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..those
console models with doors that you opened when the family gathered around for
the evening’s entertainment, and then discreetly closed again when the
TV station went off the air at 11 o’clock, so that the unsightly TV screen
was hidden from decent people’s view the next day and all you saw was
a rather large and mysterious piece of furniture.
From the first moment I saw TV I was hooked. It was as well that we didn’t
own a set till my schooling was nearly over; otherwise I’d be at school
still, with a faraway look in my eyes and whistling The Gormans under
my breath.
I recall seeing Stan Freberg in concert in Christchurch in the mid-fifties.
It was Stan that anticipated we’d soon be as tired of TV as he was, with
his hit calypso spoof, Tele-Ve-Shun.
Tele-Ve-Shun, Tele-Ve-Shun
I’m a sick of looking on Tele-Ve-Shun
I got weak in the eyes
Weak in the head likewise
From sitting and looking on a Tele-Ve-Shun
The only joke I remember from the show related to the advent of stereo radio
(probably FM, but I don’t recall if he used that term). There was a well-loved
radio serial at the time that I as a sickly lad had listened to quite a lot
from my sick bed, called Portia Faces Life. Stan quipped that in stereo,
Portia would be facing you. (I liked Stan’s satirical bent –
I must check out what’s available from his massive output). I was a sucker
for radio, so I guess that I was a natural for TV, and if anything, my addiction
has grown worse over the years.
Not long after my wife died in the late nineties, a salesman for cable TV showed
up at my place. He didn’t need to ask twice – I signed on immediately.
It was the TV coverage of the rugby that Foxtel promised, or more specifically
for the rugby challenged, the rugby union, that transformed an expensive
luxury into an expensive necessity. I am a Kiwi afterall.
TV’s most often the best way to see rugby anyway. Most grounds, in the
southern states are designed for cricket and the AFL, and the intimacy the crowd
gets with a purpose made rectangular ground is lost – a classic example
is the Bledisloe Cup at the MCG, where there are massive crowds, but no atmosphere.
(The smaller Phone Dome is an exception – I thoroughly enjoyed seeing
a day of rugby there at the sevens’ tournament during the recent Commonwealth
Games).
Cable TV hasn’t let me down by and large, and the add-on of the World
Movies channel has been a cultural plus. Mind you, there are a number of channels,
a large number of channels, that are a complete waste of space, from
which you would correctly deduce that Foxtel’s packaging leaves an awful
lot to be desired. Still, as a confirmed TV addict, I’m of the opinion
that if you can’t find anything worth watching on yer forty or so channels,
you’re not really trying.

..some
lost pride with a fast and lucrative sale on Gumtree.
It was overcast anyway and it was also getting dark so I had to move fast. I
was heaving the antiquated looking beast into a more photogenic position one
of the wheels fell off – and then I remembered that was one of the issues I
had when I off-loaded from the van in the first place.
I decided to photograph the vinyl dust cover first with the emphasis on the
Beef Eater logo – the former owner had told me it was a sought-after brand in
its day. The pic came up OK, a little bit menacing in a Darth Vader kind of
way. (see pic)
I filled the plastic bucket I found near the BBQ with hot water, (which was
when I also discovered that it had a significant leak, dear Henry), and washed
the wooden slats and hood down with a damp sponge. I surveyed my work. It looked
a bit better – almost dashing.
When I lifted up the hood I discovered that a) the hood wasn’t attached
to the grill and was made in two pieces, which naturally came apart and b) it
was also covered in fat and badly balanced so was darned awkward to put back
together and reinstall over the grill.
The grill itself was absolutely caked in fat from the last meal cooked on it.
I refilled the leaky bucket with more hot water and tried to brush the fat off
the grill with my trusty old scrubbing brush, (the same brush I used to clean
my bath with until it was banned from being stored indoors, let alone used indoors).
I was also fervently hoping that I wouldn’t get my good clothes spattered
in fat in the process.
