Earning A Crust

It is six months ago this week that we first blinked at the southern sun and wondered whose bloody stupid idea it was to come here.

In some ways it seems like five minutes ago and in others like we have been living here for ages. We have gone through the trial and error routines of finding a favourite beach, favourite pub and the bus routes that get us where we want to go. We have also become part of the system with driving licences, medical insurance, a lease on the house and parking tickets.

We have bought a car, bless it, which has gone further and faster than I ever dreamt possible and got a decent job each. So, with a bit of luck to help us out along the way, the ledger looks OK.

So far, since putting ourselves at the disposal of the South Australian economy, we have been pretty lucky and things have worked out fairly well. Mandy has been in great demand as a nurse and I, after work as a removal man and ticket collector, have found a comfy swivelling chair from which to earn a living.

After moving around from ward to ward, being the new girl on the Intensive Care Unit means being assigned all the rotten shifts. While they do it with a broad smile and a pat on her back, Mandy knows this is an inevitable part of the process. Although the money is good, very good, working from Good Friday through to Easter Monday, immediately followed by three night shifts, is a prospect which would make most nurses shudder.

On the other hand, I have been pretty lucky in landing a job with the city council. I am based in lovely offices in the heart of the city, working with 800 people who are largely as helpful, open and friendly as you could wish for.

On top of that, my terms of employment include a table tennis table, subsidised massages (lovely), and, when I take my books back late, no library fines.

So far, Maltese Eric has consistently cleaned me up at ping pong, but I am getting better. This week though I am taking on an Aussie from Transport Planning with the high stakes of a few beers on the outcome. The hairs on my neck are rising at the prospect of beating him. Beating an Aussie at anything is an exciting prospect.

As if that wasn’t enough, we have the most agreeable routine of morning tea, which, depending on your perspective, is either one of the great institutions of local government or another excuse for council employees to stand around gossiping.

It works like this. Every week, two people on our floor of 50 or so take it in turns to put on nibbles and coffee for everyone else. For thirty minutes the city stops and we all tuck in. It is very sociable and a chance for the talented and imaginative among the staff to show off a little. This week was my turn to put on the show along with a very friendly lady from town planning.

Well!…..I wouldn’t mind popping round to her house for my dinner. She came up with the most fantastic home made cookies, and dozens of them. My mouth is watering just typing this. I simply do not have the words to do credit to her efforts. Wow.

Fortunately for those of us less blessed in the kitchen, Adelaide has a produce market beyond compare. I will tell you more another day, but for now, I was able to saunter up to one of the many dedicated cheese stalls and put myself in their capable hands.

After explaining my situation to the more than helpful staff, I spent the next 20 minutes tasting a variety of South Australian cheeses and walked back to work with something for every taste and enough for the appetites of a couple of dozen hairy building assessors.

If you like your food and wine, this really is the town for you.

Have a good week
W&M

Hmmm, I can smell.....

Adelaide is a small city, but it is perfectly formed. It is also a city full of surprises, if like us, you wander round with your eyes closed most of the time.

After living in this house for four months, we only recently discovered that the original Penfolds vineyard is only two miles from our front door, (Penfolds is Australia’s most famous label). And last Sunday was our well overdue first visit to sponge some free booze, otherwise known as ‘tasting’.

Looking back over this diary, there is recurring theme of wine, wine and more wine. Despite what you may think about my reasons for this, it really is what South Australia is most proud of. With seven wine regions in the state and most of the best wines in Australia coming from around here, the locals are pretty clued up about their wine; it’s just something they grow up with.

To be fair, SA really does have something to be proud of too. For example, one of Penfold’s wines (Grange for those of you in the know) was named best red wine in the world by some fancy magazine or other. Needless to say that wasn’t up for tasting, costing as it does £250 and upwards a bottle.

And people like to talk about their wine too. If you have wine with dinner, people want to know which wine. A night in with a DVD and a bottle of wine is not acceptable. It must be a night in with a DVD and a specified label and a report is expected. So you see, getting away from wine in Adelaide is impossible. Even if you wanted to.

