Man vs Ikea
The weekend before last, I had an important writing project to accomplish. Well, more accurately, I had three important writing projects to accomplish. Deadlines loomed. If I owned any boots, I would have been quaking in them. It was clear that I needed to spend practically all of my weekend sitting at my desk, responsibly tapping away at my computer. But on Saturday morning, as I sat down at my desk and began limbering up my typing fingers, I realised that something was amiss. The room was untidy. And by “untidy”, I mean that not only were there boxes everywhere from when I’d moved in a few months ago, but several of them were half-unpacked all over the floor.
My mother might have described my room as “looking like a bomb had hit it”, a phrase which I have now seen more than enough action movies to discredit – if anything, bombs remove objects littered around a room. A more accurate description might have been that it looked as though a toddler had run rampant, although in this case the only occupant of the room was 35.
I’d been promising myself all year that I would do something about it. And I remembered a quote by Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and disorderly in your work”. That’s what I needed, I told myself. I needed to reorganise my room.
I imagined myself sitting in a beautifully neat room. How happy I would be, and how productive! My jokes might even be funny, or at least, funnier. There was only one thing for it. I must set forth on a quest. A quest to a better place, a land of order and heavily discounted hot dogs. The de facto Swedish Embassy. Ikea.
I used to think that the Ikea at Homebush Bay was absurdly massive. In Homebush, Ikea is part of a huge shopping centre I like to call The Colossus Of Rhodes because of how I’m hilarious. But Tempe dwarfs it. The café area is bigger than most food courts. It’s on the scale of an airport, except that you are journeying instead to a better version of your own home. Well, perhaps not ‘better’ so much as full of plasticky furniture that I always manage to break when moving house. But still, it’s a pretty impressive place. Apparently lots of families visit their Beijing branch for a fun day out at a furniture theme park – and don’t buy anything. I thought this was ridiculous before they built the Tempe store.
It never seems clear whether Ikea never is a supplier of cheap furniture or a religious cult. When you walk in, there are a heap of posters suggesting you sign up for the “Ikea Family”. Like religion, their Family costs nothing and offers free cups of coffee. What’s more, they promise – well, not quite eternal life, but a much longer returns period, at least. And then before long you’re tithing them 10% of your income.
Nevertheless, I signed up for the Family the first time I visited, because I’m both a sucker for freebies and genuinely starved of affection. But I never remember my membership card, which means I print one every single time I come, which I think rather nicely offsets the patronising posters they have everywhere about helping the environment.
I have two major issues with trips to Ikea, both of which I only ever remember at the point of sale. The first is that they’re always out of stock of at least one essential item. Sure, okay, you can check stock levels online, which is progress, but if you go there without any specific goal beyond “organisation”, then you can pretty much guarantee that by the time you get to the vast warehousey bit at the end and wander down to the very end of the long aisle that always makes me envisage the racks toppling like massive scary dominoes in the event of an earthquake or maybe it’s just that I’m morbid, you’ll see an empty shelf and a cheerful little card telling you to try another day.
Instead, your trolley will somehow be full of a massive quantity of items that you didn’t think you needed. I simply cannot go to the place without buying napkins and light globes, even though I have a vast stockpile of both at home. Nor can I get home without buying some sort of cheap lamp. On returning home I discovered that I’d bought exactly the same model of cheap LED desk light that I already owned and had rejected because it hardly produced any light.
This time, I really outdid myself, buying a strip of flashing coloured LED lights that gave my apartment the exact ambience of a convenience store. And three packets of smoked salmon, because it was on special.
Fortunately, I avoided the most common mistake – buying frozen Swedish meatballs that I never eat, and don’t even like when I eat them at Ikea. However, I did succumb to the second most common mistake, buying a $1 hotdog, and some kind of lingonberry drink, which I managed to regret all the way home. I’ve never heard of lingonberries anywhere outside of Ikea, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised to learn that, like nearly everything else at Ikea, they’re mass-produced in Cambodian factories.
The genius of Ikea, which they boast about in massive signs outside their bathrooms, is that by selling flat-packed, self-assembly furniture, they keep costs down. And the frustrating thing about Ikea, which I should put a sign warning me of outside my bathroom so that I remember it, is that I’m rubbish at assembling furniture.
In my defence, the booklets don’t help. The lack of language and colour makes it harder to interpret the instructions than it might be.
In their defence, I’m hopeless.
But for whatever reason, the first time I assemble any Ikea furniture item, I will inevitably make a major mistake by ignoring something that should have been obvious. This time, I managed to assemble a rack to hold my fancy new sliding drawers with the rails on the outside. Still, I didn’t destroy the item while trying to assemble it, which by my standards is progress. If there’s a way of assembling a Billy bookshelf without fatally chipping or warping the particleboard back, I certainly haven’t discovered it. Which is why my bookshelves have innovative see-through backs.
By the time I’d driven to Tempe and back, and assembled the new storage system that I’d bought, it was 7pm. The next step was to fill the drawers with the contents of my boxes, and make it all tidy and nice. But I was tired, so I went and had dinner. And then I invited friends over to play Singstar. Which meant that I awoke on Sunday morning to a room that was even more cluttered than it had been on the Saturday morning, because it now contained not only the original mess, but the storage system.
I sighed, resigned myself to deferring the tidying project to the following weekend, and sat down to finally get to work. By which I mean that I went out for coffee.
My submission on submission
I read Archbishop Peter Jensen’s piece on marriage in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald with considerable interest, and have been following the heated debate over the proposal to change the word “obey” to “submit” in the Anglican marriage vows. I don’t really understand why non-believers are so eager to condemn marriage vows that they’ve no interest in taking anyway. If Christian women freely choose to promise to submit, then in a society that guarantees religious freedom, that’s their choice.
But what what the Archbishop appears not to understand, perhaps unsurprisingly given his decades in church leadership, is contemporary secular society’s enthusiasm for marriage. "Individualism leaves us with little reason to join our life to that of someone else," he writes. If the institution is in such moribund decline, then why have I attended a dozen weddings in the past 12 months, most of them secular? I could have saved a fortune on gifts and dry-cleaning bills.Now, the marriage rate is certainly lower than ever – although it hasn’t dropped since 2005. But I would argue that this is not because we “choose to bypass" marriage or "need to rethink it”. I believe it’s precisely because secular society understands how serious marriage is that many people choose not to enter into it unless they’re very confident that it will work out. We are well aware that “it really matters”.
Indeed, I’d argue that secular marriage has a meaning that it might not have for Sydney Anglicans, who are warned by Archbishop Jensen and his colleagues that the only valid way to experience love and sex is by marrying. When those who have no moral imperative to marry nevertheless choose do so, they choose to do so out of love alone – often later in life, after a number of serious relationships, and after living with their spouse beforehand.
I don’t know whether Archbishop Jensen has attended many secular weddings. I doubt he’s attended any gay weddings. Perhaps if he did so, he would realise that “making our promises before witnesses and trying to keep them” can be meaningful even without the Bible. Perhaps he’d understand that the 70% of Australians who choose secular ceremonies are able to understand the gravity of what they are undertaking.
And perhaps he wouldn’t assert that “secular views of marriage are driven by a destructive individualism and libertarianism.” To the contrary, civil, secular marriage is an antidote to individualism and libertarianism. It’s inherently anti-individualistic, because it makes coupledom the fundamental basis of one’s life. And it’s anti-libertarian in that it’s a contract where you give up a degree of personal freedom in the interests of approaching life as a couple.
These changes are central to all marriages, both Christian and secular. And furthermore, both Christian and secular marriages fail when couples abandon them due to individual selfishness – or because, in some instances, couples simply grow apart.
What’s more, if secular society is so opposed to marriage, why is gay marriage one of the most prominent civil rights battles in the Western world? Jensen is clearly aware of this, since he has devoted considerable effort to opposing it. Gay couples, for whom the Bible’s heterosexual concept of marriage has little to offer, do not need the Archbishop to remind them how important marriage is at the same time as he attempts to deny them it.
Nevertheless, much of what the Archbishop writes resonates with non-Christians, whether married or single, like me. Many people would agree that “husband” and “wife” are more meaningful and profound terms than “partner” – indeed, that’s precisely why gay couples want to have access to them. Many husbands would view that as their most important role in life. And many enter into marriage because they think it will be better for their children.
As a former Principal of Moore College, which trains the majority of Sydney’s Anglican ministers, the Archbishop is one of Australia’s leading theologians. I’ve no doubt he’s articulated the New Testament’s position accurately. So those who object to his point of view are probably objecting to what the Bible says – or, more specifically, what the Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians.
I’ve no wish to engage in a debate over precisely what Paul meant, and am ill-equipped to do so. Let me instead explain why that passage, and the new Anglican vows, present a view of marriage that makes many people uncomfortable. The analogy that man is to woman as Christ is to the church does call upon both parties to love and serve one another, as the Archbishop points out. But it’s hardly an equal relationship – Christ is perfect, the church sins; Christ is divine, the church is worldly. If Christ is “the head of the Church”, that is surely the antithesis of equality.
Jensen attempts to dispel our discomfort with men being placed in a superior position with the argument that the man’s obligation to the woman is “more onerous”. Yes, great power comes with great responsibility – even Spider-Man can teach us that. But in the end, you still get more power, don’t you? To assert that husbands have the more onerous obligation in marriage neatly illustrates why feminist object so violently, and I would argue validly, to these teachings.
But then again, the Sydney Diocese are comfortable with asserting male superiority. It does not permit women to teach, as per another of Paul’s instructions. Indeed, Paul said that women should remain silent in churches, one of a number of his mandates which have proven controversial over the years. Personally, I find it difficult to relate to an institution which makes such demands of women, and this is one of a number of reasons why I am not a churchgoer.
Of course men and women are different – if they weren’t, nobody would buy books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and FM breakfast radio shows would have nothing to make jokes about. The important question is whether they are equal.
Sydney Anglicans have recognised this by arguing that their view of women’s role in the church is “equal but different”, and indeed, the Archbishop’s wife and sister-in-law serves on the Steering Committee of a group which is called Equal But Different. Forgive me if I simply suggest that an institution in which women are not allowed to occupy the same leadership positions as men contradicts my, and I suspect many people’s, definition of equality.
Let’s talk now about the vexatious issue of submission. Marriage necessarily involves submission of one’s will in certain circumstances. And this can be enormously difficult. People in committed long-term relationships (whether married or otherwise) might have to live in a town or country where they might not want to live, or stay at home with children when they’re rather be working, or stay in to keep their spouse company when they’d rather go out, or not have sex with somebody else when they feel like it. Even something as simple as restaurant choice can involve submission.
In a broader sense, though, this is an exercise of free will where spouses choose to deny themselves short-term gratification for the long-term emotional reward of a relationship. Marriage, simply put, is a promise to keep doing this into the future. It’s much the same as when we sign up for employment and voluntarily submit our will to our employer’s. It’s in our ultimate self-interest.
Where the argument really loses me – and indeed, where Ephesians really loses me – is the suggestion that this obligation should be understood differently for women and men. (Or indeed, for two men or two women who wish to marry.) There is no argument offered for this beyond the fact that Paul says it must be so.
If I ever marry, I would never want my wife to submit her will to mine simply because I’m a man, which is precisely what Ephesians suggests. I would want any power dynamic that exists to be an equal one. Neither of us should “wear the pants”, we should have a leg each!
Personally, I’m comfortable with stating that I find Paul’s views on topics like sexuality and slavery and the role of women outdated, which perhaps explains why I am not a churchgoer. It’s also worth noting that in Ephesians, Paul requires slaves to submit to their masters in similar terms, which is a position that I don’t see Archbishop Jensen advocating in the newspaper.
Then again, others of Paul’s views are extremely progressive for their era. For instance, he writes in Galatians 3:28 “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
I have met the Archbishop, and have heard him express regret that the Church is not able to make a larger contribution to the debate over these kinds of social issues. But I fear that there is a fundamental tension between secular society’s comfort with its views on human rights and relationships “evolving”, to use Barack Obama’s term on the question of gay marriage, and the Church’s position on the authority of documents written thousands of years ago. I do not know how much each group can teach the other, starting from such different positions.
Nevertheless, I can reassure Archbishop Jensen that on the basis of the secular weddings I’ve attended recently, the institution is thriving. Whereas if civil vows were rewritten to require women to promise to submit to their husbands, I have no doubt that the marriage rate would drop dramatically.
The moral dilemma of blokes on a plane
As a single gentleman who is rather partial to both aeroplanes and holidaymaking, I was cut to the quick by the recent revelation that Virgin Australia won't allow unaccompanied children to be seated next to a man.
I imagined how humiliated I’d feel if I was forced to move seats at the last moment, as some male passengers have been. Generally, I assume, my fellow passengers wonder enviously about the identity of that debonair fellow istravelling by himself on no-doubt-important business. But if I got moved away from kiddies for their own safety, they’d instead be wondering which watchlist I was on.
As I often do when facing an imaginary slight, I got extremely self-righteous. "Fine, Virgin Australia," I said to myself, although not to their customer feedback line. "If you're going to operate on the assumption that I'm a potential paedophile, I'm going to operate on the assumption that you're a terrible airline. And I shall find another carrier that treats potentially dodgy men with a bit more respect. Or, at least, I will just as soon as I can find a less creepy way to express that sentiment."
Unfortunately it turns out that pretty well all airlines have this policy, meaning that the more dignified alternative for the single fellow is driving or walking.
Clearly, this is sexism. It’s also profiling, the approach that’s proven so controversial in the aftermath of September 11. It’s subjected many non-white travellers to regular, intrusive security checks. Having been on the receiving end of one or two of them while travelling on a US airline as aa youngish, bearded, solo male traveller, I can affirm that it’s a truly horrible experience. I can only imagine what it’s like for the people who routinely experience it.