Although my clothes were spared, fat did spatter onto the porous paving stones
around the barbie, which refused to respond to subsequent vigorous brushing
even when accompanied by imaginative cursing. Surprisingly the grill did look
a bit better though, but when I looked again at the surrounding wooden slats
and hood, the water had dried into dirty looking smears, so I frantically refilled
the bucket (there was now a lethal trail of water from the kitchen to the back
door) and dampened the offending bits to temporarily remove the smears.
Unfortunately, by the time I grabbed my camera the smears were reappearing,
but Maria was about to arrive home so I took the photos anyway. I mopped up
the trail of water in the kitchen and attempted to tidy up as best I could.
It was quite dark by now and the fat-spattered pavers were safe for the moment.
I nonchalantly remarked that I’d inspected the BBQ and thought I might
be able to fix the wobbly wheel with a nut from my assorted nuts jar that I’d
been amassing for the last forty years. It turned out there was no usable thread
available so I gave up on that idea and advised Maria that it would most likely
be impossible to sell the BBQ on Gumtree. Maria always knew this and so happily
agreed and yesterday I rolled the corpse out to the nature strip, (which took
a little time as the wheel kept falling off).
The first thing to go was the vinyl dust cover bearing the proud Beef Eater
logo.
Yesterday morning I noticed the hood was lying on the grass and the partially
cleaned grill had been removed by some metal-collecting scavenger. The tray
was still full of burnt charcoal and fat which had petrified into a miniature
Breugel diorama.
I took some of the stuff cluttering the shed out to keep the dismembered BBQ
company on the nature strip and actually engaged in banter with some of the
passing scavengers who liked the look of some of the items I was parting with.

This morning we awoke to find some ruffians from one of the less civilised adjoining
suburbs no doubt, had deposited a mountain of white goods on our second nature
strip. (Our house is on a corner). We shall have to wait and see if the council
is feeling in a charitable mood and removes it – otherwise I could be
mowing around it for the next twelve months.

..burn your effigy of choice – I would recommend Rupert Murdoch if
you are of an incendiary mind.
In the Northern Territory and, until this year the ACT, you could still buy
fireworks perhaps because they calculated the fun versus injury equation in
favour of fun.
In my youth, a state that as for most males of the species lasted for an inordinate
time, I was of a pyrotechnical bent and found that fireworks weren’t
just for Guy Fawkes but provided all year round fun. As an art student one
of my flatmates and I blew a door off its hinges whilst the room’s occupant
was in the midst of coital ecstasy. It took a mere handful of carefully placed
crackers connected to a simple time fuse that employed a cigarette and a bit
of cellotape to see the door majestically implode with sweet voluminous smoke
and a very loud noise. The lady in question never quite recovered from the
bang of her life.
Actually my anonymous flatmate, whom we will call Keith Reid because it happens
to be his name, developed a machine that would have one the most ingenious
use of fireworks and a motor scooter ever devised.
He took six cardboard mailing tubes of about a metre in length that were sealed
at one end but had a small flap about thirty centimetres from the base –
roughly the length of a skyrocket’s stick. He firmly attached the cardboard
tubes at an angle of about thirty degree to the side of the scooter. Using
flap he placed steel wool that was connected by wire to the scooter horn.
When the horn button was pressed sufficient current ran through the cable
to the steel wool to make it glow red hot.
He placed skyrockets down the tubes so that the touch paper rested on the
steel wool and rode along until a suitable opportunity presented itself, such
as an approaching bus or police car, and pressed the horn. Current flowed,
steel wool glowed and there was the magnificent sight of six rockets sailing
ahead to both confuse and delight the public. He was chased several times
by people wishing to congratulate him on his achievement
But I digress.
In many of the cities of Europe you can rent a bike from street stands for
a few Euros and cycle off in all directions returning them elsewhere in the
city. It is extremely popular. Melbourne has the same system but it is hardly
used because you have to wear a bicycle helmet, an item of protection that
most people don’t usually carry in their back pockets. Hire a bike and
don’t wear a helmet and you score a $146 fine. No exceptions.
