Category Archives: family

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Munich: Ferret Club is Cancelled

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In Munich I thought about Tom. He’s the agriculture teacher at my Hertfordshire school. A kindly, magnificently original fellow, he’s the volunteer every community needs.

Once during daily briefing Tom announced, “Can you please tell the students that today’s Ferret Club is cancelled? I arrived this morning to find all the ferrets have escaped. Actually, until further notice there won’t be any Ferret Club.”

I also remember him collecting some German exchange students on the school bus. Learning they were landing at Heathrow just after lunch Tom said, “Are we sure they’re Germans? I thought they only flew over here at night.”

*

Afternoon in Munich, and Alex, Max and I go on a canal walk. The trees are bare in the gothic style of a Tim Burton film. The sky’s dark and close. Church spires dominate, and it’s great that nothing can be taller than the Frauenkirche or Cathedral of Our Dear Lady. In Singapore, where we live, building heights are limited by the unromantic practicalities of flight paths.

The boys rush at an entirely wooden playground. The ground’s covered in bark chips and not recycled rubber. Ah, the Old World. As they would in any place and at any time, they bound about like Labradors. At year’s end, it’s renewing.

Is it pointless to traverse the planet and visit a playground? No, I think it’s precisely the reason. You can’t just sprint maniacally from museum to cobblestoned market to ancient freaking monument. The spontaneities, especially if they spark out of a dismal Bavarian park, are to be enjoyed.

Despite growing only cold gravel, the biergarten of The Golden Leaf craftily invites us in for refreshment. Then, with the sun slung low we ramble on. On this jet lagged day, what better to discover than another pub? Why a brewery, of course!

Looming over the Falkenstraße apartments, the Paulaner brewery is a titanic complex including a warmly timbered bar and restaurant. Outside, copper vats cast shadows. Inside, gabbling folk gallop into the cheer. Hefe-Weißbier and apple juices downed, we head back into our afternoon.

*

We promised the boys snow. More like an Adelaide winter, Munich was obscenely warm. We were frantic. With no snow forecast we travel by rail and funicular to Zugspitze, home to three glaciers and Germany’s highest mountain. Yes, trains are The Rolling Stones and buses are a dreadful Boyzone tribute band.

Outside our window snow patches expand and multiply. Disembarking, and then climbing the stairs, we burst out onto a bright, white plateau. It’s vast, majestic, elemental. It’s life, our life, untainted and festive.

Having whispered to each other in that obvious, magical way as we soared skywards in the train, Alex and Max throw snow at us. We play along. Undentably excited, they slip on the ice like newborn giraffes. I swing between laughter and tears.

Next they jump above me on a platform while I take some photos. The westerly sun devours them in its halo, and across the azure emptiness I can see to Austria, Switzerland and Italy. I’m a lapsed Catholic, but standing at the top of Germany, I can almost feel the hand of God.

It’s Christmas and we’ve hauled our boys a long way from the burnt dirt of home. A long way from family and Nanny’s fruit mince pies and friends and Paul Kelly’s story telling as the Boxing Day Test wanders along like an unending Sunday. But this is our gift. This is, I hope, a noble investment in our boys.

We descend to the handsome mountain resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Home to the 1936 Winter Olympics, it borders the town of Wank. Wank has a cable car too. It’s called the Wankbahn. I know, I know. But this’ll still be funny to me, and not a few of you, when I’m an octogenarian. Wank.

There’s a cosy knot of stalls selling handicrafts, Bratwurst the length of rope and the wife’s Germanic weapon of choice, Glühwein. A Christmas market! A man roasts chestnuts. Dogs scamper. Alex and Max spring onto the small stage, and dance. For the first time in days, I don’t hear Slade’s “Merry Christmas Everybody.” I look over the thunderous, darkening valley. It’s a moment.

*

Wirtshaus in der Au is a Bavarian restaurant famous for dumplings and jazz, and often hosts Dixieland outfit the Occam-Street Footwarmers, which formed in 1953.

We see servers in Lederhosen and bosomy women conveying steins of lager in which a netted shark could drown. We eat roast pork and schnitzel and pork knuckle. Now dreamily helpless, we are upsold from ice cream to the Dessertbrettl.

A regal interval. Then, after a victorious tour of the restaurant, accompanied by sparklers and a clanging cowbell, the Dessertbrettl is carefully docked onto our table’s mothership as if in an indecent pudding version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other diners clap our monstrous gluttony. I can almost hear Wagner. I imagine the waiters who sell these are rewarded with a trip to Majorca.

It is a wagon of lard. There’s ice cream, jellies, chocolates, a vanilla cream pot, mousse, token cubes of fruit, strudel, cakes, and much more. We drag most of this calorific beast home, and subsequently to Paris. Next millennium, an archeologist will dig up our Dessertbrettl, and when no one is looking, eat it.

*

Is anything better than falling snow? It’s too, too long since we last saw some a decade ago. Despite the joy of Zugspitze this is the first time for Alex and Max. It cascades down, and bedspreads the city and us. It’s bliss.

Later, with the boys asleep, the wife opens a window, thrusts her paw at the ledge, and makes a vodka and fresh snow! You can’t buy one of these from a Marina Bay Sands mixologist. Our snowy pilgrimage is complete. It’s the perfect coda to our week in Munich.

Next we wrestle Paris.

f

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July 2005: It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

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bus

I stop the Macbeth video and flick on the radio. My Year 7’s leap around, shrieking and pink-cheeked. Ties are flapping.

IOC President Jacques Rogge begins, and with delightful, British style, the boys link arms and make a circle. Their camaraderie is catching. I laugh. Either way, we’re about to have a moment.