Treating people as innocent until they’re proven guilty is one of the bedrock operating assumptions of a free society. And while I’m fairly comfortable with airlines obtaining confidential information about past sex offenders and adjusting their seating accordingly, I’m bothered, to say the least, by the prospect of a company I’m paying treating me on the basis that I might be a sex offender just because I’m male.
On further reflection, though, I might have firmer grounds for my outrage if the assumption the policy makes about men being relatively likely to be child abusers wasn't quite so thoroughly borne out by the data. The statistics from the Australian Study for the Centre for Sexual Assault say that 98% of sexual abuse against women below the age of 16 is perpetrated by men. Not only that, but around 20% of women have reported experiencing it. That’s a truly horrifying figure. They don’t have data on sexual abuse with male victims, but from the cases reported in the media, it seems reasonable to assume that the majority involve male perpetrators.
In other words, it’s unquestionably true that men are more likely to abuse children than women. Perhaps I’d be better off finding fault with my fellow men than the airlines.
Reading through the data on sexual abuse, though, something else struck me. Such crimes are far more likely to be perpetrated by someone known to the victim rather than a random stranger. In other words, the kids sitting next to their parents – and, let’s be honest, we’re predominantly talking about their father here – are actually more at risk than those sitting next to a stranger. But if airlines started treating dads as prospective child abusers, their markets would collapse instantly – and of course, the vast majority of children are safer with their parents than with anybody else on the planet.
This observation does make me wonder, though, just how far we can obey the data in these situations. There has to be some consistent policy – we can’t just have people who “look dodgy” being moved away from kids, surely? The best solution, I think, for the airline to actively monitor the safety of their unaccompanied minors, no matter who they’re sitting next to.
Our society is now hyper-aware of paedophilia. In schools nowadays, I’m told, no teacher may be alone in a room with a student with the door closed. And thinking about this, I’ve realised that I modify my behaviour on the assumption that people will be suspicious. When babysitting in the past, I’ve found myself clarifying with strangers that I’m my nephew’s uncle, just in case they’re judging me. And the other day, I suggested to a female friend that it might be better if she found an outdoor cafe table next to a playground while I waited in line, just so it didn’t look like I was “lurking”. And ’ve heard lots of stories from friends about how they’ve had to prove to strangers that they were their kids’ father before they’d let the little girl leave with the scary man. We might be overcompensating for society sweeping this issue under the carpet in the past, but I’ll bet the net result is that fewer children are harmed today.
Our systems to protect children certainly need to strike a balance between safety and hurting men’s feelings, but ultimately, the lesser harm in the equation is to people like me. I guess we’ll just have to take that on the chin.
And look, it’s not all downside. Unsupervised children can be incredibly annoying, especially if and they squabble or play noisy games. Under those circumstances, I'd probably ask to be reseated. But if our airlines can find a way to keep kids safe without humiliating men in front of a crowded aeroplane, I for one would certainly appreciate it.
Gay or not, it's none of our business
I couldn’t care less whether Ian Thorpe is gay. But I do care about just how much we all seem to care whether he’s gay, and how reluctant we are to believe him. What’s the guy got to do, other than keep saying no for more than a decade? And more to the point, why do we think we have the right to pry into the inner workings of his sexuality, just because he happens to be an outstanding swimmer?
Unfortunately, Thorpe’s had about as much success in convincing the world that he’s straight as he had qualifying for the London Olympics. The pattern’s been the same for years: the question is posed by an impudent journalist, and Thorpe classily denies it.
Even on a show as highbrow as RN’s Sunday Profile, it still comes up:
MONICA ATTARD: But there’s a down side too isn’t there, because, in terms of your personal life, there’s been an awful lot of speculation about your sexuality?
IAN THORPE: Well, there has been. It’s something that, you know, I think people are very quick to judge people. You know, I’m a little bit different to what most people would consider being the Australian male.
MONICA ATTARD: Why do you think people…
IAN THORPE: That doesn’t make me gay. I mean, I’m straight so… people want to claim me as part of a minority group and want to put labels on people and that’s not what I’m about and I don’t understand why other people are like that.
That interview was from 2002, and our interest in the question hasn’t diminished over the subsequent decade. This week, Fairfax websites published an article that focussed primarily on Thorpe’s successful stint as a BBC commentator under the headline “It hurts that people don’t believe me”. The Telegraph’s original went even further, using the headline “Ian Thorpe: Am I gay? It’s at the stage I just say ‘whatever’”. Since the interview dealt with his frustration at constantly being asked this question, it must have frustrated him all the more to see how it was billed.
The poor guy must be sick to death of this. His publicist asked the reporter, Harry Wallop, not to ask him about his sexuality but that doesn’t help either – by placing the question off-limits, you just invite more speculation. There’s absolutely nothing he can do to stop people asking that question except getting into a high-profile relationship with a woman, and even then there would still be speculation, just as there is with other celebrities who are assumed to be in the closet. I won’t name them here both because it’s unethical and because they might sue – but we all know who gets whispered about.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard rumours and gossip about Thorpe, and people swearing that they know the truth one way or another – and why? What does it matter? What would it prove? Ian Thorpe delivered Australia five gold medals – enough for five Olympics, based on our London 2012 swimming haul – and all we’ve given him in return is grief. Admittedly he repaid us a little of that grief with Undercover Angels, but still – the least we could do to say thanks is to leave the guy alone.
I’d like to think that we now live in a world where it would be okay for Ian Thorpe to be gay, if that’s what he is. But perhaps we don’t, not quite yet. Perhaps he would have lost his lucrative sponsors back in the day. Perhaps his extensive charitable efforts would have been undermined. I do know, though, that if he were to come out, he’d inspire a lot of younger people who were struggling with their sexuality. And while admittedly a few people might think worse of him, such bigotry is resolutely to be ignored. Ultimately, it’s his choice.
Despite the enormous progress we’ve made in the past few decades, the fear of being thought to be gay is still something that many men struggle with. I can admit that there was a time when I was paranoid about people concluding that I was secretly gay because I, like Thorpe, tended not to have many girlfriends. In hindsight, I think that was a reflection of my own homophobia, inspired partly by religion and the bigotry that was commonplace in my single-sex high school. Now, I’d really like to think I wouldn’t care. But then again, people don’t constantly ask me about it. Perhaps I’m not sufficiently well-groomed to conform with the stereotype? Perhaps Thorpey might finally silence the whispers if he really let himself go?
I don’t think he’s gay. Or straight, for that matter. Even wondering about it seems unkind at this point. Especially since, while we’re talking about confessions, I’ll admit to having had the occasional laugh about Thorpe over the years, simply because for a man who was so insistent on denying being gay, he did seem to do a lot of, well, stereotypically camp things. There were the fashion parades and the pearl necklaces, and his somewhat ambiguous relationship with a female swimmer named – and you couldn’t make this up – Amanda Beard.
But I feel guilty about that now. Now, I’m happy simply to say that the question is none of my damn business, and it isn’t any of yours, either. Let’s just hope that Ian Thorpe is getting as much loving as he wants from whomever he wants, and that he’s happy. And refusing to ask him the same intrusive question or whisper about it behind his back would be a great way for us to contribute to that happiness.
The Olympics needs more playground sports
I have been watching the Olympics in Asia, as I mentioned last week, and I have discovered something that’s both extraordinary and disturbing. Which is that not every country determines what events to broadcast on the basis of Australia’s medal chances.
I know, right? You would have thought that in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, they’d be tuning in for every moment of Australian excellence, in the hope of learning a little something about sporting awesomeness. They might also have learned something about winning silver medals, a competition in which we’re currently gold-medal favourites. (Hint: it’s probably better if, when you mount that podium, your facial expression isn’t this one.)
It turns out that for some reason, Asian television networks also focus on events where their country might win a medal. Consequently, my Olympics has been a little different from what I would have seen back home – although they don’t have Eddie McGuire’s commentary, so there is some upside.
I’ve been watching a lot of badminton, volleyball and table tennis, which has brought a lot of fond memories flooding back. First, I remembered that these sports were part of the Olympics in the first place, something we tend to forget in Australia. And I’ve been reminiscing about how much fun they were to play back in high school. I loved badminton – whacking a shuttlecock and watching it float gently down across the net is endlessly satisfying, like tennis with the addition of hang time. And volleyball is great too, although it requires a little more skill than I have to consistently smack the ball back over the net instead of into it.
But my favourite Olympic sport to play is ping pong. My brother and I used to hold huge series at my grandparents’ house, and during uni I regularly skipped lectures to play long rallies in which my friends and I used to compete not to win the point, but to achieve a positively Gillardian volume of spin. It was far more satisfying than attending classes, and I’m not sure that it was any less rewarding in the long run.
The sports that we played as kids seem almost too much fun to be in the Olympics, really. And I suspect that by choosing to specialise in such enjoyable pursuits, Asia might be onto something. How great would it be if you could become an Olympian by playing table tennis for ten hours a day?
Now, it’s become clear that Australia needs to pick some new Olympic events, because our traditional sports are in crisis. Or at least, we have fallen below the ridiculous heights we achieved in 2000 and 2004 after pouring vast funding into sport for our own Games, and now think we deserve to maintain forever. But nevertheless, the Australian public has spoken, and our view is that there must be more gold.
Rather than competing in events like long-distance running that require genuine work, though, why don’t we come up with some new Olympic sports? And if we push for the games we played back in school to be added to the programme, we’re have the most precious thing you can have at any Games: an unfair advantage.
I’ve pulled together a few suggestions so we can start lobbying the IOC immediately. John Coates should feel free to start talking these new sports up when he’s calling everybody to apologise for his son.
Real handball
I’m sure that many people, like me, were surprised and delighted to see handball on the Olympic programme, and imagined it was the same as the magnificent game we used to play in school. But no – Olympic handball is like soccer, only you can throw the ball. Who wants to do that? Well, Europeans, apparently. What the Olympics need is Aussieplayground handball – it’s a sport anybody can play with only a worn-out tennis ball and a piece of chalk.
In the Olympics, there would be both singles and fours categories, of course. Of course, the competition would be professional-level. Which means no intoes or hoonying. And imagine if we had Hawkeye to end those perpetual arguments about whether the ball had its second bounce on your side of the line or your opponent’s.
Brandings
This is what we used to play back before handball’s ascendency, throwing a tennis ball at a wall and then at one another. Brandings combines skill at throwing and catching with that little twist of violence which would make it an outstand television sport. I can just imagine the super slo-mo as the ball raises a bruise on somebody’s thigh.
Australia’s cricketers could form the nucleus of our Olympic brandings team – their ability to pull off spectacular one-handed slips catches and fire the ball at the stumps would make them fearsome brandings competitors. Ricky Ponting has the skills and the temper to be truly world-class – you can only imagine how much he would have liked to peg a ball at Steve Smith after that collision.
Bullrush
Wikipedia calls this ‘British bulldog’, which I remember it being called when I lived in England as a kid. Forget that – its name is bullrush, and that’s all there is to it. It would favour the sprinters already competing at the Olympics, obviously, and the chance to see Usain Bolt playing bullrush would pack the fans in.
In order to give Australians a chance of a gold medal, we would include not only the classic ‘tip’ version but also the ‘tackle’ variant that some of the rougher kids at my school insisted on playing. It’s one thing to simply tap somebody on the back, but the need to take them down at full speed would give rugby-playing nations a distinct advantage.
Jump Rope
There was a period in the mid-1980s when the government ran a big ‘Jump Rope For Heart’ programme and we all had to skip regularly. That was well and good, but I’m talking about the version girls commonly play where two people hold a long rope and a number of people jump in the middle, performing increasingly complex routines while they avoid the rope. Medals would be given in the single-rope and double Dutch categories. Judging by how things went at my primary school, the female athletes would display a great deal more skill than the men.
Marco Polo
A classic game we used to play at the homes of friends who were lucky enough to have a backyard pool, Marco Polo would be absolutely outstanding in an Olympic-size pool, and give the aquatic centre a reason to open its doors in the second week. Those swimmers like Denis Pankratov who swim long distances underwater are likely to be useful in Olympic Marco Polo, easily swimming right underneath the blindfolded person who was ‘in’.
Catch And Kiss
This was an extremely important game in late primary school as we began to experience those first stirrings of romantic interest in our classmates, and including it on the Olympic programme would give sport that reality TV element of frisson it needs to appeal to the modern television audience. Olympic catch and kiss would also create an event where men and women could compete together for medals – a welcome change to the usual gender divide in sport. Plus, given all the stories about condom consumption, you’d only be handing out medals for what’s already happening in the Village.
Now, I’m aware that these are all children’s games – but a schoolboy invented rugby, if you believe the legend of William Webb Ellis. And while some of these sports might feel a little silly, they’re no more ridiculous than handing out medals for beach volleyball and synchronised swimming.
Bring them on, I say. And I’ll be the first to cheer when Australia wins its first Marco Polo medal. At least it’d give our blokes some chance of winning gold in the pool.
A land without gold
I was planning to go to the London Olympics this week, but then I looked at the airfares, and gave up. Instead I decided to go halfway there, to Singapore. The only thing it has in common with London is that the local English dialect is fairly incomprehensible, and they use those infuriating chunky powerpoints. Then again, the food’s better.
As is par for the course for newspapers the world over, the local Straits Times has been splashing Team Singapore’s Olympics achievements all over its front page. But from the perspective of Australia, or “ theindisputable champions at every Olympics as long as we’re calculating per capita”, I’ve been a little surprised by what counts as a noteworthy sporting triumph in this other island nation.
