And so it begins in earnest!

Maroubra beach this morning I now have a camera phone, a 3.2 megapixel camera with a phone on the back. It's also got a radio, a music player etc. etc.

My new toy arrived on Friday afternoon and I have so many things I can do with it that I don't quite know where to begin. However let's start with the camera - the image quality is so good that you can actually see the dirt on the windows in the picture (click on pic for big)!

I am so impressed with the little thing that I had to try it out, unfortunately it's got so many technical features that its taking me a little while to get all the details working. For example there is a way that I can post to this page direct from the phone but for some reason I can't figure out how. I can now capture video and audio from my daily life and post it up here. In short, nothing is safe!

Being the geek I am I had to find a ringtone that wasn't completely hopeless and there are surprisingly few of these. I have an ongoing addiction to the TV series 24, which, I might add, is the only decent thing on TV out here. So what have I done but got the ringtone from the series and put it on the mobile. Not only that but you can click on the player below to hear what it sounds like, great! I can be a real sad act at times.

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The Great Ginger Beer Experiment - Bottling

15 brown bottles sitting on the sideboard

Looking at my ginger beer in its' bucket it looks as if the time has come to bottle it. Bubbles have stopped rising to the surface and it looks like fermentation has slowed almost to a stop. I'm slightly concerned that the mild disinfectant properties of the ginger haven't affected the brew too much. The reason I can't tell is that the sludge generated by the yeast coming out of suspension is almost identical in colour to the pureed ginger in the brew which has also sunk to the bottom of the fermenter.

Raw ginger beer

I disinfect my bottles and put the priming sugar in. Back in the UK I had a siphon with a tap, here all I have to get the beer from the fermenter to the bottles is a length of tubing which means I have to put my thumb over the end of it to stop the flow of liquid into the bottles. This results in a spray of sugary ginger beer all over the kitchen. Lovely, that's going to be sticky for weeks.

I managed to get most of the liquid into the bottles, eventually. As expected at the bottom of the fermenter is thick with a yeast and ginger suspension.

Funk at the bottom of the barrel

A small amount of this has gone into each bottle in the hope that I can keep the ginger flavour strong and that I might yet be able to make a more traditional cloudy ginger beer in place of a clear amber ginger ale. The next step is to see if I can squeeze the last two litres of ginger beer out of the funk at the bottom of the barrel. I don't have time or a filter good enough to deal with the quantity of yeast so I am going to have to seive the mixture and have a couple of bottles with more funk than I would actually like in.

Mmmmmm yes!

Seiving this causes a fantastic mess. By now the whole flat reeks of yeasty ginger and is covered in a thin film of syrupy ginger beer which is beginning to stick me to the floor. My shoes make a sucking noise and have to be released from the floor's grip with a sharp tug. Eventually I managed to squeeze an extra litre and a half from the ginger porridge at the bottom of the fermenter which I carefully poured into three extra bottles.

The funky three

There is so much solid matter in these three that they feel significantly heavier than the other bottles. If there is a candidate for bursting the bottle it will be one of these three.

I tried a little of the mixture that was going in to these three and in all honesty it wasn't bad. It's come out a little dryer than I would have liked but there isn't a hint of the dusty muddy flavour that has been the case with all previous attempts. I'm hoping that I've fermented the beer for long enough that there is no fermentable sugar other than the priming sugar left in the bottles otherwise the beer will cover the inside of the cupboard with broken glass and ginger beer. It's a bit hard to tell if this is actually the case as the lactose has sweetened the mixture so I can't tell by tasting it. It is now a matter of time. I have to wait probably another fortnight before I can open one of these bottles, presuming that they don't open themselves in the meantime.

The Great Ginger Beer Experiment

1.1kg ginger

I have been in Australia a year now and it is high time I began brewing again. Aussie beer isn’t that great and I’m missing a decent pint of bitter. Thankfully the Aussies are quite interested in home-brewing so 15 minutes with Google and I’d found a homebrew shop 5 minutes drive from where I work. $130 later and I have enough equipment and consumables to keep me happy for several months. Before I start to brew proper beer that tastes of something however I have unfinished business with Ginger Beer.

I have been trying to brew drinkable ginger beer since I was a child. The first abortive attempt was based on a recipe from the Food and Drink programme on BBC 2 in the 1980s. The presenters cooed and clucked over what was clearly a new idea to them. Egged on by their impressed pouting faces as they exclaimed how much better it was than the over-sweet and not gingery enough shop-bought ginger beer we boiled up our ingredients, bottled them with the right amount of yeast and left the bottles in the cellar to ferment until ready to drink. I religiously checked the bottles for a week to see if they were ready to drink always drawing a blank. Then one Sunday evening we were sat back in post-dinner post-muppet show reverie when we interrupted by a loud POP from the cellar. The bottles were either blowing off their lids or simply exploding. I was so surprised I nearly soiled my pyjamas.

