoping to be blessed with the recipe for the perfect dim sim. I think he may have been slightly misinformed.

But the pilgrim who immediately caught my attention was a young woman, sitting slightly apart from the group, her face covered by a long forest green hood. She said nothing, but her very countenance exuded a feeling of peace, well being and fair trade. I now had two reasons to make the journey to Santiago; one, to find the identity of this mystery woman, and two, ... hmmm, nope, I guess I just had the one reason then.

Over the next few days, as we drew closer and closer to the city, the pilgrimage began to take its toll on the group. The summer heat was becomming a problem for the Russians, who as it turned out were made of parmesan cheese. As we approached Ponferrada they began to melt and had to turn back to Russia. Ella was picked up in Cebreira for over staying her visa and deported back to Wellington. Somewhere between Sarría and Lavacolla Claude was accosted by a band of gypsies who demanded that he surrender immediately. Being French, he agreed and ran screaming into the hills.

That just left me and the mysterious stranger. Given that she didn´t talk, that didn´t leave us with many options in terms of stimulating conversation. Eventually I decided to make her a deal.

"I´ll make you a deal," I said, redundantly. "If we make it as far as the cathedral, will you at least tell me who you are?" The woman still said nothing, but nodded her assent.

As more days passed and we got closer and closer to Santiago, I grew more and more curious, but less and less enchanted, as her thick velvet hood was covered in mud and sweat and was starting to stink a bit. Finally, when it seemed I could no longer stand the suspense and she could no longer stand the smell, we arrived at the gates of la Catedral de Santiago de Compostela.

"Now, sir, I believe I have a promise to keep," said an enthralling, but oddly familiar voice from beneath the veil. "It´s time you learned my true identity". With an anti-climactic flick she flipped her hood back to reveal...

"Oxfam Girl? Oh you´ve got to be kidding me.
"What? I thought you´d be pleased to see me."
"Yeah, I am. It´s just... don´t you think this gag is getting a bit old?"
"Oh gee. You really know how to make a girl feel special, don´t you?"
"Oh shut up and help me find this damn shrine so we can get the hell out of here."

We climbed inside the main sanctuary and I was immediately struck by what a firm grasp of the basic tennets of Christianity the folk who commissioned the cathedral must have had. Everything was so huge and overstated and covered in gold. It would have been enough to make St. James roll over in his grave, if it wasn´t for the fact that, actually, it was his grave.

We passed through the sanctuary and now I have a certificate I can show St. Peter, redeemable for a 50% reduction of my time in Purgatory, assuming I get as far as St. Pete in the first place, that is. Quite how I´m going to transport the certificate into the hereafter with me is anyone´s guess, but I´ve decided to take the Pope at his word. Oxfam Girl was unfortunately deemed unworthy and was instantly transformed into a sea-shell.

She got better

Far from h... Oh no, wait...

What actually happened

I caught the train in from Porto and found myself a bed for the night, then set out to view the cathedral. I walked under the sanctuary to see the big silver coffin that supposedly contains the apostle´s remains. Not being Catholic or remotely superstitious, it would probably have been an utterly underwhelming end if I had walked all the way from Bilbao to get there. The pipes for the organ looked like they could blow the roof off the place (maybe even wake up St. James) if you pulled all the stops, but I couldn´t see the keyboards anywhere. They must have been tucked away in a loft up the top.

While all this was taking place, the flu (non-porcine, thankfully) that I had been attempting to out-run finally caught up with me, which was ironic since I was supposed to be a in a city of purity and healing. I decided to stay an extra night and rest up, leaving me with just a little too much spare time on my hands, since apart from the cathedral, there´s not much to see in Santiago as it turns out. This may or may not have resulted in the quantity of inane drivel you had to get through to make it this far.

Enough already!

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs

San Isidro's Bane

Last weekend was the St. Isidro festival. Isidro is the patron saint of Madrid, and the locals like to honour his memory by dressing oddl… I mean … traditionally and putting on various cultural performances in the city.

Normally I can link the saints’ names with their Anglicised equivalents, like San Pedro (St. Peter) San Paulo (St. Paul) and Santa Kieda (St. Kilda). The most obscure one I’ve come across is Santiago, which is the Spanish derivative of St. James (more to come on that later, potentially). Something obviously went wrong in the English rendering of that one.

The closest English equivalent to Isidro I could come up with was Isildur. I’m not prepared to claim that it’s a direct cognate, just a possible conceptual link. Wikipedia suggests that actually Isidro is a form of the name Isidore, but I’ve discounted that because that’s obviously not a real name. Who ever heard of someone called Isidore?

Anyway, the celebration is a week long cultural festival. The only events I really had any access to were the Friday traditional festival of wandering around in strange clothes, and a public musical theatre number in the main city square on the Saturday night.

