Today was moving day – the first of several. Unfortunately, this will be interrupted by a conference in Cannes next week. Fortunately, there is sufficient overlap in rental periods to complete the process when I come back, thanks to us getting the key early. This will give me plenty of time to consider where exactly to put my enormous workbench, which currently resembles a twelve-year-old nerd’s bedroom.

Internet and TV are working nicely in the new place, courtesy of NTL, so I went to cancel the old contracts. Perlico gave me some lame excuse about having to wait 15 days for Eircom to unplug some equipment. By contrast, Sky were straight up about it – 30 days notice, read your T&Cs. That’s fine, as I have an entire season of 24 recorded on Sky+ that I haven’t watched. Time to test out the TV input on my dodgy media centre PC.*

Tonight will be the first night sleeping over in the new place. This should work out the teething problems. I’m getting up very early on Monday to catch a flight, so I wanted to make sure everything was up to speed when lying in the morning after was still an option. I’m not fussy – so long as it’s warm and dry and has internet I’ll survive. The other half is a little more particular however…

* It has a strange habit of locking up three times out of every four boots, but if it survives for an hour then you can be reasonably certain it will struggle on. I’m not sure if this is connected to the fact that it looks like it fell down the stairs. That’s what I get for buying ex-demonstration equipment.

Today* I took the plunge. I paid deposit on a house.

Before you get too excited, it’s only another rental. I had been looking at buying (I’m always looking) but the market might fall a bit more and my savings are in Sterling, which has a rotten exchange rate right now. And my new personal circumstances require resolution. Two heads and one car don’t work efficiently when you live in the back end of beyond.

Admittedly, this is a slight exaggeration. For real remoteness, I could take you to some parts that are beneath the armpit of the far field behind the back end of beyond, and even those still have running water of sorts. But the PDRP is sufficiently far from civilisation that it takes me two hours to walk home from town.** This makes driving pretty much the only sensible means of access.

The new place, on the other hand, is at most twenty minutes staggering distance from the Bierhaus, which is all that some of my readers need to know.

I shall now attempt to quantify the pros and cons of the new abode:

Pro:

1. Five minutes drive from work. Even in the rush hour!
2. Open gas fire, of which I have experienced the radiation. Mmmmm.
3. Spare room with ensuite (Mum will be relieved).
4. A back garden (!), but with no grass to mow. Sweeeet.
5. There’s a giant shed.
6. It’s almost impossible to find.
7. Did I mention it was staggering distance from the Bierhaus?

Con:

1. Electric heaters. This was nearly a dealbreaker (but must be balanced against the gas fire).
2. The washing machine is in the shed.
3. There’s only one parking space per house (but everyone seems to use the alleyway).
4. It’s almost impossible to find.
5. The fridge is tiny. But then again, there’s space in the shed…

So we move in on the 1st of March. Paddy sucked his teeth about notice, but he can take the extra week out of my deposit. Which reminds me, I’d better clean the place before he starts showing people around.

In related news, I discovered today that I can claim back tax on my rent. Unfortunately, this involves filling in a form with the tax details of your landlord. I’m not sure how Paddy will react to that.

Methinks I’ll wait a couple of weeks before bringing it up…

* Since it’s now past midnight, technically yesterday.
** I know it well – I’ve done so on at least two occasions that I can remember…

I made it to about 6pm on Friday before throwing in the towel and going to bed. I was woken up an hour later by a phone call from someone who sounded just like the Reprobate. It took me quite a few fuzzy seconds before I realised it was the courier with the first of my bags, asking for directions.

Courier is not quite the correct term. It was a taxi.

I woke up at a reasonable time the next day and spent most of it watching TV. I was so out of it that I didn’t eat anything apart from some Fruit&Fibre for breakfast and a Magnum for dinner (it was all I had in the freezer that didn’t require cooking). Got another phone call in the evening from a second courier with the other bag, again asking for directions.* Besides being completely filled with tiny bits of black plastic, everything in it seems to have survived. I will now follow the Karate Kid’s sage advice and throw the damn thing out.

Slept in again on Sunday, although I did eventually make it to the supermarket. I managed to eat meals too, which was a definite improvement, but I still couldn’t make it past 9pm. This had the unfortunate effect of making me wide awake at 5am on Monday.

I really need to get this sleep cycle tamed. It’s not that it’s early or late: that I could deal with. It’s both early and late, on alternate days.

Work has been quiet so far this year, which was good to hear. I should ease back into it without much trouble. Unfortunately that means easing back into my bad habits too, which have already started to surface. It doesn’t help my psychology to hear that the Karate Kid, with no relevant experience, has just been to an interview for a gofer job in mining that pays 50% more than I get.

