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DAY 246: Experiencing great bonhomie at a glee club

It wasn't like this.

I HAVEN’T got the loveliest of timbres, truth be told, so when Esther – who provided the cynical backing track to our Heal Your Soul With Song experience – suggests we toddle off to a glee club, I’m apprehensive.

I’m picturing women in brightly coloured stockings and twee winter coats; Esther predicts gay men singing numbers from Starlight Express. Either way, when someone uses the words ‘hip’ or ‘funky’ in their online bumf, you know you’re going to have to check your pride at the door.

This glee get-together is held at South Melbourne’s charming Butterfly Club; a Victorian house with its parlour converted into a kitsch-cluttered lounge and the kitchen into a bar. It’s got a fairly clandestine entrance, which adds to the feeling that we’re slinking into somewhere shameful.

We cram into the front room with around 30 men and women, all clutching red wines, and not one of them looking particularly punchable. So far, so good.

Or this.

Glee hostess Vicky Jacobs has worked extensively coaching singers for musicals, and she has a warm, natural way about her. “I want her to run my life,” whispers Esther, brainwashed already.

Vicky runs us through some vocal exercises, each a tone higher than the last, so that we can discover our own comfortable pitch. I have a choking fit halfway through, which signifies I’ve passed mine already. I’m nervous that I’m going to vomit, because I used to trigger my gag reflex regularly when trying to sing along to screamy girl-bands in my teens. You know the ones – all jailbait dresses and photo shoots utilising raw meat.

Anyway, none of that here. We warm up with a run-through a ditty about some sailor whose flesh rots off his bones, sung in rounds. From there on, we sight-read our way through Solla Sollew, Chapel of Love, Falling Slowly and Over at the Frankenstein Place, singing in harmonies. En masse, it works, although I’m not ready for any solo spots. The songs sound so beautiful and forlorn that Esther and I grip our hearts and get goosebumps in rivulets… although I download the tracks later at home and it all suddenly feels a bit Sarah Brightman.

In the here and now, though, we’re filled with good cheer and wide-eyed about the whole experience. There’s a sense of stillness and robustness all at once. I may wind up rasping like Patty and Selma Bouvier for a few days, but I know I can get this feeling back.

Keeper? Yes.

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Categories cosmic shit, social death risk, specialist skills

DAY 244: Gassing the old girl

2 May

I’D thought ‘gas’ was American for ‘petrol’ – giggle – but no. I’ve been joyfully reunited with my ute, now fixed, and I’m filling it up with a bit of gas because it’s dual fuel and it needs a bit in the tank at all times.

I pump the gas into the connection and it hisses right back out again, forming a frozen pool by my shoe. After a few minutes of this I fill the other tank with petrol and get back in – once I’ve figured out how to get the passenger door open again.

Truth be told, I’m too nervous to drive the thing myself right now. As a first car for the nervously inclined it’s starting to look like a dubious choice, and my parallel parking lessons didn’t extend to skips on wheels. So I get Old Dog to peel off down the freeway, with the old girl making a curious tha-thunk noise whenever there’s a burst of acceleration. Atmosphere: tense.

Keeper? Avoiding gas wherever possible. This vehicle is starting to look like a year-long challenge in itself, grumble.

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Categories physical death risk, specialist skills

DAY 243: Eating my nemesis

1 May

Eel action shot. I just sicked in my mouth.

I’VE always had a morbid fear of eels.

I hear what you’re saying – sea snakes are worse – but perhaps because the English don’t eat jellied sea snakes and the beasts don’t hang out in rivers much* or star in porn films so regularly, they don’t rattle my cage.

The Mighty Boosh put it best when they mused:

Eels up inside ya
Findin an entrance where they can
Boring through your mind
Through your tummy
Through your anus
Eels!

This blog’s named after an Eels song, though, and it’s all about facing your fears, so I order an eel something-or-other at this café in Chinatown and get cracking.

I look a bit like an eel in this frock.

Fortunately, when the thing arrives it’s nicely grilled, and looks and tastes like a bit of white fish. If it was a foot long and covered in jelly, that would be a different story all together.

Keeper? Will have to tackle a jellied eel next in England. Then that’s it.

* Did you know: Eels don’t hang out in watering holes; they only like running water.

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Categories creatures, food and drink

DAY 242: Jumping the border

30 Apr

WE’VE hit three deserts in three days, and the tip of the furthermost desert, the Murray-Sunset National Park, stops just short of Mildura, a country city on the Vic/NSW border.

Mildura’s a hell of a weird place. It’s an agricultural epicentre, a fruit pickin’ town, but American in design: wide highways, numbered streets on a grid, outskirts that stretch on into oblivion with the biggest Bunnings I’ve ever seen, endless motels, three drive-thru McDonalds within five minutes… all lined with palm trees. The larger district’s known as Sunraysia – so named when the ‘prince of ballyhoo’, local entrepreneur Jack De Garis, launched a competition to name the area’s dried fruits in 1919. Thrashes ‘Orange County’, I reckon.

The town centre itself is nearly swallowed whole, but eventually we find it – a mall and a strip of souvlaki joints jumbled up with fancy restaurants.