The problem with ginger beer is that you need a great deal of sugar to keep it sweet. But the yeast you use to brew it consumes sugar and turns it into alcohol and CO2. If you give yeast a super-abundance of food it just keeps going until it runs out, or its’ own by-products kill it off. Yeast won’t tolerate alcohol much above 10% by volume but it is much less sensitive to CO2 and much more efficient in producing it. Thus ginger beer is much more difficult to brew than ordinary beer. In ordinary beer you don’t want any sugar left in the brewing process all the sugar turns to alcohol and you are left with the flavour of malt and hops. In bottle and cask conditioned traditional beer a small amount of priming sugar is added to the bottle or to the barrel to achieve the fizz. The mass produced beers that you buy in cans or bottles are actually brewed until flat, filtered, pasteurised and then artificially force carbonated in the same way that soft-drinks are. In Ginger beer you need sugar left in the mixture to keep a little sweetness or you end up with a very dry ginger ale.

This leaves the home ginger-beer brewer with a few problems. Pasteurisation to stop fermentation and force carbonation isn’t really an option because of the amount of kit needed. Teenage over-enthusiasm aside neither is producing a special-brew strength ginger beer, although from the research I’ve done the final strength of the original brew was around 11%. You just don’t need that much alcohol in it so a way to keep it fizzy but keep the alcohol levels down must be found. The way this seems to have been tackled in the late Victorian era was to maintain a steady fermentation in a jug, pouring off the product into a bottle to finish the fermentation/carbonation and serving the brew with the yeast still very much alive in it. This is how I approached a much later adulthood attempt at ginger beer.

Still using baker’s yeast to emphasize CO2 production and not alcohol I started a jug of warm water, sugar, ground ginger and yeast. You feed it a spoonful of sugar and a spoonful of ginger everyday for a week then pour off the fermenting mixture into a bottle, leave that for a few days then open and enjoy, or not, in fact decidedly not. The same sort of mixture results; very yeasty dusty and a bit gingery. Not pleasant at all. I did some research and discovered that there is actually a second microbe in the closest recipe you can get to the original and that this is normally available only from “yeast banks”. At this point I give up.

Ginger beer is very popular in Australia which has several different brands available in just about every corner store. Some of the breweries still produce ginger beers to original recipes. So why am I bothering to make my own? Because I’m a stubborn bastard and if you don’t learn to do something better when you fail at it you may as well not have tried in the first place. I want superior ginger beer with proper flavour and a bit of an alcoholic kick to it and I am not going to be discouraged by the thought that I can buy a bottle of ginger beer and add vodka to it. That seems just a little too easy.

A little problem solving needs to be used in constructing a recipe as not once have I succeeded in brewing anything gingery and drinkable whereas my ordinary beer results have been excellent. The main problems are flavour, alcohol, and pressure and they are all closely related.

Flavour
There are two problems with the flavour; yeast and a dusty ginger taste. The dusty ginger taste seems to come from using ground ginger and in the case of the experiment using the jug to ferment the mixture, not cooking it. Fresh ginger is clearly the way forward. The older recipes also include a fair amount of lemon juice so that will be going in too. To make the taste a bit richer and smoother a vanilla pod will also go in and a tiny bit of cinnamon.

The yeast is down to a couple of things, firstly I have mostly been using baker’s yeast which has very different properties to brewing yeast and secondly the huge quantity of sugar in the mixture keeps almost all the yeast alive and in suspension in the final product. This time I will use brewing yeast but I will have to find a way of sweetening the mixture. Lactose is the answer. Lactose is the sugar in milk and because it is derived from an animal source the yeast I’m using can’t ferment it, I have my sweetener but I won’t be inviting any vegans to try my ginger beer (not that I would anyway, scrounging bloody hippies!).

Alcohol
I still want some alcohol in my final ginger beer but I don’t want knockout drops. This can be quite a big risk with home brewed beer as you can’t “feel” the alcohol like you can in commercial beer. You can keep additives to homebrew to an absolute minimum and you are fermenting the beer at almost optimum temperature so the alcohol is of only a single type and is extremely clean. This makes it tempting to bung in loads of sugar and make extremely strong beer. However if you add too much sugar you can corrupt the flavour and start producing different alcohol and nasty acids. I am also using brewing yeast which responds differently to different sugars.

The brewing yeast I’m using has evolved to brew maltose. Maltose is a fairly simple disaccharide sugar which in brewing is traditionally derived from roasting germinated grain. It is easily broken into two glucose molecules by yeast, glucose is an almost universal metabolic sugar and can be thought of as the most basic carbohydrate. Maltose added in the form of malt also carries additional flavour. Disaccharides like maltose provide a slower, steady and stable fermentation with no tainting from by-products of breaking more complex sugars like sucrose down into metabolic sugars. Because I also want the fermentation to get off to a vigorous start I’ll need a metabolic sugar to get things going, dextrose or glucose are the normal brewers’ choices. I’ve found a “beer improver” sugar pack which contains spraymalt, dextrose and glucose – perfect.

