Spring on the Rooftop

In the past two weeks, the exceptionally calm winter has given way to a rather unsettled Spring. Such is a perfect description of our weather here in Sydney. But I could equally be talking about my own personal circumstances!

The weather has been bizarre even by Australian standards. Last Tuesday, saw the worst dust storms to hit Sydney since 1944. Being unfamiliar with dust storms – except for during my annual flat clean – I was at a complete loss to interpret the scene that greeted me when I woke up at 5am to see my room completely bathed in red.

Imagine waking up in the morning and seeing this view out of your window. This is an undoctored shot of my view at 5am on Tuesday 22^nd September. Now I can say that, though I’ve never been to the outback, the outback has come to me!

It’s hard to overstate how odd things looked as I peered out of my window. Nuclear attack, meteor strike, or the Rapture... all seemed like plausible explanations. But by lunchtime the skies had cleared to a familiar blue, and the only puzzling thing was how the global news networks saw fit to drag the story out across the rest of the week. ‘Sydney brought to a standstill’ was one of my favourite headlines. Sydney is always at a standstill at 5am! But the press love to talk up a dust storm in a teacup.

Let's get this barbey started. The Keith Foreman Grill cranks into action.

The high winds were back for my big party on Saturday. This was the much anticipated ‘Spring on the Rooftop’ celebration. Some cold beers and cooked sausages helped the 30 or so punters forget the chill-wind for a while, but eventually we had to beat a hasty retreat to the local pub.

There was a general consensus that the venue was pretty spectacular, and that this was an event to be repeated in a couple of months, when good weather would be guaranteed.

But this might not be possible…

I’m hoping to move apartment soon. Much as I like my studio apartment, living in just one room does get a little tiring. On better days I like to think that a studio is great because ‘every room you are in is a large spacious room’ (!), but that makes Polyanna appear like a pessimist. And since I’ve started looking for somewhere else, I’ve been more unsettled where I am. The grass has started to look greener…

Unsettling too are my travel plans for the next couple of months. I am still no clearer on when I will next be in India. I hope it will be within the next month or so as work is always easier when I can keep strong connections with colleagues abroad. And thoughts of travel aren’t just restricted to India. I would really love to pay a visit home to see the family. I’m hoping to get these trips worked out in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, a much smaller trip beckons. The next event on the Spring calendar is Ed’s stag weekend. Fifteen of us are going to the Gold Coast for a weekend of wholesome fresh air and exercise. Or something like that. This must be the most anticipated stag weekend of all time. Expect limited reports and blurry photographs.

This is the first day’s holiday I’ve had for six months (oh poor me!) and an interruption to my training routine, which has been going superbly. I’ve never felt fitter. I ran my first half-marathon last weekend and clocked 98 minutes. This was way better than expected and a similar pace to my best run for 10km – half the distance – some 8 years ago!

I wish I could push myself as hard in the pool, but I’m nervous about the injury returning. Still, running has been a great alternative. At the start of the half-marathon, running across the harbour bridge, with thousands of other Sydneysiders, under the giant Australian flags... I started to well-up! And there can’t be many more inspiring locations to finish a road-race either - running round Circular Quay and up to finish under the opera house.

Sydney’s weather is only rivalled in unpredictability by Melbourne. After my last update, I travelled down to Victoria’s capital to attend a two-day conference. I stayed an extra night to catch-up with friends and go to the Dali exhibition at the National Gallery there. My 7pm flight was then delayed as all flight operations were temporarily cancelled due to a storm passing the airport. Not ideal when I had to get up at 5am in Sydney the next morning for the half-marathon! I eventually got five hours sleep, and another reminder of why I prefer Sydney!

Cappucino for a Cause

Hi All

On October the 16th and 17th, Gloria Jean's Coffees and Opportunity International are getting together to help people living in poverty. Buy a cappuccino from Gloria Jeans across Australia on those days and 50c will go towards Opportunity's Microfinance Programs in India, the Philippines and Indonesia.

http://www.facebook.com/CappuccinoForACause

Enjoy a caffeine high, and a buzz from helping others, at the same time!


(Update on the Sydney Half Marathon coming up shortly...)

Great times

The mercury topped 32C today. And according to my friend Olivier it’s still winter. I reckon Spring started on the 1^st of September, but this is awesome, even for Spring!

It was a nice day out for Olivier, Sandra and I today. We took the train and then a little ferry south of Sydney and after a short walk along the coast we found a secluded beach in the national park. It was a great beach for swimming, only later did we realise that it was a nudist beach. And I can report that – as has been said a thousand times before – it’s never the really fit people that you find on nudist beaches. Oh well, each to his own.

The freakishly warm winter has made for some great weekends. I went back to the Blue Mountains with ‘the Irish’ last month.

Again it’s been such a long time since the last update, and when I apologise for that I do mean it – I wish I would find the inspiration to update more often these days. Maybe it’s partly because nothing particularly momentous had happened recently (until this week) while life has still been busy, and just so enjoyable.

There have been a hundred and one things on, with some highlights since my last update being…

- Last month I was one of 75,000 Sydneysiders taking part in the City2Surf fun-run. This annual event is the largest fun-run in the world. That’s largest as in number of people, not longest distance, obviously, though it’s still quite a challenge with a long uphill stretch in the middle of the 14km distance, before a long sprint downhill to the finish at Bondi beach. I was made-up with a time of 69 minutes, and it inspired me to enter the half-marathon (22km) next Sunday. I was absolutely done-in afterwards though, and the traditional post City2Surf drinking session nearly killed me! Thank goodness I cut my losses and escaped from the pub in the late afternoon and was in bed by 7pm.

