Bigger

Any speculators out there may be tempted to acquire the big lobster pictured on the last entry. This classic piece of anti culture has just gone up for sale and is expected to attract massive interest from eccentrics with more money than sense.

For $750,000 you can be the proud owner of the world’s most imposing crustacean and a tacky restaurant to boot.

There is a story that the original drawings for the lobster specified the dimensions in feet. However, the people who built it worked in metric, so the town has a lobster 18m high which appears in a million photo albums.

Unfortunately there is no record of the conversation between the builder and the owner.

In the spirit of all things large, I spent a few days in Melbourne recently. Unfortunately I had to leave Mandy behind and take on sights and lights all alone. She took it reasonably well and we were talking again within a couple of hours.

Melbourne is busy. It is a big city and it feels like one. After 9 months in Adelaide, the trip to Melbourne made me feel like a country bumpkin. The speed and bustle of the place was quite a surprise and shattered any illusions I still harboured about Adelaide being a real city.

But it is a great place, like Manchester but with loads more trams. The city is a crowded mix of Victorian grandeur, towering skyscrapers and extravagant design which would probably look ghastly anywhere else in the world. But in Melbourne, it just seems to fit in and makes for a relaxed but exciting blend.

In fact, I get the feeling that you could try anything in Melbourne and it would just work, the city is cool enough to accommodate most things.

It is also the sporting heartbeat of Australia, home to one of the one of the great horse races, one of the most prestigious tennis tournaments, the Australian Grand Prix, the Boxing day test match (I’ve still got a couple of spare tickets) and, most importantly here, the spiritual home of Aussie football.

The centrepiece is the100,000 seat Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), an awesome stadium which is full for the really big footy matches and will be bursting at the seams on Boxing Day.

I also reckon that the houses here don’t have kitchens.

How else could you explain the sheer number and variety of restaurants, all of which were full at both Monday lunchtime and evening. This is probably because they are very good and offer something for everyone. One evening, when I found myself wondering what I felt like for dinner, the solution appeared, as if by magic, on a blackboard in front of my very eyes.

Not only was the cheese smelly and the wine excellent (I think), but as a measure of the establishment, there were hooks under the bar for coats.

Now this might seem a little thing, but it is a mark of commitment to the pleasure of the customer and in a pub which offers hooks under the bar, there is no need to worry about the quality of the beer.

The other significant event this week was the first barbecue of the season; although it is still mid winter. The weather has been great recently and as one of the mountain bike gang is moving interstate, we thought a few beers and some kangaroo would be a good send off.

His company might be missed, but his cooking skills will not be. Kangaroo is generally best served rare, but not that rare. He was quickly relieved of the tongs and told to sit on the deckchair with his beer and enjoy his leaving do. It might be most fun he has for a while. He is going to Canberra!

For the vegetarians out there, you might be pleased to know that the tomatoes are growing well although the peppers and basil show no signs of playing ball just yet.

Finally Mandy has landed some more work on the burns ward which is more fun for her, and as Australian Pop Idol has just started, she is a very happy bunny at the moment.

Hope all is well
M&W

Big

Last weekend was time for a break from the bright lights and hard labour of the big city; all this sunshine, flexi time and coffee does begin to wear you down after a while.

We are very conscious that since arriving here we have spent a lot of time trying to settle in and shopping in IKEA while neglecting the country beyond the city limits. So we were looking forward to heading down the road to a little seaside town called Robe, perched 200 miles south east of Adelaide on the Limestone Coast.

Robe is a very pretty and well kept place where proudly maintained Victorian buildings provide a roof over the heads of fancy restaurants and artist’s studios. Meanwhile a sheltered harbour offers haven to a small fleet of (seemingly) fabulously wealthy lobster fishermen while the Southern Ocean bashes away at the cliffs outside.

It reminds me of Cornish fishing villages with the sort of prices which would give you an acute pain in the pocket if you weren’t lucky enough to be boarding at a friend’s holiday shack.

Did I say shack?

I meant luxury escape pad 50 yards from the beach.

With all due respect to the very helpful people at the tourist office in Robe, one of the beauties of the place is that there is very little to do apart from walk along the cliffs and argue over which wine to have with dinner. So we slobbed around, read books, paddled in the sea and argued over which wine to have with dinner.

We took our time on the drive down to Robe, partly because I was ferreting around trying to catch the lizard Mandy is holding in the picture but also to stop for an Australian icon, the giant lobster.