Pressure
The bursting bottles incident shows that yeast is quite capable of producing enough pressure to cause problems. For every molecule of glucose broken down, two CO2 molecules are produced. Meaning that for every molecule of maltose there will be four CO2 molecules. CO2 has some fairly alarming properties not the least of which is that its’ solid form is a quarter the size of its gaseous form (it also has no liquid phase which is a bit strange in itself). The net result of this is that the product of fermentation is a lot larger in volume than the starting ingredients. The reason that beer doesn’t blow up its’ bottles is that, even in the live brews that I make, the beer is fermented until it all but stops and when the yeast falls out of suspension the brew is syphoned into bottles and a very small amount of priming sugar added (approx 1 tsp. sugar per litre). As I don’t need to keep fermentable sugar in the mixture to make the brew sweet, this is how I shall approach my ginger beer too.

Now I need to do a bit of maths to work out my quantities for the recipe and I will need to do this on a litre volume so that I can multiply it back up to suit. I would normally use approx. 3kg of malt syrup to make 23l of beer. If I assume that all of that is fermentable sugar I need 43.5g of fermentable sugar per litre to get an alcoholic brew of about the same strength (4.5 – 5% a.b.v.).
How sweet do I want the final brew? Sweet enough to be pleasant, but not so sweet that it becomes sickly. Sweet soft drinks like Coca Cola have up to 17tsp sugar per can in them and they are far too sweet. A can of soda is 330ml and a tsp of sugar is 4 grams so a litre of soda would have about 200g of sugar in it – I probably want about half of this amount so I need maybe a little over 100g of lactose per litre.

How much ginger do I need? The sensible person would probably have looked at the back of a ginger beer bottle at this point, consulted a few recipe books and made a very educated guess. I went shopping and bought as much ginger as I thought looked right, 1.1kg of root ginger. Splendid.

Let’s multiply it all back up to get final amounts. I have 12 750ml bottles at hand so that’s 9 litres, ergo I need:

390-400g fermentable sugar
900g Lactose
This works out at 120g of root ginger per litre or a little over 91g per bottle. This is when it began to dawn on me that perhaps I had over bought on the ginger. Never mind, get it on the stove see how it tastes.

1.1kg ginger puree

I peeled the ginger and zapped it in a blender with the juice of 3 lemons, added my vanilla pod, about half a teaspoonful of cinnamon and a few litres of water and brought this mixture to a boil and simmer. This is to serve a couple of ends; the vanilla needs to be infused into the mixture, the ginger needs to be cooked through and I’ve got a lot of sugar to get into not very much water so it will have to be hot. In went the lactose, and the fermentable sugar. On tasting the mixture the first thing that jumped to mind was that I seemed to have made several litres of fantastic cough syrup, which looks like lumpy custard. I also realised that this is going to be very gingery ginger beer indeed. Over exuberance has got the better of me and I will have to increase the volume and not worry too much about the rest of the measurements. I’m also going to need a few more bottles.

In went the remaining 100g of Lactose and a fair bit more of the fermentable sugar. The final brew isn’t going to be very sweet but it will be very gingery and it will be fairly alcoholic. I put the heated mixture in the fermenter and added enough cold water to make it merely warm, about another 7litres bringing it to way over the target volume. I revived a bit of the yeast with some warm water and sugar in a jug which means it will start more quickly and won’t suffer “cold shock” when I put it in the mixture. The fermenter goes into the cupboard under the stairs and I have to wait until the mixture stops bubbling and the yeast begins to die back a little before bottling. Given the amount of fermentable sugar now in the brew that could take well over a fortnight.

What I’m going to end up with is a strong sweet-ish ginger ale that will probably be clear amber in colour rather than cloudy and pale. I’m not actually sure how much I’ve made, as I had to add ice to the mixture too, to bring the temperature down to tolerable for the yeast. Dead reckoning and experience suggests I’ve made about 11litres – given the amount of sediment that all the pureed ginger will leave I reckon I’m not too far off the mark. I tried to take a hydrometer reading but the hydrometer I bought didn’t come with a sample jar, so I can’t even tell you how strong the brew will be, curses.

A week on and the bubbling hasn’t stopped but the under-stairs cupboard smells fantastic!

Updates as they happen.

Interactivity

A proper interactive podcast, well kind of.


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1. Part one


2. Part two


3. Part three


4. Laura Imbruglia

A long, good Friday

At 7am local time the Soccaroos (euugh) made it through to the last 16 of the World Cup. The first time they have ever done so.

Australia has got right into the 'soccer'. I have a feeling not much work will be done in Australia this afternoon. I'm terrified of going to the pub tonight it'll be a mess.

