Blowing Hot and Cold

Summer’s here, with temperatures touching 40 degrees in Coffs yesterday. We’re having the usual vicious electrical storms and gales in the evenings, with the subsequent power cuts and phone failures, the surf’s rubbish, the police in Sydney are on stand-by in case of race riots, and the Ashes series has started with a convincing Australian win.

That’s all pretty normal (I’m glad to say it’s a lot cooler today) but enter British People Against Racial Discrimination (BPARD) which has asked the Advertising Standards Board to ban the use of the word “Pom”. This follows an Ashes-linked advert by brewers Tooheys for a new super-chilled beer which is “cold enough to scare a Pom.”

I hope BPARD isn’t serious, but it appears to be. It does remind me of the time when some Welsh nationalists tried to get Wales listed as an oppressed nation in the UN (I wanted to send them to Iraqi Kurdistan to learn what oppression was all about). This really will give new meaning to the phrase “whingeing Pom” and only this morning neighbour Chris paused while lashing down his boat against the next, inevitable storm, to remark “so you don’t like being called a Pom, then?”

My standard response to jibes like this is that it doesn’t relate to me because I’m Welsh and Poms are English in Australian minds but then that doesn’t really stand up to analysis since the term “Pom” is popularly supposed to stem from “Prisoner of Her Majesty” and presumably some of these prisoners were Welsh. But any port in a storm.

For a flavour of the debate, spiced with references to the convict stain, go
here.