Real Tart

Today is the day for extreme weather and fires. At 6am this morning it was just below 30C and smoke is thick in the air.
Two areas of New South Wales have been designated extreme fire risk areas, the Hunter Valley wine region, and right where I’m sitting now.
At the moment there’s not much wind but it’s forecast to rise to almost gale force this afternoon as temperatures climb to 42C. That’s the worst possible combination. Once the winds start blowing it’s near impossible to stop fires.
In terms of the heat, everyone is being advised to stay indoors and keep drinking (water, presumably...).
We shall see...

Yesterday – Friday afternoon – the temperature went over 40C and then there was a big storm, the thunder shaking everything in the house, making the windows and crockery rattle, the roof timbers creak and groan. There were only a few drops of rain but Four and I watched the stabs of lightning and could smell the burnt air.
It’s rare to have normal sheet lightning here, it’s usually the forked stuff and boy does it spear down to the ground. Four said, “the sky is cracking open,” which is as good a way of putting it as any.
Of course, this started several fires in the nearby bush and the fire people have been out all night and today trying to contain them around here.
One of the fires, which is apparently out of control at the moment, is four miles from our house, up the mountainside. They’ve closed the Blue Mountains National Park, which is a bit worrying, as we live in it. Fire trucks have been meandering up and down the road outside our house all morning but I can’t smell much smoke and it’s not windy at the moment, so we’ll see.
Apart from that it’s a normal Saturday so far – I took the nippers swimming this morning – Six has a lesson – and that was fine, though as we were getting back in the car there was an announcement over the tannoy saying, please evacuate the pool immediately. It was probably just some kid evacuating his bowels in the shallow end, I’d imagine.
Rest of the day we’re staying in, keeping out of the heat. Tonight The Bill is on and I try and watch it. In fact, on Friday night on the ABC it's all UK police shows. Midsomer Murders is on from 8.30 to 9.30, then it's Taggart until 10.30,  then Silent Witness until midnight. You could almost be in Chipping Sodbury.
Thing is, since they changed The Bill and put incidental music in it’s just not the same. Someone once said The Bill was half an hour about someone losing a watch, which is later found.
If only life were still that simple...

God, it’s hot. At 6am this morning it was 24C and today the fire service has issued their Catastrophic – or Code Red, as they’re calling it – warning for this area, with the temp here expected to peak at 42C. The advice in the paper and on TV is to leave our home this morning and go somewhere else. They’re suggesting a shopping centre, or a friend’s house – presumably somewhere in Europe.
Anyway, as I’m English I’ll simply carry on as usual and not panic and try to keep cool.
Four told me what to do in the event of an emergency, him and his pres-school friends having had a visit from the firemen and women from the local station (most of whom have kids at pre-school – Four told me, “Chantail’s mummy drove the fire truck.” or Fruck, as he calls it).
He got down on the floor with his hand over his mouth and crawled along like a soldier creeping towards enemy positions.
“You keep down,” he said, “then the smoke is on top of you.”
I said, what happens if the whole street is on fire, and he said, “Daaaad, you just keep crawling until you get far, far away.”
We’ll see.
In fact, Four’s pre-school is closing end of this year, which is a right pain because he loves going there and also it’s only a 10 minute drive away. They’re closing because the Federal government is insisting each centre has at least one university trained person and more ‘teachers’ per head of child then before. You can see the good intentions behind this but as there is no free pre-school here it means those centres that stay open will charge more (currently it’s around $57 a day which in pound terms is about four pence, errm, I think that’s right, the dollar acting like Popeye while the quid is more like Olive Oil, or whatever the skinny one’s name was.), and others will close down completely, so costing us all more and more to get our kids in a centre that is not nearby.
So, from January I have to move him about 30 minutes away which is going to really bugger up my mornings. Of course, I could take him out altogether but he has only another year and then he’ll be at Six’s school, and most of the other pre-school children will go there too, so it will be good for him.
Okay, I’m just going to hose myself down.
With water, madam.

Everywhere outside the cities in Australia there are bushfire roadside warning signs, usually with a pointer on them that tells you on any particular day the warning level - low, medium or high.
Now they’ve changed that, after those 150 or so people lost their lives in one weekend last year in the fires in Victoria. The top level is now tagged Catastrophic.
Today is over 40C here and we’re on the big C, and it’s not even summer yet. All this week it’s been in the high 30s. Even at night it’s barely dropping below 25.
I went with Four to swimming lesson this morning and the outdoor pool looked like it was sizzling. We were in the indoor pool so it wasn’t so bad, what with the air conditioning and all that.
Yesterday I was waiting for Six to come out of class. You go and sit on benches outside the class rooms, under a large canopy, and have a gossip with the mothers. As we were sitting there a Lace Monitor came strolling by. These things are about three feet long and look like dragons. I’d only seen one before and I tell you, first time it scares just about everything out of you. In fact they’re not that dangerous unless you corner them. Some of the little kids started baiting it and eventually one of the mothers, a large farmer’s wife with strong arms, picked it up by the tail and led it thrashing its head, trying to get her hand, and heaved it onto the garden where it scurried off with a rustle and crash through the undergrowth. Some of the women didn’t even stop the gossiping.
One thing I’ve discovered since I’ve been here is that Six doesn’t get invited for play at many people’s houses. One of the women told me it’s because the women’s husbands would mind. That’s the thing out here, they are very conservative, actually I’d call it stupid, but there you go. I feel sorry for Six because most of his friends get to play with their mates after school. But there’s not much I can do about it, other than suggest we meet at the park where they can all see what I’m doing with my hands, but even that is hard because, to be honest, it’s too bloody hot to be out and nobody ever goes to the park – they prefer to shut themselves in air conditioned cocoons.
It worries me because I don’t want the boys to miss out on the early friendship bonding sessions, but it’s hard to work out what to do.
That aside, I’ve been doing well with Mr Wolf this week. I also decided to start selling all the vintage watches I’d accrued via Ebay. I eventually worked out that I wanted to concetrate on watches made in England which somewhat limits the choice, so that’s no bad thing. Someone at school told me the problem with selling anything through Ebay is that you spend most of your life at the Post Office sending off boxes, which is true.
Still, I’ve sold most of them for more than I bought them for, so that’s good. With some of the proceeds I bought a Smiths W10 which is a black dialled watch issued to the UK armed forces back between the 1940s and 1970s (when Smiths went bust because Margaret Thatcher thought it best to supply John De Lorean with money for cocaine, er sorry, money to build sportscars in Northern Ireland). Anyway, it is a really fine watch, in this case made in 1968, and if you know anything about English watch making you’ll know the Swiss learnt most of their skills from the English – no, it’s true. The W10 is very similar in movement design to Swiss Jaeger LeCoultre watches, which start today at 10,000 pounds. I’ve got a Jaeger I bought back 10 years ago and I have to say I prefer the Smiths. Here's a link which shows you what it looks like: http://www.mwrforum.net/forums/showthread.php?t=28875
Right then, I’m off to take a cold shower.

I’m chuntering on with Mr Wolf. I have to get it finished, that’s completely finished, by December 18 because the nippers break up from school then for their summer holidays and really I’ll get no work done for two months. So the clock is ticking, which funnily enough is the way I like it.
I would have had it finished by now except for the end of term holiday a few weeks ago, and generally Six and Four are much more time-consuming. Of course, they know everything by now so endless hours are spent in arguments about how many trees there are in the whole wide world and if God can’t be bothered to show himself should we really be spending so much time talking about him. Sometimes I have no answers – or at least not good ones – for their questions. Now I understand why when faced with questions like, why did they build the Great Wall of China, some parents stumble about and then say, to keep the rabbits out.
Anyway, at school there are some right bitches. Most of the mothers are fine but there are a couple who seem to think they are descended from Royalty. They have those lemon-sucking faces and walk around in a haughty manner, though it doesn’t quite work in the Australian National Costume of thongs (flip-flops to you and me), sawed off shorts with floppy arses, tops which were once tent material, and hair-dos which haven’t been near a hairdresser – at least not one who can still see – for, oh I don’t know, maybe 16 years.
There’s a stick-insect blonde one who doesn’t talk to anyone unless they are what she considers true-blue Aussie. This counts me out, clearly, as I have no criminal record.
She’ll walk past me without so much as a nod. With great fanfare she went off to Perth with her husband and kids thanks to hubby's new job. He works in tarmacaddam, apparently, and is an expert in laying reverse cambers on the approach to roundabouts.
But soon she returned, minus the husband. I imagine he couldn’t put up with her either. Anyway, she’s got herself a little fluffy dog, presumably in place of the husband, and parades around with it like Marie-Antoinette.
Jerome’s wife, who speaks like Penelope Cruz, with twice the fire, sat down next to me the other day while we were waiting for the kids to come out of school and moved her shoulders about and said, “oh, you see, the fancy woman has got herself a fancy dog.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “and another thing-“
“No, no! Let me finish, for I have more to say.” She narrowed her eyes at me and whispered, “they are two bitches together.”
I had to laugh.

Every morning the silence is disturbed by the roar of jet engines as what the locals call ‘the post run’ comes over the mountain and heads for the RAAF base in the valley. From our house you can look down on the plane and its giant bat-like shape as its afterburners flare orange in the blue pre-dawn.
The plane is massive, a four-engined Lockheed of some sort in matt green. If you drive down to the base and stop around the perimeter fence (this is Australia, madam,) you can see it, heat still shimmering above its jets. On the rear fin it says, US Marine Corps. No one knows, or no-one will tell you, where it comes from every morning, and why.
As it happens, Jerome, ex-US Special Forces, was sent away for two weeks back to the Land of the Free by the company he now works for to be taught about new mass spectrometers.
These things can be explained to you eighteen times and you will still never understand what they are for or what they do.
Anyhow, Jerome was back this weekend and his daughter – who is in Six’s class – just had her birthday, so they held a party at the local leisure centre pool where I take the nippers for swimming lessons.
It was a good afternoon. Jerome, me, and the father who owns the 10 acre spread, got in the water and performed around 85 rescues of small children falling, giggling and screaming off the massive floating castle that stretched the whole length of the pool. A good time was had by all.
I noticed many of the mothers staring at my near naked body. I really must lose a few kilos, er, I mean, many kilos.
In the changing rooms afterwards I was chatting to Jerome and said, “you must be quite a good swimmer.”
“Oh yeah,” he drawled. “You know, they taught me to swim with my arms and legs tied.”
“Useful,” I muttered politely, wondering what could be the use of that.
When he came with the family to Australia, Jerome wanted to bring his gun collection – he was handed his first gun when he was three years old. Seriously, if I’d given Six a gun at three you wouldn’t be reading this now.
Apparently Jerome has 62 weapons, including his personal sniper rifle and another gun that can also launch a grenade from its snout. It seems when he left the Special Forces he just had to sign for them. And they wonder why America’s in trouble.
Before he stepped onto our sun-drenched shores he called the Aussie Customs people and explained the situation and the Customs bloke said, “Okay, tell me what you’d like to bring in.”
“I got as far as number five,” Jerome told me, “and then he said, whoa there fella.”
Three weeks ago I passed Jerome driving the other way. I turned around and followed him. I know, but sometimes I just do things like that. It’s exciting.
I followed him down to the town and out onto the road to Sydney. Just outside the town he turned left.
The Lockheed’s engines were roaring on the tarmac.

In Australia there are only three driving speeds – Go, Stop, and On Your Roof.
Honestly, more people get injured in car accidents per capita here than anywhere else in the world, well except for Afghanistan, but that’s mostly down to roadside bombs, and blokes blowing themselves and their Toyota up in crowded markets on their way to see 40 virgins (the after-life is probably the only place these days you’d find 40 virgins...).
We had a bit of rain last week and there were three big car accidents in two days between our house and the end of the road. Admiteddly it’s a winding road and it’s all downhill but it’s in good nick and wide.
The first day it was a mother from school who'd spun off the road in her Toyota Landcruiser and knocked over one gigantic wooden power pole. "I didn't want to put the brakes on," she told me the following day, "in case the car tipped over...". The cops were there and I had to stop to let the ambulance get out of the verge. An old cop who looked like Clint Eastwood ambled over to explain what was happening and said, "Makes you wonder how they do it, sometimes."
Crasher has got a new vehicle already, the Toyota being a write-off, what with its engine being in the back seat. The new car – which may mean little to you European folks – is a bright red Holden Clubsport R8. It looks like a fighter plane, has a 6.8-litre V8 engine and will reach a power pole in about four seconds. Good choice, madam.
The following day someone had come down the hill and on a wide sweeping bend had spun their car, hit the bank, gone through an electrified fence (bet that gave them a shock) and tipped the vehicle on its roof in the middle of the field. The same copper was there. I had to stop to let the fire engine reverse out of the field. The copper nodded to me and came and leaned in the window and said drily, "Hello again. Now, today we have a very impressive one indeed. Notice the upside down position."
"Yes, I see what you mean. But what happened to the goats?"
"My colleagues are trying to round them up.” He looked off in the distance to the smoky hills and said quietly. “Some have made it to town." He looked at me and smiled bleakly, “It seems one of them has run out in front of a bus, which hit a car.”

Just a quick one before I take Six to school.
They reckon it’s going to hit 40C today so it’s going to be a hot one.
The Melbourne Cup is on this afternoon. Melbournites have a day’s holiday so the women can dress up in silly hats and stumble around in tart-trotter shoes and watch some horses run around a track while sipping Chardonnay – that’s the women drinking, not the horses, you understand.
We went to the local park for the Teddy Bears’ Picnic on Saturday, which was a nice day out sitting on picnic rugs and eating party food. The park is on top of the mountain so there’s almost always a breeze, and there’s a 360 degree view over the lowlands. You can see Sydney’s towers 60km away poking out of the haze and on a day like today you’ll look and be glad you’re not there. The park’s about four acres of grassland and stretches of trees, including some massive English oaks which were planted when the original English settlers struggled up here, so they are massive and you can sit under them and try and keep cool. Funny to think those acorns came up the mountain in someone’s pocket, all the way from Chorlton-Cum-Hardly, or somewhere similar.
The park was where the residents of this small enclave gathered every morning during the last Emergency, as they call the bushfires, about eight years ago, to hear from the fire people shouting above the clatter of the water bombing helicopters that kept dumping thousands of tons of water on people’s houses. One woman told me she went out one morning and suddenly got swept half way up the street in a rush of water. This Sunday the Rural Fire Brigade held Fire Wise which is a gathering of residents who sit in white chairs under the oaks and listen quietly to experts tell us what to do in the event of another Emergency this year.
The chief fire officer reckoned he was a bit of a joker, only there was tension in the air and no-one laughed at his silly jokes as he told us that detection of sudden bushfires is better than it's ever been, they get there quicker ("but if you hear the sirens, then it's already too late for you to get out") and they have more equipment than ever before. The kickers is, conditions have never been this worrying before so we had better get ready. It didn’t help that on a giant screen they had a dramatic music-backed film loop of last year’s Victorian fires and the people panicking as the inferno raged and roared across valleys in seconds and engulfed houses as if they’d been doused in petrol.
The fire officer said, “if you think it’s safe to just leave and go to the next village, well, think again. You will die there too.” Nice.