Wired for sound

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Choices, choices...

Imagine for a moment that you have little or nothing to do this weekend. Then imagine that you have two conflicting invitations; the first is to a Samba night, the second to a Tupperware party. Which one do you pick?

Come on now, judge them on their merits. At the Samba night you will have the perfect excuse to drink many, many delicious Caipirinha. At the Tupperware party you will get the full retro experience. You might even be invited to a coffee morning, or a jumble sale, or a wife swapping party…

Without being rude to anyone that is involved in either of these events what kind of choice is that for a Saturday night, I mean bloody honestly? I know you social life dies down a touch as you get older but I’m only 28, how did it come to this?

Tupperware parties have been around so long that Ann Summers have pinched their business model and made it their own. And Samba/Salsa well I can’t dance before the eighth drink of the night but after that critical threshold I suddenly find my feet. Unfortunately reality reasserts itself at the eleventh drink and I realise that I hate dancing, everyone around me and life in general. After this point I generally fall over. There is a slim three drink window of opportunity in which I am unselfconscious enough to dance and still sober enough to put one foot in front of the other. This is a delicate balance that I have little experience of and not the slightest interest in maintaining. Ballroom dancing is a big competitive sport out here - mind you so is telling fishing lies and hyperbole in general – and I don’t fancy being shown up as badly as I would be (if you haven’t seen it you should watch Strictly Ballroom, it will give you some idea of how seriously the Aussies take just about anything competitive).

I have opted for the Tupperware party. I might bring the Ann Summers thing up every now and then, not often enough to get on their nerves but enough to make the point. Approximately once every ten minutes should do it. I wonder if Tupperware do any of the plastic moulding for them…

Maps & Satellite photo's

Last week Google released Google maps for Australia and New Zealand which means I can now link you to map pages and their satellite photographs of places I’ve been or am going to which means more Google enabled web fun. You might need to play around with the map, satellite and hybrid views and the zoom control to get the idea. At some point I will figure out how to “mashup” all this with the blog on the main page, which will be very good indeed but right now all I’ve got is links:

To kick us off, this weekend we will be going to Nelson Bay for to eat in restaurants, soak in a hot tub and drink wine.

Also the wharf in the middle of Sydney harbour that I used to get the ferry home from.

Maroubra Beach

Pearl Beach where we occasionally go for the weekend.

And last just Sydney Harbour. If you look at the satellite photo you can see how busy the harbour is.

I’m using Google for a vast amount of things at the moment including email, diary organising even web favourites and tracking the traffic on this site through Google Analytics which even though I’ve only had access to for a week has absolutely blown my mind. In case you didn’t know they also own blogger. More about Google in upcoming geek posts including the infamous "Web 2.0" meme.

Maroubra beach today

This is a bit of an experiment. I have just shot some video of a small section of the view from our balcony and uploaded it to Google video. This means you can actually see what it's like outside my window today.

Warning the file is nearly 11Mb and it's not very long, I just wanted to see if it worked.

Pie

Ketchup on a pie - it's just wrong

Right, I’m back. It appears that we consistently exceed our bandwidth allocation so at the end of every month we lose our internet connection. Whilst I’m not averse to posting small things from work sat at your desk for twenty minutes whining online about how many pies you’re eating is probably not going to be viewed particularly well by your employer.

Speaking of which, I am eating too many pies! My pie count for the week is 4. It was a slow week pie-wise.

Not unlike the UK Australia has been through the foodie revolution and the standard of food available is now twenty or thirty times what it was ten years ago. Vegetarians are no longer put on the barbeque, though sometimes it can be a little difficult for Em to explain that chicken is not a vegetable, and that actually neither is fish.

Also like the UK there are some hang-overs from the terrible food past. For example in London you can buy a substandard cornish pastie just about anywhere. In Sydney you can buy a substandard pie just about anywhere. Although if you've got half a brain you'll look for five minutes longer and find that there is a bakers round the corner and that will sell you a gourmet pie for $2 more. Yes that's right a gourmet pie, and they're not kidding the good ones are really good. I'd steer clear of the curry ones though. What seems like a brilliant fusion of two great institutions is in fact a violation of natures law.

The Sunbeam Pie Magic 4

Australia may be the only country on earth where you can buy a pie maker. Most people would settle for doing it the old fashioned way, with an oven, but not your pie chomping sheep shearer. A pie maker is not unlike a toasted sandwich maker. You line the tins with pastry put in your filling, put on the pie lids and close the top. A few short minutes later you have pies. There even seems to be a pie maker specifically targeted at children. Why you would invest in a pie maker, make or buy pastry and make or buy filling and the fiddle around making substandard pies when you could walk to the corner of the street and buy a gourmet pie is beyond me.