Interestingly studies of the positive impact of bike helmets on cyclist safety
are not regarded as reliable, with some going so far as to state that it is
safer not to wear one. Whilst I can imagine several circumstances where it
might be preferable to have a helmet, I think the equation between individual
and social benefit should be redrawn. Curiously Australia, New Zealand and
parts of Canada all have helmet laws that have resulted in the great majority
of cyclists wearing helmets, but there has been no reduction in rates of head
injury relative to cycle use. An analysis of enforced laws in these countries
has found no clear evidence of benefit. .
I am not optimistic that the law will be relaxed as that would mean that the
authorities would have to back-track on something that they have been so forcefully
dogmatic about for so long.
In Europe the speed limit on motorways is often 130kph with many drivers,
from my own recent experience, exceeding this by a handsome margin. You drive
with great awareness of low flying French, Spaniards or Germans in their Messerschmitts,
Mirages or Typhoons approaching from behind at a high closing velocity and
ensure that the passing lanes are only occupied for the minimum of times.
People pass quickly and efficiently and move back to the slower lanes with
commendable alacrity.
In Victoria the general limit is (with a very few exceptions) 100kph. One
corollary of this is that all three lanes of the Geelong freeway, with its
frequent revenue raising cameras, are usually blocked by cars driving side
by side at ninety-five kilometres per hour. It is potentially far more dangerous
than any European equivalent road as no driving skill, awareness or intelligence
is required or demonstrated.
By presuming that our drivers are compete dills we have lowered driving ability
to that of operating a domestic appliance such as a washing machine. European
drivers demonstrate greater skill and traffic awareness than just about any
Australian on the road today because there is a culture of good and sharp
driving.
Whilst on the Atlantic coast of Spain recently we traipsed off through the
typical maze of narrow roads near Ribadesella to the Bufones which are limestone
cliffs blowholes by the sea. The Atlantic was relatively calm so we expected
little in the way of geyser-like spouts. But even so the ground was moaning
like a tormented dragon and intermittent traces of foam issued through cracks
on the ground – cracks that had no protective barriers to stop on stepping
in. The nearby cliffs with their thirty metre drop into the ocean were as
equally devoid of barriers and warning signs. You or a child could fall in
and possible disappear for good.
It would seem that the Spanish authorities thought that if you were of reasonable
intelligence you would appreciate the dangers and take appropriate care of
both yourself and your children. Additionally if you did fall down a blow
hole or drop over the cliff you would be in no position to sue
Even whilst realising that the litigious nature of the Australian public makes
authorities hyper-aware of real or imagined risk there must be an upper limit
to the amount of legislated molly-coddling which now surrounds us.
Accidents do happen and there may no external authority to blame – and
in a Darwinian fashion we are degrading the gene pool by not allowing the
less intellectually aware members of the community to impale themselves on
sharp railings or choke on breadsticks. If we continue to protect everybody
from everything soon we will all be dribbling down our shirt fronts and vote
for Family First.

Robinson DL. Do enforced bicycle helmet laws improve public health?. BMJ,
2006;332:722

– and in fact it was just two days later I got the fateful phone call. The
problem sewer is a wrinkle the new owner is probably unaware of as yet, but
I guess if you’ve got $1.29m to spend on a property, another $10,000
to upgrade the sewers isn’t going to make a lot of difference.
I’m taking for granted that my gently collapsing vintage weatherboard
is going to be demolished as soon as the settlement period has elapsed. I
should make the effort to watch it go down if I can find out precisely when
that might be (it’ll only take a few minutes) – and presuming
that it’s not demolished too early in the day.
You’ve probably noticed that builders love the early part of the day.
Next door to my shit-stirring neighbours over the back fence, a new house
is going up. It once belonged to ‘Giovanni’ whom I never met,
but whose long-term smoker’s cough used to put the fear of God into
me every morning. That is until one day the coughing stopped and the wreckers
arrived and there was a big hole where his bungalow-style house used to be.
Then the builders arrived, very early of course, and now a two-storey mansion
is being erected in its place.
And in the way of builders, they’ve all disappeared by lunchtime. I
sometimes wonder if there are there other building sites that they roll up
to after lunch, or do they just go to the TAB or to the pub for the rest of
the day?
