Watery charms

My son and I spend a lot of time at the pool. What's not to love about the pool? There's all sorts of water-based play equipment, from slides to fountains to wave machines, the change rooms are plentiful, and the kiosk serves the best hot chips with sauce ever (perfect when you're tired and pruney).

Happy, happy pool days.

Well, mostly happy pool days. Sometimes, like today, the pool planets fall out of alignment and deliver us nothing but floating bandaids and hairy-man-backs, leaving us with a very unhappy happy pool day.

So what was there not to love about the pool today? Here's the list:

1. Aqua nappies. A perennial complaint. There's no leakage barrier I really, really trust.

2. The mothers who were milling around in the wading pool wearing their waist-length designer caftans and ignoring their children except to screech the occasional "For God's sake don't splash me! I don't want to get wet!"

Go back to your mansions, ladies, and spare us all.

3. When the lifeguards turned off the jets in the wave pool when we were half way around the circuit. It felt like what I imagine it must feel like to lose an erection: one moment everything's rocking along, then pfzz, nothing.

On the plus side, the chips were still good and the sauce divine; and who knows, the Caftans might be back at the factory having their touch-ups during our next visit. We can only hope.

Painterly thing-bits

Pointillism - really very silly.

We've just returned from a quick trip to Canberra to see the 'Masterpieces from Paris' exhibition for the last time.

I don't mind a bit of art; in fact some of the nicest afternoons I spent while travelling around Europe were spent in art galleries, especially when it was raining and our tent was wet and we couldn't find a Maccas.

So despite a clear sky and the complete absence of camping gear (wet or otherwise) I found myself at the National Gallery in Canberra on Friday, with at least 15 trillion other people, checking out a truck-load of Gauguins and one or two by that other guy, whatshisname, van Gogh.

My Mum, who is actually a painter and knows many a thing about art, sacrificed three hours of her life to come with me, knowing full well the time would be filled with such un-funny gags as "Pointillism - what's the point?" and "Impressionism - I'm impressed."

Mum, I owe you a beer.

But while my comments may have been inane, they weren't altogether mystifying, unlike those I heard passing between another mother and daughter team. "Look!" said the younger one, "Lean forward, Mum, right up close! You can actually see the canvas under the dots; seriously, the canvas!"

I still can't figure out what else they thought might be there.

Warning: Shameless Objectification of Nice Boys with Brown Hair Below

There's a new Doctor! Here he is:



Apologies, he's not just a well-lit cheekbone with a great ride, he does actually have a name: it's Matt Smith, and he's being hailed by critics in the UK as potentially the best Doctor ever.

I'm sure you're very good, Mr Smith, and I wish you all the best for your stint as the Doctor, but I'm afraid this man was The Best Doctor EVAH:




Oops! How did that get in there?

I meant of course to post this:




And this:



And, of course, this:





Sadly I'm no philosopher so can't tell you what beauty actually is with any authority but I do know it's got something to do with nice boys with brown hair. Look! Here's another one:




Oh Mr Whishaw, you would make a simply lovely Doctor.

But all nice boys with brown hair must come to an end so that we can get on with whatever it is we're supposed to be doing. So here's a little something less dreamy to help bring you back to earth:




Right then, pass me those spreadsheets.

Parlez-vous ... what?

Once, in a camping ground in Florence, we were approached by a couple of tall, athletic Euro-types. They spoke to us first in Italian, then seeing our looks of stupefaction they tried again in French, then Spanish, followed by several other languages which were wholly unrecognisable to us.

Finally, realising we were ignorant of not only the Romance languages and German but most likely Bothno-Ugaric tongues as well, they decided to try English.

While they actually said: "Do you speak English? Can we borrow your rubber mallet?" I'm sure what they wanted to say was:

"Do you poor idiotic types perhaps know a few words of English, the native tongue of poor idiotic types everywhere? And do you linguistic amoebas have a rubber mallet we could borrow for a few moments to complete the sturdy erection of our award-winning European-designed tent?"

It was the moment I realised just how impoverished we are not sharing borders with any other countries, and just what a good thing immigration is.

Since that humbling experience I have tried to learn a few bits and pieces of various languages and am happy to report that if someone ever says to me: "El cajero antomatico se ha tragado mi tarjeta de credito," I can answer, with all confidence, "Tengo un pinchazo."

But none of this European phrasebook readiness prepared me for reading Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, which I can describe, with all confidence, as vastly incomprehensible.

May I give you the opening sentences?

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

O...kay; I thought perhaps the second paragraph might make more sense:

Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood...

I did what I always do in situations of complete incomprehension: I quickly downed several glasses of wine and skipped to the end of the book.

Bugger, plenty of 'itty' and 'oddy knocky' and 'profound shooms of lip-music brrrrrr' there too.

