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.

Fresh Fish

We’ve got some new neighbours. It was fairly easy to spot that Chris is a keen fisherman as there were two boats parked on the lawn (Australians seem to go in for parking things on their lawns, which seems very strange to us). Anyway, there was a knock on the door just before supper the other evening and Chris presented me with two Nile Perch fillets, part of his afternoon’s catch. So fresh they were practically still twitching, they smelt of nothing but the sea. We ate them that night and they were delicious. Strange to think that they’d been swimming around only a few hundred metres away but I suppose you get used to that idea.

An Australian, His Bike and His Axe...

A cycling revolution has swept Sandy Beach, as you can see from this photo. Ever since the Red Rock Triathlon, Saturday morning has seen us all up at 5am to drive into Coffs Harbour for the community bike rides, which draw up to 80 riders in four groups differentiated by speed and lycra. You have to do it that early because this is Australia though, I am glad to say, afterwards you have to have a cafe breakfast sitting outside in the sun as well. But Carl, for it is he, and his axe? Well, not only do we rise at dawn for a ride on the road, but we also head for the trails of the Wedding Bells Forest in the afternoon and Carl has become increasingly frustrated by the trees lying across some of the trails. So today he took his small axe and sent the woodchips flying. He may have a big axe too, for all I know, as he did spend some time living in the bush. I happened to mentioned that I'd never been mountain biking with an axe before. "This is Australia," he replied.