Letters To Harry

Pulling focus

Dear Harry,

So here we are, sat on the 333 bus heading to work at 5.30am and wishing I had my new glasses with me.

In the past my glasses have generally been dictated by vanity. They've been useful but unless I'm attempting to pilot a car or watch a film they weren't a nesserity.

But not no more. I went for an eye exam on Saturday and for the first time since I was 12 my prescription has changed. Not massivly, but my eyes are now matched in their delinquancy.

I've noticed this coming on over the last few months with the muscles under the eye that has degraded twitching a good deal, which gave me a somewhat demented look.

Anyway new eyes are being fashioned as we speak but on days like this, with an early rise, a long slog in front of my computer and then a shoot this evening I'd rather rely on good specs rather than the BBCs recommended 5 cups of coffee a day to give me "sight beyond sight".

Regards,

Charlie

Harry in my pocket

Dear Harry, It was only a month ago that I wrote to you stating I had opted out of the mobile rat race and from now on I was going to enjoy only the delights of retro handsets. Yet here I am, Sunday night, lying in bed and tapping out a letter to you on the iPhone I got yesterday. So what changed? Well as time marches forwards It seems that I need more and more access to the web, espically when I'm out and about. Enter the iPhone. The latest version of this device has access to a host of applications that really do bring the best parts of the Internet into your pocket. Alex returns home tomorrow, so the quiet times are over. House hunting, driving tests, you name we're doing it baby (including getting ready to have a baby). Anyway I'll leave it there for now and write again soon. Regards, Charlie P.S. If anyone can point a really good typing app that let's you rotate the keyboard like you can do for the SMS feature it would be greatly appriciated.

Trip the Light Fantastic

Dear Harry,

Just wanted to show you this

The picture is taken by Time Out Sydney's man with a Cam Dan Boud at today's PMA (Photo Marketing Association) expo and shows your Godfather dwarfed by an enormous Broncolour Para 330FB reflector.

This monstrous studio reflectors cost about USD$10,000 so it's unlikely I'll ever want, need or be able to afford one, but for sheer scale of light up worldwith a single flash burst this baby is it.

Either that, or you can turn it skywards and use it to signal the mothership, watch Sky News in the desert or beam data back form the surface of Mars.

Regards,

Charlie

My Birthday Bunny

Dear Harry,

Stuck at home today as I am with a runny nose and absolutely no desire to spread my germs far and wide I’ll take this early opportunity to wish my beautiful wife Alex a very happy birthday.

As I write these words she slumbers a hemisphere away but when she awakes, most likely crack of dawn due to the jet lag, she shall find this message and wonder what on earth I’m up to all on my own in the house all day.

Well my love in a word - 'Influbrowsing' - the activity of engaging with the internet while locked in a cold or flu like medical state.

Regards,

Charlie

P.S. While rummaging through my collection of pictures to add to this post I came across this picture of an alternative Alex. Now for those of you who not met my wife, and there will be a few, rest assured that I’ve not transformed her into a rabbit with a broken leg as a birthday treat (although thinking about it, unless one of us had a thing about casting broken limbs I'm not sure who the treat would be for, but I digress ...) it just that I didn’t set the filter on the Flickr search before punching the “Give me pictures” button.

Be Afraid, Be very Afraid

Dear Harry,

It’s with great pride, and a good deal of trepidation that I announce that Alex and I are expecting our first child.

As with all these things we have waited until the week 12 scan was completed before making any formal noises about our impending parenthood but as you can see from the image below our progeny looks surprising human, so we can assume it’s safe to proceed.

At this very moment Alex is stampeding around the UK scaring her parents with a surprise visit to break the news in person. I have opted to stay in the colonies and disseminate these great tiding from a far, that and wrangle the cats, who have been demonstrating how excited they are by taking turns to sleep on my face at night.

So all hands to the pumps.

Since it’s regarded as unwise you reveal you hand before the 12 week barrie, a lot of the preparation so far has been done in clandestine secrecy. Alex has had to fain a lengthy detox program to get around her continued decline of alcohol for the last three months.

