Word. It's been eighteen days (allowing for time differences etc) since we last updated the internet phenomenon which is fast becoming known as too easy. Sorry about that, but someone forgot to mention to Australia that unlimited broadband access packages are a Very Good Thing, and as a result we are stuck with a paltry 25GB limit per month, after which our service is traffic shaped within an inch of its life, and we can't do anything. We are now back, alive, and kicking. So. What's been going on?
1. The Great Ocean Road is great.
Laura and Marc came down to visit us, (our first guests in chez miniscule) which was very nice. They had roadtripped down from the Golden Coast to see us in Melbourne, the cultural capital of the ay you ess, and after a few days of hanging out in the city we busted out on a road trip to see the sea. It was very lovely, achingly picturesque, with plenty of dramatic looking beaches and trees and other such to drive past. We stopped off on the first day at a place called the beach with no horses where Laura and I had an epic surf competition which I totally won, but I sportingly allowed her to pose with me in the victory photo anyway:
Charley noticeable by absence
Having shown Marc and Laura what it meant to be a surflord we jumped back in the car and drove on down to Apollo Bay where we pitched tents in a campsite, and played some cricket. Frances proved to be very good, I on the other hand managed to lose the ball on my first attempt at batting, pitching it at full toss into a bunch of bushes on the edge of a cliff. Half an hour later I emerged battered but unbowed from a confusion of twigs and thorns with the ball proudly clasped in my trembling hand and play was resumed. We went to town for fish and chips later, the portions were too small and the chips substandard but the fish was nice. On our return we played some Uno, and then went to bed. The next day we got up early and drove up to the twelve apostles which is a collection of rocks in the sea that look like this:
Pedants please note that we know that not all twelve are visible here. National Geographic blog is next door.
On our way back to Melle Melb we encountered some vicious looking koalas being gazed out by a group of old people who solemnly informed us it was very rare to see them awake and eating in the wild, as if somehow we didn't deserve to see such a thing. We pointed at them, and I mimicked the mating calls they seemed to be making like Terry Nutkins in his prime which brought some odd stares from the bears above our heads. Fight or flight kicked in, and heeding Marc's warning that they might attack we headed back to the car, deftly avoiding a Steve Irwining in the process, leaving an enraged collection of marsupials for the next unwary travellers to stumble upon and no doubt meet a grisly end. There were some intense clouds to be seen on the road back, soundtracked by a collection of the finest pop punk, and finally we were back in the city which we for now call home, where we promptly got stuck in traffic for an hour and then it chucked down with rain. Good times.
2. THEE CHIZ.
I have been working in a bar for a while now. One of the legal requirements for this course of action over here is a certification that proves you have attended a course on the basic tenets of the Responsible Service of Alcohol. Getting this certificate is annoyingly costly and also involves getting up early in the morning, two of my least favourite things. I did mine finally on Saturday, under the tutelage of a man called Andrew Chisholm who I found to be interesting and slightly disturbing in equal measure. The general idea of the RSA is to tell you that if someone is too drunk to serve, you shouldn't serve them, and that if anyone is too young to be drinking then the same rule applies, and if you break either of these rules, Very Bad Things will happen. Knowing this before I went I was curious to see how a three and a half hour session was necessary to get these points across. As it turns out, this much time is essential because Andrew "The Chiz" Chisholm is a disturbed man with no real concept of sticking to the point. He is an exnightclub owner with a chequered past, who has friends in the real police and who now works for a government agency going around nightclubs and asking people for the ID, handing out fines to all and sundry for infractions of their license etc. He did his best to point out that he wasn't a stick-in-the-mud by informing us that, "I've probably fallen off more chairs than most of you, been more drunk than everyone in this room put together, I've run nightclubs in the eighties, like Miami Vice on the Gold Coast, I've got a lot of money, I have a bigger car than most people here, my car goes at 3,000 miles an hour, I drive a magic helicopter with laserguns" etc etc etc. He carried on in a similar vein for the next few hours, neglecting to talk much about the Responsible Service of Alcohol, preferring to talk about his friends and his holidays, his kids, his mates in the police, punctuated by sporadic embarrassing attempts to flirt with a young course attendee by the name of Emily and stories about the dangers of drink driving, most of which ended with someone flashing a badge or a revolver and the words "what do you wanna do?". Personal highlights included:
"Hands up anyone here who takes heroin. No-one? Well, some people do. It doesn't mean we all have to do it. Some people choose to get intoxicated and get out of control. We don't all have to do that either."
"Look. We've got sexual predators making out with kids within three metres of their parents. If they're going to do that then what are they going to do in a nightclub? What's to stop them hiding behind a pillar, talking to a girl, they get her out to the car and then it's over? She's dead."
"Children are the greatest gift you will ever have. But if my daughter ever thought about taking drugs I would nail her hand to a table. Because that's what an addiction to heroin is like."
"My daughter isn't old enough to have a boyfriend yet but when she is and she brings a guy home I'm going to be there, polishing my revolver. *makes hand gesture to illustrate* And I'll be like, 'what's your name? Benjamin? I'm going to have to call you Ben because it's easier to engrave it on the bullet that way, if I call you Benjamin I'll need a 9mm extended shell.'"
