A Week in Adelaide: Part 2 - Suit Up

Sometime back in May I decided that I would buy myself a nice new suit for the occasion of my sister’s wedding. Having learned from previous attempts to buy stuff that I like, I decided I’d better get out there and start looking around in case it took a few weeks to order in.

There’s basically only one place in Darwin that does professional suit tailoring. I went to see them and let them know what style of suit I was after (have you got anything to match this hat?) and get the whole process moving. It was quite an educational experience. Here are just a few things I’ve learned.

1) Professionally produced suits for Darwin take at least ten weeks to get here. So ordering a suit in May for a wedding in July isn’t enough notice apparently.

2) My taste in suit jackets is not currently fashionable. I can live with that, except that suit jackets with more than two buttons on the front are not just out of style, they are out of existence. It is not possible to purchase a suit jacket off the rack with three buttons. NOT POSSIBLE! Who makes these decisions?

3) All modern jackets are designed with what is known as a “slim fit” Apparently this doesn’t mean that to wear them you have to be slim. It means that they are designed to give the illusion of being broad of shoulder and narrow of waist. Unfortunately I’ve got that the wrong way around, which means most jackets in menswear shops look a little ridiculous on me.

I gave up on local menswear shops in fairly short order, and decided to go with the time-pressure option of picking one up in Adelaide in the week before the wedding. So Monday morning, fresh off a day of buckful frivolity and grandmotherful bereavement I headed for the city centre to meet my sister and complete a tour of Adelaide’s top menswear outlets.

“Three buttons? Uh… no.”

I honestly wasn’t expecting to make it through the day without having to suppress the urge to punch someone. Suit shopping seems a fairly pretentious thing to do in the first place (I’m not sure why. It’s a perfectly legitimate thing to want to buy when you think about it), and that pretension was only amplified by the fact that were doing it in Adelaide, whose commercial operators have never really struck me as down to earth or helpful.

I was pleasantly surprised. The guy in the first shop we visited actually spoke a variety of English fairly close to mine, and seemed more interested asking what I wanted than in telling me what I should want. Also his suits actually did seem to be made for real people as opposed to unrealistically framed shop mannequins. I ended up buying the outfit he put together for me, but not before shopping around a little, and it was here that the fun really started.

In Gauler Place, which runs off the side of Rundle Mall, is a smallish menswear shop called Uzumco, or something like that. If you're ever in Adelaide and looking to buy a new suit, go there and get fitted - not because the suits are necessarily better than anywhere else (I went with a different outlet in the end, although this guy's suits were pretty good) but because the guy is just so damned cool.

The proprietor was a shortish, slightly built Italian gentleman, who had quite obviously devoted his life to the science of finding nice suits. Where other salesman had determined my size by using a tape measure, this guy - I kid you not - just stood four paces away from me, framed me with his hands like a photographer, then ran off into his storeroom. He came back with a shirt and a pair of trousers that fit me perfectly. I was impressed.

Choosing a jacket was even more fun, he waved his hands around again, then sent his assistant out for a very specific jacket. they bought it to me with great ceremony, but I only got it on as far as my elbows before he yelled "Stop! Take it off, I don't like it. No!" He whisked it away and came back with another one.

I was honestly torn between his outfit and the first one, but in the end the Italian suit, while very comfortable, was just a little more "Sicily in the 1930s" than I usually go for.

All I needed now was a tie. I'd been told Mum would be wearing a blue dress, and Dad would be wearing a tie to match it, so I went out to find me a plain blue tie. I figured it was a safe bet, particularly as I went shopping in the biggest shopping centre in Adelaide.

After about an hour and a half of searching, I found the only plain blue tie in Marion shopping centre. It was in Roger David of all places. Both Myer and David Jones failed to supply just simple plain coloured ties. Apparently stripes are very fashionable at the moment. Again, I'm not sure who is responsible for making these decisions, but just in case (as I suspect) it's some housewife in Canada making all the decision based on Google searches, I'm just going to put this sentence in so it shows up on the next search she runs:

Three buttoned suit jackets with plain coloured ties are so hot right now.