We have even engaged in secretive field trips to Sydney’s outer suburbs to attend Pregnancy and Baby shows. One on site we joined thousands of other demented parents or parents-to-be and like they, shuffle glassy-eyed amongst the stalls jam packed with every possible accessory for your new addition and more besides. Carry cots, strollers, plastic wear, bottle sterilizers, baby food, nappies (dear god, so very many nappies).

Alex has been amassing a towering collection of pregnancy literature. We have even gone on tour of the local hospital to check out the various birthing options, and there’s plenty of those as well. The tour was conducted by a seasoned midwife who gave us the spiel with a while a dozen anxious men and women huddled in couples looking like cattle being led to the slaughter.

So all we can do now is wait. Well that and find a new home to live in as we’ve just sold our place by the beach. If all goes according to plan we can expect the stalk sometime between Christmas and New Year, while we have 12+ relations staying with us ….

What’s that you say? Timing could have been better. Sure but what the hey - them’s the breaks.

Regards,

Charlie

Harry 08

Dear Harry,

As one of our irregular readers pointed out it's been a while since I've updated the right hand image of you.

So gone is the Harry of 2007 aged only 2 and in his place is the Harry of 2008, pictured in all his finery at our wedding in Devon last summer.

I'll do my level best to keep the image a little more up to date.

Regards,

Charlie

P.S. It's been so long since I've had to hand edit HTML code that I added an <img src> to an HTML page rather than a .jpg file. Must be slipping in my dotage

Raised to the power of 4

Dear Harry,

One of the advantages of living on this side of the globe is that I get a chance to be the first to wish you a Very Happy 4^th Birthday.

By time you read this your gifts should be in your hands, and possibly your mouth. No doubt I’ll be receiving a detailed missive from your parent about what you actually wanted for your birthday, rather than the somewhat mal-educated guess work that Alex and I went through to choose your final present.

Anyway all the best and have a fantastic day,

Charlie

Fraud Foiled by poor Engrish

Dear Harry,

This email just in:

"Dear friend: look：Beautiful China's online store I recommend to you a very good shopping site << insert idiots web address here >>.

The quality of product is had better, the service is perfect, and price is had better, the speed of the deliver is very fast. There are own warehouse and store, there is customer in the whole world, receive customer very high praise.

Wish we cooperation delectation !"

What? I'm not one to brag on my skill at typing prose (I've dedicated the title of this whole blog to the very fact that I cannot, and will not, be constrained by the tired conventions of the English language) but I consider myself a veritable Wordsworth compared with the morons who penned this.

Reminds me a little of something that the artist Banksy once said "All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?". Somewhere someone very clever has developed the smarts to hack someone's hotmail address book and send out thousands of these bogus invites but written the final message so badly a dyslexic YTS student hopped up on paint thinners would think twice about going to the enclosed web address.

Silly!

Regards,

Charlie

Product Recall

Dear Harry,

I hate my phone. Even the Motorola MR1 I owned at University back in 1995 performed the tasks of being a phone better than my current Nokia 6220 Classic.

The real villain is the keyboard. The Fins have been too bloody ‘Howard Hughes’ about the streamlining the ergonomics and made the keyboard so flush that you have to press the unlock buttons about thirty times before the handset actually activates. That and the fact that every other text message I send gets garbled by the space bar failing to register a space and instead altering the text input from T9 to block caps and well … it’s driving me potty.

So despondent was I that last night I got to thinking which has been my favourite handset over the years? I’ve had Motorola’s, Nokia’s, Sony’s Ericsson’s and more besides but the one that stands head and shoulders for fun and function factor was my 1st generation WAP enabled Nokia 7110.

The production version of the handset dubbed the ‘Matrix phone’, the 7110 is best remembered for it’s spring loaded cover that used to shoot down to reveal the keypad (fans will note that the actual phone used in the first Matrix film was a customised Nokia 8110 banana phone). I was also particularly partial to the roller wheel used to scroll through the menu and the fact that it has large buttons that you could press.

