beer

To the outsider beer would seem to enjoy almost mythic status in Australia: national drink, passtime and major export. You would have thought that quality would be the major selling point in a crowded marketplace. Sadly this does not seem to be the case. Whilst the fizzy pish loaded with colouring and sweetners that haunts the UK lager market is broadly absent, so is flavour. Don't get me wrong, Aussie beer is in no regard as bad as American "beer" but it still doesn't taste of anything much.

As with a lot of things in Australia that are unexpectedly a problem, the reason behind the phenomenon is that Australia is a very long way from just about everywhere, is quite stupifyingly large and is the driest continent on earth. This means that in its' developing years Australia has had to try and grow critical beer ingredients and attempt the brewing process in conditions far from suitable for either. The resulting product, whilst it probably resembled beer, was actually nothing of the sort.

The beer problem is also a matter of cultural heritage in that the beer early colonials were trying to make would have been a British style ale with light hops and quite a depth of malt, a fact still present in that many Aussie beers are still called "Bitter". Bitter does not drink too well in hot climates, crisp pale ales and lagers are far better in the blazing sun than your average pint of heavy. Unfortunately to make lager you need to use a strain of yeast that ferments most effectively between 10 and 5°C, (5°C is roughly the same temperature as your fridge)*. This kind of temperature is readily available in a Czech or German cellar but a little difficult to find in early colonial Australia. What the colonials would have brewed is something called California Common: lager type ingredients with not quite enough hops fermented with an ale yeast. This produces a fizzier than normal ale with a dry-ish flavour that needs to be served very cold to be palateable. This has had an effect on national tastes and so Aussie beer remains pretty crap, particularly to fussy bugger like me.

As the informed reader will already know and has hopefully been made clear the "Australian" beers available in Britain bear very little relation to the beers actually served in Australia. They are attempts to break into an undiscerning and tasteless British market by Australian brewers who have an insipid and uninspiring product ready to go. Fosters for example is nowhere to be found in Sydney but the biggest selling beer in Australia is brewed by Fosters, this is VB (Victoria Bitter).


VB is flatter than lager, it is served at lager temperatures and tastes of ...er... well, not very much. It also gives you demon grade hangovers. Unpleasant.

Other brands, many brewed by Fosters, include:


Tooheys New - this is a fizzy lager-style drink with not enough hops, but tolerable enough.


Carlton Cold - also a fizzy lager-style drink with not enough hops, unfortunately you can't taste the malt as much as you can with Tooheys.


Carlton Draught - This is the pick of the beers available on draught. This is much closer to a European lager, nicely balanced hops a good grain flavour, easy to drink. Hangovers still a bit of an issue. You may have seen the ad for this beer kicking round the internet.


Cascade - Slightly more crisp than Tooheys but not much.


Hahn - A better effort this one, more hops, a decent grain flavour but still it doesn't have the finish of the European lager it is emulating.


Coopers Pale - Pretty good, has the advantage of having no artificial colours etc. in it. A very Aussie beer.


Crown Lager - This is a good crsip clean lager and extremely drinkable. Very similar to Carlton Draft it is available only in bottles. Probably the pick of the litter.

Imported beers do make it to Australia but they are often a bit overpriced because of the distance they have to travel. Lowenbrau actually have a bar in Sydney to lure punters in with the promise of beer that tastes of something. The Aussies seem to like this but the beer is still too expensive so a trip to the Lowenbrau Keller is not an everyday occurence.

Not being the world's greatest lager devotee I have also been trying some of the independant breweries proper beers. Thus far my favourites have come from: The Malt Shovel Brewery, which produces very high quality full-flavoured beers, and on micro-brewery level The Lord Nelson which is a pub/hotel/brewery which has some stunning beers which they serve far too cold (review).

Beer over here comes in some rather strange measures and protocol for ordering varies from state to state. Being your average pom I haven't fully got to grips with it yet but have found this guide to be of some use. To make life even more complicated the Australian Government doesn't use a simple method of measuring drinks either. They have a system of "Standard Drinks" which is annoyingly confusing. A bottle of beer that appears to contain a single serving of beer will often have "Contains 1.5 standard drinks" printed on the label in clear contradiction of the facts, surely they can't be suggesting that you share your beer?*

Among "interesting" beery things to do in Australia, other than drinking it alone, are the Darwin Beercan Regatta, which you've probably heard about and an outback pub crawl, by aeroplane. The latter sounds interesting until you think about: a) what happens when you need a pee and you're only a third of the way to the next pub? b) motion sickness? c) the huge amount of money it costs.