Of course it didn't really matter. By the time I sat down at the grand piano wearing a suit complete with black felt fedora, no-one was looking at the tie anyway. But that's another story.

The Voice of the People

Last night I received some information that will change the way I shop forever.

It’s a well known fact that I hate the automated self servicecheckouts at the supermarkets. I realise it’s old fashioned of me, but I’m okay with that. I prefer to have my essential services performed by humans; it adds a social dimension to the otherwise completely menial task of buying food. It’s a chance to make small talk and potentially brighten someone’s day before you take your groceries home.

You just don’t get that anymore with the new machines. You can try as hard as you like, but engaging in mildly flirtatious small talk with a touch screen just comes off looking weird and awkward. Just ask Samantha and she’ll tell you (sort of). And all they ever say is “please take your change” "Please take your items” “Please take your receipt” “No, you can’t buy me a drink later” and “Thank you for shopping with the Fresh Food People”. And it’s always in that voice that’s been synthesized to sound like a human but hasn’t quite got there. It’s like they took the top fifteen most irritating voices of not-quite-humans and blended them into one patronising computer to rule them all.

But all that changed last night. Last night, in one glorious moment of profound revelation, I discovered a forbidden secret.

Did you know you can turn the voice off before you start?

Just like muting the ads during a Friday night movie, or watching Millionaire Hot Seat with the sound off while you boil your dinner (Fish fingers again tonight. Yum) because all you’re really interested in is the trivia answers, or hurling a pewter carving of a Turkish carpet salesman through your television screen every time Michael Slater comes on the cricket (or, for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet, the Footy Show), now I have the power to banish that god-awful voice from my universe forever! Liberation! Power to the real people! Death to simulated people everywhere! Except you Siri, if you’re reading; please don’t hurt me.

Make of that what you will.

Garry with 2 Rs

Rage Against the Machine

It seems the robot uprising has begun. Yesterday the Commonwealth Bank was bought to a grinding halt by computer errors that caused ATMs to hand out thousands of dollars to disgustingly greedy and opportunistic users. Meanwhile in the US (where else?) some clever cookies have developed a program that can beat human competitors at Jeopardy. And only three hours ago my brother was attacked by a giant robotic canary which exclaimed ‘expatriate’ and began faxing yoghurt to the Bavarian Consulate. Also, my spell check is coming the raw prawn and keeps defaulting back to US English. Apparently it can recommend the wrong spelling of ‘favour’ and ‘recognise’ but still can’t do anything to prevent that sentence about the canary. So that’s one to me, I suppose.

Sorry about that.

I’ve written before about my distaste for the new computerized customer operated check out stations at the supermarkets. Since then, the stations have been installed in every department store (or what passes for department stores in Darwin) in Darwin. I’m sure tech heads all over the city are rejoicing in the advent of the robotic revolution while owners and managers are gleefully rubbing their hands together at the thought of all the wages they don’t have to pay anymore.

I am just about ready to take a cricket bat to the stupid things. I’m all in favour of technological progress when it works. But the self operated checkouts don’t work. Every time I try to use them, they’ve run out of cash, or the weight scale isn’t working, or it won’t recognise the barcode on my biscuits. Generally I show my antagonism for the devices in a way which is less inclined to cause damage to a perfectly good cricket bat. That is, I just boycott them and only use the stations with human beings working at them. But during the last two days I’ve been pushed over the edge.

Last night I went to buy some new shoes for Sepak Takraw. Sometime later on I’ll get around to posting about how cool it is that I’ve taken up Sepak Takraw again, but for now I’m all revved up about evil department stores.

