More on swimming

Is it just me, or is every discipline these days taught by aspiring Mr Miyagis?

You don't seem to be able to learn to cook risotto or use a spreadsheet without being reminded to keep your limbs loose and relaxed, concentrate on your body core, breathe to the bottom of your lungs, relax don't force it etc.

This is all actually a good thing because what I've learned in my first two swim classes is that the people you notice in the pool making a great song and dance about their powerful strokes are not very good swimmers. The best ones are moving their limbs pretty slowly - there's a reason it's called crawl - and hardly making a ripple in the water.

Unlearning some of the things I picked up in my imitative version of freestyle is the most difficult bit. Most of all, I've struggled to come to terms with the initially counterintuitive nature of good breathing. Like most people, I'm not keen on the idea of drowning, and taking big gulps of air when my mouth is half in the water doesn't come naturally to me; so like most (non-Australian) people, I tend to lift my head ooh about a foot out of the water when I take a breath. Which is of course a waste of energy, because you're going up and down rather than forwards. Another thing I had been doing (wrongly) was rationing my breaths out and concentrating on gulping my breaths in, when doing the opposite means you barely have to concentrate on inhaling when you come up for air. In addition, to keep my head up I've always tended to let my bum sink, which is why I tend to kick with my knees rather than my whole legs.

Unlearning all this is a pretty slow process, and each day I head down to the pool and splash around with my hair in my eyes, failing to catch my breath and feeling like a bit of a plonker. I have drunk so much sea water over the past few weeks' practice that I'm almost ready to switch to the Bear Grylls method of hydration. But I can feel myself improving, and each day there are a few lengths where I feel like I'm moving properly and I don't even end up out of breath. Whether I'll make it as an ocean swimmer by the end of the year is another matter.

Sydney goes festival...

Last night was the Sydney Festival opening night. I'd heard this mentioned a few times by different people over the past few weeks and thought, whoopee, a few plays and concerts have their first outings. Big deal.

What I hadn't realised is that the festival opening night is, like, a thing. For the duration of the night, a huge swathe of central Sydney, including treelined Hyde Park and the parklands of the Domain, were closed off to traffic for an immense free festival, with a good proportion of the acts that will take part in the ongoing festival turning out to perform for the night.

Of course there's no such thing as a free lunch, and ANZ bank (who have just completed one of those rather limp rebranding exercises which no doubt has the brand experts privately raging about their clients' lack of vision and the clients wondering why they embarked on the project in the first place) were sponsoring the whole shebang with free filtered water bottles and odd little electric hand fans which projected eerie They Live!-style messages when you switched them on. And proving the effect of good marketing on raising brand awareness, here I am telling you all about ANZ and their selfless dedication to free festivals.



There's a great atmosphere to a city when the streets have been closed off. At Martin Place, people were dancing among the road markings on Philip Street; at Chifley square, slightly dizzy lines of people milled around the tarmac waiting to have their water bottles refilled. Add to that the warm night air, the fruitbats circling the clouds of insects swarming the illuminated pinnacles of the buildings, the stars coming out - beautiful.

Icebergs ahoy!

I can remember as a kid watching that scary midwinter Russian ritual where people cut a hole in the ice and go for a quick swim in the frigid water. In fact I'm sure I've got a nasty image of Boris Yeltsin lowering his fleshy body into an ice hole, but I can't find video on YouTube so, following the first law of the internet, it must never have happened.

Anyway, with thoughts of that and the courageous Serpentine Christmas Day Swim in my mind, I found it hard to stifle a guffaw when I found out that Bondi's ocean baths are called the 'Icebergs'. Sure, in midwinter it must get pretty nippy but never subzero. These Aussies don't know they're born.

But what Australians lack in cold resistance they more than make up for in athleticism. As a Brit, going for a swim in Australia is simply embarrassing. The gym I used to visit in London boasted shamelessly about a 20m pool that would barely cut it in an Australian backyard. My local pool when I was last living in Sydney was a 33m one. It was considered so inadequate that it's currently being rebuilt as a proper 50m Olympic-sized model.

The length of pools seems to be in direct proportion to the ability of swimmers. Whereas in Britain I normally belong in one of the faster lanes, in Australia if you can't do a tumble turn you're pretty much consigned to the osteoporosis classes.