There is good beer to be had here, but you do have to look for it a bit harder than you would expect or would have hoped. I think it may be time to kick off the homebrew over here. Then all I have to do is convince Aussies to drink warm flat beer. Oh well, I needed a challenge...

Click related link for an Australian guide to Australian beer - don't trust the beer reviews but everything else is straight up fact

*Water chemistry comes into this as well but I haven't included anything about this, I wouldn't want to sound obsessive or anything.

**Not that the units of alchohol system used in Britain is particularly clear but at least the units of alchohol are easily worked out: amount of drink in litres multiplied by strength of drink ABV% = units of alchohol. Ergo a pint of beer (0.575l) at 5% is a little under 3 units.

Lollies

I haven't eaten a mars bar in years, not a full-size one anyway. There's something not quite right about trying to eat a piece of confectionary that represents about half your daily energy requirements. People give these to children and wonder why "little Darryl is such a handful". Mars bars are an adult dose of sugar. Giving one to a child is tantamount to attempted poisoning*.

Mars bars have been removed from the shelves in New South Wales since early July and have only just made it back in to the shops this week. This was triggered by an extortion racket that seems to be very shady and very short on detail. The strangest part of it is that Masterfoods, who make the mars bar, have been putting a senior member of staff on TV with updates. This tubby bespectacled man has the charisma of a more boring than average theologian. He looks like he could use a little sugar injection to get him through the day and will be very glad when this issue is put to bed and he can work, rest and play as normal.

To celebrate the return of the Mars bar - its' absence was clearly an issue for the women in the office - a family pack of "fun size"** mars bars was handed out. Australian chocolate has more preservatives in it compared to European chocolate and is tempered very differently to deal with the heat. The result is that Mars and Snickers bars taste even less like chocolate than I'd expected. Thank heaven the liquorice here is pretty good and much more prevalent than in the UK. I shall, in addition to switching my default filthy food from pastie to pie, be changing my default confectionary back to liquorice.

Personally I couldn't care less about Mars bars, and I had already heard from other poms that the chocolate here was shite. What I hadn't expected is that the Aussies call sweets "Lollies". This is just plain backward and the bread-stealing recedivists need to be corrected. A lolly is a type of sweet and entirely unrepresentative of sweets as a whole. Even Americans haven't debased sweets so badly. The word "candy", whilst not necessarily accurate is at least descriptive. Lollies?! Horrid.

Oh well I guess it's the little differences that make Australian culture*** different.

*For those wishing to cause trouble giving a child a can of Coke to wash their full size Mars bar down with is an ideal way to send them absolutely sky high. In additon to the caffeine Coke contains another 17 teaspoons of sugar. I recommend dosing the child approximately 10 minutes before their parents come and collect them, the child's blood sugar levels will reach their peak around ten minutes after collection. You will never have to babysit again.

**Tolerably small

***[insert yoghurt joke here]

A moment of clarity

Idly dreaming as sauntered home last night, lost in my usual comfortable childish fantasies (Jedi/James Bond/Batman/Free Ice-Cream – delete as appropriate), I was struck by an awkward moment of clarity:

I had just been playing tennis at the club and was walking along the seafront to go back to the apartment to sleep and to prepare for another day at my job working for a huge financial corporation, in Australia. That doesn’t sound like me, how the bloody hell did this happen?

Thankfully this moment was a particularly momentary one, interrupted as it was by a pair of flying foxes doing a quick circuit of the park. These things are bloody enourmous and make a quite incredible sound as they take off (a bit like a wet sheet being shaken). Normally I get to the spot where I had this awkward feeling, deep in infantile reverie, and startle one of the bats. Naturally when it's dark a bat with a wingspan nearly the size of my armspan taking off and swooping low over my head can interupt my train of thought. It's uasually about this time of the night that I realise I need the toilet quite badly and that I should run home up the hill as quickly as possible to avoid an embarassing accident. The shrill scream of "AAAaaarrrgggH! A fucking vampire!" is completely incidental.

I was pleased to see the bats this time. Firstly because for once I saw them before they saw me and secondly it brought me back in to focus. I came to Australia to see things like this every day.

Contracting

I have, as I hoped would happen, got a new job. I have left the Supreme Court of NSW and am now working for AMP which is a large financial organisation that does just about anything you can think of with money. My job title seems to be Operations Consultant which suits me just fine, I can make up any amount of bullshit to go with that! It may even be good enough for me to claim that I am helping them out with a bit of Change Management, which is a half-truth but it might open a few doors.