Anyway one Wikipedia search and a second hand phone dealer on Ebay later and I have a refurbished 7110 in transit as we speak. Yes it old technology and yes it’s only dual band and the sceptic in me tells me it’s likely that it will not work in Australia but for $50 it’s worth getting hold of just to break the continual sense of crushing disappointment that I feel every time I go near a phone store. I have and MP3 player and a camera and I don’t need either device fused into my phone. I want a handset that fits my hand, I want buttons that are designed to be pushed by a human and most of all I want a cover that thunders down when I answer my call and brings back some of that old Neo magic.

Regards

Charlie

A glimpse ….

Dear Harry,

With Alex out of the house this evening and the cats in a placid mood I find that I have time to sit down and say hello.

The last week has been spend frantically covering Rosemount Australian Fashion Week, Sydney’s annual ode to the local fashion industry. Each year it’s the same thing. A collective dread as you all gather to mark out your shooting positions, 15 minutes of frantic pushing and shoving and then 5 tough, but highly enjoyable days of backstage, catwalk and celebrity photography.

Only problem is that since you are working between ten to twelve hour days all week there is precious little time to do anything else. Even now I’m still only a couple of rolls into going through the pictures I took with my Contax G2 while we were inland on our trip. And I’m already starting to get bored.

I’ve always found holiday pictures mean a great deal to the person who took them, yet to everyone else they are just 6x4’s of some place they haven’t been and in a lot of cases have no desire to go.

For me holiday pictures are personal. I’ll share them because I share almost all my pictures with people but you can’t share what you felt when you stood there. In a room full of people staring at albums only those who feature in the picture or were there when the shutter fell have that real connection to the moment. For everyone else it’s rather like trying to describe the taste of water without using the word ‘wet’, you see, you perceive what it must have been like, but you don’t really know.

And I think it was these thoughts and going through the pictures of the town of Meckering that gave me pause to think and set me about writing to you.

Meckering is a small Western Australian town on highway 94 about 130km east of Perth. For most people in the region Meckering is best known for being laid waste by an earthquake in October 1968 that measured 6.9 of the Ricther Scale. But for me it’s where a man called Charles created a camera museum in the shape of a giant 35mm SLR Camera.

I’m not sure whether it was the combination of both of use sharing not only a name, but a love for cameras as well, but only moments after having met the other Charles I was having curious delusions of taking up his mantle and moving to Meckering to run the Big Camera one day. When I voiced this idea to Alex I received a smile that at best could be described as pitying and at worst as downright dangerous.

And so I’ll press on through the shots I took – performing the most difficult but appreciating of tasks and editing down the reams of images into a selection of only the best images from the trip. Which brings me to the photograph I’d like to leave you with, below.

Again from Meckering this is an image of the water pipe that travels hundreds of kilometers inland supplying water to all the towns in the gold fields.

Regards,

Charlie

Mad World

Dear Harry,

Just a quick line to let you know that Alex and I are back from the Inland (as it will now be referred to) and all here is well.

I'll write in more detail about the trip over the coming days, the places we've been and the things that we've seen, but right now I wanted to just break radio silence and say hi.

I'll add to this, since our return to Bondi, which was only a week ago, our lives have been turned all sorts of crazy upside down, but we'll get into that in more detail over the coming weeks as decisions are made, plans are laid and the paths are set out upon.

Until then,

Regards,

Charlie

The Important things ...

Dear Harry,

I'll keep this brief as I'm in Perth and my horse is just about fallen over.

At approximately 06:30am today I got in a taxi to head to the airport to begin my honeymoon.

At 06:58am, as we pulled into Sydne Domestic terminal it dawned on me that I had forgotten my digital SLR camera.

About 2 minutes later the look of disbelief subsided and the realization dawned on me that for the first time in about 2 years I'll be going somewhere without a camera and I might actually have a chance to have a holiday. By time I got on the plane I had a coffee in my hand and a grin on my chops ...

Now naturally I still have a little film camera on me (Contax G2) but it will be some nice to spend 3 weeks with Alex with the camera as a sideline rather than the other way round, as so often seem be the way during this summer.

Time for the important things.