Harry's cafe de wheels

My own pie consumption has been driven up by the amount of nights I am not at home for dinner. On my way off the ferry I have to walk almost straight past a window kiosk on circular quay that sells some of the bestt pies and pastries in Sydney. The temptation can be too much. Often I've grabbed a coffee and a danish for breakfast there in the morning too.

If you listen to the tourist guides there is only one place to buy a pie in Sydney Harry's Cafe de Wheels.

A pie floater

At Harry's you can buy an Australian delicacy, being Australia there is nothing delicate about it, it is called a pie floater. A pie floater is more commonly found in the state of South Australia. To make a pie floater take a bowl of mushy peas, float a pie in it - you're done. Harry's also put mashed potato on the top and cover it with gravy. I will leave you to imagine what I think of that.

At the end of Rainbow Street

The Lord Nelson

Last night I almost felt mildly homesick for the first time. It was the coldest day for 8 months, raining hard, there were Australians behind the bar, only poms ordering drinks, I may as well have been in London. I stood at the fireplace sipping an excellent porter exchanging pleasantries with my fellow countrymen. The kind of night you only get at The Lord Nelson in winter. The fact that it is nearly June didn't really cross my mind...

As of Sunday I have been in Australia 1 year. I haven't really even thought about going home in a serious way. I haven't even really settled in properly yet. There have been a few recent events that have made home feel a very long way away. Not making it to Paul and Molly's Wedding was a real disappointment. I had the return leg of a ticket to Oz use but no way to get back here after I'd used it.

The death of a favourite pet is never a good thing either, although this remarkeable cat made it 20. Trodden on by the biggest horse in a 50 mile radius he endured a smashed pelvis well before he reached full size. A few years later he was run over by a car and lost a front leg. He also survived a trip to the Netherlands for a year and the subsequent quarantine on his return. For a while it looked like he might even have found a way to sleep through old age without being disturbed.

There are also other things I won't go into on here, but they aren't good either.


One for the road dear?Doom and gloom aside I've had a pretty good year in Oz. However it seems long overdue that I take the piss out of Emily for events on the night of my arrival in Australia, even though her colleagues have made a decent effort in this direction.

After 5 months apart, after leaving behind my friends my family and my job I might have expected a warm welcome at Kingsford Sith airport. Not a bit of it. I was furnished with an address and told that: "Taxis leave from...er...well you'll find it."

Having come directly from London I had high expectations of taxi drivers. Lesson ther first: Sydney is not London. Taxi drivers don't have to know where they're going. They don't necessarily seem to have to speak too much English or be able to drive in a way that ensures their passenger's safety. Luckily mine could do all three, though he did need a little prompting and did so with a degree of reluctance.

My driver's most obvious shortcoming, apart from the fact that he refused to take Sterling, was one all too familiar to me; a total inability to read a map. He threw the road atlas to me with a blasé: "You know where you going, you find". My response, after a full day of aeroplane travel was a bit more than robust. If memory serves it went something along the lines of:

"You picked me up from international arrivals, I cleared customs and walked straight into the taxi queue. I have lived in this country for approximately twelve minutes and all I have is an address and that it is somewhere at the end of Rainbow street."

"We at end of Rainbow street, road stop here!"

Eventually we find the place that is to be my home for the next six months. The door is open and I'm not positive that I'm in the right place. I push open the door and am releived beyond belief to see Emily standing there.

"Hello. How are you? I've opened some crisps and some wine, but I'm afraid I was a bit nervous and got bored waiting so there's not much left...."

Okay, I see, that's to be the way of things is it?

Events above are mildly fictionalised and whilst broadly accurate they should not be taken as fact.

Emily was very excited to show me the fantastic falt she'd found and comlpletely forgot that I was turning up penniless, without a clue where I was going and that it would be dark when I arrived so I wouldn't be able to see the stunning sea view...

Peter Costello Bought me a Beer

The Chancellor: Peter CostelloAustralia has just had a budget. Beeing the penultimate budget before a general election it contained much of the gumph you might expect. However it was also quite a clever one as Australia's current financial situation gives the chancellor a fairly sizeable sum to throw around - over $10bn this year alone.

Australia, after a long period of what it's population sees as fairly high taxes, has got a measure of control over it's public spending and eradicated government debt. There is no budget defeceit and no public sector borrowing. Unlike almost every other westernised country in the world Australia is in the black.

The cash for the chancellor's recent generosity hasn't just come from taxing the populace but an Australian economic boom powered by the mining industry. Oz has minerals and they are relatively cheap. Oz is also sells to the fastest manufacturing economy on the planet, China.


The PM: John HowardYou might have expected a chancellor with that amount of money to use to throw it around and gloat a bit. Peter Costello though is after John Howard's job and doesn't want to appear reckless; this may be his last budget as chancellor after all. Howard is almost certain tostep down before the next election having been in power for 10 years. Costello is seen as the natural successor.

