Published The Advocate, October 22, 2005
LOOK at those people passing on the street. See their furrowed brows? Put all the brows end to end and they’ll lead to the local hardware store. I have never been inclined to follow brows. I have reached the stage in life where every physical exertion requires a full risk assessment and nothing in DIY fulfils my safety requirements. You need to understand that my life is a chain reaction of slapstick disasters. Wash sheets. Peg on clothesline. Step back into possum poo. Spend rest of day shampooing carpets. That was last Sunday. I should have been painting instead. Yes, painting. Against my better judgement I have been painting my bedroom. Three months now and it’s nowhere near finished. It started by picking at a loose piece of wallpaper. I tore off as much paper as I could by hand, then went to the hardware store to hire a wallpaper stripper. The stripper, resembling a weapon out of Dr Who, daunted me. "Have you used one before?" I asked Mitchell, the hardware lad with whom I have since developed a trusting relationship. "Nah," he said, "but lots of people hire it so it can’t be that hard." Ominous last words, Mitchell, old pal. Amazingly, the stripper worked fine although it churned out so much steam the smoke alarm kept going off. Why do paint lids, like buttered toast, always fall paint side down on the carpet? When I had finished running around in circles yelling, "What’ll I do? What’ll I do?" the paint had dried in a neat ring. I feel like Sisyphus, the evildoer of Greek mythology, who for his sins was made the futile labourer of the underworld. He was doomed for eternity to push a boulder up a steep hill until near the top it rolled back down. Then the whole process started again, and again, forever. Bummer. The mystery is why Sisyphus persisted. Why didn’t he grab a beer and hire someone else to do the job? Someone with a forklift. At the end of each day’s painting, at beer o’clock, I have been resting on the bed with a Boag’s in hand watching the paint dry. I seem to have developed x-ray vision. The paint I am using is off-white but no matter how many coats are applied, I can still see through to the original grey plasterboard. I have drawn the line at three coats, no matter what. Or four. In market research, an "immersion study" is where the consumer is accompanied all day by a researcher who compiles a first-hand report of their shopping habits. Every weekend I return to see Mitchell. Crack filler, sponges, brushes, rollers, extension handles, ground sheets, turpentine, scrapers, sandpaper, not to mention paint. I would have thought my shopping habits were obvious. The man ahead of me in the hardware queue last weekend bought $650 of electrical tools, his brow very deeply furrowed. You don’t need immersion research: The first rule of DIY is you never have the right tool at home to do the job.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Published The Advocate, October 15, 2005
EACH year the English-speaking world showcases three football codes: the American Superbowl, the English FA Cup final and the AFL Grand Final. Only one dares to feature a 71-year-old man dressed in drag throwing gladioli to the crowd – Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage, at the Eagles v Swans grand final at the MCG. Back at the 1998 grand final I sat eight rows from the fence as Muhammad Ali was driven past in an open car, so near The Greatest that the hair stood up on the back of my neck, which is saying something. Nothing like that happened to me with Dame Edna. Melbourne was awash in "Go Bloods" banners in memory of the time when Sydney was South Melbourne and not The Swans. It’s as close as the Victorians get to having a local side in the grand final nowadays. I went for West Coast to be contrary because everyone else in my group was going for Sydney. In the stressful last quarter, with the Eagles holding a slender lead, the woman in the Sydney beanie on my left kept saying she was going to vomit and the one on my right said she had wet her pants. I thought, hell, this is going to turn ugly for me if Sydney loses, so I swapped sides with five minutes to go and was air punching with the best of them when Leo Barry took his match-saving screamer on the siren. Unfortunately both my companions had their eyes squeezed shut and missed the mark. Afterwards, with the mobile phone networks jammed by 92,000 people trying to ring at once to share the special moment … if I heard one more person say, "The real winner is football". In the MCG car park I bumped into George, who did his cadetship under me and is now press secretary for the Leader of the Opposition, Kym ``Bomber’’ Beazley. George, normally a mad Adelaide barracker, went for Sydney. Bomber, with his Perth origins, supported West Coast. In Tasmania, at least state cabinet members have the good sense to support whoever the Premier supports. Jim Bacon was Essendon; Paul Lennon is Geelong. Nice knowing you, George. We discussed the fallout from Mark Latham’s diaries. George said Bomber was keeping his head down waiting for the storm to pass. Fair enough, I said, but it was immense fun in the meantime. Here was a former Labor leader having the biggest dummy spit of all time and he was doing it without spin, just getting it off his liver in bucketloads. Also, what he had to say about Labor’s structural problems seemed about right to me. George shuffled off, head bowed. There must be easier jobs. I boarded a tram jam-packed with victorious Sydney fans and we sang "Cheers, cheers, the red and the white…" 23 times on the way into the city. Anyone in Eagles colours waiting at the tram stops was duly abused, and wisely decided to walk into town trailing their scarves behind them. Glad I swapped sides.
EACH year the English-speaking world showcases three football codes: the American Superbowl, the English FA Cup final and the AFL Grand Final. Only one dares to feature a 71-year-old man dressed in drag throwing gladioli to the crowd – Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage, at the Eagles v Swans grand final at the MCG. Back at the 1998 grand final I sat eight rows from the fence as Muhammad Ali was driven past in an open car, so near The Greatest that the hair stood up on the back of my neck, which is saying something. Nothing like that happened to me with Dame Edna. Melbourne was awash in "Go Bloods" banners in memory of the time when Sydney was South Melbourne and not The Swans. It’s as close as the Victorians get to having a local side in the grand final nowadays. I went for West Coast to be contrary because everyone else in my group was going for Sydney. In the stressful last quarter, with the Eagles holding a slender lead, the woman in the Sydney beanie on my left kept saying she was going to vomit and the one on my right said she had wet her pants. I thought, hell, this is going to turn ugly for me if Sydney loses, so I swapped sides with five minutes to go and was air punching with the best of them when Leo Barry took his match-saving screamer on the siren. Unfortunately both my companions had their eyes squeezed shut and missed the mark. Afterwards, with the mobile phone networks jammed by 92,000 people trying to ring at once to share the special moment … if I heard one more person say, "The real winner is football". In the MCG car park I bumped into George, who did his cadetship under me and is now press secretary for the Leader of the Opposition, Kym ``Bomber’’ Beazley. George, normally a mad Adelaide barracker, went for Sydney. Bomber, with his Perth origins, supported West Coast. In Tasmania, at least state cabinet members have the good sense to support whoever the Premier supports. Jim Bacon was Essendon; Paul Lennon is Geelong. Nice knowing you, George. We discussed the fallout from Mark Latham’s diaries. George said Bomber was keeping his head down waiting for the storm to pass. Fair enough, I said, but it was immense fun in the meantime. Here was a former Labor leader having the biggest dummy spit of all time and he was doing it without spin, just getting it off his liver in bucketloads. Also, what he had to say about Labor’s structural problems seemed about right to me. George shuffled off, head bowed. There must be easier jobs. I boarded a tram jam-packed with victorious Sydney fans and we sang "Cheers, cheers, the red and the white…" 23 times on the way into the city. Anyone in Eagles colours waiting at the tram stops was duly abused, and wisely decided to walk into town trailing their scarves behind them. Glad I swapped sides.