"I was drinking in a rooftop bar when a guy drops a bottle off the roof. My mate, a copper pulls his badge, goes to the guy and says, 'I'm arresting you'. The guy goes *puts on stupid voice* 'what for?', my mate goes 'Attempted murder. I saw you drop that bottle, it nearly hit this woman, now, what do you wanna do?'. Guy got fifteen years. The thing you have to remember is even if he hadn't nearly hit anyone then there would've been broken glass around and if a kid falls over in the street they might cut their hands so yeah, what do you wanna do?"
"I was in Italy, yeah, that's right, I ski. A lot. But I was out there and there was this girl, and then there were these guys, they tried giving me some shit, you know what they're like, anyway, one of them pulls a blade on me so I just look at him and I go, 'look mate, before we do this I just want you to know that the girl over there is my sister, so once we go, I'm not gonna stop.' Guy puts his blade away, then starts apologising. Emotive facts. You have to use them."
"Three goth kids outside Flinders Street Station, some meathead comes up to them, clearly intoxicated and starts giving them hassle, goes 'what are you guys meant to be? Vampires? Ha ha!', so I walk over and square up to him, look him in the eye and I just go 'Well mate, I guess you should just think of me as a vampire lover' and he goes 'yeah? what are you gonna do about it??' then this huge guy behind me looks at him as well and goes "i'm a vampire lover too' and he just bricked it and left. Then I put the kids in a taxi and I was going to ask them why they had to dress like that but then I thought, no wait, why should they have to dress like me? What is normal? If that's the way things go then Adolf Hitler is definitely going to come back, that's not what we need."
"Me and my mates we're out getting hammered, proper gone, my mate says he's going to drive home. I'm like, 'look, we're both rich people, I've got a lot of money, you've got a lot of money, so let's get a hotel for the night'. Ends up with five of us in a hotel room, I ended up sleeping in the bath. I was going to sleep on the bed, I said to my mate, 'You know, you sleep under the covers, I'll sleep on top of them' but he was all like 'nah mate, I don't want it getting out that I slept with the Chiz' so yeah, what are you gonna do?"
After three hours of this he gave us all the answers to the (open book) test, we spent five minutes doing the test and that was that, and I am now legal to serve. What do you wanna do?
3. The Found Bag Mystery
On my way to work yesterday I went past a little grassy are by the house that we've lovingly christened the Grassy Knoll. There are a couple of benches there and on one of them someone's bag had been tipped out and left. I had a look and saw there were some notebooks and a phone etc so I thought the best thing to do was to take the bag with me to work and see if I could find some way of tracking the owner down when I was finished. I got it home last night and should confess that under the possibly false pretext of trying to find some details of my quarry with which to reunite him with his property I ended up reading the guy's diary. Probably shouldn't have but I'm a curious guy, what do you wanna do? It was full of weird clippings from magazines and detailed a variety of slightly melncholic tales about having come to Melbourne recently from Sydney to study art therapy, allusions to a woman he had been going out with but hadn't worked out etc but no details so I charged his phone and went from there. Three texts in there, one from a "TTAAYYLLOORR" (names changed to protect the innocent) saying:
"can we cuddle one nite"
So I think this is probably a good person to try after calls to "mum" and "Brother" have gone unanswered. I call them and get a strange sounding Asian man. I explain that I'm not whoever they were expecting, but that I'd found the phone etc, and was trying to find out who it belonged to. He denied any knowledge of who it might be and then hung up which I thought was odd. About five minutes later another text from the same guy comes through saying:
"I want u to *ahem* my *ahem* bareback again...and *ahem* inside me...*ahemming* each others *ahem*"
Despite knowing that his friend doesn't have the phone, and that I'm tracking him down, that's his response?? Anyway, I go through ringing every number in the phone and bar a couple of old friends from Sydney who had no idea where he might be staying every call was pretty much the same; a collection of men saying that they'd only really met once and that they wished me luck. One guy was a bit more upfront saying that he'd only spoken to mystery man on an internet site once. I asked which one and found out that mystery man is a fan of manhunt.com. Frances and I were starting to get a bit weirded out by this point, fearing that I had in fact picked up a bag of vital evidence from a potential crime scene and that what I had were the last personal effects of a murder victim. I turned the phone off last night having told everyone on it that if they heard from him to tell him to get in touch. Woke up today to a missed call from his mother. I called her back and she explained that he is bi-polar and hasn't been taking his medication, he says he's OK but they're not entirely sure really, that she appreciated us taking the time to help etc and that she had emailed him telling him to get in touch so left the phone on again. The next thing I know a get a message on his phone from one of the guys from Sydney who'd seemed quite concerned and helpful last night saying:
"Hey mister Hope u got everything back alright. hey wats josh like, he sounded pretty hot"
WTF??????? If he doesn't call soon to claim his phone it's going to the police station, I don't understand how trying to do a nice thing can end up getting you embroiled in some bizarre underworld of swingers but I think I'm going to take Frances' advice and just never do anything ever again.