Regards,

Charlie

The Plan

Dear Harry,

Once upon a time there was a plan. It involved a much deserved trip for a newly married couple from Perth to Alice Springs in the Autumn of 2009.

The plan was that the couple would fly to Perth, stay with some relations and then depart heading west east (as our mate Stu points out "if you head west from Perth you have a short drive to Fremantle and then a very very long swim...?") in a four wheel drive bushcamper much like the one they took up to far North Queensland in 2007.

While the wife planned the trip with meticulous detail the husband dealt with supplies, logistics and equipment that they would need. Maps were bought, permits acquired and flight cases filled with all sorts of useful odds and sods ready for their departure on Thursday 26th of March.

And with a little over a week left to go and the first quiet night in what seems like a month I though it was high time I told you all a little more about it.

View Larger Map

The interactive map above will give you an idea of the sheer distance that Alex has to drive over the next two and a half weeks. I’ll be there is the navigators seat but as I failed my driving test for the second time last Friday, I won’t be behind the wheel ( to be accurate even if I had passed my test I couldn’t legally drive the vehicle as you need to hold a full license to be validated on the insurance).

The trip will take us along great swathes of the Anne Beadell dessert highway and through the Emu Junction  Nuclear test site as we snake our way across the country eastwards towards the mining town of Coober Pedy. From there we turn north and head up towards Uluru and Kings Canyon before performing a giant circuit of the land and heading east once more to Alice Springs, the town in the heart of the nations red centre.

As well as some time alone together away from the excitement of our day-to-day jobs, we will also get a chance to see the countrie's interior for the first time. I’ll be taking a camera but I’ve promised that this will not turn into another work expeditions where I spend all my time with a camera in my hand mucking about with f stops and ISO speeds. That said I'll be shooting both digital and 35mm film on my Contax G2 and hoping that the background radiation at Emu Junction isn't enough to expose the film.

The map isn’t quite finished yet so be sure to check back after the weekend to see the final updates added.

Regards

Charlie

Damp / Tired / Burnt

Dear Harry,

 

So today I got up at 3.00am.

I got in a taxi, crossed town and climbed on board a boat in the middle of the night to head out into Sydney harbor. Once at sea I stood on the bow a fire tender and photographed a ocean going cruise liner arrive in Sydney.

Soaked to the skin (the tender was using it's water cannon to welcome the ship to port. The cannon work at 10 Tonnes per square inch pressure and can dispense 16 tonne of water per minute) I returned to the office, filed my images and turned around again to return to the ship, take a tour, shoot a fashion show and return to the office to file yet more images from on board.

The ship in question was the Queen Mary 2 and these are the results

Fashion: -  CLICK HERE

The arrival - CLICK HERE

Long Day, Good Fun, Tired now.

Regards,

Charlie

Into the Breech

Dear Harry,

As you have no doubt heard things over on this side of the planet have been a bit of a battle zone.
Every year Australia is blighted by a string of fires that lay waste to thousands of acres of bushland and national park, but this years bushfires have been catastrophic.

A killer combination of record temperatures and 100km/h winds had whipped up firestorms the likes of which the country has never before seen. As I write this 181 people are confirmed dead and 1,033 homes have been lost with that number set to climb in the coming weeks. You can get a full picture on the events since Feb 7th by looking at the Wikipedia page on the fires.

Firefighter Rob Langston surveys the devastation in an area razed by the Churchill-Jerrelang fire in the LaTrobe Valley. Picture: Stuart McEvoy
My friend Susan Gordon Brown asked me to add a link in this letter so that anyone who wants to can make a donation to the Australian Red Cross, who are on the ground in Victoria dealing with the aftermath of the fires.

CLICK HERE to go to the Red Cross Donation Page

No matter how much you can spare everything will help, so if you have a spare 2 minutes please take the time to a make a small donation to assist in all the people who've lost everything get back on their feet.

If you are interested in seeing how the story is unfolding then you can keep abreast of the latest events via the Herald Sun's webside

Regards,

Charlie

Down the Track

Dear Harry,

To some of us things come naturally, to some of us practice is required and then for some perseverance in the face of adversity is the best course.  Regardless how structured the learning, each person will develop their own way of picking off a skill or task.

