Will the last Englishman out of the country turn the lights out please ?

Three years …

Well here we are. Three years down the line and, as is traditional on this anniversary I like to reflect on our lives here in Australia since we emigrated from England. The first thing to say is that this past year has been the most difficult – financially, emotionally and physically – but most of all, financially.

Paying the bills
Workwise, my little PC repair business has faltered – it had a promising start, but work has dried up lately thanks in part to this global recession thingy. I hope to pump some new life into the business, but it was never going to make me a millionaire. So I’m also looking at the alternatives and at the moment I’m applying for fulltime work. This falls into two camps – jobs from my old life in the media industry (which if it happened would mean a commute to Sydney everyday) or local jobs where I can retrain as something else (including, I shit you not, a prison guard).

Liz’s business continues to go well, although we’ve had to find money to pay for the failures of an inept accountant and a large surprise tax bill – along with the daily difficulties she faces running business in two hemispheres. We are, at least, making ends meet – though we often have to perform various monetary miracles each month to get the mortgage payment in the account.

We were thrilled to find out that Kevin Rudd was going to stimulate us, and the $2000 cash handout we got from that meant the mortgage was paid for one month without too many dramas. The plummeting interest rates also helped us a great deal, dropping our mortgage payments by about $700 a month – though of course we’ll start hurting again when those interest rates inevitably climb skywards again. Hopefully by then I’ll have got meself a job.

Like most people we save cash where and when we can. We got rid of things like Austar and have started shopping for groceries more sensibly. We now do a large shop every two weeks in Aldi, rather than lots of small shops in the more expensive IGA (think, co-op non-Australians) in Broughton. We have had to put our plans for trips to the UK and America on hold and I’ve told the boat designers to use cheaper marble in the en-suite on the 50 footer.

The Sprog
Jack’s had quite a year of it at school too – lots of growing up has been going on. He’s a real brainbox and his mental capacity certainly outstrips his social skills – but he’s getting there. He had an outstanding school report this year and a gold stamp from the principal, which was great. He’s discovered that he hates teams sports, loves running and writing and using computers. So, ermmm, nothing like his dad then. He’s in a pretty shite class this year (they lumped all the ‘problem’ kids together) but we’re hoping he gets a better deal next year.

The Missus
She’s been slogging her guts out keeping a roof over our heads, while dealing with difficult clients on both sides of the planet (no, not you Jerry!). Oh and she’s got a second cat – a kitten called Simon who arrived on her birthday. Won’t say much more than that, because she reads the blog and I’ll get a cuff round the ear.

Rest and Relaxation
We still love living in our house in our small town, but you have to work hard not to take somewhere for granted. You get into your daily routine and before you know it, it’s three weeks since you walked on the beach. Why move to a coastal location if you’re not going to make the most of the coast? Makes no sense. I remember before we emigrated, reading all these posts from disgruntled British expats saying that the beach was boring and that after you’d been there for a few months you never bothered going. I thought it then and I think it now – move, then! It’s like people have this bizarre fantasy of what life’s going to be like here and unless there’s a palm-tree fringed beach involved, it’s not a goer. This despite the fact that most people, when it comes down to it, find the beach a bit of a bore. Ho hum.

So we make an effort to get out of the house. We walk the dog down by the river, we drive to Black Head and look out for whales and dolphins, we go to the headland in Gerroa, we walk on our own beach. It’s good for the soul, but we’re basically your average humans, prone to sitting on the sofa watching CSI Mentally Lie To Me Miami House.

So yes, what else? I’m currently fat. I was making good headway with a fitness regime last year, but in a kind of inverse new years resolution it all petered out after the new year. However I need to be in fairly good shape to patrol the beach here as a surf lifesaver and so I know that I’m going to have to hit the gym again any day now. Before I know it the surf lifesaving season will begin and I’ll have to do my proficiency and I sure as shit ain’t doing that when I’m puffed running for the bus. So yes – spin classes and laps in the pool await.