I am doing the same kind of thing I did in the UK but for a commercial organisation, dealing with Financial Planners as learners, with a bit more client facing stuff and a fair bit more process re-design. On my CV it will sound a lot more impressive than that. I will be squeezing in as many business catchphrases as I can and still make sense. Which is only fair as that seems to be a favourite passtime here. For example I didn't have an induction but "gained exposure to team activities", to me this sounds like walking in on a rugby team in the showers but here it just means being shown what people do on a daily basis. As far as I can tell they don't do very much. The pace of work seems unreasonably slow, sorry that should be measured, and the sense of urgency almost non-existent, a low-pressure environment. The office I work in is right on the front by Circular Quay and from the front of the building there is the most amazing view out over the harbour towards the bridge, naturally I work at the back where there is the most fabulous view of a few stories of the even taller AMP building behind that holds AMP Capital.

There is so much space in this office, the desks are probably 3m long, there are about 6 meeting rooms of various capacities shared between around 70 staff on this floor, there is a large staff kitchen with seating and sandwich makers and...well it's all a bit much really. The environment is so different from anywhere I have worked before I am beginning to wonder what the catch is, other than having to start the job on my birthday, no doubt I will find out in due course. It is so nice to work amongst humans again after the freakshow that was the Supreme Court that I have completely ignored the fact that they aren't giving me enough to do and that I could probably do most of the jobs in the team without too much effort, possibly doing a few of them at once. For the moment I am content to relax and earn my cash doing very little, this will all change next week.

temping:2

Okay, it's been a month and I am thoroughly sick of being a filing clerk. Working here is like some sick parody, a bit like The Office but with a darker tone. All the characters are certainly here (all names have been changed to...er...no sod it, they need to know what a bunch of freaks they really are, and if they find this it'll be a bloody miracle:

Liz
Liz is genuinely physically impaired. Through some hideous accident of birth her left upper arm is about half the length of her right. She would normally get my patience and sympathy but unfortunately she can also be loudmouthed beligerent and dogmatic to the point of me actually having to walk away from her. She has an idiotic high-pitched laugh which she uses every three minutes without fail on items of conversation that would not elicit a chuckle from a nervous hyena. Liz's nose appears to emit a strong gravitational field which has, over the natural course of time, sucked the features of her over-wide face into it's middle and elongated both eyebrows.

Patricia
Patricia has the most deadpan sense of humour I have ever witnessed and takes great delight in saying the most miserable possible things to you without a flicker of emotion passing accross her face. She would be very hard to read had I not caught the slightest most momentary upturn of one corner of her mouth when she does it. She also gets the hiccups at least twice a day, very loudly.

Gail
Gail is a great person and very easy to work with but English is very much her second language. She flits around the office in a very businesslike way and generally gets the job done. Her favourite trick is to jab me in the ribs with a biro and say, "You mean to me Tom, you saying me a bad girl!" and giggle maniacly.

Lynette
Lynette is of Italian descent and is very pretty. She also knows it and can be an unbearable flirt. When Andrew, a typical Aussie of the 6 foot sheap shearing rugby playing type, joined the office she melted into butter. "Andrew's a country boy, aren't you Andrew? I'm a country girl, I like country boys, don't you like country boys Gail?", all this whilst fluttering her eyelashes in the most cartoonish possible way. I could have punched her were it not for the fact that she is the only thing of aesthetic value in the entire building.

Renee
The biggest mouth of the section belongs to Renee, as does the widest arse (it's funny how often those two go together isn't it?). Renee is going nowhere and doing it fast. She is a genuinely dead-end person, unfortunately the end that is dead has her head on it. Renee has the work ethic of a primadonna celebrity hooked on strong painkillers. Renee likes to act the boss and she's crap at it. I subtly started suggesting tasks to her so that she wasn't anywhere near me for the larger part of the day. She is engaged to Tim, who I can only assume, was roughly chopped, Pinochio like, from one of the branches of the ugly tree, one of the the long thin knobbly ones near the top.

George
I can't for the life of me work out what is wrong with George. He looks vaguely simian and indeed walks like a chimp that has had the idea of life on the ground explained to it and is doing it's best to fit in. George likes to talk, Christ George likes to talk. Unfortunately he is one of the least interesting people I have ever met. He warbles incessantly about the infantile processes going on in his head. He talks about the ridiculous amounts of yoga that he does, he talks about global events from his own, far from unique, perspective: "...both sides think they're fighting evil". If you try and walk away from George whilst he is talking to you he will follow you around as you work until he has finished talking. Eventually all you want is this well-meaning chatter to stop and you are quite prepared to tie George up in knots to achieve this, which is probably why he does so much yoga. I have come to the sad conclusion that George is just a fuckwit.