When I was a little boy I remember my father teaching me to tie my shoe laces. Under and over and round and about and no matter what Dad did I still failed to grasp the essence of what he was explaining.  It wasn’t until my father, in a flash of paternal genius, re-orientated the demonstration from being in front of me to leaning over my shoulders to emulate how I would visualise the knot that the penny dropped and I mastered the bow in a heartbeat.

I’ve always been that way I think. In the past I’ve become deeply frustrated when there was something that everybody understood, yet I failed to grasp. These frustrations have wained as I’ve got older though. There comes a point you see when you become one with the notion that there are some things that you simply aren’t going to get and a better use of your time would be to pursue new and exciting activities, rather an beating yourself up because you can’t be like everyone else.

So it has always been with me and driving a car. As my friends learnt to drive I rested on my laurels content in the knowledge I lived 250m from my college front door and 350m from my local pub. My mates drove, and it always seemed like they wanted  people in their cars (as much out of teenage boasting, as the friendly offering of lifts I suspect) but whatever their motivation my buttocks swiftly developed a natural affinity with the passenger seat . And so the trend continued. Either my mates drove or I lived within staggering distance of where I needed to be. Any location outside this comfort zone fell into a three way toss-up between a pricy cab ride, charming a lift off a mate or simply not going.

There were  periods of clarity mind you. Moments where the haze of my twenties, booze, fags and a pointless job, cleared for a moment and I stood tall and entered the right hand side of a motor vehicle. I had hours of lesson while living in Shoreditch. Sixteen in all, if I remember correctly, but since I was driving once a week, had no access to a car and other time and had no real motivation to pass my test the whole process what simply my way of tilting at windmills with a carbon footprint attached.

In fact it wasn’t until this week that I made good on the promise I made to myself about a decade ago and actually learnt to drive. Not pass my test mind you, I’ve still got to do that, but actually reach a point when I can get behind the wheel of a car and not have butterflies in my stomach and sweat on my palms and generally wish I was pretty much anywhere else in the world except gripping a steering wheel. 

There’s been a fair amount to broom broom, toot toot over the last 12 months in Australia. But the dribs and drabs have never left me in a state where I feel that had enough confidence to demand the car keys and bolt full pelt toward the side of the car that I have always regarded as being reserved for the adults in my life. But it would seem this is no longer the case.  Over the last five days I’ve has 2 hours of lessons per day with three and a driving test last Friday. A test I failed, I might add, but I wasn’t really expecting to pass first time. Instead I have a few simple points to work on (I’ve got to do checks at traffic lights for people shooting through on red, nicknamed ‘Red Racers’ by the local RTA, that and not turning right and sitting behind a bus like a plumb for 5 minutes) and I should be set to go again a couple of weeks time, which by my reckoning isn’t bad going for a guy who secretly hoped they’d perfect personal teleportation before it got to the crunch.

So I think I’ll leave it there for today. New South Wales is expected t be the hottest place on earth tomorrow (a warming  47 degrees) so what better way to beat the heat than to head for a few cheeky cocktails to guarantee the morning is met with with thick heads and happty hearts.

Regards,

Charlie

Mayhem & Sadness

Dear Harry,

Fear not, after a week plus of madness all is well. News in brief

We have moved house - HUZZAH

I booked the moving van for the 17th of January 2008 - D'OH!

We have no phone or Internet at home - BOO!

We have accidentally moved into a building that does not allow pets - GRRR!

We are now in breach of our own Strata (Residents association) laws and now we have to have a meeting to see if we are allowed to keep our pets - Sigh ....

I watched the 1987 film The Lost Boysat the movies last night and after the film we had a live hook up to speak to Cory Feldman who as we all know played Egdar Frog in the origional movie - HURRAY

I have to spend all day tomorrow at the Big Day Out - HOT!

I have to go now, return to Bondi and watch a screening on Man on a Wire - COOL!

