A lot can happen while you are spending a couple of weeks in the wilderness. Viz:
1. We return to a house with no kitchen, no laundry, four working power points for the whole house, very few working light fittings, every manner of filth, from dust and builders’ detritus to a large number of dead cockroaches, the house crawling with builders. The first thing Colin the carpenter said to us when we walked in the door was, You should have stayed away for another week. He was right. We have invented a new, inexpensive (and not at all enjoyable) type of holiday: camping out in your own home. We have been operating out of a microwave and the barbecue. The fridge and microwave, neither of which have working internal lights, have been placed in the new part of the house in a pitch black location, requiring the use of a torch to see what you are doing (thus restricting action to one hand), and also requiring for power the longest extension lead known to man, which because of where the power point is located is frequently knocked out, necessitating a long walk to the other end of the house to get the power back on, so that by the time you get back to the “kitchen” whatever is in the microwave has been overdone. Meanwhile the bathroom sink has seen use at various times as a bathroom sink, laundry trough, kitchen sink, and repository of soiled and/or vomit-laden clothing: sometimes all at the same time. Canberra, outlying satellite of the third world. At some point I had to resort to retail therapy: the second volume of Alan Moore’s “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”, and one of only a very small number of essential “live” records (jazz and classical excepted), “The Name of This Band is Talking Heads”, just now released on CD for the very first time, so that I can once again hear the young David Byrne saying “This song is called “New Feeling”, and that’s what it’s about.”
2. It is a punishing blow to have to return a book to the library when you are half way through it - especially if that book is a real page-turner like William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition”. I probably should just buy my own copy and be done with it.
3. Gillian Welch is coming to Canberra. Oh boy!
4. We now have two boys who can ride bikes without training wheels. They both took to it on the same day, using their girl cousins’ bikes, at the RACV caravan park at Cobram. It is surprising how much mobility this has given us as a family. They rode with us to the local school yesterday to help us do our bit towards ridding the nation of the odious Mr Howard (maybe next time). Jules’ first question to us this morning was, “Who won the vote?” This being Canberra, we have to go through the process again next Saturday for the local elections. (Still, rather that than live in a dictatorship, I suppose.)
5. Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” is just as remarkable now as it was in 1986. I was worried that it wouldn’t be. There once was a time when we accepted as“good” anything recommended to us as such by certain writers at the NME. Our collective judgment was generally pretty good; but occasionally the passage of time, and the art of growing up, caused the scales to fall from my eyes. I guess I was scared of losing such a sacred tome to the ageing process. I needn’t have worried.
6. Either the new Jim Jarmusch film has been and gone in this town while we were away, or it’s coming, or it’s not getting a run here (a frequent problem lately, with the closure of one of the two independent cinemas).
7. Whatever personal demons cause Marcello Carlin (link at right) to periodically push his constant love-hate relationship to blogging sharply in the direction of “hate”, he is mercifully still with us, in both senses. Now working his way through 1974. He is the same age as me. 1974 was a very important year, trust us, but maybe you had to be 10 years old.
8. While we blinked, three of the big guns have released new albums: Nick Cave (reputed to be quite strong); Elvis Costello (ditto, but you never can be too sure these days); and Tom Waits (a bit of a no-brainer there, as our broker might say).
9. “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell is Carl’s newest favourite song. I think I know how he feels. It once was for me, too, but I was about 10 years older than he is.