Much of the budget spend was on infrastructure - Australia's roads could do with a bit of attention - there was additional spending on childcare and support for families. All good commendable stuff. It's all pretty boring really so what's the clever bit? The clever bit of this budget is that there were notr the predicted vote winning cuts in income tax. Instead Costello tinkered with the tax thresholds.

Unsurprisingly like most taxation systems Australia's derives most of its' income from the tax bands where the majority of the population pays its' tax, in the middle tax bands. The 30% tax band, the second one from the bottom, has been carefully manipulated so that 80% of Australians pay the vast majority of their income tax in this band. The bottom Threshold has been pulled up and the top end extended upwards massively. Much the same has happened with the next tax band up, at 40% has been massively extended upwards.

The net effect of this is that not a great deal has changed for the middle income earners. The average Aussie brings in about $53k a year and their income tax burden will be 1.6% lighter. Low income earners do better; someone on $30k is 2.7% better off, but this is before low income benefits are taken into consideration. The percentages are a bit deceptive here as the dollar amount is the same $822 that has come out of the bottom 2 tax bands. The rescaled tax bands mean that very low and high-end salary earners benefit the most whilst things are not too different for anyone earning below $75k. In fact the biggest benefitters percentage wise are people earning towards $150k coming in at 4.3%, or $6,500. After this point the percentages start to fall again, though obviously the fact that this is more money doesn't.

What's happening here is that the chancellor is taxing people at virtually the same rate but giving people money back in the form of tested benefits - they are primarily available to families. This has allowed the chancellor to put through what is virtually a tax and spend budget whilst giving benefits to lower earners and not driving off the high earners so that the economy stays lively. Interesting strategy, it might just work.

How did I do? With most of Australia I will be a little under $16 a week better off after 1 July. With beer at around or below $4 a glass Peter Costello has effectively bought me a beer Monday to Thursday. The Aussies have a word for someone who does that: mate. The chancellor's prospects look pretty rosy.

Phone

I need a new phone, or rather more accurately, I don't. I have a phone and it works well, but it just isn't what I want any more. What I want is a camera phone with a built in mp3 player that I can watch video on and send photographs directly to the internet from (optional Light saber attachment would also be a big plus.

Why do I want such a thing? I never carry a camera with me and I always regret it when I find something good to photograph. Mercifully for my bank account this isn't possible yet as Sony Ericsson need to hurry up and release the damn thing (maybe it's developing the light saber add-on that's holding it up). This gives me time to save up and be sensible, dammit.

I can't justify spending the money on just a camera and I have a phone with me permanently anyway. See how I am rationalising spending huge amounts of money on a gadget? Other people seem to live with a camera. Chris seems to sleep with one under his pillow and Ben seems to have just about given up on the blog and now lives on flickr.

The italian bloke behind me on the bus as was scribbling this in my notebook was listening to music at ear-bleed volume and taking numerous pictures with his phone. I was tempted to get up and punch him for reading over my shoulder then nick his phone. But I didn't.

Winter

It seems winter has arrived in Sydney. Last night it rained.

The Sydneysiders have been wearing long coats, fleece tops and gloves for the past 2 weeks. The average daytime temperature has not been below 10 Cesius. I will freely admit that there has been a hint of winter about the mornings recently but it's a basic rule of thumb that if you can't see your breath, you don't need gloves. Winter here is a mindset not a season, and I'm not inclined to think it's Winter just yet.

A week?!

How can it be a week since I last posted? I need to get my act together.

The truth is I am still petty damn busy. This is a good thing because it means at least my life is pretty full, and I'm not wasting any time with pointless crap (like watching Aussie TV).

It is also bad because it means I am trying to fit having a life into my life whilst actually having a life. Which is difficult. It also means that you end up living a backlogged life where you are constantly catching up with yourself.

I have taken to carrying a notebook with me on public transport and scribbling away at top speed to try and get some writing done in the travel time between activities. These are usually filled with staring vacantly into space. My brain normally copies over these areas of memory like you'd record over a bad TV program on a video. This has the odd effect of timeshifting me to new places. I emerge from the bus blinking in the sunshine thinking: "Now how the bloody hell did I end up here?"

The notebook is obviously a laptop substitute but laptops don't have the other side-effect that I quite like, keeping the seat next to you free. Nobody wants to sit next to the lunatic scribbling away at top speed in an unintelligible scrawl. I may take to giggling as well and in extreme casses drooling. Updates as they happen.

Wagga Wagga

Yesterday I flew to Wagga Wagga for a meeting meeting. It provided one of those rare moments when I actually realise that I'm in Australia. Looking out of the plane all I could see for mile in any direction was scorched bromn earth.

