KING OF THE YARD

I want to kidnap my neighbour's cat.

The neighbor lives in the apartment block opposite and is your ordinary, middle-aged guy. He's average height and was probably of average weight once, but with the man boobs and beer gut that come with age, it's gone pear-shaped.

He’s completely bald – by bad luck or choice, I’m not sure – and being unemployed, is always casually dressed; shorts and a wife beater in summer, track pants in winter. He has an ordinary Australian accent and a friendly grin for the neighbourhood kids who he banters with while watering “his” plants; the garden is common property but he is often out there radiating a commanding sense of ownership. It keeps him active, and despite the beer and the cigarettes, he seems to enjoy excellent health.

Yep, he’s just an average Aussie bloke.

Except for all the yelling.

Last week he yelled at length at a council worker who was trying to whipper-snip the nature strip.

He yells at passing pedestrians.
"YOU'RE A BAD MOTHER!" – taking issue with the way a woman crossed the street with her babies.

To which I heard her reply,
"I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK," then, showing she did indeed care what he thinks,
"I'M A GOOD MOTHER!"

"YOU'RE A BAD MOTHER!" he just shouted back.

He yelled at my upstairs neighbour for a full five minutes because her smoke alarm had malfunctioned and beeped non-stop for the last eight hours, ruining his day.

Earlier I'd found him in our stairwell, barefoot as usual, trying to track down the noise.
"It's driving me so crazy," he told me (loudly), "I've had to start drinking."
It was 1 pm.

Then there was the power blackout. When my neighbour's electricity was finally restored after more than 24 hours he came out into the night to shout his euphoria.

"HOORAY! IT'S BACK! WE'VE GOT POWER! WOO HOO!! " he yellled, over and over. Then, needing to shout some more, he crossed the street to harass – I mean, thank – the technicians (still at work outside my building) in person.

"YOUSE GUYS ARE HEROS! THANK-YOU! YOU'RE THE BEST!" etc, etc, on and on and on.

The gloating was particularly galling for us on the other side of the road still without electricity. The technicians were still trying to work on that, which was not easy - on account of all the yelling.

But most of all he yells at his cat, or "my little daughter" as I overheard him describe her recently.

"NOOO-OH! NOOOO-OH! SHEBA!! SHEBA! NO, SHEBA, NO!"

He's an utter control freak whenever he lets her outside to poo and play. The minute a whisker gets past the boundary of the front fence he's on her case like a kelpie mustering a wayward sheep.

The yelling – or reign of terror as I saw it – started about a year ago when Sheba first arrived. I felt so sorry for that tiny kitten that I formulated a plan to befriend her then sneak her back to my house where no one would ever yell at or bully her again.

But the plan failed first time I tried to make friends. She sniffed my hand, scrunched up her stripy little face and ran straight back to the safety of my neighbour. He was embarrassed when I told him I could hear him shouting at her from my apartment.

"I'm just terrified she'll run out in the street and get run over," he explained. Loudly.

Anyway, I live right across the road. He'd have found out, inevitably.

And then I'm pretty sure he'd have done more than just yell at me.

Flag-waving... Shudder.

The apartment block opposite me is situated on a busy corner, with only an outward facing front yard. The residents seem to enjoy the publicness of their garden and love public displays of festivity. At Christmas their strobing fairy lights and animated santa were so bright they lit up my living room.

So, on Australia Day I looked out my window and saw the horror. Flag-Waving Patriotism, out loud and proud. A giant Australian flag tied to each corner fence. Little Australian flags festooned all over their front garden.

I had to quickly look away.

There were probably about thirty news articles in the paper that day on the topic of our controversial flag: Opinions on what it should look like; its history; what it means or doesn't mean; how, contrary to popular opinion, the Anzacs were not at all "fightingfor our flag" because our current flag was not finally decided upon and adopted until 1954.