At 12:46 pm and ‘Lon-don,’ they erupt. England to host the 2012 Olympics! It’s lovely, and I’m happy for them, but the day after, I can barely believe it happened. A terrible contrast was coming.

*

‘Chris goes through Liverpool Street Station about this time,’ says Jane, tears starting, ‘and I can’t get him on his phone.’

‘I’m sure you’ll reach him soon,’ I offer, her panic cloaking me. Texting to check on friends, I agonize, the seconds stretching, waiting for my phone to pronounce their safety.

It’s July 7. I’m at school in St Albans, where news of the suicide bombings rushes upon us. In our desperate and sightless ways, we try to tether ourselves. The stabs of horror come quickly, as just to our south, London is wounded. This bespoke violence makes home seem mercilessly remote.

Emerging from her Hammersmith train, Juanita messages in that cheery way Australians often have during a crisis- “all good mate.” She’s only escaped by minutes. Jane gets through to her husband, finally. He’s arrived at his office in the City.

We lived twenty-five miles north of the Themes, in cloistered, handsome Hertfordshire. That evening our answering machine blurts a succession of messages from Australia. Our parents; hotly anxious, friends; fretful, and even people we’d seldom talk with have called.

The day is draining, and forces a deep, pounding introspection. It’s our twenty-fourth month away.

In his remarkable Guardian op-ed piece* Booker prize winner Ian McEwen calls the terrorists’ minds ‘unknowable’ and asks, ‘How could we have forgotten that this was always going to happen?’

*

REM’s Around the Sun concert is postponed because of the attacks, and on Saturday week as we board the Jubilee line I try to think of the fun ahead. It’s our first Tube journey since the unspeakable awfulness, and my hands become sticky as our train crashes through the uneasy dark. My fear races like gas. My eyes zip incessantly.

A streak of jets howls across, the full moon beams, and here we are with 85,000 folk, just across from The Serpentine, in Hyde Park. It’s chardonnay and sushi, not black t-shirts and insurrection. It’s wonderful. Kerry buys a slice of watermelon.

For me, today again confirms London as the planet’s finest theme park. Just walking about is compelling theatre. Send me out on foot for the day, let me meander, and then late afternoon, tip me into a boozer like The Moon and Sixpence in Soho. Sorted.

Twilight falls. REM begins. The concert’s more gorgeous picnic than Glastonbury. Mainstream’s replaced alternative edginess for these Athens, Georgia natives.

Jangly pop doyens, they also have picturesque moments. “Electrolite” from New Adventures in Hi-Fi is one, and I’m thrilled to hear it. It’s their tribute to an often unloved Los Angeles, but the joyousness applies, right here, right now

You are the star tonight
You shine electric outta sight
Your light eclipsed the moon tonight
Electrolite
You’re outta sight

Unhurried and summery, it’s threaded by Mike Mills’ jaunty piano and Peter Buck’s banjo, and insulates us, fleetingly, against our broader catastrophes.

Michael Stipe introduces punk iconoclast Patti Smith to sing on ‘E-bow the Letter.’ It’s her sole appearance on the tour, but in that quotidian, London way, she’s in town. After, with a coda of swirling, Sonic Youth-like guitar feedback, ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’ closes their show.

The wife and I zip through the crowds along Oxford Street, and then turn towards Kings Cross. An accusatory light blazes out at us. There are police everywhere, and yellow police tape.

It is Tavistock Square. On the street beneath the light is a silenced double-decker bus, untimely torn by the bomb that detonated ten days ago. Our musical buzz vaporizes.

This tableau’s between University College Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital, but for those on the number 30 Stagecoach, both were too far. How could this occur in Bloomsbury? Once associated with arts, education and medicine, and now death. We go home.

July 2005 continues, as it must. Lance Armstrong retires after winning a seventh consecutive Tour de France. Mumbai receives forty inches of rain within a day, and its city decelerates massively, but like London, cannot be halted.

And later, as witness to the gargantuan persistence of this capital, the cricket! Yes, the slow, strange cricket in which we find sanctuary commences with the opening Ashes Test at Lord’s. While Australia wins this match, the longer narrative develops astonishingly, and reminds us of all that’s decent and affirming. In Yorkshire and Cumbria and Cornwell, summer’s in bloom.

We stumble on.

ashes

* http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jul/08/terrorism.july74

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Playing Trouble with Max

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Trouble is among my favourite board games. It’s simple, and loud, mostly because of the “Pop-O-Matic” die bubble. Recently I was home sick with mycoplasma, and Max and I played Trouble. I learnt some lovely things about him.

 

Image

 

Playing Trouble with Max

 

every roll

of the dice

is a buzzing surprise,

is a celebration like a party,

is a triumph of your good character.

 

for Max the most thrilling moment

is not six,

but when you throw the same number,

matching perfectly, like DNA.

 

like rain, the game fades and

Max wants us to only pop the dice

he’s devouring what’s coming

grabbing this instant

his gift of sharing the precious.

 

Playing Trouble with Max

 

 

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AFL Round 9- Adelaide v Collingwood: Chernobyl FC still likely to host Crows’ entire 2015 pre-season

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Forking out a week’s salary to see Milli Vanilli at the Vienna Konzerthaus. In 2014, this is Adelaide Oval for the Crows fan.

Magnificent arena, miming charlatans.

Can anyone tell me if Adelaide has recently beaten Collingwood in a significant match?

No, I didn’t think so.

Connecting inside the centre square during the 2002 Crows and Magpies preliminary final at the MCG, Anthony Rocca’s third-quarter drop punt went straight through. The Sherrin had covered seventy ghastly metres.

