Real Tart

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.