Brass Monkeys! (Jeremy)

I thought Melbourne’s normal winter weather was pretty ordinary. There are a few consistent elements to Melbourne’s winter weather. Number one is absolute, constant cloud cover punctured by little three-minutes patches of bright sunlight (and it’s in this three-minute patch that you naturally choose what to wear for the day, and that how one ends up wearing clothing so cold that one wears one’s nether regions as earrings). Number two is a chilly breeze that is always a headwind. I don’t care what direction you are heading, the wind will turn and blow straight in your face even if does mean that it’s blowing seven different directions all at once. Number three is that everyone wears black, number four is that it doesn’t start raining until you get out of the car, and number five is that there will always be stupid women in miniskirts in subzero temperatures. That was, of course, all true up until this week. This week, someone turned the thermostat down. I don’t care who it was. I just wish the little b****ds would turn the damn thing back up again!

Y’see, the last few days have been the sort of weather to make your body forget that it actually has extremeties. (Seriously. It’s the sort of weather that makes you look, count, and say, “I’m sure I used to have ten of those!”). The thermometer has plummeted, the days seem to be even shorter than the solstice, and above all we have finally had rain. I know that its Good For The Farmers and Good For The Country but quite frankly I wish it was warm rain. Still, rain is becoming such a scarce commodity that I cannot complain about it too much. The validity of the seven-year-cycle argument of El Nino has well outworn its own welcome and the truth is that it just doesn’t rain as much as it used to. Year after year, the creek at my Grandmother’s property used to flood. We have photos of a submerged train line that runs a good seventy-five metres away. It has now only flooded once in the last seven to eight years and the lower paddocks never flood like they used to. Unlike our football ground.

I rocked up at quarter to eleven to footy on Saturday to find the eighteens having first use of the ground which looked more in tune to hosting an exfoliating mud bath rather than a game of footy. Players turned like dodgem cars and were coated from head to toe in mud. Our normally white jumpers looked as though we had come off second-best in a chocolate cake fight and the ball was so heavy it looked as though it wouldn’t look out of place stuffed down a cannon. A small wave of mud sprayed out from under our feet every time a player turned. In short, it was a great day for footy. And this was only the U18’s. Before the weekend was out, we would have the U18s, the reserves, the senior side, plus the colts and two or three sets of juniors playing on the ground. I feared that the last we would see of any under-nines player who went near the foward pocket on the far side would be a small, soft white hand frantically waving above the mud from some small child drowning cutely in a particularly muddy tract.

By the time we were halfway through our game (and I had to squint just to see through the rain) the rain was still bucketing down and the ground now looked as though someone had melted a giant ice rink and stirred some mud through it for good effect. Club Stalwart ‘Prangers’ did not slide through the water as he dived for the high footy; he aquaplaned, sending great sheets of water either side of him as he dived, like the bow wave from a ship. Our runner was told to slow down five metres away from the coach’s box so as to not splatter him with mud. At the end of the game, the sheds consisted of three or four either polite or underendowed young souls clustered in the room and the other eighteen of us lining up, waiting for the showers. Even after a good shower-hogging three minutes, I still couldn’t get all the dirt off. It was straight home and into another shower, where I finally managed to peel off the thick sports tape across my left shoulder. Naturally it felt as though I was peeling off half my skin and left three angry bright-red welts across my back where the tape was. Not for the first time in my life (!!), I made a mental note to NEVER get my legs waxed. (And every time I shave my face in the morning, I give thanks for the invention of razors).

After Sunday – a day miraculously spent under roofs and ceilings – came Monday and that brought with it a visit out to Knox to a local school to promote the Wonderful Wide World of GAP (the organisation who sent me overseas to China to teach English). I knew it was going to be a fantastic day on three counts; one, the parcel containing all the promotional material such as brochures et al didn’t show up, two, GAP had promised to cover all my transport costs which was great excepting of course for the fact that the quickest way there was by bicycle, and of course the third factor was incessant rain all morning. Ah well – a little rain never hurt anybody. Trying hard not to think of hot chocolate and chicken soup, I stuffed some warm clothes in a bag, pushed off into the rain and started to pedal.