Thankfully I now have my long-stay business visa to stay in Australia and work as a resident until 2009. I have registered with a whole bunch of recruitment agencies and will hopefully not be working there much longer...please God.

dope

The biggest ongoing news story in Oz at the moment is that of Schapelle Corby, a 27 year old Australian woman who was found in possession of 4.5 Kg of marijuana going in to Bali.

To put this in context Bali is to Australia as Ibiza is to the UK, more or less. Bali falls under the governence of Indonesia, a state with some of the strictest - read draconian - drug laws anywhere in the world. Indonesia is also not noted for its' commitment to human rights, particularly with reference to its' judicial system. Corby got 20 years, the prosecution asked for life and drugs campaigners in Indonesia were asking for the death penalty.

Part of the intricacies of Indonesia's drug laws, which are designed to intimidate potential smugglers by achieving convictions with the minimum of effort, the burden of proof is shifted to the defense on a technicality. The defense that someone has tampered with your baggage is no defense at all. All the prosecution has to do is prove that the bag containing contraband is yours, not that you had knowledge of its' contents at the time you were arrested. The concept of reasonable doubt is dispensed with; if the bag is yours the contents are your responsibility.

Whilst initially this sounds unnecessarily harsh but if I attempted to walk through customs at Heathrow with a few kilos of grass I would have more than a few serious questions to answer. I would almost certainly be detained for trial. However, as with any incident like this there are complications. Australian customs have been sitting on a report that indicates that baggage handlers at Sydney's Kingston Smith Airport have been involved in drug smuggling and stealing from passengers, forcibly reinserting reasonable doubt into Corby's trial. Something the court didn't consider as the story was late to arrive on the scene and was broken by an Australian newspaper.

To further complicate matters prior to Corby's 9 young Australians were caught attempting to smuggle serious amounts of heroin out of Indonesia strapped to their bodies. They are the Bali 9. There have been real indications that the 9 mules have been coerced into this. They face death by firing squad should they be found guilty of drug smuggling. I hate to be a pessimist but without some really serious evidence of coercion they've had it.

Australia has naturally got behind Corby as an apparently blameless victim of circuses. This is despite the fact that her defence case is not particularly strong, and wouldn't be even if she were tried elsewhere. Much of the money given to her defence team by the Australian government thus far seems to have been targeted at Australian public opinion. The fact that Corby's parents have now taken on the Australian equivalent of Max Clifford to manage the media has done very little to persuade me that they are in no small part to blame for the inefectual nature of her defence. They so convinced that her innocence was self-evident that they barely seem to have tried to use the resources at their disposal. Allegations of bribery and corruption have seen Corby sack her entire legal team over the weekend and re-hire 3 of them. It's a right bloody mess.

In fact the entire event has been characterised by semi-constitutional and extremely partisan behaviour behaviour by everyone concerned. Jury trials do not happen in Indonesia, three judges were allocated to hear the case. At the head of this panel was a man who, in over 500 drugs cases, has acquited exactly no-one. He also, other than just stating that there would be no special treatment for a high profile case, started dropping hints that Corby probably was guilty and the trial would be swift.

The Australian government has so far put about $250,000 of legal aid the way of the Corby family, critically without stipulating that the 2 QCs, both with substantial training and experience of trials abroad, offering their services on a pro bono basis, were used. Only now that Schapelle is a convict has this been done. More legal aid has been put her way to try and strengthen her case, with negligible evidence, but at least a chance of getting the original conviction thrown out on an accusation of bias. In turn Indonesia's strong popular anti-drugs lobby has been campaigning for tougher sentancing with particular refference to Corby. Some of the ugliest scenes at court have been the clashes between Corby's family and campaigners.

Both prosecution and defence have appealed against the verdict. The defence against the verdict and an apparently biased judiciary, and the prosecution against an apparently over lenient sentance.

Whatever you think about the proceedings it is utterly impossible to talk it through with any degree of clarity over here, so you will pardon my rambling. All Aussies - 90% according to The Australian - think she's innocent and this is self-evident and none of the ex-pat's I know will touch such an emotive issue with a ten foot Polish national. The resolution of this is not even close. It's going to be long ugly and unpleasant and I will be thoroughly sick of the name Schapelle Corby at the end of it, which is a terrible thing to say about something that will decide someone's future. My own opinion is that she probably is innocent, but everyone involved has made it exponentially more difficult for her to prove this with every intervention.