It was an astonishing goal. It was a horrible goal. 88,960 people remember it. Although Rocca was down the City End, everyone around us at the Punt Road End knew as he kicked it.

How could Collingwood lose after that?

*

We decided to go after the Crows defeated Melbourne in the semi-final. Now, this was a game of graphic mood swings. Like K. Rudd in a midnight cabinet meeting. Apparently.

Some Kapunda schoolmates and I drove over from Adelaide. In microscopic Singapore a decade on and squeezed into a condominium with two boisterous boys there’s an otherworldly quality to this idea. Time passes.

Sweeping road, conversation, music.

You Am I escorted us into Victoria with their superb album, Hourly, Daily. Evoking boyhood and backyards, Kangaroos supporter Tim Rogers moves us through the skimming bliss and little deaths of suburbia.

The loose narrative arc recalls Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, and the laconically pretty, “Please Don’t Ask Me To Smile” especially stirs memories of this weekend.

When I was in grade six

I used to hold open a door for a girl

And she called me a wimp

Said there’s just no need

To be so fcking polite

I politely agreed with her

I think she was right

Tradition urges a break at Horsham’s White Hart, before pushing on to our Carlton digs, and an animated slurp at the University Hotel.

Saturday. Preliminary final. Sluggish breakfast. Wander about the Docklands. Young & Jackson. Stroll to Jolimont. The footy. Disappointment.

*

Dane Swan is an ugly duckling. Despite years of resistance, he’s now among my favourite footballers. He presents as a dilettante. His expression is of joyless slogging on an assembly line. At any point, he could simply walk away. It is his unlikeliness, that is, well, likable.

It was Taylor Walker’s return following a serious knee injury. Last we saw, he sported a Broken Hill mullet, but now he models a Berlin coif and post-ironic hipster moustache. He could have launched into Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. Tex was rusty, kicking four behinds, but got the pill seventeen times.

Adelaide and Collingwood often play close, scrambling matches. On this balmy May night, both miss opportunities. Neither grasps the ascendency. It’s pulsating.

Travis Cloke checks himself into the cloakroom. An early fumbled chest mark sets a dismal tone for the black and white power forward, and he remains ineffectual. His opponent, wunderkind Daniel Talia, demonstrates how he’s overtaken former tricolour Phil Davis.

Showing us his protean composure in traffic yet again, Scott Pendlebury is the evening’s best Magpie. When next juggling crates of live chooks by a feverish intersection, in, say, Ho Chi Minh City, I want him to chaperone me across the road, between the cars, honking trucks, and zipping motorcycles. Surely, a Pendlebury Brownlow’s coming.

Although there’s only a solitary goal in the final term, it’s oddly magnetic football. At the Boomarang Bar we know the Crows are never certainties until they’re up by fifty points with fifty seconds left. Eddie Betts is the scorer, and we hold on.

Our season flickers.

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AFL Round 3- Adelaide v Sydney: Danger in Dallas

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Saturday morning, in Singapore’s Boat Quay. The footy’s on in an Australian-themed pub called the Dallas Bar. I imagine somewhere like Uzbekistan there’s an American boozer showing baseball, and named the Wagga Wagga.

I’m seldom homesick, but today I am. It’s the Crows first game at Adelaide Oval. Since dawn it’s been bucketing here, and despite the heat, our sodden skies contrast with the sunshiny allure on the screen.

For his new club Buddy has so far done little, but he slots the first goal from fifty. In our code a Franklin major, unlike the Franklin mint, often provides a twinkling of beauty. He’s an elegant kick, not thumping like Travis Cloke. Buddy’s about finesse and timing; more Mark Waugh than Dave Warner. The mythology seems true: Adelaide runs players and teams back into form.

Sydney youngster Luke Parker gets two in a rush, and then Malceski contributes. The Crows are tentative, and lack intelligent aggression. Our backline is a jumble. As fabled Kimba coach Danny Horgan says, “They’re playing with a pocket full of eggs.”

Among the second stanza highlights is a dazzling chase from Crow Brodie Smith. Leroy Jetta’s shrieking through the middle, seemingly clear, with Buddy streaming out towards him. Approaching half-forward, Jetta takes a bounce. Gaining on him, Smith launches himself, and slings Jetta down. Superb tackle! It could be a catalyst.

It is. Like the ghostly detective in JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls Adelaide “takes charge massively.” However, inaccuracy, chiefly through lightning fast, and thunderously built Josh Jenkins, leaves the ascendency with Sydney at the main interval.

Doubtless, the Dallas Bar would be stripped of its Texan moniker if it didn’t deliver a burger the size of Damian Monkhorst’s head. It does, and I star in my own half-time show.

For the third time this season Adelaide threatens hollowly in the third quarter. When Dangerfield and Mackay kick long, stirring goals they appear poised for victory at the fetching oval.

But Buddy again murders the Crows with a wily baulk and a buoyant six-pointer. We’re in grave danger. But as Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan R. Jessup growls in A Few Good Men, “Is there another kind?”

Lady Penelope’s chauffeur Parker then registers his third. An impressive display, and the goal results from a prodigious handball by Kieran Jack. I know he shouldn’t, but I’m reminded of this sentence, which tidily illustrates the value of capital letters: I helped my Uncle Jack off his horse.

At the final change the Swans lead by four goals. During the huddle the Adelaide forwards must’ve inhaled multiple Dallas Bar burgers for they then unforgivably kick seven behinds.