I think my disapproval of flag-waving patriotism might have reared up when I visited the USA not long after September 11. The stars and stripes flew from every pole, was strung up in every window. Out in the suburbs and rural areas people had erected flagpoles in their front yards – sometimes unfeasibly enormous ones – and it struck me as something unseen in Australia. At the time I was glad we Aussies weren't like that. It seemed somehow – um... racist. The flag said to me "We are American, we are the best. You are other, you suck."

So when the flag-waving trend crept into Australia, my heart sank. There should be nothing wrong with being proud of the country you live in, but in a world already so polarised it feels even more polarising to be brandishing banners that define your tribe, that separate 'us' from 'others'.

If I had a flag it would be the flag of planet earth, for my tribe: the Human beings.

Oh, and the animals and plants too. And the microbes, and...

Okay, The Union Flag of all earthly life-forms.

Fat chance. Can you imagine getting everyone on earth to agree on the design?

little white dress

People often say to me "You're so fit!".

I'm not bragging, a friend said it to me just the other day, after I'd cycled across the city. (Whereupon I replied "But you're writing a novel" and grovelled humbly in her far more awesomeness).

I know I look fit. I exercise regularly.

But out on my bike today, wearing my official cycling lycra, I was overtaken – on the flat – by a curvy girl with not a hint of muscle tone in a little white broderie anglaise dress.

Bam! Another of my stereotypes challenged.

Okay, she was about 30 years younger than me. She probably slept like a baby last night and didn't wake up feeling like she was coming down with a cold. For all in know, she might have just had a double espresso. She might have been on the way to a date with a new love, and not on her way to work.

All's I'm saying is it's relative. I might very well be fitter than some, but certainly not as fit as I was, and I know because I remember what that felt like.

that's not a dog. it's a canine.

When Tony Abbott said the cuts to the ABC and SBS were neither cuts nor a broken pre-election promise but an “efficiency dividend” I thought he was just making up words.

I, in my taking-words-at-their-dictionary-meaning way, always understood dividend to be a bonus, a share of profit. A reward even.

The funding cuts are anything but.

However, it turns out the “efficiency dividend” really is a thing. Dating back to the 1980’s no less. A measure to increase efficiency and performance in government agencies, albeit flawed and referred to more than once as a “a blunt instrument”.

I wonder which wordsmithy spinmeister dreamed up this less that delightful example of doublespeak, presumably intending it to mean a dividend to the taxpayers.
I’m putting it up there with “friendly fire” and  “enhanced interrogation”.

And can I just point out that if Tony is going to nitpick over terminology then he’d better try a little harder because guess what. The definition of efficiency dividend is

“an across-the-board cut to the funding that agencies receive for running costs” 

So it’s not a cut, it’s a “cut to funding” is it, hmmm?
And that’s not a dog, it’s a canine.

But terminology aside, here’s the thing. According to this Parliamentary research paper of Dec 2012, several government funded agencies have full exemption from this not-actually-a-dividend dividend. In particular:

“the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Special Broadcasting Service Corporation due to election commitments from both major parties to ‘maintain the real level of funding’ for each broadcaster”

It seemed however that everyone was so upset by the whatever-you-want-to-call-them-but-lets-just-call-them-funding-cuts, that no-one noticed this little issue of exemp… no wait.

Matthias Corman said it out loud to the media and anyone who wanted to listen.

“The ABC has been exempted from efficiency dividends for the last 20 years…”

As if that would somehow win him friends among we taxpaying people of Australiana.

At least Malcolm Turnbull had the good sense to steer us clear of those murky waters quick-smart (so, not just a broken promise but a broken bi-lateral commitment) and asserted–on a technicality, mind, nothing to do with exemptions or anything–that whatever these not-cuts were, they were definitely absolutely not in any way an “efficiency dividend”.

In fact, to put his own positive spin on it, the whole "dividend" thing clearly not working,  Malc is now using the more cuddly – and I must admit refreshingly straightforward and non-doublespeaky – term “government savings measure”.