- All this running has gotten me a lot fitter and I think I can finally… with some conviction… say that my shoulder is cured (and never let it be mentioned again!). I was swimming in the sea today for the first time and hope to start with the ocean swimming club on Saturday mornings now that Spring is sprung!

Right: the girls putting the 'fun' into 'fun-run'. :)

- I’m just about to book my next trip to India. This is the longest I’ve been without a work trip (4 months) and I’m really looking forward to getting back to the field. But before that I’ve got Ed’s stag weekend, and then Ed and Dace’s wedding in October, which I think I’m MC-ing, after which I’m MC-ing a work event too (how am I getting MC-ing jobs with my Scottish accent… what the hell’s going on here?!?). Got a trip to Melbourne next week too, followed by ‘Spring on the Rooftop’ – a bbq event at my place which should go gangbusters, given the level of excitement generated so far!

All of which means that there will be no shortage of more exciting news for the website between now and Christmas!

Right: Ed’s surprise birthday party. Not a surprise was Ed getting very (very) into the partying spirit. ‘Enough scotch to sink a battleship’ is the expression I reckon. Here he is getting into Dace’s hen night accessories. Almost topped recent antics at the Abercrombie…

Lastly, the momentous news is that this week the immigration department approved my application for an extension of my working visa. The extention takes my visa up to 2011, which is rather more reassuring than my old visa which would have run out in a month’s time.

A sincere thanks to Graeme and Fraser for badgering me to update. It’s effective… eventually!!

What’s worse – 105 Days in a Windowless Capsule or 3 Days in Canberra?

With my shoulder still recovering slowly, I’ve decided to do a bit of running again. Here’s a shot from a run across Sydney’s Anzac Bridge – one of the longest cable-stayed bridges in the world. I’m hoping to run the 14km City to Surf run in a few weeks time.

CAUTION: I must warn readers who are sensitive to sarcasm and sardonic wit… …as this update follows a recent trip to Canberra, a city deservedly famous in Australia as a national centre of dullness.

I’ve been to Canberra three times now, twice at gunpoint. Not literally at gunpoint of course, but being work trips I didn't have any influence over the choice of destination. This time I had a three day stay in Canberra for a microfinance course. This constituted my longest stay in the city yet, by two days, and about three-days longer than anyone needs to stay in the ACT, as Australia’s Capital Territory is known.

But before I really let rip on Australia’s capital city, something far more interesting caught my eye in the news in the last week. With all the focus on the 40^th anniversary of Neil Armstrong stepping on to the surface of the moon, a rather less stunning milestone in the history of manned-space travel has been reached.

Six volunteers have just emerged from 105 days locked in a windowless capsule intended to simulate the cramped and inhospitable conditions that astronauts would have to endure on a manned flight to Mars. As incomparable a moment as Armstrong’s first step on the moon was, I have doubts about whether manned space flight is still relevant in these days when all the spectacular science is being done by unmanned telescopes like the Hubble (admittedly serviced by humans), and the newly launched - and criminally under-celebrated - Herschel telescopes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8150385.stm

But even supposing for a moment that manned space flight does have a future, would you really volunteer to sacrifice 105 days of your life to such an experiment? Sure, these men could also say they were contributing to the scientific advance of mankind. But wouldn’t it grind you down to know that you were locked inside a glorified tin-can pretending to be an astronaut. In fact, mightn't there be something fundamentally abnormal – geeky, unimaginative, passionless (isn’t it telling that all of the volunteers were men) – about these people?

Surely it’s only reasonable to ask: what on earth (a rather appropriate construct I’m sure you’ll agree) leads people to volunteer to be shut in a fake space-capsule for 3 months? Even more unfathomable is that this 'adventure' will now be followed up by a repeat experiment, identical in every respect except that it will last 520 days…

Well one thing’s for sure – at least the experiment is far less dangerous than an actual manned voyage to Mars, where at any point in the two year journey, a rogue chunk of rock could careen into your space capsule, spilling you out into the atmosphere-less expanse of space.

Space isn’t the only place completely lacking in atmosphere. During my work trip I took an early evening constitutional around the streets of central Canberra. Though I hadn’t expected it to be like the last day of the Rio Carneval, or the banks of the Seine in mid-summer, I was still shocked at how much Canberra’s streets lack any joie de vivre.

It was like Edinburgh’s Princes Street at 10am on the 1^st of January (though without the smell of rancid beer). Worn down by the soporific feel, I retreated to my hotel room, where at least Aussie Tv might provide some distraction.

Passing reception, I picked up a rather thin publication called “This Week in Canberra” on the off-chance that the town’s streets were so empty because people were having a rip-roaring time at any number of exciting Canberra events. And yes, it is possible that people were cramming themselves into ‘An A to Z of Animals in War’, an exhibition promising “stories of horses, donkeys, camels, dogs and other creatures used by military forces from the First World War to the present day”.

Or maybe there was a run on the unself-consciously named ‘Cockington Green Gardens’ with its “fascinating display of meticulously crafted miniature buildings”. Regulars at Cock Green - as it may or may not be known - must be reassured to learn that 30 years of the Gardens have not subdued the spirit of innovation there, where you can now find a “newly constructed Syrian arch, complementing the original English village”. Not sure those are traditionally considered to be complementary architectural styles, but clearly, as in Canberra, anything can happen at Cockington Green Gardens…

Favourite Old Band * Favourite Modern Artist = Bliss

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico "Run Run Run" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.