This year I made more gains in the surf lifesaving club, picking up my patrol captain, spinal, defib and IRB drivers awards. The IRB drivers was a big deal for me and I feel I’ve achieved something in getting it. It basically took me three years to get that award.

Oz in general
It’s all part of the wallpaper now really. Three years in, we know how everything works, what brands to buy in the supermarket, how to buy houses, car and pies, what day bin-day is on, why they all go to bed at 9:00pm, who Bert Newton is, how Centrelink works, why they drive in the middle of the road and what Lammingtons is.

We’ve made some good friends since we arrived here.You can’t expect these sorts of things to happen overnight and in our case they haven’t. We’ve made a few mistakes along the way, but that’s been half the fun to be honest.

The final thought
And that’s it really. Are our lives better here than they were in the UK? In some ways yes, in others no – where our lives are better, the reason isn’t due to any deficiency in the fabric of society in the UK, but in us. When you emigrate you have a chance to reinvent yourself. Nobody knows who you are and on the whole they couldn’t give two shits where you came from. So you have this chance to shed the baggage you build up living in one place, in one society at one time. Whether you do that is up to you – seems to me that many people just recreate their old lives here and then complain that nothing’s changed.

Britain Britain Britain ...

Jeremy Clarkson made me giggle again. He might be to the right of Genghis Kahn politically speaking, but he is a funny chappy. This is what he had to say about Britain:

Perhaps you’re saying that you’re proud to be British? But what does this mean exactly; what are you proud of? Our provincial town centres with their Styrofoam carpets or those pastry-faced people who work in petrol stations; our National Health Service, our trains, our cricket team, our roads, our government, our wobbly bridges, our Millennium Dome, Rover, our Hutton inquiry, the British Library, British Airways, Britart, our education system, Will Young — what? 

Had we been around between 1850 and 1875, when Britain was the workshop and the engine of the world, then maybe you could wake up every morning and bask in the hope and the glory and the pomp and the circumstance. Maybe then you could have put a sign in your garden saying, “Support our troops and Lord Palmerston”.  But now?

All we have is our world-renowned sense of humour and I’m sorry, good though it is, I’m not going to spend £500 on a flagpole to celebrate Richard Curtis’s dab hand with a metaphor.

Small town people …

Living in a small town was always a compromise for me and my family. If the missus had her way, we’d live on acreage in the arse end of nowhere and if I had my way we’d live in a city. So the compromise we arrived at was to live in a small town so I at least get the feeling of having some other people about and she gets the rural vistas that make her happy. When we lived in the UK we lived in Nailsworth, which is a fab little town in Gloucestershire. We moved to a similarly sized town here in Oz.

Anyway – people get to know you and you get to know people. You learn the names of the petrol station attendants, the lady in the chip shop, the local copper and the bloke in the bottle shop. This has advantages and disadvantages – it feels friendly on the one hand, but it also means that people often know your private business. Not that we’re running a knocking shop in our garden shed or anything. Just that if you like privacy then small towns probably aren’t for you.

Most of the shop are great, there’s a couple however that I only go to if I’ve got no other option. The chemists is one such shop. There are two things that annoy the living shit out of me in our little pharmacy. Firstly, they jump on you like half-starved jackals the second you walk through the door and ask if you want any help. “Yes, I’d like a jumbo-sized tube of KY Jelly and some extra-strong Canestan,” I always have the urge to shout. But instead, I just say no thanks. Why have your goods on shelves if you don’t want anyone to browse your fine collection of haemorrhoid creams, vaginal douches and Sunspirit Thuja wart ointments? You could save yourself a fortune by just having a counter and ticket system like Argos.

However even worse than the “Can I help you?” the moment you graze the door entry infrared beam buzzer – is the nosey trout of a pharmacist behind the counter. I suffer from gastric reflux which is when stoumach acid passes up your throat, usually when sleeping, meaning you wake up gasping for breath and gagging on your own bile. I don’t get it every night, but it’s such an upleasant experience that I take medication every night ‘in case’. I’ve been to the doctors about it and was prescribed a Ranitidine based pill which I used to get on prescription here until I found out that it was cheaper to buy over the counter.