Last night, not only were the automated stations in Kmart beeping at me rudely, but when I went to deliberately and obviously not use them, I found I had no choice. Kmart did not have any human beings working the registers at all. There were two assistants supposedly on hand to help with the machines, but none of them seemed to pay the slightest attention when it took me three goes to get the thing to read my credit card correctly. I was ready to forget the whole thing and walk out, but I needed the shoes. Sort of. Admittedly it was six o’clock at night, so we might expect the shop to have been a bit quiet. But that should also have meant that service was exceptional since there was nothing else to do.

I also don’t want to single Kmart in this particular debacle. As I said, all the department stores and supermarkets, with the notable exception of Coles, have put them in, and no-one seems to have got them working properly yet.

This afternoon I realised that the only food I had in the fridge for tonight was pasta, and that if I cooked pasta tonight, I wouldn’t have anything to put leftovers in (I recently moved house and am still getting some of the basic things sorted out. Like a roof) so I went to buy some plastic microwavable containers which so prototypically embody a single man’s kitchen.

I tried Big W first, and once again was disgusted to find only one human being serving at the checkouts, with a line right back to the ladies’ lingerie section. My desire not to be late back from my lunch break overrode my desire to avoid the inhuman checkout operators and I gave it a go. After being told by a recorded voice that I need to remove my items from the bagging area and then put them back three times in a row I got over it, left the items where they were and made a great show of storming defiantly out of the shop.

No-one noticed.

I went back to Kmart and found that once again there was only one human-operated station open, despite the fact that is was lunch time and the shop was teeming with customers. I queued for twenty minutes and finally managed to buy my plastic containers. The poor check out chick was obviously struggling to cope with constant demand from old ladies who couldn’t use computer terminals and twenty-something year old professionals who just had to be difficult.

I’ve written complaint letters to both Big W and Kmart, but I’m philosophical about the chances of corporate strategists putting the concerns of one old-fashioned consumer over the chance to save millions by not actually providing any kind of service.

Maybe the robots have taken more control than we realise.



Garry with 2 Rs

Lending A Hand

I'm in Brisbane this week for a wedding and a U2 concert. Wandering around the Brisbane CBD this morning I realised how much I've missed the opportunity for some sporting backchat with the friendly neighborhood charity spruikers. I mean, sure we have them in Darwin, but not with the same intensity and optimism as in the larger eastern cities.

I met a really nice Amnesty girl named Freda who was cleverly set up under cover out of the rain beside a set of traffic lights, so she could pick off helpless pedestrians waiting for the green man. She wasn't even asking for money, just signatures on a petition demanding an increase in living conditions in Myanmar.

Then I met a really rude one from some child sponsorship agency called The Plan. She didn't even give me her name, she just asked me a whole series of rhetorical questions about the benefits of giving them money. I explained that I already had a sponsor child through Compassion and that I couldn't afford to take on another at that time. She responded by asking how good it would be if I gave more. I impolitely excused myself and moved on. I really don't like it when they force me to be rude in order to end the conversation.

But by far my most unusual experience today came from a spruiker not for a charity but for a manicurist's Christmas package. I guess he thought it was worth a go.

Golan: Hello. Can I ask you just one question?
Gw2Rs: Only one question.
Inside Garry's head: How would you like your remains displayed?
Golan: How long do you think it would take to give yourself a full manicure?
Gw2Rs: I have no idea. You're asking the wrong man
Inside Garry's head: Really? Of all the questions available to you, that's the one you're asking?
Golan: My name is Golan. I'm from Israel. Have you heard of Mount Golan?
Gw2Rs: No
Inside Garry's head: That's two questions, punk.
Golan: It's in Israel. It's named after me.
Gw2Rs: Is it in the Bible?
Golan: Yes
Gw2Rs: What happened there?
Golan: ... Many things.
Gw2Rs: ...
Golan: I'll show you how this works. Can I have your hand?
Gw2Rs: Um... (proffers hand anyway)
Inside Garry's head: That's three on a technicality.
Golan: Is there a special lady in your life?
Gw2Rs: No.
Inside Garry's head: Thanks for asking.
Golan: A mother or sisters?
Gw2Rs: Well...