Even in the rain, once I got used to the cold, I began to enjoy the riding; I always have and always will. I even began to enjoy the cold air that lapped my frozen fingers as I began to make the long climb out of Warrandyte. I rode into Ringwood in not unreasonable time in the wet, and then the rain’s intensity doubled. Down I rolled towards Wantirna – where the hell was this turnoff onto Mountain Highway? – and suddenly the magic of the ride was lost as I was almost swiped by a truck who decided that twenty centimetres was certainly an adequate distance to differentiate cyclists from pancakes. My heart leaped into my mouth as I pulled off the road and onto the gravel to recollect myself. Suddenly the Cycling Magic Trick started to come into play – jump in the saddle and watch your Melways grow! – and I became aware of just how freezing and soaked I was. Water was kicking up off both the front and back wheels, creating wet trails down both my back, and front, and the rain was making visibility tough. After paying homage to the Law Of Threes by missing the turnoff to the school, I looked a pretty, pretty picture as I trudged into reception, with no brochures, no car and a sopping wet bike top. After defrosting me from the inside out with some coffee, the friendly counsellor (if the Counsellor of the Knox School is reading this, a big thankyou is in order) showed me through to the spacious disabled loo, complete with heater and hot shower (which I would have used but for want of a towel). Whatever they pay those people, it isn’t enough.

In the finish I managed to use my considerable resourcefulness to pull off some sort of display at our GAP table (what this really means is that I pilfered the three display brochures from the school’s Career’s office and looked wistfully at RMIT’s exquisite setup with flags, brochures, posters, themed plastic bags and giveaway Fantails whilst reading through my pitiful three brochures in turn). The Careers person, who initially looked at me as though I smelt quite bad (and to be honest she had very good reason for it), turned out to be quite friendly and accomodating (after a change of clothes from yours truly) and seemed quite unfussed about our somewhat spartan demonstration. “Less is more!”, I said with a hopeful smile, and I feel that all five students who visited our stall in the three hours I was there validated my attitude.

I won’t mention what it was like changing back into that sopping, cold, thin set of bike-riding clothes but I think I could summarise it by saying that my voice was substantially higher after I put them on than before I was changed.

I flew home like the wind (there is a nice cause-and-effect to having done all that climbing in the morning) and rode up beside the house. You wouldn’t believe it – there was the courier-sent parcel full of GAP-advertising paraphernalia, three hours late and containing enough brochures and material to convince a used car salesman. Smiling wryly to myself, I walked through to the laundry and took off my riding gear. There are two tests that men apply to dirty garments to determine if it needs a wash or not (and these can be relaxed on school camps if needs be). Unfortunately my bike top probably failed the visual test and most definetely failed the sniff test and so in it went. Utilising this form of jurisdiction, some men have been known to wear the same black t-shirt for months on end. Lucky for poor Kim who we were inviting over for dinner that night I did decide to throw the bike top in the wash, and shut the laundry door to cover the slight pong. Actually, in all honesty, I did the same with my bedroom too for exactly the same reason.

The next day (and I’m trying not to make this post too long) I had a slightly better selling experience. I ambled into Uni for the mid-year recruitment Clubs and Societies day with the aim of giving away not too much chocolate and selling plenty of memberships. Unfortunately our poor Vice-President had managed to not only contract appendicitis but also an infected wound after surgery (he could have just told me he didn’t want to do it in the first place instead and saved himself the trouble) and so I am still ever-grateful for the prescence of Darling Kim who decided to help out of nothing more than a sense of charity and perhaps a little bit of chocolate. I knew we were in for a good day when I set up table next to a long-lost school buddy (think: 1996) from the Political Interest Society and we had managed to rake in ten members to their every one within the first hour. Within an hour and a half I had made a reconnaisance trip for more pens, emergency chocolate blocks (as we were running low) and our Chocaholics polo-shirt stuffed deep within the bowels of the CLS locker, and within two and a half hours Sophie had turned up for the PIS table (though there’s something about that acronym that bothers me) and had finally managed to meet Kim for the first time, having heard about nothing but her for the past month. Speaking of Kim, she was fantastic as a chocolate jockey and I honestly would have been completely snowed in without her. Apart from Krispy Kremes, arty movies, chocolate, and, most importantly of all, each other, we don’t share a whole lot of common interests and to me that’s the most special part to our relationship. To me, it means that there is more than mere superficiality in my relationship to this wonderful woman, and she is now probably quite red and embarassed after reading this so I’ll stop that now! (Suffice to say that I also met Sophie’s ‘J’ for the first time – a really nice guy and a living incarnation of every word Soph said about him – and I would like to start a nationwide campaign to get him on board with our idea of a double-date to ‘Ten Canoes’. He’s still standing firm, despite the attempts of us three to coerce him).

Best of luck with Alloc8 (and don’t I just wish that system had manual override with timetable clashes);

jez

ps – Anyone who has read and enjoyed the following – Wild Swans, Mao’s Last Dancer, The Russian Gulag, Long Walk to Freedom – go and read ‘Life and Death in Shanghai’ (Nien Cheng). In fact, just go and read it anyway. It is the most powerful book I have read – and it has serious competition on that front.

pps – I had my first blogging fan come up to me today and tell me how much she enjoyed reading this! I didn’t know anyone did, so thanks. Hope you enjoy your transition back to Uni and stay in touch!