Here in Singapore our own hot deluge continues. Meanwhile, there are telling majors to Hannebury, Cunningham (not KG) and the man with an appellation like agricultural pesticide, LRT. Nothing functions for the Crows. Betts, Petrenko and Griggs all miss opportunities. Like Curtly Ambrose decades earlier, the Swans are fluently annihilating the locals on their own pristine arena.

My friend R. Bowden’s at the game with his toddler. With the match now a catastrophe, the two-year old’s response is reasonable. The bathing sunshine, and Daddy’s football torture offer no choice. He falls asleep.

Bowden and I were among some Kapunda boys who finished our playing careers at the Unley Jets. Late in that season we suited up in the C Grade (obligatory, self-applied nickname: The C Men) against the Glenunga Rams.

The match decided who finished bottom of the A8’s, then Adelaide football’s lowest competitive rung. It was a dreadful July afternoon, and, of course, Unley was whipped.

In the fourth term, my cousin Puggy, once a handy footballer, and also tagged Daicos as a junior, was dragged, mostly for symbolic effect, to rouse the rest of us into action.

As he ambled, for the ultimate time, from the forward pocket toward the bench, I hollered out to him, as only family can, “You know this actually makes you the worst footballer in Adelaide!”

That was a miserable match, made memorable.

On an autumnal afternoon, Adelaide against Sydney was a memorable match, made miserable.

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Football islands

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Alex and Max at footy

My ears are more alert than my eyes. I hear the song before I see anything.

Meet me down by the jetty landing

Where the pontoons bump and sway

I see the others reading, standing

As the Manly Ferry cuts its way to Circular Quay

“Reckless” by Australian Crawl takes me back. With a funereal bass line, and a snare drum like gunshot, it’s prominent in the soundtrack to my last year at school. This was also the year I broke my arm playing junior football for Kapunda. June and my season, wrecked.

A fortnight later my arm was to be re-broken, as the locum had not aligned it. Six more weeks in a cast! So with Mum watching I was on a hospital bed as the resident doctor loomed and mumbled.

“Ouch! It’s hurting!” I sensed the subterranean crunching.

Doc was an absorbed professional. “Be quiet please!”

I was in distress. “ No, it’s really hurting!” Not just Masters bakery is out of sausage rolls distress. Or even Skyhooks split distress.

Minutes later the doctor squinted at the drip. He realised. His tone transformed. “Oh! I’m so sorry. I’m very sorry!” There he was, fracturing my arm enthusiastically, but, somehow, having neglected to turn on the anaesthetic. After, the local veterinarian gave me artificial insemination gloves to slide over my cast when showering. Pleasingly, for the district’s young and old bulls and especially me, these were not pre-loved.

We’re at the Australian School in Singapore. It’s Auskick registration on Australia Day. With blonde mops, the boys now merge. Unlike much of Asia, no one here takes their photo. Ninety-five inches of rain annually means there’s artificial turf. However, they’ll be in the cavernous gym. No footy boots. Not yet.

The covers band chugs along. “Reckless” runs into “Flame Trees.” More country town wistfulness. Bouncy castles. Bins bulging with ice and drinks. BBQs and stalls. Barefoot blokes, clutching lagers, kick to kick. They spill nothing. They could be Geelong backmen. We rush the Singapore Sharks footy tent.

An official measures them. The Sharks jumpers are green and gold. The major sponsor is a Boat Quay restaurant and bar. Our coach anticipates. “Who do the boys support?”

“Adelaide Crows.”

“I reckon I’ve got a Tex Walker left.”

And so Alex is to begin his career as number 13. Could be worse. Shane Ellen kicked five in the ’97 grand final wearing 13. We like Tex, but I can’t envisage our first born cultivating a Broken Hill mullet.

“Number 8 for the little fella?”

“Sounds good.” Nathan Bassett is Adelaide’s best number 8. The boys’ mother’s favourite too. Dependable. Left arm like a telescope, and an under-age kicking style.

Welcome aboard, Max.

A bouncy castle seduces us like sirens, both footy ground and Greek mythological. I think ahead. What do we want for our fledgling footballers? A thirst for sport and endeavour. Skills, but also camaraderie and community. And ultimately, social and personal responsibility.

As Malcolm Blight maintains, football is difficult. You wait for your turn in a handball drill. It devours your boyish patience. Mostly, you don’t have possession. You watch the ball up the other end. Zinging anticipation. And then- it’s coming your way! Make a decision. Quick. Do something! But there’s fun too.

This, an ex-pat isle of footy, is itself on an island. The Singapore Sharks is new, whilst I began at Kapunda. Launched in 1866 at the North Kapunda hotel, it’s among the world’s oldest football clubs, in any code, operating under its original name. Magnificently, its website is

http://www.bombers.com.au/

My home club owns this, and Essendon’s behemoth doesn’t. I imagine Kapunda as a brittle island up against the seismic bullying of the AFL. I imagine Demetriou ringing the club president, and in a loutish, aborted monologue, trying to acquire it.

Mini-League was my Auskick. Wednesday training at Dutton Park. Former stationmaster Bruce Dermody was our coach. He was grandfatherly. “Hold that ball straight, when you kick lad!” We’d have scratch matches with goalposts across the ground, down the trotting track end. It was an innocent island. It was our world. Only stopping because of the gathering gloom, we’d then cycle home to chops and three veg. Dukes of Hazzard and bed.

Bruce met his wife Melva at Bowmans, a railway siding, between Balaklava and Port Wakefield. It’s long gone. They lived for the club, and it was their family. Now they are also gone. With blind, familial loyalty Alex and Max often announce, “I’ll play for the Kapunda Bombers!” Their Poppa, my Dad, is a life member. Football flows like rain. A stationmaster? My boys are likely to be coached by a web-master.