That's the news in Oz...

good 'n' bad in Oz

Bad

• Advert jingles - alive and well and living down-under


• TV generally - not great but some stunningly awful individual examples.
  
  'Blue Heelers' - think the bill in small town Australia.
  
  'Hi 5' imagine Steps (remember them? A sort of pseudo Abba but with boy band types in place of comedy scandiwegian beard wearers) made a kids TV programme. They sing athe theme tune at the end, each presenter has their own dance move. Awful isn't it?



• Australian sports - Iron man contest? Why not just have a triathlon? Rugby league; 'tis a silly game but not compared to Aussie rules football. This is football?? I can't see a trace of any rules in the game Aussie or otherwise. They call their soccer team 'The Socceroos' which makes me cringe whenever I hear it

Good

• Food - cheap plentiful and fantastic. Lots of Thai and other Asian flavours.


• Wildlife - Loads of it. Whales swim past on their migration. Bloody amazing!


• Weather - The locals are wandering around shivering in long coats. I wear a jumper and laugh at them.


• Insults - Aussies are good at these. Calling someone a 'slack-arsed tart' works no matter what their gender or sexual orientation.


• Shop names - I went into a cafe called 'Wok on Inn', I was hoping the food would be crap so I could tell people to wok on by, but it wasn't. I also have to try 'Holy Crepe', I nearly walked in to 'Bush Outfitters' to see what they were about but something stopped me...

More later, run out of credit...

temping

I have just got a temporary assignment working for the Supreme Court of New South Wales. This may seem like a rash decision by our antipodean cousins as the phrase "The law is an arse!" - ass being too weak a word, and seemingly some kind of American donkey - has been heard to escape my lips on more than one occasion (probably more frequently than I'm letting on, particularly if beer is invloved).

Just consider, if the pattern of my work history continues as it has for the last few assignments I will be taken on full-time, promoted and end up running half the day-to-day operations of the place. I can almost feel Sydney, Canberra and the rest of the state shivering at the prospect.

Un-PC thought: Just how do you have a justice system for a country that was colonised by criminals (allbeit people that were branded criminal for stealing things like bread to feed their starving families)? Drumhead trials? Some kind of code of conduct a la pirates? Or just a damn good thrashing behind the courthouse?

nosh vs knowledge

We ate out at the thai place down the road a few nights ago. The total bill came to $21. Both of the books I wanted to buy earlier that day were $25. I have come to a country where knowledge costs more than luxury and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.

To be fair this is probably more a reflection of Sydney's low-cost and super competitive restaurant industry than it is a cultural indicator; made for a good quick blog post though didn't it?

Starwalker

Walks into Mont Blanc shop, looks at expensive fountain pen. Sales assistant approaches...

"You want StarWalker?"
"No me want Light Saber!" Makes appropriate whosshing noizes

Receives utterly bamboozled look from sales assistant.

"This is not the sci-fi fan you are looking for...." Makes appropriate Jedi gesture. Still nothing. Backs slowly out of shop.

Good to see that the 13 hour flight hasn't dented my twisted sense of humour.

Changi

At Changi Airport in Singapore. I'd forgotten how bloody big this place is and how little time the computer terminals give you.

Only 30 mins left to wander aimlessly through acres of overpriced luxury goods that I don't want and couldn't afford anyway. How will I cope?

panic

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrghh!!

Have I got it all done? Christ alone knows. Moving to the other side of the world is giving me stress attacks. I got good and pissed last night & I still couldn't get to sleep before it started getting light outside.

Too much to do....run out of time....

tiger

I know that truth is supposed to be stranger than fiction but honestly who would make this up?

If Ms Htay sticks to her offer of only breastfeeding until the cubs grow teeth, she won't be at it long. Tiger cubs grow teeth within weeks of being born, says Taina Strike, a vet at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). "I still feel sorry for the woman though. Their sharp claws will be pummelling her."

As to why Ms Htay has offered her services, when bottled milk could do just as well? "I don't even want to go there," says Strike.

Imagine the psychological trauma this is going to cause to both Tiger and Toddler. The tiger will grow up believing it is okay to try and take milk from humans, which is probably going to prove a trifle hard to deal with for any future female keepers. My overactive imagination is already picturing the headlines should the unfortunate creature ever escape; "Titty Kitty on the Rampage" or "Faster Titty Cat, Kill Kill" (Russ Meyer gags must be made at every opportunity)....

