one hour's work took a day

I shit you not. Although I got a lot of other things done too, including reading an excruciating Enid Blyton book (look, I had my reasons) and correcting a lot of pages of another book, and doing my emails etc on the train when the train condescended to go through places where there was coverage. But all good y'know?

So I had to look at the Borough of Swan Hill's minutes for 1939+ to see what they were saying at the time about the Frank Heath plan for Swan Hill which was launched (such as it was) in the early 1940s. TLDR, I mean, cut to the chase, long story short, whatever: there seems to be almost no interest or concern at borough council level regarding the Heath plan, which was pretty swish, but there you go. They don't talk about it, except once, which suggests to me that it's being funded from another source, though I don't know what that source might be. So anyway rather than settle an issue, a bigger question has been raised. However, there was a lot of other interesting things in those minutes, so I'm not sad. The minute book was, in any case, held at the Bendigo branch of the Public Record Office's reading room. 

It did only take an hour though. Then I had time to kill till the train (more than I realised, or rather, maybe less than I realised, well that's confusing what I mean is... I looked on the PTV app to see when the train coming back was, and what I didn't realise was the app wasn't telling me when the train left the station but rather when I would have to wait at a nearby bus stop (I was, like, three or four blocks away - 15 minutes' walk max) to get a bus to the train station. So I walked to the train station and had another 40 minutes to kill. For all I know, I could have got an earlier train. Anyway... doesn't matter. 

I went to a couple of op shops but nothing jumped out at me, which is perhaps for the best all things considered. I had a good coffee and a weird sandwich, and I bought an oven mitt that seems to have been made out of those rubbery sucker things we used to throw at windows and watch them crawl down. Also I bought a copy of Mojo, a magazine that really has nothing going for it anymore, but it had an article on Magazine and I guess I just wanted to see what they'd say, because I like Magazine. 

Been awake since 4am though (for no reason I can glean) so I guess I'm a bit fuckin' shagged now. Will stay up for Mad as Hell but that's IT. 

what do men like

So I am on the train and it’s a Saturday morning going to do a radio interview and at Jacana station a woman probably early 20s gets on she is wearing sneakers and jeans and one of those grey – I don’t know what you would call them – vesty things and she has a reasonably ample bosom, though this is probably accentuated by the fact that she’s unhealthily thin. What is remarkable though is the response of the young man – probably about her age – who is another row of seats down. He gives her a long, apparently entirely disinterested look (‘I happened to feel like gazing in that direction. SO some chick is there, so what?’) and then gets up, walks I suppose to the end of the carriage (not sure: I’m facing the other way) then comes back and sits opposite me, in the seats across from her, where he can look at her many, many times. She appears not to notice. He is wearing loose, old jeans, a smart new black jacket, those big puffy sneakers, and he is listening to music on his phone I think, with earbuds of course. What’s particularly funny is that he occasionally stops holding the phone to rest it on his knee while he plays air guitar – which he does with real attention to where his fingers are on the fretboard. – and a look of quiet concentration on his face. Really weird and sort of hilarious, crossed with sad.

When you spend a lot of time with dogs you get kind of used to their very base behaviours but you also recognize the same sort of behaviours in people too, when you see them. This guy was being so clearly interested in that woman, it almost was a situation where it was only a few thousand years of civiillisation (and its attendant conventions) that stopped him humping her leg there and then, though of course if she’d told him she didn’t mind he wouldn’t have thought twice. Some younger, hipper girls got on at Essendon and he got up to give them a seat, which I think was an opportunity for him to then stand in the doorway and look at the grey girl with even greater attention, though I can’t see him from where I’m sitting and I’m not going to turn around to see him, or do anything that might make him appreciate the possibility that I’m writing about him on my laptop.

Once again, I talk about this kind of stuff like I’m unaffected and I am at least twice this guy’s age, not that that is really so important, anyway the real thing is, I’m probably in some part motivated by competition or some other base instinct to belittle him and his ineffectual attempt to impress a woman with his air guitar and longing looks, mainly because I assume that wouldn’t work in a million years . I know a lot of you would probably think this is a dodgy subject for me to be writing on but you’re probably responding to some innate instinctual unease too, that’s my guess anyway.

crawl of... death

So I have to get to Park Orchards by 10.30 on a Thursday morning. A little time spent on the Metlink website has me sorted on a Broadmeadows train at 8.34 and in PO at 10.14 or thereabouts, luverly jubbly. Well, of course I arrive at Broady station and to my enormous surprise the train is 20 minutes late. This means naturally I get to the city three minutes after I am supposed to take a 307 bus to the Donvale terminus. At this time I always enjoy calling the hapless call centre workers and putting in a complaint, and they have perfected a brilliant synthesis of politeness and complete lack of interest that I suppose deflects people from thinking that they are dealing with someone who might want to defend the lateness of trains. (The bus, by the way, was 9 minutes late getting to the appropriate spot for me to connect with the 271 Ringwood bus which was due 6 minutes after the 307. However, the 271 was fortuitously 3 minutes late. It’s like cliché of a primary school maths problem isn’t it. Once getting on the 271 I gave John 3 apples who gave Jill half the number of apples Peter gave Redmond, who had twice as many apples as me).