Back a few years ago Don and I got together and came up with a book idea called Wish You Were Beer.
The concept was we’d travel around the world reporting on the world’s foaming ales. This lavishly produced tome would contain startling facts and figures, stuff you never knew about the amber nectar (I know, I’m going to run out of beer phrases pretty soon...), health facts about beer, the history of the brews, the beer drinking donkey of Tijuna – you know, a homage to the hops. At the bottom of each page there would be a timeline running the length of the book - Cleopatra bathes in pale ale, 44BC - Adolf Hitler can't get a decent wheat beer, decides to invade Poland, 1938 - yes, of course it was meant to be fun too!
For the presentation to publishers we decided against anything electronic as most of them still appeared to use quill pens and delivered rejection notes with all the speed of a tortoise with a zimmer frame.
So, Don designed the look and feel of the book – our theory being that this would save the publisher four and tuppence, which in publisher land is thought to still be the price of a quail and pigeon pie down at the Horse and Bridle. I penned the words and between us we finished up with a very nice presentation pack.
To be frank, as I’d had dealings with publishers before, I expected to see Jesus Christ walking towards me on the High Street saying, Hello, could you spare a moment to talk about the Lord, before we got anywhere with it. Don, on the other hand, was busy cruising Double Bay, where all the millionaires live, looking at houses. One day when we got together to plan our campaign he said, “You know, I’d like to donate some of my earnings from the book to setting up a charitable philanthropic organisation to help those who are blind help to see again.” Yes, I thought, I too would love it if a publisher could spot a good thing when they see it, but really.
We sent the pack off and heard...well nothing, for a very long time. In fact, if I’d had children back then I could have watched them grow up, go to school, borrow my car and crash it several times, and even be dating, before a reply came back.
But one day, a message made of the finest parchment was delivered. The man they sent – bedecked in a red and white ermine fringed costume and wearing a tricolour hat with gold braid unrolled it and read aloud – as his horse snuffled behind him, pawing the ground impatiently – and said, “Don’t you mean, Wish You Were Here?”
He handed me the message, and sped off on his steed. I placed it in the FW file, not having the energy to write Fuckwits out fully.
But the day did come when a publisher from one of the big companies invited us to come in and discuss it. Well, even I was beginning to think there could be a drink or two in this.
When we arrived we were ushered into the board room and left there to ponder the stacks of presumably unsold books against one wall. Eventually the publisher – a flinty eyed woman with grey hair and the haughty demeanour of Margaret Thatcher came in with a girl whose job appeared to be to pass the biscuits around.
Now, the funny thing was, Margaret would not look at me at all. She would only look at Don. It was utterly bizarre. Soon, Don was casting sideways glances at me – I was glad someone was – because even when I answered one or other of her questions, she would look at Don. I have never experienced anything like it. I mean she was too old for me to have shagged in a previous life, or even her daughter for that matter.
The thing was, she said she really liked the idea, but followed that up with, “And how would you propose to fund this book?”
Don looked at me and I looked at him. We sort of thought the idea was they would give us some money and we’d write the book. I mean, we didn't expect them to fund a lavish drinking trip round the world - though clearly that would have been nice - but we did expect enough to buy a pack or two of salted peanuts. But no, we had to deliver the book and then if they liked it they might give us a sovereign – each, mind you! – and then they might publish it, but only if Saturn was rising against Jupiter on the seventh equinox in the east - and then they would lavish the usual publisher sums on worldwide advertising (er, a poster on the back of a dirty bus on the Sydney to Canberra run, once a month).
We had to laugh.
On the way out, the publisher shook Don’s hand. Then she shook mine, but looked at Don.
Outside Don said, “What was all that business of never looking at you?”
“I have no idea. It was most bizarre.”
“Maybe she fancied you.”
“Oh yeah, but if you fancied someone wouldn’t you want to look at them?”
“Oh yeah, you’re right.”
We never have figured it out and sometimes we still have a laugh about it.
A few years later I had an idea for another book (yes, I am an idiot, but a hopeful one, mind you!) so I sent it off to the-publisher-who-wouldn’t-look-me-in-the-eye and she sent a lovely long letter back (they were upmarket, they used a racing pigeon), saying it was a good idea and if the non-fiction publisher saw eye-to-eye with her on it it was a goer.
I laughed to myself and went to look for the FW file.

This weekend just outside a town called Bathurst about three hours drive north west of Sydney they are holding the annual Bathurst 1000, a 1000-kilometre (620 miles) touring car race held annually at Mount Panorama Circuit and featuring the biggest, most fuel-greedy V8 engined cars the planet has ever seen growl around a track.
It’s a venue for rev-heads from all over who spend the weekend extolling the virtues of Fords, Holdens, and beer.
This year the organisers put out a press release (which contained not a hint of humour) which said that this time around the visitors would be, and I quote, “strictly rationed” when it came to how much alcohol they could take to the meet.
Everyone is limited to 24 bottles of beer or two bottles of wine.
That’s person, per day.
I imagine the punters must be grumbling louder than the V8s.

Five miles, down the mountainside in the fetid sink of a trapped valley where it gets hot as sin and no breeze stirs, there is a town.
If you were to travel through a time warp, perhaps be sucked through a blackhole, you’d believe you’d arrived in 1964.
Shops lean one on the another, heat sizzles on the wide, uneven pavements. In the oval a wooden stadium casts a shadow over two black cannons from the Great War. The whack of leather on willow echoes under a sky where blue never ends.
A 24-hour McDonalds oversees it all. It arrived in 1998, in a truck, and was assembled inside 36 hours. Apparently that’s a record.
It doesn’t matter what time you drive by, it’s packed with corpulent SUVs, sound systems doof-doofing, waiting in line in the Drive-Through lane, V8s throbbing like a heart.
Any early morning you drive from our house, down the mountain, the fresh cool breeze sifting through your open window, enlivening you with scent of jasmin, eucalyptus, fangipania, you’ll see McDonald wrappers strewn about; boxes, empty drinks cartons rolling from the verge, sometimes the wind sending them skittering like silly animals, under your tyres where they pop.
The other day, I saw a field of cows the colour of butter scotch, standing knee deep in a field of the greenest grass.
One of them had its nose in a MacDonalds box.
He chewed.
The silk breeze made the grass flow like the sea.

Monday: AFL training for Six. Sit on benches in the late afternoon sun with the mothers as children run around screaming for an hour. Mothers talk amongst themselves, asking why they are all so fat when all they do is eat normally, well sometimes there is a snack involved and one woman said, “we only have Maccas two or three times a week, KFC on Fridays and Sunday.” I watch the sun go down behind the baobab trees, their elephant trunks casting a shadow across the playing fields almost as wide as Mrs Maccas.

Tuesday: Football (soccer, as it was known) in-door five a side for Six. He’d never played football before, unless you count kicking me in the testicles every now and again. Gets on court and scores a goal within two minutes. Father of Six’s team-mate who looks like a biker and has more tatoos than a painted lady shouts across the court, “Yer a fuckin’ demon.”

Wednesday: Day at home for me – both nippers in school and pre-school. Have been asked to write journalism course for a college. Also, back on marking papers. I’ve had 90 this week...

Thursday: Four (yes, birthday last week, read on...) goes to swimming lessons. I tell woman behind the counter I’ll go for a swim too. She looks at me as if I’m mad. Leisure centre is packed with mums – sitting at the café. Australia’s best pies, says the sign. I look in vain for Mrs Maccas then realise she is probably still climbing the steps outside.

Friday: Go and help at school, which consists of helping Six’s classmates with their reading. All the girls can read, all the boys play. One of the teachers is going steady with herself. She is blonde (this week...) and wears figure hugging one-piece outfits that squeal when she walks. She is rumoured to be a top tango dancer in her spare time, offering lessons to anyone who's willing to get close to her. I imagine the queue is longer than the one at KFC.

Saturday: Six goes for swimming lessons. I say I’ll go for a swim. The woman at the desk looks at me, wondering why I don’t like pies.

Sunday: Four’s birthday. People have realised I don’t do 2-4pm at a play centre, so big crowd gathers. I cook jaloff rice, chick pea salad, potato salad, bbq lamb chops, sausages, t-bone steak, fish marinara. I do jelly shots with vodka (purple for the adults, blue for the kids, or is it the other way around...I forget). Kids organise their own games. The girls organise the boys, sending them off to go play hide and seek. I hear two Four year old girls discussing the game plan. One says to the other, “The thing is, you just can’t trust them.”

I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet but a bunch of enterprising aetheists in the US (where else...?) have launched a pet rescue service for Evangelical christians.
The idea is when the end of the world comes along (I really hope it’s not before next Monday because I need to know what happens in the BBC's Ashes to Ashes) and the Evangelicals are whisked away to sit by the side of God, someone has to look after their pets.
It seems that the Bible doesn’t mention being able to take your four legged friend with you on this one-off trip of a lifetime, though in fairness there are lots of things the Bible doesn’t mention, such as dinosaurs, the woolly mammoth, pyramids, and China.
Anyhow, it seems quite a few people have signed up to have their pets looked after.
Personally I see this as a golden opportunity to get a few more things off the Evangelicals, I mean, as they’re going anyway.
I am on the lookout for a late model Bentley Azure so if any of you God-fearing folks have one of those – preferably in Midnight Blue – do let me know. I'm willing to travel for the right mileage.
I would also like an original set of The Beatles LPs, in vinyl, so give me a shout, I mean, there'll only be Gospel where you're headed.
I’m partial to French Impressionists, so any Gauguin, Renoir or Monets going begging – I’m your man.
And finally, as there will be a lot of empty churches, I’d love one with a view.
Thank-you, and have a good trip. 

I can hardly believe it but it’s almost a year since we moved here to the mountains.
At first the nippers didn’t like it much – there was too much grass, trees and fresh air and not enough hustle and bustle and they missed the old house, I guess because they’d never lived anywhere else.
But on the way home from school today Six said, “Dad, I really like living here.”
“Good,” I said, “It is nice living in the country.”
“Yes”, said Six, “there is always fresh air and lots of room and many, many trees.”
“And the people are mostly nice.”
“Yes Dad, and there are never any roadworks.”
I frowned. “But there are roadworks everywhere. Every morning there’s a bloke leaning on a revolving stop sign somewhere or other, and sometimes there are several of them.”
“Daaaad,” said Six, “I was being sarcastic!”

At Six’s school they’re always trying to entice the kids to get involved in sports stuff and this last week they started running an AFL training session after school.
Aussie Rules, as AFL is colloquially known, is a bizarre game which is a mix of Gaelic football, rugby, football, and running around as fast as you can while bouncing a rugby-shaped ball in front of you and hoping it will come back to your hands and not spin off sideways into the pie-cart on the sidelines (there is no bigger faux-pas in  AFL than hitting the pie-cart...).
Anyhow, Six was keen to do it because for $33 you get six weeks of running around trying to catch that bouncing ball, plus a holdall, ball, cap, drinks bottle, CD, photo-frame, stationary set, football pump and a tenner from the bank with a money box. By anyone’s standards it’s worth just going along just for that (which I’m sure is why Six wantsto have a go...).
Sadly, on week one, the boy is sick with a bad stomach bug – as is his younger brother – so I’ve put a large black cross on the door and I ring a handbell at opportune moments as I mooch around the house, just to warn passers-by we have the plauge.
The thing with AFL is, you can watch it as much as you like – and I have been for 15 years now – and you will never understand the game.
Two teams of blokes wearing unfashionably tight shorts and tops with no sleeves run around this oval shaped pitch like madmen, passing the misshapen ball back and forth, bouncing it as they run and then kicking it through some rugby-type posts.
Two blokes dressed in white, wearing porkpie hats, who look like they have just come from the local butchers after giving a piece of brisket a good seeing-to, stand either side of the posts and if the ball goes through they each stick out an arm and a hand with a flourish only Italian traffic police can rival, and the crowd goes wild.
I have no idea how the scoring works because each time someone scores, a box comes up at the bottom of the TV screen with 58 assorted rows of numbers in it. I’ve tried everything to work it out, including a slide rule, set of compasses and a weather-vane but it’s still all gibberish to me.
Anyway, if you get a chance, it’s worth watching. I just can’t think of another game where the teams get to run around so much for so long, or where $33 buys you stuff to keep your nippers quiet for, oh I don't know, 20 minutes. Honestly, I'd pay three grand for such moments of peace.

Sunday was 29C, can you believe, and we’ve still got two weeks before winter ends and spring begins. Truly the weather is bonkers, but in Sydney at least, beautiful.
Anyway, it was a super day to go to a party, so I did. Yes, yes, of course it was a kids’ party – you don’t seriously think I have time to go to an adult one, do you?
The thing is, pretty much every weekend either Three or Six is going to a birthday party. I tell you, they go to more events than Paris Hilton.
This one was for one of the girls at Six’s school. Her parents own this house on a high plateau looking out in all directions to the horizon. It sits on 10 acres and it is blissful
For the party they’d hired a couple of those bouncy castle things which cost about the GDP of Botswana for an afternoon but let me tell you it’s well worth it because you can sit in an easy chair on the lawn with the mothers and look across Australia in the sunlight with a soft breeze in your face while the kids laugh and scream.
The father of the girl took me on a tour of the estate and pointed out a big wooden white house over yonder. It seems that when the blocks of land were sold, deer were still running around all over the place. The bloke’s wife liked them and started feeding them but if you know anything about deer you’ll know they will eat all your plants, and trample the ones they don’t find tasty. The upshot was that Mr White House got some deer hunters in to do a cull, you know, as you do.
Thing was, the birthday girl’s father – who is a top bloke who built his own house – knew nothing about this until high velocity bullets started whizzing across the valley and in one case embedded themselves in his chicken coop (no eggs that week, apparently).
Of course, thinking a madman was on the loose he called the cops who sent a swat squad around, or whatever they’re called these days. Seems the bloke in the White House who'd ordered the hit on the deer was a lawyer from Sydney (two things that just don’t play well in this neck of the woods, let me tell you) and threatened all kinds of legal reprisals, because the boys in blue had been called.
“There’s no doubt, he’s a very clever bloke,” said birthday girl’s father as we looked across the valley at his gleaming house. “But also very stupid,” I said.
He clapped me on the back and said, “You’re not wrong. Now, how are you on the barby?”
Apparently, though he can build a house, no problem, the barby is something of a challenge to him. I’ve never met an Aussie bloke who doesn’t claim to be a whizz with the tongs and a hot flame, but his wife told me he’d never successfully cooked anything without either poisoning people or half burning the house down.
So, I ended up cooking sausages, steak, chicken, lamb and a rack of ribs for all the starving children and parents.
Yes, of course it was well done, I don’t do medium and I definitely don’t do rare.

Most evenings I let the nippers watch The Simpsons at six. I love that program because as we know it plays on different levels, and the youngsters just like the slapstick of it (and they keep quiet when it's on, which is worth, oh I don't know, about a squillion dollars...).
After that Neighbours comes on. Now, I don’t follow it because it’s effing awful and the kids usually watch for two or three seconds and then go off and fight with each other upstairs or, if I’m lucky, they sit quietly and do a bit of colouring in, and if I’m exceptionally lucky the colouring in takes place in a book and not on the walls...
Anyway, in Neighbours it seems there has been a whole succession of calamaties over the past few weeks.
I think it began with a car crash, er actually no, it would have to have been a multiple vehicle pile-up, this being Neighbours, and then as a typoon swept ashore lightning stuck the town and then a light plane crashed, into a bigger plane, carrying the heads of state of all the nations on earth, and they came down in the bit of the town left after the tsunami caused by the earthquake just offshore swept the houses away, only one house was left and most of the Neighbours cast were inside it looking at each other with serious looks, as the house hung over a chasm to the centre of the earth that the tectonic plates, which are under the Neighbours town (and apparently Los Angeles too) opened up when the local nuclear power plant overloaded because the bloke who was supposed to be looking after it ran out in front of the car which caused the multiple-pile up, and he left the red lever down.
Sorry if you haven’t seen this episode yet.
Anyhow, I was emptying the dishwasher (yes, eventually it’s fixed, but that’s another story...) and I groaned and said, “I wish they would stop being so depressing on this program. Wy can’t we have some smiles!”
And Six turned from the TV and said, “Dad, I think things can’t always be the way you would like them to be.”