Leaving this rowdy islet of Australiana, the band jangles through Powderfinger’s “My Happiness.” What varieties of happiness might football offer Alex and Max? What will it teach them of the tantalising connections between danger and beauty? Others and self? Will football become a faithful, tormenting mate, or fade like a sepia photograph in a museum?

This Saturday, we’ll start to learn.

bouncy castle

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The cobra and the condominium

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williard

 

This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, a lotta strands to keep in my head, man. Lotta strands in old Duder’s head.

The Dude, The Big Lebowski

Condominium living with two young boys is to be imprisoned within an endless St Kilda players’ function- minus the moments of deep introspection, and wholesome civic values. It’s occasionally beyond challenging. It’s at the heart of our predicament. To stay in Singapore or head home?

Australia is lucky. Although threatened, a chief reason is the backyard. Here five million Singaporeans wrestle on a napkin. It’s a quarter the size of Adelaide. It’s berserk. There’s a plan to surge to seven million. How can we continue in such crushing lunacy?

Mercifully, nearby is bike-riding, footy-dobbing, scooter-crashing open space, straddling the canal. Recently, as the boys played, an English jogger merrily pointed out the assorted cobra nests. Frenetic construction means homeless snakes slink elsewhere. Obsessed by these reptiles, I’m Willard to the cobras’ Colonel Kurtz. I need to confront one. Not in the zoo. Up the river. Or at a bus stop. We best leave Singapore before I do.

Our school’s in the shadows of Orchard Road, and sometimes, skulking and coiling, cobras come a-callin’. Slouching past, the groundsman saw one inside the PTA office. The PTA president, a bellowing, volcanic empress, sat at her desk, focussing fiercely on her PTA-ing; fabulously unaware of the poised snake. The groundsman stomped. “Watch out! There’s a hideous, poisonous creature! Get out! Get out!” He yelled to the cobra.

I intermittently amble along Alexander Canal to The Boomarang (sic) Bar at Robertson Quay. It shows the AFL on big screens, hypnotic altars. Settling on a stool in the sultry noise, I buy a beer. Football and refreshment finished, I glance at the bill.

Tiger Pint- $15.01

“Excuse me,” I ask, “Is this correct?”

“Yes?”

“The $15 part. I get. Sort of,” I fucking offer, “The government doesn’t want people to enjoy themselves. Ever. It is an obstacle to the singular, undying aim of zealous National Service. But One Cent? Really?”

The bartender blinks. “Sir, this is the appropriate price.”

I can live in a city that cheerfully steals $15 from me for a beer, but my Principles of Drinking, and interior cash register, cannot stomach $15.01. In The Big Lebowski Walter Sobchak hollers, “Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?”

Singapore is a pubescent with an attendant sense of self. Its 2013 Grand Prix concert headliner? Justin Beiber. Truly? Is Barnsey retired? The Choir Boys doing a bikie wedding? Metallica has toured; surely they could have been seduced by the petrochemical /banking /biotechnological coin.

Grands Prix peddle aspirational fantasy and boorish volumes of din. We moved here to engage with what we don’t understand, but are snarling motorsport devotees Beliebers? I can’t connect F1 to my fuzzy, involuntary construct of JB. It’s a funny joint, this Singapore.

The government aims to protect its citizenry. Buses and trains are gruesomely crowded; fetid, heaving confines. A billboard campaign directs commuters to

Protect yourself against unwanted sexual harassment

It’s arse-about. Yes to empowerment against predators. But I think an alternate message should be disseminated. I’d suggest, ”Hey you! Shithead. Keep your stinkin’ hands to yourself!” T-Shirt of The Gruen Transfer agrees. There’s much to appreciate about this diminutive island, but it’s often unknowable.

Football is the final dilemma. Next year, Adelaide oval hosts AFL. I’m impatient to take a clattering tram from Moseley Square with our boys, Alex and Max, and walk down King William Road. This is where their learning, their golden heritage waits. Footy happens in Singapore, but as a desolate addendum, a doomed transplant. It’s decontextualized. You can’t get a decent pie here.

And there’s Auskick at Glenelg oval on sun-dappled afternoons. Our boys will scurry about in their too-long sleeves. Delighted shrieks curl about on a sea breeze. We’ll get teary, as one, maybe Max, arrests the Sherrin’s flight, somehow marks the ball- and then kicks it, joyously, messily, toward a muddy mate. And after, in the still swirling exhilaration, A4-sized schnitzels for all. Perfect.

This towering cosmopolis allows us global insight, but country footy is vital too. We’ll watch the Kapunda Bombers and the Kimba Tigers. What is more instructive, more superb than an unhurried Saturday at our game? Yes, we’ll make the most of now. This is a remarkable sabbatical. However, for how long can we resist home?

The Big Lebowski: What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?

The Dude: Dude.

The Big Lebowski: Huh?

The Dude: Uh… I don’t know, Sir.

The Big Lebowski: Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn’t that what makes a man?

The Dude: Hmmm… Sure, that and a pair of testicles.

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How football cost us the 2005 Ashes

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2005

Like a crazed nymphomaniac I could not get enough of the punt.

It was perfect to be an Australian in England when we won the first test by 239 runs. My local friends conceded glumly that the 2005 Ashes were gone. Smirking, I imagined how I’d spend my bodyweight in pound notes when we won our tenth consecutive series.