For all I know A Clockwork Orange is a book about the rise and fall of rubber mallets in a post-apocalyptic Florentine camping ground. I only wish there was an Anthony Burgess phrasebook.

You might wanna check that

An old friend of mine travelled to China once and brought back an ergonomically-unfriendly backpack stuffed with cheap market-bought goods.

It was a veritable goldmine of all that is craptastic, that backpack, and we spent hours pulling out all sorts of marvellous plastic treasures, from miniature stethoscopes to Zhu Zhu pets (perhaps better known as Go Go Hamsters, of course).

And while the cheap plastic novelty items gave us several minutes of entertainment, it was the cheap CDs I really wanted to get to. Ah China, before MP3 players and downloadable music changed the face of piracy forever, you were the motherland of knock-off CDs.

With great anticipation I took the first CD from the pile: Pink Floyd's The Wall, a two-disc set. Sure there was some separation of colours on the CD cover, and sure this particular set had two copies of disc one (but two copies is better than one, right?) but I still believed. I still believed that in the moments following the closing of the slot and the first fine spin of the disc (either one of the disc ones) I would hear, in all its Pink Floyd glory, track 1, 'In the Flesh?'.

Disc in.

Initial spin.

Loaded.

Track 1. "Oh my God what is this? Seriously what is this shit? Oh God don't tell me, no no no please don't be. Oh bloody hell! It is! Shit! This isn't Pink Floyd; it's the freakin' Beach Boys!"

There's nothing quite as disappointing as expecting something good and getting something shit. Pink Floyd = good; Beach Boys = shit.

Similarly, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde = good; The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, as retold by Jill Nevile (abridged) = shit.

This is all by long way of saying I grabbed what I thought was Wilde's Dorian Gray off the library shelf on Saturday but, failing to look at it properly managed to pick up Jill Nevile Does Dorian Gray instead.

And because I like to share, I thought I'd pass on a little something of both Wilde's and Nevile's work. First, Wilde:

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

Now, if you'll bear with me, the same passage under Nevile's reductive eye (it won't take long, trust me):

Through the open windows of the room came the rich scent of summer flowers. Lord Henry Wotton lay back in his chair and smoked his cigarette. Beyond the soft sounds of the garden he could just hear the noise of London.

The only good thing about this kind of pared down re-writing is that it only took me 23 minutes to read the whole 'novel'. Thank you, Ms Nevile; you left me with enough time on Saturday to listen to the whole Beach Boys Do Pink Floyd album. Fan-freakin'-tastic.

Well hello there

[I've got some thing-bits to do at the moment; sorry it's been so boring here (unless you just come by to read the comments, in which case we may all be in luck! Over to you, MCL, Ramon and Squibelline).

I'll be back next week, most likely Thursday, with a whole load of twaddle just ripe for twaddling. See you then.]

By any other name

Many a year ago I travelled around Europe with a friend. She was fond of expectations and had many; I was not fond of expectations and had none. While my responses to most places we visited ranged from mildly ambivalent to ecstatic, hers ranged from deeply, personally disappointed to reasonably satisfied.

I maintained during our long journey that it was better not to have expectations because being expectation-less left you free to experience something for how it appeared to you in the moment. She maintained the wrong, oops, I mean the opposite view. This made for many interesting hours in our very-tiny-close-proximity-oh-my-God-I-can-see-your-nose-hairs 1.2 litre Renault Clio (not to mention in our two-person tent).


The Renault Clio, seen here in relation to the equally minute and irascible common house fly, or Musca domestica.

So I've always thought I was foot-loose and expectation-free but I've started to realise, to my horror, that I do indeed have expectations and they're rather easily upset.

And how have these hideous expectations revealed themselves to me? Why through an innocuous little misnomer.

I recently bought a book for my son: The Dangerous Book for Boys. I expected practical suggestions for jail breaks and jewellery heists (or, more usefully, jewellery heists followed by jail breaks), for how to escape a grizzly bear by sawing off your leg then using said leg to hit said bear, and surviving in a post-apocalyptic (i.e. Liberal/Coalition) world. So dangerous + a pile of folios folded, assembled and glued + son (fun for).

What did I get when I opened The Dangerous Book for Boys (so newly purchased and so erroneously titled)? 'The Greatest Paper Plane in the World,' 'Understanding Grammar - Parts One, Two and Three,' and my favourite, 'Five Pen and Paper Games'. So lame + lame + lame.

I expected something good and realised I'd paid top clams for, well, 'Some Australian Trees' and 'Growing Sunflowers'.

So what did I learn from this foray into the world of expectations? That it really is better to be perennially mildly ambivalent than deeply, personally disappointed.