So I get a couple of packets of Zantac off the shelf and go up to the till. The pharmacists eyes light up. “Zantac?” she says, “Yes, I say – for the control of gastric reflux.” She emerges from behind her prescribing counter.

“You have two different strengths there, 150Mg 12 hour and 300Mg 24 hour.”

“Yes,” I say, “I realise that. I take the ordinary 150Mg dose on normal nights and the 300Mg when the reflux feels particularly bad, for instance if ate late and then got drunk.” She frowns.

“You do know there are alternatives,” she says.

“Yes.”

“You’ve seen a doctor about this?”

“Yes. Both here and in the UK.”

“And they didn’t suggest alternatives.”

“They did. I prefer to just buy my Zantac over the counter.”

“You’re happy with that.”

“No. Ultimately I need to lose some of this weight,” I pinch my beer belly, “and eat a more sensible diet, but in the mean time I’m happy keeping the drugs companies and you in business.” I say. She holds her hands up as if to surrender and returns to her potions counter. I offer the sales assistant my EFTPOS card and she grins embarassedly.

The only time I’m going back in there is if I contract Ebola and know I’m still contagious.

Mind you, the chemists in nearby Broughton isn’t much better. In there they don’t jump on you the second you walk through the door and they don’t give you an Abu Grahid style interogation everytime you buy a packet of Nurofen. No, what they do is gossip. The wife of the chemist is on the P&C at my son’s school and she’s the biggest loose-lipped gossip-monger in New South Wales. Take, for instance, the following incident.

Friend of ours (we’ll call her Sara) was recently seperated from her husband who’d shacked up with their Filipino nanny. Sara had been romantically connected with another friend of ours (himself recently seperated) who I’ll call Martin. There probably had been a drunken snog at some point, but there had been no jiggy-jiggy and they certainly weren’t an item (apart from anything else, Sara was returning to her native New Zealand). Anyway, Sara’s married sister comes over from NZ to visit and, having missed her period, asks Sara to pick up a pregnancy test kit from the chemist. Sara obliges. About a week later, Sara bumps into the chemist’s wife and she says, “So have you cancelled your planned return to New Zealand then?” Sara looks at here with a confused look on her face. “No, why would I do that?” She says. “On account of your being pregnant,” she says.

Sara puts the chemists’s wife straight, but over the next few weeks loads of other mums at school come up and ask her if she plans to settle down with Martin! All thanks to some pharmacist’s wife who put two and two together and got 69. Of course once Sara explained the situation it was the nosey cow who ended up looking stupid, but I doubt she’s learnt. I’ve since heard from loads of people that they choose to go to nearby Nowra to get their presciptions for precisely the reasons I’ve mentioned above.

The solstice …

So. Shortest day here in the southern hemisphere. Longest day in the northern hemisphere. Which means that from here on out the days get longer down under and shorter up over. Gather you’re all having a pleasant summer after last year’s wash-out – shame our plans for a trip back never panned out – would far rather visit England in summer than winter.

I was glancing back at previous blog entries from around this time of year and it hit me that so far we’ve had a very uneventful winter. Admittedly it’s only one month in, but by this time in 2007 we’d had two major storms and some very serious flooding. Oh and an eclipse. So winter here runs, I guess from June through to August and the main thing that gets to me is how quickly the cooler temperatures, lack of flies and closed kitchen window become normal. That kitchen window is the ultimate barometer I think. It stays open from September through to May and when it opens again in a few months, you’ll know summer’s on the way.

Was driving the sprog to school the other morning and noticed this lick of cloud over the top of the escarpment west of Broughton.

Mother England ...

I fought the bank and I won …

When we emigrated we had a good look around for a bank that would suit our needs. We realised that Australian banks charge like wounded bulls, but what can you do - you need to put your money debt somewhere. All the banks seemed pretty similar to us, similar charges in each of ‘em so in the end we went with NAB because they’d just won Bank of the Year in Money magazine and because they had a village branch in nearby Berry.