And anyway it’s all the ABC’s fault, he said.

“...in terms of program changes that has nothing to do with the government.”

So there.

a lesson in global economics

me: “I see you’re out of figs”

cashier: “Yeah, I hear they’re hard to get from Turkey. Because of the floods.”

me: “The floods. So not the unrest.”

cashier: “Ha. They'd want to keep the exports up. It takes money to run a war.”

the great driving bungle of 2014

Today I did the unforgivable.

You know how when you’re riding along on the bike path thinking “the pedestrians are there on their footpath, the cars are in the car lane and we have this bike lane just for bikes, how cool is that?” and then a car suddenly cuts across in front of you to turn or park, and you slam on the brakes and swerve, freaked out at narrowly avoiding a horrible accident and furious at the stupid, stupid driver?

Well, in an awkward shoe-on-the-other foot type situation, today I was the driver and I did that to a cyclist! I did that unforgivable thing which many drivers have done to cyclist-me, and which i’ve written cranky blogs about.

You’d think I’d know better.

For hours afterwards I yelled at myself (inside my head) just like the cyclist-me yelled at those other thoughtless drivers (also inside my head) and now I’m writing another cranky blog about it.

I cut across a bike lane, in front of a cyclist, to park the car.
Argh!

To his credit, the cyclist just made a funny noise and swerved around me creating the strong impression that this sort of thing happens ALL THE TIME.

And now I know how it happens. I was in an unfamiliar city, in an unfamiliar manual car, with a worn out clutch, looking for somewhere to park. The road signs and line markings were not like what I’m used to in my home city, and I wasn’t deeply familiar with the local traffic’s unique behaviour and patterns like I am at home. I was busy managing to not be in the wrong lane at a multilane intersection and crossing tram tracks without hitting a tram, then entered a roundabout, ahead of a cyclist who I immediately forgot about while my mind was focussed on how to get into that off-street car parking bay up ahead. But the entry I thought I’d seen turned out to be a carpark exit only.

So I kept driving while trying to figure where the entrance could be, and within seconds spotted an empty kerbside car space and pulled straight into it: across the bike lane, across the path of the long forgotten cyclist, Oblivious; distracted with concern that car spaces are hard to find so you don’t pass one up. As the cyclist veered past me and whooped, I was shocked back to earth.

So that explains it.

“But that’s no excuse!” I yell at myself some more in my head. It was poor driving.

It was inexperience. I’m not used to driving strange cars around strange cities, so I failed to juggle all those tasks in my conscious mind which are largely dealt with by my subconscious back at home where I know the patterns and interactions of every street and every bike path. No muscle memory to rely on, you see.

I’m ashamed to admit that the only subconscious process going on in me-the-driver was the very unhelpful “Don’t dither in the middle of the road and hold up other cars. See parking space. Grab it.”

Where was the “don’t try to kill cyclists” instinct, that a special awareness for two-wheelers that I have back at home? That awareness, it turns out, is highly conditional.

I am massively disappointed and angry with myself. And I don’t for one minute forgive any of those drivers who’ve done the same thing to me. Having now walked in his shoes, I understand that the befuddled old guy in Campbell Parade was in a strange town, looking for a park and unable to process everything that was going on. But I don’t excuse him. He nearly killed me. And as for those young guys who were totally aware of everything going on, being in familiar territory and knowing full well they were cutting in front of me and double parking across a bike lane but went ahead and did it anyway – because, you know, they’re in a car and cars just have right of way and can do whatever they want, so nyer! – there’s even less than no excuse. When I tried to explain they’d broken a road rule – not to mention the whole endangering my life thing – they booed me. Seriously!

It’s possibly a bit interesting that when I returned to the crime scene a few days later, (this time the territory was familiar so I didn’t do anything stupid) – I noticed a couple of signs posted where the bike lane exited the roundabout:



...even though the line marking for the bike lane continued.

Which is a bit contradictory.