Just got a text from the GMS producers about rehearsals starting next week. Normal service shall now be resumed.

* Everyone phones up and asks for directions to my house. This is because nowhere in the Republic outside town limits has a house number, or even a road name. The mobile phone companies make a fortune from this sorry fact. I suspect the real reason postal deregulation hasn’t happened here, despite the blatant laziness of An Post who won’t even deliver on a Saturday, is because everyone else ran away screaming at the thought of processing letters addressed “Sean O’Reilly, O’Reilly house, Ballymuckymore”, which is the best you can do in most rural parts. Postcodes? Don’t make me laugh.

Oh my God.

I am never ever doing that again.

Long plane journeys are bad enough. I’ve had a couple of 12-hour-plus excursions in my time but I’ve always been reasonably fresh and perky when getting on board. Not already shattered from a previous long-haul flight.

13 hours and 30 minutes of sitting in a window seat with a pathetic choice of movies and a mental state too tired to read. I can never sleep on planes, although this time snoozing was made slightly more bearable by the complementary earplugs, which did manage to ease the transition from noise to silence (see Day 1). Nevertheless, I must have woken up every half an hour. There were several spots of turbulence, but nothing compared to the Perth-Sydney flight. I gave up on sleep after a while and made my eyes even worse by playing Mahjongg on the inflight system, while the girl beside me sat engrossed in her PSP. Unfortunately my DS was in the hold. Hand luggage can only carry so much. I did end up watching Rush Hour 3, which has a dreadful script and too much Chris Tucker.

I had taken a few minutes to change clothes and brush my teeth in Singapore, which took the edge off slightly. Somebody sitting near me had not been so foresighted and occasionally it wafted in my direction. Normally I get up and walk around on long-distance flights, but this 777 didn’t have much room in the kitchen areas and too many other people had got the same idea. I was never so glad to get off a plane in my life.

Paris Charles de Gaulle looks impressive, but some parts are still a rat warren. I hadn’t really paid much attention to the connection details, so it took me a while to locate my onward flight on the departures monitor. This was because I had wrongly assumed it would be on the second monitor, not the first.

It was flashing Boarding.

Luckily it was on the same pier, but we (there were several getting the same connection) still had to go back through security to get into the departures area. This took forever. The lady in front of me had a pacemaker and it took ages for her daughter (?) to get clear instructions out of the security staff, because she didn’t speak good French and they didn’t speak great English. The whole operation was the most inefficient security screening I have ever seen in an airport.

Boarding.

Finally through into… the duty-free area. Nooo! Where was the gate? I saw a sign saying C43-C58 (3 minutes)* and followed it. I found myself at the high-numbered end. Which was mine again? C41. Nooo! Back the other way to C43, where I found myself at the back end of another (more organised looking) security screening. Nooo! They pointed me down a small staircase to C40-C42, which was a bus gate.

Boarding.

Finally on the bus, which didn’t look like it was going anywhere soon, we waited in the winter cold. Then people started looking out the window. I turned to see. There was a large, irate man with two small children in tow waving his arms and yelling at security. We couldn’t hear very well, but it was obvious that security weren’t letting him on the bus. The bus driver thought for a moment and then closed the doors. Reinforcements arrived, but the irate man didn’t look like he was going to resort to violence to get past – he’d already tried to half-heartedly break through once. His tiny daughter was vainly patting at his arm. Not to worry – once you start yelling at security, you’ve lost. “That guy’s better off out of Ireland” muttered a fellow passenger with a Derry accent to someone who looked like his dad. I wasn’t worried about that, I was just glad he wasn’t on the plane.

By the time I got onto the little BAe 146, I was ready to curl up in the foetal position and start crying. My hands were shaking so much I could hardly hold my book**. They served breakfast again*** and finally it was Dublin.

Where I discovered that it was zero degrees outside, and my luggage was still in Paris.

One macchiato and a newspaper later, I was on the beautifully warm but hellishly uncomfortable bus to Galway, half convinced that having survived four plane flights I would die in a bus crash because the driver was always either eating, drinking, reading his checklist or taking a phone call, and took road markings as suggestions, all the while cursing the Gards who had the cheek to set up a checkpoint in Kilbeggan.

The long and short of it is: the house is still here, the plants are alive (barely), the car started first time so I could go and buy milk and my bed is looking very seductive. No matter that I’m sitting on my sofa which is firmly attached to solid ground: I can still feel that 777 bouncing in the turbulence over the Hindu Kush. The luggage will turn up at some point, but right now I don’t care.