“S’pore’s women paddlers through to quarter-finals”, Tuesday’s Times boasted on the front page – and above the fold, at that. I was initially confused by the term ‘paddlers’, as I thought that the Olympics only issued medals for competence in swimming, rather than a lack thereof. But then I remembered I was in Asia, and realised that they meant ping pong.
The article went on to point out, with great anticipation, that if Feng and Wang triumphed in their matches on Tuesday night, Singapore would have two semifinalists and thus be assured of a bronze medal. How charmingly quaint, I thought, that in this country, you can be front page news when all you’ve achieved is a toss-up chance for a bronze.
In Australia, we reserve our praise and admiration for gold alone. You don’t even get that much acclaim for silver. Sure, you’ve helped your country with its overall tally, but all a silver medal means is that you failed by slightly less than anybody else.
Just in case I needed to lord it over any Singaporeans I met over the course of the day, I thought I’d research Singapore’s Olympic record. “In your face, Singapore,” I imagined saying, or perhaps I’d quip about their “Singapoor performances”. How I’d sneer! It would be such a magnificent performance that the IOC would have no choice but to issue me with a special honorary gold medal for gloating. Eddie McGuire would call my achievement “magnificent”, since, judging by his Opening Ceremony commentary, that’s the only adjective he knows.
And my research discovered that Singapore’s Olympic record offers precious little to brag about. Tan Howe Liang won silver in the weightlifting at the 1960 Olympics in Rome – in the lightweight division, I planned to scoff. And then it was a long drought until Beijing 2008, when the aforementioned Feng and Wang joined forces with a certain Li Jiawei to snaffle another silver in the women’s table tennis team event.
I’m sure that if you’re as patriotic an Australian as I am, you will already have fast-forwarded to the same incredulous conclusion that I reached: Singapore has never won an Olympic gold medal. (Given the temperature here, I didn’t bother to check the winter records.) They began competing in 1948 and since then, the anthem ‘Majulah Singapura’ has never rung out at any Olympiad.
What I’m saying is that when Emily Seebohm sobbed because she merely won silver in the 100m backstroke, she was upset because she’d merely done as well as any Singaporean has ever done in the Olympics.
But Singapore’s a smaller nation than Australia, you might be thinking. Yes, it is. There are only about 3 million Singaporean nationals as against our 22 million. Let’s call their population 10% of ours, to be generous. Plus, they’ve only competed as Singapore since 1948, and we’ve been there since the modern Games started in 1896. So they’ve competed in around half the Games, and you’d therefore expect Singapore to have netted around 5% of Australia’s 400-odd medals. That would be about 20 – but they’ve only got 2.
In other words, how awesome is Australia?
We do really, really well at the Olympics, by any yardstick. And, in fact, by the literal yardstick – in the Games’ history, we have won the ninth most medals. Let’s all pat ourselves on the back, shall we? Oi oi oi.
I kept thinking about this, and got a bit indulgent, and even more patronising. Good on Singapore, I thought, for being so proud of the two moments of Olympic glory it has managed to attain. It’s not winning or losing (and if it was, we’d totally smash them), it’s about playing the game. Those are the Olympic ideals right there. It’s about competing, not about whether you win the competition.
And then I started to compare Singapore’s attitude to the national disgrace that occurred on Monday morning, when our men’s 4x100m relay team came in fourth despite being favourite. Words like “shock”, “fail” and “disappointment” were used in our headlines. James Magnussen, who Nine’s commentator had predicted would set a world record in the first leg, gave a brusque interview and point-blank refused to explain why he had so shamed Australia.
I mean, look at the official result. Australia finished an implausible 1.70 seconds behind the victorious French. How is that even possible, unless you are willing to accept that in competitive sport, it’s possible just to have a bad day? How can this possibly be explained, unless you happen to view the Australian women’s unexpected victory in the same event as an example of that offensive cliche about how you “win some and lose some”?
As for Magnussen and his colleagues, the blame, of course, must go entirely to them. They owed us gold. We expected it, and they disappointed us. I expect a personal apology, frankly. And furthermore, I expect each of those swimmers to gain a late wildcard entry to another event at London 2012 and to win back the gold that they owe Australia. James Magnussen, I hope you know a bit of Greco-Roman wrestling.
In particular, I blame the team for choosing that unfortunate nickname. If we learnt one thing in Iraq, it’s that so-called “weapons of mass destruction” don’t always show up when you need them to.
Of course here in poor old Singapore, they probably would have been over the moon just to make the final, and downright chuffed if they’d finished fourth. The entire nation would have been thoroughly proud of their swimmers, I imagine. But that’s Singapore. They’ve never won a gold medal.
Hair today, gone tomorrow
Mother Nature has given me many gifts, some of which, to be frank, I’d be comfortable throwing back in her face. Chief among these has been hairiness. A ridiculous abundance of hair, even in places where hair by rights ought not to be, has always been my special genetic treat.
Oh sure, there are worse genetic curses. I’m a decent height, have the requisite number of limbs and don’t seem to have any of those terrible disfiguring disoders we studied back in high school biology. It’s a bit silly to whinge about a bit of hair, which isn’t even necessarily a bad thing on a bloke, surely?
Well, apparently lots of blokes not only dislike bodily hair, but... well... let’s just say that Kasey Edwards’ article in Daily Life yesterday utterly blew my mind. In fact, I would have torn my hair out in frustration, except it would have taken too long.
Her revelation was that lots of guys are waxing their pubes. And in some circles, most guys – she cites a survey of US undergraduates that found 65% of women and 63% of men remove their pubic hair.
YES THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID 63%.
Am I missing something here, or are they? Why would you do that to yourself? Regularly? I mean, who wants stubble there? And obviously male hair grows more rapidly than women’s, and... WHERE WILL THIS END? NOWHERE GOOD.
Perhaps I’m simply ignorant of a fad that’s so pervasive that it’s become normal. It wouldn’t be the first time. After all, Kasey reckons her friend’s friend (that most reliable of sources) hasn’t slept with a guy with any follicular action in the groin region in five years. Maybe it’s fashion, maybe it’s a fetish, maybe she just has an extremely dull sex life. (Hey, not judging, I can relate to that.)
Or maybe – MAYBE – I simply need to recalibrate my standards for normal male behaviour, and accept that my fellow men are now removing not only the hair on the visible parts of their bodies, but everywhere else as well.
My beef has previously been with a culture that says that the visible parts of men’s bodies should be hairless. And if you don’t believe that this is the case, it’s probably because there aren’t many guys besides me whinging about it, for whatever reason. But just try and think how many ads you’ve seen where topless guys had even an ounce of body hair, except perhaps a smattering under the arms. Similarly, when dudes in movies and bands take their shirts off, you can pretty much guarantee that they’ll have about as much visible fur as a prepubescent.
Having had the privilege of viewing a number of gentlemen friends naked over the years, most enjoyably at that Korean bathhouse in Kings Cross during the course of a bucks’ night, and before you ask, yes, it was totally awesome and yet very masculine, I can confidently say on that a significant proportion of Aussie guys have at least a bit of body hair.
So I’m arguing that this jihad on male body hair is abnormal. Wax on, wax off – it’s something the Karate Kid does. Not the Karate Man
I mean, if no body hair anywhere is the new normal, what hope is there for people like me who are outriders in the other direction? There’s having a bit of a pelt, Pierce Brosnan style, and then there’s – well, let me illustrate just how weird this can get. Look at your hands. Imagine hair on the back of it, for starters. Then look up at your fingers. Imagine tufts of hair between the knuckle, and the joint. Weird, right? It gets worse. Imagine a few scant hairs in between the first and second joints of each finger. Surely that is a location where nobody needs hair. Okay, so maybe if I was in the habit of punching people, those errant follicles might provide a tiny amount of extra insulation. But otherwise, it’s simply bizarre.
You can imagine the rest. Hair removal really isn’t an option for me. It would be like painting the Harbour Bridge – there'd be more to do as soon as I'd finished. And besides, I’d feel weird – not myself. I’d gladly have less hair than nature has given me, admittedly, but I’ve no interest in having none.
So, I’m going to assume that this is just a bizarre fashion thing, and that we’ll get over it eventually. Every possible human configuration drifts back in and out of style, after all – for instance, who would have thought in the 1990s that beards would ever come back in again? And perhaps in twenty years’ time, men will let the whole of their bodies blossom with the same hirsute glory that many of us currently display atop our faces.
What I’m saying is, don’t get electrolysis down there, guys. Because body’s hair’s time will come. Or at least I hope it does. Because until then, I’m going to keep on feeling distinctly unusual.
Last drinks for the drunk
As I kept visiting my friends’ little bar, I discovered that violence was a regular occurrence on Bayswater Road. Brawls were commonplace, and more often than not, I saw cops dragging pissed idiots into their paddy wagons. On more than one occasion, the entire street was closed down. I soon learned to walk the long way around and bypass the Bayswater Rd strip completely – walking up a dingy alley alone felt far safer than walking along a street that was often full of hundreds of people.
This contrast between megavenues and an embryonic small bar is why I was so bemused by NSW Hospitality Minister George Souris’ suggestion that small bars had contributed to the violence in Kings Cross. I’ve visited around half of Sydney’s small bars since the government finally allowed the city to have sensibly-sized watering holes like those which revitalised the Melbourne CBD, and they simply aren’t places where people go to get punchy.
Small bars are not above criticism, of course, but if you’re going to fault them on something, make it the prices or the trendiness or the clientele. In small bars, the weapon of choice is not the broken beer glass but the sneering putdown, generally because another patron is sporting last season’s style of corduroy jacket or an insufficiently ironic trucker cap.
Of course, the debate over drinking and violence isn’t a new one, and nor are the legislative attempts to solve it. I remember being in Melbourne when they tried a 2am lockout, which hardly seemed necessary at the cushion-filled Gin Palace bar I was in – the only physical danger that loomed was of a pillowfight. They quickly abandoned the lockout, presumably because it made no meaningful difference while ruining the experience for law-abiding patrons, and have tried “time out” zones, among other things.
What I can’t understand about the problem is this: it’s illegal to serve intoxicated patrons. Bars can be hit with hefty fines if they do so, or potentially lose their licenses. So how is it that Kings Cross in Sydney, Swanston St in Melbourne, Rundle St in Adelaide, Fortitude Valley in Brisbane and the main street of Surfers Paradise are predictably crammed with dangerously drunk people every single weekend? Perhaps the drinkers of Australia are such brilliant actors that they can feign sobriety long enough to order another round of shots? Or perhaps there simply isn’t enough enforcement.
If we’re serious about fixing these areas, we should force venues to fund an independent enforcement team (think parking inspectors) with the power to ban any punter from being served drinks and evict people if they're too far gone, not just from venues but from the entire area. (People buying rounds for drunk mates is part of the problem as well, despite its dinki-di Aussiness.) All patrons would have their photo IDs scanned on entry, and the grog inspectors would be able to share their lists of soft drink-only and evicted patrons so that after one punter was banned, they couldn’t get entry to or be served alcohol at any other licensed venues in the area. If a punter wanted to challenge the inspector’s ruling, they could voluntarily take a breath test.
Here’s the thing: we have cheap breathalysers, and we have laws that ban drunk people from being served alcohol, and it’s time we put the two things together. Because anything that isn’t actually measuring whether people are too drunk and then comprehensively banning them from being served more drinks simply won’t work. And furthermore, I don’t see why people who drink responsibly should be punished by earlier closing hours or other draconian rules.
I’m not talking about imposing a limit of 0.05, but I’m suggesting that we impose whatever experts decide a sensible maximum limit is. If you want to exceed it, drink in your lounge room. The reality is that excessively drunk patrons are making Australia’s inner city areas unpleasant and dangerous. Too many people can’t control themselves, and so it’s time that the government got serious about stepping in – not only to prohibit violence, but to ensure that those of us who like to drink within sensible limits are able to keep doing so.
This piece originally appeared at Daily Life
The parental paradox: fatherhood vs freedom
A while back, I wrote an article for Sunday Life in which I admitted to wanting a baby. This, apparently, was quite an unusual confession for a man to make – in which case all I can conclude is that given the birth rate, there are a lot of guys around who are either hopelessly out of touch with their feelings, or pretty darn unhappy with the amount of sleeping they're getting right about now.
The article got a surprising response. A lot of my friends read it, albeit primarily for mockery purposes, and it enticed quite a few men to write into Sunday Life about their own experiences. Some of the commenters suggested that I was brave, which seemed bizarre – surely if I were brave, I'd have succeeded in communicating the whole baby-having concept to some specific woman, rather than simply gasbagging about it into the ether?
I received a few invitations to come and talk about it on mid-morning radio programmes, quite a few internet comments and some faintly disturbing emails into the bargain. Perhaps the most curious result of all was that the piece was republished on Fairfax's Executive Style website.
Flash forward to last weekend, as I was driving back from yet another visit to yet another couple who have just produced their second baby (a form of reproductive gloating if ever I saw one – hey, we're so fertile we even have a spare!) it occurred to me that it must have been about two years since I wrote that article. And in this, at least, my biological clock was spot on – it's two years this week.
First, to answer the obvious question – I'm still not a father. (As far as you know, people sometimes quip under these circumstances, but given the terrifying expense of inner-city living nowadays, let's just say that I think the mother would have been in touch.) My progress towards that particular life goal can best be described as minimal.
But although I've accumulated a grand total of zero offspring over the past two years, I have spent a great deal of time in the company of babies and their parents. And while the desire for fatherhood is, if anything, stronger than ever, the picture has grown considerable more nuanced. Here, then, are the five things I've learned in the past two years.