I came across a group of strange clothes wearers sitting around a table singing a traditional Madrileño song. As usual, I couldn't catch any of the words, but I am reliably informed by the internet that they go something like this:

Ai! laurie lantar lassi sūrinen
inyalemīne rāmar aldaron
inyali ettulielle turme mārien
anduniesse la mīruvōrion
Varda telūmen falmar kīrien
laurealassion ōmar mailinon.
Elentāri Vardan Oiolossëan
Tintallen māli ortelūmenen
arkandavā-le qantamalle tūlier
e falmalillon morne sindanōrie
no mīrinoite kallasilya Valimar.

The musical theatre piece was equally opaque to me. Normally it’s okay if you have no idea what the words are; the whole concept of opera is premised on exactly that principle. However, this wasn’t exactly classical art, and furthermore the female lead couldn’t really sing, which is normally a prerequisite for people making a living from singing. So I bailed on that one pretty early and went to watch some street chess, until they were shut down by the police for creating a public disturbance*. I did catch one particularly stirring soliloquy by the male lead, who took centre stage and boldly proclaimed:

“Miro en os ojos el mismo miedo que robaría mi corazón. Podría viene un día en que el valor de humanidad falte y abandonamos nuestras compañeros y rompamos todas las fianzas de compañerismo. Pero no es hoy día. Una hora de lobos y escudos destruidos cuando la época de humanidad se calla. ¡Pero no es hoy día! ¡Hoy día peleamos! Por todos que aprecias en eso mundo bien, os mando a quedarse en pie. ¡Hombres del Oeste!”

I need to get out more.

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs

*I feel compelled to point out that, while this entire post is, more or less, complete rubbish, the street chess bit did actually happen, as did the police intervention. And you thought chess players were just geeks and little Asian girls. Hell no! ¡Somos bandidos!

Chocolent

Life here in Madrid continues much as it has the past three months. In the case of any other blogger, this would make for a rather uneventful and possibly neglected blog; but not for me! I can, and will, spin a malcontent rant out of just about anything, or indeed out of nothing at all, as is about to be proven.

Easter is almost upon us. For anyone living in Australia right now, I would assume that this would be flamingly obvious. Even if you haven’t the slightest religious inclination (or indeed if you’re strongly inclined towards a religion other than Christianity) it would be almost impossible to ignore the brightly coloured chocolates on display throughout shopping centres all over the country. Impossible, that is, unless you never go there, and live as some sort of nomadic hunter-gatherer out in the Simpson dessert somewhere, in which case… how are you even reading this?

Here in Spain I would have thought I’d be up against something similar, especially given the strong religious beliefs adhered to by official Spanish culture. I’ve read all about the colourful parades and spectacles that some Spanish cities put on for Holy Week. But honestly, I haven’t seen so much as a solitary chocolate egg. To tell you the truth I hadn’t even noticed they were missing until yesterday, when I happened to spot three lonely chocolate rabbits in the front window of a chocolate shop.

What does it all mean? Could it be that despite all its religious zeal, Spain as a nation just doesn’t get into Easter as enthusiastically as Australia does? Or could it be that that same religious zeal prevents them from commercialising the holiday and making it about chocolate rabbits? Or perhaps, do the Spaniards simply not like chocolate that much?

Yep, it’s another week full of deep philosophical pondering here at FFH. Join with me next week as we tackle the juxtaposition of the search for objective truth in a subjective world, and the search for an Australian off-spinner who doesn’t get clobbered over the fence every second ball.

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs

Airports I have known

"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, 'as pretty as an airport'" - Douglas Adams.

So I visited a moderately impressive list of countries on my way to Madrid, but didn’t really get out beyond the airport in any of them except Germany. I was hoping to present a photographic essay on my adventures in foreign airports, but unfortunately they’re a little touchy about people taking photographs of international airports these days. So instead, here’s a not so photographic essay on airports I’ve visited since Christmas.

Launceston International

No, really. If we’re counting from Christmas (and we are), which I spent in Tasmania with family, then the first airport is Launceston. It’s not the most grandiose of constructions out there, but it gets the job done. Sure, you can see one end of it from the other, but they’re renovating and modernising to bring it into the twentieth century. While we were there they were constructing a baggage conveyer belt so they could do away with driving the trailers into the building.

And yes, it is technically an international terminal, but only if you consider New Zealand an independent country. Or if you consider Tasmania an independent country.

Meanwhile…

Tullamarine, Melbourne

Having visited Tasmania numerous times while my grandmother was alive, transferring through Melbourne has become second nature to me. I know the layout of Tullamarine quite well these days, despite having been outside in Melbourne a grand total of once.

For some reason, I always seem to end up eating Hungry Jacks there, whether I’m hungry or not, and despite the obvious risks involved in eating heavy oily food before boarding a flight over Bass Strait. I guess it’s a better way to kill time than buying a souvenir of my time in Victoria. Or a new designer handbag. And there aren’t any other food outlets that look halfway appetising. Furthermore there’s only one place in the whole terminal that sells ice cream.