Pretty much from the outset we started realising that NAB probably weren’t much cop but once you’ve got your direct debits and incoming payments all sorted it’s a real pain to change, so we stuck with ‘em. Over here pretty much all bank accounts come with a cheque and a savings account and usually a third separate credit card account. So when you go into a shop and use your card they always say, “Cheque, Savings or Credit” and press the appropriate button. Obviously most people keep any spare cash they have in their savings account in the hope that it’ll attract a buck or two of interest while it’s in there, so it’s the most common account used in a shop with EFTPOS. That’s all fine and dandy, but with our NAB accounts, we couldn’t use the savings account in shops - only the cheque. So when we went shopping we had to get online and transfer funds from the savings account to the cheque account. And you know what it’s like - you often forget to do things and so we were always finding ourselves in shops with baskets of food and no way of paying for them.

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Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse …

Bored of the rings …

Not sure whether this is unique to Australia (I somehow doubt it) but a good number of Jack’s classmates have seen films that about three age classifications too old for them. It troubles him, because we won’t let him watch grown up films and he’s jealous of his school friends who have. He’s nearly eight years old and there are quite a few films that are out-of-bounds.

That said I do wonder how some films come by their classifications. For instance, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the first film (The Fellowship of the Ring) is a PG, but the second two (The Two Towers and Return of the King) are both PG-13. There’s certainly nothing in the second two films than is any worse than the first one. There’s pitched battles and limbs chopped off, orcs, and a huge man eating octopus just for starters.

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The pox …

If you ever need proof that, despite the trappings of civilisation we’re still just a bunch of largely defenceless descendants of monkeys, you only need look at the influenza virus. It circulates around the globe targetting those communities in winter and whose occupants defences will be at their seasonal low ebb. It can transfer from ‘animal’ to human, it can mutate, it can be transferred by the air but is happy to jump ship on saliva, snot, shit and blood too. The Spanish flu virus which struck just as the armistice was signed at the end of the first world war is estimated to have killed at least 20 million people and possibly as many as 100 million. Truly an amazing virus - and one that is highly likely to outlast mankind’s tenure.

I’ve had proper flu just once and I sure as shit won’t be unhappy if I never get it again. Over here in Oz everyone (not just the elderly) is recommended to get a flu jab - the posters go up just as the kids return to school for the autumn term. But the incidences of flu are few and far between. You hear people in the queue at the bank saying they’ve just got over the flu but at worst they probably had a bad cold. I don’t know why people feel the need to exagerate in those circumstances. I’d also like to go on the record as saying that I’m not one of those soft bastards who gets man flu. I’ve no idea why blokes feel the need to ham it up when they’ve got the sniffles, but it sure goes on. The absolute worst offender in the world for that is the FIL - he could audition for RADA when he’s feeling under the weather. Grumpy wanker that he is normally, he turns into an absolute cunt when he’s got a cold.

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The old man and the sea …

So it’s about two and a half years since I joined my local surf lifesaving club. Originally I signed up because I wanted to help out with Nippers, because the sprog was attending. But the sprog didn’t like Nippers much and he dropped it after one season, but I found out that I rather liked it. I did my Bronze Medallion, then my IRB crewman, then defib, spinal and senior first aid awards. This year I added beach management to the list, which means that I can be a patrol captain.

Today, however, I took a new test - IRB driver. I’ve been building up to this one since pretty much my first days on the beach here. Way back when we first visited this area (five years ago now), we paid a visit to nearby Gerroa and the surf club were there doing IRB drills. As they bombed around in the surf, flying over the top of waves, I thought to myself - that’s the life for me. Then, shortly after I started training for my Bronze, nearly three years ago, I got to crew the IRB and found out that it was as much fun as it looked. Scary as fuck on many an occasion, but fun.

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Sci-Fi dorks of the world unite …

The fools of the road …

Every country has its driving peculiarities. The French, for instance, do not give a tuppeny bit about their cars - it is merely a means of getting form A to B - and if you have to push in the door of another car in order to get into a space, then so be it. The Americans are great at driving in straight lines, but shit at going round corners. The British pride themselves on letting people out of turnings, but try jumping the queue and you’ll have a plasterer from Twickenham tapping on your window with a tyre iron and a very angry expression on his face - verily it is road rage blighty.