Ferocious Feline Savages Sister Theresa's Ti...er...Dignity

Nuns on the Run from Confused Cat

A small superfluity of sisters from St Agnes' Home for Enervated Ecclesiasticals( Enfield) were enjoying a day out at London Zoo when disaster struck. "Titty" the Tiger, so named as she was breastfed as a cub, leapt from her enclosure and lunged at the group, pinning elderly nun Sister Theresa to the floor and ripping off her habit.

"I thought I'd had it," Sister Theresa said later, clearly traumatised by the ordeal, "I was praying that the tiger would finish me off quick and not start toying with me. Goes to show how wrong you can be."

Far from going for the kill the tiger, apparently thirsty, began trying to suckle from the octegenarian.

"Its' tongue was ever so rough," continued Sister T. "I haven't felt anything like it since my youth, but he's gone now..."

Clearly unsatisisfied after some five minutes Titty jumped back into her pen of her own accord, much to the releif of her keeper.

"At first I thought that Titty'd mistaken her for a penguin or a zebra or somthing, what with the black 'n' white get-up 'n' all," said keeper Joe Harris, "but then I saw what she was trying to do. All I can say is thank God it wasn't Titty's brother. He was suckled for much longer than Titty and has developed a real fixation. He could've gotten really confused, I dread to think what could've happened."

Several such attacks on female keepers in the past have resulted in Titty having an all-male keeping staff. Despite these obvious warnings the big cat enclosure carries no warning notice for women and is set into the ground causing people to lean over the edge, giving the lions and tigers an exagerated view of their chests.

When asked to quote on the event RSPCA spokesman, Tim Holt, gave us he following statement:

"London Zoo have known about this problem for some time and have singularly failed to take action. Similar such incidents will continue to happen whilst ZSL refuse to address the core of this issue: namely Jovani the leopard's 'Show us yer tits!' tee shirt. Until this is taken from the animal female Zoo attendees will be at risk."

Truth stranger than fiction, he says, instantly proving himself wrong.

coffee

I love coffee. On an average day I will drink about 8 cups of the stuff. My favourite comic book hero is the excellent Too Much Coffee Man. It doesn't matter how much coffee I've had to drink if I can smell it I want a cup. Coffee is great.

However, coffee is far from being an ideal drug of choice as it can make you hyperactive and dehydrated give you a frenetic lifestyle flitting between cups, getting headaches, being knackered by 3pm and introspection (please God no, not introspection, anything but that!!). What can I say, I'm an addict. The boom-bust cycle of caffeine dependancy is all part of the fun, until you OD and get the shakes.

Today I have clearly been suffering from withdrawal symptoms. The caffetiere at work has been broken for a couple of days and I decided that this might be a suitable point to try and cut down my intake. Instead of cutting down I seem to have gone cold turkey. My flatmate who is used to being woken by the sound of the coffee grinder and being constantly surrounded by the smell of coffee must be wondering what has been going on. I have been sluggish and grumpy for 2 days and I decided that I had had enough of it (this has nothing to do with the last post I made on here, *sarcastic cough*, nothing at all). I resolve to pinch the coffee pot from upstairs:

Ninja-like I creep into the lift unseen by the ever-watchful Raj in security. Stealthily I slide up the third floor corridor, insinuate my way into the sparsely furnished corridor that serves as tea room. Making full use of the available cover and carefully keeping to the shadows I make my approach. Then with the speed of lightning and the subtlety of a stealthy moth, I strike! A double forward somersault lands me tantalisingly close to my target. A few combat rolls and a swift grab and it is mine! Concealing it in my clothing I drop neatly to the floor and go to make an unobserved escape when disaster, the door opens and I am seen! I fell the first of my oponents with a hail of shuriken, the second falls to a dart from my blowpipe and the third to a hail of kicks and punches as I somersault over his head. Disuading persuers with a scattering of caltrops I make good my getaway, slipping away more smoothly than an oiled otter.

My childish fantasies aside coffee is bloody interesting as one of the world's first internationally traded leisuretime commodities.

Most people think that tea is the British traditional drink but it was far less popular than coffee until about 1750 onward and tea's popularity exploded when the East India Company made tea fashionable and capitalised on it. Tea wasn't as popular early on because of it's outrageously high price and the fact that it was often adulterated with non-food things, like rat droppings, a flavour retained for the sake of tradition in many of today's most popular brands.