Those of you who have been around Australia might be familiar with some of the ‘family’ of giant objects scattered around the country. These include giant pineapples, koalas, sheep, Ned Kellys and, strangely, a boxing crocodile.

Apart from the necessary eccentricity of their patrons, the only thing these objects share in common is that they are in little towns on the way to somewhere else, and they represent an attempt to lure people into the over priced cafes and petrol stations attached to them.

Of course they have developed a cult status as well with people collecting pictures of themselves at each one, so it was no surprise to find a group of snap happy Japanese guys appear as if by magic, just like the shopkeeper.

We passed another South Australian 'big landmark' on the way, but this one doesn’t seem to make the official list on the link above; the giant olive of Tailem Bend.

And frankly, I’m not surprised, in fact Mandy may be the only person in the country to have had her picture taken next to it. It is placed in the grounds of an olive oil factory in a long forgotten part of the town, the sort of place you only find if you are lost.

And getting lost in a place the size of Tailem Bend is not an easy trick to pull off.

Of course I can manage it though.

Anyway, the lobster was not a let down, it really is quite big, and it fulfilled its mission as we filled the car up and bought a pile of unnecessary chocolate.

While getting away to Robe was just the ticket, it was also poor timing as it meant leaving all our new plants and seeds which we had sowed. After the tree planting of a couple of weeks ago I had become strangely inspired and bought a boot load of native Australian bush plants and tomato, beetroot, red pepper (or capsicum as we must learn to call them) and jalapeno seeds.

The master plan is to have half a garden of authentic bushland full of contented birds, lizards and spiders while the other half is a lush crop of home grown veggies to go with the barbies which will be starting again soon.

The news so far is that the seeds have shown no signs of interest and the plants have not attracted any interesting birds or spiders yet. Watch this space though, despite Mandy’s lack of confidence, I reckon I’ll sprout green fingers yet.

Keep well
M&W

Brown

I would hate to tempt fate, but it looks like spring is nearly here. There is pink blossom in the garden, the daffodils are emerging and, after quite an absence, sunglasses weather is here again.

It has not been a cold winter when compared to the north of England, there have been no frosty car windscreens, no snow and no biting wind. Indeed, outdoors it has been bright, fresh and thoroughly pleasant.

On the other hand, indoors has been brass monkeys; we have often left the back door open to let some warm air in and Mandy has taken to warming the bed up with her hairdryer. Reminiscent of a couple houses I lived in while at university.

Our house is a lovely traditional bluestone cottage built in about 1910. It is spacious, affordable, in a great suburb, with its own wine cellar, and bloody freezing in the winter while unbearably hot in the summer.

Not to worry though, the worst of the cold is over and the first barbie is on the radar.

While the warm weather cheered us up no end, it is still a bit cold for the snakes around here. Thank goodness, my mum would say, as I found myself learning to catch and handle a brown snake somewhere in the hills, at least an hour from medical attention.

If you haven’t come across the brown snake before, this website, among others lists it as the second most venomous snake in the world. This is a contentious subject as the snake has to land a bite first. So a shy snake with massively toxic venom, such as a brown snake, is less dangerous than a thoroughly ill tempered bugger which packs a lesser punch but is more than happy to use it.

Anyway, I think it sounds cool to say that the snake in the picture is potentially the second deadliest in the world. Sorry mum.

I was lucky enough to get this invitation to a snake handling lesson following my trip to the venom farm a few weeks ago and what a brilliant day it was. The chap teaching myself and a guy from a wildlife park has a part time business clearing snakes from houses and offices and has had many years experience in handling them; he is a no nonsense pro who makes Steve Irwin look like a show pony. What a bloke to learn from.

We spent the morning at his friend’s house, somewhere in the hills surrounding Adelaide, practicing our techniques with a rubber snake until he thought we were ready to take on the real thing. In between learning the ropes we played with her pet pythons and ate home made pumpkin soup. Not bad.

Eventually, deemed ready to do battle with the snake, we went to see a farmer who figured that one more snake on his land probably wouldn’t make much difference, and found a nice flat piece of pastureland.

We had taken a snake with us, one which Mike had recently caught in a house somewhere in the suburbs. It was a beautiful animal, about a metre long, slender and healthy. Our mission was to pick it up from the grass and, in stages, manage it in such a way that its fangs didn’t get near us, then hold it’s head between thumb and forefinger and eventually place it safely in a porous bag to be placed out of harm’s way. These things are both fiddly and scary with only two hands and one very dangerous animal.

Fortunately the weather was wet and a little cold, not ideal for a snake’s reflexes, but perfect for a clumsy and nervous chap like me who did not need a writhing, agitated and frightened snake to deal with. While it is generally a shy animal, it is always important to remember that an angry brown snake does bite.

My heart was cracking my ribs as I tried to be assertive about grabbing it for the first time but eventually I got the hang of it, albeit with a very dopey snake.

Obviously snakes are not at their best in the cold weather and complacency could easily set in while practicing handling the poor thing. However, it only needed to sun to peep from behind the clouds for a couple of minutes to wake it up and remind us just what a quick and, at that point, irritated animal it was. What a buzz that was! We have a follow up lesson in mid summer when the snakes will be a little more lively, I can’t wait.

After a whole day with the snake, I was feeling quite fond of it and it was great to find a decent place to release it near an old tree by a creek. Just as we let it go to enjoy a life eating frogs, the sun came out and the dopey practice snake woke up again, sniffed its freedom and disappeared effortlessly into the rotten trunk; a graceful and beautiful animal. God help the frogs this summer.

Have a good week.

M&W

Green

There are lots of things to like about Adelaide, from the parks to the markets and the hills to the sea. I still don’t think much of the curry, but one thing that I really enjoy is the city’s little attempts to look like a big place.

This occurred to me during the week as I came across our own little LA, a series of handprints from Formula 1 drivers placed haphazardly on garden walls and shop fronts. A kind of metropolitan fossil find…dinosaur bones from a time when Adelaide had something for the rest of the world to look at. There is no explanation attached, no apparent reason, they are just there. They are not a tourist attraction, but perhaps should be. I got a small kick from knowing I have bigger hands than Damon Hill.

Another of my favourite South Australian institutions is that of Thinker In Residence. Each year we invite an eminent academic to come and live amongst us and then tell us where it is all going wrong. It is a highly sought after position, partly because much of their time here is spent as drinker in residence, touring the abundant vineyards, and partly because being a salaried smart arse is a job to kill for.

The ‘Thinker’ for the year is generally selected to address the burning issue of the day for our perpetually worried state. This year an American professor is telling us about environmental sustainability which, after bidding for the world cup (!), is the hottest potato in town.

To be fair he is very clever and a brilliant speaker, I attended a lecture which suggested that his time in the wineries was not entirely wasted. He is here because Adelaide has a massive environmental impact for a little place, it’s the size of London with a tenth of the population.

Apparently we have what is called a significant footprint. Depending on your spin it means big gardens for everyone or an unsustainable metropolis. When you add the size of the average car, the way we drain the River Murray and fill the shark infested sea with pollutants, we become the biggest environmental terrorists per capita in the world. Something must be done and he has some very practical ideas.

Next year’s resident boffin has just been announced as an eminent Canadian child psychologist. As I mention, the choice of Thinker reflects the worries of our state and this can only be a reaction to our paranoia about childhood obesity.

The tabloid TV which this country so adores runs a story a day on tubby kids. So, forget the Home & Away propaganda of skinny, tanned, well adjusted, surf dudes; real Aussie kids are probably chewing through a Chico Roll, the deep fried food of choice. Everyone assumes it is full of chicken, but nobody is brave to check for sure.

That the country is getting fatter is not really a surprise; the restaurants have no concept of portion control. I have rarely been able to finish my plate when eating out; too much is just enough being the motto of the South Australian restaurateur. Meanwhile, bananas at nearly £5 a kilo make the healthier option a little out of reach.

Anyway, getting back to greener matters, it was National Tree Day last Sunday and we took our trowels down to the park to join in a mass planting of drab looking shrubs. These sorry looking sprigs are of great importance as native species which offer food and cover for native wildlife and strike a blow back against 200 years of introducing weeds and tougher plants which wipe out the more frail local flora.

While Mandy and I had a good time getting our hands dirty, I’m not sure this was the relaxing weekend in Adelaide that I had promised Jonny McGarty. For those of you who don’t know him, Jonny has been beavering away in the tropical north of Queensland at a mine engineering firm. He recently resigned to take a job in the desert, 400 miles from the nearest town, a place which redefines the benchmark for the middle of nowhere. After a year in the fruitless pursuit of intelligent life in Queensland he had hoped that the relative sophistication of Adelaide might give him one last bit of cheer before heading off to find copper in the harsh outback. I don’t think his plans included wallowing in the mud. Still, he’s from Wigan and knows how to put a brave face on things.

Keep well
M&W