Random 100th post

This is my 100th post on this blog. I think I've been in Australia for about 250 days so I guess that's not a bad posting average. Having said that, I'm getting a little bored of posting in the current format, so my mission for this next week is to shake things up a little bit, possibly with some form of 'photo of the day' approach (I need to start using my camera a bit more than I have been as I've been slacking with putting my photography course from last year into practice).

I'll start with a randomly captured image from a week or so ago (artistic license!).

I walked past this car on my street on my way to get the train into work. It had been fairly wet the night before - obviously enough to cause the branch to collapse in a sodden heap! Not a nice way to start the day for the owner!

And the 2nd one is my view from train station platform while waiting for my train to work.

I realise I've been a bit down on Australia and Australians in recent posts, which is probably a bit unfair of me - apologies Australia! I've met lots of good people here and if I've been a bit negative, it's probably more to do with my natural tendency to take an opposite view of things to the majority around me - so I react against the unrelenting positivity of the average Aussie!!!

This week has been another busy one for both K and I - we have been a bit like ships passing in the night as he's been away in Canberra, Newcastle and Melbourne, and I've been down on the southern New South Wales coast. That old cliche, "quality time", is on the agenda for this weekend and we're also going walking in the Blue Mountains tomorrow with a few other people, so here's hoping for a rejuvenating, refreshing, relaxing weekend.

Whizz - there goes another week

The last week has been really busy but I can’t think of anything particular to write about in this blog. Here’s all I can really remember!

• I had a really crap, demoralising week at work (various things that probably best I don’t write about in public), although it ended reasonably positively.

• We had a friend from work in Scotland staying with us for most of the week which was nice but meant that K and I had almost no time on our own together, so this weekend it’s been good to actually catch up on each other’s weeks!

• I had a good skype chat with my pal Will on Monday and a good phone chat with my brother today, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed – tis good to talk, as they say!

• I drank far more than is healthy due to going out for dinner with group of pals from social enterprise after a particularly bad day at work on Thursday, which had me reaching for my glass of red wine more frequently than is sensible – oh well.

• Despite being pretty whacked by the week’s events, we ended up watching Man U-Liverpool in the pub with some friends till 2am last night, which perhaps explains why we’re both a bit zombie like today.

• I went running 3 times, to the gym twice and am going again later today – so it’s not all been too unhealthy!

• My homesickness from last week seems to have abated a bit, maybe because visit in May is getting closer.

Homesickness

Homesickness is a funny thing. Most of the time I don’t particularly feel it and although I miss family and friends, I feel reasonably in touch with people to avoid anything too bad. I haven’t found myself particularly craving haggis or Irn Bru or feeling the need to wrap myself in a Saltire or anything like that. And I’m really enjoying lots of things about being here. But I think one of the really hard things about being away from home is that it’s really quite hard to feel at home in a different place. Other times I’ve been away, I’ve been away for shortish periods of time where by the time the initial excitement and ‘wow isn’t this so different and amazing’ phase wears off, it’s almost time to go home again. Here, because we’re here for a few years, it’s inevitable that we’re reaching the ‘settling into life in a new country’ phase and bizarrely instead of feeling more at home here, I feel less so. It’s something to do with not having shared history, shared culture, shared sense of identity, shared values. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I’ve definitely noticed over the past couple of months that I’m getting increasingly irritated by the “Aussie way of life” (shallow, superficial, individualistic, arrogant, unconcerned with social justice) What was mildly amusing when we first got here is actually getting me down a bit because I feel like I don’t fit in and I’m having an increasing number of moments where I find myself really missing the way of life in the UK (at which point I try to rub off the rose tint on my glasses!!!). Someone told me once that the average length of time people who’ve emigrated here permanently actually stay for is only 2 years. I was shocked and amazed by that at the time, but now, to be honest, I really understand why. It could be a Sydney thing rather than an Australia thing mind you – as whenever I’m in Melbourne I feel very at home. Maybe we should have moved there after all!!

Two seasons in one country

Apparently it’s a truism in Australia that there are only two seasons here – drought and flood. So after the bushfires that have made headlines around the world, now we have Cyclone Hamish, the worst cyclone to hit the east coast since the ubiquitous ‘when records began’ (does this mean since vinyl was invented?!). Queensland has been quietly flooding for a while and not getting much news because of the fires in Victoria, but now it looks like yet another natural, or possibly human-helped, catastrophe will be the talk of the town.

Life’s a drag

The Mardi Gras is on in Sydney at the moment. The main parade is widely heralded as a “Sydney institution” and was one of the things we put on our “things to do in Sydney” list when we first arrived here in July. Saturday night was the event itself and (unfortunately) was a bit of a damp squib. One of my colleagues said the best way to see it is to be in it, and I can understand why. The route is fairly short (pretty much restricted to the main thoroughfare in the ‘gay’ part of the city) and the crowds are big, so it’s kind of impossible to see anything unless you’re right at the front. I managed to see a bit thanks to clambering on K’s shoulders (benefits of having a 6’ 4” boyfriend!), but couldn’t keep that going for the whole thing! From what I could see, some of the floats were pretty impressive but most were quite basic and not the all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza I’d been expecting. That, and the gaggles of pissed 15 year olds everywhere made the whole experience a bit less than I was hoping for…oh well.

Celebrating idiocy

So, despite the fact that there have been two shark attacks at dawn and dusk in recent weeks (see post below) and therefore people have been warned repeatedly not to go in the water at these times (as this is when sharks feed), some teenager and his dad went surfing on a deserted beach at dawn on Sunday morning (you're also meant to go in water when lots of people around - big numbers put sharks off). Lo and behold, said teenager gets bitten by a shark and instead of the media highlighting the utter stupidity of him and his dad, instead it's poor old sharks that are getting a bad press, with talk of increased shark fishing quotas (note - sharks are actually endangered) and macho rubbish about shooting every shark on sight.

Sigh...

Up & over

I’m reading Vaclav Havel’s autobiography (To the Castle and Back) at the moment – just started. I liked this observation from some time he spent in Washington just after the pope died.

“America is a rather odd country. It’s very religious, and at the same time it allows the broadcast of the pope’s funeral to be interrupted by advertisements, many of which were the direct embodiment of what he had criticized for his entire life. I found it truly hard to understand, and it made me more and more uncomfortable, until I finally switched the television off.”

On a less serious note, K and I went to a grand prix athletics event last night. It cost us $15 each (about £6) which is a bit of a bargain – most sports events here are really good value, especially compared to UK prices. We saw Asafa Powell, some other Olympic medallists and then Steve Hooker, Australia’s gold medallist in the pole vault. He’s aiming to beat Sergei Bubka’s long-standing world record – didn’t come too close last night but it was great to see an athlete of that calibre in action.