1) Toddlers are even better than babies
Okay, we might as well start with the sappy bit. If anything, I'm cluckier than I was two years ago because I've come to appreciate how great toddlers are. Two years ago, my friends mostly had newborns. They're delightful in their own way, of course, and the portability factor was certainly a plus – many parents I know simply carted their babies around with them to a succession of great restaurants, and parked them safely under the table.
But as adorable as babies can be, it's when they graduate to toddler status and gain the ability to converse that they start to become excellent company. I've had more engrossing conversations about Toy Story lately than I would ever have imagined, even if my interlocutor seems not to realise that Zurg is meant to be the bad guy.
What's more, the older a child gets, the less likely they are to randomly spray miscellaneous fluids over you, and that has to count as a plus.
2) It's a bigger sacrifice than I realised
One hour with a baby is almost always delightful. They can be hilarious, sweet, occasionally a little irritating if in a bad mood, but for the most part, they are splendid in small doses. But after a protracted period of playtime, I sometimes find myself wanting to do other things. As time goes by, I find myself inventing games with the specific objective of tiring the child out. Because until they finally drift off, any other task I may have, no matter how urgent, simply has to be put on hold. I've seen friends run out of wedding ceremonies (from the audience!) because their children suddenly decided to race off somewhere, or couldn't remain silence. This requires a fairly radical adjustment in priorities, to say the least. Because in the rest of my life, the only capricious, unpredictable whims I'm forced to cater to are my own.
What especially freaks me out is the idea of this child-prioritisation engulfing the whole of my non-work life. Of eating out, going to a movies and having a beer with friends becoming an impractical dream, and entering the permafrazzled state of my poor sleep-deprived friends.
It's at this point in the conversation that my parent friends remind me that they're just as wistfully envious of my total lack of responsibility for any other living being as I am about the adorable dependency of their offspring. Sometimes a babysitter will allow them to escape for a precious evening evening, most of which they'll devote to commenting on just how weird it is to have a night out, and how much they miss it. By the end of the night, they'll often be occasionally hugging and rocking themselves, like shell-shock victims. And since I'm a person who views a Saturday night spent indoors as a personal failing, I wonder how on earth I'll ever be able to adapt to that.
When my parent friends are waxing lyrical about how lucky I am to have all of this free time, I gently suggest that there are times when it can be a tad lonesome. I mean, there are some weekend days when I realise I've forgotten to organise anything, so the entire day looms with absolutely nothing to do. But of course when I mention that, I'm describing their most cherished fantasy.
3) There's no middle ground
Or at least it's difficult to achieve without a phalanx of grandparents and/or professional carers – I gather that Hollywood celebrities manage it. What we all want, I suspect, is the joy of parenting maybe 70-80% of the time, but the ability to ditch the sprogs now and then to enjoy what remains of our youths. To be fair, this is something that most parents manage to achieve by the time their kids hit primary school and are able to be left with babysitters or, better yet, to fend for themselves.
But with young children, the compromise position simply doesn't exist, at least without shared custody arrangements, and of course that results from a whole pile of other difficulties. And this realisation has made me realise that I'd better enjoy my freedom while it lasts, however long that may be, because as soon as I'm a dad, it'll be more or less over forever.
That said, some dads I know have managed to negotiate the odd week away with their mates. All I can say is that I hope I'm allowed to do that someday, and that the women who have agreed to this are both saints and deserving of their own childless weeks as payback, just as soon as their kids are old enough.
4) The fear sets in
I'm lucky to be male, and not just because for us, childbirth is a process that gets outsourced to somebody else. I'm lucky because the fertility clock simply doesn't affect me the same way. I'm now 35, the age at which pregnant women are routinely offered amniocentesis and other tests (although this is the subject of debate, like absolutely every other medical aspect of childrearing). I'm sure it's a great deal more stressful being 35 and wondering whether your capacity to conceive children might decline before you can do so.
But it's still stressful wondering if it will ever happen for you, and if it does, whether you'll be too old to be able to enjoy it, or even participate fully. I still find myself doing the maths that says – well, if I have a child when I'm 40, then I'll be 61 at its 21st. If I have a child at 50, there's a higher chance that I won't be able to be a grandparent myself. And the longer I leave it, the less capacity there is for grandparents to help out, which I've come to appreciate is a vital factor.
The fear is still mild, and only really bites when I'm actually hanging out with young families. But with every passing year, I can tell that it will grow.
5) It's just too darn hard to do with the wrong person
Here's the kicker. There are people in committed relationships who want to have children but can't, and that's a different kind of unfortunate situation, of course. But most of the reluctantly childless people I know haven't found the right relationship. I reckon they're wise to wait nevertheless.
Sure, there are times when I start to appreciate the point of arranged marriages. But then I reflect on just how much of a jolt parenthood is, and just how much strain sleep-deprivation and the radical contraction of their freedom has placed on my friends' relationships. And that reminds me that it's worth waiting for a person with whom the process can be as enjoyable and stress-free as possible.
Above all, it requires you to trust and respect your partner more than anything else in your relationship. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are an apt illustration of why parents should share their fundamental values, and this applies to questions like the choice of school and where to live as well as to questions like the plausibility of Scientology. Even such minutiae as how much television kids should watch can spark intense arguments.
I simply can't imagine how awful it must be to doubt your partner's wisdom, or to send the child off in a car with their parent, worrying about whether they can drive safely. I hope I never have to find out.
What I've come to appreciate in the past two years is not only how great parenthood is, but how hard it is. It's made me appreciate what my parents did for me, and what my friends do for their children. And it's made me realise that even though my script for my life had me being a parent by 35, and I still regret that it hasn't happened, there are people who have it considerably worse than me as well as better. I'm lucky ahead of me, I still have the chance to get it right.
What's more, I've come to appreciate from my trapped parent-friends, who can think of nothing more pleasant than spending a day in my irresponsible shoes, that the grass is always greener, whether there's a tricycle on yours or not.
99.95% problems with Year 12 exams
Earlier this week, I left my laptop hanging over the back of a chair in a cafe in Blackheath. By the time I realised, I was in Orange, which is more than 100km away. This was a big problem, to put it mildly. For one thing, if I hadn’t gotten it back, I would have had to tap out this article on my phone. Although that may have made me more concise.
When I discovered the loss, I panicked, and then resigned myself to a three-hour round trip early the following morning, during which I planned to lash myself with a knotted cord like the freaky Opus Dei monk in The Da Vinci Code, despite the potentially detrimental impact on my driving.
And then my colleague Luke came up with an ingenious solution. He arranged for the kind folk at the Wattle Cafe to take the bag down to Katoomba, where it would board a bus to Orange, where he would collect it for me. It was in my hands just a few hours later, and I didn’t even have to get out of my comfortable chair.
Now, there are several lessons from this story. Firstly, whenever you’re in Blackheath, I strongly recommend the Wattle Cafe, especially if you’re forgetful. Secondly, if you ever need help with a complex logistical challenge, contact Luke, who I imagine could organise a rapid troop deployment behind enemy lines in his sleep.
But the main reason for mentioning the story is because I’ve had recent experience of losing something that I felt was rightfully mine. Which gives me a certain degree of insight into the plight of Sarah Hui Xin Wong, who this week lost her appeal over her mark of 99.95 in the 2008 Higher School Certificate.
Now, I have detected just a hint of Schadenfreude in the widespread fascination with Ms Wong’s case, which was demonstrated by the fact that over the past two days, separate articles about it have featured in the five most-viewed articles list at smh.com.au. Poor Sarah was not only forced to retain a mark that was merely excellent, but the media attention exposed her to widespread ridicule from all those who scored below 99.95 themselves. That is to say, roughly 99.95% of us.
Even if her appeal had been successful and she’d retrospectively achieved that elusive 100, it would have been a Pyrrhic victory given the media coverage. (Which I suppose makes the result a Pyrrhic defeat?) As things stand, she’s gained absolutely nothing from the experience besides infamy. Although I don’t know whether the story is over – she may yet appeal to the High Court, or perhaps the UN Security Council.
But try and see it from Ms Wong’s perspective. Many may have seen her academic glass as 99.95% full, but she saw it as 0.05% empty. Many may have felt that her successful entry into medicine was a sufficiently good enough outcome for her to be content. And many of us might have reflected how glad we were that everybody stopped thinking about our Year 12 exams a month into first year university, once we’d all figured out who got more than us and whom we could therefore resent until graduation.
But we must remember that Sarah is a med student. I can only assume that in that particular social milieu, the kids who got 100 constantly kick sand in the faces of those who scored a mere 99.95.
Besides, her claim may have had some merit. Take this statement from the SMH report: “She told the tribunal she believed if she had been granted a computer or extra time, she would have achived much higher marks.” Now, that’s fairly difficult to dispute. In fact, now that I think of it, I reckon I could also have achieved higher marks if I’d been allowed to touch-type essays and given an extra hour. My hand cramped and my writing became illegible after three hours of writing too. Am I too late to appeal the 1994 HSC?
It might be easier to find sympathy for Sarah Wong if we think of her as an elite athlete, or perhaps mathlete, that might remind us that those who perform at an elite level can nevertheless be wronged. I don’t see anybody reacting with disgust whenever Ricky Ponting uses the decision review system to overturn a dodgy lbw decision. I don’t stand at the edge of the oval and yell “Hey Ricky, suck it up and be grateful for the centuries you’ve already made”, because back when I was in the 13D XI in high school, I only once made it into double figures and we didn’t win a single match all season.
Although I would like to formally review one of my many cheap dismissals, if anybody has footage of our match against Newington College and access to Hawkeye. I’m certain to this day that the bowler was over the line.
Reading between the lines of the articles about Sarah Wong – or indeed, reading the specific line where it’s noted that the appeal was filed by her mother – we can tell that there may have been some parental pressure at play here. In which case, we should perhaps be more sympathetic than sneering.
But what her story really reminded me is how awful the Higher School Certificate was. In my case, the intense pressure to achieve inspired me to sit in my bedroom learning how to play Cure songs on the guitar and thinking that nobody had ever felt as depressed that I had in the history of the human race rather than to study extremely hard in a bid to get 100. But I can imagine that for those who did, the experience was even more hideous than mine, and even less tuneful.
I really don’t see the point of forcing school students through such an unpleasant experience. There are other systems for university entry, which include interviews and a list of a candidate’s other interests. And even if we must sit exams, it surely isn’t necessary to divide everyone up by 0.05% bands, and create this silly target of 100%. As everyone who’s been to university knows, if you don’t get a great mark in the HSC, there’s no shortage of subsequent opportunities to shine, many of which are far more meaningful than a bunch of exams.
To end the unnecessary sadism of Year 12, we should make the most competitive courses like medicine and law graduate entry-only, as they are in America. Many medicine programmes have already switched to grad-only, but this should happen across the board, making everyone’s first degree one that’s relatively easy to get into and allowing them to blow off a bit of steam during their first few years of adulthood.
If there was no med degree to aim for, and Sarah Wong had only found out whether she’d gotten into a general humanities or science course instead of having had to try for the yardstick of 100 which is entirely meaningless in later life, I wonder whether her Year 12 experience mightn’t have been a happier one. I’m sure mine would have been. Although without it, I wouldn’t know how to play ‘Lullaby’ on the guitar.
Let’s hope that Sarah Wong can now get on with the rest of her inevitably highly successful life, and that when she looks back in ten years, she’ll barely remember what she got in the HSC. There are achievements in life which matter, of course, and they’re worth working hard to accomplish. But nobody ever lay on their deathbed regretting 0.05% in their Year 12 exams.
Remembering Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron knew how to make me cry. Or at least she knew how to spark those first pinpricks of tears in the corners of my eye, and transform my upper chest region to the consistency of caramelly goo, a feeling akin to what I assume would happen if somebody randomly handed me a puppy. (Do people do that? They should.)
Those are the feelings we get at the moment of revelation in a truly great romantic comedy, when it becomes clear that the seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the path of true happiness will be removed, and our newfound pals on the screen will be together forever.
In a great rom-com, the audience ends up investing so much in the characters’ happiness that we wish we had confetti to throw at the end. And Nora Ephron wrote a stack of them, including the best one I’ve ever seen, When Harry Met Sally. (Annie Hall comes second, largely because the ending made me sad, and Some Like It Hot third.) Harry and Sally’s cultural impact when they arrived back in 1989 is hard to overstate – so many of its scenes have become iconic.
To this day, if you visit Katz’s Deli on the Lower East Side, you’ll see an arrow suspended from the ceiling, pointing down at the very seat on which Meg Ryan faked that “I’ll have what she’s having” orgasm. And yes, you can order the same thing Sally Albright ordered, if you insist.
(I’ve just remembered that the film’s director, Rob Reiner, asked his mother Estelle to perform that line. Which makes me appreciate the scene all the more.)
Even if she’d only written that film, I’d still be mourning Ephron today. Like all great narrative writing, it both captures a precise moment in time, and touches upon the universal. The famous debate about whether men and women can be friends, or whether “sex gets in the way” as Harry Burns postulated, rages on to this day.
Wikipedia also reminds me that the “transitional person” and the term “high-maintenance” had their origins in the film, and it’s worth remembering that for Harry and Sally to have so many other relationships on the way to getting together was a fairly edgy thing back in 1989. In particular, Sally was no princess waiting in an ivory tower for her prince. Even when we first met her, upon leaving college, she proved she was no less sexually experienced than the boastful Harry – that was ultimately the point of the orgasm scene. It’s unsurprising that Sally’s character was created by a female writer, and it’s often said that she was based on Ephron herself.
The way Harry and Sally lived in New York, supported by enduring friendships while they navigated through a series of non-enduring relationships before they found the right person, is how many of us went onto live over the following decades. Whereas comedy had previously revolved around the nuclear family, When Harry Met Sally blazed something of a trail for smart, inner-city thirtysomething comedy. In particular, Friends owes Nora Ephron an enormous debt, particularly when Chandler and Monica – in many respects a second wisecracking Harry Burns and endearingly neurotic Sally Albright – got together.