You know that Chinese bloke on Inspector Clouseau? I think his name’s Cato. He’s got this arrangement with Clouseau that he surprises him at inopportune moments and launches into some martial arts mularky, the theory being that Clouseau sharpens his fighting skills, but of course he just ends up wrecking his gaffe. 
Well, Three is my Cato.
It started a few weeks ago when I was sitting working on the computer writing Mr Wolf (which you will be glad to hear is not far off being finished...). Suddenly I noticed something out of the corner of my eye and turned around and got the shock of my life – Three was just standing there silently at my side.
I told him, hamming it up for his benefit, “Oh! You shocked me! You nearly gave me a heart attack!” to which he falls about laughing.
The problem is, because he gets a laugh out of it, he’s stalking me all the time, creeping up on me, and sooner or later – as I’ve tried to impress upon him – he will give me a heart attack for real.
The last time it happened was two days ago when I was having a shave. As I was looking in the mirror and thinking how young I looked (I didn’t have my glasses on) I felt a tickle up my bare leg. Jesus! I nearly had a heart attack! Three thought it was hilarious but really he’s getting like one of those demonic children that used to appear in novels in the 1980s (how come there are no more demonic kids, I mean what’s the fictional world coming to...?).
The other day I heard Six and Three talking as they worked out if I’d be the Evil Wizard or an Elf in their upcoming war games and Three said, “Six, Daddy is going to have a heart attack. I keep shocking him.”
Six sighed with boredom having to explain to Three, “Look, Daddy is very, very old, but if he dies he will go to heaven. Then God will bring him back to life. That’s what happens, Three.”
“Oh,” said Three, “that’s good.”
“I know,” said Six, “God works miracles every day.”
Honestly, I have to get him out of that weekly school scripture lesson. Before I die.

In other news, I popped around to George’s the other day as I hadn’t seen him for ages, him being in the city and me now out on the edge of the universe (well, it takes three days to get anyone out here to fix anything, so it’s slower than getting a space shuttle up to the space station with spares).
He had his Merc broken into outside his house and unwisely had left his wallet and mobile phone in there, can you believe. I bought him the Burberry wallet years ago and it pains me to think some light-fingered git in the western suburbs is all flash with it now. Clearly crime pays...
Anyhow, George likes the idea of the Merc but not the bills that come with it so he had the smashed side window replaced by someone dodgy and now it squeals like a baby pig being slaughtered.
Maria – George’ wife, who is 27 years old – has just gone on a course of tablets which are making her shed pounds. Honestly I didn’t know such a thing existed and I had no idea doctors would prescribe it to young girls who can’t keep a rein on how many McD’s they eat. Really, I was as shocked as if Three had materialised beside me.

I’ve been a bit quiet lately because it’s been a bit noisy.
I’ve been trying to stop Six and Three from inflicting grevious wounds on each other while playing with toy fire engines, sticks, swords, or even soft pillows. Yes, the nippers are on their two week winter holidays.
For me it’s a full-time gig aside from when they’re asleep at night though even that often turns nasty with one or other of them variously falling out of bed, coming down telling me they’ve had a nightmare involving a dinosaur, a chicken, some honey and a badly rising souffle (they’ve been watching Masterchef), or they simply want to stay up and watch So You Think You Can Dance.
They argue all the time about the most inane things.
The other day Six had a friend over for a play morning, The mother decided I could have him all day – well thanks for that madam – and basically I spent all day separating the three of them. Boys.
When we took the friend home his younger brother Nate was there at the window. On the way home in the Bentley Three said, “I waved to Nate.” Six said, “But I waved to him first.”
Three: No you didn’t.
Six: I did. You just didn’t see me.
Three: I saw you fine.
Six: You didn’t. You were too busy waving.
Three: I waved more times than you.
Six: I waved eight times.
Three: I waved even double the times you waved.
Six: No, I was wrong. I waved sixty billion times and I saw him first.
Three: Did not!
Six: Did!
Three: Stop looking out of my window.
About then I’m gritting my teeth and holding the steering wheel so tight if it were a living thing it’d be dead, and I stop the Bentley quickly, usually sliding it off the road into the verge (and once into a ditch, but that’s another story) and give them a good talking to.
Of course it does no good and soon another subject is being argued about as though it’s an Olympic sport.
Roll on next week, I say.

There are some really silly Ads on TV here at the moment.
When I say silly I don’t mean amusing, I just mean real stupid.
One is a government jobby where a child is shown shouting at her doll. The idea here is if you shout at your children they will give the doll a serve.
Aside from the obvious – this is an Ad made by people who don’t have children – frankly I’d be quite happy if my kids shouted at their bears rather than abusing me all day long.
There’s another one which has been banned in several States. It comes on in the evening and features a bloke and his girlfriend in bed. She groans and turns away from him and then three copper-type blokes enter the room and the one says, “Now sir, you were speeding.”
Yes, it’s to do with premature ejaculation and it’s for some snake-oil type product that apparently can prolong the moment. Me personally, if indeed I had that problem madam, would like some idea of just what amount of extra time you could expect for your $29.99. I suppose though looking at your watch during the business could be a bit off-putting.
Anyway, it seems there have been many complaints to the advertising standards people along the lines of it makes men feel small (another problem, surely?) or inadequate. Er, yes...I think that’s the idea.
To be honest, I’m wondering what a bloke with this problem is doing watching TV when really he should be upstairs practising the too-and-fro and getting it right.
And the final one today is for some snack biscuits type thing where the woman comes on and daintily takes one and nibbles it and says, “they taste so good you’ll eat them straight out of the packet.”
Wow! That’s incredible! I’ll go and get me some of those right now!

I took Three to the doctor’s yesterday to get his sickness looked at because it seems to be because he’s really congested. Not that that stops him running around like a dervish, as they say, but still it might be something serious.
Now, Three likes to speak his mind, is afraid of no-one (except for the mythical ‘men’ who I threaten I will call to come and take him away if he keeps misbehaving...), and is very vocal.
We got in the doctor’s surgery and on duty was a plump, middle-aged, nervous looking woman, busy wiping her glasses with the bottom of her blouse as if trying to summon a genie.
Personally I thought she should see a doctor, but then I’m no expert.
Three stood in the corner, glaring at her as Six and I sat down. Then he pointed a finger at her and shouted,
"I will not come near you. You will not put that stellyscope near me. I will turn you into a monster because I am a Transformer. Leave me alone. You are a witch."
The doctor started flapping her hands and fanning herself. “My word!,” she said, “I have never come across a boy like this before."
I managed to get him to sit on my lap eventually with the threat he would have to go straight to hospital. She managed to look in his ears in amongst the screaming and howling but couldn't get him to take any breaths because he held his breath.
She reckoned he’s probably got a chest infection because his temperature was a bit high, but really she couldn’t be sure because he wouldn’t let her examine him.
At one stage she said, "I don't really know what to do because I've never experienced a boy like this before."
Well, welcome to my world.
The best bit was, when we were leaving he said to her, all innocent and kind and fluttering his eyelashes, “Could I please have my lolly now?”
She looked at him, frightened at this child who I’m sure she thought was the spawn of the devil himself and muttered, hands shaking, “I’m afraid we’re right out of lollies at the moment.”
Three stared at her, his brows knitting like Heathcliff’s. I picked him up under one arm and carried him out. “I want my lolly!,” he shouted as I bundled him into the Bentley.
Six, who now has one science lesson a week and is learning far too much for my liking, said, “Three, if we have to go to hospital they will carry out an examination of you and your bones. An infernal examination. Now, you don’t want one of those.”
No, indeed.

I was all set today, with Six in school and Three at pre-school, to spend the day working on Mr Wolf, which I have almost finished, praise the Lord!
But then I awoke this morning to the melodic sound of the Bellbird, and of Three vomiting on the shag pile rug.
So, he’s at home today and I’ll be tending to his needs. I’ve managed to get most of the vomit out of the rug but, you know, it’ll never be the same again. At the moment it looks less like a shaggy dog than a dog who’s just been in a very smelly river and then rolled in something very nasty indeed.
Ho-hum.
On a lighter note – on Friday when I picked up Six from school, Three was running around with this little girl he sees at pre-school, called Rachel. As Simon & Garfunkel would say, they’ve got a groovy thing going, baby.
In the Bentley on the way back from school I laughed out loud when Three said, “Six, did you see me playing with Racheee?”
Six said, “Oh yes, Three, I certainly did. It seems you have your eyes very much glued to that girl.”

So, the latest on the Bosch dishwasher is that the extended warranty people sent an email to Three Weeks (because he is the only Bosch person in the area) telling him to give me a call to arrange to fix the bloody thing (bloody thing is a technical term used by irate people who have bought a Bosch dishwasher three years ago).
Of course, he didn’t call. So I call the extended warranty people again and they tell me if it’s the door seals then these are not covered under the warranty anyway. Of course!
I then call Three Weeks, actually he should be called Four Weeks as a month has now gone by since I first called him. This is the conversation:
“Oh yeah. I remember. You’ve got a leak. Where is it coming from?”
“Well, we don’t know really, do we? On account of the fact that you still haven’t managed to drag your lardy arse the 8km up here” (I didn’t actually say, lardy arse, but it was on the tip of my tongue).
“Well, I don’t know if the parts have come yet.”
“What parts?”
“The parts you want.”
“But we don’t know what the problem is yet.”
“Don’t you?
“No, you NEED TO COME AND LOOK AT IT!”
“Oh yeah.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“No.”
“What?”
“I mean tomorrow is not good.”
“What about Monday morning?”
“Oh yeah.”

Now, on Monday this week I had to have an x-ray on my hand because one of my fingers is hurting badly (it’s the one I use for pointing out things, and jabbing at tossers).
The x-rays get delivered to the doctor’s on Tuesdays.
I called the surgery today (Thursday) as I’d heard nothing from them.
“Hello, have you had the x-rays delivered this week?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Has mine arrived?”
Rustle of paper.
“Oh yeah.”
“Right. So, is it all okay?”
Yeah. No, I mean, yeah no.”
“So I need to come in to see the doctor?”
“Oh yeah.”
“When were you going to let me know, like next week or something?”
“Yeah.”
“Right. So is Monday afternoon okay?”
More paper rustling.
“Oh yeah.”

I don’t know if you saw the story last week out of Tokyo but it seems a study has shown fat people live longer than thin and healthy people.
To be honest I’ve not got much time for research like this. It reminded me of the bloke who used to run the local off-licence (evocatively called Bottle Shops down-under...) where I used to live in England many moons ago. He was a ferrety looking person with the pallor of a funeral director, but he was married to a sultry Italian woman who looked like Gina Lollobrigida. Yes of course I used to go in there regularly (umm, I mean into the off-licence..).
One day I was chatting to him about drinking and how much you should or shouldn’t consume, and also at the time there was loads of news about the benefits of eating plenty of fruit and veggies.
“You don’t believe all that, do you?” he said.
Sometimes I wonder. I mean if anyone can show me any definitive research that shows eating fruit and veggies makes you live longer I’ll eat my hat, I mean I’ll eat an apple.
Of course, it could be the same with this ‘overweight people live longer’ mularky.
Apparently what the Japanese Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry found was that people who were overweight at the age of 40 lived longer on average than people with other physiques.
The study showed that thin people had the shortest life expectancy, on average dying six or seven years earlier than overweight people. Serves them right for being so bloody pious, if you ask me.
Researchers studied the health of about 50,000 people aged 40 or older over a 12-year period. They looked at the past physiques of the participants and how long they lived past the age of 40, and grouped them according to their body mass index (BMI), an indicator of how fat a person is.
Men of regular weight (with a BMI of between 18.5 and 25) at age 40 lived for an average of 39.94 more years, while those who were overweight (BMI of between 25 and 30) at age 40 lived a further 41.64 years.
Women of regular weight lived on average a further 47.97 years, compared with overweight women, who lived another 48.05 years.
Obese men and women (BMI of 30 or more) lived a further 39.41 and 46.02 years, respectively. But thin men (BMI of less than 18.5) were on average expected to live 34.54 more years, and thin women another 41.79 years.
Possible explanations as to why thin people could die earlier included a theory that thin people are more susceptible to contagious diseases.

I’ve been trying to think of someone, anyone really, who I’ve come across in the past six months who has any idea what the fuck they are doing.
I discovered this morning that the Bosch dishwasher which is leaking all over the expensive blackbutt timber floor is still covered under warranty. That’s good, I thought. But whoa there, hang on... I paid the store I bought it from - David Jones, Chatswood, if you happen to be in the area take my advice, drive right on by, do not even slow down.
It seems that though I paid extra for an extra three years, the DJ’s people have not registered the extended warranty with the insurance people, so now I have to start faxing stuff, my fingerprints and DNA profile and all manner of ‘proof’, before I can even dream about getting my dishes all sparkly again. Really you’d have thought that was illegal. I mean it’s like taking money without delivering the goods. It seems the insurance people get this about three times a week.
Mind you, they are insurance people so how true that is, I just don’t know. I mean to my mind they’re lumped in with estate agents, car mechanics, call centre operators, the people at Telstra, bankers, peodophiles, pickpockets, genocidal murderers and, oh sorry, I got a bit carried away there.
Meanwhile, I had phoned the local Bosch person, as you may recall, to fix it because I’d forgotten about the extended warranty. I call him every week (this is week three) and he’s still not been out to even have a look, despite living only 6km away (about four miles).
So, hopefully once the warranty is all confirmed the people at Bosch will send someone out, anyone except for Week Three, I hope.
We shall see.
Anyway, I’m thinking of getting a sort of league board made up and put somewhere, maybe in the kitchen, with a list of Tossers of the Week. The only thing that worries me is I don’t have more than a couple of hours spare time a week and frankly the way things are going updating the board could be a fulltime job.
Hmm, maybe I could interest a keen school leaver who’d like to learn about commerce, umm, or not.
The only thing is with that, I’ve seen the kids around here and while they could get an A grade in Slouching Along, and certainly a Distinction in Hanging Your Shirt Out Over Your Arse, and clearly a Diploma in Monosyllabic Utterances and Grunts, I’m not sure any of them are ready for a demanding business role of this type.
Finally, I saw an advert yesterday (this has nothing to do with what I’ve been talking about but my mind wandered and I think you all deserve to know which way it veered) for a Director of Training for Greenpeace. The people they want trained are called Direct Dialogue Associates. What? Well, I figured out it’s the people who come up to you on the street and go, “And how are you today?”
Honestly, these days everyone has a fancy title. I think mine should be, Director of Special Familial Affairs with Executive Power Of Censure Over Related Infants. My side portfolio would be, Chef du Jour, Spag Bol.