And then there’s the Australians. Like all nationalities they have their foibles. I’ve lived here for three years now and these driving habits have been getting on my tits since day one. In no particular order, here’s my list.

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The ‘wooooo’ gene …

Alright. I feel we’ve known each other for long enough that I can level with you about something. It’s not something I’ve ever spoken about publicly before because I’m aware that there’s a certain stigma attached to the condition. When one person in a family has this particular genetic mutation, they are often given the cold shoulder, mocked and removed from the annual round-robin Xmas card distribution list.

And what is this ailment I hear you ask? Well, it’s like this - I don’t have a ‘wooooo’ gene. The wooooo gene is a genetic marker on the same long-chain of DNA as the self-consciousness gene. Its presence (or rather the lack of its presence) usually manifests itself at a very early stage - indeed many sufferers report that they first realised they were missing the wooooo gene on a school trip.

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Down on the farm …

Earlier on in these Easter holidays we had promised Jack that we’d take him to Canberra (about a two and a half hour drive from here depending on how many serial-killing pill-popping lorry drivers have rolled their road trains into a ditch on the way) so he could visit Questacon. However as the day approached both the missus and I realised that we really couldn’t be arsed to drive all that way, particularly since we were bound to meet plenty of homeward bound holiday traffic in both directions.

However we’d already promised Jack his day in our nation’s capital and so, in time-honoured parental fashion, we resorted to blatant bribery in order to console him. We said we’d drive up to Shellharbour instead and that he could spend the equivalanet of the entrance fee at the museum on Lego. He quickly ran off to his computer and started working out what he could get for $50. Once he’d discovered he could get several cars and a Power Miner, he quickly agreed.

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The sun goes down …

Ah yes dear friends - I’ve actually managed to get another blog entry out inside a week this time. I don’t know how many people follow my blog but I would like to point out to those of you that do, that it’s pretty hard to keep yourself motivated to do this, three years on. And any of you that read this blog and know me personally will understand that the fact that I’m still writing this blog three years on is as close to a miracle as you’re likely to see this side of an aubergine with the visage of Jesus in it.

So. Easter holidays have been ticking along here. The sprog’s had some playmates over and vice-versa - one mum even presented us with a box full of cakes when she brought her son over! Bloody nice they were too - we told her that as much as we’d enjoyed having her son over, she shouldn’t expect an pastries in return as neither of us can cook for shit.

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Summer’s last hurrah …

Eight thousand or so people are about to descend on our village. You can hear the engines starting in Sydney, the traffic will already be building up on the Princes Highway southbound. Utes, 4WDs, soft-roaders and battered family station wagons crammed full of tents, boogie boards, bikes and fishing gear will be nose to tail in all the usual traffic hotspots.

And down on our beach here in Barefoot Bay, you’ll find us volunteer surf lifesavers staring fixedly at the swimmers by the rip. And we’ll be doing head-counts and watching that Indian family who quite obviously can’t swim and have decided to go paddling fully-clothed. And someone will get stung by a blue bottle and, if the surf’s up, we might even have to swim or paddle out to them and return them safely to shore.

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You might say that - I couldn’t possibly comment …

Found myself in and out of the surf club this week. I’m one of the few members of the surf club that actually lives here in Barefoot Bay. For reasons best known to themselves, most of the members of the club choose to come to the Bay instead of other clubs that are closer to them. Our long-serving club secretary lives in the Sussex Inlet, 60km south of us - the club president lives in Broughton, 10km away. In fact of all the members on the club committee - I’m the only one that actually lives here.

The advantage of that is that I have a 90 second drive to get to the club on patrol days and can stay in bed a lot longer than most of ‘em. The disadvantage is that I’m usually the person called upon to open up the club for people wishing to gain access for whatever reason. So the Yoga club, the SLSA Branch Committee, various maintenance bods, instructors and miscellaneous club members give me a ring if they need to get in.

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