On the morning of the second Test in Edgbaston our summer guests and we take a day trip to Amsterdam. Anne Frank’s House is affecting and crowded. We visit Nieuwmarkt- zigzagging about the canals and museums, and enter the heart- or is it groin- of the Red Light district with its prostitutes behind windows. Tragicomically stricken with zero speech filters, my mate Bazz hollers across to his wife, ‘Hey Annie!’ He then suggests. ‘Pick out which hooker you’d like to join us for a threesome.’

Late afternoon at O’Reilly’s pub near Dam Square, and the stumps score blazes from a TV screen. Over 400 English runs in a day! Ponting had won the toss, and bowled! I then learn that McGrath, fresh from a man-of-the-match, nine-wicket bag in the Lords test, was a late withdrawal. He injured his ankle playing football! At silly mid-off! And Ponting strangely, unknowably, elected to bowl. Shaking my head, I think I must be a passive coffeeshop smoke victim. Despite the last wicket heroics from Lee and Kasprowicz, Australia is defeated. Arguably, football cost us this match, and the Ashes.

Boston made me a fan of three things: New England clam chowder, the Red Sox and naming beer after national idols. The Barking Crab restaurant faces the old Northern Avenue Bridge in the downtown area. Its shanty-like setting appeals to sailors and Harvard professors, and we devour the tasty seafood. The billboard declares, ‘It’s the best place in Boston to catch crabs.’

T-shirts pronounce there are two baseball teams to support: the Red Sox and whoever beats the New York Yankees. Catching a few innings in America’s oldest continuously operating tavern, The Bell in Hand, converts me. Baseball and cricket are both beautifully hypnotic. Both anchor a country’s summer.

Named for Declaration of Independence signatory, Sam Adams lager encourages me to ask why Australia fails to similarly honour their icons. I’d love to be at the altar of my Sunday pub ordering, ‘Two pints of Dennis Lillee, a jug of Gough Whitlam and a bottle of Bon Scott, thanks.’ Boston’s illustrious baseball history provides a captivating context for the fourth Test at Trent Bridge. In this pre-smart phone universe I frequently visit the hotel’s business centre to check the scores. Flintoff stars again. We’re down a test with only The Oval remaining.

Ashes tickets are as rare as sunburn in Sheffield but, back from North America, we score a pair for the Saturday. Taking the Northern Line to the ground, I’m struck by the blissful civility of those waiting to gain entrance. I’m also struck by the industrial quantity of wine and beer allowed. Adelaide Oval banned BYO decades ago. After lunch the Barmy Army is amply lubricated. Many ditties on their hymn sheets simultaneously tease and glorify Warney. Set to the tune of “Amarillo”, I enjoy

Show me the way to Shane Warne’s Villa

He’s got his diet pills under his pilla

A dodgy bookie from Manila

Nursey’s on her mobile phone

Rain restricts play to only fifty overs, but Langer makes his 22nd century, and Hayden achieves his first ton in a year. After tea, with vino bottles spread about like a berserk Neapolitan wedding, I’m startled by the tidy conduct of the Vauxhall End supporters. The gasometer looms benevolently. The Oval is festooned in Wolf Blass advertising and I’m homesick for Australia and the Barossa.

I dreaded going to school on Tuesday September 13, 2005. The previous afternoon England reclaimed the Ashes for the first time since 1989 and I, as fortune would have it, was teaching just north of London in St Albans. Over the next weeks the banter I had as the conquered Australian in a country celebrating a gigantic sporting triumph, was good-natured. Mostly.

As they had not been born the last occasion England defeated us in cricket, I helpfully suggested my students at Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School (named after the only English Pope) should enjoy the victory. ‘You could be grandparents the next time this happens,’ I lectured. Freddie Flintoff celebrated like a Viking and on the first morning after, Mike Gatting asked him whether he had had anything to eat. ‘Yes,’ replied Flintoff, ‘a cigar.’

I trudged the campus handing over cash to numerous colleagues. I also gave each horribly happy Englishman a letter.

Dear Sir

On behalf of the Australian cricket team I’d like to offer my congratulations on a highly deserved victory. It was a most exciting series.

With the Ashes now completed, I can reveal that the ICC, ECB and Cricket Australia were engaged in top-secret talks over the past months. If Australia had won and made it ten consecutive triumphs, then all future Ashes would have been cancelled and a more competitive nation, officially sought to play Australia every two years.

So whilst cricketers from Italy and the Shetland Islands are disappointed, I for one am pleased that, at least for the next encounter, the Ashes will continue.

Your colonial servant,

Ricky Ponting

oval

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The Frog and The Footy

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volleys

Ordering rissoles in Bali is a sign that I need to go home to Adelaide.

It’s a Friday night, and I’m in Barb’s sports bar for the Crows season opener. With an Adelaide Crow tattoo on his arm, mine host Ian ambles by as the club song choruses from the TV. He mutters, “It’s got a good beat, but I reckon the kids won’t dance to it.” He’ll say that another twenty-one times before September. There’s a galaxy of Indonesian dishes on offer, but I inhale a plate of meaty patties, chips and veggies. The footy is streamed from Channel 7 in Perth and, frosty long necks of Bintang aside, when I find myself getting misty-eyed about the Bunnings ads, I know the score.

Then there’s the frog. He lurks in the grounds of our Singaporean condominium, and he’s seeking a mate. After dark, his thoughts turn, as Barry White may have sung, to making a little love or as HG Nelson certainly said, to “wielding the night tools.” His call is a loud, resonating, metallic honk. He honks nightly into the cruel fug. His throbbing desperation wakes me up and keeps me sleepless. Nightly. I want to escape his amphibious ardour so am heading to South Australia for a June holiday.