So, I got to see Simon & Garfunkel on Saturday.
Well, actually I barely got to see them...let me explain.
As some of you will recall, I bought a ticket at the ridiculously high price of almost $400, so around 200 pounds, because that was all that was on offer, at least initially. As the weeks prior to the concert wore on the promoters dropped the price down to $75.
Okay, I’ve always wanted to see S&G live and I thought, hmm, 400 smackers will get me a super seat within hand-shaking distance of my musical heros.
You know, you can be so wrong.
The stadium is called Acer Arena, Acer being a computer company whose only link to music that I could find was the ability of their machines to help you download free music for which at some stage in the future you will go directly to jail (did you see the story last week about the woman in the US who was fined $2.4million for downloading 24 songs...).
Anyway, the concert was at Olympic Park which was built on a waste site back in 1999. I had to go to car park 5 which is like saying if you’re on your way to Marble Arch that you need to park in Walthamstow. Then you wait for a shuttle bus. It’s good really, the time spent in the rain let’s you mull over many of life’s mysteries, like where is the fucking bus.
In the Arena itself – it’s an indoors stadium – I discovered that the seats I and several hundred other people had paid handsomely for were on the floor of the arena, as was the stage, at the same level. The seats were not tiered so unless you were in the front row you could not see the stage at all. Unbelievable.
Conversely, those lucky folks who’d dipped into their savings to the tune of $75 were arrayed on tiered seats either side of us. This was good for them because it gave them the chance – pre-show - to laugh at us mugs in the pit.
Honestly, I was disgusted. I have never ever been anywhere where the seats were so poorly placed.
It wasn’t just me either. The level of complaining flowing across and around the seats was more vocal than Brian Clough.
As I always seem able to do, I did get a laugh and small ripple of applause because S&G were late coming on and someone shouted out, “where are they?” And I shouted back, “waiting for the shuttle bus.”
Anyhow, hearing them live was good, even if I couldn’t see them except by cracking my neck back and staring at the small film screen. Really, aside from actually saying I was there, I might just as well have watched the video when it comes out.
After it all finished – a good two hours of solid singing and a handful of interesting anecdotes – I walked outside with the hordes to wait for a shuttle bus but then decided to walk to the car park because it was quicker.
On the way this massive white stretch limo with lights arrayed along the sides and with blacked out windows swished past.
As I tramped along in the rain I thought, ah, now i know where my money went.

U.S. government-to-government arms sales are growing fast.
Arms sales were at a "pretty unprecendented level" after averaging $8 billion to $13 billion per year in the early 2000s, Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieringa, head of the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency, told Reuters in an interview.
Sales in the first half reached $27 billion, some 60 percent of the year's expected total, making it likely the actual 2009 total would top $40 billion, he said.
Wieringa said the Obama administration was committed to building international partnerships, and arms sales were an important instrument of that policy.
"We sell stuff to build relationships," he said.
Of course you do.

Here’s the thing – I ordered Six’s winter school uniform and it didn’t turn up because the woman who does it (I use the phrase in its losest sense...) put me in the wrong ledger, whatever that means, and so I had to go into school and talk to some woman who looked like she was sucking on a lemon and who said to me, “don’t bite my arse off.” Frankly nothing was further from my thoughts, but it did send a shiver up my spine. Mind you, nothing compared to the shivering Six was doing as he tried to keep warm in his shorts.
Eventually, weeks later, the uniform turned up, well some of it. The lemon-sucking woman handed me over the strides (pants as they call them here) and five long sleeve polo shirts. I checked because that’s just me and the polos were all short sleeves. So, I took them back and she rummaged around the uniform shop (a shed without a lock which is apparently why so many bits of uniform seem to walk out of their own accord. Now, I’m no rocket scientist but I’m not sure I need a degree in astrophysics to figure that a lock of some kind would be good).
Anyway, I digress. This week the correct polo shirts turned up. Well, four of them, the fifth had apparently been given to some other child who I’m sure I’ve seen in the playground shivering, and who I now seem to be sponsoring. So, though I’ve paid for it all months and months ago I’m still one shirt short.
I went to the P&C meeting to vent my concerns and suggested someone look into all this and they looked at me like I was from Pluto and speaking Plutonese. “The ladies are volunteers,” one shocked woman told me. “Volunteer what?” I asked, but I got no answer, just some evil looks.
I also asked why this is the only school in Christendom that has no sign out front, you know the one that tells you which child has maimed someone most effectively in last week’s interstate judo championship.
“Oh,” said the headmaster, a man routinely referred to as Grandpa, “the lock is broken and so we don’t put anything in there because someone might come along and change the letters around.”
To be honest, having looked around, that level of academic ability is unlikely to be found in this area. I can imagine some could change the letters to read something like, “I’ll have large fries with that” but I doubt it would go further, and for sure the apostrophe would either not be there or in totally the wrong place.
I called the dishwasher bloke last week too to try and get a leak fixed. He said, stretching his words out like elastic, “Well, I’ll have to order the part.”
“Well could you do that, then?”
“But is it the door seal or the washer,” he pondered.
“Well I don’t know,” I said, “not being a dishwasher repair man myself.”
“Ah, I see,” he said slowly. “So what shall we do?”
I took a deep breath. “Can you come and have a look?”
A sharp intake of breath and a low whistle. “Well, you’re up the mountain, aren’t you? Well, I’ll have to see.”
I’ve tried to get Six enrolled in the local soccer team (I think I’ve mentioned before, rugby league is referred to as footy or football which must surprise the players every time they find the ball in their hands, but there you are).
The woman organising the team (I use the word organise in its losest sense, of course) keeps promising to get back to me once she has spoken to all of the teams. But the registration date has now been and gone.
I imagine she is saying, “We got this kid, he’s an Aussie but his Dad’s a Pommy bastard. That means he’ll try and organise things” (She would string the word ‘organise’ out for about a foot and a half). “Now, do we want that?”

It’s been really cold here the last two days, though you’ll laugh when I tell you it’s 15C in the day and about 2C at night, and it’s sunny.
Yes, I know it looks like I’ve gone all lily-livered and years ago I’d have slipped on a t-shirt to go out in minus 5C and play with snow, but the wind chill here is very nasty.
If you look at a map you’ll see the south pole is not a whole long way away and when we get a southerly it brings the smell of polar bears with it (musty they are, let me tell you...).
Teachers at Six’s school were walking around yesterday with about five layers on, which frankly is a bit of overkill, but still it is cool.
An hour away in Lithgow (regular readers with a memory will recall we went there to Ironfest and nearly froze to death) it snowed yesterday and also in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains which is also just an hour’s drive.
I don’t think we’ll get snow here but when I put the rubbish bins out last night the clear air, full moon and smell of woodsmoke reminded me a lot of England on a cold winter’s night, only there were no yobs returning drunk from the local pub and kicking my front gate in. Oh, how I miss it!
Right, off to chop some more wood. 

I just got these from a good friend in Melbourne (currently swine flu capital of Australia, but of course I’m reading nothing into that). You might have seen some of them before but there’s some excellent ones here...

Economic Models Explained By Cows

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows. You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows. The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows. The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows. The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows. The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away...

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons

AMERICAN CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

ENRON VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to our listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public then buys your bull.

THE ANDERSEN MODEL...
You have two cows. You shred them.

FRENCH CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

JAPANESE CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called 'Cowkimon' and market it worldwide.

GERMAN CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves....

ITALIAN CAPITALISM
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You decide to have lunch.

RUSSIAN CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 2 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

SWISS CAPITALISM
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you. You charge the owners for storing them.

CHINESE CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity. You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

INDIAN CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You worship them.

BRITISH CAPITALISM
You have two cows. Both are mad....

IRAQI CAPITALISM
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows. You tell them you have none. No-one believes you. They bomb the **** out of you and invade your country. You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of a Democracy....

NEW ZEALAND CAPITALISM
You have two cows. The one on the left looks very attractive.

AUSTRALIAN CAPITALISM
You have two cows. Business seems pretty good. You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

The fire is still warm. Embers whirl when I open its door.
Schoolgirls, laughing, appear out of the fog like drunken soldiers. One has a short skirt, bare midriff; a thick woollen scarf keeps her neck warm. The school bus is metal; creaking, groaning, engine roaring, climbing the mountain like an animal. The girls get on, a boy kicks a football through the door, jumps in after it and is swallowed with a hiss.
Six appears by my side, quiet as the mist. “Dad, when can I get the school bus?” he whispers. I look at him in his pyjamas, bear in one hand a Jedi warship he built in the other and I laugh because I'm glad to see him again and I say, “do you want toast or crumpets with your hot chocolate?”

After businessman Sol Trujillo came out and called Australia racist and backward there’s been a predictable response from people here.
The Victorian Premier, Cyril Brumby, or whatever his name is, said there was no racism and made the point that Australia was multicultural and over 40 per cent of people in Victoria were immigrants. From a professional journalist’s perspective I was ashamed that no journalist asked the obvious question of Brumby: “Oh really, why does being multicultural and having 40 per cent immigrants mean Australia isn’t racist?”
I mean, it’s like saying in Germany in 1934 there were 2.5 million Jews. While not making a direct comparison I’m sure anyone with an ‘O’ level in, say, knitting can see the stupidity of simply saying, we have ex-number of immigrants therefore we’re not racist.
Meanwhile, as it happens, India’s Foreign Minister, M.S Krishna has hit out at what the Sydney Morning Herald calls, “an apparently racially motivated attack on four Indian students earlier this week which left Sravan Kumar Theerthala fighting for his life in intensive care in a Melbourne hospital”.
For those of you who don't know, Melbourne is the State capital of Victoria and it's Premier is....oh come on, pay attention at the back!
Also, earlier this month a 21-year-old student, Sourabh Sharma, was bashed by a gang on a Melbourne train, and last year two Indian students working as taxi drivers were seriously assaulted.
"We will also impress upon the Australian authorities that such attacks should not be permitted and that it is their responsibility to ensure the well-being and security of our students studying in Australia," Mr Krishna said.
He also sent India's High Commissioner to Australia, Sujatha Singh, to Melbourne to "assess the situation" and to ensure that those responsible for the latest attacks are "brought to book".
The attacks have received widespread publicity in India over the past two days.
"Australia, land of racism" screamed a headline in the influential Economic Times yesterday, and some news blog sites were swamped with comments accusing Australians of racism.
The story also featured prominently on many Indian television news channels, which showed video surveillance footage showing Sourabh Sharma being brutally bashed by a gang on a Melbourne train.
But no, there is no racism here – you just ask Premier Brumby.

Now, in brighter news, Six’s latest milk tooth has fallen out after five days of hanging there like a chad. The Tooth Fairy gave him $2 this time around because of the relief in this house – ie: no more whingeing and sucking spaghetti like he was emptying a drain.

Three is a bit worried his teeth will also fall out and believes it may be all in one go and happen sometime this afternoon.

I went round to Jerome’s yesterday so the kids could play with his girls. We had a fine time and Jerome and I stood out on the back deck while he had a smoke and in the mist and dripping rainforest stretching away we talked about stuff and listened to the call of the bell bird.
Seems he doesn’t need to go into the office very often and people just “call me so I can give advice.”
Jerome’s boss lives next door and if that isn’t a lightly armoured Mercedes-Benz in the driveway I'm a Chinaman.
We’ll find out more on the weekend...

The Bentley is in for a service today. Can you believe, it’ll be the first time the brakes have needed replacing in 10 years, though in fairness it has done only 90,000kilometers, and of course my driving style rarely includes braking.
While it’s in I’m tooling around in the Peugeot 206. This is the most unreliable car I’ve ever owned, not even surpassed by the Citroen ZX which was stupendously unreliable (and made by the same company, as it happens...).
The Pug – designed by the French but made in England, really what chance did it have - is eight years old but within 14,000km, so about 8000 miles in old money, I had to have the power steering replaced twice. The litany of other problems is too long to list here, or anywhere for that matter.
Anyhow, on the Bentley...back when I was a full-time motoring journalist I used to go on advanced driving courses, partly so I could write about them and partly to make me a better driver.
When I was in the US about 15 years ago I managed to get on one of the more bizarre courses. Organised out of Ford Bragg in North Carolina, it was an evasive driving course for secret service and covert operations people. I could write about it but you know, no names, etc, otherwise I actually do think they could have killed me.
The instructor, a sergeant with steel blue eyes and one of those crew cuts you don’t want to touch because it will injure you, said on the first day, “Gentlemen, your automobile is your weapon.” I said, “but what if it is a Bentley?” which they all tittered about.
“Sir,” he drawled, “the Bentley is your finest automotive weapon of all time.” We all laughed and then he shouted at me, “Sir! If you do interrupt me one more time I will take your bootlaces and tie you to that damn Bentley and drive it off the nearest cliff edge, sir! Do I make myself clear! Sir!”
Yes, it was a lot of fun and I never knew you could use a Bentley ashtray to disembowel a man.
The main point is, one of the people on the course, a bloke called Jerome from Alabama, was in the Navy Seals which is the US’s equivalent of the SAS, only they swim better. Jerome is a fine person.
Imagine my surprise back on Friday when I saw Jerome in the school playground. Oh yes.
I thought I must be mistaken (though I never forget a face) because he bent over fussing over a little girl who would be his daughter. He lifted his head and looked right at me and smiled, so he knew I was there. He patted the daughter on the head and she skipped off. He walked over to me and stood by my side as the Principal called assembly to order and he said out of the side of his mouth, “Used that Bentley on anyone yet, sir?”
It seems, coincidence of coincidences, that Jerome is now a professor of oceanography, has married an Argentinean woman, speaks fluent Spanish as well as Alabaman, lives just up the road from us and has two daughters, one of whom is in my son’s class. They’ve just moved here from Buenos Aires.
They’re coming around for a meal on the weekend so hopefully I’ll find out what he’s been up to in the last decade, and perhaps more importantly, what he’s really doing here in the mountains...

Sol Trujillo, an American who was running Telstra, the part state-owned telecoms giant, has just left the building after an eventful few years which saw the company battling with the government and its share price plummeting.
He wasn’t popular. But now he’s caused a new controversy with his claims that Australia is both racist and backward.
Of course, Aussies are rushing to deny it, saying Sol is a loser.
Well...if I’d got a dollar for every time I’ve been called a Pommy bastard – er, just to my face – I’d be driving the latest Bentley GTC now and have had it pimped up too, with enough change to buy a Rolls-Royce convertible. Pom and Pommy are a derogatory terms that Australians believe are acceptable because they so commonly use them. So, Paki bastard is obviously okay too, as is Jew bastard.
People of Italian descent are commonly referred to – sometimes by themselves it should be said – as Wogs. Can you believe it?
And when you scratch the surface a lot of Australians really hate the English. Some of them think we’re arrogant. I have no idea what they mean.
I mean, really, all we did was send Captain Cook across the oceans for six months, find this country, tell the Aborigines it was now ours, told the French to bais off, brought over some blokes to get some buildings and roads put in, installed democracy and the rule of law and then handed it over lock, stock and barrel, and not a farthing changed hands.
And do you know, I’ve never had one Australian thank me.