We’re here to see the Murray River, though, which doesn’t disappoint. We follow it out of town, as the bush pirate’s cortisol levels are going through the roof here, and hook up with it again the other side of Robinvale.

The Murray River acts as the NSW/Victoria border, so by jumping in I’ll be crossing into my third state in three days. There’s a beautiful sunset going on, which makes whizzing off down the river in a rip at least very scenic. Eventually I manage to engage some kind of a front crawl and get back to the bank. Stunning.

Keeper? Would definitely do that again.

Comments 1 Comment
Categories idiocy

DAY 241: Bothering bees

29 Apr

AS we approach the Little Desert on our road trip, we pass this unmanned platoon of beehives, and the bush pirate bid me run through them.

They’re pretty passive bees it has to be said, zigzagging through the air drunkenly. A few try to nest in my hair, but I’m not chased back to the car, so there’s little comedic value.

Keeper? No.

Categories creatures, idiocy

DAY 240: Having a good old streak

28 Apr

A FRIEND recently told me about a mission he undertook a few years back to streak in every suburb in Sydney – for which he nearly came a cropper in Redfern.

I do like the sound of that mission, but I can’t help thinking it’s ill-advised for a lady, unless accompanied by an escort. So I go for a dry run in the desert.

The desert responds.

Keeper? Yes.

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Categories idiocy

DAY 239: Getting busted by the pumpkin cops

27 Apr

Ha. Ha.

ON the edge of the Big Desert, feral pumpkins roam the land like unloved kids. At first we deduce some must have scarpered under the fence from a farmer’s field and made a break for it, but they’re bloody everywhere.

They huddle at the sides of dirt tracks, make a run for it across great expanses of scrub and freeze when you turn around, so that they’re scattered like so many sinister pods in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

We jump out of the ute and break green globes free from their vines, fired up with joy as though this sudden glut of vegetables has taken on some magical significance. Scattered around are tiny yellow balls with soft spikes, like the useless toys you find up near the till in useless tat shops. We have a baby pumpkin fight and I squash one in my palm to lick it. It explodes like a tomato, but it doesn’t taste good.

I climb up into the ute tray with the vegetable matter and hold on to the rack, ducking low-slung trees as the bush pirate goes chundering down Border Track, quite deliberately exploding rogue pumpkins as he goes.

The main road between Victoria and South Australia is punctuated by a Fruit Fly Quarantine Station, which means the number’s up for our new friends.

“Why is everyone so obsessed with our poisonous pumpkins?” one of the two uniformed women approaching the ute says incredulously. I can still taste deadly cucurbita on my lips. Suddenly we feel foolish for being so excited at our haul.

“Roll them over there with all the others,” she says, pointing at the undergrowth where hundreds of pumpkins have already fallen.

The border cops are nice enough though, looking after the rest of our hoard while we head into the nearest SA town to see what gives. You can’t blame them for being jaded – they’ve seen it all.

The neighbouring town’s a welcoming place, and we’ve a warm, fuzzy feeling by the time we pull up to the fruit fly quarantine station again. And here’s our friend with our cooler bag of dangerous salad leaves.

“We’re going to tell people it’s full of cocaine,” quips the bush pirate as we take her picture handing it over.

“That’s okay, we went through it,” she says, “it’s not in there anymore.”

Cheeky.

Keeper? Gone right off pumpkins.

Categories food and drink, idiocy

DAY 238: Spotting my first Australian snake

26 Apr

I’VE been trying to spot a snake ’most every day since I moved to Australia five years ago, with no joy.

Today in the Big Desert we stumble across two – a brown one in the road that looks like it’s been squeezed like a raw sausage until it split its casing, and a black one that’s had its spine broken by a car.

Having expressed remorse, some hours after spotting the brown snake, that I didn’t pick it up and do something interesting with it, the bush pirate seizes the chance to hand me the black snake when when he spots it in the road. Erm, grouse.

Keeper? Ready for a wriggler now.

Comments 1 Comment
Categories creatures

DAY 237: Pulling a pot in a country pub

25 Apr

The Pinnaroo Hotel.

WE’VE just crossed the border from Victoria to South Australia; first stop Pinnaroo.

Pinnaroo (pop. 900) is a no-nonsense, dusty sort of a town, peppered with railway tracks, silos, and the biggest specimens of farming equipment I’ve ever seen. It’s a town that sees itinerant workers passing through, although since the spud wash* closed a couple of years back, it’s been struggling a bit.

While I charge my iPhone and laptop like a nonce in the games room of the spotless Pinnaroo Hotel, and worry about where I can find a latte, the bush pirate pulls up a pew at the bar. He sinks a bunch of beers with the manager, Phil, who looks a bit like Dennis Hopper.

For a loner, the bush pirate sure can talk. By the time I come out, he’s learned the lay of the land, secured us multiple suggestions of swimming holes, an invitation to the local ATV race, told Phil all about this blog, and persuaded him to let me pull a pot behind the bar of his country pub so that I can add that to my list of things done. I pour Phil and the bush pirate a pot each, and Phil says they’re on the house.

“That’s a fucking great idea, that is,” he says, and wishes me luck on my quest.

“Hoo roo from Pinnaroo” a road sign bids as we leave.