At this point Golan started rubbing my finger with some sort of rectangular shaped piece of plastic. I still don't know what it was. He made some more chit chat about how although men aren't usually interested, women will spend hours coating their nails with chemicals to make them shiny and smooth. I wasn't really listening, as I wasn't really interested. Blah blah no chemicals...blah blah easy and quick blah blah. He finished buffing my fingers and took his plastic rectangle away.

Golan: Wow.
Gw2Rs: ... ?
Golan: WOW?
Gw2Rs: Oh... yeah. Wow.

My right index finger was now faintly reflective. Apparently this warranted a capitalised wow.

Golan: And that will last for two weeks.
Gw2Rs: It's going to stay like that for two weeks?
Golan: Guaranteed.
Gw2Rs: Um... Thanks for your time.
Inside Garry's head: Challenge accepted.

So now I'm typing away with one ridiculous looking fingernail reflecting my blogger screen back at me. You'll be happy to know I'm making progress on returning to normal with a combination of soft drink and hamburger grease.

On the other hand (see what I did there?)



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

Bed Time

The biggest disadvantage of my move to Coconut Grove has been shifting from a furnished unit to a completely unfurnished room. I don’t own any furniture apart from a plastic trestle table and a glass top coffee table I ‘inherited’ when a mate moved house and couldn’t fit it in his new place. I don’t currently have any of the more useful items of bedroom furniture like a bed or a wardrobe, or even a chair. I’ve borrowed a thermorest from a friend for the moment, but since it’s tax return time I decided to start looking around for something a little more substantial.

Fortunately my house is just around the corner from the Homemaker Village, which promised everything I could need to furnish my home, including a large chain store which specialises in beds, so I figured I’d be fine. I’d just pop over and see what they had, and maybe pick up a new laundry basket while I was there.

I was well prepared for how expensive beds can be. Manchester stores are quite obviously designed to intimidate people who really don’t have any business being there by putting all the really impressive looking king size displays right at the front, complete with a price tag that might as well say “don’t bother”. But I figured somewhere out the back in a less seductively lit corner they must just have a standard single mattress section.

Not so much, as it turns out. The “specialist” bed shop didn’t stock anything smaller than a queen size, which for me was annoying. I’m still on a fairly tight budget these days, and don’t really have the funds, or space for that matter, for a full-on double bed. And let’s be frank: I’m a well behaved (well…) single Christian, so I don’t really have any need for a double bed.

Don’t look at me like that. It is what it is.

I arrived quite quickly at the suspicion that I wasn’t going to find anything helpful in the bed shop, and just started wandering aimlessly, looking at various bedroom settings and avoiding judgmental glances from shop assistants who obviously didn’t think I should be there either. Some of them were really nice (the furniture, that is, not the assistants), and if I were a recently married billionaire I could have had a great time choosing upholstery for my master bedroom

Without warning I arrived in a section with single mattresses and even single bed frames. They didn’t seem to be too expensive either. I almost smiled to myself, but something wasn’t quite right. As I tried to imagine what each one might look like along the far wall of my room, I realised they were all unrealistically short. I looked around to find a wall full teddy bears and duck-themed wall paper. I had unwittingly walked into the kids’ section and was drawing concerned stares from parents standing protectively in front of their children. I left.

I realise that I am part of an increasingly small minority here, but I resent the implication that once you reach a certain age you are assumed to be either married or lecherous. I’m not judging those who choose those lifestyles (okay, I am a little judgemental of people who choose to be married) but as someone who chooses neither of them I am feeling decidedly uncatered-for. And surely it can’t just be those Christians who bucked the trend of getting married in their early twenties that shop for single mattresses. There must be plenty of folk out there who, for one reason or another, “don’t entertain much”. If I didn’t have my religion as an excuse I’d probably be one of them. I think it’s high time single people all over the country stood up against this sort of commercial discrimination and fought for their God-ordained right to sleep on their own. And in the meantime, next weekend I’m off to an op-shop to buy a second hand single mattress. Thank God for the Salvos.