Her other big hit, Sleepless in Seattle, was almost too schmaltzy for me, what with the widower and his son and everything, but the payoff still worked on me. I haven’t seen Heartburn, though I’ll make sure I do, having read a great deal about it since Ephron’s death. With Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, it's almost certain to be excellent.
Romantic comedy is my favourite genre, bringing engaging characters together through satisfying banter and then peeling back their fast-talkin’ exteriors to expose their inner vulnerability, creating the opportunity for tenderness and ultimately happiness. It’s a narrative trick that’s worked since at least Much Ado About Nothing, where Beatrice and Benedick spar wittily before winding up together. And two characters in one another’s arms is perhaps the most satisfying of all narrative endings – in a rom-com, love is a redemptive force which heals all narrative ills. In fiction, it truly is all you need, as the Beatles put it – it’s never necessary to explore exactly how the Harrys and Sallys of this world will function after their clinch on that rooftop on New Year’s Eve. We just know that it’s going to work out.
Life’s more complicated than that, of course – in reality, the two lovers have to wake up the morning after their fairytale wedding, and figure out how to co-exist, and age together. Ephron gave us a sense of that challenge through the mini-interviews that she sprinkled throughout When Harry Met Sally, culminating in the titular couple’s own. It seems that Heartburn deals more explicitly with this theme.
To be honest, I’m such a sucker for rom-coms that I even found myself on the verge of tears in You’ve Got Mail, an Ephron effort that time has remembered somewhat less fondly. I watched it again a few months ago, and I hate to admit it, but the romance still worked on me, even though the premise of the huge chain bookshop destroying the smaller independent one now feels extremely dated – today, Tom Hanks’ megastore would had been ground into dust by the internet, while the smaller, friendlier bookshops like Meg Ryan’s have in many cases survived.
While I’ve only watched half a dozen of Nora Ephron’s movies, it’s more than enough to say this: she's a one-woman contradiction of those chauvinist who doubts that women can be funny. (I expect when Christopher Hitchens called her, Ephron was being polite.) It’s sad to reflect that decades after she began writing hugely successful screenplays, there still aren’t many female screenwriters in Hollywood – but that at least allows us to appreciate what a trailblazer she was.
And now that she’s gone, she has us blinking our tears away again. The best way to remember Nora Ephron is to re-experience her work, of course, and to discover new aspects of her writing – I had never read any of her New Yorker pieces before now, for instance, and I’ve no doubt her autobiography will be worth reading as well, especially judging by the taster of this piece on Deep Throat.
And whenever I want to watch a movie that makes me laugh as well as imagine, even if just for one brief, delightful moment, that love can solve all the problems in the world, I’ll have what Nora Ephron gave us.
Man Can't Cook
I’m 35 years old and I can’t cook.
Well, that’s not quite true. I’m 35 years old and I don’t cook. When the mood takes me, I can cook spaghetti bolognese that has been described as “surprisingly good”, in what I would describe as a “triumph of low expectations”.
I can also cook a serviceable roast, probably because it only seems to require me to buy an expensive piece of meat and whack it in the oven for as much time as the sticker on the cling-wrap tells me. Any culinary task that only requires, a clock, an oven and basic literacy, even I can accomplish. Unless the only clock available is the one built into the oven, in which case there’s no way I’ll be able to get it to work.
I can boil an egg with aplomb, as long as I Google to remind myself how long you’re supposed to boil it for. I can also boil water and put ravioli in it and microwave the accompanying sauce, and indeed did so through many of my university years. In those days I also cooked tinned spaghetti, which was dull, although not as much as those times when I was broke and feasted on white rice and soy sauce.
Nevertheless, my repertoire is best described as limited. Which is a pity, because I was quite the culinary innovator at the age of eight, I’ll have you know. That’s when I invented my trademark dish, ‘Bread Bits’. Here is the recipe, exclusively for Daily Life.
BREAD BITS
© Dominic Knight 1985
1) Take two slices of bread. Nothing fancy now, just regular sliced multigrain will do.
2) Artfully rip the bread up into pieces of roughly a square inch in size. (Roughly 2.5cm in metric.)
3) Sizzle a knob of butter in a frying pan and place the bread on it, frying it lightly.
4) Break two eggs over the top and stir.
5) Continue until the egg seems to be cooked, and then serve.
6) Garnish to taste. Adding tomato sauce is advised in order to make the dish taste primarily of tomato sauce.
Optional step: Before eating, take a moment to reflect on my extraordinary ingenuity at the age of eight, and what I might have accomplished by 35 if I’d stuck with this cooking lark.
The dish isn’t perfect, I’ll admit. For one thing, had I been more of a foodie back then, I’d have called it frittata del pane. But I think it holds up fairly well.
Now, I’m not one of these dudes who thinks that food preparation is a woman’s job, and happily sits watching the football and then makes a big production of stacking the dishwasher, as though that in any way constituted an equal division of labour. I’m more than happy to share equally in such important domestic chores as dialling for takeaway pizzas and throwing away the boxes afterwards.
What’s more, I quite enjoy cooking when I give it a go every six months or so. But since I live by myself (op cit), it feels like a waste of effort that could go into more important activities like watching Game of Thrones and wondering whether I should get a flatmate and/or pets.
Plus, when you spend the best part of an hour faffing around in the kitchen only to spend ten minutes eating it in front of the television, you feel like a bit of a loser. Whereas when I go out to my local cheap and cheerful Thai joint, I’m eating with other people, even though none of them are actually talking to me.
What’s more, the social rituals of dining are very much group-based, so when I cook at home and then sit there finding fault with my own cooking, there’s nobody there to protest that it’s lovely and that they don’t know what I’m talking about.
So I save cooking for those rare occasions when I hold a dinner party. The problem with that, of course, is that the pressure to succeed is high, and that I lack experience. This can lead to situations like a recent dinner party when the roast wasn’t ready to serve until 10pm. Unfortunately hilarious jokes about my general hopelessness or how we’re eating “European style” can only do so much to mitigate the embarrassment.
I’ve never stuffed up a meal to the point of total inedibility, or at least if I have, people have been sufficiently polite not to tell me, but it’s a fairly foolhardy approach. Cooking only when you’re hosting a dinner party is like not doing much preparation and expecting to get straight into the Olympic swimming team. In other words, it’s like being Ian Thorpe.
The other problem is that our society’s obsession with cooking has raised the bar uncomfortably high. The old staples no longer cut it in an era where most of my friends won’t dream of serving anything at a dinner party that hasn’t come from a fancy providore or a farmer’s market. And thanks to MasterChef, you can’t just serve up a Sara Lee apple pie and Blue Ribbon ice cream for dessert. Nowadays, you’ve got to attempt a snow egg.
I tell myself I’ll get into cooking eventually, much as I tell myself I’ll get into golf. When you have kids, cooking becomes essential, for reasons of both economy and logistics. And I already know how to cook my own favourite childhood dish of spag bol. Maybe, on special occasions like birthdays, I’ll even serve my kids a bit of my special frittata del pane. But in these solo days, mine will remain a casa del takeaway.
This article originally appeared at Daily Life.
Ten things I hate about winter
April is the cruellest month, TS Eliot wrote in ‘The Waste Land’. He was wrong, both about this and about how much Classical Greek it’s appropriate to include in poems. The cruellest month is definitely June, in Australia at any rate, because it’s the first month of winter. Its arrival invariably reminds me just how bad winter is in this country, and also not bad, thereby making it all the more bad.
That phrase makes no sense, I realise. That can probably be attributed to the fact that I’ve just been reading TS Eliot. My meaning will become clear as I rant on about why I despise winter even more than those maudlin characters in Game of Thrones who keep saying “winter is coming” as though it were some profound insight into the nature of fate itself rather than a fairly self-evident weather forecast. Speaking of which, Westeros’ Bureau of Meteorology really doesn’t seem to be up to much.And if you’re tempted to write me some snarky comment about how in the universe of Game of Thrones, summers and winters can last several years, and that’s just another awesome facet of the awesome awesomeness of George R. R. Martin’s imagination, let me pre-emptively suggest that you tell somebody who cares, like these guys. They care way, way hard.
Anyway. back to winter. Which, as I was saying, has come.
1) It’s cold.
A slight chill can sometimes be bracing, but cold weather is downright unpleasant. I know that some of our ancestors wrapped themselves in animal skins and huddled around fires, and so those with Anglo-Saxon heritage like myself really should be used to single-digit temperatures, but to them I say “fie”. (I’m hoping that’s an Anglo-Saxon expression of contempt, but I really can’t back that up with any actual knowledge.)
I simply cannot stand being cold. The first minute of lowering myself gingerly into a chilly swimming pool is torture. The dash from the blissful, enveloping warmth of the shower to the icy misery of the bedroom is agonising. I shiver. I was not meant to shiver. It’s demeaning.
I know others have it worse than we do in Australia. I know that in Toronto it gets so cold that they’ve built a huge underground network of passageways and shops to stay warm. To which I’d simply say – move.
But if the entire nation of Canada takes my advice and moves somewhere warmer, they’ll discover that in Australia...
2) It isn’t cold enough.
We have much of the unpleasantness of cold weather in Australia, but almost none of the splendour. There’s something lovely and romantic about a real winter, when the temperatures fall below zero and you have to wrap yourself up in layers and don scarves and gloves and beanies and thermal underwear. It allows you to warm yourself beside a roaring fire, and that, I can admit, is a fine thing.
I last experienced a proper winter in New York a few years ago, and was even lucky enough to enjoy the great compensation of northern hemisphere cold: snow. Walking out the door to discover that the entire world has been hidden beneath a layer of glorious whiteness is one of the most exhilarating feelings you can ever experience. It can turns even the most miserable of cynics, like, say, myself, into a child again, filling an ordinary day with the most delightful wonder and whimsy.
That lasts a day, and then the snow turns into slush and gets grimy and gritty and refreezes and makes the city into a giant slippery obstacle course where you’ll twist your ankle five times walking a few blocks to the subway and step into a puddle that’s deeper than it looks so that your entire foot will be sopping wet and freezing cold and then you’ll slip up and land hard on your frosty arse and it will ache for the rest of your holiday. Or perhaps that was just me.
Anyhow, my point is that it doesn’t get properly cold in most of Australia. This also means that...
3) We don’t have snow.
Disregard that last statement if you live in the Snowy Mountains, obviously, but Sydney and Melbourne are about as likely to wake up in a winter wonderland of thick, delightful snow as they are to have a decent public transport system.
4) Heating is oppressive
I know that in cold climates, they have excellent heating everywhere, and they only ever dash briefly through the freezing streets from one warm place to another. But here’s the thing: everywhere, everywhere is overheated in places like New York and London and Tokyo. It’s like going from a sauna into a plunge pool and then into another sauna. When you go indoors, you immediately have to take off every layer bar one, and even then it’ll still be too hot.
Furthermore, heating dries you out. If you go to sleep in a heated room, you’ll wake up parched. The one good thing about heating is that it makes you glad when you have to leave it to step into the cold. For about ten minutes, after which you’ll bitterly regret leaving the heat.
5) Nobody goes out
Sydney has valiantly tried to reverse this trend with events such as Vivid, and Melbourne’s Comedy Festival has long been an incentive to head out into the winter – well, autumn, but it’s Melbourne, so it’s still wintry – chill. But Australians plan all their social events for the warmer months. Weddings, parties, picnics, barbeques – we just don’t bother with them in winter. Or if we do, I certainly don’t get invited to them.
6) The Premier League stops.
One of the delights of my life is watching English football, except when Arsenal lose, when it becomes a source of exceeding torment. But because we’re in the opposite hemisphere, the time when I most want to watch it, when it’s cold outside, is the exact three months in which it stops. Worse still, our A-League season now mirrors the European one to facilitate transfers and so on, with the perverse result that during the most suitable three months for soccer in Australia, there are no games here either. And speaking of England...
7) Winter is why I have stupid white stupid skin.
Certain people with my racial heritage are ignorant enough to view themselves as superior to people from other races, which is surely a self-disproving belief. But I’d go further than that. Every summer, I’m reminded that I am demonstrably inferior to people without my northern ancestry. I burn within about 15 minutes of going into the sun. So I am forced to cover up my lily-white surface area with chemicals before I can expose them to the sun at all, and if you’ve got skin like mine you will know that it’s impossible to cover every single inch of your body with sunscreen, and there’s always some bit that gets miserably burnt anyway and then gets flaky and painful and peels and yuk and seriously, yuk.
It’s become even worse since I started losing my hair. There are few more humbling acts than massaging suncream into your prematurely bald pate, which is why I now own as many baseball caps even though I know nothing about the game. So even though I love hot weather, even though I’d much rather bedripping with sweat than icy cold, my body really isn’t designed for it.
8) Seasonal affective disorder. It’s a thing.
And it’s so sad its initials are even SAD. I’ve noticed that my moods are much better in summer than in winter. You may also have noticed this, given the tone of this article. Some might say that the solution is for me to get therapy. I’d say that the solution is for God and/or Julia Gillard to adjust Australia’s thermostat. Or we could just keep on with this whole global warming thing, and then those of us who haven’t drowned will at least be free of seasonal affective disorder.
9) Thermal underwear.
Yuk. I struggle to muster much in the way of raw animal sex appeal even clad in silk boxers, frankly. Forced to wear long johns, I might as well give up and embrace celibacy.
10) ‘Frosty The Snowman’
Surely this is the most annoying song ever recorded. Okay, the second most annoying behind ‘Whistle’ by Flo Rida. I mean, the lyrics are ridiculous. Oh, you might think it’s charming the first time through, but get it stuck in your head, and I guarantee you’ll seriously consider decapitation.