A big bit of that comes down to teaching: aged six, I remember being packed off to the William Penn leisure centre in Oxhey, where a tattoed bloke called Steve piloted a gaggle of kids around a urine-tainted pool until they could do a passable imitation of front crawl, back crawl and breast stroke. Once we could stay afloat and move forward, we were pretty much done. There was the sense that you were being taught swimming so that you would die of hypothermia rather than drowning if your ocean liner happened to hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland.

In Australia the objective is rather more ambitious. Swimming is a fully-fledged sport, and every kid is a potential Thorpedo. Kate says she learned to swim 'quite late' - ie, at the age of four. Some of these Aussie kids must be doing butterfly before they can crawl.

This has meant that until now I've never really been able to swim front crawl (which they call freestyle around here), and I'm going to have to do that if I'm to achieve number 4 of my New Year's resolutions - an ocean swim by the end of the year. So Kate's Christmas present to me was a course of swim classes down at Bondi Icebergs.

This post is getting a bit tl; dr so I'll leave my experiences at the pool for tomorrow's thrilling instalment.

A trip to Flat Rock

Well this blog is named after the feeling you get after a swim in the sea, and late in the afternoon yesterday the overcast weather that has hung around Sydney since Christmas finally started to clear up and the temperature rose. So I threw a snorkel and mask and a towel into a backpack and headed down to the beach with Kate and Althea.

I've always been more of a snorkelling than stroke-swimming or body-surfing fan. Snorkelling is like a miniature, up-close underwater safari. There's something too about floating weightless, diving down and feeling the pressure on your lungs and sinuses, feeling yourself jogged by the ebb and flow of the current and watching it sway the seafloor around you.

The best place to go snorkelling in Sydney is Clovelly, a sort of giant rockpool formed when a fall of cliff rubble all but blocked off the entrance to an inlet about the size of two Olympic-sized swimming pools. But Flat Rock, the spot where the cliffs of the South Head peninsula crumble down to the sand of Bondi Beach, runs it a pretty close second.

[caption id="attachment_114" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="You can't get much closer to the beach than this"][/caption]

Even getting in is a ride. The tide swells here over a platform covered in weedy green and red algae, and aficionadoes can time their entries and exits perfectly so that the gentle waves carry them into and out of the deep water. When the water is too rough it's less fun - one friend once got dragged over the rocks and got cuts all over his feet which stopped him walking for a couple of days. Yesterday, though, was beautifully calm.

Once you drop off the edge of the rocks you find yourself hovering over a garden of waving, crinkly seaweed, in which more acute eyes than mine would be able to find leafy sea dragons. This falls away into a landscape of sand, punctuated by the odd rock, overgrown with weed and orbited by small fish. In the blue middle distance a school of silver trevally, each as long as my forearm, nosed their way out of the shallows off to the deeper water. Garfish twinkled past, jerking their needle-snouts from side to side. Closer to the waves, some of the boulders are coated with algae as pink as Miami stucco, and down between them you find the real action - crimson-banded wrasse popping in and out of shelter, dun herring cale inspecting their hunting grounds, and fortescue and rock cale squatting grumpily on the bottom.

I couldn't get pictures of any of this because my camera ain't waterproof, so here's some shots of the waves breaking at the base of the cliffs north of Flat Rock:

[caption id="attachment_111" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="A bit rough for swimming, this"][/caption]

Jasper's prison diary: Part 4

Thursday, November 19 - yes, really, I overheard one of the humans saying it

Wonderful news! The humans came to visit!



Of course, I tried not to let on that I was excited. I am still utterly confounded by their role in all this. Perhaps they are being punished too, but if so, how come they are allowed to visit me?

They were very friendly when they arrived and immediately started picking me up and cuddling me and stroking me. It was all a bit much, what with the heat and the fact that really I needed to punish them for what they had done to me, so I scratched the female a bit in the nostril and after that they left me alone for a bit.

They had a talk with Jessica, who is a human who seems to live here and brings me food and new litter and water each day. If I am very cute she also gives me a bit of a stroke. I have decided to curry favour with her rather than the old humans: she seems a more consistent presence. I wonder if I can impress her by biting the old humans.

