Every square metre of Sydney Harbour has at least a couple of floating bodies. Watching Water Rats, it’s a miracle they still manage to get the ferries through to Manly.
The judges who preside over cases in the United States are always African-American.
Being the sibling of a police officer or a doctor is pretty much asking for it: I’d give it three episodes before you’re revealed as a heroin addict.
The main guy’s an Anglo; the sidekick is from a minority group.
The main guy is handsome; the sidekick is both fatter and shorter.
The circled classified ad left by the murderer is always in the middle of the page of classifieds, never on the top or side.
Only on game shows does the carry-over champ win $61 000 of prizes — which works out as one pin-ball machine and three nights on Hamilton Island. Remind me to never shop where they shop.
Radio announcers, heard for three seconds through the car radio, just happen to be conveniently announcing both the time and place of the scene: ‘And it’s a beautiful morning in Adelaide.’
Criminals never shop at Target. That fibre fragment discovered at the crime scene comes from a jacket that could only be bought at a single shop in southern Glasgow, during the years 1951 to 1953.
Heroin use leads to an inability to shave.
Everyone in New York can see the Manhattan skyline out their window, just as every single citizen of Sydney has a view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
As people glide through the airport, no suitcase ever looks as heavy as a real one.
The only compatible organ donor is the no-good, long-lost father.
The policeman at the crime scene is always starting a fresh notebook.
The crucial phone message left by the kidnapper is always the first on the message tape … the audience conveniently spared the four messages from the video shop.
Everyone pulls up right outside their venue, and finds a parking spot, even in the middle of New York.
Murderers have long tired of simply shooting people. Not when they could have fun with mirrored walls, electrical spikes, and trampolines buried in lawns.
The big boss is always a humourless, thin-lipped stickler for the rules, handling pressure from above.
The more brilliant and intuitive the cop, the worse his bad breath/rumpled clothes/psycho-sexual problems.
And, most curious of all, beautiful young women always, and inexplicably, fall for craggy older guys.
7
My favourite was the cover headline: ‘Small
Breasts are Back in Fashion’. And you were
left wondering: what does the editor imagine?
That women like Jocasta have sets of these
things? That they get up every morning,
umming and ahhing about whether they’ll
slide on the 38 double-Ds or the 32 As?
Daddy Longer Legs
Jocasta is trying to get me out of bed, employing the customary method of throwing the kids in there with me, using them like small incendiaries. It’s certainly a terrifying scene, and one that normally brings a rapid end to the Reading of the Newspaper. But not this morning.
However much the kids wriggle, I can’t take my eyes off the bold headline in the free magazine. It’s on the fashion page, in the same type they normally use to announce that ‘Spring Dresses will be Shorter’ or ‘Winter Coats are Darker’. Except this time it says, and I am not making this up, ‘Summer Legs are Longer’.
Lying in bed, with my string-tie pyjamas cutting into my growing roll of fat, with last night’s Mudgee red still pounding just behind the eyeballs, and with two children bouncing up and down on my ribs, I wonder just how I am meant to use this information.
Already, the fashion industry seems to have totally removed women’s secondary sexual characteristics. The sexy arse (‘the Lopez’) is, of course, long gone; and even the breast is a fading memory. (In the latest designs, it is finally uncovered — but only in order that we may note its virtual disappearance.)
It’s only a theory, but with every passing day the fashion models are getting thinner while I am getting fatter. There’s good evidence, I now believe, that Eva Herzigova is channelling her buttocks onto mine — rather in the way that Lake George, just outside Canberra, rises and falls according to rain levels in Western Australia. Every time she eats a hamburger, I put on two kilos.
And now this. ‘Summer Legs are Longer’. Clearly, in order to be fashionable, I’ll have to make mine grow. But how?
Already, the fashion industry demands its brutal entry price. For the women, starving yourself until you are a celery-stick off death, then surgically gouging any loose skin from your face. And now the ultimate: demanding we strive for longer limbs, presumably by being stretched on some sort of medieval rack. The fashion industry may be swinging away from the torture of animals, but not from the torture of its own customers.