11) We get sick.
I was going to stop at ten things, but then I was reminded of this one by the giant sneeze I did midway through writing this article. Remember how I said earlier that I was genetically designed for cold weather, because I get burnt in the sun? Then riddle me this:, why am I no more able to resist annoying sniffles and influenza than anyone else? Winter’s awful enough without feeling sick all the way through it. And yet we do. Winter illnesses are the icing on miserable winter’s miserable cake of misery.
I hope I’ve convinced you all that winter is evil. There’s only one thing for it – we should all move to Queensland. Sure, it’d ruin State of Origin, but given the results in recent years, we New South Welshmen should probably wave the white flag anyway. Or maroon flag. Up there, it’s beautiful one day, perfect the next, and I don’t even care if it doesn’t live up to that slogan. Queensland doesn’t really experience winter, and at this point, I will emphatically sniffle that that’s good enough for me.
Celebrating the Royal Weirding
Today’s Australia is a land of extraordinary ethnic diversity. 27% of us were born overseas, in dozens of different countries, from Malaysia to the Mediterranean to the Middle East. Our land is a cultural cornucopia, where different languages and skin colours bond over the values that unite modern Australia, like sport and The Voice and – other sports.
Despite being Australian-born, I’m proud that my own DNA is also a rather tasty genetic smorgasbord, because my ancestors hail from extremely diverse parts of... well, the United Kingdom. My origins are English, Scottish and Welsh, with a twist of Cornish for good measure. (As far as I’m aware, I’m 0% Irish, regrettably, although this does free me from any obligation to participate in St Patrick’s Day parades.)
Once upon a time, my British background would have rendered me a member of an exclusive club, giving me the inalienable right to take tiffin beneath the gently rotating ceiling fans at genteel establishments like the Raffles. In the outposts of Empire from Bombay to Burma, we Britons would have talked about how successfully we were civilising the rest of the world, even though the blighters didn’t appeciate it.
That is to say, I would have been able to assume a position of cultural superiority while wearing khaki shorts, long socks and a pith helmet.
(Did you know that ‘pith’ is a kind of plant material, by the way? I didn’t. It still doesn’t explain why they wore it in the form of a helmet.)
Now, I’m not yearning for the days of Empire, far from it. My point is that the days of Imperial yore seem a long way removed from modern Australia, in both time and place. But if you tuned into the coverage of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee over the weekend, and saw all of the pomp and circumstance, the gleaming gilded barge and crimson velveteen thrones, the stiffly formal uniforms and the fluttering Union Jacks, you could be forgiven for wondering whether the sun had ever set on the British Empire.
Alternatively, you might have found yourself wondering whether the sun had ever risen on it, at least in weather terms.
(I’m allowed to mock British weather because I’m British. So there.)
Now, we Poms don’t get many opportunities to celebrate the delightful quirks of British culture here in the land formerly known as Terra Nullius, not least because there aren’t that many of them that don’t simply involve drinking. We Anglo-Australians have neither lunar new year dragons nor Ramadan fasting nor Vishnu statues. Our only thoroughly quaint custom, in fact, is cricket. Which, come to think of it, very much involves drinking.
But if ever there was an event to get my British heart a-fluttering and celebrating my proud heritage, surely it would have been the Jubilee flotilla. (Well, it might have been the royal wedding, except for that whole business where the Palace cancelled our TV show.) And yet, I was left approximately bemused by the whole thing as Jon Stewart.
Don't get me wrong – I found the flotilla spectacular, impressive, picturesque and even rather sweet. I just felt no connection to it, no cultural ownership. My primary reaction was "well, they all seem a tad overdressed" – which, to be fair, is a highly British observation, except in David Beckham's household.
Now, I have been talking about the pageantry of the Diamond Jubilee as the embodiment of British culture rather than Australia’s, even though I’m fully aware that Queen Elizabeth II is simultaneously also Queen of Australia in her own right. And I recognise this even though she’s British, speaks with a British accent, lives in Britain, and celebrated her Jubilee by sailing a British barge down a British river while people waved the Union Jack. She is nevertheless equally Australian, even though the website I just linked to, her official site, has the domain “royal.gov.uk”, and even visits here occasionally.
But I don’t mean to go off on a republican tangent. The feelings I had watching the Jubilee aren’t really anything to do with that issue, not least because it seems an uncouth moment to raise it. One does not discuss a prospective divorce in the week of one’s spouse’s 60th birthday party – although I suppose if one did, it might make one feel a great deal better about leaving one.
Furthermore, I admire the Queen very much, because she has discharged an almost impossible job with grace, dignity and even humour. Sure, the rest of her family disgrace themselves regularly, with the possible exception of William, but she seems a good egg.
My point is not so much about her being the Queen of a realm 10,000 miles away from hours, but her inhabiting a world, as we saw on Sunday, which has only the scantest connection with the one I inhabit in 2012. That didn’t feel like my culture up there, my heritage. It felt like watching a beloved grandmother and her eccentric family run amok in a costume shop specialising in garish miltary garb.
And the hats! I assume the designers looked at wedding cakes like this one, and thought “no, that’s too subtle”, and then “hmm, maybe if you dropped it?” What's more, I would have gently convinced the men to leave their swords at home.
It’s not just the clothes and accessories, though – the majority of British royal tradition is almost impossible for me to relate to. Nobody in Australia has crowns and sceptres and lives in palaces, except perhaps John Symonds. The coaches, the elaborate formal titles, the protocol, the ladies-in-waiting – it seems no more familiar to me than the peculiar bubble surrounding Japan’s emperor. I feel far more at home navigating the grandeur of the West Wing than Buckingham Palace. (Perhaps an Sorkin-scripted TV series would help?)
And that’s because I’ve grown up in a country where ostentation is shunned. In Australia, it’s a social taboo to suggest that your wealth or background makes you better than anybody else, whereas that is the founding principle of a monarchy. Our tall poppy syndrome is sometimes criticised for inhibiting excellence, but I find it comforting much of the time. It keeps us for getting a big idea of ourselves.
And it’s a million miles – or at least 10,000 miles – removed from a world where people are called Your Majesty, and have to be curtseyed to. Can you imagine our Australian leader – our modern equivalent of the rulers who invented these courtly traditions of deference, back before the constitutional monarchy devolved some of their power to parliament – being referred to in those terms? I’m sure Julia Gillard’s relieved whenever she meets somebody and doesn’t get shouted at. She certainly wouldn’t expect a curtsey. And yet she, not Quentin Bryce, essentially reigns here. That is, she has the role in our society closest to the monarch’s traditional role in Britain. It’s a rather stark comparison.
Like the Australia that’s evolved since European settlement – and like America, what’s more – my origins are British, but we’ve developed in a markedly different direction. And that’s why when I watch hundreds of boats proudly sailing down the Thames, I appreciate the spectacle, but I don’t feel part of it.
On one level, this is a source for sorrow – many people I know get enormous pleasure from their cultural traditions. But on another, it’s a source of satisfaction. I’d rather be part of a society in which pomp and circumstance seem bizarre and even a little surreal. On Sunday night, it was hard to remember that I was watching a live telecast in 2012, not outtakes from The King’s Speech or Downton Abbey.
Whether or not we formally become a republic, we are already a great distance from the tradition and splendour of the monarchy – and so is most of Britain, as a matter of fact. In effect, the lack of bother about the republic probably reflects how little the institution already has to do with our lives – it seems pointless to go to the trouble of dropping something that causes so little inconvenience.
And as for the Queen, I did but see her sailing by, but I will find her both extremely admirable and somewhat alien until I die.
This piece originally appeared at Daily Life.
Fighting our gut instinct
Australians, according to a widely-reported survey from 2008, are the fattest people in the world. And yet the OECD recently announced that we are also the happiest. Okay, so that’s probably because we couldn’t be bothered worrying about the survey saying we were the fattest. Or it might be because we have one of the few economies whose prospects aren’t more miserable than Craig Thomson’s preselection chances.
Sure, you have to take these surveys with a grain of salt – or, given the Australian diet, more likely a heaped tablespoon of salt. Another recent survey says we’ve now slumped to a mere fifth in the fatness stakes. But regardless of exactly where we sit in the top five, we, as a nation, are currently both exceptionally plump and exceptionally cheerful.This correlation between obesity and jolliness will come as no surprise to fans of 1980s movies, which featured many fine exponents of the funny fattie character, from John Belushi to John Goodman to John Candy. They’re generally called John, for some reason, and bring joy to millions before, in many cases, dying a premature death.
But – and I fear this may spoil John Hughes’ classic comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles, so if you haven’t watched it, you might want to take ninety minutes or so to do that before continuing with this article. (Pause.) When they want a twist in those classic comedies, it turns out that the funny fatso, the life and soul of the party, is generally crying on the inside, and just wants to be loved, despite being all hideous and fat.
And thus, at the end of PT&A (I’m sorry if I’m spoiling it, but honestly, you can see the ending coming about as far off as you can see John Candy), after a series of contrived circumstances throw them together on a cross-country road trip (What’s that you say? The movie sounds exactly the same as Robert Downey Jr. and Zack Galifianakis’ comedy Due Date? Goodness me, I hadn’t noticed) it emerges that John Candy’s annoying yet cheerful loser is left alone and impoverished. At Thanksgiving, of all times!
Fortunately, the slim, successful Steve Martin character relents and invites him home for a slap-up turkey dinner with his loving family. Heartwarming stuff. And also potentially heartstopping stuff, I fear.
We don’t get to find out what happens after that, though – presumably after the three days were over, subtle hints were dropped, and then unsubtle hints were dropped, and Del was turfed out again, homeless and broke. They never made a sequel.
I wonder how happy John Candy was, though. Even if they’re raking in the bucks in Hollywood, I would be very surprised if very many overweight people are happy with their bodies, with the possible exception of sumo wrestlers. And even then, I assume that after retirement, most of them wake up in the morning and stare into the mirror and wonder how on earth they made that particular career decision. Especially if they didn’t make much money, and have little more to show for their years of sumo toil besides difficulty walking through standard doors.
I’m allowed to make fat jokes, incidentally, since I’m not exactly Slim Shady myself. I know how debilitating it can be to put on a shirt that’s a bit too tight and say to yourself – well, I’m not going out in that. You feel guilty, you promise to do better and then, when you don’t, you feel disappointed in yourself. It’s not exactly a limitless source of jolliness.
But there’s only so much sympathy that those who are overweight because of lifestyle rather than medical factors deserve, surely? If there’s something in your life that persistently makes you feel bad, and you can change it by modifying your behaviour, why on earth wouldn’t you? But we don’t, which is ridiculous and foolish and yet an extremely common human instinct. Personally, the goal of shedding around 10kg has eluded me for quite some years now. My wholehearted theoretical devotion to this goal is yet to translate into, well, actually doing anything much about it.
Well, I’ve changed my coffee order to skim milk, even though it tastes miserable. Thanks, I’ll be autographing my weight-loss book later.
There is no better illustration of Australians’ self-defeating lack of self-motivation than the statistics on heart disease. It kills more Australians than anything else, and yet most of us are given years, decades even, to do something to stave it off. And that’s because of what are known as “modifiable risk factors” – things like smoking, high cholesterol and blood pressure, diabetes, physical inactivity, being overweight, and finally depression and social isolation.
Okay, so the last one is a bit complicated, but the only thing preventing most people from addressing the first six of those factors is willpower, surely? There are other factors you can’t change, such as “increasing age, being male and having a family history of heart disease”, and regrettably Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are also at increased risk. But we don’t modify the modifiable factors, even though addressing most of those lifestyle factors is as simple as diet and exercise.
And yet simply pointing to diet and exercise is like when Kofi Annan tells Syria that both sides just need to put down their guns. Sure, it’s a simple solution. Sure it’d totally work. Sure, all it takes is the exercise of will. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
So what can we do about it? At times like these, many of us turn to the most important source of wisdom in this secular age, Yoda. “Do or do not,” he told Luke Skywalker. “There is no try.” And that scene was also about moving very heavy objects – one’s spaceship in Luke’s case, one’s gut in ours, so it’s directly applicable, except for the minor inconvenience of the Force not actually existing.
Nevertheless, Yoda is right, even if his extraordinary wisdom is yet again accompanied by extremely poor mastery of English syntax. There’s no point banging on about our lack of motivation, especially since in the time it’s taken for me to write this article, I could have gone to the gym twice over. The fact that I find whinging more enjoyable than working out is my problem, and it’s up to me to do something about it.
I think it’s reasonably clear that Australians being simultaneously overweight and happy involves more coincidence than correlation. But Australians being overweight and complacent and distracted is something that no doubt a lot of us can relate to.
I don’t really know how to end this article, except by tritely saying “Life. Be In It”, and going off to have a swim. Honestly. I’m going to have a swim. Involving laps. Right now.
Crush or crush through
Like the infamous Black Monday stockmarket crash, the events surrounding my first crush began towards the end of 1986, and ended abruptly in 1987. I spent Year Four and Five in London, and like most of the boys in my class, I “fancied”, as we termed it in our ridiculous Cockney patois, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed classmate called – well, I won’t name her, because if the quick Googling I just did is correct, she’s married, and it would seem wildly inappropriate if she somehow read this article.
Besides, she might hold a torch for me, and... whoa, it’s only the second paragraph and things are already getting weird. Let’s rapidly back out of this particular line of thinking.
She was from New Zealand, and she and I were the best readers in the class, a fact that I offer in an attempt to make us seem like star-crossed lovers, but which probably says more about the relative quality of Antipodean public education. We even lived in the same building. Although again, not so much of a coincidence when I admit that it was a hall of residence specifically designed for Commonwealth students with families, like our parents.