I am never doing that journey in one session again. Never.

* Or some such, I can’t remember the exact numbers.
** Woken Furies by Richard Morgan. Very good, but you should start with the first one.
*** Due to multiple flights and the vagaries of time zones, I have had three dinners and two breakfasts so far.

Up at 0430. Only got five hours sleep. This is a bad start.

Had a shower (the last for quite a while) and checked out. Luckily the bus station isn’t far, but I am ten cents short of being able to buy a drink from the machine. Bah.

Yet more technical problems – this plane was an hour late leaving because they had to send off to the stores to get a replacement part. The attendant kept getting back on the intercom to give us her personal estimates of how long it would take, because they weren’t telling her either.

At time of writing, I have completely forgotten everything else about the airplane, including what size it was, what seat I sat in and what I did during the flight. This is probably down to lack of sleep. Suffice it to say, I arrived in Sydney Domestic 2 with my bags, stashed most of them and my coat in left luggage and caught a train in to Circular Quay clutching my laptop bag.

I wandered around the Rocks, the historic section of Sydney, but there wasn’t much going on. I stopped for breakfast at an Italian place in Playfair St., but was disappointed. I moved on down to the more reliable German establishment at the corner and caught up on my blogging while drinking a pint of dunkel. There are very few places back home you can get dunkel, which is criminal.

Made it back to Domestic 2 and got the baggage, only to find that my through ticket to international wouldn’t let me back onto the train platform, contrary to what the left luggage attendant had declaimed. I cursed and went to the machine to buy an extra ticket, only to find I had to pay full price again, as the trains run in zones. After complaining to the little attendant, I struggled through the no-luggage stile with my luggage (d’oh!) and was just about to get in the lift when she called after me.

- Hold on, are you getting your flight today?
= Well, duh.*
- If you show your boarding pass at the ticket desk you can get it for two thirds off.
= Nice of the machine to tell me that.
- Er, yes, ahem.
= But I don’t have a boarding pass – I can’t get one until I go to the terminal.
- Hold on and I’ll see what I can do.

To the girl’s credit, she did get me discount on my train ticket.

Even though I arrived in International with two hours to spare, I only just made it to the gate. This was partly because of the huge queue at checkin, but mostly because my luggage was badly overweight. Even after repacking as much as possible and putting loads of small, heavy items in my coat where they wouldn’t get weighed, I was still charged excess for 3kg. The rate was extortionate due to the distance to be travelled, but the only thing I could reasonably have done was to leave behind my Christmas presents.

I paid up. But there was only one woman on the sales desk and she made me wait forever while she took a phone call. By the time that was all done and I got through security, I was literally running down the pier. Lucky enough the plane was a little late boarding.

Another jumbo, and this time I was sitting right in the middle. Fortunately for me, the guy beside me had been having trouble with his headset, and they’d replaced it so many times to no avail that they gave him a noise-cancelling business class headset. For some reason unbeknownst to me or him, they brought two and gave me the other one. Maybe they thought we knew each other.

Thus it was that I watched two movies and some documentaries on the 7.5-hour flight to Singapore, all in blissful noise-cancelled silence. One of the docs was the Extreme Engineering episode about the A380, which featured the Paris Concorde crash. I thought all mention of crashes was banned on airplane entertainment systems. The flight was continuing on to Frankfurt, but I was getting off to change, so I donated the headphones to the lady on the other side of me.

Two hours layover in Singapore, and then the big one. Here we go.

* OK, I didn’t actually say that, but I muttered something and made a facial expression that I fervently hoped would mean that.

It has been a quiet day. I toyed with the idea of going somewhere out of town, but given the vast distances involved getting anywhere in Australia, I pushed that out of my mind and went shopping for tat instead. I spent the day wandering round the shops and cafes, discovering little alleys and huge shopping centres I hadn’t seen before, and generally enjoying my last flight-free, and thus stress-free, day away as quietly as possible.

I like Melbourne. It is charming in a way that Sydney, for all its fame, fails to match.* Although it is a big city (nearly 4M people at last count) and has the skyscrapers to prove it, its broad, airy avenues, street cafes and whimsical approach to architecture** set it apart. Sydney feels denser, its streets darker and starker, its nether corners emptier. Melbourne feels somewhat Mediterranean, like the newer quarters of Barcelona or Madrid. And despite its grid structure there are hidden alleyways galore.