On a serious note for a moment my Uncle Andrew passed away last week, I've been so out of touch I've not even been able to contact my family to offer my condolences. The second my phone gets turned back on on I'll call.

Charlie

All The Small Things

All the small things.

Dear Harry,

You’ve heard me lament the lack of time we all seem to have in the modern world on numerous occasions in the past. Well one real world translation of this problem in my case is never seeming to have time to deal with all those amusing / amazing emails that my mates send me.

It’s the same every time. The email arrives at work, I open it I’m blown away and then send it to my Gmail account where it sits like a unwrapped present for months … and months, until a day like today that it.

That’s right, today I have trawled the unopened gems from the last 12 months and put together a digest of some the highlights.

• So lets start with something musical. In this case the Australian comedian Adam Hills reworking Advance Australia Fair to make the nation’s national anthem fit to the tune of Jimmy Barnes rock classic Working Class Man.

• Next up I though I’d share with you a fantastic audio slide show from the New York Times where their Indian affairs correspondent Adam Huggins follows the journey of how the Big Apples manholes cover get manufactured in the baking heat of foundries outside Calcutta.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20071126_MANHOLES_FEATURE/index.html

• From the man-made to the natural and a gallery illustrating the amazing microscopic world of sand. Daft though it may sound, have a look, because as the Discovery Magazine article highlights, the minuscule world under our feet on beaches and dessert all over the world is a perfectly preserved geological record of how our planet came to be.

http://discovermagazine.com/photos/01-each-grain-of-sand-a-tiny-work-of-art?dupe

• The world as it was to a glimpse of the world as it may be with this footage of a new breed of robotics. Nicknamed ‘BigDog’ this mechanical marvel has been created by the boffins at Boston Dynamics and has a new found capacity to deal with uneven terrain that illustrates the way in which science is getting ever closer to realising the visions of writers like Issac Asimov.

http://gizmodo.com/368651/new-video-of-bigdog-quadruped-robot-is-so-stunning-its-spooky 

• Then we have a three of the best comedy clips that I’ve seen online this year. A big thank you to the comic genius of Mitchell & Webb and their rude series as shown below:

The Waiter

The Shop Assistant

The Vicar

• And finally from one sort intolerance to another. This 2007 newspaper article contains some of 1943 hints to transport managers when confronted with employing their first female staff during the Second World War. Staggering to read now but in a lot of cases women had never been included in many professions at that time and this type of iron first wrapped in a velvet glove mentality was what passed for touchy-feely during the no-nonsense days of the war.

So that about does it for now. Next time I write we’ll be in 2009 so let me sign off by wishing you all a fantastic New Year and I look forward to flooding you all with more madness, nonsense and poorly spelt anecdotes next year.

Charlie

And Cameras for All ...

Dear Harry,

With the entertainment aftermath of the Yuletide period tucked neatly behind us I though I’d share a little about your Christmas present. I just need to adjust my musical choice a moment as It’s because clear that Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy is not the most conducive background ditty to try and write to.

I decided this year that my nearest and dearest were all going to get cameras. I’ve so many of the bloody things myself I though it only fair to try and share my obsession with those around me.

This all started off a while ago when I bough myself a Canon G9 as a compact semi-pro option to have with me when I couldn’t be bothered to lug an SLR around. I rather naively though that I could share it with Alex and it could become a sort of everyday household camera, the sort of photographic equivalent to a pair Converse I suppose. Sadly the G9 proved to be less than easy to operate (in fact it’s never really had a fair go in the field as it really is massively complicated) and has so many more megapixels than glass to squeeze then down that I’ve never been wild about the results.

So anyway. It was decided after a brief meeting of the joint chief of presents that we’d get Alex an little digital compact for Christmas this year. After a bit of shopping around we actually settled on the new Leica C-Lux 3. Being a nifty n’ natty wee number with sporty black paint job and compact enough to fit into the girl about town’s handbag it pretty much ticked all the boxes.

Your camera, on the other hand, was more of an accidental discovery. You’re a good deal older than most of my friends in Australia’s children, therefore you have moved into that tricky stage to buy for. In the end I was so undecided between presents that I barely registered the word camera on the Amazon.co.uk listing page I was on, and simply saw the word CAMOUFLAGE.