Anyway, the clever money is on drinking the wine here as the kindest thing that can be said about the beer is that it’s cold.

All of which leaves us at a bit of a disadvantage. ‘Nice’ is about the limit of my tasting notes and to fit in around here that needs to change, so the time has come for us to sign up for a wine tasting course. Partly for interest, but mostly to save Mandy from herself.

The tasting room at Penfolds is rather well appointed and they do a very good service considering it’s free and there is no obligation to purchase anything. Set in an old pressing room full of dusty bottles, straw and various antiques with a suave and well informed barman filling the glasses, it is very well done.

In no time at all though, the posh surroundings and expensive wine had gone straight to Mandy’s head and before you could say ‘plummy finish’ she was transformed in to a gargling, glass swirling font of adjectives.

As one ‘nice’ wine was followed by another, everyone in the room was treated to Mandy’s opinion which started with ‘smoky’ warmed up to ‘caramelly’, before the splendid ‘liquorice bouquet’ and reaching a memorable crescendo with ‘grassy’.

The slick barman caught this last one and my translation of his pained expression was that he considered Mandy had been inhaling her grass rather than drinking it.

Keeping Mandy away from the free grog is easy when it comes to Aussie Rules Football though. Offer her the chance of standing on the hill (Aussie jargon, hill = terrace), within six feet of the brutal action and you are in grave danger of having your hand chewed off.

So it was an enthusiastic Mandy who accompanied me to watch the Redlegs with 4,000 other oddballs. It’s a shame, but the season is falling apart and even though they fought hard for ¾ of the match, in the last quarter they were totally outplayed.

I have no idea why North Adelaide looked so good, I still have no idea why one team is better than another and not the faintest grasp of the laws. But I know when to cheer and when to shut up and that is the international law of life on the terrace.

As for Mandy, she doesn’t care about who wins. As long they do it with a bit of grappling and near her. She’s very easy to please.

Take care,
M&W

Make Mine a Gold One

The good news from Australia is that the two Tasmanian miners have been rescued after two weeks trapped in a tiny cage under several thousand tonnes of rock.
(I work in that lot somewhere)

They were dragged out early in the morning live on breakfast TV and the breathless wait for them to emerge from the lift reminded me of waiting for the Marie Rose to rise from the Solent. In fact, I reckon the miners were deeper than the Marie Rose.

The rescue of Todd and Brant was almost certainly the most interesting event to happen in Beaconsfield for many a long year and the locals weren’t going to wait all day to start the party. By the time the two dishevelled heroes emerged everyone else had already settled in to a long day in the pub.

This was 7.00am, but most people looked very comfortable with a beer for breakfast, reinforcing the general feeling throughout Australia that there is not much to do in Beaconsfield if you are not looking for gold. Until 1878, the town was known as Brandy Creek but the vicar of the time renamed it in the hope of creating a more desirable image. Judging by the TV pictures, it really doesn’t matter what name you give a rose.

While this news was greeted with delight across the country and with yet another beer in Beaconsfield, everyone remembered their mate who was not so lucky when the mine collapsed and four hours after seeing their first daylight for a fortnight, the (by now ex) miners were at the funeral.

Meanwhile, the TV companies have not been quite so dignified. The day before the rescue and shortly after interviewing the manager of the mine, the best known reporter in Australia died suddenly from a heart attack. He was a household name and seemingly quite a journalist who had seen the rough end of many conflicts over the last 30 years.

By the next day, the tributes were already being overshadowed by the inevitable but still unseemly bidding war for the story. The chief executive of one channel had even flown over to buy a drink for everyone in the local pub, with cameras everywhere of course. All this overshadows the probability that the mine will close in the near future. The cost of the rescue has put an already marginal mine beyond any measure of viability and there is no guarantee of work further than the end of June.

With one drama in Tazzie nearly resolved and another bubbling away, Adelaide has been getting over it’s own little excitement of the exploding café with nobody any the wiser as to the reasons behind it. A colleague and I have picked up the job of trying to work out what the city council can do for the businesses affected by the blast. It’s all PR of course but it still needs doing and short of helping with some plastering there’s not a lot we can offer.