In truth, I was quite excited to see them when they came to visit today but I can't understand how they could have let this happen to me. I had a careful sniff when they arrived for any traces of scent from Fluffles or Mrs Minxie, but there was nothing. Maybe they're in the dark about this as much as I am.

They left after a couple of hours. I hope they come back tomorrow. I heard them talking to Jessica about how hot it was in my cell - I wonder if they were sorting out an air conditioner?

Later - One other strange thing I noticed. I distinctly heard them say it was Thursday when they were here. But I'm sure I was picked up on Monday, and it was only one night - a slightly long night, I admit - before I arrived here. I can only reach one conclusion: someone, or some cat, has stolen Wednesday. Perhaps I was brought here in advance because the perpetrator fears my powers of deduction. Cui bono, I thought to myself, cui bono? If I ever get out of here I will search for lists of calendar makers. If each week is going to be six days long in future, someone with inside information could wind up making a fortune.

Smells

With the exception of Smell-O-Vision (OK, not excepting Smell-O-Vision), modern communications have never been very good at conveying odours. So writing about the smells of Sydney in a blog seems futile, but it is the most evocative sense and I'm trying to capture a feel of what it's like living here, so here goes.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Sydney would smell so much more intense if I had one of these"][/caption]

Smells were, oddly enough, one of the things that Kate missed most about Australia. Londoners will no doubt complain that their city smells of old fried chicken boxes and exhaust fumes, but for the most part it is a strikingly inodorous city - I can't remember many occasions when I was forcefully struck with a strong smell, least of all a strong pleasant smell. The scent of barbecuing meat will always remind me of summer afternoons and a few times in summer you'll walk past some flowers smelling potent in bloom, but for the most part the city smells of paper and metal, ie nothing.

I think it must be something about the cleansing effect of the sea air and the ranker quality of vegetation in a warmer climate, but Sydney seems full of smells to me - Brisbane, closer to the tropics, even more so. Walking back from Bondi Beach last night the salty, seaweedy smell of the ocean swept over us in slow waves, and in between there were fragments of other, unconnected odours: the sweet smokiness of fish grilling in someone's garden, an astringent dose of eucalyptus sap, a tang of basil in a school vegetable patch, the rich dressing-table scent of frangipani blossoms. At night, you first sense the presence of the ubiquitous American cockroach (who seem to be the main element of pavement-traffic after humans once the sun goes down) through their not unpleasant pheromonal smell; jasmines glow a dull white in the warm summer dark, surrounded by heavy clouds of perfume.

Any old iron...

In Britain if you chuck an old TV on the pavement out the front of your house you're likely to be arrested as a fly tipper. In Australia, you're making a valuable contribution to the community.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="This would never happen in Australia"][/caption]

Hard rubbish day is a hallowed part of the calendar in any Australian suburb. This is the day, usually once a month or once every few months, when the council sends a bunch of blokes round in big vans to pick up any hard-to-dispose-of rubbish that people have left out on the grass verge outside their front doors.

The days leading up to hard rubbish day feel almost like the preparations for a festival. It's like Christmas decorations season but with knackered Lay-Z-Boys and bust DVD players. Crucially, a decent proportion of the rubbish never makes its way into the council vans, because locals tend to treat this bounty as a sort of giant, free flea market. This piece from the Melbourne Age, based on hard rubbish day in the trendy inner-city suburb of Brunswick, gives you a flavour of the thing.

One thing that's striking about this sort of public recycling is how astonishingly efficient it is. When we were clearing out our UK house we had a bunch of things which we were unable to sell or take with us, so we put them as free items on Gumtree, an internet small-ads site. Everything we advertised had been picked up by the end of the day - old barbecues and bikes, a filing cabinet, a folding card table...

Hard rubbish day is clearly coming up around here, although I've not checked the calendar. In the past few days we've seen:

• One large television with the corner kicked in


• One art deco three-door wardrobe, doors removed, some scratching on one side


• One kitchen chopping-block trolley thing, with a castor missing


• One flatscreen computer monitor, left under a hedge close to Bondi Beach


• A mattress spring frame, with a few wisps of foam attached


• Two sofas, both without cushions


• Several 80s-style tube-and-wicker dining chairs, all smashed in different ways

Of course, it is possible that hard rubbish day is nowhere near and this is just the general informal recycling that goes on much of the time in Australian suburbs. The spirit of hard rubbish day certainly spreads year-round: I remember when we were last leaving Sydney, Kate left a couple of dozen Buffy review videos she'd received from work in a box outside the house with a sign saying they worked and were free. They were all gone within a couple of hours.