I read The Age every day and I appreciate the universe it creates, a pleasant fantasy based on elements of fact though, unlike for instance the film Fargo, not universal truths. Yesterday I enjoyed seeing the Age grapple with why people might perhaps want to live somewhere more than 3 km beyond the CBD. The good reason they never seem to have tried on for size is that many suburbs offer triple the variety interest and versatility than any number of elegant Fitzroy ruined terrace houses, but that’s not important right now. Yesterday it was so someone could buy a block of land – any land please god even if it’s in (shudder) Epping – to reunite their family, and family is something the Age understands has relevance to the ethnics. Similarly the Age’s obsession with public transport is both intriguing and misses a basic underlying fact. This is that the state government whoever they may be can get away with underfunding public transport because only a small percentage of Melbournians use it (and many of those are too young to vote and probably equate reaching adulthood with the ‘freedom’ of learning to drive). Yes, it is a catch 22, because the more PT is funded the better it will be and the more people want to use it, but at the same time, the more possibility there is for people to feel disgruntledly in the thrall of a government (or semi-government) service.

For some reason people can disconnect from the idea that roads are not also every bit as much a feature of planning and governance. I remember the argument I had with some dumbass students I had to cope with five or so years ago re: road tolls and train tickets, where they didn’t think they should have to pay road tolls and I said well why is using a road different from using a railway and they said (sort of unanimously, or at least a couple said it and others agreed), ‘well we don’t buy tickets’.

On the bus I entertained once again my irritating ability to recognize one of probably thousands of irritating pop songs I sincerely dislike, from a few squeaky bars above engine noise. It was Dire Straits’ ‘Walk of Life’. I mean for all I know that chronically horrible keyboard line is completely calculated to be audible above every other ghastly noise of daily life (as it was lived almost 30 years ago). I hate that song very much thank you. The radio also played some things I like though like ‘Summer in the City’ and ‘Get it On’. I suppose I say these are things I like but in truth I would not voluntarily play them for my pleasure. I just hate them about 30 000% less than ‘Walk of Life’, which should not even have been allowed to be a song. That song was like a direct by-product of a Thatcher government, and not in a good way like songs by The Specials or whatever, but in a way that it was like Thatcher policies created the diseased environment in which such a travesty could flourish. I don’t have a clue what that song is about (Chuck Berry? That’d be right)* but it should have died on the first night of its existence. Instead it is still being played, its cheesy topping piping like a wheezy phlegm tweet above the sound of a bus engine and passing cars on Hoddle Street. I want to smack not only Mark Knopfler but everyone who bought that song and who responded favourably to its inclusion on a hypothetical playlist in consumer polling. That would take the rest of my entire lifetime I suppose – it no doubt sold millions and not only would it take hundreds of people hundreds of years to find out who bought it, but also getting them lined up. Some of them are probably now dead and I would like to think there could be a special exemption for dead ones but maybe there isn’t. It would probably be easier to just smack everyone born between 1940 and 2000, as I am pretty sure no-one under 10 would have bought ‘Walk of Life’, and you’d be going pretty well on getting the largest possible section of those who did just concentrating on the 11-70 year olds.

The downside is it’s not fair that so many people who didn’t buy or otherwise support ‘Walk of Life’ are getting the punishment. But as far as I’m concerned that’s part of living in a society. So much of one’s life is dominated by other people’s bullshit. I mean why am I always singled out for explosives testing whenever I come through the airport? I’ll tell you: it’s because I look white and educated (and the truth is, I’m both) and am unlikely to kick up a stink. If there is actually a system that makes my selection genuinely random, then I should buy more lottery tickets, because random is less random than I realized. Anyway. The real reason I have to so often suffer the boredom and indeed it’s probably even humiliation of being checked for explosives every time I get on a plane is that other people are jerks. It’s no different to being slapped because other people bought ‘Walk of Life’. I know I’ve put it in your head now, sorry, but I didn’t create or support it in any way. It disgusts me.