...is the first line from Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence.
Back about 20 years ago I had tickets to see S&G somewhere in London but I got the flu or something and couldn’t go. At the time I thought I’d never get the chance to see them again because they were so old. In fairness they probably weren’t really that old but I was seeing it from the viewpoint of a 20-something boy and I say that because men are boys until they are at least 45 and sometimes 50, and sometimes it never happens...I know, madam, sadly it’s true.
Well, now S&G  are coming to Sydney in June and I managed to get tickets. They cost a motza, almost $400 can you believe!
They have this Ticketek system here where you don’t talk to anyone, you just key details in on the phone, realising at the last second that your credit card has been sucked with a similar skill and dexterity offered for free by those who skim your card at crooked ATMs. You get no option of which seat you want either.
Anyhow, I swallowed it because I want to see S&G on stage before I die...
Here’s the thing though; a week after opening ticket sales they were advertising it again.
Of course, back in the ‘60s I imagine an S&G gig was packed but now some of the regulars probably can’t go on account of hip and knee replacements and zimmer frames and wearing felt hats with a brim sitting on ears which look flapping huge as you’re following them in their 1982 Ford Granada Ghia X in gold with the nodding dog on the back parcel shelf and you’re thinking, Jesus Christ pull over and why does he grip the steering wheel – at the top – with such a tight on-the-edge-of-a-cliff grip. Maybe they can’t remember their own names let alone Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, which let’s face it is a mouthful anyway, so perhaps there’s not a lot of demand for S&G tickets.
Well, knock me down with an electric buggy with a flag on it, now they’re advertising them at $70 a ticket! It’s making my blood boil. I mean those of us who paid almost $400 (well, maybe it’s only me...) are going to be in a right mood before it even kicks off. Frankly for that sort of money I expect to be taken out for dinner afterwards by Paul and Art, followed by a night on the town – or perhaps we’ll just go back to their hotel room for a hot chocolate and a bit of a lie down.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, so I’m going to do a really quick run-down.

The Eye of the Abyss by Marshall Browne
One-eyed bank auditor, 1939, Germany, doesn’t like Nazis.
Real gripper, well written.

The Iron Heart by Marshall Browne
Excellent follow-on to above. Makes you feel like you’re there. Nazis really not very nice, hope there’s more to come in this series.

Sail by James Patterson
Formula, formula, formula and then a bit of formula, Patterson makes another zillion.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
Kid gets slapped at BBQ. Could be boring but it’s really good, confronting at times. Bloody well written.

The Coast Road by Peter Corris
Writes two easy-to-read Aussie thrillers every year but still only makes $12K a year. Please give generously...

Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks
A James Bond thriller, set in the 60s. Costs $36 but I got it for $18, enough said.

Tsar by Ted Bell
Suspend disbelief while reading...Russia has a new Tsar, oh yes it does, and he’s a nutter but British spy is up to task of shagging the bloke’s daughter, er sorry, I mean rescuing the world. Really this should be awful but it’s well written and gripping.

The Laws of Nuclear Thermodynamics and Cross-Transfer of Polymer Regeneration in Tibet by Crispin Douglas
Excellent. The table is no longer wobbly.

I went to the P&C meeting the other night. This is Parents & Citizens, which is the same as your PTA in the UK (well, it used to be called the PTA...). basically you sit around in the staffroom from 7.30pm and discuss cream cakes, how to make your pies rise nice and golden brown and what to do if your child overdoses on lime cordial. Oh yes, they also discuss things that are going on at school.
Latest news is that we’ve got $2.5million for a new school hall. This is courtesy of the government spending our money to try and keep people looking busy, busy, busy in these challenging economic times. Multiplex are going to build it. These are the same people who couldn’t seem to finish Wembley Stadium, so I tell you, they fill me with confidence.
Now, $2.5m for a hall, I hear you ask. Yes indeed because though it could be built for a fraction of the cost if you used your local builders it seems this is a package price agreed with the government and a few choice companies like Multiplex. Is it suspect? Is the Pope a Catholic?
But, the school will soon have a spanking new hall. I asked if it would have air conditioning, which in this part of the world is about as necessary as shark repellent and all the women looked at me as if I’d asked them to undress and let me make them all pregnant quick as I could.
“Air conditioning!” said one of them. “That costs another $20,000.” Of course, how silly of me.
They also discussed the winter school uniform and why various bits of it are still not with us despite the weather turning very bitter indeed. To cut a long story short, if I was doing it I’d just go to Shanghai, take a uniform with me and get someone to run them up. The way it’s done here they have all sorts of middlemen who basically get to pocket lots of money and don’t seem to feel too obliged to come up with the goods, or is that just my suspicious mind?
One woman brought a uniform from another school to show us. I kid you not, this is what she said, “The material these are made of, look, it’s silky smooth and shiny and reflects the light. The great thing is, my friend, when her kids’ uniforms are dirty, she just gets them to stand in the shower.” A short period of silence followed this useful laundry tip.
The uniform was handed around and the women perused it and handled it and stroked like only regular clothes shoppers could do. One woman said, fingering the polyester blend, “I wonder if the girl’s tops are see-through.”
“Only when they’re in the shower,” I said drily.

I was asking around yesterday at Six’s school if anyone knew a chimney sweep. The way some of the mothers looked at me, with their nervous smiles, you’d have thought it was the first part of a joke, you know where you go boom-boom! at the end.
Thing is, everyone here has a slow combustion fire. I know this because you can smell the woodsmoke every night, and when we were looking at houses back last winter everyone had theirs on heating their homes. They are pretty efficient and because they’re essentially a closed fire (a glass door allows you to see what’s cooking...) they heat the house pretty well all on their own.
But...of course you have to get the chimney cleaned and it seems to me that nobody ever does that here.
One woman said to me, “Oh yes, my husband has a spiky ball. And he’ll come around your house.”
Interesting, I thought, but I want my chimney cleaned, not a vaudeville act in the living room.
But it seems what you do is climb on the roof (which frankly not even a possum would do thanks to the height, given it’s three storeys high, and the steep pitch of the roof and also it’s steel and so it’s pretty slippery), then dangle your spiky ball down into the chimney and lower it on a rope. The upshot, I’d imagine, is that it either rips the metal chimney pipe leaving it looking like a Scotsman at Culludon who’s charged an English cannon or – and of course it may do both these things – it fills your lounge room with choking soot four foot thick.
Anyhow, I found a proper chimney sweep and he’s coming around next week, though he did worry me a bit when he said, “I’ll send the boys around.”
Presumably they are small enough to be sent up the chimney to give it a proper clean.
Well, I’m all for tradition.

Well, I have a good excuse for my absence - I’ve been moving the firewood from the front driveway to the steel shed out back.
I bought three cubic metres of red gum which meant nothing much to me until the bloke with the truck dumped it on the drive. Put it this way, if you’d have climbed it you’d have been able to see China and would have needed an oxygen mask.
It took me two days to haul it out back. I felt like I was a contestant on Biggest Loser. I have to say, exercise is not all it’s cracked up to be.
That aside, I’m bashing on with Mr Wolf which is nearing the end of draft two. I just have a couple of plot turns to sort out and then I reckon once I’ve read it through again and dickered with it some more and given it to a couple of friends to read it’ll be ready to go to publishers. I’m getting pretty happy with it. I’ve also had an idea for a crime thriller (I know, yawn, but I reckon I’ve got a unique take with this one) which I’m thinking about a lot at the moment and it’s taking shape nicely, though only in my brain so far.
This morning Three fell over running into Six’s school and banged the back of his head. I think he might have given himself a bit of mild concussion because as soon as we got back home at 9.30am he went to sleep on the sofa and snored like an old man until 11.30. Then he sprang up and said, “I alright now. Where my lunch?”
That aside the two of them are driving me nuts with their arguments about nothing. A couple of days ago we were out in the Bentley, both of them strapped in their own back seats and Three says, “Six, don’t look out of my window.” Six replied that it wasn’t his window and so Three rapped hard on the glass several times and said, “Hear that, Six. That is the sound of my window.”
Another day as we drove along Six said, “Daddy, I’m just watching that cloud up there.” Three said, “Six, that is my cloud. Do not look at it.”  

Well, I got Killing Che from Random House in the US. They sent it by courier. I tell you their customer service is something not a few companies could emulate, including Random House Australia. But here’s the thing, I got a call yesterday afternoon from the courier. He said, “I’ve got a delivery for you.”
“Yes,” I said slowly.
“Do you want to come and get it?”
“Well, where are you?”
“Outside your front door.”
Obviously he’d never mastered the art of getting out of his van and knocking on the door. Soon people will wonder what that piece of metal on the door is for.
Talking of courtesy and manners, I took the nippers to a playday at the house of one of Six’s friends last week. Another schoolfriend was there with his mother too. She told me that her child had burped loudly in the car the other day and not said, excuse me or pardon me. She told him off and her husband said, “What are you having a go at him for, it’s not the 1950s.”
Oh, I didn’t realise December 30th 1959 was the date when we all could stop saying, pardon me.
I'm glad I found out.
It must be open season on breaking wind in public too, and especially in office meetings and while taking a ride in a taxi.

So, I got in touch with Random House in the US about my defective copy of Killing Che, as Random House Australia couldn’t help.
Now, say what you like about Americans but you can’t fault the service. Honestly, no questions asked, and a copy’s winging its way to me now, which is most excellent. I think it’s only cost me, oh, about $2500 in time and effort and calls and emails. A complete bargain.
Talking of service, we went to Lithgow on the weekend to visit Ironfest, which is an annual event showcasing all things metal – a sort of industrial revolution kind of a show. They had blokes dressed as soldiers from the Napoleonic era, both French and English, as well as Vikings, German WWII soldiers and cannons. The boys loved it, especially of course the fighting, though the weather was abysmal.
Lithgow is a small town in the middle of nowhere, an hour from where we live, further into the mountains. We’ve got winter coming on now (indeed I’m having a truck load of firewood delivered today...) and by golly it’s cold in Lithgow. The wind scythes through you and never lets up.
But that aside, it was a good day out; they also have stalls where people sell knives they’ve made, leather stuff, and they have blacksmiths showing you how to whack the bejesus out of a piece of glowing metal, but skillfully...
When we came out of the show I stopped in the town for petrol (here’s the ‘service’ bit of the story, in case you were wondering...). I plucked the pump out and inserted it in the Bentley and nothing happened. After a minute or two I walked into the shop.
“Is that pump working?”
The woman behind the counter jumped, and looked as surprised as if I’d barged into her front parlour with a sawn-off shotgun.
“Eh?”
“The pump. Is it working?”
“Which one?”
“Number 6.”
“Yes.”
“But it doesn’t work.”
She looked at me with hard black pupils. I thought she might be casting a spell on me.
“Well, I was out back.”
“Right. Well can you turn it on now?”
“You want fuel?”
I took a deep breath. No, I’m out there in the freezing cold posing for a photoshoot for Pump Attendant Weekly.
“Yes, I was hoping to get some.”
“Right. Well, just pick it up and I’ll turn it on.”
I filled the car and went to pay.
“How much is it?” she asked.
“Don’t you know?”
She looked startled, like such a wondrous technology could only be dreamt of.
“No. You have to tell me.”
“Right. I’ll just go and look then.”
As I went out into the arctic gale she shouted to me, "remember, it's pump six!"

In James Howard Kunstler’s most excellent novel, World Made by Hand, which is set in the not too distant future and which tells the story of our world when the oil runs out, one of the levers that pushed the world to the brink was a pandemic that killed millions around the world. Kunstler called it Mexican Flu. Funny that, eh?
But there’s nothing funny about this latest flu, still called swine flu but surely soon to become known as Mexican Flu.
Back about four years ago I heavily researched and then wrote an article on the coming killer pandemic, which was published in The Bulletin, then Australia’s weekly news magazine but since closed when the owner’s son became more interested in building casinos than running a news operation.
Anyhow, the point is, every 80 years or so a major pandemic sweeps the world and kills millions. Spanish Flu killed at least 18 million people in 1918 - and that was before people were able to travel the world so freely and quickly. We’ve been due another one for a while. This Mexican Flu is that killer pandemic, I’d bet my life on it.
Here’s the thing; it’s already killing people, and the people it’s killing are not those who normally die when flu strikes – the elderly and very young – but rather very fit, able people. That’s one reason it’s so frightening.
Another reason to be concerned is that there’s no vaccine. Now, they’ll rush and produce one but the point about Mexican Flu, which they already know, is that it is mutating really quickly, so the killer flu some people get today will bloom and expand as it goes, which makes stopping it really difficult.
Already this new flu has been found across most continents and thanks to air travel it will spread quicker than you can say, cheap airfares. What needs to happen is that air travel should be stopped right now. But yes, that’s not likely to happen because we want our economies to keep working – even though if I’m right, soon there may not be enough people to run an economy.
Soon, borders will be closed because the mounting cost in terms of loss of life will be massive, but I think by then it will be too late.
Of course, I could be wrong, but I have to say it’s sending a shiver up my spine. This is no ordinary disease and this is not a SARS outbreak where you had to be drinking the blood of a chicken while shagging it before you got it, this has incubated in animals – in this case the pig – and then jumped to humans. It’s what pandemic specialists fear and it’s what they have been warning about for decades.
Kunstler updates his blog every week on a Monday, (www.kunstler.com) so I’m guessing that in a few hours time when he logs on this will be his subject du jour. It’ll make interesting reading.
Meanwhile, I’m going to cook the kids some spag bol tonight and have a couple of bottles of the most excellent Coopers Pale Ale, because, you know, life has to go on...

Alright, let me explain then.
The amount of marketing that goes into selling women’s lipstick, eyelash stuff, anti-wrinkle, anti-age, anti-sag, anti-lopes, oh sorry I got carried away there, is amazing and I’m always stunned by things like Fabulash that extends your eyelashes so much – thanks to the Thick Bristled Brush Applicator Adjudicator With In-Built Lash Plumper – you can use them to tickle that bloke over there by the wall.
I love that device that not only washes your face to remove, well dirt I suppose, but it also massages the face at the same time to get out more, well dirt, I suppose.
Then there are the anti-aging creams, none of which work, well except if you believe the chemical company’s claim that 90 per cent of women found it relieved the visible signs of ageing (sample size, six women, says the small print you can only see if you’ve been using the Clear As Day See For Absolutely Miles To That Lighthouse Over There Eye Lotion Solution For Tired Eyes That Can’t Read Small Print On The Telly, daily for 25 years).
But I think I’ve found a couple of products that really will cause your eyebrows to lift (that’s a visible sign of receiving interesting news...). I was reading a UK issue of Womens Weekly, as you do, and they had a special double page spread on ‘winning the wrinkle war’. Crikey, I wonder if hostages are ever taken, and if so where?
Here’s a couple of real products that really roll off the tongue: Soap & Glory Supereyes Moisturising Eye Gel. I mean by the time you’ve asked for that you’ll definitely have visibly aged.
Then there’s my personal favourite: Soap & Glory Catch A Wrinkle In Time Age Avoiding Day Moisturiser. Phew! Remembering all that’s going to make you really frown.
But perhaps the one with it all is L’Oreal Paris Collagen Filler Double Action Lip & Lip Contour. No really. Apparently it, “plumps, de-crinkles and defines’. Bargain.
You can also use it to repair the grouting in the bathroom, making it smooth as, er, your skin should be. If you were still aged six.