The first recorded coffee house was "Angel" in Oxford in 1650, but it was London's coffee houses that were really famous. The first of these was opened in 1652 by a Greek named Pasqua Rosee. By about 1670 London coffee houses became meeting places where political and literary ideas were discussed, something of a rarity in Britain which was run by puritain thought police at the time. Coffee houses were seen as a breeding ground of subversive dissent, both French and American revolutions were plotted in coffee houses. Something which makes me wonder whether the social order, not to mention the democratic process in Britain, would be vastly different had tea not been so popular. Ultimately British coffee houses slowly died out as tea, which they initially served, became more popular but had bizarre taxes and licensing restrictions put on it making it's open purchase in private houses problematic.

London women didn't agree with coffee at all; launching The women's petition against coffee, a fantastic historical oddity which basically calls for the serving of coffee to stop. The reason? Since their men stopped going to the pub to drink ale and took up coffee the women weren't getting enough sex. With the beer goggles removed and quivering from too much caffeine their men had become "as Impotent, as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought".

Coffee became more popular in America as a result of a little-known event called The Boston Tea Party where uppity yanks revolted against perfectly legitimate British tea taxes and ruined vast quanitities of tea, the mutinous caffeine-addled colonials (points awarded for the best revolting yanks joke).

Instant coffee was invented when Brazil developed a coffee surplus equivalent to a world supply for 6 years. The Brazilian government approached Nestlé in 1930 to see if coffee's popularity could be boosted with the introduction of a new product. Amazingly it took 7 years of development to produce this thin bitter and virtually flavourless travesty of a drink that they had the nerve to call coffee. Imagine what they could have done with another 7. On 1 April 1938, NESCAFÉ was launched in Switzerland; worst April fools gag ever.

Without the Second World War I doubt that instant coffee would have got very far. I mean, just how instant does a drink have to be? Take ground coffee, apply hot water, lo and behold coffee. Instant is clearly lighter, easier to carry and makes more sense during war time. Nestlé had timed it perfectly (check out Nestlé's history of instant coffee as a point of information you should also check out baby milk action to find out why people refuse to drink NESCAFÉ).

Coffee factoid attack:

• The ingestion of coffee provides the equivalent amount of antioxidants as three glasses of orange juice


• Coffee originated in central Ethiopia and then was transplanted to Yemen, where it was cultivated as far back as the sixth century


• October 1st is the official Coffee Day in Japan


• Currently there are approximately 2,200 ships involved in transporting coffee beans each year


• Over 53 countries grow coffee worldwide, but all of them lie along the equator between the tropic of Cancer and Capricorn


• Coffee stimulates the apocrine glands and makes you sweat more. Which is why I sweat when I eat - bugger.


• It takes 42 coffee beans to make an espresso


• 80% of the world's coffee farmers are smallholders working on less than 3 hectares. The rest comes from plantations which are run more as agri-businesses.


• To make a roasted pound of coffee it takes around 2,000 Arabica coffee cherries. With 2 beans per cherry - this means around 4,000 beans are in a single pound of coffee.


• In December 2001 Brazil produced a scented postage stamp to promote its coffee - the smell should last between 3 and 5 years.


• The USA is the world's largest consumer of coffee, importing 16 to 20 million bags annually (2.5 million pounds), representing 1/3 of all coffee exported. More than half of the United States population consumes coffee typically drinking 3.4 cups of coffee a day


• Coffee is the most popular drink worldwide with almost 2 billion cups consumed every day


• The world's most expensive coffee is made from beans cycled through an Indonesian marsupial's digestive system. It is called Kopi Luwak and no I haven't tried it.


• The French philosopher, Voltaire, reportedly drank fifty cups of coffee a day.


• Regular coffee drinkers have about 1/3 less asthma symptoms than those of non-coffee drinkers according to a Harvard researcher who studied 20,000 people.


• Turkish law makes it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he fails to provide her with her daily quota of coffee.

I could hardly sign off this post without mentioning that as a traded commodity which grows best in some of the world's poorest areas coffee has become a worldwide economic conundrum as farmers in the developing world are ruthlessly exploited by large corporations. This happens with a lot more than just coffee but is probably most pronounced with coffee given that, as stated above, 80% of the farmers involved in coffee production are smallholders with no leverage at all. Buying fair trade coffee can help but I have heard rumors that not all coffee labelled as fair trade are really that fair. Have a look at Make Trade Fair for information on this. I have found that the fairtade coffees are far more likely to be organic and generally taste a lot better, even the instant.

If you are a real tree hugger you can actually buy fairly traded bird-friendly coffee, I am happy to report that it is delicious.

hangover

How is it that a few drinks in the park ends up with me walking halfway home in the middle of the night?