* Later, I wikipediaed it and it's about street musicians. I guess as they were its inspiration MK put all the royalties from the song into small coins in a huge tank and went around shooting 20p a piece at street musicians. No, seriously, he does a lot for charity.

jodi picoult's rubbish million-seller perfect match

I am listening to an audio book (my first) of a Jodi Picoult book called Perfect Match. The narrator is very good, but I am uncertain whether I am impatient because when reading normally I just jump around the page or whether it's because Picoult is an incredibly frustratingly drawn-out pain in the arse writer.* I am about half way through and I reckon the priest was a twin and the twin was the abuser, not the priest. I really hope that is the case, because that would be sufficiently subversive to compensate for the hours spent listening to the interior monologues of these appalling people. It does occur to me that the priest should be holding a service while the kids are at sunday school, so how does he come to be abusing little boys in the boiler room at that time? Yet the ghastly protagonist and her self-righteousness leads her to shoot the priest in court and everyone around her is congratulating her over it (as are most of the readers, I guess). Well, even if this is not how it's going to pan out - how could it not though - anyway even if it isn't, I still can't forgive JP for being such a dull and obvious writer. I see people reading her books all the time on the train, which is what piquoed my interest. Now I see they are the novel-reading version of looking straight ahead with a vacant expression. Anyway like so many things (the surprisingly similar and equally execrable We Need to Talk About Kevin, for instance) I can't not keep going with it.

Later: OK I was wrong about twins (maybe twins don't have the same DNA, how the hell would I know) but it was half-brother priests one of whom had given the other bone marrow which apparently gives you the same DNA as your donor. Who knew!? Still the book is completely morally corrupt and revolting, because it's all about killing rock spiders out of revenge. When Nina Frost realises she's killed the wrong priest she is much more upset that the right (i.e. child molesting) priest is still alive, than she is that the wrong one is dead because she killed him so that her son would not have to testify against him (the suggestion seems to be that then going and killing the right priest would make killing the wrong one 'mean something'). I would just love to see brain scans of plebs reading this stuff. I would like to see what patterns their brains light up in when the noxious child Nathaniel - a kind of Little Lord Fauntleroy for today - gives his own perspective, too ('it smells of November' is all I can bear to remember of his testimony) I know, I know, I am turning into a Leavisite. I'm not even that much of a highbrow. I know this trash pushes buttons for me too, just different ones but still every bit as unconscious and stupid, which is why I am persisting with it and afterwards, I feel soiled and cheap, though at least I do not feel dirty like a thousand showers would not clean me and I'd have to scrub my own skin off, which is the experience of a couple of the characters in this foul tome.

Much later: Finally finished this gruelling potboiler. Feels like having come through a minor illness. Still confused about the author's intentions. Does she condone a killing spree en route to 'closure' for her child? (PS obviously in writing that last sentence I confused author and narrator. Picoult must be a genius).

* I keep thinking about Orwell's essay on Frank Richards, which also makes me think about Orwell on Miss Blandish and seaside postcards.

like an old man

Like an old man, I fell over running for the train yesterday. From this the lower palm of both my hands are sore and my right thumb has a small red blemish on it that threatens to crack open and spurt something out when I do something manly with my fists eg turn taps tightly.

People were very solicitous when they saw me fall and this just confirms I am an old man. If you saw a young man fall he would probably be falling into a commando point a gun at you position. Or some other killing attitude, with a knife or vampire teeth or something.

As an old man I have to go and get my foot x-rayed (I am an old man so I tend to call them röntgen rays). This is because it has been hurting for some months now and the doctor thinks I might have arthritis. This seemed particularly so in her mind because the foot hurts when I wake up, but not after I walk on it for a while. I see a positive: I like walking and it is good for me and now perhaps no-one can stop me walking as they are always trying to do, as it stops me having pain. The other possibility is I suppose I might have to have the foot removed and replaced with something bionic, hopefully, a bionic foot though a duck’s head as per umbrellas might be nifty. I always thought that was an extraordinary idea and charmingly humorous. Did they use real ones.

There are so many advantages to our fine multicultural society and one is that when, for instance as now in my proximity (at Glenroy station) people have loud conversations in a language other than English, I can’t understand them and so they don’t annoy me. I bet whatever these youngsters (girl ‘n’ guy) are talking about loudly it would annoy me a lot if I understood it and felt compelled to follow its narrative. They are surely talking about driving fast cars and eating mcdonalds.

did leo sayer have a song about a train and was it called 'train'?

(Writ yesterday) Spent a bit of time at the SLV this evening looking at RAIA files, I went through the press cuttings from 1936-37 which had a lot of great stuff about the inauguration of the Slum Abolition Council, a group which – unless I’m thoroughly mistaken – served its purpose and was wound up very quickly when a lot of its members, the ones for whom slum abolition was a core concern, were co-opted into a government committee for the same then reformulated as the Housing Commission of Victoria.

Also, looking at bungalow courts/ maisonette stuff and generally chipping away at the important process of eventually understanding the world and everything in it. Now I am listening to the Black Kids on the train and typing to you.