Fortunately, most of the owners are philosophical about not having a shop anymore. The building was a dump and they are all insured so we pat them on the back, wish them luck and wander off for a quiet coffee to discuss our next mission.

So while Adelaide returns to it’s happy and sleepy equilibrium, winter’s grip is getting tighter and the lazy evenings of drinks after work on sun drenched boulevards seem so long ago. The conversation is less about where to go tonight and more about what is on TV. And in this house, that means only one thing.

Bloody Home and Away!

Just in case any of you do watch Home and Away, you will NEVER guess who killed Josh West. While it’s a big surprise, it was a big disappointment too. There were at least four people I would rather have seen written out of the programme. I don’t know how far behind you are, so I do hope I haven’t ruined anything by telling you Josh gets bumped off.

It has seemed like a slow couple of weeks for us since getting back from holiday, I think we are still stuck on Kangaroo Island time which means pretty slow. Back to work blues are an international thing which are usually only solved by one thing….time to look for the next break. How does diving on the barrier reef sound?

Hope all is well
M&W

Little Islands & Big Bangs

Although this may seem like one big holiday to many people, it really is a lot harder than we manage to make it look. So, exhausted after a long hot summer, we obviously deserved a holiday and headed off to Kangaroo Island, about 100 miles and a short ferry ride south of Adelaide.

It really is a remarkable place, largely untouched bushland and forest with white sandy beaches, spectacular cliffs and an ocean of pure turquoise. It’s pretty big but with a tiny population so finding only your footprints on the sand of one of the many coves is not unusual.

Similar in many ways to Cornwall, it is a quirky place where everybody waves to each other on the deserted roads and the happy hour at the pub lasts thirty minutes. There is also a graveyard for former lighthouse keepers where one chap who passed away in 1858 has two headstones at opposite corners. He must have found the spiral staircase a challenge.

It also has bitterly cold winds, white knuckle ride dirt roads and every single snake on the island is dangerously venomous. We bumped into a few and fortunately they gave us the benefit of the doubt, even when we nearly trod on them.

Kangaroo Island is renowned for being probably the best place to see much of Australia’s animal life in an environment identical to that which the whalers who first landed on the island would have seen.

Being out of season, we almost had the island to ourselves and had a fantastic time walking along beaches full of seals, climbing over the strangest rock formations and tripping over wallabies, koalas and penguins while parrots and eagles filled the skies. It really is a great place.

As is the way though, it was soon over and it was time to go home again, and very strange it was too, to be heading back to Adelaide to continue the holiday.

On our arrival back in sedate old Adelaide though, we found that an explosion had rocked the centre of the city, wrecking a café, a sports shop and the preferred wine bar of the local politicians. Sadly the owner of the café lost his life in the blast and so can’t explain what he was doing there at 3.00am with 50 litres of kerosene. So the mystery and speculation continues, all of which leaves the whole city a little shocked. These things just don’t happen in Adelaide, it’s not that kind of place.

Away from our little local dramas, the whole country is hooked on the story of two miners trapped 900m below the surface. As I write this, they have been down there 12 days following an earthquake which caused a collapse in their gold mine.

While the rescue teams are getting close to them, it is very slow going and the conditions sound appalling as they scratch at rock five times tougher than set concrete.

There is obviously a lot of public sympathy for these blokes, but it’s not for them being stuck in a tiny hole licking water off the rock; Aussies expect their diggers to put up with the odd hardship. Everyone is more concerned with their battle with the nutritionists who are deciding what they should be eating.

Each and every day they request McDonalds, pizza and beer and each and every day they are given carrot soup and vitamin tablets which is pushed through the little serving hatch they have managed to drill through. We have a new public enemy number one; the bloke denying these heroes a Big Mac. Anyway, hopefully they will be out tomorrow.

On the home front, Mandy is now rat and mouse breeder in chief at the local wildlife park. While she enjoys it, she would rather be working with the wombats, partly because they have more personality but mostly because all the rats and mice end up in with the snakes.

And finally, this week sees the end of an institution in Australian as This Is Your Life is taken off the air. There is nobody left over here to do.

Until next time, hope all is well.

M&W