So after a late lunch or early dinner, depending on your point of view, I packed up as much as I could and went out for one last drink (well, actually two) and watched the sun go down. I planned an early night, but two hour-long phone calls and some maguro sashimi later, it’s normal bedtime. 4.30 will come early in the morning.

* I shall immediately qualify this by stating that the Cuz’s house is not technically in Sydney.
** Stand on the corner of Swanson and LaTrobe and see if you can find any two buildings in the same architectural style. Bonus points for spotting the buried ruin.

P.S. I picked up a “Photographs of Ireland” book today and was actually homesick. Bloody hell.

Slept in due to squeezing the last out of my hour of internet time last night. Thus it was that I had breakfast in a cafe and just kept walking. Spent quite a bit of time in the botanical gardens taking photos of things and cursing the rechargeable batteries every time my camera browned out (a frustratingly regular occurrence). Nothing beats a pack of Duracells, but the camera eats through them at a shockingly expensive rate.

After visiting the war memorial (there’s surprisingly more to it than first appearances suggest), I caught a tram to St Kilda. This is Melbourne’s beach area, but it also has quite a number of cafes and shops. Spent too long in the bookshop, as usual.

Catching a different tram back into town – one which fishtailed alarmingly at high speed – I checked the times of the airport bus and then went to cram in one last sightseeing trip for the day.

The Edge is a glass box that slides sideways in and out of the viewing platform of the Eureka Tower, the tallest insert-sneaky-qualification-here building in the hemisphere/world/known universe. Or something*. The evil thing about it is that the glass is electrically opaqued while the mechanism works, during which they play all sorts of grinding, creaking noises to scare the punters. Then they turn all five free sides of the box transparent, listen for the screaming, take your photo and charge you a fortune for a copy (having made you leave your own camera in the anteroom of course). The Bro had mentioned in passing last week that he’d seen it on TV, but I didn’t realise this was it until I arrived at the top of the building.

Two days left: one in Melbourne, half in Sydney. Need to go to bed early tomorrow night, as I’ll be up at 5am on Thursday morning to catch the first of my four flights. Better plan my last day in the city well.

Is it really over already?

* OK, OK, it’s the highest viewing platform in the Southern Hemisphere, and the tallest residential building in the world, according to the blurb.

Gah. This hotel gets worse. I woke up at least twice during the night because of traffic noise. The Cuz and his wife had warned me that I was in the nightclub district, but I couldn’t hear any drunkenness over the lorries. Traffic noise usually doesn’t bother me, but I come from a country where double glazing is pretty much mandatory. Not only is this room single glazed, there’s a gap between the sashes you could spit down.

And then there was the breakfast. It’s supposedly served between 7.30 and 9.30, but in practice it’s served at 7.30 and sits in a buffet for two hours getting rubbery. Well, those bits that aren’t eggshell get rubbery. And the toaster spat my toast onto the floor. I didn’t dare touch the coffee.

After finally getting the washing machine to work, I went for real coffee and read the paper for an hour while the drier did its work. After that I went for a walk. This took me through a couple of the many parks that the city is known for, and then to the Museum of Melbourne where I dawdled around until closing time. Having got a joint museum-IMAX ticket deal, and having decided to see Beowulf 3D, I rushed back to the hotel to change clothes and glasses*, stopping for dinner on the way.

I stated previously that Melbourne is a grid city. I should qualify this. It has multiple competing grids with differing orientations, and where they meet there is potential for confusion. Combined with how disoriented I get having the sun in the north, I picked considerably nonlinear routes both to the hotel and back to the museum, so I missed the first couple of minutes of the show.

How was it? Not bad, but gimmicky. The 3D experience is still not perfect – fast-moving scenes lost the persistence of vision effect, and I suspect my off-centre position in the auditorium contributed to some difficulty in focusing. Technical glitches are forgivable in themselves, but combined with the director’s insistence on using every outlandish virtual-camera move possible and constant poking things in the audience’s face, I was starting to feel my dinner return on me in some of the confused and cluttered early fight scenes. Oh, and they should take some tips from Pixar about how to render water.

I gave in and bought an hour of internet time, so I’m uploading the blog entries that I have finished. Missing bits will be inserted as soon as I get them written out in longhand – this will be done offline to save me some small fraction of my bank balance, which I’m too terrified to check right now.

Three days to go.

* I learned from the previous experience that watching movies using prescription sunglasses is somewhat less than satisfactory.

I was woken up last night twice by the Weeun calling for her Daddy. I knew then it was going to be a long day.