Jasper's prison diary: Part 3

Tuesday, November 17 - I think, though all the timing seems wrong

So, we have landed. I think Chairman Meow was misinformed - this is not the hellish limbo he described, although it is certainly hot as hell. My winter coat was just approaching its full glory a few days ago - if the weather doesn't turn soon I'm going to have to shed it altogether.

Still no sign of the humans. I have been taken to some sort of penitentiary on the outskirts of the city. The usual indignities were performed by a vet on arrival, but I am almost immune to such behaviour now, and now at last I have a place to sleep out of earshot of those damned Yorkies. I have a concrete cell with a plastic box full of bedding on a sort of mezzanine floor. There is what passes for a metal ladder joining this to the ground, but it must have been built for a chihuahua because I can barely turn around on it.

I have been spending most of my time sitting by the grille looking out on the lawn. By the gods, it is hot! I'm feeling too tired to do anything much, and the light hurts my eyes if I look up at the sky. I have noticed one good thing, though: they're feeding me only biscuits. As long as this sun doesn't addle my brain and make me confuse them with the litter tray, I could get used to this.

But where are the humans?

Addendum: the nonsense side of green resolutions...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="320" caption="Thermal image of a kettle boiling"][/caption]

I got a bit of inspiration for my list from this piece on the Guardian site. But I'm pretty sceptical about the article in general, particularly the estimates about how much CO2 you will save through particular actions. It seems to me that the actions suggested are a mix of genuine and fairly verifiable carbon-saving measures and more amorphous bits of contemporary middle-class do-goodism that don't have any real effect on emissions, and may in fact increase them.

One quick example: they reckon you can save 200 kilos of carbon dioxide a year through "never buying ready meals or processed food". Now I'm sure that lots of people consider this a laudable ambition on a par with eating only organic and knitting your own yoghurt; and I really don't know enough about food production to say for certain that it's not true; but intuitively it seems completely backwards.

Take processed foods. Which is more energy-efficient, a glass of freshly-squeezed pineapple juice, or a glass of the processed stuff? Assuming the fruit are all from the same source, the energy-efficiency basically comes down to packaging, processing, transport, and wastage.

• There's probably more packaging in the processed variety, because whereas both will probably be moved around in wooden pallets and cardboard crates, the processed juice will be in a can or bottle which can be recycled but will still cost some energy.


• As far as processing is concerned, the pre-processed juice is likely to be more energy efficient. For the pineapple-processor, energy is likely to be the second-biggest cost after labour, and so if they're smart they will be making efforts to reduce it. They will be processing on a mass scale, rather than using an inefficient home juicer that you switch on once a week. Commercial fruit-processing machines these days are no doubt marketed with rising energy and carbon prices in mind.


• For transport, the pre-processed juice is way out in front. My rough guess would be that a kilo of pineapples yields about 400g of juice. Add say 100g for a can or bottle and you're still carting only half as much mass around for the same quantity of juice in your breakfast glass. Kate grew up in pineapple country in Queensland and they process that stuff right next to the farms. So essentially, juicing a kilo of unprocessed Sunshine Coast pineapple in Sydney involves transporting 500g of waste material for 1,000km before sending it to landfill or for composting in another farming area outside the city.


• Wastage is the other factor. Canned pineapple juice lasts for at least a year without additives or preservatives, and more or less every pineapple grown on the farm goes into some part of the production line. Whereas the fresh variety will involve wastage at the wholesale, retail, and domestic stages, when someone over-orders, old pineapples go off, a crate gets knocked on the ground etc. There are probably cases where there's simply massive oversupply and whole acres of crop are just ploughed into fertiliser because they can't get a worthwhile price; but the existence of a flexible processing industry probably reduces the likelihood of this happening, by providing a safety-valve and letting farmers arbitrage between current low prices and future prices.