Back in the bed, I am sweating slightly, lost in my nightmare, while Batboy mutters to his brother, explaining how to use one’s father as a trampoline.
I ignore them and show Jocasta the headline, hoping to share the horror, but she says I’m being stupid — they mean summer legs will look longer because of the different clothes.
Of course, she’s the one being naive. Lots of ideas from the fashion industry have sounded stupid, but that hasn’t stopped them. For instance: the trend of getting fuller lips — achieved by having fat suctioned off your bum and injected into your lips. Who would have believed that a few years ago? Or believed that, in the 21st century, when a group of style-setters smother each other with kisses, they are literally kissing each other’s arses?
Then there’s my personal favourite, the cover headline that announced in huge print: ‘Small Breasts are Back in Fashion’.
What a great headline it was — a really practical fashion tip for all those readers confused about what size breasts to choose. You were really left wondering: what does the editor imagine? That women like Jocasta have sets of these things, just sitting there in the wardrobe? That they get up every morning and stand in front of their mirrors, umming and ahhing about whether they’ll slide on the 38 double-Ds or the 32 As?
Or that reading their magazines, they’ll let out a whoop of excitement: ‘Oh, thank God I didn’t throw out those squitchy little ones back in 1982. I just knew they’d come back.’
Out at the Royal Easter Show a while ago, my friend Jennifer was staring at the signs outside the funfair ride. Each ride had a masonite cut-out of a little boy, and a sign: ‘If you are not as tall as me, you can’t come on this ride.’
Jennifer reckons city dress shops might as well go the same way. Outside each store they’d be a masonite depiction of a model: ‘If your waist isn’t as thin as mine, I wouldn’t bother.’ They could even have a cut-out in the doorway: to get in the door, you have to be able to squeeze through.
Which store will you be able to enter? Which size breasts should you choose? And what length legs would be right for me?
I lie there distracted, as Batboy begins his climb on to the bedhead, ready to perform the dive-bomb on my belly, shouting to The Space Cadet to move aside.
Finally Jocasta has had enough of my blubbering. She grabs my ankles, heaving me out of bed just as Batboy launches his dive-bomb. There’s an ominous crack but I’m sure my legs are longer.
My body destroyed? Of course, but fashionably so.
We Cook, You Praise
All I need to know is how much olive oil to put in the mix,’ I say to Jocasta, ‘and then you come in and try to highjack the whole operation.’ I wave an egg flip towards her in a vaguely intimidating way.
‘Well,’ says Jocasta, ‘if you don’t want my advice, I’ll just leave you to stew in your own juices. Over-oiled though they may be.’
She shoots the fish a look of commiseration, as if she wished its life had not been so clearly in vain, and marches from the kitchen. This is the problem with Jocasta: too often she does ex
actly what I ask. In this case, leaving me alone in the kitchen with a rather threatening piece of fish and no recipe.
What Jocasta doesn’t understand is that, in the kitchen, I want exactly the right amount of advice. Enough to make the meal edible — and to prevent any outbreaks of disease — but not so much advice that I’ll have to share any resulting glory. If the guests love it, no way do I want to find myself forced to mumble it was all down to her recipe.
Women claim to know plenty about cooking, but still they seem ignorant about that special culinary area: Bloke’s Cooking. Maybe some guidance would help.
Rule 1: We do it for the glory
Forget the ‘special delight of providing nourishment’. Forget ‘the quiet warmth of watching people eat’. That’s girls’ stuff. Blokes want feedback. Lots of it. Women’s cookbooks may display Expected Preparation Time; the blokes’ edition instead lists Expected Praise and Adoration (expressed in hours). After the basting, in other words, should always come the basking.
And luckily we’re happy to help, with a series of subtle, after-dinner, conversation starters, including:
– ‘Go on, everybody, say it, I’ve overcooked the meat.’
– ‘Does anybody else think I’ve hideously overdone the nuoc mam?’