I suppose there’s the same curiosity about musicians’ lives. ‘Musicians
stay up all night, therefore they wake up after lunchtime and carry on their
out-of-synch lives without a care’, is a pretty common assumption.
Well, that still might be true of younger musicians, but as I get older I
find that the pull of our planet’s diurnal rhythms becoming irresistible.
Anyway, I would describe myself as a ‘morning’ person by nature,
and by the time the evening comes around I’m nearly incapable of coherent
thought, let alone action, unless that action involves a remote control. Or
unless we’ve got a gig, at which time I can still rely on my body producing
enough adrenaline to clear my head and provide the requisite energy.
Stemming from my recent reunion with a variation on my first band, The Chants,
I’ve had cause to review my origins in the music biz. The Chants got
back together in Christchurch in 2007 with what could be described as the
original line-up, and in February of this year we played a couple of nights
at Al’s Bar in Christchurch with a slightly streamlined version of the
band featuring Tim Piper on guitar.
There was interest from a couple of quarters locally in putting a doco together
about The Chants, (or Chants R&B as they evolved into), and thankfully
it was decided the interested parties should pool their resources rather than
compete.
There’s been quite a lot of material unearthed in the process, mostly
in the form of photos, but also some much rarer film footage has resurfaced.
Aspiring Director, Fred Goldring, shot quite a bit of footage at and around
the Stagedoor, The Chants’ cellar residency for a couple of years, which
had become the centre of the Mod Universe in Christchurch.
Jeff Smith, one of the doco makers, sent me a low-res copy recently. There’s
no sound track and it’s unedited, raw footage, but nevertheless it makes
a fascinating document of the times. One thing you notice immediately is the
comparative formality of the times. I think I observed the same thing with
some of the old footage on the Small Faces and I suppose it follows, seeing
as we Antipodeans so closely followed the fashions from the UK.
Sometimes the energy for these kinds of enterprises diminishes once the subjects
scatter and return to their post-celebrity lives, but e-mails are still to-and-fro’ing
across the ‘dutch’ and there’s every chance (hah!) it will
be completed and shown on NZ TV at the very least – actually, if it’s
half good, I suspect it will get world-wide distribution on cable.

I was at a party the other night, where the Kiwis outnumbered the Aussie four
to one. Inevitably there was a discussion about accents. I’ve been living
here for quite some time and I rarely lapse into Kiwi-speak, but I do choose
to pronounce some words in the NZ (or BBC English) way. For instance, words
such as ‘chants’, I choose to pronounce as ‘chahnts’.
Same with ‘dance’ and ‘prance’. And ‘lather’.‘Castle’
I much prefer as ‘cahstle’. Consistent with this approach
I’ve elected to go with the local Doncahster, but I cannot come at
the local pronunciation of Reservoir as Reservore – although, if
I was inexplicably conversing with some local riff-raff of the tattooed and
pierced variety, I might swallow my snobbery and mutter ‘Reservore’.
For some reason, my elective exceptions to the local code are not pegged
as being a reversion to my Kiwi origins – rather the utterances of a genial
but otherwise inherently snobby bastard, temporarily, at least, from the genteel
suburb of Camberwell. And I wouldn’t have it any other way..

..clothes.
When Mike is over for a meal he can at least sing for his supper whilst the
stereo sits darkly in the corner. Sometimes we forlornly and plaintively complain
to the electricity purveyor we are currently signed up to. The frequency and
ongoing nature of the failures seems to indicate that there is little they will,
or can, do about it.
In our circumstances we are calling one of the retailing organisations that
claims to be selling green energy a fact which I regularly confirm from the
brown envelope, recycled paper and greater expense. The electricity itself is
no different to any other stream of electrons but is allegedly generated by
something less pernicious than brown coal. Or so they say – it is really a matter
of trust.
But green or not, supplied by fermentation wind and good intentions, it often
just stops and we sit temporarily marooned in the dark in the bush with only
the sound of frogs or distant cars to keep us company,
After a while the lights flicker back into fluorescent action, the various motors
hopefully not damaged by the fluctuating voltages cut back into action, and
the heating heats and the refrigerator refrigerates. The annoying task of resetting
all the mains dependent clocks gets done and life gets back to normal.