Yes, Borders the bookshop people (bought out in Australia in a management buyout after the company floundered) got me a new copy of Killing Che. Before I went on the hour long drive to pick it up I asked them to check if all the pages were there...
“Funny you should ask that,” said the girl cheerfully, “yes, from page 208 they’re missing until you get to page 241!”
So why would I want that, then?
Honestly you wonder how anyone in this chain – book publisher, book printers, bookshop – can possibly run any business, or even stay in business.
I’m going to get in touch direct with the bloke who wrote the book and see what he thinks. Bet he’ll love it his book is useless to read.
In other news, well the nippers are on school holiday now, or at least Six is, Three is still going to pre-school on his two days a week. That alone presents problems because Three wonders what Six is doing all day while he’s away slaving it out over his morning tea, climbing frames and a fight or two over ownership of a piece of Lego. I have to constantly inmpress on Six that whatever we do should not be transmitted to Three, otherwise the late afternoon degenerates into a prolonged and nasty fight that makes the Taliban look like pussycats.
Yesterday we went to try Tae-Kwon-Do which for those of you who don’t know, is a ‘sport’ where you learn to pummel an opponent almost to death – well, that’s what it looked like to me.
They dress it up by saying it gives the kids confidence but frankly all it seems to do is give them confidence to go out and maim other kids, or maybe I’m missing something.
Anyhow, of course Six is a boy so he loved it and despite being told by the trainer, “not to take this outside this room”, (oh yeah, sure) he tackled everyone he could on the way back to the car, via the supermarket. The old bloke with the white stick hardly knew what hit him down by the cold meats counter.

I’ve been reading this most excellent novel called Killing Che by Chuck Pfarrer – no, I have no idea how you pronounce his name either, but never mind.
I was really enjoying it, the suspense building to a crescendo, until I got to page 208...The next page is 241. Now, if that wasn’t bad enough, pages 241 to 280 are repeated too, just in case you thought the book was too slim, I suppose. It’s what we in journalism call, a fuck-up. In fact, if I’d achieved such a dogs bollocks in my business I’d have lost more than a sheaf of paper, I’d have lost my job.
The way these things are printed, this would not be the only book affected - it's likely to be the whole run because no-one spotted it and sorted it out.
Sorry Chuck, but the good news is most people will have bought your book before they find out it contains rather more mystery than even you yourself dreamed up..
I got in touch with Random House and was told that they couldn’t do anything about it – like give me another copy – because they had nothing to do with Random House in the US, which is apparently where the book was published (and happily sold by Borders in Australia).
Clearly, buying up all those small book companies, as Random House did, and forming them into a global entity was an incredibly wise and fulfilling move, er, for? I have no idea who for.
I’ve been in touch with Borders (yes, I know, my morning has gone....) and I’m told a copy is coming to Australia – just one mind – but they have no idea when it will arrive and they don’t save books for customers. Yes, yet another successful business operation, though in fairness Borders has gone bust, which is only fair as they tried to undercut your small independent bookshop, slash their margins too much, and then went belly-up. It too must have seemed like a good idea at the time to the owners who presumably had day jobs as circus clowns.
In desperation I called my local bookshop who tut-tutted and called Random House the spawn of the devil, or maybe she was just referring to a hot new book title (yeah, that’s right, I know my libel laws) and refused to order the book from the US, which is probably fair enough as I drove right past the shop when I went to buy the book, but they are very nice otherwise, so I’ve ordered another book through them, just to make sure they have some money in the till this week, love ‘em.
I don’t mind the small bookshop, after all I’ve not smelt mildew like that, or seen such a flock of bats, since I used to be an altar boy, and it is quiet in there, well yes mostly because they have no customers, agreed, but do we really need coffee shops, magazines from 48 foreign countries and in-store appearances by a bloke dressed as Harry Potter who waves a wand as he pops each of your books in a biodegradable bag (which biodegrades in the rain before you get to your car) with, “free book mark, dude” (it’s just a piece of card) to get us to buy books.
It’s a rhetorical question, dude.

I was reading a report yesterday that said the amount of money the US is printing to pump into the economy in an effort to get the old sluggard moving again is almost identical to the amount of money people in the US owe on their mortgages. Well, well, well...
Now, not being an economist myself (yes, you’ll see no Volvo in my driveaway – oh sorry, I mean parked across next door’s driveway) I can see a clear answer to all of the world’s economic woes. I can solve the ongoing global financial meltdown in a stroke.
Here’s the plan - use that freshly printed wad of dollars to pay off everyone’s mortgage, leaving them free to spend their spondooli on important things like hot dogs, plasma TVs, trips to Vegas, Hummers, walk-in fridge freezers, psycho analyst fees, and, of course, guns and plenty of ammo.
Now if that doesn’t get the economy moving I don’t know what will.
Of course, you’d also have to tax the bejesus out of them too so the debts owed to the furiously money-printing government can be paid back, and so inflation doesn’t go bonkers, but I’m sure you’ll agree this is the grandpappy of all stimulus packages.
All that remains is for me to receive the Nobel Prize for Getting Your Lard Arses Out of a Jam. I look forward to receiving it in due course (or just send me the money).

...but it sure can pour. Last week it rained all week and in one 24 hour period we had 94mm can you believe, so in old money about equivalent to a yard of ale.
As the house is on the mountainside I could watch most of the water go off down the road, with most of the road as it happens.
I discovered that under the house – which is tiered as it sits on a hillside – there is a complex drainage system which turns into a surging, foaming river of water flowing into a gravel pit which drains to God know’s where but I suspect it probably ends up in the underground lake that gives us all our pumped water.
In other news, I’ve bought a telescope.
From the front verandah you can see down over the sea of trees, the wind flowing through them like waves, watch cars on the road out that meanders in and through the woods as it switchbacks down the hill, then look out over the flat plain all the way to Sydney, 60 miles away.
Nearer to home, down on the meadows below, maybe 10 miles distant, I can watch the comings and goings on the horse breeding stations.
Get up early while the sky is dark blue stippled with the rising sun’s tangarine and you can see the owners’ helicopters taking off in the dawn, their lights twinkling like fireflies, their far off drone no more than insect-like as kookaburras cackle and hoot and the early morning mist hisses through the trees.

I’ve been a bit busy and there’s been lots going on, hence my absence yet again from blogland.
I’ll tell you later about Six’s birthday party (50 guests, including all his school class – yes I’m bonkers) and loads of other stuff.
Now, last night I watched Mission Impossible 3 on the big screen. This film is of such a quality that I’d forgotten I’d seen it before, but I leaned back and thought of England and watched it again.
There’s one scene where Tom decides to launch himself over a massive gap in a bridge, blown apart by rockets, and as he was running up I was thinking, Tom, you and your short legs are never going to make it over there, no way. But they have special effects by the Hummer-load so Tom vaulted the gap like Steve Austin in Million Dollar Man. You almost expect to hear the elongated boing sound as he springs the chasm.
I haven’t seen Valkyrie yet – the true story of Klaus von Stauffenberg’s real-life effort to blow Adolf Hitler up in an attempt to stop having to do all that Seig Heil stuff with the left arm 85 times a day.
I’m only guessing, but because this is Tom playing Stauffy, and the film is made in Hollywood by Americans, I imagine Tom manages to pull it off and assasinate Hitler.

...is a French film based on the true story written by the editor of French Elle magazine who at the age of 43 gets struck down by a massive stroke (while driving his new Jag XJS, can you believe). 
Of course, only in France would a bloke be in charge of a womens’ magazine and only in a French film would everyone in the hospital be beautiful – yes, I mean all the female staff.
Seems Jean-Do, to use his nickname, is completely paralysed (except he can still blink his left eye) but still has a razor-sharp mind and he dictates his book letter by letter to a willing assistant who is of course, er, beautiful.
Anyhow, you might think it would be a boring film but it’s really well made and though hardly likely to leave you chortling in the aisles it’s worth a look.
Talking of having a look, well the bloody bulb went in the projector a couple of weeks ago. If you have a film projector (What! Doesn’t everyone! Really? Good Lord!) then you’ll know that the really expensive thing are the bulbs which last for about as long as the three Lords of the Rings films run (yes, about eight months, but even so).
Sony make this particular one and all I can say is it’s a good business if you can get in it.
Honestly, these things cost almost $1000 – about 500 quid!
Not only that, there’s a waiting list!
And on top of that, if you drop it you will die thanks to all the mercury in it!
But it is excellent when you can sit down in your living room and watch a film like you’re at the cinema, minus the sticky seats, rustle of popcorn bags and some bloke who’s seen it all before telling everyone what he thinks of it.

I was watching The 7.30 Report last night. It’s similar to whatever you have on in Britain now after the news. You know, the programme that examines the news you’ve already seen, but in depth, so you get even more depressed.
Anyway, they had a report from the UK by the ABC’s European Correspondent on how, now how did they put it, oh yes, how Britain is sinking into the North Sea, going down faster than interest rates or house prices.
I tell you, even from here it was depressing. I was saddened to see Woolworths has closed. No more pick-and-mix then, and nowhere to practice shoplifting.
I understand all of the banks except one in Chuggins Bottom-on-Slope (left at Portly Come-Often) now belong to a Mr Gordon Brown and his friends.
It’s rumoured that the plague has reared its head again in Rotherhithe, while a madman stalks the streets of Soho murdering ladies of the night. According to The News of the World, he’s an ex-panto star (behind you! He's behind you!) with no-one left to perform to.
I hear Prince Charles has launched his own range of detox products – for Corgis.
I was stunned but then I thought, at least you still have a car industry, umm, owned by India, and there’s always the City of London financial district, but now I understand that’s all up for sale too.
Meanwhile, on Dartmoor in the freezing fog and dead of night a hound can be heard howling.

Sometime ago I promised to write about George’s 40th birthday party.
For new readers, George is second generation Italian (well, second in Australia). He worked as an accountant for several years before deciding to become a fruit and vegetable shop owner, before chucking that in to become an estate agent, as you do.
He has a large family...
Now, the party invite said, no children. I thought it must be a joke. Not having kids at an Italian party is like forgetting the Pope.
But when I turned up, all dressed in white as demanded on the invite, I realised why it really was x-rated.
I was met at the door by two seven foot tall blonde girls young enough to be my granddaughters, dressed only in brief white see-through French knickers and white push-up bras with sweeping white wings attached to their backs, proferring me drinks. I had to do a double-take. I’m no stranger to scantily clad girls but you don’t expect to see them at a suburban birthday party, or perhaps I’ve just not been going to the right parties.
Outside in the garden, George had a laser show which lit up the surrounding area, er, like all of Sydney, while a sound system cranked out 80’s hits. You didn’t need a GPS to find the house, you just unwound the car window 38 miles away and listened for Joy Division.
There was an industrial-sized dry ice system which at opportune moments gushed out a dense white fog; people stumbled into each other, coughing, like it was London, 1952.
All the usual suspects were there.
Tony Two-Times on account of he says everything twice, as in, “good to see you, good to see you.”
Dom Five-Kids because he wanted lots of kids but they had to stop at five after his wife demanded he leave her alone. Also known as Dom The Snip because eventually she nagged him to have it done to prevent a population explosion.
Cinema Sam because he owns a whole chain of movie houses which allow him to have a garage full of Ferraris, an arrogance that’s bigger than a V12, and no friends.
Uncle Benny, the mafia man. He has a stare that makes you remember him and a handshake that lowers your body temperature.
Pauli Pollie – short for politician – he sits in the NSW parliament where, I’ve been told, “he gets things done”.
Sorry Sam, because when you ask him how’s it going he sighs and says, “not good. Not good at all, mate.” Sigh.
Condito the Consigliere, also known as Con The Con – the lawyer in the family who works closely with Uncle Benny, if you know what I mean.
Back-up Benny – cousin Benito drives a dump truck and is always backing it up to unload something or other in a darkened corner of the State. Also works closely with Uncle Benny...
Five – the five beautiful daughters of Pauli, as in Louisa Five, Francesca Five, etc.
Tutti Two-Beans – Tuttino knows more about coffee making then anyone alive, he says. “It begin, my friend, with just two coffee beans. Like a two lovers lying side by side, but one is green, the other is black. Not the lovers, the coffee beans, capiche?”
Manny Money, also known as Double-Em. Works for an investment bank handling off-shore investments. Rumoured to be close to Uncle Benny.
Maria – George’s wife, from a family of salami makers.
I walked in and almost had an epileptic fit as the light show did that flicker thing. I thought they’d been banned everywhere outside Tenerife, but no, there was one spluttering and staccatoeing like nobody’s business.
At one stage in the evening Louisa Five came up to me and we had a chat. She has long blonde hair and in her figure-hugging white dress she looked like an angel.
“You’ve met my cousin?” asked George, as he always does, a cami-knickered girl on his arm.
“George, I’ve known Louisa for 12 years.”
“Oh,” she said, “you must remember me when I was a fat little 14 year old!”
I smiled. She never been fat, she’d always been beautiful, but even now she didn’t realise it.
At 12.30 the police arrived, for the first time. This being Sydney they joined the party, leaving after 2am when the second contingent arrived.
At 2.30am George’s mother, father and 97-year-old grandmother came to see what all the fuss was about.
The Grandmother fussed over a cami-knickered girl.
She’s only 19, can you believe,” George told me, his eyes glittering, his brow slick with dance sweat, as if she was his new date.
Nonna told the cami-knicker girl how much weight she’d lost, though “you boobinos still like colliseum”, before realising this wasn’t George’s wife in her underwear out here in the garden in the middle of the night.
Half an hour later the dry ice-machine pumped. George’s father screamed, rushed forward, threw a ice-bucket full of water over it.
“There,” he said, brushing his hands, “the fire, it is out.”

The bat I mentioned the other day made another appearance, this time hanging on the wooden windowblind slats in Three's room. I got a wet towel and grabbed him and let him loose in the garden - the bat, I mean.
Then I read online that if a bat has been in a house with sleeping people then everyone needs some anti-bat venom because you might have been bitten and you could easily die, due to the bat being a carrier of all sorts of diseases, all of which have the distinction of killing you quick-smart and having no cure once they take hold.
I called the medical centre whose receptionist said, "oh my son was bitten by a bat once." Then she went on and on about how long it took to get ill, how long it took to recover and what the after effects were and one day he'll walk again, praise the Lord and Hail Mary! and I wanted to shout, Hey! We're all dying here!
Of course, the only advice was to go to the local hospital. Having been to the local hospital before I can tell you I'd only use it if I needed a large car park so I could stop and polish my wing mirrors. I mean, I'd rather die than go there again.
Anyhow, it seems Five has now contracted some big flu type thing which for a moment or two I thought might have been down to the bat but apparently if you get bat flu you die very quickly indeed so I'm guessing it's not that as he is now fighting with Three over a Lego Star Wars drone ship and you have to be fit to do that, what with the punches being thrown and the wrestling moves.
I was going to continue with Mr Wolf (the novel madam, the novel...) today but with both of them at home I decided I'd be better employed making coleslaw (which I've done) and lamb stir fry with black bean sauce and rice, which I'll start doing now, once I can get hold of that damned frisky lamb.
Honestly, I feel like a housewife!
But I'm not sure where I can find one at such short notice.