And then I looked through every single shop in the Homemaker Village and couldn’t find a single washing basket. Apparently promiscuous billionaires don’t do laundry either.

…



Garry with 2 Rs

The Price of Freedom

One of the things I had forgotten about my beloved home town is how abysmal the public transport situation is. Even on weekdays during peak hour, the buses are just a little too infrequent to be really classified as useful. And if you’re living out in Palmerston, you’re pretty much grounded unless you’re content to wait for forty or more minutes in order to get anywhere, especially on the weekends.

Yeah. Basically anyone in Darwin who can own a car does. And after a week of getting up at a quarter past six in order to get to work by half past eight, I decided they’ve all got the right idea, and set off to find me a car loan.

Now the thing about personal loan information brochures is that they’re always all about the benefits and the freedom you can buy (?) with your new money. I found them all really annoying, because I was already sold on getting a loan. I just wanted the necessary information on interest rates and repayment schedules. Apparently those data aren’t the sort of thing you want to include in an “information” brochure (notice my experiment with using /data/ “correctly” as the plural of datum. That’s classical styles, baby. I’m still not sure if it works in the new millennium, though. Thoughts?).

Eventually I stuck my head out and asked for an appointment with a bank … consultant? Assistant? What do we call these people? My bank … lady’s card just says “customer service specialist”. I think that’s a bit pretentious, but then, I use data as a plural, so I’m in no position to judge.

At this point the flood gates opened and I got so many facts and figures that I was drowning in them. It took me a week to get over it and figure out exactly which among my plethora of options I wanted to go with. I made up my mind and got myself a pre-approved loan just in time for the weekend. Tony Barber appeared from behind a nearby bougainvillea bush and exclaimed

“Let’s go shopping!”

And then disappeared again. Weird.

I spent the following Saturday shopping around the various new car dealerships in Darwin. The trick was that they were spread a fair way apart, and the bus system, as I mentioned, is not really an efficient way to get around. I started my mission at half past eight in the morning and had collected all the information I needed to make my decision by half past four that afternoon. I signed on for my brand new car, and got ready to take the forms to the bank on Monday.

At this point I hit my first snag. In order to fund the loan for the car, the bank needed to know the insurance details. In order to insure the car, the insurance company needed to know the registration details. And in order to register the car, the car company needed to receive confirmation that the loan was funded. It was a cyclic impasse the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the great frequent flyers calamity of ’07.

I let the customer service specialists battle it out between them, and eventually we got the loan funded, but not before I discovered the insurance company had created a policy under the wrong name, and the car dealership needed three extra days to treat the paint and tint the windows. Finally, after a three week ordeal, here are the specs for my brand new spacesh… I mean… car.

Model: Ford Focus CL Sedan
Doors: 4
Transmission: 5 speed manual (better than automatics for dropping down a gear and overtaking a road train)
Allegiance: Autobot
Power: 107kW
Torque: 185Nm
What those numbers mean: No freaking idea. A kW is a kiloWatt, and an Nm is a Newton metre, but I’d need to find my high school physics books to figure what that means. And that’s not going to happen.
Colour: TARDIS Blue
Average fuel consumption: 7.1L/100km
CO2 emissions: 169 g/km
Dimensions on the outside: About average for a small sedan, I guess
Dimensions on the inside: 15 decks, with accommodation for 560 crew, mess, cargo bay and holodeck.
Top speed: Well, the NT now has a blanket speed limit of 130 km/h (so stupid…), so obviously I won’t be going any faster than that. However according to the specs it can get as fast as warp 9.75
Armoury: articulated transphasic photon torpedoes, frequency modulated phaser blasters and a picture of a bear holding a shark.

Woah… sorry, I got confused between my new car and the USS Voyager there at the end.

