Friday, August 1 2008, 12:19

Murder most horrid

There's no cheer to today's blog, I'm afraid. I read an article today about a young guy on a bus in Canada who was stabbed to death by the man sitting next to him, and then decapitated with the same knife. There it is again: decapitated. Beheadings seem to hold a special, mediaeval, and barbaric place in our imaginations. There's an inescapable grisly horror for me about beheadings - whenever I see it in the news, I'm torn between absolutely not wanting to know anything more about such a shocking act of violence, and on the other hand, being drawn by morbid fascination to see if it's really true and under what circumstances it's taken place.

But why? Because killing with guns is easy - you pull a trigger and death happens: you're not even physically connected to the person you've shot. If you stab someone, you're connected to the agonised thrashing of your victim, the unavoidable effusion of blood, close enough to look your victim in the eye and feel the frenzied rhythms of their heartbeat fading away. But even that is over quickly - quickly enough for a murderer to feel shock, amazement, and most importantly, remorse. It takes a completely different kind of deranged or inhuman monster to persist through the horror of inflicting a mortal wound to the throat and then continue through the gory minutes that must seem a lifetime and saw, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, through another human's neck.

It's horrific and dehumanising in a way no gun rampage could ever be. It astonishes me that there are some people capable of such acts of brutality.

Friday, August 1 2008, 17:27

Removed

Maybe my last post was a slightly morbid note to end the week with. I should reassure you that July hasn't all been birthdays and musings on conservatism, obesity, and murder. We moved house last week, and in what is becoming a tradition for my Sydney moves, it was a mere few hundred metres from the last place. This will be the third different view of the same park that I've enjoyed since I emptied my suitcases in 2006. There are already some pictures of the rooms in various states of unpackage on facebook, but no doubt I'll stick some nice tidy ones up on here when we finish.

In Australia, people don't just "move house"; since the people who help you aren't "movers", they're "removalists", I suppose that means we removalised. Our removalists arrived after 5pm, already tired from a long day's removalising (removalisation?) and sluggishly removalised over the next four hours while Chris and I moved from a position of distanced "we paid for you to lift this stuff, we're not doing a thing" to a vigorously collaborative "let's get this show on the road or we'll be here all night!" We did have to pause briefly while the building manager harangued us for having the temerity to removalise outside the acceptable removalising hours and the gall to load through the lobby of our new building instead of the carpark... That's the kind of reception that makes you feel welcome!

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, where was John while you and Chris were labouring to get the job done? John was off on a work jolly on the Great Barrier Reef for four days, so he managed to avoid any kind of lifting. There's no justice.

Friday, August 22 2008, 8:32

Squeezing too much in

While Team GB were rocketing to Olympic glory, not matched in a hundred years, John and I went to Melbourne last weekend. From Jetstar's tin arrivals barn, we took a bus to the city, where Adam found us in his sexy little TT and whisked us off to Fog for dinner, and a few hours drinking in assorted drinkeries. Our Sydney pad isn't nearly so stylish as Adam's schmick Prahran residence, whose bathroom is improbably found, walled in by glass, in the bedroom. I'll leave you to ruminate on the logistics of having guests to stay...

After not nearly enough sleep, we emerged for some brunch in Chapel Street and began our day of shopping. I say "shopping", but really it was more window shopping (or even more accurately, "window licking" as you might say if you were French), and really all that I bought all day was a book which has since reduced me to tears on several occasions. Anyway. Exhaustion pressed a short nap upon us on our return. Alarms were set with plenty of time for us to zip in and out of Adam's crystal bathroom, but I soon realised that Adam has managed to conceal a guilty secret from me all these years: he is a master of procrastination and delay. I shall certainly appreciate his polished appearance more in future, knowing how many anxious moments have been expended in the preparation! We eventually met Matt, freshly arrived in this faraway place, and Chris and Curtis at Big Mouth Café in St Kilda, which was sadly not a patch on the previous night's meal at Fog. You can't win them all. And from there we revisited our nightlife tour of Melbourne...

It really wasn't that many hours later that John and I met (a much more lively) Matt and Chris for brunch in Prahran again, having left Adam sleep-wrapped in his duvet. My sugar pick-me-up took the form of pancakes drenched in strawberry syrup, which refuelled me with just about enough energy to make it to the Art Deco exhibition at the gallery, where we fruitlessly thumbed through every poster in search of the sleek train blazoned enormously down the wall of the gallery building itself. But sugar and caffeine only get you so far, and our subsequent homewares shopping became an aimless wander until we stopped at Melbourne Central to sit down, chat, and watch the much-hyped Swiss-style pocket watch do its hourly thing until finally our schedule drove us homeward.

The moral of the story is: it's great to visit friends, and it's silly to try to cram too much into one weekend.

Monday, August 25 2008, 12:30

Heavyweight sporties

The Olympics are over. I didn't see the opening ceremony, but the closing ceremony and handover to the British contingent was cool, even if I did think it was unjust that Ken Livingstone put in all the work as Mayor of London and that buffoon Boris took his moment of glory. Like my fellow Brits, I was quite stunned to wake up last Monday and discover Team GB had rocketed to third place in the medal table with a haul of 17 medals in two days. Stunned, and mildly chuffed - let's face it, I couldn't really care less who wins what at the Olympics, but it's always nice to see your own team get ahead. Aussies however derive a deep satisfaction from their sporting triumphs (of which there are many), and it's well known that the sunburnt country punches well above its weight on all those fields of glory where it participates, with a remarkable per capita achievement.

So it was with no sign of nerves that the media here observed Britain's super medal weekend with articles poking fun at the "cocky Brits" and their "premature celebrations". After all, surely it was only a matter of time before those whinging Poms got knocked back to tenth place where they belonged? But it didn't happen. That jibe about Brits winning at sitting down sports had a slight taste of bitterness to it, and there were comments about Poms stealing Aussie coaches and methods too, and the per capita argument has been raised ad nauseam. Not very sporting for a sporty country! Britain got knocked off third place by Russia, but fourth place is still our best result for a century. Great news for a country that doesn't really expect to win anything, but always excited when it does. Australia finished in sixth place, which Britain would have been overjoyed with, but some here seem to feel that there were only two teams that mattered, not 204, and that these Games were just the latest round in a long-running grudge match, a round which Australia lost to the Old Enemy.

This week I read two articles on SMH. The first ('Tears before bedtime as the empire strikes back'), is the first piece of journalism I've read here that seriously asks why Australia is so obsessive about sports and winning them.

The second told us the cost of Australia's medals - $50 million for each gold, apparently, or $12 million for every medal of any colour. This comes on the back of comments that suggest more sporting investment is necessary if Australia's getting "beaten by the Poms" (never mind the fact that sixth place is an achievement most countries would be proud of). This article goes on to ask if that money can't be better spent on making Aussies overachieve in something other than sports, that benefits the whole community, and not just its elite athletes. It appears the UK has learnt that stumping up the extra cash and getting its sporting house in order (much like Australia after the Montreal Games), delivers tangible, shiny results. Will this turn the Olympics into some kind of sporting arms race? If so, can the plucky Aussies afford to keep up? Or is Team GB going to find the purse strings pulled tight again after 2012?