It is hard for our generation to imagine life without the most ubiquitous and
culturally transforming invention since the wheel, the flush toilet, and the
stump-jump plough.
But my grandmother’s generation lived the early part of their lives in
the era of the kerosene lamp, candles and firelight. They went to bed early
soon after the sun set and got up as the sun rose. In the winter they worked
less and in the summer months the worked longer.
With more time in bed there were more of them. The wound their scarce clocks
and watches by hand in an approximate time for the time could vary – not just
between individuals – but between towns and cities. It wasn’t until the
invention of the telegraph that trains and events that required synchronisation
ran to the same time more or less everywhere.

The privatisation of the electricity industry has not been a major boon to
anyone except the organising financiers. It provided a short term hit to the
public coffers when it happened in the Stygian gloom of the Kennett era. Basically
the industry was divided into three sectors, production, transmission and
retail with various degrees of regulatory and overseeing bodies with the sole
purpose of maximising financial return.
With the options of new base-load power generation in the hands of executives
who are unsurprisingly worried about the implementation of a carbon tax moving
away from Victoria’s brown coal backbone is going to be a hard investment
decision. In fact because retailers compete for power it is more profitable
to build short term overload gas turbine capability for when everybody turns
on the air-conditioner as the summer temperatures rise. The decision as how
to replace the base load generation for which Victoria seems to be addicted
to brown coal as a smoker is to his cigarettes remains unanswered .
Power is one of the basic utilities whose the privatisation was political
rather that logical brought about by the few cells of Jeff Kennett’s
brain glowing in awe of Maggie Thatcher whose doctrinaire and wholesale privatisation
has had the same effects in England. Long term investment decisions that benefit
the whole state are not generally going to be made by companies interested
in maximising profitability. It is arguable that Victoria did not have to
sell either the gas or electricity corporations but could have used the income
generated from their operation to steadily rectify what was seen as the then
intolerable financial situation. Whilst I realise that most State governments
have a poor history of running the even the most basic of enterprises it doesn’t
need to be so nor has it always been so. Despite the occasional eye-watering
bastardry of some Australian unions.
We should remember that in Victoria the government took over and unified the
electricity industry in 1920 when it was structurally dysfunctional and inefficient.
Prior to the 1920s electricity generation and distribution was carried out
by municipalities, by private companies under franchise to the councils, or
by joint private-public bodies.
Given the current tea party state of Australian politics there is neither
the appetite nor the money for repeating this take-over so what the future
holds should be interesting.
Though given that the Federal government is in the midst of recreating a new
Telstra after brilliantly having destroyed the previous version, perhaps anything
is possible.

..be
burying thirty-five of our citizens per week. It would attract some comment
in Melbourne as the trains would effectively stop running. But I suspect that
the trains in Mumbai cannot afford to stop running more than momentarily given
that seven million people use the suburban rail system on a daily basis. Naturally
on the sub-continent they are desperately trying to do something about the death
rate, but are handicapped by people making holes in the new barrier walls to
get to their favourite shortcuts.
Not so long ago I was talking to an accountant from an IT company with the curious
name of Jamcracker, which is based in Mumbai, who had decided to move to Melbourne.
It was a Friday lunch hour in Collins Street, the veritable heart of this thriving
metropolis and I asked him what was the most uncomfortable aspect of the world’s
sixth most liveable city. Judiciously ignoring the opportunity to lead with
‘casual racism’ he observed it was the fact that the streets were
so empty.
It is, of course, all relative. I arrived in Melbourne more than four hundred
moons ago from the then more vertical city of Christchurch, a smallish agricultural
centre with a population less than quarter of a million of fine British expatriate
shopkeepers, unlanded gentry and deviated septa. In those days the joke about
sheep outnumbering the people was actually true. I found the number of people
in Melbourne almost traumatising by comparison with the vast empty echoing spaces
of Christchurch. I developed Enochlophobia of the supermarket variety.