Despite living on the equator, I love winter. The endless summer here delivers an effortless lifestyle of shorts and swimming, but Adelaide extends her charms. I like dressing for the cold; faded jeans and my boots- indestructible Blundstones bought in Kimba twenty years back. Include Dunlop volleys and a pair of dusty thongs and what other footwear is there? The Southern Ocean often lashes its wind at us so I’m a convert to the hoodie. I’ll stick a pair of rubber boots on each of our boys Alex and Max and they’ll be right. Cousins are often among our first friends and, happily, they’ll all soon be running, yelling and settling their necessary disputes.

I’ll relax in Adelaide, but also tour the Barossa, McLaren Vale and Coonawarra – viniculturally. Confirmed by one ignoble episode, tropical life and cabernet sauvignon simply don’t combine for me. It’ll be superb to plonk down with some old winter friends from Turkey Flat, d’Arenberg and Katnook, and discover what they’ve been up to. I’m confident that every bottle will burst with stories as I sit at assorted tables with Dad and uncork some robust conversations about footy, the Ashes tour and everything else.

Winter back home often hosts cloudless, still days of pale sunshine; ideal for beach walks and parks. Blokes occasionally label their pubs; Rundle Street’s Exeter is, “The X.” The boys name their preferred coastal playgrounds- the Nemo Park, the Buffalo Park and the Rock Lobster; baptised for the B52’s song I unthinkingly played them once. They also have to climb some trees with their mates.

Enthusiastically standing on the terraces as Glenelg play at Brighton Road could placate my football pang. Contemporary AFL spectators have little opportunity to appreciate the contest, as it should be enjoyed. Standing, skilfully, allows for better talking, laughing and barracking, and also expedites what Roy Slaven described as, “drinking in concert.” Unlike modern colosseums, I can wander to Snout’s bar or the BBQ while maintaining an eye and an ear on the ball, without burrowing down a concrete hole, like a rodent, seeking a snag or a pint.

Improbable footballers such as cult Roosters full forward Grenville Deitrich charm me. Treasured exceptions who, despite their prohibitive shape, advance to a high level. Thankfully, these survive in the SANFL. Just. I favour this over the AFL as the national competition is increasingly conquered by charisma-free robots, automatons manufactured into facsimiles of footballers like an Asimov dystopia.

A fire is vital. Grumpy’s Brewhaus at Verdun boasts a German-inspired microbrewery, wood-oven and combustion stove. A golden pint of Tomcat pilsner and a few slices of Funky Chicken pizza on a Sunday and I’ll be set. I taste it all now and can smell the drifting eucalyptus smoke as Alex and Max scurry through the last of the autumn leaves on Grumpy’s lawn.

Life here in the endless summer is fine, but like gravity, winter at home exerts an indisputable pull. It will be a languid exhalation but, ultimately, I’m hoping that when I return to Singapore, the amorous frog is on his honeymoon.

fire

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london & you

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london & you

lost and excited along oxford street drinking in the colour and the promise on our first morning

in boxy bunks chatting in the dark like teenagers in orbit (the toilet flushing next door)

offering vegemite to europeans as the summer sun pushed in the hostel kitchen window

you sending home emails from the smoky lounge and me delighted by your wit and exuberance

blitzkrieg chunks and holes in cleopatra’s needle and putting our astonished hands into the cold wounds

ending an exhilarating first day with you proudly sipping a shandy in soho’s white horse pub and then

dipping hungrily into the rock ‘n’ roll guide to london after you, always knowing best, insisting on this gift for me

piccadilly circus to ourselves at 7am, jet-lagged and euphoric; awake since the 4:30am sunrise

like peering into cupped hands at a secret, mesmerised by the sutton hoo in the british museum quiet

a tiny squirrel in greenwich park and our pure delight as it scampered

you photographing me on the lords dressing room balcony, knowing I’d treasure the image

your hysterical laughter as I kept jumping at the spider web display in the museum

our soft afternoon calm, strolling by the round pond in kensington gardens

the abbey road pedestrian crossing and despite my tantrum and the traffic you persevering so the moment was caught

hot drinks huddled among the pigeons in the trafalgar square grey breeze

your pink thongs slapping and dashing up the theatre stairs as shrill bells ring for mamma mia and

chasing the yeoman warder’s baritone as it animated history and myth at the tower

1

golf at clare

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clare

 

golf at clare

for bazz, hen, klingy and maurie

 

buggy tracks and shoeprints darken chilly fairways

dense valley morning sliced by birdsong

excitement strides to the first tee

on the last putts weary exhilaration

 

conversation surges but every shot accepts an anzac dawn hush

chattering carts explore thirsty creeks

and admire vines swollen with shiraz

balls freeze towering above the seventh green

 

like bungee jumpers, scores dive and climb

our girls happily skirt the eighteenth

and birdies and bogeys echo as

golf tales bubble over laughing beers

 

lake

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Roxy

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Roxy

How do you farewell the family member who’s been with you faithfully, happily, trustingly for over sixteen years? The girl who went from the Barossa to Gawler to Kimba to Port Pirie to Adelaide to England to Glenelg? I don’t know. But I tried.