Complaining as I am it did give me the opportunity to practise my new favourite hobby of falling asleep standing up at a bus stop. Sounds like an invitation to robbery? Remarkably I have never lost anything more than my sense of direction doing this.

Outdoor drinks are clearly a case of soft drugs leading to hard drugs. If you have a can of Red Stripe in the sunshine you will end up doing Tequila slammers at one in the morning (*gags slightly* I can still taste it).

Thank Christ I didn't get really carried away and decide to go for a kebab. There are limits to even my hard drug use.

sweets

Can anyone explain to me who the audience for this website is?

It describes itself as "a traditional , old-fashioned sweetshop, online" which strikes me as a bit of a misnomer. Whilst I do occasionally get a hankering for humbugs or a craving for coconut mushrooms I have never had trouble finding them in a sweetshop, ever. There may be somewhere in Britain where you are more than 5 miles from a pick 'n' mix, but I've never been there. In fact most village shops have a better selection of traditional sweets than city shops.

Perhaps a quarter of is aimed at housebound pensioners that can't shift themselves away from Trisha to get their weekly supply of aniseed balls in a noisy and toothless nightmare of pink froth. This doesn't quite tally with the fact that the older generation seems to have taken to the internet like a fish to space travel. Perhaps because they find it unbearably patronising to be called silver surfer (link goes to an over-fifties portal. No really).

Who the bloody hell wants sweets through the post anyway? Differed gratification and confectionary are almost mutually exclusive. If you live in a dodgy part of the world where postmen are less scrupulous than they should be not only are you going to lose your sweets but the rest of your post is going to be sticky and covered in popping candy.

I think it may be the name of the site. If you asked me to finish a sentance that started with; "A quarter of..." you would almost inevitably elicit a facetious reply such as; "...your finest marijuana my good man", or "...an hour with your daughter costs how much?! A tad overpriced for used goods I'd say.".

Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to laugh, it is probably for expats. As a website this clearly has a global audience and whilst I may take the piss a bit now after 6 months in Australia I will probably start to get a bit misty eyed at the idea of a bag of sherbert flying saucers in all their stale papery foulness, but I doubt it ( I hereby reserve the right to send the occasional email pleading for Marmite).

click on related link for a sick giggle (internet granny related)

toads

Cheers to Phil for putting me on to this one: exploding toads in Hamburg.

What I particularly like about this story is the suggestion that the toad's dramatic self destruct could be:

"...a defence mechanism against aggressive crows" - Werner Smolnik, animal protection worker

Toad thinks: "Oh shit, that crow's looking a bit tetchy. It's wearing a Burberry cap, it's coming this way..." Toad goes BANG!!

Somehow it just doesn't wash as a defence mechanism.

If only I could persuade the damn turtles to part company in such style. Anyone fancy a trip to Hamburg to see if it works on turtles?

celebrity tongue

You can tell I'm having a slow day at work can't you.

Click on pic for a collection of pictures of celebrities with thier tongues out. The awful example below is in fact Celine Dionandonandonandon.



Why do people collect this kind of shite?

horse's head

For the film nut who has everything a horse head pillow.

I mean honestly what is the point, but I still want one...

australia

I think I have now told everyone who would be shocked or surprised now, so I can announce it on here too. I am moving to Australia to live and work for at least a year. I leave the UK on 20 May and Christ alone knows how I am going to get everything done before then.

If you are still shocked and/or surprised by this announcement try reading your email you may have been told and just not picked up your messages in a while. If you still feel aggrieved because I haven't got your email address, or your computer is broken, or you just haven't called me in a while, then tough. Harsh I know but I can't be held responsible for your lack of dilligence.

I have been offered a working visa and a plane ticket to Australia with the help of @www, the web agency the beloved Mrs, works for and I am at a point in my life where I would be stupid to turn it down. Huge thanks to @www. Things might otherwise be very different.

Thanks too to The Place2Be (P2B), the excellent but little known children's charity for whom I have worked for the past 2 and a half years. P2B took me on from being a temp, gave me training and continually took risks on me that have benefitted me enourmously. I will genuinely miss everyone I have worked with there.

One of the main reasons for the recent flurry of activity on this site is because I am trying to get into the habit of posting as often as possible so that this page can be a journal of where I am and what I am doing(and my slow descent into Aussie slang). I will eventually be posting pictures as well and have discovered a thing called a moblog which allows you to post pictures from a mobile phone camera. Updates as they happen.