Anyway, this is getting a very long post but you get the idea. The same principles probably apply to ready meals to an even greater extent.

I love home-cooking but coming up with spurious arguments to make people feel morally superior about doing it bores me. Processed food may not always be as tasty as the home-made variety but it's often as good as any available alternative and I would be prepared to bet that, more often than not, it's more energy-efficient. The fact that we can afford to eat non-local, non-seasonal produce in an unprocessed form at all these days is a sign of how low energy costs are for most people in developed countries.

Green resolutions

No sooner had I posted up my New Year's resolutions than I realised I had made a pact with a friend (buy her book!) to come up with some green new year's resolutions,

1. Travel: Avoid overseas flights this year unless they're absolutely necessary, and next time I travel to Melbourne/Brisbane/Canberra go by train, at least to see what it's like. Offset air transport carbon through Carbon Planet, one of the more trustworthy offsetting outfits. Don't buy a car, and only use the carshare car for absolutely essential trips. Buy a bike and try to use it whenever possible for trips northeast of the seven-kilometre radius line.

2. Food: Eat meat as a main item no more than two days a week (meat as flavouring, eg a bit of pancetta in a soffrito, is allowed as long as it’s v small quantities). Only eat sustainable seafood, as outlined here. Get a compost bin if the landlord permits it, and use it.

3. Household: Make the house incandescent-free. Switch off lights if I'm not in the room. Get a rainwater butt if the landlord permits it, and use it for indoor and outdoor plants.

I feel a bit of a fraud because a lot of these I already do or won't find very hard to switch to. And there's get-out clauses aplenty in things like travel, which I find hard to cut back on. But anyone reading this can pick me up if they catch me breaking any of the rules.

What will I find hardest? I'll miss Tasmanian scallops, a lot (I'm hoping there's some other sort of scallop I can get away with eating) and I love the soft glow of light from an unoccupied room at night. Transport carbon could quickly get quite expensive, and I'm sure I'm going to struggle to replace the bus with a bike for as many short trips as I ought.

Jasper's prison diary: Part 2

Monday, November 16 - later

I have to say, economy class has gone to the dogs since I last flew. Literally - there's a trio of Yorkshire Terriers sat directly opposite me right now who I might just have to murder if their damned yapping gets any worse. Plus: no aperitifs, no warm towels, not even one of those dusty bags of rice snacks they force on everyone. Just a top-up of water through the bars of my cage. This must be that Ryanair I've heard about.

The flight, to be fair, has been pretty smooth so far, if interminable. Over the yammering of the dogs I have been able to exchange some intelligence with a cat in the neighbouring cage, Chairman Meow. He claims we are being sent to a place that he had heard whispered about by other cats, a sort of limbo where animals must fend for themselves in the absence of humans. As evidence, he claims to have heard one of the handlers mentioning the name of this place, "a stray layer". I'm not quite convinced by this, and the phrase seems to remind me of something, if I could only remember what.

Anyway, racking my brains to think of it is more fun than sitting here doing nothing. They're showing 'Tropic Thunder' as the inflight movie. I think I'd get more stimulation and wit listening to the Yorkies.

Glorious

There was a slightly annoying column in the paper the other day going on about how everything in Sydney is crap but we do have amazing weather. Well I don't agree with the first part, but I do agree with the second. Or more specifically, we have the most amazing light: it makes colours more intense, beautifies otherwise ugly buildings and streets, and seems to inject a little germ of optimism into everyone's lives. The downside of this, I suppose, is the caricature of people not really caring about important stuff as long as the beer is cold and the barbecue is hot. But there's a reason they call it a sunny disposition.