At 0630, her mum gave Bro, KK and me a lift to the airport, where we found that our flights were all from different terminals. The Karate Kid’s total luggage complement was impressively over the standard allowance, given that she was transporting pretty much everything she owned. Living out of a suitcase has its disadvantages, especially if you’re a girl who loves shoes.

I caught up on breakfast while waiting for my flight to board – no rush, as it takes a long time to fill a 747. Getting a jumbo from Sydney to Melbourne strikes me as comparable to getting one from London to Paris. This one was the tail end of an international flight that was serving both cities, so I got an exemption stamp to bypass Customs at the far end.

We were about five seconds into the takeoff sequence when the captain pulled the plug. Back to the maintenance bay we went, but couldn’t get in because some crates were blocking the way. The boyfriend of the girl in the window seat disappeared off and got them relocated beside the cabin crew. Apparently she forgot to bring her Valium. Passengers and crew started to stew. One young crew member appeared beside me and started gibbering away manically. Apparently I had pressed my call button by accident or something. I think he needs a holiday.

Two hours late, we finally took off. The captain cranked her up to 11 and hared off to Melbourne as fast as possible. The final approach was not so much a descent as a controlled fall – he just opened the airbrakes and pointed the nose at the ground. A bumpy landing, but that’s par for the course for Oz in my limited experience. Standing at the carousel, I tried to calculate how much longer in total it would have taken to just drive, and how much less stressful it would have been.

I caught a reasonably-priced shuttlebus into the train station and wheeled my new luggage* to the hotel, which was in the next street. The shared bathroom has nothing in it, not even a soap dispenser; the “King-Size” bed is just two single beds and mattresses pushed together with a double sheet wrapped round them, and when pushed flush against the wall turns off the socket that powers the lamps; and the internet access costs almost as much for 24 hours as I pay in a month at home. Oh, and it doesn’t even have as much as a coathook. Obviously Australians don’t wear coats.

Melbourne is pretty. All the streets are lined with trees, the trams run in straight lines through the grid, and there are plenty of little shops in the main drag open until 5.30 on a Sunday evening. I stopped for a beer at Federation square and watched the Aussies beat India in the second Test by a small miracle** on the big outdoor TV. There was also a guy along the riverfront who was juggling torches while lying on a bed of nails at the top of a pole. His standup routine was very good too.

With plenty of change and a new tube of toothpaste in my pocket, I tried to use the hotel’s washing machine. Apparently you can’t after 8pm. Bah.

* Luggage with wheels is a great idea, except when its wheels are so close together that every time you turn a corner it rolls over. Oh, and when everything inside gets covered in tiny bits of plastic. I understand why she wanted rid of it.
** Three wickets in four balls, with seven balls left in the game.

Bidding farewell to our lovely little B&B, of which we were the only guests last night, we did the appropriate thing for wine country and visited a wine tasting, followed by a cheese tasting. In a shocking development, the Kid found a wine she actually liked. We had lunch in the area and then decided it was best to head south, as all three of us have flights to catch in the morning.

Halfway home and making good time I, as the driver and thus the only one awake, unilaterally decided we should stop in Gosford for coffee and a wander around. Continuing the tradition of backwoods Oz* every establishment but the supermarket was closed. At 3.30pm. Even the kebab shop was locked up. What is it with this country?

Arriving back Chez Cuz, I used the Bro’s net connection to book a flight and a hotel in Melbourne using a well-known internet travel agency and breathed a sigh of relief that all was well. I just needed to pack, and getting everything back into my bag was looking hairy.**

We ate dinner; the Ba ate dinner; the Ba sicked up on the Kid; the Bro got an email confirming his flight…

- Did you use my email address when booking your flight?
= No, of course not.
- You didn’t let it fill in all the fields automatically, did you?
= No, of course not.
- Then why have I got a flight tomorrow on Virgin Blue?
= Don’t ask me.
- Because my flight is Qantas. I always go Qantas.
= Hold on a sec. Nope, mine’s a different flight. Let me see yours… er, you booked this on the 7th of Dec.
- Oops.

The Bro had somehow managed to book himself on two flights from Sydney to Perth on the same day. This prompted a manic scramble to get one of them cancelled. Either one, it didn’t matter so long as he could get money or credit refunded. So now we are each catching a different flight tomorrow, and the Bro has half an hour to make his connection to Kall. Exciting.

I found a solution to my packing problem, BTW. The Kid was throwing out one of her many suitcases, so I stole it and packed my overflowing backpack into it with room to spare. Sweet.

* In this context, backwoods means anywhere not within Sydney city limits.
** The second law of holidynamics states that the total amount of luggage in a closed system shall continually increase with time.