Two large spiders took up residence this week.
When I say large I am talking looking you in the eye and sizing you up. I went at one of them with the Dyson (the vaccum cleaner, not the washing machine) and he fought and fought but eventually got sucked up. He’s joined another small family of spiders already in the see-through barrel. They go for a spin every now and again and overall seem to be having a fine time.
The other spider has disappeared, so he’s probably working on a strategy which eventually sees me spinning in his web.
Now, this morning at 5am I was up and about and all was quiet and a small bat came into the room from upstairs and flew around silently before squeezing behind the chimney breast. The chimney is a large sandstone affair which goes right up into the roof. As I’ve said before, the ceilings are your cathedrally type so, I don’t know, maybe 25 feet high. Hopefully the bat simply eats all the mozzies which constantly plague us and refrains from flying around indoors at night.
Meanwhile, yesterday I was just getting something out of the Bentley’s boot and Three wandered off down the driveway.
“Daddy!” he shouted, “look”, and I looked around and he was holding a snake above his head.
Australia has the world’s largest collection of deadly snakes and in this part of the world they have signs up this time of year with Watch Out, Snakes About!
If you get bitten by one of the common ones around Sydney, a brown snake, for example, you’ve got about 20 to 30 minutes before you die, maybe a bit longer if you stop moving after the bite. The nearest hospital is about 45 minutes away, even by Bentley Turbo, so I got a tad concerned, but this one was dead.
Yes, it’s very peaceful in the country.

US authorities say a Florida woman phoned the emergency 911 number three times after McDonald's employees told her they were out of Chicken McNuggets.
According to a police report, 27-year-old Fort Pierce resident Latreasa L. Goodman told authorities she paid for a 10-piece last week but was later informed the restaurant had run out.
She said employees refused to give her a refund, saying all sales were final. A cashier told police she offered Goodman a larger portion of different food for the same price, but Goodman became irate.
Police say Goodman was cited on a misuse of 911 charge.
"This is an emergency. If I would have known they didn't have McNuggets, I wouldn't have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I don't want one," Goodman told police. "This is an emergency."
Dispatchers for 911 told police Goodman called the emergency number three times and on each occasion was told an officer was en route.
A McDonald's spokeswoman said the company did not immediately have a comment on the incident.
Presumably they were still chewing it all over.
To me the funny thing is, the police actually sent officers out there, but hopefully to arrest the McLunatic rather than to try and get the nuggets for her.

Have you noticed how economists know absolutely nothing?
What I mean is, they never have a handle on what’s going on. Not ever.
Tuesday they were all tipping another interest rate cut from the Reserve Bank of Australia (our rates are still at just over 3% so still a way to go until we reach the bottom of the pit...).
The rate drop didn’t come because the bank reckoned the economy was still just about alright. Yes, they know nothing either. The following day official figues showed ‘negative growth’ (which is of course not English, but what can you do with people who work with numbers, I ask rhetorically).
The fact is, none of these cardigan-wearing, Volvo-driving, swept-over-hair types have a clue. Barely any of them saw the credit crunch coming. Even a blind man scrabbling to find his abacus could see lending money to people who didn’t even have a job was not really that wise.
Economists always tell you the in-your-face obvious. I heard one of them on TV saying, “it’s likely there will be a rate cut next month.” You do surprise me.
Now, the economists all seem to think this world recession will be beaten by people going out and buying oodles of plastic goods made in China. Oh really? You seriously think people who are just about to be laid off – because let’s face it, it could happen to any of us today or tomorrow - will splurge on more useless tatt? Please!
And, er excuse me, how did we get in this mess in the first place? Do we need an over-paid economist to tell us we bought too much stuff, using too much credit?
Frankly I could do a better job than your chief economist from whichever bastard bank is still paying their grossly inflated wages.
Here’s my professional opinion (based on ownership of a cheque book). It’s a fucked system that will remain fucked for a hugely mighty long time. I mean, no-one is going to spend large, no-one in their right minds is going to buy a car unless they absolutely have to, no-one with half a brain cell is going to get a loan for anything (even if they can get one) and no amount of ‘stimulus packages’ are going to change it. People are hanging on to the folding stuff.
And there is a long way to go before this plays out.
You know, just one thing; there are tens of thousands (maybe even a million or more) home loans in the US that allowed people to pay less than their proper repayments for a set period, the idea being that house prices would continue to rise (a bunch of economists came up with that one - ho-ho!). These loans, which have some wanky acronym like GOTCHA, are about to ‘mature’ which means loads of people won’t be able to pay the higher rates and will lose their homes. 
Can you imagine what’s going to happen then?

There’s a bit of a thing – I was going to say row, but in truth it’s just something kicked up by one of the tabloid TV channels here – about McDonalds charging more for their ‘meals’ in poorer areas of Sydney.
Really, that’s a surprise, what with McD’s being a business and all that. I thought that’s what businesses did.
But anyway, the to-do is all about hitting poor people where it hurts – in their swelling bellies presumably.
The TV channel reckons poor people have enough on their plates (er, or maybe not...) without Maccas adding to their woes with tuppence more on an ice cream cone.
The TV folks reckon poor people have to eat Big Macs and stuff their faces with McNuggets and McFat because they just can’t afford proper food.
What bollocks. If you cook your own food and choose wisely, and I’m not talking about starving yourself, you can eat very well indeed for much less than it costs to take the car down to McD’s, lever yourself out and fall through the doors into your plastic booth.
There’s the added benefit that if you avoid the fat burgers you’ll probably not need to go to the doctor’s, or ultimately hospital, quite so regularly.
Come on, cook your own food.

There’s a case running here at the moment involving former Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld - who has admitted to perjury over a $77 traffic fine. This bloke used to be one of the country’s top judges.
He’s been sitting in the dock because he tried to get off the speeding fine by saying a female friend of his was driving the car. Trouble was, at the time she was dead. Yes indeed.
Ian Barker, QC, for Einfeld, told Justice Bruce James that, "in the scale of things", the offences were trivial, but the consequences for his client were "catastrophic".
The court also heard today that Einfeld was still receiving a pension of more than $200,000 a year for being a former judge, and that Einfeld had sent people to prison for perjury.
Mr Barker said the defence accepted that the crimes of perjury and perversion of the course of justice usually attracted a full-time custodial sentence.
But "there had to be flexibility" in deciding whether a person in Einfeld's position should go to jail, he said. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he.
Yesterday the defence said Einfeld would be very depressed if he had to go to prison and his depression would be likely to get worse.
Really. Are there people who go to prison and like it? I mean, come on! Of course it’s bloody depressing – it’s bloody prison!
We’ll see, but my money’s on a suspended sentence.  

We are the champions...

Much as I like to cut Americans some slack, as they would say, I just can’t believe some aspects of Obama’s speech yesterday to Congress.
Here’s what he said about the US auto industry: “And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it."
Where on earth does he get these ‘facts’? Henry Ford did revolutionise car manufacture by mass-producing the Model T, the first assembly line car, but there is no way Americans invented the car, not unless he thinks Louis Renault (er, actually a Frenchman...) and Gottlieb Daimler (last time I looked, he was German) are somehow American!
He also said that America had given the world more prosperity than any other nation in history. News to those folks in the Roman Empire I’d imagine and to not a few Greeks, Assyrians and Chinese.  You know, people who invented things like writing paper, chairs you could sit on, currency, and special egg fried rice.
One thing the Americans definitely have given us is the worst economic meltdown in history.
I think I can safely say the whole world thanks you so much for that.

Sorry, dropped off for a bit there.
I’ve been building a large ocean-going vessel so I can float away once the rain stops and I can come out from hibernation. Honestly, it has been of biblical proportions, while an hour’s flight away my friends in Melbourne are still staring down the barrel of a fireman’s hose (the fires, madam, the fires...).

Anyway, Five is in his fifth week of school and loving it immensely. It’s all changed since my day – it appears they actually have fun there. Five told me yesterday, “Dad, Deanna is so...ohhh, so...ohhhh, beautiful, but she is not my girlfriend. Just because I like her doesn’t mean anything much, dad.”
No, really. Yesterday another girl came up to him as I was talking to his teacher (the fragrant Mrs Lavinia Violet, I kid you not) and lifted her skirt to show him her underwear. You know, as you do.
Meanwhile, I’ve signed up for him to do religious guff once a week. You know, Tom always let me make up my own mind so I’m happy to let the nipper make his up too. Thing is, it costs $4 a year for a teacher with glittering eyes and the sort of level of energy which makes me suspect he will soon self-combust (if it happens, it’d be a miracle, I assume...) to tell Five stories written by God know's who.
But if you opt for Catholic instead of Protestant guidance, it costs an extra 50 cents.
I assume that’s because you get a Pope as part of the package.

Well, I had to. You know the past few weeks it’s been mid-40sCentrigrade, really stupidly hot. So now it’s all changed around and it’s been pouring with rain non-stop for a week and the temp is down to 17C. Amazing.
So, I stoked up the combustion stove and we sat around toasting marsh mallows.
All this week it’s going to continue raining and I suspect for some time beyond that too.
Now, I tell you this because if you live in Britain you may well have come across Aussies who look at you all smug when it rains during Wimbledon and say things like, “so, this is what you call summer!” When they start, direct them to me.
Of course, I’ve still been getting it in the neck. On the weekend a friend called and I said I’d had the fire going and she said, “Yes, it must remind you of home.”
“Yes, I said, BUT WE DON’T HAVE FIRES ON DURING THE BLOODY SUMMER!”
Anyway, I have to say I love the rain, so there.

I never thought I'd end up like my parents.
You know, with their endless diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up, what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.
Uphill. Barefoot.
Both ways.
I remember promising myself I wouldn’t do that.
But now I’m older, and of course, wiser. And I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.
I mean really, you've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damned Utopia!
And I hate to say it but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!
I mean, when I was a kid, we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, We had to go to the library and look it up ourselves. In the card catalogue!!
There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter. With a pen!
Then you had to walk all the way to the village and put it in the postbox and it would take like a week to get there!
Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to give us a kick up the arse! Nowhere was safe!
There were no MP3 players or Napsters, whatever they are! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the nearest town and visit the record store and shoplift it yourself!
Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!
There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favourite tape and "eject" it when finished and the tape would all unravel. And it didn’t matter how long you took respooling it with a pencil (which we also used for writing, as there were no computers), it never worked properly again.
We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!
And we didn't have Caller ID either!
When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school,your mum, your boss, your Bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics!
We had the Atari 2600!
With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'asteroids'. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever!
And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!
You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You didn’t channel surf because there were no remote controls.
You had to get off your arse and walk over to the TV to change the channel!
There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoilt little rat-bastards!
And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the oven ... Imagine that!
Honestly, you kids today have got it too easy.
You're spoilt. You wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1976.

You know, there’s always one.
Australia’s Catch the Fire Ministries has tried to blame the bushfires disaster on laws decriminalising abortion in Victoria.

The Pentecostal church’s leader, Pastor Danny Nalliah, claimed he had a dream about raging fires on October 21 last year and that he woke with "a flash from the Spirit of God: that His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb".

I had a few dreams last week. I dreamt Bill Clinton and I were going to a party. Bill was late and when he turned up in his big limo I had a go at him. He was suitably chastened; I called Five to come and have a look at the chipmunks who were building a city of mud; Amy Winehouse asked me if I could write another song for her; my brother cycled past me singing in Italian and I laughed myself silly; a duck bit me; Angelina Jolie said, honey, turn the light out.

...it would look something like this if you compared it with the fires that have been burning in Victoria state over the weekend where around 200 people have now lost their lives.
 
It’s equivalent to fires wiping out several of the larger Cotswold villages and their surrounding hamlets/farms (ie: Victoria’s Marysville, Kinglake and the Yarra Valley), while other big fires simultaneously razed, say, an area of Dorset (the Bendigo fires) and the whole of rural Kent (Gippsland), while another fire front was threatening the Peak District (Beechworth and the Australian Alps).

In other words - the whole of the State was under threat and you simply didn't know where the bushfires would start and then, more to the point, where they would spread because of the wild, galeforce winds on Saturday coupled with temperatures that for days had sat in the 40s (over 100 Fahrenheit)

On the geography of Victoria, relative to other Australian States it is small in size, so relatively it is more densely populated than other parts of the country, and the towns and townships (villages) are closer together but the topography and other natural features (lakes, rivers, forests) often means there isn't as broad a network of roads as you would find in Britain so the means of escape is limited.

Now, add to this, that 60% of Queensland (north-east Australia) has been under water all of last week (ie, the whole of England) following intense low depressions/cyclone activity, and I think you’ll get a bit of a feel for how it’s affecting us all.

The good news is, here on our mountain we had 19C today and some heavy rain and fog, and that’s set to continue for at least a week, so that’ll stop any fires developing here.

Meanwhile, in Victoria, it’s still hot and windy and several fires are building in intensity with a number of towns threatened...

So, as you may have seen on the news, over 100 people have lost their lives in the bushfires sweeping across Victoria on the weekend. Honestly, these fires are so powerful and move so quickly there's often nothing you can do. Some of the people were burned alive in their cars as they tried to flee. It's absolutely tragic.
The PM, Kevin Rudd, has now sent the army in to help, though why they were not used as a matter of course I don't know. I imagine some questions will be asked about that at some stage.
Of course, several of the fires appea to be the work of arsonists who when caught - and they will be caught believe you me - will be charged with murder. Honestly, I would not like to be in their shoes...
I spent most of the 47C weekend sniffing the air and on Saturday we had some smoke misting the air but I'm not sure where it came from but we had no dramas just where we are.
Today it's incredibly humid but the temp has dropped to 21C, as it does, so it's a bit more bearable.

On a lighter note, I went to George's 40th this weekend. I'll tell you more about it tomorrow because I really need to spend some time on my thriller today, but suffice to say he had near-naked girls serving canapes and drinks, a light show they could probably see from Pluto and sufficient loud music to get the boys in blue around on no less than three occasions...Definitely a mid-life crisis, if you ask me.

Sorry, I’ve been inside the double-door Electrolux for the past week trying to keep cool.
This weekend, in typical Australian boasting fashion we will once again be absolute tops at something – this time, according to Channel Ten (the same people who said Hugh Jackman was the world’s top actor – news to de Niro, I’d imagine...) we will be living in the hottest place on earth.
Look, I don’t want to argue that one too much though I’d have thought there’s a spot somewhere in the Gobi desert that’s a tad warm too, but this weekend is a scorcher.
All week it’s been 40C and it’s just dreadful. Really you can’t do anything except put the air conditioning on and hope the power doesn’t go off – which it did yesterday for 20 minutes.
This weekend it could reach a record-breaking 50C which is not funny. You just can’t do anything but stay indoors and try and breathe really slowly.
We had leaflets through the door this week from the fire people saying if we want to stay and defend our house in the event of an expected bushfire we should make the decision now, or else go and stay somewhere else for the next few days – like Yorkshire, presumably.
Of course we’ll stay and hope the power doesn’t go off if the flames come because then we won’t be able to pump any water.
That aside, Five has just started school which he loves. They’ve been battening down the hatches there too, telling the kids on Friday that they wouldn’t be allowed to go outside all day – you know, because they don’t want deaths on their hands.
In The Independent last week there was a story which you woulnd’t read about here that said Australia might well be the first country to implode under the effects of global warming. I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, a big bit of our ‘industry’ is farming and some places haven’t had a drop of rain for, wait for it, 10 years.
Rivers are running dry down south, even big ones like the Murray-Darling, while up in Queensland they’ve got more rain than you can shake a brolly at and whole towns are under water. Some of them, like Cairns, are having food delivered by helicopter or boat because there are no roads still passable by truck.
Anyway, we’ll see. But I hope you’ll excuse me, I’m just off to sit in the fridge for a while.