Sydney Domestic

I’ve been through this one a few times as well, but I always seem to come at it from a different angle, or even a different terminal. Invariably I start at the wrong one. I’ve never had to kill any sizable amount of time there, but everything just feels a lot more welcoming than Tullamarine. The food looks better. You feel less like you’re going to get growled at for browsing the bookshop without actually intending to buy anything.

Short version is; Sydney is awesome and Victoria isn’t.

Sydney International

Okay, so here’s where the real adventure starts. I’d never been here before, and even just the check-in part overwhelmed me a little bit. Seemingly endless lines of check in desks for every airline I’d ever heard of and a few I hadn’t. I got my rucksack checked and picked up my boarding passes all the way through to Berlin, which was handy.

I’ve been flying on planes every few months for almost my whole life, so I don’t know how I managed to do this, but I successfully misread my seat number as my gate number, and ended up going through customs at the wrong end of the terminal. Very embarrassing, but they gave me a free bus ride back to the other end, where I sat for an hour and watched the cricket.

Changi, Singapore

I didn’t have quite as long in Singapore as I thought I would. Actually I had about twenty minutes and had to hotfoot it from one gate to the next. It was night time, so I didn’t get much of an impression out the windows, but the Christmas decorations were nice. I only saw one corridor of the place, but I get the impression that it’s a monumentally huge arrangement of shops and hotels and the occasional departure lounge. Maybe I’ll stay longer on my way back.

Heathrow, London

I pulled in to Mother England at six in the morning England time, approximately 14 hours after leaving Singapore. I must have got more sleep on the plane than I thought, because the time seemed to pass pretty quickly. I had six hours to kill in Heathrow. About an hour of that went in getting a bus to transfer me to the right terminal and getting through security again and figuring out which gate I was leaving from. Then I stopped in at one of the airport cafés. I figured there was really only one appropriate meal to order:

“English breakfast, please.”

It was pretty good for the price, and I must have been hungrier than I realised because I even ate the scrambled eggs, which I wouldn’t normally do.

I spent the next few hours looking around the freaking huge duty free shops. Those things have always struck me as strange things to have in a departure/transit lounge. I mean, I understand the attraction of cheap stuff, and the desire to pass time by buying things. But really, when you’re about to climb on a cramped and crowded aeroplane, who thinks to themselves “you, know, what I really need is more stuff to carry”.

Tegel, Berlin

I wasn’t quite prepared for how cold it was going to be in Berlin. To be fair on myself, the Berliners weren’t quite expecting it to be that cold either, but it snapped cold just before I arrived, and the whole place was blanketed in fresh snow. Fortunately there was an aerobridge thing from the plane to the terminal. I was all ready for the usual forms and bag checks and passport stamping and difficult questions (even more difficult in German), but there was none of that. They just stamped my passport and said “Welcome to Germany”. My rucksack had a harder time getting into the country than I did, since the door to the baggage compartment on the plane had frozen shut. We had to wait half an hour for them to be rescued.

The hardest part of negotiating Tegel was when I left four days later. The check-in counters for my flight were tucked away in an obscure corridor. I had to get a policeman to help me find them.

Ruzyne International, Prague

Of course, half the reason the checkout was obscure was because, in order to secure a reasonably priced flight in peak season at short notice, I was flying a moderately obscure airline; the highly esteemed Czech Airlines. Flying from Berlin to Madrid via Prague is certainly the long way round (although not as long as Sydney to Darwin via Madrid) but it was the only way to do it for less than a thousand dollars.

I ended up spending a lot more time in Ruzyne than I had hoped or expected. It was supposed to be a forty minute stopover, but tragically there was a blizzard in Madrid (!) the day I was supposed to fly and the Madrid airport was closed, so my flight was cancelled. That sucked a bit, but the up shot was that Czech Airlines put me up in the nearby Marriott hotel for the night, which was pretty nice.

I would have gone out for the afternoon to check out Prague, but it was minus fifteen degrees at the most, I was stuffed, and I had cleverly turned all my money into Euros, only to discover that the currency of the Czech Republic is the Czech Koruna. So I stayed inside instead and watched the BBC.

Barajas, Madrid

I made it! And only a day late. Not bad for a week’s worth of travelling. Barajas was kind of boring as airports go, although it does have a kind of interesting yellow and black colour scheme going on, which made a nice change from the traditional blue and grey. Another fantastically relaxed country with nothing to sign or declare as you come through. Actually, my passport doesn’t even have a Madrid stamp on it, which is a bit of a let down. On the plus side, apparently no-one officially knows I’m here, which probably means no-one is going to officially kick me out any time soon.

So there you have it. A whirlwind tour of airports I have known. Join us next week as we examine the fascinating lives of… Petrol stations of the twentieth century.

Far from home



Garry with 2 Rs