I went out this evening to pick up a pizza. This is what was blazing at me all the way back home:

My New Year's resolutions

I am absolutely useless at New Year's resolutions, or resolutions of any sort, so take all this with a pinch of salt. But moving to a new country ought to be an opportunity to do new things, so here's my go:

1. Take classes in Mandarin, and learn a bit of it

2. Write something non-work related (and not an email) at least five times a week

3. Meet some new people who live near me! Not that there's anything wrong with the old ones...

4. Do lots of swimming. Aim at doing an ocean swim by the end of the year

5. Take at least one camping trip in the bush

6. Oh, and get a job. Layabout

I'll try to check back in when I achieve/give up/forget about each one

Jasper's prison diary: Part 1

Monday, November 16

I can hardly find mews to express the abominable events of the past few hours. As if I had not suffered enough in recent days: the constant scramble up onto the roof and through an open window to get inside the house; the noisy shivering of the sleeping humans inside every time the gusts blow open the curtains when I jump down; the indignities I suffered at the hands of that vet on Friday, the injections and the pills, being lifted by the armpits to be inspected for fleas and ticks (the impertinence of it!), not to mention the taking of my temperature. Suffice to say, the themometer wasn't put in my mouth.

But now I find myself kidnapped, seemingly with the consent of my humans. My prison is a cage about the size of a rabbit hutch, and I am surrounded by other similarly caged cats in the back of a vehicle that bumps and swerves to a destination I tremble to imagine. They put me here, with various coos and terms of affection that contrasted sharply with my treatment, and promised they would see me again soon.

Are they in some way involved in this dastardly plot? I have been racking my brains to work out who could have carried out such an infamous act. Was it Fluffles, feared kingpin of the Elgood Avenue string-dealers? Or Mrs Minxie? I had heard she was worried my testimony would bust her Woodside Road shakedown network wide open; every house on that street is in hock paying for treats as 'protection' against the mouse 'epidemic'.

Must hide this now. The van has come to a stop. The driver is coming round to the side door. What is this place?

Sentenced to transportation

Until six weeks ago I was a Londoner and so considered it my patriotic duty to complain about public transport. This is a favourite pastime for Londoners: in fact the phrase normally used (with typically British hyperbolic self-denigration) is that London has a "third-world public transport system". This always baffled me. Quite apart from the fact that a lot of third-world cities don't have public transport systems at all (unless you count tro-tros), London's underground/overground/buses are overall astonishingly comprehensive, efficient and (if you've got an Oyster card) even pretty good value.

The contrast with Sydney is stark. My current address is in North Bondi, an inner suburb just a short walk from one of the country's premier tourist attractions. But, to quote an Australian friend who lives up the road, you can wind up feeling like you're spending your life on buses round here. It's a 10-20 minute bus journey to get to Bondi Junction interchange, from which there are six trains an hour to the centre of the city, which takes a further 10 minutes. If you're planning to meet someone in the centre of Sydney, you're best leaving at least 40 minutes to make it there on public transport, although by car it's just 20 minutes.



This is the reverse of what I'm used to. In London I can't understand why people drive at all: it usually takes longer to get anywhere by car than by walking or taking the tube or a bus. From a relatively central suburb of Sydney, I spend longer getting to the centre of town than I would spend travelling from what in London counted as the desert of Zone 3, so far out that only bold friends dared visit. The situation is even worse in western Sydney, where you must either be able to afford to run a car for each member of the family who wants to leave the house, or put up with a two-hour commute to get to even the most central places.

What is stranger still is that many Sydneysiders seem to actively dislike public transport, to the extent that plans a few years ago to extend the CityRail network to Bondi Beach were canned due to objections from residents. A CityRail stop, they argued, would bring the wrong sorts of people to their beach, and make it more like Cronulla, a more working-class beach with a train stop in southern Sydney. Oddly enough, you don't hear the last part of that argument from Bondites these days. Maybe because it sounds a bit too close to the position of the folk who decided to preserve the, ahem, unique character of Cronulla a few years back by beating up Lebanese-Australians.

The effect of having such a parlous public transport system is fairly predictable. Residents of New South Wales own more cars per head than people in any other state of Australia, and car numbers are rising faster than population numbers. With energy prices, not to mention carbon prices, likely to grow massively in the next few years, the absence of any serious attempt to improve public transport infrastructure is seriously worrying in a city expected to add 40 per cent to its population by 2036. But it's sadly predictable as well: whereas there is money to be made by the state government from waving through residential and commercial property developments, improving transport infrastructure (even under a public-private model) requires the government to take on at least some of the risk and cost.

At the moment, New South Wales politicians seem to have neither the money, nor the vision, nor the will to do anything about that. Sydneysiders, for their part, seem far too attached to their cars to push for change.