Creating The Emperor

My new job is of questionable veridicality. On the one hand it is almost certainly real, but then I float through my days in a technopiate haze and stumble out at the end of the day a little unsure.

On the average day I enter my state of the art workplace through the security system (to keep out undesirables presumably) before whizzing up to the 21st floor and taking my seat in this glacial tower. I then undertake my two jobs, which are;

- Cross referencing people's scanned identity documents with the details on their scanned application forms looking for anomalies and scanning errors.

- Checking other verifiers flagged scanning errors and deciding whether they were right or not (meanwhile someone does the same with mine)

This sort of job is as menial as it sounds and consequently I spend a lot of time gazing out across the city, thinking of ways to improve it, like an admin Le Courbusier. Conversation is kept to a minimum so I often listen to ambient electronica whilst working, adding to the general sense of cyber-unreality.

One of the plus points though is that no-one keeps track of my work rate any longer, and I am free to net surf for quite ridiculous amounts of time (hence the now regular updates here). I seem to have landed a George Costanza role.

Anyhow, during this morning's shift I came up with an idea for a new type of condom called 'The Emperor'.


- It will be manufactured in purple, the colour of the Roman emperors, which will make it a more visually attractive. The company will use the profits of condom sales in the west to finance the distribution of Emperor condoms in Africa along with a sexual education anti-AIDS programme to counter anti-contraception propaganda by Christian groups.

- In the African context the purple will also represent the democratisation of protected sex, since this once most elite of colours will be available to the world's poorest people.

- The packet will have a symbol of Imperial Rome on, the Colosseum or whatever, to represent Rome's pre-catholic past and set the product aside from catholic intervention in Africa on sexual issues.

- Finally, Bono and Bob Geldof will not be allowed to endorse the product.

But to whom does one go with a product like this? And does Bono have your legs broken if you don't polish his halo?

I don't know but I shall try and find out or lose my kneecaps trying!

A Blessing in Disguise

There is a general lament in Britain about the lack of housing affordability, but having now witnessed a country where property is still (just about) affordable to younger people I hope Britain stays as it is. Knowing that you have little hope of being able to buy a house has turned people to regard their youth as a great fin-de-siecle rort of resigned abandonment. There is something of the raw liberation of Wiemar about this decadence before the deluge, albeit on a more innocuous level.

In Australia by contrast, as soon as the teenage years are over the Australian dream of a plot of land enters the brain and as the years pass it grows and grows, rotting away any joie de vivre like a personality cancer. Money and mortgages are all anyone ever thinks about. They claw after more and more cash with a deranged obsession, like grotesque characters from a second rate parody of Thatcherism, forcing themselves to work with the flu and always finding reason to stay back (Australia works more unpaid overtime than anyone else). Of course however much you have there's always someone on more to bitch about, and so every pay rise saps away a little more humanity and replaces it with envy and hatred. Gradually life become measured out entirely in payment installments and how much you are earning, or, more crucially, how much you aren't.

I am not suggesting that money is a bad thing per se, my upbringing was not affluent enough to allow that indulgence, but to place it at the centre of one's whole being is truly sick. If you have money it should be enjoyed frivilously, not fetished. The fixation of some people here could not be any more perverse if they tried to fuck an ATM.

On the plus side I just read a tabloid scare story about house prices going higher than ever, so maybe there is still hope. Throw away your 1950s dreams Australia, the party is just beginning...

A City in Need of Cruz Control

I am sick of seeing Penelope Cruz's face, but not in the same way that I'm sick of seeing Jeremy Clarkson's face (I'm afraid he is popular in Australia too). No, there's a difference between my annoyance at her luminous good looks and my distaste at his denim-chaffed mug, which resembles a battered old dustbin overflowing with discarded pubic hair. Hating Clarkson's face is almost enjoyable.

There's something a bit like being at the pantomime when watching him decide which cars are cool and uncool (has he looked at himself in the mirror lately? Clarkson labeling something 'uncool' is a little like Adolf Eichmann calling something 'immoral') or moaning about how he's being persecuted by speed cameras when his only crime was to deliberately break a law designed to save lives. Poor old Jez, even Adolf Eichmann would think speed cameras were going too far surely? Clarkson plays the pathetic, declining middle aged prick with such unapologising aplomb it's quite amusing. With Penelope my anger is much more unsatisfying.

What riles me up is that her profile seems to have emerged all over Melbourne in the past few weeks unannounced, on various bus stops and bill boards and it is now almost impossible to go five minutes in town without having her cast a seductive, eyelash-heavy pout at you. The problem with this? Everything else is dismal by comparison. Ordinary people are ugly at the best of times, but now I feel as though I am walking amongst some troglodyte race of nuclear survivors. And it's not just other people I apply my rule to. A glance at the bathroom mirror reveals only a hideous mutant; and once he moves out of of the way I can see myself, which is almost as bad.

Please, oh gods of Melbourne remove lady Penelope and her impossibly high ubermensch standards and let us be human again! Nothing could please me more. Nothing, apart from Jeremy Clarkson being knocked down by a speeding car and the driver escaping because all the speed cameras have been vandalised. Even Adolf Eichmann would have to laugh at that.