Wagga Wagga is a town town of some 60,000 people which in rural Australian terms makes it a heaving metropolis. The reason for the odd name can be found on the tourism Wagga Wagga website website:

Wagga is the local Wiradjuri aboriginal word for crow and to create the plural, the Wiradjuri repeat the word. Thus Wagga Wagga translates as 'the place of many crows'.

Naturally I didn't see a single crow.

Driving back to the airport we decided to see what was around the town. We picked a direction and drove for about twenty minutes. I can confirm that Wagga Wagga is in the back end of nowhere. We turned back having found nothing and driven past only four other cars. This left us with the choice of going to the airport in the vain hope that there would at least be planes to watch.

Despite the enthusiastic tourism website there isn't much to do in Wagga Wagga and still less to do in the airport airport where we were stuck for some 3 hours before being able to board our plane home. There were no planes to watch. There was a helicopter, but it didn't fly anywhere. There was a shop which sold ginger beer. The girl behind the counter was clearly bored to tears and would start conversations with anyone and everyone.

I was treated to a pretty spectacular view of the stubble being burnt in the fields as we took off to come home, but I didn't have a camera.

ANZAC Day

It’s not bad this not drinking thing, really. I haven’t become a gibbering wreck, temptation hasn’t yet got the better of me and I haven’t succumbed to the truly awful nature of the world. Even despite the fact that it was ANZAC day yesterday and drinking is the favoured pastime.

ANZAC stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps and the day is set aside for the commemoration of Australia and New Zealand’s war dead. This primarily means remembering the horror that was the Gallipoli campaign in World War One. A grossly simplified version for those not familiar with Gallipoli:

Winston Churchill, first Lord of the Admiralty at the time, ordered the ANZACs and a British & French force to land on the Turkish coast and go about the business of ending Turkey’s involvement in the war. The day one objective for the landing party was a hill that it was believed had a view over a tactically important stretch of water named ‘the narrows’ which artillery would then be placed on to prevent Turkish use of the channel. After 8 months this objective was still not achieved. Like elsewhere in the first world war trenches and infantry were seen as the way to fight. This meant mining under or into enemy positions to blow them up. Unlike the Somme however the temperatures were scorching, the ground was hard limestone and the water ration 1 pint per day, one fiftieth of what would be provided to troops in those conditions today. Personal hygiene was impossible and dysentery killed as many as bullets and bombs (many of these being from the dread fate of falling into the latrine and not having the strength to climb out). Australia lost in the order of 26,000 men and about 20% of New Zealand’s male population was lost. The hill they were still fighting for at the end of the campaign has no view of the narrows, but it does have a particularly fine view of anyone attempting to approach the mainland from the coast.

Gallipoli caused Winston Churchill to resign from the government and has been attributed with triggering of his profound alcoholism. It is commonly thought of as one of the most disastrous campaigns of the First World War but could equally be seen as a tactical masterpiece from the Turks. The Turkish, for their part, do not distinguish between their own dead (220,000) and the Allies and ANZACs (180,000) and commemorate Gallipoli on the battlefield with Australia and New Zealand. Gallipoli is extremely important to the antipodean identity and is about the only day that kiwis and diggers don’t mercilessly take the piss out of each other. ANZAC day is for all ANZAC war dead and whilst it was particularly resonant last year as the 90th anniversary of Gallipoli it is more interesting this year as the last Australian World War One veteran to serve overseas died late last year. Kokoda is also commemorated on this day though it took place in August, as was Private Jacob Kovco, Australia’s only casualty of the Iraq conflict who, amongst the chaos of car bombs all around, rather tragically managed to shoot himself whilst cleaning his gun. He was apparently ‘an elite sniper’.

Very solemn commemorative services begin at dawn in Australia and marches take place until lunchtime when everyone goes to the pub to get pissed and plays 2up. 2up is a gambling game played with 2 coins and necessarily simple rules. You shout out your bet, "Ten dollars on heads!", and find someone who will take it. They hold the money and if you win he gives you twenty back, if it came up tails you lose it, if it comes up head and a tail you both bet again. This game must be played with as many people as possible, as loudly as possible and with as much beer as you can tolerate and still stand up. As far as I can tell it is designed to try and recreate the chaos of war in a pub setting, a good thing it is legal only on ANZAC day.

A week off...

There are moments in your life when you just wish someone would put you to bed with a shovel. Quite often on the morning after these moments I wake up feeling like someone actually did. This is becoming ever more frequent, frighteningly so, and I think it is time to take at least a week off the booze. This means no beer after work, no glass of wine with dinner, no sneaky G&T after dinner, no snifter of whiskey on the way to the bathroom, I must temporarily stop cleaning my teeth under running vodka and I absolutely have to stop drinking the mouthwash.