 

we wanted no wedding attendants

as it was always just us three

within our happy cocoon.

photos on the beach, at the sepia tram and there’s

a special one of you in the rotunda

wearing a ribbon & your elegant gaze

our golden, wonderful bridesmaid

in the field behind our Lakes District cottage

we paused by some horses & there you were

suddenly zipping through the spring grass!

beneath the bemused mares

barking & bounding about

we laughed, how we laughed!

our loyal travel companion

a bright July day, your last afternoon

on the lounge, curled serenely, your hazel eyes

dusty sunlight streaming onto your fur

baby Max on Mummy’s knee, looking at you

& for the first time, he giggles & giggles

as if enjoying what we had loved for sixteen years.

i’m so grateful for this,

your final gift to us

our gentle, precious girl

thank you.

lakes district

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Homecoming

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cricket

Like Gatsby preparing to again see Daisy, I’d imagined it vividly and often. However, our plane simply rose from the Heathrow runway, and ended our English adventure. Leaving became only a transaction, a mere connective between one life concluding and the old one, recommencing.

Returning to Australia after nearly thirty months is like being both troubled and delighted by the sudden, unmistakable scent of a forgotten friend. I ‘d missed our popular culture, and drifting through the in-flight entertainment during my 3am restlessness I discovered Billy Birmingham, the Twelfth Man, being interviewed by Adam Spencer.

Billy’s first success, I‘d forgotten, was co-writing 1983’s Australiana. How weirdly wonderful, as we rushed over the Tanami Desert, sleeping in the silently breathing below, to be stirred by those faintly pathetic puns- Well a few of the blokes decided to play some cricket. Boomer says, ‘Why doesn’t Wombat? Yeah, and let Tenterfield.’

I then watched Crowded House’s farewell concert from the Opera House. Could that have been a decade ago? I recall my sadness as we journeyed along the Grand Union Canal in a narrow boat, and I read in The Guardian of Paul Hester’s passing.

Through the 767’s window, the sun then burst up over the Western Plains. Not a stunning sunrise but as it’s my first Australian sunrise in nine hundred days, its poignancy makes me misty.

Which band could have served me other than Crowded House? Favourably compared to the Beatles with their fetching melodies, but manifestly local, they’re as effortless as a Sunday BBQ. When they performed, “Better Be Home Soon” I realised the golden corridor, my arrival, was close.

Scurrying about the Sydney airport shops, I beam at things unremarkable transformed by my excitement to native treasures. Powderfinger CDs. Steve Waugh’s autobiography. Boost Juice! Their realness is exhilarating. Within the terminal, the uncluttered spaces, affable colours and the brazen January light are deliciously Australian.

After the gloomy British currency, visiting an ATM makes me gawk at the crayfish-coloured banknotes. And everywhere, voices, our voices. Here, accents don’t crash like improper cymbals above a mortified English string section. I eavesdrop, and the chatter is as comforting as a Coopers.

Waiting with our hand luggage while my wife goes for a stroll, I fiddle with my Walkman radio, singularly ravenous for Australian sounds. My morning’s second musical epiphany occurs as Triple J plays Sarah Blasko’s version of Cold Chisel’s “Flame Trees.” Originally released as I began uni when life was inching beyond my dusty hometown, Kapunda.

I’d long appreciated the song’s jaded melancholia and evocations of happy hours and old friends. But the girl’s plaintive singing gives it an aching warmth. This is a welcome contracting of my planet back to the recognisable; a sensation not easily found in a confronting, often unknowable Europe. Having hugged me so tightly upon my homecoming, this song again sits in my heart.

It is fitting that Sydney was covered by cloud for when we land in Adelaide the unbounded sky is a cathedral. Walking across the tarmac, I take in the low, auburn hills and the thirsty plains and later, the idyllic drone of the cricket as we move through the empty afternoon streets of our screen-doored suburbs.

After months and hours of hungry longing, I am home.

flame trees

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Mother’s Day 2008

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boys

Mother’s Day

Like Verulamium Park as spring surges, there’s clustering throughout.

we claim our corner in Wattle Reserve

surrounded by sea and thudding balls and sky.

 

Squinting into the autumnal sun, I snap photos of you both

cocooned on the rug; enjoy our silence, wonder about Alex’ voice.

Who will he sound like and what will he say? We’ll be listening.

 

Chilli olives, fetta in bell peppers and pesto. Alex sleeps in his pram.

bouncy kids follow footies, rush around swings and slides

soon he’ll be there- too soon, too soon…

 

Drift south to the Brighton café wallpapered with Marilyn Monroe.

The menu board can’t spell, but we comprehend

Maltezer cheesecake and I have a lemon, lime and bitters.

 

We’ve explored Central Park and Madrid’s Retiro;

Greenwich Park and the World’s Prime Meridian but

For us three this tiny common is our world.

 

Mother’s Day Dream

Like a persistent vision, I’d seen it often and vividly…

You’re strolling across Wrigley Reserve;

excited dogs and swirling colour and laughing picnickers

burst across the glittering, autumn afternoon.

 

I imagine you both hand-in-hand, chatting away.

in our private universe Alex christens you “Mummy” and

asks curious question after curious question with

a voice innocent and eager and trusting.

 

I’m watching as the sun catches his blond curls and

perfects this image. Now that Alex is here

my dream is speeding towards us and

I can’t wait to witness that mother and son moment.

 

park

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Autumn 2004

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derby

it is snug and perfectly pretty

a vague dog bark and whispering breeze.

listen.

now it is hushed.

trees guard the dappled streets

their molten leaves

fall

and carpet like painted snow.

we swim along the footpath

our shoes drown

under swirling colour.

the village green is proud and prim

its gnarled set of stocks

vivid like a sepia photograph.

suddenly, a boisterous tractor and

then it grumbles to a stop.

a green-capped farmer

vaults

from his cabin

nods at us and

saunters into the Red Lion

her antique vine, blazing burgundy

Friday lunchtime and

we’re blissfully cocooned

in this Derbyshire hamlet.