Or, on occasions where the meal is actually awful:
– ‘It’s certainly a bit dry; I think Jocasta’s going to have to change that recipe of hers.’
Rule 2: The greater the mess, the better the meal
Others can cook the hum-drum, everyday meals. (For instance: women.) We prefer something that’s a bit of a challenge, something with a degree of difficulty, something, in other words, totally beyond our ability. Which is why we choose the most show-offy, fancy-pants recipes in the book. Recipes that involve Tahitian spices, bundt tins, and obscure German sweetmeats.
Not only do such recipes lend themselves to lengthy discussion afterwards; they also turn your kitchen into a vivid monument to each stage of the bloke’s heroic struggle — filth, mess and unwashed pots covering every surface. Remember the basic rule of Bloke’s Cooking: no real meal has been produced in this kitchen before. Nor, it seems, will be again.
Rule 3: The more ingredients, the better the meal
There is no requirement, under the rules of Bloke’s Cooking, to use ingredients economically. By the end of your preparation, the place should be full of halfcut lemons, open packets left to go stale, and cheeses left out of the fridge. Remember: you’re an artist.
Rule 4: When in doubt, barbecue
It’s outside, it involves dead animals, and it’s dangerous. (Particularly once you and your mates are onto the second cask, and Mark suggests a bit more oomph via the lawnmower fuel.)
Rule 5: Men’s cooking is exempt from any need to be balanced or nutritious
That’s right: a bloke’s meal is so special and fabulous it can’t be judged by such narrow parameters as nutrition. Any passing woman can make the salad; he’s too busy creating the homemade pizza with triple cheese and extra oil. Expected praise: Five Days.
Rule 6: Don’t expect the kids to eat before midnight
This is our one confession. Blokes make fabulous cooks: flamboyant, emotional and vocal. But we have been known to stuff up the timing. Indeed, the expectation that artists like us should be kept to some sort of suburban timetable is just a little bit offensive.
Besides, even if the meal ends before midnight, it’s not as if the diners can leave straight away. There’s the meal to discuss. ‘Come on, admit it, I overdid the tabia lombok, didn’t I?’
Fields of Dreams
People said you were a rotten team,’ says Batboy’s soccer coach, Sam, addressing the boys in his usual Churchillian style. The boys are all exhausted, sucking at oranges, but they’re listening hard. Sam — who’s Italian, and knows the value of a rhetorical flourish — pauses for effect and then stabs at the air with his hand. ‘Well, anyone who says that you’re a rotten team now, well, they’d have to have rocks in their head.’
Eleven-year-old boys don’t give a lot away, but I can see them quietly glancing at each other, out from under their fringes, a clamped-down smile creeping onto their faces. They know something transforming has happened to them, somewhere in the last four months.
Sam doesn’t go into details, because we all know the story. The long season last year when Batboy’s team didn’t win a single game. OK, let’s be honest here, didn’t score a single goal. Not one. Not even close. All season. Not even against teams which could only field eight players. Not even against the team whose goalie was bored, fiddling with the net, and got himself tangled, unable to move. Not even then.
The boys coped fine with their losses, although they did develop a sudden taste for American sports films — and always with the same plot. A team that couldn’t score a single goal or point, a team which everyone laughed at, miraculously came good. They could watch that plot a thousand times. Especially on Saturday afternoons, following that week’s crushing defeat.
This season, Batboy found himself in a team made up of remnants of various old teams. Few knew each other, and they had sharply different temperaments. Quickly they fell into warring factions. There was even the odd punch being thrown. It was a spiky group of kids, one that didn’t look likely ever to play together as a team.
I was remembering how grim things seemed at the beginning of this season, as I stood watching Sam finish his speech. ‘You didn’t win today,’ he tells the boys, ‘but you played great football. You showed character.’
This is Sam’s favourite word, so he says it again: ‘Character.’ He points to David, his co-coach. ‘We didn’t do it,’ he says, ‘we just coached you. You guys did it. You did it for yourselves. You found out what happens when you play like a team.’
Sam makes the best speeches. By the end of it, the boys are dazed, drunk on praise, and various parents are dabbing at their eyes with tissues.
Sam pauses for effect again, and tells them they’ve made the semifinals. We’re going to have extra practice for the next few weeks. He reckons they might even be in with a chance.
I look out over the neighbouring ovals, and see other teams dotted around, all with their coaches and their managers. Lots of little speeches. Lots of emotion. Lots of lessons. And yet none of it seems to fit into the public discourse that we have about ourselves. We talk also about how society has fragmented, how there’s no community left, yet to believe all that, is to squeeze our eyes shut to this — these people, on every oval in every city and town.
Sam and David are young guys, without kids of their own yet. Both soccer mad. When Sam finishes his speech, someone tells the boys it’s his birthday, and so they crowd around and sing to him, laughing to see their coach blush and stumble. They slap their arms around each other, and babble about the semis. They’re a team.
One week later they win the semi, and then — with a penalty shoot-out — the final. Another week on and it’s the grand final.
Tino — one of Sam and David’s friends — leans towards me, and whispers conspiratorially. ‘We’ve heard Burwood has come up with a new formation. They’re going to try to surprise us on Saturday.’
I pass the information to Batboy, and a flicker of fear crosses his face. ‘But, Dad, what do you think they’ll try to do?’ Batboy’s not used to talk of soccer strategy. To him, the word ‘formation’ has only one implication, and that’s military.
I explain: ‘It’s just a new way of placing their players. They’ll be trying to come up with an answer to “Il Pressing”.’ He nods. Of course. Burwood would be desperate to find an answer to ‘Il Pressing’.
‘Il Pressing’ is our coaches’ secret weapon. It’s what’s taken Batboy’s team from being awarded Most Pathetic in the Inner West, to today’s moment of drama.
Already the boys chatter among themselves, dropping the term ‘Il Pressing’ as if they’ve known it from birth. ‘Well that’s what you get with “Il Pressing”,’ I hear Jimmy s
ay to Will, real casual.
Actually, it was only last week our Italian-Australian coaches confessed they’ve had a particular strategy all year — one based, and I swear I’m not making this up, on that used by the Dutch National Team in the 1974 World Cup. ‘Total football’. Or, in the Italian, ‘Il Pressing’.
I’ve watched Sam and David, arguing about it with Tino and Maria; all four bent over David’s chalkboard, arrows flying everywhere, diagrams more complex than for the Battle of Waterloo. And all directed at the second-lowest division of the Under-11 competition, in a single corner of an Australian city. Such arguments! Such knowledge! Such history!
Tino stares at the chalkboard and announces that ‘Il Pressing’ is too dangerous. David points out that after the Dutch let it go, it was taken up by the Italian national side. He squares his shoulders and emphasises his point: ‘The Italians — the most technically-correct soccer nation of all time.’
What can Tino do? He’s hardly going to disagree. So ‘ Il Pressing’ it is.
But when Sam drags the boys together, he doesn’t talk to them about winning. It’s another of his Churchillian speeches. ‘It’s not about winning. It’s not even about soccer. You got here not because of your soccer. Not because you kick well.’
I notice how he steps around using the words ‘win’ and ‘lose’. ‘You got here because you played like a team; because you had respect for each other; because you showed character.’
Sam’s been to the laminator, and he hands them bits of laminated cardboard, telling them to pin them next to their beds. It says: ‘A champion team is remembered longer than a team of champions.’
Already that week, before the tension of the grand final, Sam had handed out the photocopied yearbook. It had pages of little paragraphs: each coach’s assessment of each boy and girl. We’d all read what the coaches had written about our team. James, they’d written, is ‘the true definition of an Italian striker.’ Young Nicholas a ‘typical Italian-style attacker.’ Fast Edward is like Maradonna. Evan plays ‘in the true modern way, à la Paolo Maldini.’
In Bed with Jocasta Page 12