And yet I nevertheless somehow convinced myself that we had a Special Bond, and that we were Destined To Be.
Destined to be what, I can’t exactly recall. We were only nine, so I presumably had grand romantic visions of us being library monitors together.
But I can still remember how it felt to become painfully conscious of where she was in the class, what she was doing, and who she was talking to when she wasn’t talking to me. Which was almost all of the time, unfortunately – we were never friends, and if I recall, my attempts to win her favours involved a great deal of avoiding her, and on those rare occasions we actually spoke, adopting a rather unhelpful proto-sarcasm.
In fact, I’m pretty sure we used to insult one another, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, except that in her case I doubt the outward contempt hid anything deeper. But in my case, her presence inspired unfamiliar feelings of warmth and longing, and I began to feel the first stirrings of the self-consciousness that would make my adolescence such a non-stop treat.
While she and I had a great deal in common, particularly our homesick resentment about being at that dreadful inner-London school, I can’t in hindsight understand why all the boys talked about her instead of anybody else. It now occurs to me that it must have been horribly awkward for her when they did. She probably did like me more then them, entirely because I never told anybody.
To cite just one in a year’s worth of examples, I remember on a school camp, a fistfight broke out in the boys’ dorm because one boy claimed that she was at that very moment “brushing her hair for me”, and another boy took exception, boldly asserting that it was with him in mind that she was preening her lengthy locks. Whereas I remember thinking that she was probably just brushing her hair because she wanted to get it dry, and then mentally congratulating myself for my superior insight into her ways.
What we would have done if she had been brushing her hair “for” any of us, I’ve no idea. Even the thought of a peck on the cheek was uncharted territory in primary school, of course. If my boldest designs had come off, we probably just would have played Travel Scrabble together, and I would have been H-A-P-P-Y. (15 points.)
It’s not just me that remembers my first attraction, as I discovered a few years ago at a twenty year reunion for the Sydney school to which I returned in Year 6. After a few drinks, at least one guy made a drunken dancefloor declaration that he’d been in love with another reunionee back in Year Six. It was hilarious on the night, but I bet there was nothing funny about those first tender feelings back in the days when we were all wearing blue polyester tracksuits.
The thing I find remarkable about my own first crush 26 years ago was its intensity. I could think of little else during the year she spent at our London school, and when she returned to Auckland, I was both heartbroken and somewhat relieved. I’d thought of telling her before she left, but I never did. I’m glad I copped out, because really, what possible good could have come from it?
Okay, so we might have started writing to one another, and one thing might have followed another and... shut up. I told you, she’s married.
The question of whether one should declare one’s secret love was the subject of a typically brilliant Daniel Kitson routine which I saw earlier in the year. He recounted a recent situation where he’d realised he’d fallen for a friend, and shared a number of pithy reflections on the subject of unrequited crushes which dredged up some uncomfortable laughs from many of us, myself includedt.
You don’t fall in love with someone in those situations, he said. You fall in love at them, because it’s entirely one-directional. We romanticise the years of unrequited devotion shown by Cyrano de Bergerac and Sydney Carton or Jay Gatsby, but in the real world, all of that lofty, intense emotion deflates immediately when pricked by the cruel thorn of indifference. Or should, if you’re to remain sane.
And furthermore, as Kitson pointed out, it seems an act of the most appalling self-indulgence to unburden yourself like that, for the very reason that the other person is somehow expected to carry your burden instead. In such instances a problem shared isn’t a problem halved, it’s a problem multiplied. In many ways, declaring one’s hand is an appalling act of narcissism.
And yet, after making powerful arguments against such gestures, which tend to ignore the subtle, unambiguous signals that crushers are sent by crushees if only they stop being captivated by the vast nobility of their souls for long enough to pick up on them, Kitson told us that he had decided to tell her anyway. I admired his bravado, at least.
But crushes aren’t simple when you’re grown up, not like they were in primary school when everybody’s lives were uncomplicated and anyone was fair game. As an adult, crushes are a curse. Because in adulthood, if you like someone and they’re single, there’s really no excuse for not either trying to do something about it, or giving up and moving on.
For grown-ups, the crushes that linger and fester are the unrequited ones on people in relationships. And in those cases, the only sensible approach is to soldier on as though they don’t exist. How would our society even function if everyone who experienced an intense attraction to someone else simply went around dramatically throwing their cards onto the table? There are good reasons for keeping these things bottled up. Ask Gatsby.
Spoiler alert: In fact, you can’t ask Gatsby, because he’s dead, because of his crush. I think there’s a lesson in that for all of us. He wouldn’t necessarily have been any happier if he’d bottled up his feelings for Daisy Buchanan, but he would certainly have been more alive.
And if my first crush from the mid-1980s does somehow read this article, I’m over it, honestly. No, really, I am. Besides, I’m pretty sure I was the better reader.
24 hour plane people
I first flew overseas in 1985. I was eight, and my parents had decided to move to London. I boarded the Qantas plane with a sense of enormous excitement. Every detail was fascinating to me, from the safety cards to the inflight magazine to the strange compartmentalised food. I can still remember being engrossed by the kids’ channel on the inflight audio system, which involved a game where you had to evade the nefarious Black Knight.
I was somewhat confused by the morality of this, being a Knight myself, but of course, I understood what they were telling me – that a black knight must necessarily be bad, whereas a white knight would of course be good. And that, folks, is how racism starts.Hang on, that’s not the point of this story at all. Although now that I think of it, why does white always get to go first in chess? How typical is that? Why can’t they toss a coin? And in the age of Obama, why can’t we have a chess set where all the pieces are half-black and half-white?
Anyway – the point of this story, other than to illustrate that I really like planes, even to this day, is this: it took us roughly 24 hours to get to London. We had a stopover in Singapore, where I looked at electronic shops with absolute fascination, and in Bahrain, where I looked at pit toilets with absolute bafflement.
The idea of getting to London in only a day would have seemed a miracle back when there was no option besides a sea journey taking weeks. It would have seemed almost as miraculous in the early days of Qantas, when the flying-boats used to do the journey in nine days. The jumbo jet changed the nature of international travel irrevocably.
But my 24-hour flight to London was 27 years ago. Since then, jets have become larger and more fuel-efficient, thanks to the A380 and forthcoming Dreamliner, and improvements in range has meant only one stopover on the way from Australia to Europe. But the journey still takes 22 to 23 hours. In nearly three decades, we’ve shaved only a few hours from the journey.
Decades of extraordinary innovation in passenger aviation, then, have come to an abrupt halt, in contrast to the speed at which technological innovation occurs in most fields. Back when I took my first flight, the movies were screened with those huge clunky projectors with the red, green and blue lightglobes. The image was almost unwatchably dim, and of course there was no choice. (It’s great to see this technology has been kept alive on some domestic Qantas flights, where everybody still has no choice but to love Raymond.) Now, we have personal video screens, and the advent of tablets has meant that some of us provide our own inflight entertainment.
Back when I got that first flight, telephone calls between Sydney and London were prohibitively expensive – ringing our Australian relatives was for birthdays and emergencies only. Now you can talk for free on Skype for as long as you want. And of course mobile phones were science fiction in 1985.
1985 was also the year that Marty McFly climbed into the DeLorean in Back To The Future, of course. It didn’t seem implausible in the sequel that we’d have flying cars by 2015. Where are they, exactly? Even flying skateboards would be a welcome improvement.
In computing, Moore’s Law stipulates that the number of microprocessors that you can fit on a chip will double every year. The corollary of this has been a doubling in the speed of computers every 18 months. Whereas aviation has gone backwards. When I was a kid, Concorde regularly flew between Europe and America, and sometimes even flew between Sydney and London, taking around 17 hours. But now, that’s no longer possible – Concorde has been retired. It’s too noisy – those of my vintage may remember hearing the sonic boom as it arrived in Sydney – and uneconomic to run given the small cabin size. But still, it’s extraordinary to think that commercial aviation was faster in the 1980s than it is today.
There are many reasons why it still takes nearly 24 hours to fly to London, and I won’t go into them here – let’s just say that it’s got more to do with economics than technology. But it’s important, because that number, the 24 hour number, is what makes living in Australia a challenge.
Australians become accustomed to distance. We’re one of the few peoples in the world who view a ten hour flight as short. And I’m sure that most of us have met people on our travels who say they’ve always wanted to visit Australia, but find the idea of that spending that long in a plane overwhelming. In other words, wusses. But still, it’s a reminder of just how far away we are.
Surely I’m not the only person who’s jealous of friends in London who can spend an hour or two in a plane and get anywhere in Europe, or friends in Singapore or Hong Kong who can nip down to Thailand for the weekend. In the rest of the world, or at least the parts of it where Australians are relatively likely to live, budget airlines have made international travel commonplace. Except perhaps for Western Australians, it’s simply not an option for us to go overseas for the weekend the way it would be if flying to Bali took, say, two hours from the East Coast.
But it’s not just leisure that we’re missing out on because of the lack of innovation in aviation. The greater loss is of people. With 1 million Australians living overseas at any given time, most of us have suffered from the expat drain. Whenever I flick through the contact list on my phone, I remember that dozens of people I care about still live abroad. I should probably delete them all, in fact, to teach them a lesson. Which they won’t learn, because they’ll be too busy catching EasyJet and Air Asia flights to the beach.
Facebook makes the loss seem all the more potent, bombarding us with a constant stream of overseas weddings and babies and holidays and lives, none of which we can easily participate in. And sure, we can visit sometimes, but flying for 24 hours is exhausting even without the jet lag.
If air travel had continued to become both faster and cheaper at the rate it had in the decades before I boarded that plane in 1985, and we could fly to London in four hours for $400, say, our lives would be different now. Those of us in Australia wouldn’t feel so cut off from the rest of the world, and from people we care about. We’d undoubtedly both have more incoming tourists, and travel overseas more ourselves. And more of us would probably go and live overseas if it was easier to return home.
Virgin Galactic is talking about doing the Sydney-London trip in four hours someday. Let’s hope they can manage that, and at an affordable cost, as unlikely as that currently seems. But in the meantime, all we can expect is incremental improvement and additional comfort. For the next few decades at least, we’ll remain a day and more than $2000 away from the rest of the world.
Perhaps it seems churlish to be disappointed by this – after all, getting from one side of the world to the other in 24 hours is still an miraculous thing, when you think about it. But I can’t help hoping that someday, I’ll be able to go to Europe or New York for the weekend almost as easily as I can now go to Melbourne. And the world will feel a great deal smaller.
What I’m saying is, the 2012 equivalent of Doc Emmett Brown needs to invent that flying car, and probably the flux capacitor into the bargain. Without a breakthrough of that order that dramatically changes the physics and economics of flight, we Australians will continue to experience the tyranny of distance.
The thirtysomething dilemma
A few years ago, when I was in my early thirties, my generation’s relentless instinct for coupling and childrearing, aided and abetted by our ceaseless expattery, reduced me to my last two Fun Single Male Friends Of About My Age Who Also Lived In Sydney.
Tim and Sandy – not their real names, to add an unnecessary air of mystery – had both recently returned from stints living overseas, and they were damned if they were going to settle down just because they were back in their hometown. And I was determined to join the resistance they were so bravely leading.
I wasn’t sure whether we were dinosaurs in denial or the last fun people heroically struggling against the dying of the light, I suspect. But right when I needed them, those two guys became my last bulwarks against the onset of middle age.
Well, them and my Nintendo Wii. I don’t think genuine adults are capable of playing New Super Mario Bros for eight consecutive hours. Despite decades of feminism elsewhere, in the Mushroom Kingdom, the fairy princesses simply don’t seem to be able to save themselves.
The peril of Princess Peach notwithstanding, my two friends became invaluable. If I was out late on a Saturday night and wanted to find somewhere to kick on to, or I wanted to lure somebody to come out and dance until our joints creaked painfully (after about thirty minutes, in my case), they were my go-to guys for a “whassup?” text message.
(I didn’t ever actually text the word “whassup”. Just to be clear.)
And so, while our letterboxes continued to be stuffed with wedding invitations, and our Facebook feeds went from containing pictures of young people drinking to pictures of much younger people drinking breast milk while the adoring parents looked on, we could nevertheless amuse ourselves.
In particular, Tim and Sandy were the ones who hosted legendary parties that kicked on until dawn at residences that seemed to have been chosen specifically for their extreme party-friendliness. Tim had a pimpin’ high-rise inner-city bachelor pad, with a glorious balcony boasting panoramic harbour views, and a set of decks in his lounge room. And he even knew how to use them.
Whereas Sandy had one of those lovely terraces that brought back happy memories of student days. Even queueing for that one mildewy bathroom inspired waves of nostalgia for my early twenties. The house boasted an ample backyard for the smokers, slightly bouncy floorboards that converted perfectly into a trampoline/dance floor by the end of the night and that signature of the terrace party, the bathtub full of ice. Plus, Sandy knew how to make jelly shots and he had enough charisma to persuade everyone to try one. The night would invariably end with everybody jumping up and down and singing the lyrics to early 90s Britpop songs, and very jolly it was too.
Now, I’m not saying that parties like these were weekly occurrences. But still, theywere the red-letter days, the days to look forward to, when I knew I was guaranteed a good time, and perhaps even the chance of meeting someone new, interesting and – if I was really lucky – single. They were the days that justified ironing a shirt with extra care, and perhaps even a splash of cologne.
In my younger days, I’d been quite shy, and my preferred position at any given social function had generally been on the fringe, in deep conversation with someone I already knew. And my general approach to seduction was not to talk to women in case they thought I was trying to chat them up – especially when I was.