I am going to have to concentrate on my hobbies which may mean a flurry of inconsistent and possibly incoherently written posts on here as I attempt to come to terms with the world without the nice fuzzy haze around the edges. Essentially 95% of everything is rubbish and I tend to find that rubbish takes on a more decorative look when viewed through the bottom of a glass (half-empty naturally). The shock of actually dealing with a world without the daily dose of anaesthetic may reduce me to a shambolic wreck or it may spur me on to become the creative genius of my dreams. Probably not the last one, but it’s a nice thought.

Cooking is always a good way to relax. I will create some recipes and post them on here. Maybe I just need to freshen up and de-toxify my life in general. I hereby resolve to eat more fruit and veg, less red meat, fewer chips and no sugary soda. I will attempt to do more exercise and try to be more healthy and generally nicer to people. I shall be known for my sunny disposition, my charm and warmth. I shall be nice to children and small animals. Oh God it’s going to be awful. Rehab is for quitters.

NZ Summary

So now I’m back, from outer space (or New Zealand anyway, which is almost as densely populated with people as outer space, more sheep though).
Got in to find me here with a fat look upon my face (I need to get some bloody exercise, look at the photo in the sidebar: I’ve got saggy nipples!),
I would have changed my eating habits, should have gone for a run or three, if I’d thought for just one second I’d start to get flabby…

Enough with the Gloria Gaynor pastiche.

New Zealand was as beautiful as ever, but it was quite definitely Autumn there. Australia is baking hot by comparison.

It will surprise no-one to learn that on holiday, as in life in general I have spent my time in and out of hot water and engaged in activities that involve jumping into cold water. The brief version of the holiday goes like this:

• Friday 7 April – Sprint from work to airport. Arrive Aukland in the middle of the night. Taxi to friend’s house. Knock on wrong door, shit!


• Saturday 8 April – Ferry to Waiheke Island. Bus to accommodation. Walk on beach, admire Rod Stewart’s house from afar. Wedding – good! Drunk.


• Sunday 9 April – Hangover. Bad. Pie for breakfast, good! Wedding barbeque – good. Drunk, can’t remember much after that, other than throwing up when I got home.


• Monday 10 April – Not much of a hangover really. Walk on clifftops. Wine tasting tour. Buy wine. Buy some more wine! Taste olive oil. Mmm olive oil & bread. Fabulous lunch at winery. Walk on beach.


• Tuesday 11 April – Ferry to Aukland. Taxi to collect campervan. Diesel, bugger. Point campervan to middle of nowhere & drive. Arrive at hot springs in the middle of nowhere. Hot springs smell of eggs! Drive to campsite in Thames. Walk on Beach. Aaargh bed in campervan is like a Tetris puzzle to put together!


• Wednesday 12 April – Walk in bush. Trapped possum aaargh! Splattered rat, yuk. Set off all traps, hah! Abandoned goldmines. Shopping. Drive to Coromandel, stunning scenery. Shuffle schedule. Mmmm muscle chowder. Shelley beach campsite.


• Thursday 13 April – Drive to Whangamata. Note odd pronunciation. Breakfast in car park. Cave cruise with odd kiwi in ex-military boat. Amusing kiwi accent! Play instruments in cave. Drive to hot water beach. No hot water to be found. Not impressed. Walk on beach. Drive to Hahei and stay at holiday park. Walk on beach.


• Friday 14 April – Em goes diving, I make a thing out of bone. Lunch on beach. Drive to walks in woods. Drive toward Rotorua. What is that smell? Arrive Rotorua. Smell is Rotorua (lots of hot springs)! Thai dinner. Beer, wine. Polynesian Spa. Police are parked next to our van breathalysing everyone who drives past. ARSE! Talk to friendly bouncer have (soft) drink and go back to van. Police have gone. Get to campsite at half past midnight.


• Saturday 15 April – River rafting, over a 7meter waterfall, aaaarrrgggh! Hell’s gate spa, weird place, mudbath. Curry!


• Sunday 16 April – Walk round Rotorua. Hot springs & mud pools everywhere. Drive to walk along old railway tracks. Long dark tunnel. Weird. Drive to Waitomo Caves. Go down caves & underground river with the aid of a rubber ring. Glow worms, pretty. Walk from campsite through woods. Possum (untrapped), gloworms, pretty.


• Monday 17 April – Battle of wills with kitchen cleaner over epic sized omelette. Drive to Aukland. Holiday over, boo rubbish!

All this will be recounted in greater detail as I get the photos uploaded.

One thing I have noticed is that I was wound up really tight before the holiday and I have to try really hard not to fall back into the old habits of stressing out about, well everything really. I’m sure I never used to be like this, it must stop. I honestly have very little to worry about but I don’t know how Em has been putting up with me. Never mind, I will beat it.

Off to play tennis and be a pom at the top of my lungs – great fun.

That'll be me away...

In New Zealand for 10 days.

Posted from Kingsford Smith Airport in Sydney. Off for some blackwater rafting (!), some whitewater rafting, and we might manage to go to a frieds wedding at some point. More later.