I did a bit of random blog searching recently and it is amazing to me how many people start blogs and don’t, you know, continue them beyond a certain point. Wow, who do they think they are? A blog is not just a whim you know, it’s an ongoing living thing like sourdough or sad songs. Though it’s hard to tell on the whole whether some of those people are actually setting out to do a blog (and stopping after a couple) or whether they’re really more concerned with having an identity on blogger. That’s probably a big part of it.

I like this Black Kids record though at the moment I like the singles and the other bits are like the cushioning muscle round the vertebrae or, perhaps, one-entry blogs. Well, I will persist and I bet I get to love one or two songs more. They remind me a bit of the… no, I won’t say, you’ll just think I’m a prat.

Man, spend a bit of time looking at architecturally-themed press clippings and then take a train to Broadmeadows viewing as you go the houses lining the railway line. I dare you. The line was electrified in the early 1920s and while there are a few Victorian buildings at (say) Essendon and Moonee Ponds, it’s basically housing from Federation up to pre-WWII, pretty nice a lot of it. In the late 1930s there was hubbub because 85% of buildings weren’t architecturally designed – it’s less now, isn’t it, Shane?

It’s funny looking at those clippings, to my more-trained-than-most-but-still-untrained-nonetheless-eye, a lot of those 1930s houses look like remodelled Victorian houses. I am not sure if they are (and the accompanying text is just not saying so), or whether Melbourne architects of the 1930s were sticking to the form they knew and making the outsides look cool. Both, perhaps, the key being whether the newspaper columns on new buildings – basically industry puff – would dig very deep or see renovation/refurbishment of a façade as a good thing.

Anyway, I loved looking at those clippings. Then I was looking at some individual files, and checked out Charles Heath’s irate letter to the RVIA responding to their stuffy letter criticising him and asking for an explanation because he sent out a slightly self-publicising pamphlet – really, just a folded over piece of paper – featuring his latest (and as far as I’m aware, greatest) building, the Coburg Town Hall which, by the way, you can still see anytime you wanna, in Bell Street. Check it out, cool dome. Then I got into other files which I won’t go into detail about in case someone does a lazy search on them and sees me being flippant about them and thinks I’m not a serious scholar. Am I paranoid?

I left the heritage reading room and I was the last to leave, leaving the lady behind the desk to do whatever crazy thing she might get up to when there’s no-one around to see. I wonder. I kind of envied her having at least an hour just staffing the HRR without having to answer any dumb question (though let’s face it those SLV librarians make things more difficult for themselves). Then I thought, no, I’d just get bored hanging out there with nothing to do and no-one to do it for/with/at.

Then I got to the station and had a few frantic minutes as I had two minutes to buy a ticket and get on the train – just made it otherwise I’d probably still be sitting there on the platform being annoyed and thinking ‘that train’s probably at Glenbervie now,’ or ‘I bet it’s at Oak Park now, damn it.’ And hoping it crashes and blows up and burns to pieces, so that my missing it turns out to be a good thing, and then thinking, what if that actually happens to the one I am about to get on? That’s how it goes peeps don’t say you don’t do the same.

Now I am at Jacana station, which has got to be (I’ve dwelt on this before) the most poorly situated, inaccessible, ugly station in Melbourne, now that Mobiltown’s gone, anyway. Did I ever tell you about the time some bikies circled me at Mobiltown? It was I guess 1978. I was a railway buff of sorts though I wanted to cultivate my own take on railways and I did. And it got me nowhere. Oh, I suppose it got me interested in planning and the built environment and the like, probably, now I come to think of it.

odd

I note that this ad for something or other on the trains includes a bystander reading a paper which includes a rather large headline referring to the Kerang rail disaster of June 2007 (unless 'Kerang misery haunts victims' has some other, more cheery meaning). Since I am used to assuming every square inch of an ad is something calculated, dub tf?

holy shit!

Yesterday evening I got on the train at Strathmore going north and a young guy was talking to a friend on one of those hands free things so he seemed really to be talking into the air. He said 'Uh, Strathmore' and the friend said something and he said 'Oh, bullshit, what do I do?' and it was pretty clear he was going in the wrong direction. He said, 'How far to Southern Cross?' and got an answer, then said he'd talk to his friend soon. And then he just went and sat down. And I thought, do I say something to him like, 'you do realise you're going the wrong way?' and then I thought, oh well he's young maybe that was some kind of elaborate sardonic game, I'll stay out of it. But then after about five minutes he said to the woman next to him, 'Excuse me, how far is it to Southern Cross?' and she said, 'you're going the wrong way' and he got up and she and someone else said to him, 'it's about ten stations in the other direction' and we were at Oak Park by this stage and she said, 'You're going to have to get off here, and go under the platform and catch the train going back that way.'

'Holy shit', said the guy. And alighted.