But through a process of sheer attrition, I had become one of the last men standing. I’d become the guy who could text nightclub managers to get my name on the door, simply because they wanted people in their thirties to come and spend a bit of money and I was one of the few who was willing to leave the house. To my surprise, I found I rather liked being One Of The Few Guys Who Still Kind Of Parties A Bit.
Then, better yet, the small bar reforms happened in NSW, giving us a whole fresh wonderland of venues to explore – and at last there were venues where you could actually have a conversation. The early Darlinghurst adopters like Doctor Pong, Ching-a-Ling’s and Pocket became our new regulars. It was a wonderful way of easing into my thirties, with a crew who were just as interested in putting off anything resembling responsibility as me.
Well, I wasn’t necessarily trying to put off responsibility. It was just that until that happened, until I managed to find someone with whom I could embark on that graceful descent into domesticity myself, I valued company.
They were good times, but with every passing month it became clearer that we were an endangered species. So, Sandy relocated to London and Tim relocated to the East Village. There, if Facebook is any guide, they’ve found a different species of thirtysomething – one that still goes out. And every so often they return to Sydney, and fun times are still to be had.
But now, at the age of 35 and deprived of the gentlemen who organized wonderful parties where all I had to do was show up, I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do when I feel like Hitting The Town. I don’t really know where to go, what to do, and in particular, which venues’ bouncers won’t turn me away. It’s quite the dilemma.
I have some new, younger friends, and they’re great but it’s hard to keep up with them, if I’m honest – and it feels strange being five or more years older than everyone else at a party. You begin to wonder whether you ought to be supervising or cleaning up or something. (Hint: you’re really not.)
Perhaps the solution is for those of us to remain to unionise, and find a way to keep having big, fun nights, until death, rheumatism or a Fair Work Australia inquiry intervenes. (Hey, I wonder if we could get one of those HSU credit cards?) Perhaps we could establish a gated community or sorts, where security guards ensure that nobody in possession of a baby can enter?
But all these measures are temporary. In the long run, if you can’t beat them – and it’s now abundantly clear that we, at least, cannot – you have to join them. And that’s fine, that’s just the way Australia is, I guess. And it’s what I want, I think. I only wish that until that joining process had concluded, there were a few more people like Tim and Sandy around.
Julia Gillard, we’re just not that into you
This should have been a wonderful week for the Prime Minister. She should have been tripping merrily through a field of political daisies, as difficult an image as that might be to conjure of our workaholic Prime Minister. On Monday, she announced the imminent delivery of the landmark National Disability Insurance Scheme – which has achieved rare bipartisan support in this most fractious of Parliaments. And then on Tuesday, the Reserve Bank dropped interest rates, exactly as she and Wayne Swan had hoped it would – and by 50 basis points, double what most experts predicted.
Some economists may question the government’s insistence on bringing the budget back into surplus, but politicians know that a reduction in mortgage repayments matters far more to the average voter than the country’s abstract macroeconomic health. Besides, if the budget isn’t brought back into surplus, Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey and Wayne Swan will say mean things about Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and black holes. So by her own metaphor, the PM is not only full-forward for the Western Bulldogs, but kicking a clutch of sweet, sweet goals.
But Julia Gillard isn’t having a wonderful week. She’s playing more like the actual Western Bulldogs, in fact, who are 2-3 for the season. (Although unlike her, the Dogs managed to win over Western Sydney.) Unfortunately, there’s that vexing little problem of the electorate. This is the week of Labor’s second-worst Newspoll performance ever – a yawning 59-41 gap on a two-party preferred basis, which means she’s polling about the same as Anna Bligh was before Labor was reduced to single figures in Queensland. Clive Palmer may be willing to build the Titanic II, but on those figures, Julia Gillard should be the skipper.
So the media is once again full of speculation about a leadership challenge. Despite senior government ministers having attempt earlier this year to not only bury Kevin Rudd but stomp on his grave, pour salt on the surrounding earth and erect those new warning signs designed to tell future generations not to excavate a site for thousands of years, he is the only viable option if Labor is willing to risk another change of leader. Any other move would be a fresh backstabbing, not a restoration, and simply remind voters how angry they are with Labor over Rudd.
For months now, the PM and her Deputy have been arguing that their strong performance will ultimately turn things around. Swan has talked of a political dividend as voters belatedly realise just how cracker a job the government is doing. It’s Field of Dreams logic: if we build it, they will come. But even Swanny must be beginning to have his doubts now. The only person who’s definitely coming for him is an angry billionaire.
With an election just over a year away and another Queensland or NSW-scale defeat looming, only without the justification of the party having been in power for over a decade, almost every Labor MP now must be panicking. Even some of those, you’d have to imagine, who voted for Julia Gillard in the spill. Because the choice on the table no longer seems like one between a Prime Minister who’s effective and one who’s difficult. It’s the choice between being an MP and finding another job.
(Although it seems the HSU may soon be hiring.)
And that’s what makes a change increasingly inevitable, as even John Howard has pointed out. “In the end,” he said, “the instinct for political survival is very strong”. And he, the famous “Lazarus with a triple bypass”, would know. He has also seen that sometimes the voters just don’t change their mind before election day, no matter what you do. And he’s well aware just how much the Australian electorate likes Kevin Rudd.
Julia Gillard has a unique capacity to simultaneously chalk up policy victories and public relations disasters. It’s as though her everyday world, in which legislation is carefully tweaked until it somehow appeals to both the ornery Independents and the Greens, exists in another dimension from the one inhabited by the general public and the media.
(I think hers is called “Canberra”.)
In this other dimension, the PM’s currently tainted by the twin disasters of Peter Slipper and Craig Thomson, both beleaguered by allegations of both financial and sexual impropriety and both of whom she has doggedly defended, and then, without a change in circumstances in either case, abruptly cut loose because “a line was crossed”.
Furthermore, in the dimension outside Canberra, where opinion polls are conducted, she’s still imposing a carbon tax that most people hate and still hasn’t been forgiven for knifing the Prime Minister that most people liked.
If her performance had the capacity to save Gillard, it should have done so already. She’s already passed a raft of landmark legislation. What else can she do from here? With other Prime Ministers, there was an initial base of election-night euphoria and enthusiasm to recapture, as John Howard successfully managed to do despite being behind in the polls to both Kim Beazley and Mark Latham. But Julia Gillard has never won a Federal election in her own right. And any poll can tell you that it’s now overwhelmingly likely that she never will.
Sometimes, the writing is on the wall and it’s just a question of reading it. It’s an ages-old problem that was addressed in the dating realm by two of the sages behind Sex & The City, Greg Berendt and Liz Tuccillo, in their classic tome He’s Just Not That Into You. Now, I have many problems with this book, some of which I outlined here, but in one respect, it is absolutely right. There’s no point sitting around and waiting in the hope that people will change their mind. And yet, to adopt the parlance of S&TC, Gillard and Swan are perched by the phone, waiting for Big to call.
Well, guys, he’s not gonna call. He’s more interested in Tony. Maybe he’d be interested in calling your former friend, Kevin, but one thing’s clear: no way is your phone gonna ring. When someone has written you off, it’s borderline impossible to get them to care again.
Okay, so I’ve just compared Australian politics to Sex & The City. That’s not really fair – at this point, Carrie and her friends have far more to offer. Even including their most recent movie.
It’s easy to take a swing at the Labor piñata – it’s clearly on the verge of cracking. But there’s a broader problem here, though, and it’s the one highlighed by Tony Abbott’s biggest problem – his personal lack of popularity. In that latest Newspoll that has the Coalition at record numbers, 55% of voters nevertheless expressed dissatisfaction with him. Sure, compare that to the ongoing Gillard catastrophe and he’s laughing – her dissatisfaction rating’s sitting at 63%. But still, it’s a surprising figure in the same poll that tells us he’ll lead a Parliamentary rout.
With two deeply unpopular leaders, the Speaker under a cloud, the iconic Leader of the Greens retiring, and even the rural independents having threatened their previous popularity by supporting this government, the electorate could be forgiven for getting fed up with whole of the political system, since every cynical instinct we have is ultimately justified.
Take yesterday’s events, for example. Suspicious about potential corruption in the union movement? Why, here’s the former national President of the ALP trying to escape a police raid with a bag of documents! Allegedly.
Perhaps we should consider selling the whole box and dice to Clive Palmer after all. At least it’d be entertaining, not to mention less depressingly predictable. And at least, unlike the Prime Minister, he knows when he’s on board the Titanic.
Yet another rant about smoking
I don’t want to seem a wowser, a square or a prude, although I am in fact all three of those things, but I despise smoking. I despise it even more than I hated watching the Nyan Cat video for a solid hour, and that’s saying something. (The lengths of research I go to for this column!)
In Japan, it’s considered rude to smoke in public. You won’t see people lighting up on the pavement, outside their offices the way you will here. You won’t see them jamming a ciggie in their mouths as soon as they get off the train, because they’re so pathetically addicted that they couldn’t bear to be without tobacco for a whole hour. Instead, you’ll see Japanese smokers clustered together in certain designated ciggie-leper colonies, many of them glassed off, with a forest of ashtrays so that the butts aren’t simply chucked randomly onto every public street the way they are here.
The Japanese taboo against smoking in public is so strong that as well as subsidising many of these open-air smoking areas, Japan Tobacco has even run a public education campaign to try and teach smokers the appropriate etiquette for their habit. The posters are beautifully designed, and some of them are even quite funny. It’s polite, it’s considerate, and I only wish Australia had adopted the same taboo.
You might conclude from this that Japan is a wonderland of social civility that places public health on an appropriately lofty pinnacle – until you entered any bar. Without any restrictions whatsoever on smoking in private areas, every Japanese bar, and most restaurants, still contain that ominous fug of smoke that most of us can remember from the bad old days before regulation here. My recent trip to Tokyo was a throwback to the days of my throat feeling dry and scaly, and my clothes stinking to high heaven the following morning. The practice also condemns anyone who works in a bar to a lifetime of passive smoking, of course. But hey, at least they’re not being so rude as to smoke in public!
Both the Japanese taboo and the Australian regulations are correct. Smoking in the open air is by far the lesser of the two evils, of course, and it seems odd to have focused on that as the unforgivable rudeness, but the Japanese are still right that it’s inconsiderate and a source of litter. Whereas our regulations in enclosed spaces have transformed Australia’s watering-holes into pleasant places – or relatively pleasant places, in some instances. And they’ll undoubtedly save lives among those who work in the nation’s bars and clubs.
I can’t wait until smoking in outdoor dining areas is banned around the country as well, because the current restrictions have made all outdoor areas intolerable by funnelling smokers into them, as Bruce Guthrie recently argued. With one exception: I reckon you should be allowed to smoke in pokie rooms – let’s make them as intolerable as possible. You should also be allowed to skateboard and practice the tuba in them.
All of this regulation begs the question: if you can’t smoke in public and you can’t smoke in bars, then where can you smoke? The answer is simple. At home. That’s it. And if you have kids, perhaps not even there, at least anywhere where they’ll breath the smoke in. Perhaps in certain designated smoking areas, rooms with powerful extractor fans or bits of public space that have been cordoned off so you can indulge your folly.
But nobody should ever have to involuntarily inhale cigarette smoke. If you are mad enough to persist with the habit despite the implications for your health, fine – knock yourself out, or emphysema yourself out, if you must. There’s no law against, say, punching yourself in the face, an activity that will probably cause less long-term damage to your health than smoking. That’s a sufficient quantity of the individual liberty that you smokers perpetually whinge about. Because your liberty only extends to the point where makes others to suffer along with you.
A smoke particle from that cigarette you simply couldn’t resist smoking might be the one that condemns somebody else to lung cancer, or any of the other litany of illnesses that smoking causes. Why should that be permitted? It’s the equivalent of you shooting up heroin, and everyone around you having to jab themselves with a couple of as well.
Let’s not forget that smoking shouldn’t be legal in the first place. Oh, I’m not suggesting an outright ban now that the horse has bolted with the Marlboro Man atop it. But surely if we knew then what we know now, cigarettes would never have been allowed onto the market. We aren’t even allowed to buy energy drinks that contain too much caffeine, so the current legal status of a product that harms every internal organ is an even more glaring anachronism than the monarchy.
Rather than outlawing them, the government should take any means necessary to make cigarettes as unpopular and difficult to indulge in as possible. Which is why the cigarette companies’ opposition to plain packaging of their product simply must be defeated. I’m sure it will be when the High Court rules – it seems thoroughly absurd to argue that by restricting what they can display on their packets, the government is actually acquiringproperty from the tobacco companies.
The argument seems all the more bizarre when you consider that if if the government is actually acquiring the trademarks, as their opponents are claiming, and has to pay just compensation to do so, then the Department of Health would own every cigarette trademark. Consequently, it could stop them being used. Rather than calling their precious little tubes of pre-packaged death Winfield or Marlboro, they’d just have to market them all as Generic Cigarettes. Is that what British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco and my old pals at Japan Tobacco actually want?
There are other spurious arguments on the table, like the one that the laws will increase black-market imports of tobacco – perhaps, but surely not more than the current hefty taxes do? And then there’s the curious World Trade Organisation action being brought by Ukraine, who hasn’t actually traded tobacco with Australia since 2005. And while I don’t have much insight into international trade law, I’m pretty confident that public health interests will prevail.
I’d like to see the government doing even more to discourage smoking than it is now. I’d like to see a law that puts up the price of a packet of cigarettes by 10% a year, every year, forever. As it does with other dangerous products, the government should attempt to protect us from our own short-sightedness. But when these products can and do harm other people who are sensible enough not to smoke themselves, the crackdown should be maintained until addicts are puffing away exclusively in their own backyards. And even then, they’d better make sure the neighbours aren’t breathing in the smoke.