Um…

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs

The Great Australian Fedora Niggle

As you may have read earlier, one particularly harrowing self-inflicted disaster to befall me on my travels through Europe was the loss of my trademark black fedora whilst changing trains on the Spanish/French border. It was gut wrenching at the time, although to be honest it was a miracle the thing made it as far as it did, as it was always riding in strange places on trains owing to my inability to rest my head back against a train seat while wearing it.

Anyway, once I was safely back in Australia I set about an epic interstate adventure in quest of a replacement. I started my search in the menswear and department stores around Adelaide city, but I didn’t have any luck. This was hardly surprising, as it is well established that Adelaide is more or less completely useless in terms of anything cool.

My sister had suggested that late spring was probably the wrong time to be buying felt hats, and that most people would only buy such a thing in the lead up to winter. I couldn’t help but feel that this was a ludicrous suggestion. Since when did black fedoras have an in season? The last time they were fashionable was nineteen forty-seven. There again, my sister would know more about such things than I would.

I took my search to a national level when I visited Sydney on my way north. I was so determined to find the right hat that I even resorted to taking a girl shopping with me. We went straight for a specialty hat shop in the Strand Arcade and although they did have a selection of black fedoras, none of them were quite right. If this seems a little picky and ridiculous, that’s only because… it is.

Almost all fedoras in shops today have a folded or lined edge on the brims. Apparently this is considered the vogue look in felt hats. My old hat had what I have since learned is called a cut edge, without the girly edging on the brim. Unfortunately this is now considered terribly unfashionable (I am still working on the draft of a paper theorising the exitence of a quantum commercialism uncertainty principle, whereby the very act of me wanting something specific instantly renders it unavailable) so such cuts are very difficult to come by.

But come by it we did. Sort of. There on a low shelf in the so-called ‘menswear’ department of David Jones on Pitt St. was exactly what I needed: black felt, cut edge, size 58 fedora.

Two hundred dollars. Freak me sideways. Who pays $200 for a hat? The most relevant answer is: not me. I was crestfallen, but I still had one trick up my sleeve.

I spent a week in Brisbane and headed on in to the shop where I bought the original way back in ’06. The shop was still open and still full of hats. I asked the same guy about whether he had any of the kind of hat I wanted in stock.

Hat guy: Ah yes, I remember the hat you’re talking about. It came out of Melbourne right? An emu feather in the band?
Garry: That’s the one.
Hat Guy: Yep. They don’t make those anymore.
Garry: (aside) Noooooooooooooooo!

I looked around his shop for a while, and did find a similar hat that was the perfect style. Unfortunately they only had it in brown, so I asked about ordering one in black. He looked it up on their database and it turns out the manufacturers (Akubra) only make it in brown or steel grey.

At this point the young sales assistant, who evidently had some experience in other hat retailers around the country (…I know) remarked that he knew of a hat that would match the specifications I had asked for exactly. Unfortunately Akubra made it exclusively for the Strand Arcade hat shop in Sydney.

I may have thrown a small tantrum at this point.

So I’m still fedoraless as I sit and write this in Darwin. Unfortunately here it’s difficult to find styled hats that aren’t decorated with crocodile teeth. I’m working on potentially placing an order with Akubra, once I can figure out what styles they do. But before that comes a car and a new computer and new phone and God knows what else. I’ll keep you posted. Because I’m sure you’re all riveted.

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs

Fashion Victim

Another strategy I employed while reducing my luggage weight in in Europe was to chuck out everything but the most essential clothes. This turned out to be a largely fruitless exercise as the newly created space was quickly reoccupied by souvenir junk from all over the place. But when I got back to Australia, it did give me the overwhelmingly exciting chance to head into town to restock my wardrobe. And then blog about it.

Now I've never been well regarded for my taste in clothes. I realise that in terms of casting a disapproving eye over what others consider to be the it look for the season (whatever that is supposed to mean) I don't really have a leg to stand on.