Now you know me and Camo – if it’s got a disruptive pattern on it I’m pretty much there,  but the fact that some genius at V-Tech though it wise to create an armored camo-coloured digital kids camera left me drooling jealous and wishing I was a great deal younger than I am. (physically at least, mentally I suspect I’m still in the playground running around with my arms out pretending to be a plane – Good Times.)

Anyway I hope you like it and I hope you get a chance to snap some fun things of the family over the festive period. The shots I’d go for are parent and grandparents asleep on the sofa after one too many glasses of sherry, they always go down a treat.

Next up I suppose next up we should get you a flickr or photobucket account so you can place your pics up online and you can show the world what the life of the three year old is really like.

All the best and get snappin’ my lad,

Charlie

Christmas Eve

Dear Harry,

It’s been a couple of weeks plus since I last dropped you a line and since I’ve got Christmas Eve off work and I’m just finished pinning fairy lights down the garden fence, I though what better time to catch up.

So after one Australian Christmas with my Godmother Daphne in Melbourne and one will Alex in Sydney, now it’s our turn to play host. This will be our first married Christmas and the first time we have had a chance to use our new BBQ in anger, grill for the Chrimbo masses.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been experiencing an increasing number of Hyper-Australian events, these started with the buying of the BBQ, seen as an Australian right of passage and culminating in the moment that Alex and I bumping into our mates Sharon and Don at Bondi Junction. The pair of us staggered out of the bottle shop, armed with a slab of beer apiece (a slab is a 24 back of beer, usually 4x 6bottles) while Don and Sharon were perusing the butchery goodness in the window at Bush Meats. G’Day’s were exchanged and we went our separate ways.

So what does our Christmas day hold in store, I hear you ask. Well I don’t really but it’s better if I just press on. In a nutshell the - Christmas Trinity – food, booze and presents. I’ve tried to be good this year and not get in quantities of comestibles that would attract as admiring nod from the quartermaster of an invading army, but old habits die hard. Plan for all eventualities – there must be enough to go round so that if for some reason you get an extra 30 people you are fully covered. It’s nonsense of course, in the end you either end up stuffing all your guests to the point where the taxi home comes with blue flashing lights or the quantity of wastage attracts the ire of Bono and his like.

Then you have the question of where do you put all your guests? Despite the simple failing of our current home, the space at the rear of the building, that with some landscaping could be called a garden but at the moment looks like a bomb site decorated by a one-eyed man with a brick fetish, will do a not bad job at housing the troops.

The biggest problem is that nothing is on the level. The brick floor is on a slope from the laneway beyond the gate to the back door with the bricks themselves undulating in such a higgledy-piggledy fashion as to look as if someone has made a shabby attempt to try and conceal the body of a shire horse by throwing rubble on top and jumping up and down a bit.

Erm …

Sorry minor break in my though pattern there. Hendricks was / is / always demanding attention. All sorts of feline song and dance. As a special Christmas treat we got the cats some chicken yesterday. While generally getting on with a host of things today I boiled this chook up and it seems that the smell of cooking meat in our kitchen, a rarity in this house, has distinctly loosened the spring in Hendricks’s already overwound mind. At one point earlier I ended up having to cut the chicken into chunks with his head trapped under the crook of my arm after he leapt full bodied onto the kitchen counter,  despite the fact I was standing in his path.

To make matters worse Hendricks managed to loose his collar last week and his temporary replacement came fitted with a bell. This means that his approaching insanity is now accompanied with the perpetual jingling of said, little bell. I imagine that the cats stealth aspect has been somewhat reduced by the fact that he sounds like a Lapland Reindeer, but at least it warns me of impending lunacy.

Anyway I must dash. In the great tradition of religious holidays I’ve got to see if I can get a haircut. Somehow I seem to always leave it until the day before a significant moment in the life of Jesus to realise that I look like the underside of a Yack’s sac and need to get shewn immediately.

Loads of love,

Charlie