The signs could either mean “End of separated bike lane” - Within the roundabout, the bike path was isolated from the car lane by a concrete curb. The signs were placed where the curb separator ended and the bike lane merged with the road again, marked only by a understated unbroken white line.

Or, they could signify that I’m not the only stupid tourist in this tourist town who can’t think and drive at the same time and so for safety they might as well just put the onus on cyclists to avoid the tourists.

As no moral tale is useful without learnings, I would suggest the following (as would any half sensible urban planner) because it’s just blindingly obvious, really, that:

1. Placing a bike lane between car lanes and kerbside parking is just asking for trouble; and

1. Bike lanes should be painted bright, hard to ignore colours with large bicycle icons at frequent intervals, so drivers who aren’t paying attention don’t just see a line on the road and think it’s some kind of lane marking that has nothing whatsoever to do with bikes, or don’t even see the line at all because lets face it - a driver in search of the holy grail (a parking spot right next to the place they’re trying to get to) has tunnel vision.

God! Still can’t believe I did that.

never again

How many times have you been in a bar with a group of people who love drinking and they’re pressuring you into keeping up; needing you to match them drink for drink as if to validate them; and making you feel like a party pooper if you don’t; making you feel like you’ll miss out on all the fun. “Here - try this, it’s called ‘absolute suicide’ -  you’ll LOVE it. Drink it down!” - as the bartender lines up another round of shot glasses and one-two-three you’re gulping down another overproof depth-charge shot of jelly slammer and fuck me what is in this, rhinoceros piss?  

And some time later you stumble home chiding yourself for probably drinking a wee bit too much, and wake up the next morning feeling like utter, utter shit swearing never, ever again. You’re not 18 anymore, your body can’t take it. 

Until next week you’re in a bar and you just get swept along with their corrupt influence because - well - you have to admit you’re having fun. This does feel good. Not just good, dammit. You’re feeling absolutely fucking great - and another drink is going to make you feel even betterer.

Then you wake up next day with the mother of all hangovers again.

Sound familiar?

Nup. Not me.

Not ever. Not even once.

I stick to my guns. 

They down their shots, I sip a few nano droplets - I’m polite like that - and pass my glass to someone else to finish, or empty it in a pot plant when no-one’s looking.

They try to make me feel like a wimp, a spoiler of fun, but It’s water off a duck’s back.

I am impervious to peer pressure, I tell you.

Impervious!

I’m smarter than that.

I don’t want to wake up next day feeling like utter, utter shit.

I want to wake up feeling healthy and ready for yoga class.

Morning yoga! 

It’s so pleasant and relaxing. And the teacher really enjoys it. She really enjoys teaching us new poses and encourages us to try the tricky ones. And even though I now know that my body can’t do those tricky poses anymore, I can still remember - a muscle memory - how it felt to do them when i was, er hem,… younger. How good it felt. How relatively easy it was. 

And so I follow the careful step-by-step process to warm up and get into the pose safely and there again is that great feeling of achievement when I’m balancing there in a pretty awe-inspiring way and feeling pretty good about myself. 

Until towards the end of class I feel a twinge in a muscle, and wake up the next morning in with a not-quite-cripping back pain and figuratively slap my forehead as I phone the physio.

Never again. 

I will just do the basic poses from now on. The basic poses are still a challenge, they’ll still do me good. I will not injure myself again.

Until next class, when I stick to my guns and skip that particular tricky pose that hurt my back, and take it easy so as not to exacerbate it. But then the teacher introduces a new, new pose and shows us how to do it and makes it look beautiful and simple and I remember doing it myself a while ago without any trouble. She encourages us in her fun, enticing voice to just give it a go, just have a stab at getting somewhere near it. So I carefully follow the steps to warm myself up and ease myself into the pose safely and - ta daaa!! Look at where my leg is!

And then about five minutes later there’s a sharp pain in my ribs and I can’t even do the final twist before savasana.

Never again I say, as I hobble home to the arnica ointment.

Never again.