43 degrees of summer nasty

The tree ferns are against this.  They want to be deep in a rainforest gully in the moist Otways, mouldering under a canopy and working on getting some mossy sideburns going, not frying away in a city backyard.

And here below is a wider shot of the backyard.  I’d say the azaleas have had it.

Ants

They are everywhere and they are bastardos.

You expect a contest in the kitchen.  That is as it should be.  So even as you resist — in the cupboards, on the bench, in the bin — you expect no more than to check them momentarily.  And even finding them in the fridge —  wearing coats expertly sewn from animal fur – you are dismayed but not broken.  

But when they camp amongst books in the bedside table or they nip at you in the privacy of your morning ablutions or they march through the airconditoner and across the house in a mighty river to attack an unsealed box of Tic Tacs, then the futility of appeasement is clear. 

The sticks of chalk which promise to disable the ant’s nervous system are so far proving effective.  I think the active ingredient is napalm.

Border Post

A border is an idea.  We layer it on the landscape and the landscape ignores it.

But we have a mental map and we have preconceptions, so we cross the border with our senses alive, anticipating strangeness to show itself.

Serbia -> Montenegro

Hungover.  After a string of hillside Muslim villages we climb to a high mountain pass. Fir trees and fog. Grumpy Serb guards – who can blame them, so often divorced.  The Montenegrins are lumbering and huge.  Enter the land of the jolly mountain giants.   

Syria -> Turkey

Sheer stupidity.  A night bus.  Everyone smuggling.  Bulging plastic bags stashed under seats, in compartments under the floor.  A friendly Tunisian helped with the tickets and sold me an unfinished coffee pot stamped USSR.  They made the best, apparently.  Now as a favour we hide two black bags of sugar and cloves in our packs. Sugar and cloves. We don’t even check and only when the Turks start rummaging does it hit me.

Laos -> Thailand

Brought low by a night of vomiting and shitting and shitting and vomiting etc.  Across the narrow Mekong is Thailand.  We enter a day late drained of everything.

Germany -> Poland

On the trip from Czech young Polish law students coming home take us under their wing.  The night train drags.  We change every few hours. Then the bus, and the hours become giddy and light-headed.  Walk to the border – a bridge over the dark-running Oder River, a kiosk, hours in a pub waiting for the next bus, addresses, pale skin girls in fur hooded coats, we gaze at fields blanked by snow and I am asked ‘what does it look like to you?’.  A favourite.

Serbia -> Macedonia

Summoned off the train in the early hours.  Cold fields and nothing around.  I recall the crunch of my boots on the railway gravel, the train huge beside me, everything still. At the guard hut its all fun and games.  Naked girls on the walls.  The smell of coffee, uniforms and cigarette smoke.  ‘Australia? Very good!’.  Handshakes.  Free visa.  Nice to be an unthreatening oddity.

Bosnia -> Serbia

The man at the desk uses the plastic ink tube of a ballpoint pen to stab at something jammed in an old receipt-issuing machine.  I sit there and long minutes go by.  Deeply treed slopes are hurtling into a ravine.

Macedonia -> Greece

Most unhappy border.  Mutual invisibility. You don’t see us we don’t see you, except to say Fuck Off Greece on the walls of Bitola.  Take a taxi through fields of poppies.  At the check the driver is suddenly tense – We friends.  Not taxi.  Don’t talk.  And the guard looks at my expensive visa and says – No need. No need?  Then give me back my money, you Macedonian bastards!

Amazing facts!

Whenever I find myself telling an amazing fact, at the back of my mind a little thought rears up:

Geez I hope they don’t google that.

I have no evidence for most of my amazing facts and I suspect most are wrong.

So..my top 5 amazing facts which may not be facts at all:

1.  John Howard and Paul Keating are the same height.

This one never fails.  Everyone loves it.  It first stuns them with its breathtaking wrongness, then it reels them in by stroking their prejudices.  Once they pick themselves up from the floor, the next line is always: “It just goes to show that Keating’s vision and charisma makes him seem tall, whereas Howard — little Johnny — is a mean little small-picture man”.

God knows whether its a true fact.  I hope not.  We need more such facts to circulate.  I have a friend who tells people that John Howard was runner-up in the under-15 New South Wales BMX championships.  That ‘fact’ is a harder sell.

2. Guinness has less calories/fat than skim milk

This one could well be true.  Most people generally doubt it though.

3. Turkey is importing labour now

Always gets a ‘wow!’ response, then some talk along the lines of how well the Turks are doing, which allows me to come straight back in with a favourite topic: why Turkey should be in the EU.  I think I read this in The Economist.

4. Boiled water makes ice faster 

Never tested the veracity of this one and I don’t care to.  Not a bad fact to throw in when a G&T is being prepared and the host has run out of ice.  No one tries it, of course, since you’d need to wait for the water to cool down.  If asked to explain further I discuss the ‘fact’ that boiled water has less oxygen in it and hence, etc etc, freezes faster.  True or not, who cares?

5.  Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite

This is a curious one.  My source is my mother, who is knowledgeable on the topic of endocrinology, glands, gender ambivalence and so on, from her work.  So I tend to believe it.  At the same time, it is entirely possible that the celebrity she told me about years ago was not JLC, or maybe it was but the curio did not pertain to hermaphrodism and was rather something different…

Like all these facts it has the desired balance between outlandishness and the ring of truth.  The actress is obscure enough these days for this tidbit to have escaped general public knowledge.

Adults have a responsibility to stock kids with these little non-facts.  It can take many years before the deception is revealed, and (if it was harmless enough) we all enjoy the moment of seeing our parents humour revealed.  It is a little present for the future.