So, on Thursday, Five’s second baby tooth started wobbling and thanks to a big box of popcorn at the cinema (Hotel for Dogs was showing, if you must know) it came half out. The shock of it not just popping out like the last one made him howl and cry worse than any of the dogs on the movie. Indeed, for a while I’m sure other patrons thought it was the movie dogs making all the noise.
Upshot of all of this was that he wouldn’t eat anything and wouldn’t drink anything either. By Sunday he’d not eaten or drunk anything and he was dehydrating, especially considering the 42C heat we’ve been having, and by Sunday evening was becoming delirious and throwing up, which was a worry.
I eventually made the decision to call the doctor who said go to the hospital right now.
You know, sometimes in life you just have an experience you’ll never forget. I’ll paraphrase this one because if I write about it all we’ll be here for, well, about three days.

6.45pm: Arrive at hospital, carrying Five who is muttering like an old man. Take him down to the GP, growls the witch on reception. For a moment I think I must have entered a time warp and been transported to Auschwitz.
7.30pm: Meet GP who has just arrived from Iran, speaks no English and has worried, harried look as if secret police are still after him. Why have they sent you here, he asks before sending us back to Emergency.
7.32pm: Witch says, you will still be in the same place in the queue. By my reckoning that means we should be seeing a doctor about now. Of course, it’s a lie.
8.15pm: Five throws up every 15 minutes.
8.30pm: Three entertains the growing crowd of sick people with various songs he has heard on the radio. Grimacing I make a note to myself not to let him hear lyrics again like, my father loves a vamp, he looks just like a tramp and he’ll fuck you senseless all night, yeah, yeah, yeah, he will, or something like that.
9.30pm: Where are we in the queue, I ask the witch. You’re next, she lies.
10.30: Witch invites us into inner sanctum and looks at Five and says, so what appears to be the problem. I tell her. She says, let’s give him an ice lolly. I roll my eyes. Five likes idea of ice lolly. Throws it up after 15 minutes. Wait outside, she says, you’ll be next.
11.30pm: I want a bottle of water, whines Three every two seconds. We don’t have change, I say, every three seconds.
11.32pm: Bloke with his aged father who looks like he might already have passed away hands me three dollars for the drinks machine. Some people are very good indeed.
12 midnight: Bloke comes in with head wound, bleeding profusely, but still clutching beer bottle. His t-shirt says, Love Sucks, True Loves Swallows.
12.20am: Three says, daddy, what does that man’s t-shirt say. I laugh. Love Sucks stares at me. I stop laughing and give him a London look. I can tell he realises it will go like this: What are you looking at? I have no idea, I would say. His beer is almost empty.
1.15am: Everyone before us has been seen. Goodbye, says witch as she takes her corpulent lying self home where I suspect she will never feel guilty about taking the public’s money for nothing.
1.30am. More drunks arrive sporting various head wounds. I hear one was the result of a baseball bat, another fell off a wall, one more outran the police before being hit by a car, and another seems uninjured but is full of injury stories, as in, I lost my two front teeth here, my arm got broken there. I’m thinking, and when did your brain drop out.
2.15am: We get to see a doctor. He says, get him to drink some water. Three lies down on the bed and sleeps. He’ll recover, says the doctor, tussling his hair. That’s not the ill one, I say.
2.30am: I’ll be back in a minute, says the lying doctor.
2.45: Five says, I feel a lot better now. Can we go home?
3.00am: I pick both the sleeping kids up. Love Sucks is asleep, his beer bottle spilling dregs on the seat beside him.
3.01am: Three-dollar bloke says, good luck, mate. His soon to be deceased father waves his walking stick and smiles his goodbye and I think, that’s where the good manners come from. If God existed he'd bless you.
3.02am: The doors whup open.
It’s cool outside. It's silent. The sky is full of stars. 

Yesterday we went to Sydney's Powerhouse Museum. Now that we’ve moved it’s a 12 hour journey, well it feels like that with two squabbling kids on board the Bentley.

They have this Star Wars exhibition on titled Where Science Meets Imagination but I think it should really be called Where Branding Meets Kids And Parents Get Fleeced.
Honestly, it’s supposed to be a museum but alongside all the Star Wars ‘exhibitions’ they’ve got so many things on sale – Lego, light sabres from every province in China, alarm clocks which beam the time on your kids wall and which, by my Rolex at least, will last about 49 minutes before fizzing and zizzing and never lighting anything up again, character costumes that don’t make you look like Anakin Skywalker and even huge cardboard cut-outs of your favourite characters which look great until you realise even a Hummer can’t accommodate their size so you’ll have to double fold Count Dooko to get him on board, and he’ll never be the same again.

So after doing all that we go to the Members’ Lounge which is this haven of tranquillity where you get free drinks and biscuits and the morning paper and you can sit in the sun streaming through the glass roof and almost imagine for a moment or two that your life is still your own. So, we're sitting there having lunch. Five finishes his sandwich (made by my fair hands with a concoction of Hawkesbury River prawns, mayo – the proper stuff, madam, not Kraft – dill and mint) and then helps himself to a pile of biscuits on the next table, which belong to some woman who's with her kids, takes a big bite and his tooth comes out.

It is quiet in there. Well not when Five loses a tooth...
Three said, "Five, what is that face for?"

Anyhow, after a little bit of bleeding and loads of "daddy I am so sad my tooth will not be in my mouth anymore", he was fine. By the time we got in the lift to go he was wondering whether the tooth fairy would bring him chocolate or money, "but I hope she does not bring me a toothbrush and toothpaste because that really would not be a good idea, you know...".
That evening as he slept like only a Five year old can do, all spread-eagled and clutching his bear with the fan whirring overhead, it’s cool breeze kissing his hair, I took his baby tooth from under his pillow and replaced it with a shiny gold dollar.
In the morning he came down all sleepy-eyed, clutching the gleaming dollar and said, “Dad, look, the tooth fairy gave me a dollar.” He looked at it and then looked at me. “Dad, is that all I get?”

Yesterday I went with the nippers to the nearest big town and at 11.30am the temperature was 43C, can you imagine. It was hard even to walk from the car to the shops but we had to go because we were on the hunt for Chocko Monkey.

Actually there is no such thing. I think its real name is Yogo, or something like that but the kids have always called it Chocko Monkey because some tubs used to have a picture of a monkey on it, for some obscure reason. It’s a yogurt-type thing made with chocolate. I don’t let them have it very often because the makers squeeze the contents of an entire sugar cane field into every tub, but now and again it’s okay, especially considering they probably burn it off quicker than a bushfire.
Speaking of which, the one near us has eventually been put out. Apparently it was started by someone torching an abandoned car, you know, as you do.
Last night the firies, as they are called here, had to take their trucks and stuff to another fire down in the valley which destroyed some houses and cars as it swept towards a village. Seems like that’s under control too now but it took 250 firefighters and two aircraft dumping water to stop it.
We had some rain last night and today the temp is unlikely to go above 27, which is good. I woke up this morning at 5am shivering, can you believe.
Anyway, back to the Chocko Monkey. We went into the supermarket, the kids chanting, Chocko Monkey, Chocko Monkey, but they’d had a power cut sometime before and had emptied the cooler shelves. When we got there they were just starting to restock the shelves.
“Where’s the Chocko Monkey?” asked Five.
This old woman with those watery eyes looked at him and said, “What’s that luv?”
“Chocko Monkey,” said Three. “We want Chocko Monkey.”
“Oh yes,” said the woman, who stood up and shouted down the row of shelf packers, “Where’s the Chocko Monkey?”
They all looked at her, apart from one especially vacant bulbous one who was grunting and hitching her trousers like she was wrestling with herself.
“We don’t sell monkeys,” whinnied one acned youth. They all looked at him. His spots glowed.
“I said,” shouted the woman, “where are the Chocko Monkeys?”
A big smiling fat bloke, you know, the sort who thinks there’s a career here in this place, or maybe in this department (Head of Shelf Stocking and Replenishment - Spreads, maybe) came up all sprightly.
“Maeve, we’re clean out of Rocko Chunkeys at the moment but I’ll put a requistion 842 in now,” and he winked at her, “in triplicate, Maeve, and we should have them in sometime next week.”
“Thanks for that,” I said.
“Dad,” said Five, “I’ve changed my mind. Can we have Rocko Chunkeys instead?”

Yesterday the mercury hit 40C here and during the night it never dropped below 24. At 7am it was 28 and we're tipped to have a 42C temp today, so you know, it's hot. Last night the mountain ridge which joins the one we live on caught fire and they've been using helicopters all night to water bomb it, so not much sleep for us. The air is thick with smoke and ash is falling like snow.

I was thinking of taking the nippers to the open air baths today but though it sounds silly, it's just going to be too hot to be out and about. I think we'll go to the bank instead because they have very efficient air conditioning which I have of course partly paid for so I might as well get my money's worth. Oh yes, I have a couple of cheques to put in too.

Talking of money, next week Three begins pre-school for two days a week and the week after that Five starts big school, which he's looking forward to, so that will give me a bit of time to start getting some more work in. During December I had nothing and January will be the same as everyone takes their summer holidays. I need some paying work pretty quick so we can afford the water to put the fires out. Meanwhile I'm halfway through a second draft of a thriller called Mr Wolf. I was going to stop writing fiction as I can't get anywhere with it but I like doing it and some of my friends like my stories so I'll do it for them - fuck the publishers.

Right then, let's get moving.

I had a friend who used to work for one of those book clubs.
While they were preparing one of their regular brochures she noticed they'd spelt an author's name wrong. She pointed it out but they decided to go with it anyway, wrong as it was, because the girl in charge said, "look he's not that well known." And neither will he be if you don't spell his name correctly, said my friend to herself as she feverishly looked for another job where they could spell professionalism.

I remembered this today because I was just scanning The Independent on-line. I used to work for them back when they started and they always had one golden rule - get your facts right. That's always a useful rule for a newspaper but I guess it must have changed since I left Blighty. I was just reading the story now about Tony Blair, who I understand used to be the much-loved PM of your fine country, and they mentioned that he was awarded a medal by George Bush for services to smiling, or something like that. Here's the link http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-spoils-of-war-parting-gift-for-bushs-brother-in-arms-1334239.html

Anyhow, as you'll see, it also mentions the previous PM of our sun-kissed continent who also received a hug from George. The Indy referred to him as Michael Howard. I don't know him (well actually I do - he used to be a Thatcher Minister, didn't he...).

We used to have a PM for the last 12 years who was called John Howard by his parents, and somehow the name stuck .
But I'm not worried - after all, we're an awful long way away and not really well known.

I’ll give you a bit of a guided tour of our new environs, as I know some of you like the idea of Australia and all it has to offer, and who can blame you as you sit shivering in a northern winter.

Yesterday it was 37C here which is a bit too hot for anyone’s liking. Apparently it’s a fact that the human brain stops functioning properly over 36C, so that explains plenty then.

We went to one of the parks near here yesterday (there are about eight parks within a five minute drive, can you believe) and Five spent five minutes gambolling around before complaining, “Dad, it’s too hot, let’s go home”. I met a woman with her two kids who were also complaining about the heat. Really it is oppressive; the air hums and vibrates, nothing moves, red dust sits heavy on the wilting leaves, insects whine like banshees, your car ticks.

Where we live there’s one road in and one road out, which puts some people off. I mean if you have a bushfire you have to hope someone can put it out quick-smart, otherwise you’ll be getting more heat than you bargained for.

That all said, we live on a mountain so there’s almost always a breeze up here. You can see Sydney off about 60km on the plain below, sitting under a brown haze of smog. Sometimes I sit on the front verandah early morning and as the sun comes up and turns the yellow leaves gold I imagine the people sitting in traffic jams in their cars and I think, right I’ll have another cup of tea.

Anyhow, today is set to be another scorcher. Three has been a bit sick the last two days so we’ll probably stay in today and play soldiers with Five’s castle.

Yesterday when I was in the doctor’s Three ran into the waiting room singing some song he’d heard at the top of his voice which goes, “they call me Jane, they call me Stacey. That’s not my name”. The other day I was planting the Christmas tree (don’t worry it isn’t a plastic one) and I heard him singing in the house at full pelt, “I kiss the girls, yes I kiss the girls.”

...blogging, that is. Every time I make a decision to finish it all, scrap my blog, tear up the pages (virtually, of course...) and do something decent, noteworthy, hell, even something good for humanity, I find I’m tapping my fingers on the desk. It starts off as a tap here and a tap there but pretty soon my fingers are searching out the keyboard and going at it like Mozart, well without the final symphony, obviously.

Anyway, I promise not to promise to drop off again. It is all too stressful making these life-changing decisions.

Talking of stress and decisions...for about 13 years now my doctor (well, every time I see him he ask me to take my clothes off so he surely must be a man of the bedside manner) has been telling me he wanted to get me on blood pressure pills. Clearly he has shares in Pfizer and must be really unhappy that so far I’d fended him off. I calculate his lost additional earnings at somewhere approaching $2million, plus several lost opportunities to go on free medical company trips to places like the Seychelles and the flesh pots of Amsterdam.

In reality my blood pressure has not been sky high. One week Doctor Mengele had me wearing one of those blood pressure monitors. It has a pump which inflates a bag plastered to your arm, invisible under your shirt. I tell you, thanks to the regular hiss of this thing, and the rapidly expanding bulge it suddenly made in my shirt, in meetings girls avoided me and even Gav in accounts who was well known for his prediliction for all things inflatable shuffled his feet and looked nervous.

But really, sometimes it was up, sometimes it was down. And the blood pressure too.

Since we’ve moved to the country I’ve got really unfit though. Because the kids are up from dawn to dusk I’m too knackered to walk anywhere other than to the sofa and usually I’d clutch a bottle of Coopers Pale Ale to help me unwind (er, actually I’d do more than that – I’d drink the beer inside too...). My weight is up and my sense of humour has been down lower than the Nasdaq.

So, the point of this ramble is that new home, new doctor. This one is a woman and clearly a relative of Luciano Pavarotti. Frankly what business she has telling anyone they are unfit is beyond me, but I have to say I do much prefer undressing for her.

She’s put me on these blood pressure pills – one miniscule one a day – which has given me the blood pressure of a 15 year old. Thing is, I also had a battery of blood tests, the idea being that you have high blood pressure and things like your kidneys don’t like it and explode, or something.
When they order these blood tests they like to go for the whole banquet. They took 14 litres which is an amount more that I can drink, well in an hour anyway.

So, the news is, I have a liver and kidneys which, were there such an event, could be entered in the Olympics. Rather than floundering and spluttering, apparently they are firing on all cylinders and doing a fine job. They are the V8 Supercar of internal organs.

All the other stuff is good too. Apparently my penis is still there (and I’m told it still works too), I have only a bag and a half of sugar in my blood at any one time and my iron and folate levels are spot on.

Trouble is, of course there is always some bad news when you go to the doctor’s and in my case it is that my cholesterol is at 8.0. Jesus!, this is higher than that girl’s hemline in the local fruit market, and believe you me that is very high indeed. When she gave me the info the doctor reached slowly for the phone, but then stopped. I think she realised even an ambulance couldn’t get there in time.

Personally I feel super, or at least I did until I read the list of things you can’t drink or eat when your cholesterol is that high. I mean really I should just give up eating and certainly chop in those shares I have in Coopers Brewery and instead spend the money on a half-decent coffin.

Seriously though, the time has come. I have to get fit again, stop the drinking, put the biscuits away, no more peanuts, drop the slabs of cheese, let more pigs roam free rather than eating them, and definitely, most definitely pump up the tires on my bike.

Yes, I will try it.
I think by Friday I’ll be fine.

Yeah, yeah, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, once I've finished with the analyst (I'm helping him move his couch next door).