Melbourne’s population density is around one thousand five hundred persons
per square kilometre; that of Mumbai between twenty and thirty thousand. But
if eighty per cent of the world’s population will soon live in cities,
it might be time to think that if they had the same population density of Melbourne
there would be no arable land left to feed the prospective nine billion or more
projected inhabitants of the earth. On the other hand, if Melbourne had the
urban density of Mumbai we could all live in Toorak and South Yarra. That’s
what living cheek by jowl and in the odd slum can do for you.
We should be fairly clear how Melbourne, and probably all other Australian metropolises,
manage town planning. After a somewhat cursory investigation, in other words
relying entirely on my own prejudices, I decided on two words; Greed and Sloth
which you may identify as the two least interesting of the seven deadly sins,
(he said both apathetically and vaingloriously).
The average Australian property developer, relying as he does on an innate feeling
for the easy dollar, has come to realise that more and more people are coming
to the city. He buys land on the outskirts of the conurbation. Probably already
good market gardening area – perhaps even zoned ‘Green Wedge’ or
mixed agricultural. Being a model citizen and ever mindful of the needs of his
fellow man he then, in a fit of civic mindedness, secures his election to the
local shire or council and has the land zoned ‘Residential’.
The State government, of any convenient purchasable colour, notices that this
is a new and exciting development replete with yet to be built parks, supermarkets
and fire stations and springs immediately into action to provide the necessary
infrastructure.
‘Springs into action’ might be a slight exaggeration. Maybe ‘staring into space
twiddling its thumbs whilst suburbs spring up like rashes around the bottom
of a baby whose nappy hasn’t been changed for three weeks’.
Of course, this is how it looks to an untrained observer who sees only the unimportant
things like commuters queuing twenty minutes at the freeway exit to get to and
from their suburb every morning or evening; bus services cancelled because the
traffic is so dense that keeping to a the timetable is a complete fantasy; or
trains so packed that after the first three stops nobody can get on.
The most likeable places that I have visited have generally been the result
of slow and organic accretion of a populace and buildings over time, an obvious
example being Italian hill towns that grace places like Tuscany. However, that
such a process is still possible in our times is a romantic fallacy in this
age of near geometric population growth – it might be thought that the slums
of Mumbai are just the modern extension of organic growth writ large, but you
really wouldn’t want to live there.
Large scale planned socially engineered housing, as exampled in the less fortunate
banlieues of Paris such as Clichy-sous-Bois, hasn’t worked as they become
high rise ghettos with a self- reinforcing ethos of failure characterised by
high unemployment and violent crime. The grandiloquent social architecture of
Le Corbusier has not worked particularly well either although Chandigarh, a
smallish Indian government town, may be the exception. Buildings may be machines,
but people are not.
Large scale governmental city planning as seen in Canberra or Brasilia seems
to produce nice buildings in a sterile environment accompanied by a high suicide
rate, (the only authentic personal statement left for public servants to do),
and no productive industry. It is interesting that the only new completely planned
cities in the world seem to be national capitals. Ultimate power can still lead
to erectile malfunction on a large scale.
So what to do – even here in God’s forgotten country?
As voluntary sterilisation of everybody with an IQ of less than one hundred
is unlikely to work, I am proposing a few simple steps.
No Australian city can get any bigger; in fact must shrink in area by a minimum
5% per decade and that shrinkage should be equalled by a similar amount of newly
created park land within the existing boundaries. Therefore no more arable land
can be covered by MacMansions and other brick excreta. All hobby farms are to
be banned as well – that is nothing under 130 hectares is eligible for tax concessions.

All politicians and public servants must travel by public transport.
But I am proposing that to get size down and community involvement up that we
use the caravan park as a model. Therefore nobody can reside on more than one
hundred square metres of land; that is a ten by ten metre square of at least
partial greenery.
I’ve seen that caravans and their annexes seem to be able to hold a reasonable
size family in delightful intimacy. The option remains whether people choose
to share ablution facilities as I know that the more circumspect find descending
on an already warm toilet seat somewhat discombobulating.
So if we give over half of every square kilometre to roads, parks and shared
facilities I think that we can get the population density up to a respectable
twelve thousand per square kilometre. To increase the density more – for
example to reflect the value of land as it approaches the urban centre – we
can stack them on top of each other in vertical caravan parks. They might just
resemble apartment buildings.