But it has come to this: I was in David Jones for a few simple necessities; beige trousers, plain coloured t-shirts and a black felt fedora. I stepped off the escalator into the menswear department and immediately had to check the directory to make sure I was on the right floor, and that I hadn't just walked into the ladies' shirts aisle.

At this point regular FFH readers might be calling to mind a few important Far From Home traditions.

1) I have been known, on occasion, to stretch the truth ever so slightly in order to emphasise a point. For example, I haven't actually ever set fire to Koorong, or any other Christian bookshop for that matter.

2) At times, these artificially elongated truths can get a bit out of hand and take on a life all of their own. For example, it's not clear (though, in my defense, certainly not out of the question) whether the original Oxfam Girl has ever been to Spain, let alone walked the Camino de Santiago.

3) Sometimes I just plain make stuff up.

But no no no no no no no. This time I'm dead serious. At first glance I actually couldn't tell the difference between the menswear and ladieswear departments. Men's fashion really has become that camp.

Furthermore, it's not just me. I was walking through David Jones with a girl the other day and...

... Yes I was walking through David Jones with a girl. I'd rather not talk about why. Just take it on face value that, for very specific and justifiable reasons, I contravened my usual protocols and went shopping with a girl. Now shut up and let me finish.

I was walking through David Jones with a girl the other day and felt compelled to get a second opinion. It turns out she also thinks tight white vests with silver sequins would look a bit sexually ambiguous on a man, to say the least. Apparently androgynous is the new black.

Call me old fashioned, but I liked the old black better.

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs

Bible Study

One of the strangest and most uncomfortable choices I made in Spain while I was looking for ways to make my luggage lighter was the decision to leave my bible behind in Malaga.

Now the bible I had been using and travelling with was a huge hard cover NIV with half of each page taken up with the scriptures themselves and the other half with study notes and maps and cross-references and character profiles and all sorts of other meta-biblical stuff. It was all very interesting, but not very practical for packing in a rucksack. So I left it behind.

Nor was the dangerous symbolism associated with abandoning the scriptures to go travelling on my own through Europe lost on me. I felt superstitiously uneasy as we pulled out of the train station, so I decided not to think too hard about it and focussed instead on finding ferry tickets to Tangiers.

But the subversive niggle of realising I was a Christian who didn’t even own a bible never really left me alone and took up residence in the back of my head alongside equally insidious influences such as the feeling that I should update my blog more regularly and the suspicion that I should probably take better care of my teeth.

Once I got back to Australia, however, I knew it was time to set things right. I gritted my teeth (I’ve got to stop doing that) and headed for that ever-present help in time of nothing else to write about: Koorong Christian Bookshop.

Now I have ranted, a little harshly perhaps, on the questionable usefulness of some materials in Koorong in the past, but when it comes to places where you can buy bibles, Koorong certainly is one. They’ve got a whole section with shelves and shelves of them, which might seem excessive these days, but then if you’re going to run a Christian bookshop, the one thing you’re going to want to stock lots of is the Christian book.

They had bibles in every possible size and colour. Every translation I’d ever heard of and a few I hadn’t. Red letter bibles, large print bibles, amplified bibles. Everything from just the text and nothing else through to cross-referenced, annotated, indexed, concorded and inclusive of a CD with extra… I don’t even know what.

So which one did I choose?

As enticing as the gigantic annotated versions were, I decided my days of carrying a besser-brickesque book around with me were behind me. The study notes in the old one never really answered the questions I was interested in anyway. This is probably because the questions I’m interested in can’t really be answered in a four page essay, let alone a footnote at the bottom of a chapter. Also, I’m getting to the stage where if I want to take bible studies to the next level, then footnotes aren’t going to cut it anymore.

I went with a slim line black soft cover NIV with notes on translation choices but nothing else. I’ve borrowed one of my mother’s bible commentaries, so the new plan is to start again from the beginning with a book-by-book analysis by a guy who reputedly knows what he’s on about. So here we go again; chapter one.

In the beginning, God…

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs