Welcome to the Wonderful World of Steph

Soundtrack: "Strangers" (still). I'm on the last track.

Just found this gem on the Independent site. It's from a report of the Ivors by John Walsh:

The darling of the paparazzi, however, was Pete Doherty, whose song "For Lovers" was up against Franz Ferdinand and The Streets for the Best Contemporary Song award. Looking relaxed, if slightly dazed, in a white T-shirt, jeans and a bashed-up straw hat, accessorised by an irregular slash of biro-ink on his cheek, he adopted his now-familiar routine of feigning innocent vulnerability as microphones and sound booms were thrust at him like spears, while working the crowd like a seasoned professional. He's very tall, his hands are as large and rough as a horse-wrangler's, and he will happily answer questions from complete strangers about his drug regimen.

I watched him on the balcony as the nominations for Best Contemporary song were read out and performed. On the stage monitor screens, Doherty's curious baby face appeared, ravaged and sweaty; on the balcony he looked on unconcerned, as if watching Top of the Pops. When Tom Jones revealed that the award had gone to Franz Ferdinand, Doherty politely clapped.

Weren't you disappointed? I asked him. About not winning?

"Oh, didn't we?" he asked, sleepily, as if finding it hard to care.

Did he like the song "Take me Out"?

"It's Ringo Starr isn't it? 'Back off Boogaloo'? It's exactly the same riff."

Did he mean Franz Ferdinand pinched the tune?

"What was it Oscar Wilde said? Amateurs borrow, but geniuses steal."

What was the significance of the writing on his cheek? Was he making a statement about exploitation (like Prince inscribing "Slave" on his cheek at a ceremony to annoy his record company)?

"No, it's just my lucky lightning strike."

Had he liked meeting Sting for the first time?

"Carl likes Sting," said Pete nastily, referring to Carl Borat, his former buddy who threw him out of the Libertines for excessive behaviour. "And of course his songs are full of drug references."

Sting's songs? Really?

"Oh yeah. That song 'Fields of Gold', it's all about "fields of barley" which is rhyming slang for "charlie" which is of course cocaine..."

Mr Doherty is the most charming company in the world, but you suspect that an hour in his company would do your head in.

Well, I thought it was funny. Carl Borat. Ha.

Soundtrack: "Strangers" by Ed Harcourt. I'm educating Elaine.

Good evening this evening.

Not an anti-French thing. I am extremely angry to find that that sodding Frog ringtone kept Coldplay from number one. I really thought they'd make it this time, especially since they charted number eight in America, and "Speed Of Sound" was the fastest-ever selling download single. There was a quality quote from the guy who designed the graphic for the frog in the Times: "I would never have it on my phone. If it came on television, I would turn it off. Even before it went on the website, I began to hate myself." Yes, and so you should.

I haven't written in a while basically because I haven't really done anything of note. On Saturday night I went out with Elaine in Adelaide, and it was just like "I Predict A Riot" by Kaiser Chiefs:

Oh, watching the people get lairy
It's not very pretty I tell thee
Walking through town is quite scary
And not very sensible either

...

I try to get to my taxi
Man in a tracksuit attacks me
He said that he saw it before me
And wants to get things a bit gory
Girls scrabble round with no clothes on
To borrow a pound [okay, dollar] for a condom
If it wasn't for chip fat they'd be frozen
They're not very sensible

I went to the botanic gardens today. They were very European, and I would've been taken in if I hadn't kept smelling gum leaves. My favourites are still the cacti, though.

At the end of the day, I went down to the Adelaide Advertiser offices to buy my Episode VI poster - the paper gave out free Star Wars posters every day last week, but we missed Friday's edition. So now I've got six classic Star Wars posters to put on my wall when I get to Liverpool. Any excuse to have Hayden Christensen as a pin up, really.

What else. Oh yes, the birds here are completely insane. I always forget to write about it because I've become so used to it, but I think it's worth putting on the Internet. Every morning, I am woken up by a ferocious tapping on the high kitchen windows. It's always some bloody bird attacking the glass. There are three theories for this:

• Self-culling. The bird population is too large and they're sacrificing themselves for the youngsters. My arse.
• The greedy bastards can see spiders etc behind the glass and are trying to get at them, but can't because the glass is in the way, retarded creatures.
• They see their reflections in the window, think that the reflection is a rival bird, and they attack the reflection.

Just goes to show. Birds are stupid.

Soundtrack: Test Match Special, BBC Sport Player Online

Good evening this evening.

Looks as if England are going to finish this one off quickly.

Aunty Wendy drove me out to Hahndorf today, a German town east of Adelaide. It was founded by a bunch of Germans who were persecuted for their religion back home, and they named it after the captain of their ship. Modern-day Hahndorf has been kept all German for the tourists - there are guys in lederhosen standing outside the pubs etc etc. There were loads of places to choose from for lunch, but I insisted that we eat at the only place with a German name: Hahndorf Kaffeehaus. Incidentally, lunch was delicious.

In the afternoon, we drove up northwards through the South Australian countryside to see the world's largest rocking horse. I'm still not sure whether it was worth it or not. The drive was good, though - the sky was overcast, and lent the landscape a wonderfully dramatic feel. Sunshine never has any of that. As we were further up north, it was slightly colder, and a greater proportion of leaves had fallen off the trees. I realised that I'd experience two autumns this year, which is good, because autumn is my favourite season. Autumn always has a sense of momentum that none of the other seasons do, and the colours are so vibrant and vivid.

You'd have thought that summer would be my favourite season because of the cricket. I'm full of anomalies.

Soundtrack: "The Look of Love (Disc One)," music by Burt Bacharach

Good evening this evening.

There's this "reality" programme that they have over here called "My Restaurant Rules." As far as I can gather, they give a couple in every major city (i.e. Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth - so the Ashes, then) a shell of a building and some money and then ask them to start a restaurant. They then film all the trials and tribulations and broadcast it every week for a few months. The Greedy Goose, the Adelaide restaurant, has got into the final two, so we decided to go and queue up for a table tonight. However, once we'd queued for an hour (which I was totally up for, queuing's ace), they took our details and told us to come back in two hours.

Yeah right.

We had a rather lovely Indian meal instead.

Soundtrack: "Oh My God" by Kaiser Chiefs

I thought that I was a week ahead of myself.

I thought that I was flying to NZ on Tuesday. Wrong. I fly week Tuesday.

I need to look at my diary more.

Soundtrack: "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by the Beatles

Good morning this morning.

I finally went to see Episode III last night, and my God, did I enjoy myself. I'm not a Jack or Toby or Stephen or Miranda who sits there and picks things apart - I metamorphosise into a small child whenever I go and see a Star Wars film at the cinema. This is probably because my mum took my brother and I to see all the original films when they were reissued, and I must have been around 10 or 11. Every time "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." comes up, followed by Evil John Williams' fanfare and the Star Wars logo, a sense of excitement and anticipation wells up in me, and the anticipation builds and builds until the final climax and then it's so totally worth it and I leave the cinema extremely happy, thinking: "By God, that was great," even when it wasn't.

Actually, I'm lying here. I only had that for III, IV, V and VI. I was shite, and it was so shite that I didn't even go to see II at the cinema - I watched it on pirate VCD from Malaysia. Speaking of which, my dad said that pirate copies of III appeared in China within one day of the premier. So much for simultaneous release, huh? Apparently all the pirate copies in Malaysia were seized, so dad's going to have to wait a little longer to watch it, I feel.

It was the Boy's birthday yesterday, and he had "Happy Birthday To You" sung to him from three different continents, the lucky thing. I sang from Adelaide down the home phone, Dad sang from Sibu down his mobile, and Mum sang in the kitchen. Another of my father's well-thought-out plans.

Soundtrack: "Up All Night" by Razorlight

Good evening this evening.

I'm not really that sure about the gender of "O-Bahn," but there we are. This is because I can't remember the gender of "bahn" full stop. Oh dear.

"Steph!" I hear you cry. "What in wank's name is the O-Bahn?" I'll leave it to the Adelaide Metro booklet to explain:

The Adelaide O-Bahn guided busway opened in 1986 to meet the transit needs of teh growing population in the City's northeastern suburbs who needed to travel between their homes and the Central Business District (CBD).

The beauty of the system lies in its flexibility. O-Bahn buses travel on a separate concrete track with great speed, safety and comfort. The buses also travel on roads. The ability to transfer from a normal road to the O-Bahn track means passengers don't need to transfer to a different vehicle, as they do with bus and rail systems. This makes O-Bahn travelling times even shorter.

Each bus is fitted with special "guide wheels" by the front wheels, allowing the bus to transfer from road to the track in one smooth, easy movement. The guide wheels are directly connected to the vehicle's steering mechanism and once these guide wheels are locked in place, the track is effectively steering the bus.

The bus travels at speeds of up to 100kph along the track without having to compete with other traffic. As a result, the bus is able to travel the 12km from the CBD to the northeastern suburbs in only 20 minutes.

The system offers a high frequency of service, with buses able to safely travel on the corridor at 20 second intervals. The versatility of the system means the passenger catchment area is significantly larger than that of rail.

The track ends at a shopping mall, so it was one of those occasions where the travelling was so much more fun than the destination.

Soundtrack: "Different Class" by Pulp

Good morning this morning.

Yesterday, I decided to go to the art gallery. The thing is, I ended up only looking at the modern Australian stuff, as in Melbourne, in fact. There were some amazing Rembrandt etchings in the Renaissance section, but I pretty much avoided the rest of the stuff from that time. It's because it's mostly religious stuff, crucifixions, stimata etc etc, which always unsettles me. This must come from my religious upbringing. I still don't really like holy statues - the worst ones are where Jesus still hasn't died on the cross, and he's looking at you with pleading eyes.

Talking about my Catholicism, I forgot to say where I went to Mass on Sunday. I actually went to the Cathedral for 11am Mass, and I actually rather liked it. The priest is just a big leftie, and he was telling off the congregation in his sermon for not being more welcoming towards all the Sudanese refugees who've just recently turned up in town. The choir and organist were really good as well. And the best bit? No more not-knowing how to sing hymns. I could even sing the ones I didn't know, because they put the notation on the hymnsheets. Elgarites may be interested to know that we sang a hymn with music by Elgar.

After the gallery, I went to the Festival Centre because Aunty Wendy seemed to think that it was a rather good idea. It wasn't - there was buggerall to do apart from drink coffee, and you know how I feel about that. However, the Centre is beside the River Torrens, and I ended up going on a boat ride on the Popeye, which apparently something that you have to do in Adelaide. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, but that was probably because I love boats and being surrounded by water.

I also went and had a look round the casino, but walking very quickly because I've got a compulsive personality and I knew that if I even stopped to watch one game of blackjack I'd get sucked in and end up losing all my money. The place was full of elderly people playing on the slotties. Did I mention that as well as being a nation of alcoholic, obese smokers, Australia is also a nation of gamblers. The old people gamble during the day because they don't have to work, and then when everybody else finishes work, they go to the casino as well. It just proves that Australia is an amazing place to visit, but if you live here, you turn into one of the above.

Soundtrack: "A Night At The Opera" by Queen

Good evening this evening.

Yesterday, Elaine and I went to Adelaide Gaol, which stopped being used as a prison in 1988, and is now open to the public. It was two-dollar day, so the place was full of chavs, which they call "bogans" over here. Elaine said that she'd been to a bogan party before, and I think it's an absolutely hilarious idea. Let's all have a chav party. We could wear Burberry baseball caps and tracksuits and cropped tops and drink cider. I think I'd have to recover from it by having a suitably vamped-up Alias party, though.

So anyway, the gaol, huh? The atmosphere was oppressive, despite being full of noisy chavs. They hung around 40 people inside the walls of the compound, and though I was probably imagining it, I could feel the death in the air still. Uncomfortably, but strangely compelling too. The place hasn't been maintained that well, and all the old cells and buildings were a bit shabby and covered in birdshit etc etc, which just added to the eeriness. Added to that, people kept on randomly ringing the big bell in the yard, which kept on making me think that another person had been executed or something. I still wish Selina had let me go to Melbourne Gaol to see where Ned Kelly was hung, though.

It rained this morning. One minute, I was eating breakfast and watching shitting American soaps with Blake, the next, I was out the door, because I wanted to make the most of the rain. It stopped pretty quickly, though. I didn't think that it would be over so soon, so I'd decided to go to the seaside while it was still raining. The people who are reading this who know me really well will be able to understand, I think. Just about. Perhaps. I'm still up for a Norway Reunion (or Elgar Meetup, whatever they've evolved into) at the beach on Boxing Day.

I took the tram to the beach. It's the last functioning tram in South Australia. By the time I'd got to the sea, the sun had come out, and I don't know how, but the sea was looking purple underneath the receding grey clouds. Spectacularly dramatic.

There's not much to do in Glenelg. I went to the museum for a bit, but I didn't have the patience to stay for long because I think I'm nearly all museumed out for the time being. But anyway, I learnt that South Australia is the only colony that wasn't founded on convicts, so I can't use that to make fun of people here. Even though they're a bunch of alcoholic, obese smokers who are going to die from skin cancer or lung cancer or throat cancer or emphysema or liver cirrhosis etc etc.

I did, however, walk beside the sea in the midday heat. It was gorgeous, with the waves crashing around me and the sun sleepily shining in the sky.

Soundtrack: "Heaven Up Here" by Echo and the Bunnymen (well duh)

Good evening this evening.

I spent yesterday in the house doing Blake's psych assignment for him. Yes. We'd been to the same amount of lectures on the subject. The deadline was for 4.30pm, but it became clear that we weren't going to finish at around 3pm when we'd been "working" all day and I'd only done 639 words out of the required 1500. I wish I had a Stephen. I wish I had a Stephen anyway. The man is inherently likeable (as I once drunkenly intoned to Toby), and come on. Have you ever met anybody as gorgeous? I think not.

Aunty Wendy took Elaine, Blake and I for breakfast at the fancy Italian place down at Adelaide Market, and I had a nice healthy Mediterranean fry-up, which did me no good because I had an artery-clogging ice chocolate-and-mint to go with. Aunty Wendy then took me to Chateau Moteur, which is the swanky place where they bought their Merc, and she brings it in for a wash every fortnight. However, they only charge A$10 a go. Rather good value.

In the afternoon, we went up to Cleland Nature Reserve in the Adelaide Hills. Adelaide's funny like that - you'll be in the city one minute, the country the next, so quite similar to HK Island and Sibu in that respect. I saw all sorts of crazy Australian animals, like potoroos and kangaroos and koalas and scary goose things and scary emus and other scary scary birds urgh urgh urgh. But the cuddly marsupial types were good. Sadly, no platypi (query plural), but no worries, eh? She'll be right.

We went for a bit of a drive afterwards. Aunty Wendy drove us right into the countryside, and then up to Mount Osmond. By then, the sun had set (it's hard to remember that it's winter here) and you could see all the lights of Adelaide. I hadn't realised how much of it there was - in actuality, you can only see a small piece of it from the house. The city was laid out like a beautiful, sparkling embroidered cloth before my feet (stealing from Yeats, there. I have the cloths of heaven, but oh, I have my dreams as well) and I couldn't stop exclaiming as more and more was revealed as we moved closer and closer to the summit.

It's heaven up here. But not, as the Bunnymen joked, hell down there. Life's just lovely right now.

Soundtrack: "Thing To Make And Do" by Moloko

Good evening this evening.

I went to the South Australian Musuem today, and predictably, they claimed to have the oldest of something-or-other, I think it was some Pacific artifact or similar. The "Pacific Cultures" section was terrifying in places, actually: all those fierce masks that were built to scare. I avoided the stuffed bird section (I always do in these places), because then I definitely wouldn't have been able to sleep tonight. The stuffed toucan head in PC was bad enough, and quite a shock it gave me too.

Ancient Egyptian sections are always also rather eery. At once, I'm both intensely fascinated yet slightly freaked out by the displays. I can stand and look at mummies and mummified body parts for ages, but if you look for too long, your mind starts playing games with itself and you can see stuff move and you go mad and run away screaming and the museum staff think you're nuts and you get freaked out by the display of the giant squid and scream and run some more and it all spirals out of control, especially when you run into the whale/shark/dolphin/porpoise section by accident and into the jaws of a fake shark. Not really. But it could happen - you know what I'm like.

I really liked the opalised fossils, though. Aw, pretty.

The largest section of the museum is dedicated to the Aboriginal culture, though. They didn't have much artwork - nothing as extensive as the NGV Australia in Melbourne - but I expect that that will all be in the art gallery next door. It was interesting learning about their way of life, and how it basically all got wiped out when the Europeans turned up from the 1830s onwards. As I was saying in an e-mail to Miranda just now, the Aborigines believe that the world was created during a period called the Dreaming. Because everything's constantly changing and evolving, they believe that the Dreaming is still going on. I agree with them. Every day feels like a dream, and it feels great.

"Everybody's changing and vuhvuhvuhvuh self-pity self-pity" or however that song goes. Apparently, Keane are more famous here than FF. That's so bloody wrong. Keane write good songs, but they don't write good pop songs. Their choruses have far too many lyrics. I like nice simple lyrics, like:

• "She loves you/Yeah yeah yeah/She loves you/Yeah yeah yeah..."
• "I predict a riot/I predict a riot..."
• "Going down to talk to the cows/Going down to talk to the cows..."

I think I have to type up Blake's assignment. Wank. Serves me right for typing so quickly.

Soundtrack: "Porcupine" by Echo and the Bunnymen

Good evening this evening.

I just read Alex's comment to yesterday's post properly. May I just point out that I am both a scientist, and I have very strong faith, so it's possible. It's not really a contradiction in terms. Yes, science is all about questioning, discovering, and religion is all about belief in mystery, but I can cope with that. Like my Catholic physics teacher said, there must have been something to cause an imbalance in matter and antimatter at the creation of the Universe, so why not God?

I went into Adelaide properly today. My first stop was obviously the Adelaide Oval. No charges applied there - I just walked straight in and started having a conversation with some footie commentator from the ABC. It really is a rather lovely ground - it's close to the city centre, but manages to be surrounded by parkland, and you can hear the evil birdies singing constantly. The east stand is like the ones with the tenty things at Lord's and the Rose Bowl, and the west stand just has park benches for seats. Plus there's seating on the grass. One crazy ground, and therefore, completely suited to Test cricket.

After that, I decided to take a trip to the South Australian parliamentary building. It's a funny old place. They started building it in 1889, and it was all going to be very grand. Then they ran out of money, so they had to cut out most of the fancy design (there was going to be a big tower etc etc), and the rest of the thing didn't get built until 1939. The first half is all in the classical style, the second half is all art deco, and you can really tell the difference.

Compared to Melbourne, Adelaide is a much prettier little city. Melbourne is very metropolitan, whereas Adelaide is very verdant - there are trees everywhere that it is possible to have trees. You can actually see the sky here, because the place isn't full of towering buildings. And it's warmer. Melbourne was cold at times, whereas it always seems to be warm here. People keep on telling me that it should be cold and rainy at the moment, but it isn't, so I suppose they'll keep on telling me that until it is. Huh.

Soundtrack: "Brothers In Arms" by Dire Straits

Good morning this morning.

So last night, I went to see Cirque du Soleil with Elaine, Blake and Sheau May, the manager of Peter's restaurant. I saw the price on the tickets and I felt nauseous. I've never even paid that much for a day of Test cricket. Then again, I did spend more than that when I went to see FF @ the RAH, because I had to pay to stay in London overnight as well, so I can't really talk.

Circuses always have a slightly sinister edge, and this was definitely no exception. The random people dressed in white boiler suits were pretty scary, as was the guy with no head who walked around with an umbrella. The show was spectacularly mesmerising, though. Half the time I couldn't watch but made myself: even though I knew that they wouldn't fall from heights or drop diablos on their heads, there was still the possibility that they might. And I kept on forgetting to clap - the routines were all so mindblowing that I couldn't recover enough to applaud. I totally didn't get what the deal with the guy with the boxing gloves was, though. And I'll never see skipping in the same way ever again.

In other news, an order I placed with those 101CD people on January 5th has only just come through. The wait will be worth it, though, because it's for "Darts of Pleasure," FF's first ever release. Last time I checked on Ebay and Amazon, people were selling copies of it for at least five to six times what I paid for it. I don't think I'll sell it, though, because it's got "Shopping For Blood" and "Van Tango" as B-sides, which are both quality songs. Yes, I admit it, I do like "Shopping For Blood" just because of the name.

So sayeth Mr Daniel Wallace. More of that later.

Soundtrack: "All Maps Welcome" by Tom McRae. The flavour of the month until I get my hands on either the new Coral album or the new Coldplay album. "The Invisible Invasion" is due out in the UK on May 23rd, but I can't seem to find an Australian release date for it. "X & Y" I know for sure is June 6th, though. The more I listen to this album, the more aware I become of how mindblowingly good it is. Even more strongly recommended than before.

Good arvo this arvo.

Adelaide is warm and dry and the view from this house is bloody amazing, especially at night. It's a big house on the hill and you can see all of Adelaide, all the way down to the beach. Wonderfully, my Aunty Wendy hasn't given away the piano (apparently, she's pretty much given away everything else), so I had a good old play this morning. Unfortunately, it's not been looked after well - my cousin Elaine leaves the lid open, and because the atmosphere is so dry, the keys and the pedals have lost their action and it's quite difficult to get the thing to speak well. I suppose I'm spoilt because I'm used to Hugh my gorgeous Kemble, who sounds great and plays spectacularly because we know each other so well.

Now that I'm in a different town, I can do a bit of a retrospective analysis of Melbourne. The petrol's around 8-9 cents cheaper over there, for one. Not that that really makes much difference, because it's still nearly half the price of back home. Shocking. The other big differences are the landscape, and the pace of life. I looked at the land out of the window of the plane for the whole one-hour flight, and it does get much hillier as you approach Adelaide. [Weirdly, the fields are circular. They look like giant pie charts.] And if I thought things were slow in Melbourne, my God! Adelaide is even slower. There was a public holiday yesterday because of the Adelaide Cup. They have public holidays because of sporting events. We have sporting events because of public holidays.

So, I arrived in town on Sunday morning. My flight from Melbourne was delayed by an hour due to freak fog. The fog was good, but it's just not rain. I need rain, dammit! It's threatening to rain, but Antoinette said that it never rains when it's like this when she came to clean the house earlier today. Antoinette is Aunty Wendy's bestest buddy, and I spent Sunday at her house because Wendy and Uncle Peter were in Sydney on hippy cult business, and my cousin Elaine was away with her boyfriend Blake. I watched "War and Peace" (how could you get tired of three hours twenty minutes of Audrey Hepburn?), and I was really tempted to watch "Gone With The Wind" as well, but I settled on "Ned Kelly" instead in order to get a better idea of this place's cultural heritage. I still don't really understand why everybody thought that he was so great, though.

Yesterday morning, we picked up Peter from the airport. Wendy tried to convert me to the cult, Peter laid into my Catholicism. It's funny, other Catholics, like those evil sodding youth missionaries, make me lose faith. But outsiders, like the Falun Gong (the hippy cult) people only serve to strengthen everything that I believe in. Ever read "Join Me" by Danny Wallace? Inspired by his Swiss great uncle, he sort-of starts a cult by getting people to send him their passport photos, which he keeps in a shoebox, but then it all spirals out of control... You can see the results at www.join-me.com. But anyway, the tag line of the whole quest is: "It's not a cult, it's a collective." Except the Falun Gong people deny being a collective, so go figure.

After that, Wendy took me for a drive down to the beach. The beaches around Adelaide are really lovely - clean sand, blue waters, nice waterfronts. We had Thai for lunch, sadly with no penguin ice-creams, or else I would've ordered one and named him Toby Hester or something. In the evening, I went out for dinner with Elaine and Blake, who's one of those typically Australian boys. I expect he surfs. He pretty much lives here - he just came in to pick up his fireman training letters that he left behind.

We're going to see Cirque du Soleil tonight, which is all very exciting. But now, I'll just go and sit on the veranda and listen to the rest of this beautiful, beautiful album.

Soundtrack: "Tilt" by the Lightning Seeds

Good evening this evening.

Selina and Stephanie took me to Melbourne Zoo yesterday. It was bloody great, penguins, seals, koalas, kangaroos, wombats, tigers, pygmy hippos, everything... Though you know how everybody always asks you, "If you could be any animal, what would you be?" I think I'd still be a fish.

My one concession to the way Australians speak is an overuse of the word "bloody." Otherwise, things have been going to plan and I'm getting a bit posh for my own good. When I was in the travel agent's the other day to book my flights to NZ, they asked me where I was from. I told them that I was from Wiltshire, which they seemed to think was very posh. I tried to tell them that the place is full of farmers.

Bytheway, Japanese stonegrilled food is the best stuff ever. Your steak comes out on a crazy-hot piece of granite, along with tofu and courgettes and mushrooms, and you have to cook it yourself. On the side are a salad, sushi and sashimi as well. Delicious. While we're on random little things, has anybody heard the Euroclub-style dance remix of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse Of The Heart"? It must be one of the campest songs ever, alongside a theoretical Eroclub-style dance remix of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," and another of Shirley Bassey's, well, Shirley Bassey's anything.

Today, Andy drove the four of us out to Ballarat to go to Sovereign Hill, which is a recreated version of old Ballarat during the mid-19th Century gold rush. It was proper frontier - piles of horse shit lying around, handsome performing arts students running round in costume pretending to be miners. Even though it was meant to be a big tourist attraction, Sovereign Hill was much like present-day Ballarat, though: really rather quiet. "It's dead in the morgue, but it's deader in here..."

The organist at church tonight was awful, though the choir wasn't bad. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to take into consideration that none of the congregation had a clue how to sing their badly-picked hymns, so they all sang descant which didn't really help us because the organist was so bad. Last week, we went to a different church, and at least the music this week was many many many times better than that. I get quite annoyed about this, though. Hymns are meant to be communal, inclusive, so choirs shouldn't pick hymns that only they know how to sing. And they're so difficult to predict the tune of! All these idiot Christians who are wannabe songwriters - they just seem to pick random tunes and write nonsensical lyrics, and then they get published in hippy hymnbooks. If I ever end up being a regular church pianist/organist, I'm going to try and reinstate decent hymns like "Nearer My God To Thee," "Abide With Me," "Soul Of My Saviour" and "Dreadlock Holiday" by 10CC.

Soundtrack: "Hey, Petrunko" by Ooberman

Good evening this evening.

What's the point in Melbourne if you don't go and visit the Melbourne Cricket Ground. I paid A$10 for the tour, and I've got this illness so bad I probably would've paid twice as much. It was certainly worth it - we got to see what the view was like from all the stands, and we got to stand on the hallowed turf itself. Okay, it's not so hallowed now, it being the Aussie Rules footie season, but still... Imagine playing there! The capacity is currently at around 80,000, and when the redevelopment is completed, it'll seat over 100,000. Down on the pitch it must feel as if you're a gladiator going out to fight in the Coliseum. I badly want to watch a Boxing Day Ashes Test there now - the atmosphere must be electrifying.

I booked myself flights to NZ this afternoon. Selina told me that I'd die if I stayed in Adelaide for six weeks, so I thought I'd better not risk it.

Soundtrack: "Divorce At High Noon" by the Karelia

Evening again. I forgot to put this in the last post, but since it doesn't really fit in, I may as well create a new post especially for it.

Happy Cup is a tea franchise from Korea, which is so so wrong but so so good. It basically specialises in making all sorts of insane types of tea, then adding lots of milk, ice and jelly pieces to make it appealing to children and hyperactive student types (i.e. the people in this house). Jasmine milk tea? So so wrong! With ice! Noooooooooooooooo!

I , however, couldn't resist, and gave in and made Andy buy me a lychee green tea, which was surprisingly tasty and refreshing. But it was without milk. I don't think I could ever go for that shit with milk. Urgh.

Soundtrack: 'Matinee (Single)' by Franz Ferdinand

Good evening this evening.

This morning, I went to do some shopping in Chinatown, because we had dinner there the other night, and I saw the most wonderful Kaiser Chiefs-green duffel coat (if you've seen my Chiefette t-shirt, you'll know what I mean. I wore it to WSYO, and I only realised how green it was when my bass turned green, and Ali's bass turned green, and the French horns turned green etc etc). Therefore, I went back today to get it. Unfortunately, I turned up to the shops at 11.30am, which is far far far too early for people in Melbourne. Less than half the shops were open, so I had to bum around for a bit before I could go and get my coat. I need a new coat, because my big thick winter coat is the exact same purple as the wheelie bins in Liverpool. As I'm not much taller than a wheelie bin and don't move much better than one, I figured that it would probably be a good idea not to where my lovely purple coat to avoid severe mockery. Hell, if it was somebody else, I'd definitely make fun of them.

In the afternoon, to get over shops (because I always need to get over shops, even if I'm pleased with my purchases), I went to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which claims to have the largest movie theatre hall (or something like that) in the world. Victorians are big into one-upmanship, for sure. But dissing Victorians aside, the big movie theatre hall-place is very very cool indeed. The hall is this vast underground cavern, and it's as dark as dark can be so that the images projected onto the myriad screens around the room aren't disturbed. This season's exhibition is all about how nothing ever stands still, so there was this one film that was projected onto five screens arranged in a circle, with the same day repeated five times over but in five different ways. You sit on a bench in the middle of the circle, and you can see all this time-lapse photography going on around you, your head surrounded by atmostpheric sound-effects, and the overall effect is awe-inspiring.

The best bit was just plain walking through the hall and being surrounded by projection screens, miscellaneous weird noises from soundtracks permeating the space. I felt as if I was in the song: "You'll find me in the matinee/The dark of the matinee/It's better in the matinee/The dark of the matinee is mine/Yes, it's mine."

Soundtrack: ‘All Maps Welcome’ by Tom McRae. Hey, it’s new and I still can’t resist its sublime pull. And because it’s mostly recorded live, it just sounds so great because of its spontaneous, organic feel.

It’s Reading Week at Swinburne, where Andy and Stephanie are at uni, but they still had to go in to work on their group projects. Okay, it’s not called that here; it’s something like Supervision Week, I think. But anyway, that’s how I ended up in a computer room there.

We went to the aquarium when they were done, because Stephanie has been dying to go for ages and just needed an excuse. Melbourne Aquarium was a fairly different experience to Portsmouth (which I went to on my [19th] birthday), mainly because all the crazy creatures are from the Southern Ocean. And there are big big sharks and big big rays, and seahorses and seadragons. Lovely.
I’m actively trying not to go up at the end of every sentence when I speak. It’s going to be difficult. I reckon that the beset tactic will be just to make my accent posher and posher as this holiday goes on, until when I get to uni, everybody will think that I like cricket because I’m the daughter of a lord who married a Malaysian woman, and I went to a superbly exclusive public school for young ladies. “Yes, Daddy bought me a pony when I was only two-and-a-half, dontchaknow…”

Bytheway, for anybody who's reading/wondering, all these posts are so close together in time because I typed them all up offline first, then pasted them in. Selina only has dial-up here, and I didn't want to tie up her phone line.

Soundtrack: ‘B-Sides and Rarities (Disc Two)’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Depressing, hey, but it’s full of Australian folk songs, which I thought might be apt, seen as I’m actually in Australia now

It’s Melbourne International Jazz Festival at the moment. I’m too cheap to pay A$35 to go and see jazz, but there is free live music going on in Federation Square, the main cultural centre of the city, every afternoon. When I reached the square, it was in time to catch this crazy Italian group called Funk Off. They had no bass, but three bari saxes and (I think) a sousaphone. And they were all remarkably good movers too.

On Fed Square in the National Gallery Victoria, which houses the Australian collections. Across the river is the NGV International, which houses all the other stuff, but I couldn’t be arsed with that. In the end, I did manage to spend the entire afternoon looking at the artwork – all this amazing Aborigine stuff that sucks you in and makes you sway until you have to step away before you fall over. But then, I do fall over very easily. When I finally emerged, the security guard was rather surprised to see me. It seems that most people are very quick through the gallery. I suppose it’s because people here have very short attention spans.
Out in the square were a soul band from New Orleans with the wonderful name Rockin’ Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters, who were uproariously good fun. Nobody was dancing, though, which was a shame, and I didn’t want to because a) I would’ve felt really stupid, and you can’t dance to soul music properly without a partner anyway and b) I was waiting for a phone call from Andy and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to hear it, so I had the phone in front of me so that I could see it light up when it eventually rang.

Soundtrack: ‘Everything Must Go’ by Manic Street Preachers (it’s the album with ‘Australia’ on it)

I was picked up from the airport by my cousins Selina and Andy, and I’m staying in their house, along with Andy’s girlfriend Stephanie and their random housemate Derek. The house is very cold. Melbourne is deceivingly cold – as Stephanie said to me today (complaining), it feels as if you can experience four seasons in one day here in Melbourne.

The first thing that I noticed on the car journey to the house is that there are far more roads signs over here. Things that we take for granted back home have to be made a little more obvious over here. For example, on an entrance onto the freeway, there’s a sign saying “WRONG WAY! TURN BACK!” for anybody who tries to use it as an exit. My favourite was a drink-driving billboard. Accompanying a picture of a woman being breathalised is the caption: “A LITTLE BIT EMBARRASSING? A little bit over the limit? You bloody idiot.” Selina and Andy had to do a spot of shopping before we went home because it’s a proper student house where there’s no food but lots of tea, and next to the supermarket was a fast food joint called Hungry Jack’s. Andy explained to me that it was exactly the same as Burger King, same logo, same menu (they still have Whoppers), but it’s just that Australians compulsively have to be different.

They compulsively have to be different from one another as well. You have to have a different driving license for each state. Each state has a different license plate, so that they all try to outdo one another. If you kill somebody in one state, you can run away to another one and get away with it. Victoria itself is pretty bad, and it claims to have the biggest of a lot of things in the Southern Hemisphere. It says that it has the biggest casino in the Southern Hemisphere in the Crown complex, and the biggest university campus, in the Clayton Campus of Monash Uni (where Selina is at). They’re also building the tallest apartment block in the world here. It’s going to be 88 stories high. Apparently nobody here wants to live in apartments, though, because they all love their pools and barbies too much. The existing apartment blocks in this city are only half-full, so I don’t know what’s going to happen when this huge one is done.

The Victoria car license plates actually read "Victoria - the place to be." I'm really tempted to buy a mocked-up one from a souvenir shop, and alter it to stick on my door or wall when I get home, or even to Liverpool. I'll cross out "Victoria" and write "Scholars" instead.

In the afternoon, I watched an Aussie Rules footie match on television with Derek. Everybody here is insane. Maybe it’s the endless sunshine that does it.

Soundtrack: ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’ by the Flaming Lips

Cigarettes – I had to be careful walking through crowds, because I was worried that my clothes or bag would get burnt through by somebody’s fag.

Delifrance – The first shop I saw when Michael drove me into town from the airport was a Delifrance. They’re everywhere. When you step in (not that I ate there – I just wanted to see what it was like), some kid in a badly-fitting beret says “Bonjour howmayIhepyou?” It’s one surreal experience.

Bootleg Converse All Stars – I felt very smug in my genuine ones.

Wearing lots and lots of layers of clothes – What was the deal with that? It’s very very very hot.

Bootleg Burberry-patterned stuff – My favourites were the bags that had the pattern hand-stitched on in shiny beading. Horribly, horribly lurid.

Soundtrack: ‘All Maps Welcome’ by Tom McRae

Good evening this evening.

The saga continues. I’m trying not to let it all build up until I have to spend ages and ages going back to keep all this up to date, which would just be silly because it’s only a silly little blog to keep myself amused and to make sure that I don’t lose my grasp of the English language.

Michael Wong picked me up mid-morning so that he could take me on a drive around HK Island, to prove to me that it’s not all skyscrapers and Italian designer labels. And he was right. Once you get away from the harbour, you’re left with beautiful oriental landscapes and an inviting ocean. The surrounding mountains are covered in lush greenery, and you’d feel a million miles from the westernized world of the city if it weren’t for all the super-exclusive mansions and apartment blocks lining the way. Sadly, there are very few buildings in the old-fashioned Chinese style: mostly they’re based on European-style chateaus (I can’t remember what the Italian for castle is. Is it ‘castello’? Or have I just said something obscene?)

Our first stop was at Repulse Bay, so called because that was where the English fleet repulsed the pirate hoarders in around 1841 or 1842. There’s now a big temple there, and all the local fishermen go to worship the sea goddess there on her birthday, which apparently is coming up very soon. There are lots of other Chinese gods and goddesses there. Well, lots of different images of them, anyhow. There are only four main deities there: the god of prosperity, the god of happiness, the god of wealth and the goddess of the sea. There are others, but they’re of secondary importance, really. You’ve got to get your priorities right, haven’t you?

Further along the coast is Stanley, which is famous for its bootleg market. “100% cashmere!” proclaimed one sign. Yeah, right. We had dim sum for lunch again, and this time Michael let me choose, so we ended up eating things like pig ears and shark fin soup. Delicious delicacies.

What else. The airport express is very cool. It’s a branch of the MTR, and it’s actually quite expensive – HK$100 one-way, which is nearly 7 quid. Maybe I just think that it was steep because all the other MTR routes were so very cheap, let alone the ferry. But anyway, it’s got the train’s path traced above you in lights so that you know just how far you’ve traveled, and how far you’ve got to go. No more standing up to get off far too early and looking like an idiot – no, now everybody knows when it’s time to get off and nobody can look at you smugly or quizzically any more. I wish that all trains were like that.

Incidentally, HKIA claims to be the best airport in the world, as voted by some odd little association with many letters in its title, affiliated with other little associations with many letters in their titles. If I could be arsed, I’d check.

Soundtrack: 'Ocean Rain' by Echo and the Bunnymen

Apparently, the sun hadn't come out in HK for the past few years. I think that there must have been a storm in the night or something, though, because by morning all the haze had cleared away and the sun had burned away all the humidity. Now, there was just plain heat.

I descended the Mid-Levels Escalator again, this time to catch the ferry to Kowloon. The locals joke that you chose between first class and second class on the ferry. First class is HK$2.20 and you get to sit on the top deck, second class is HK$2 and you have to sit on the bottom deck. I opted for "first class."

Kowloon is completely different to HK Island - it's really properly Asia. Instead of the streets being lined with Gucci, Versace, D & G etc etc, there are Chinese signs everywhere, and there are only English translations on the road signs. I took the mass transit railway (MTR - the HK underground) up to two-thirds up Nathan Street, which runs through the whole of Kowloon, from north to south. I used Nathan Street as my guide and I decided to walk its entire length to take in the main sights of Kowloon. However, after a visit to the Ladies' Market, I headed in the wrong direction up Nathan Street, and after walking north for around a kilometer, I hit the New Territories. Wank.

But no worries, eh? I walked back south again, and I noticed that right at the top of Kowloon, everybody is Chinese and there are no foreign faces. The south you get, you see more Indian faces, then more blacks and whites gradually appear, until you're close to the harbour and everybody seems to be South African or Australian. Or from Essex. On the way, I also took in the Night Market on Temple Street and the Fish Market. But more importantly, I made an excursion to Kowloon Cricket Club.

I'd seen it on the map, and I knew that I had to go there. When I finally found the entrance after tramping around its entire perimeter, there was a sign beside the gates saying "Members Only. No Unauthorised Admittance." For a moment, part of me told the rest of me to walk away. Yeah, right. I just walked straight in and nobody gave a shit that some scruffy, sweaty girl had just entered their revered pavilion. And some pavilion it is too - very very very swanky, at least county standard, probably international standard. The pitch itself was a bit rubbish, and it appears that it's only used for outfield football. Two Indian boys walked in with bats for a net, but just as one was waiting to be bowled a ball, another of their mates came along and chucked a football at him and that was that and they ended up having a kickaround.

Walking along, I noticed the name of a product in a pharmacy called Pimpless. I can only assume that it's some sort of mean of moving towards self-employment for prostitutes. Heaven knows what its effect is on people who aren't on the game.

Along the harbour is the Avenue of Stars, like that place in LA where people imprint their hands in the pavement. Except with HK movie stars. I was most cheered by the small fact that I have bigger hands than Michelle Yeoh and Maggie Cheung, and the same sized hands as Sammo Hung and John Woo. Jackie Chan has freakishly long fingers in comparison with his palms.

Just as I was walking back to the ferry, I saw a bunch of people walking into the Cultural Centre in evening wear and/or carrying instrument cases. I went to ask, and it turned out that the HK Philharmonic were doing a concert - symphonic jazz. I went and bought myself a ticket in the cheap seats on the balcony and sat with the plebs, who even clapped between movements and shit. The horror.

The hall was about a third full, which I thought was disappointing considering the apparent talent of the performers as praised in the programme. Yeah, right. My mother used to ask me what I'd do if I decided to go and do music and I couldn't get into one of the big orchestras, like the LSO or the Halle or one of the BBC orchestras or whatever, and I didn't know so I decided to become a doctor, which is all-round much the better and more fulfilling career suited to me anyway. Anyway, now I know the answer. If you're not good enough for the LSo or the Halle or one of the BBC orcestras or whatever, you join a second-rate orchestra in the Far East, where nobody can tell the difference anyway.

I sat and watched them play, and they had zero charisma, let alone no sense of cohesiveness. There was no passion in their playing - when you play music, you have to surrender your Self to the audience. Performing a piece of music should be opening a window to you soul, laying yourself bare for everybody to see. And that's what makes the greatest musicians. Yes, you can have technical skill and finesse in buckets, but if you play like a robot then you can't be truly great. But the soloists were pretty good: that Canadian-Japanese guy, Jon Kimura Something, and a clarinettist called Andrew Simon (or something similar), who's apprently rated very highly in the international clarinet scene. I can sit and be horrible about it all I want (and I really can - I felt that the WSYO we had at Easter could have outclassed them on the same programme), but actually, I always enjoy seeing live music, no matter how bad, and I was glad I did catch the concert because a) the venue was wonderful and b) I love that feeling where you come out of a concert at night, no matter what the genre, and you have music swimming around in your head as you walk through the darkness.

It would've been quicker to catch the MTR back, but I wanted to see the lights reflected in the harbour, and it was totally totally worth the HK$2.20. And then some. This was when I got the song 'Ocean Rain' stuck in my head, and when I got back to my room, I listened to the whole album. I have the anniversary re-issue of 'Ocean Rain,' so it's got loads of extra tracks on it. I much prefer the live version of the title track - the band just sound so great, playing live in front of a Liverpool home crowd of thousands.

Soundtrack: 'Here Be Monsters' by Ed Harcourt. It contains the track 'Shanghai,' which is the closest I could get to a song about HK.

There wasn't anybody on the plane, which was a Godsend. I had an enitre middle row to myself, so I lifted up all the armrests so that I could lie down full length and sleep. Except I'm crap enough at sleeping anyway, and the seats on Qantas' lame old Boeing 747 were a bit annoying: they were a bit narrow to lie down on properly, and they slanted inwards, which resulted in me having to lie with my shoulders in crazy shapes and I didn't get much sleep in the end anyway. Huh.

I arrived in HK very early in the morning, and I was picked up at the airport by Michael Wong, one of the Old Man's old school friends. He took me for a dim sum breakfast, saying that whenever he flew long-haul, he always felt stupidly hungry afterwards, and I'm inclined to agree. Afterwards, I checked into my hotel, the Bishop Lei International (Catholic-run, and next to the church). I picked it because it was the cheapest one in the asia-hotels.com directory, but it's actually rather good, with a pool and everything. Not that I used it, because I was so busy out in the city.

The weather was absurdly humid, but there wasn't any sun, due to smog blown over from China. It's very hazy in HK - because the city is surrounded by mountains, I think the effect's a bit like in LA, but at least the haze can blow out to sea. In the heat of the afternoon, I walked down the Mid-Levels Escalator (the escalators are true escalators, in that they only go upwards, and you have to walk the whole way downhill). For those of you who don't know, the Mid-Levels Escalator is the longest in the world, and the Mid-Levels are an expensive residential district on HK Island. I walked round the city on that side of the harbour for a while, but I found it too artificial and westernised. Disenchanted, I went in search of the Teaware Museum, which made everything better. The post is below.

The museum is close to the Peak Tram, which for HK$30 (2.07 pounds - no pound key on this keyboard!), you can travel return to the top of Victoria Peak, the big mountain in HK. The incline is scary steep, but that was okay because so was the Bergen funicular. Actually no, the Peak Tram was steeper. The views as you climb are amazing - you can see the whole city. The best bit is once it's dark, though. The lights of HK are gorgeous, almost ethereal. The skyscrapers are all lit up really well, also, especially the Bank of China building, and this other one whose name I forget which actually changes colour. Genius. As I looked at all the lights, I realised that HK was actually a totally ace place, and I couldn't wait for my excursion to Kowloon the next day, which I'd randomly decided upon at some point. You know me.

Soundtrack: [Just the one song for now...] 'Jacqueline' by Franz Ferdinand, containing the lyric "It's always better on holiday/So much better on holiday..."

Good morning this morning.

I haven't had a chance to update this properly for the past few days, so since I'm here in a computer room at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne with not a lot to do for the while, I may as well give an exhaustive account of my time in HK and my first two days in Melbourne.

Here goes...

Soundtrack: Random ambient Chinese tea music

Good arvo this arvo.

Guess where I am? The Hong Kong Teaware Museum! This place is just totally totally ace. They have the craziest teapots upstairs, because they had some sort of crazy teapot competition last year. For example, there's this teapot shaped like a piece of cheese, and the spout is a mouse poking its head out. And the matching cups are also shaped like mice. See? Crazy. The tea set that won was called "Make Tea Not War," and had two pots shaped like a US marine and a member of Al Qaeda, holding out a grenade and a missile respectively as spouts. The cups were all shaped as halves of shells. Bloody amazing.

They also got quite obsessed about what makes a perfect teapot. I took all the leaflets - they're pretty comprehensive. If I have some time later on in the holiday, I'll type them up for you to peruse - when you read them, you'll realise that I'm not really that obsessed by tea.

Right, better go before they chuck me off the computer.