Caravan parks seem to work over the Christmas period. This way we can have Christmas
all year in a city one eighth the current size.

Anyway, at that age Dick and I actually enjoyed the old Dakota bouncing around
and roaring like a banshee. (I use that simile loosely, never having heard a
banshee’s roar, but I think you get the picture). We also enjoyed the
attention we used to get from the hosties (stewardess’) even more, but
that’s another story.
To be honest, on this trip I was more concerned about my personal plumbing than
anything else. I hadn’t had a crap for a couple of days and I was feeling
uncomfortably bloated. I‘m usually fairly conservative about my use of
the lavatories in flight – and that’s just for my bladder. I imagined
being stuck on the lavatory, (have you noticed that’s an almost exclusively
airline term for a toilet?) trying to move some enormous motion with a queue
stretching down the aisle waiting impatiently for me to finish..
I adjusted my watch to Australian time. Only three hours to go.
About an hour out of Melbourne I was starting to take much more notice of the
woman over the aisle and one up. She was perhaps Indian, but her skin was quite
light in colour. Maybe Sri Lankan? Tamil perhaps? She was middle-aged and wearing
a beige or camel toned pants suit with a head scarf that she perpetually adjusted.
She wore formal looking thongs/jandals /flip-flops on her feet with a gold studs.
She looked reasonably prosperous.
She’d been calling the hosties quite regularly for this and that, but
she was always very grateful for their attention and I didn’t get the
impression the hosties thought she was being a pest.
Something was troubling her though and she was becoming increasingly agitated.
Her headscarf was being adjusted every minute or so and she was pestering the
blonde girl sitting beside her with the headphones on about something.
Then the hosties came round with baskets of boiled lollies, (which, I’m
qualified to observe, is a hangover from the good old NAC days). She demanded
a handful of lollies and the hostie obliged without demur.
Then she stood up and opened the overhead locker and pulled out a quite large
bag, the size of a sports bag, and put it down on the floor with the end jutting
out into the aisle. She didn’t close the locker.
It was at this point I noticed that she was missing the top joint of the middle
two fingers on her right hand. My mind leapt to the conclusion that the missing
fingers were as the result of an explosives training mishap and that she was
an al-Qaeda or Taliban operative preparing to trigger a bomb as we were coming
in to land over Melbourne. No wonder she was agitated!
However unlikely this all was, everybody else was so busy distracting themselves
in one way or another that I was the only person on the plane awake to what
was going on. Surely the hosties would notice the open locker and the bag she
was now grimly holding onto?
A toddler came down towards the rear of the plane followed by its parent. She
was looking curiously at everybody as she toddled past. As she passed by my
terrorist’s seat the lady made an effort to smile and engage her attention,
but, as often is the way of children, her efforts were ignored. Maybe my terrorist
was having second thoughts. Maybe this innocent child had convinced her of the
futility of her masters’ cause. I only wished the child had been more
responsive.
The fasten seatbelts sign came on. A hostie came down the aisle – and
finally noticed the open locker and the bag with the bomb. She returned the
bag to the locker and closed it firmly. My terrorist lady looked slightly chastened
but otherwise untroubled.
I relaxed but kept my eye on the woman anyway. I noticed she hadn’t done
her seatbelt up. The otherwise efficient hosties made a couple more sweeps of
the passengers but failed to notice her unsecured belt. I kept stum. This woman
had kept me entertained for the best part of an hour and the show wasn’t
over yet.
It was obvious to me now that her growing agitation was at the prospect of the
landing and sure enough, when the plane slewed slightly on touchdown my terrorist
lady gasped as she was thrown forward into the seat in front of her.
The show was over. I left the plane relieved but unrelieved, if you take my
meaning. Shit for brains. Anyway, I finally mastered the Smartgate thing and
was out of Customs before I knew it. I missed my connecting train, otherwise
I would’ve been home in record time. Bugger records – I’m just happy
to be alive.

For all the poop on my NZ trip, go to April’s ASR