Mobster in My Pocket

Those who know me best would attest to my gross negligence of phone credit. I almost always am out of it and use is sparingly when available. This behavioural pattern grew out of financial hardship, but has continued to languish even though I am able to afford phone credit, in much the same way that war rationing survivors still get every scrap out of their beef joints, even though they could easily buy another. This is not to be sneered at, there is a lot to be said for frugality. Interestingly I read at weekend that Ian McKellan still thrills at a bargain even though he now has tons of cash. Some habits are hard to shake.

Anyhow, this reluctance to spend phone credit took a shake upon my registering an Australian phone and checking my balance. I was informed by the robo-operator that "Your current balance is $35.76. You must top up before 12th March 2007 or your service will be suspended." "What??" I cried at poor Shira, who must be so sick of shouldering the injustices of her nation "does that mean even if I still have credit they'll take it away??". "Yes", she answered meekly, knowing that an outraged kick-off was sure to follow. And it did. But I shan't bore you with details, all you need know is that I did not recharge out of principal and now have no credit as usual.

All of this was annoying, merely annoying, until tyhis morning, when it became sinister. I received a text message whilst at my desk and reached to see who was popping in my inbox. It was Optus, the subject of my embargo. "This is Optus" the message said "you must recharge your credit by the due date or all phone services will be cancelled." Christ! The fuckers are laying it on the line. Pay up or else. There has been Melbourne mafia violence in the news lately, but via text message? Orange were happy to leave me for a year without topping up, safe in the knowledge that other Orange users were ringing and texting me. But this lot are not happy with that. It's 'Give us your cash or you'll be incommunicado sunshine!'

I have one month to decide my next move. And I feel a fight coming on...

Dreaming of Ithaca

One of the main advantages of being an expat is that the homeland exists as a land of mental perfection, far removed from the day to day reality. Britain in Australia is certainly better than Britain in Britain. With this in mind I have started to pine for various things from home including:

The BBC
Snooker on telly
Decaying seaside towns
Cox's Orange Pippins
English Countryside (what would a life-long city dweller know about this?? It is a pastoral ideal I know, but still it's there)
Puddings with custard in cold weather
Ale in old men pubs
The Thames
Free Museums


But then a visit to the BBC website shows me the faces of Russell Brand and Graham Norton and my dream-world Blighty collapses into second-rate actuality.

Curse you reality for being so poor!!

The Sweetness of The Mourning Jew

April is the cruelest month, or is it?

It has been rather kind to me, allowing us to finally settle into a house after being bitch-slapped left, right and centre by February and March. That is largely the cause of my prolonged silence.

Native Britishers would not believe the rigmarole necessary to apply for a house in this city. Viewings of properties often host up to 50 people, who must then fill out an application which resembles that for a job more closely than a house. You must give a personal statement, personal references (we needed nine for this house) and wage slips to confirm your affluence. Getting a car in the Soviet Union would have involved less red tape than this, and unpleasant as Russian civil servants might be I'd wager they had nothing on the grotesque smugness of a Real Estate Salesperson. My only hope is that after death they're all condemned to some kind of eternal Glengarry Glenross hell-fire.

If you were wondering, there is in this entry no Mourning Jew as referred to in the title, 'twas merely a pun I thought of and enjoyed! There is a wisecracking Jew and an anti-Semite though, being Groucho Marx and T S Eliot. I recently read Groucho's letter to Gummo about when he dined at Eliot's house. They had three things in common, he reported; a love of cigars, a love of cats and a habit of constantly punning. But while Groucho apparently tried to suppress his urge to make puns at every opportunity, he reports that Eliot was unashamed, even proud, of his. And why not?! I despise those who relegate the pun to a cringeworthy device. In the right hands it is a thing of wonder, as demonstrated by Mr Marx himself. And besides, what's good enough for a founding father of modernism is good enough for anyone.

Returning to more everyday affairs I must report the only down-side to our new location, we are forced to cram onto Melbourne's over-burdened train system. Things here are really reaching dire straits, with the government buying back trains it sold off 12 months ago to try and alleviate the pains of the severely antiquated system. Not that this is helping. This morning we were forced to let two trains go by since we could not physically fit on them. One man had had enough and let rip at the station attendant. "This isn't fucking good enough!" he spat out, articulating the rage of an entire city. The attendant, although it wasn't his fault, sensed this, and in his heart he knew the man was right. All he could do was stand, simpering like a little boy.

And this is how the blog ends,
And this is how the blog ends,
And this is how the blog ends,

Not with a bang but with a simper.

Odour Toilet

I had been enjoying going to the toilets at work. They are clean, roomy and the soap dispenser lets out a high-pitched "toot toot" every time I press it. I like to pretend I'm the fat controller and Ringo Starr is narrating my life. But today my relationship with the water closet changed.

I entered the toilet with my usual cheery swagger, only to realise that my advance coincided with that of an office nodding acquaintance. We walked in together, awkwardly nodding and hoping each other would make a surge to the left for the numerous and spacious urinals. Imagine then my horror (and his no doubt) when we both continued forward to the cramped and claustrophobic cavern of cubicles. There are three only, and although we both did the decent thing and selected the traps furthest away from each other, this was not enough. Every rasping fart and viscous plop was deafening, and what is more they were not protected with the usual anonymity, but tethered unequivocally to a recognisable face. I would, of course, have left and waited before things went this far had it been possible, but it was too late for that, and too late for my associate also by the sounds of it.

Both this man and this room are now debased by the horror. I passed him at the photocopier today and we both stared at the floor. Once I reached my destination, the "toot toot" was oddly hollow. Another friend lost and another small pleasure exterminated. These are tough times.