Two Countries, One Cistern

Strictly Ballroom with a stabbing

2018-09-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

When I first lobbed in Hong Kong way back in the early 1990s, someone I knew roped me into doing some ballroom dancing classes in deepest Causeway Bay at Paul Bishop's sprawling dance school. Imagine my surprise a few years later when I was back there as the feature writer for the South China Morning Post's Postmagazine, on the scent of a drama that made Baz Luhrmann's sequinned epic look tame.

LIFE mirrors art. Truth is stranger than fiction. And in Hong Kong, a further general rule applies - any confluence of arty life and weird truth will quickly find its way onto the big screen.

Strictly ballroom: Or is there, in those pants?

It is almost certain that, even as you read, script writers are scribbling, casting directors are casting and celluloid is whirring as a host of low-rent Shamshuipo production houses jostle to be first to bring the twisted Terpsichorean tale of Scott Todd and Chan Ming-ming to a cinema near you.

The plot is equal parts Strictly Ballroom, sordidly bedroom and sadly courtroom; just your average boy-meets-girl, boy-dances-with-girl, boy-dumps-girl, girl-stabs-boy kind of story.

Quirky uber-waif Faye Wong would be perfect for the part of Chan Ming-ming, the tall, slim divorced mother-of-one who was quick-stepped off her feet by the oily charm of her teenage dance instructor. Perhaps Chris Bale could be tempted from television to the silver screen to play Paul Bishop, the balding dance instructor to the rich and famous who plucked Todd from obscurity in Manchester to unleash him on Hong Kong's light-footed ladies-who-lunch.

Scott Todd: Blood on the dancefloor

Lydia 'Fei Fei' Shum seems tailor-made for the role of the mystery matron named in court as Jenny Choi, a dumpy but loaded businesswoman who, dance insiders say, won Todd's affections with a fat wad of cash to bankroll his new dance school.

And for the starring role as the snake-hipped, slick-coiffed Don Juan of the dance floor, why not . . . Scott Todd? With his taste for the high-life, his smooth-talking self-confidence and talent for the tango, he seems a natural for the movie business. Let us blur the boundaries between art and life a bit further and ask him to play himself.

Now, only the dramatic denouement remains unresolved. Will Chan, convicted last week of wounding Todd with intention to cause him grievous bodily harm, be sentenced to prison or has she won the sympathy of wise-cracking Judge Chua Fi-lan? Will Todd become Hong Kong's new ballroom king, snaring the lion's share of the fox-trotting tai-tais as he rides into the sunset in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes? Or will Bishop cement his supremacy, crushing the upstart monster he created under his patent leather heels and dancing the fruity rhumba on his remains? We can but wait, breathless, as the band strikes up for the next thrilling whirl around the floor in this drawn-out and dirtiest of dances.

There can only be one: Paul Bishop, Hong Kong's
undisputed fuhrer of Foxtrot

LIFE mirrors art. Truth is stranger than fiction. And occasionally, writers blunder into some dumb luck that helps their story. By sheer co-incidence, I happened to attend several dance classes at Bishop's sprawling Academy of Dance around the time of Scott Todd's arrival in Hong Kong.

It provided an enlightening peep into the territory's ballroom dancing world; an odd oasis of swirling elegance, stirring music, mirrors, tea dances and high camp, perched above the consumer frenzy that is Causeway Bay. Though Bishop would deny it, even then there seemed an unspoken tension between the two men. The old stag, for so many years the undisputed head of the herd, now ruffled by the presence of the thrusting young buck.

Says one regular at the school: 'It's always been a bit fiery between Paul and his wife, Rozana - they were always arguing and she stormed off lots of times. I think possibly Scott's presence added to that.

'Paul is the one who's a former champion but he kept on saying things like, 'Oh, Scott's much better than me, he's much younger, he can move much better. I mean, it's true Paul is getting on a bit now, there's a bit of middle-aged spread. I know a lot of the women would want to dance with Scott. I doubt Paul would agree, but maybe there was a bit of jealousy or insecurity on his part.

'There hadn't really been a young, attractive male teacher there before, so when Scott started he sent a few hearts fluttering. The whole scene really is so Strictly Ballroom, people are always bitching about other people's dancing and, of course, there is always that sexual tension when you have bodies rubbing against each other.' Todd seemed less than impressed at having to help a bunch of beginners blunder their way through the paso doble. In his high-waisted black pants and billowing white shirt, he pouted, primped and preened, giving the distinct impression he had bigger fish to fry. Bishop, meanwhile, bellowed like a music hall master of ceremonies and whirled round the room like a typhoon, imperilling his precarious comb-over.

Todd's track record as a competitive dancer seems as pedestrian as Bishop's is distinguished. Bishop is a four-time undefeated British champion and winner of many world and European titles and has spent 18 years teaching the likes of Anson Chan, Baroness Dunn and Stanley Ho.

Todd lists among his achievements being a UK champion. However, one of Britain's most experienced ballroom teachers and judges, who asked not to be named, says Todd was a competent junior dancer but no world-beater. 'I judged him once in a competition and he wasn't bad but I didn't see him as champion material,' she says. 'I remember he had a lot of trouble finding a partner and for a young, attractive boy that seemed very strange. He certainly was not a big name dancer in England - no comparison to Paul when he was at his peak.' Bishop recruited Todd after he was recommended by a teacher in Manchester, and he joined the school in March last year. Although just 19, he was introduced to students as a 29-year-old. Todd claims putting up his age was Bishop's idea to make him seem more experienced; Bishop says he was hoodwinked by Todd.

Whatever his experience and credentials, there is no disputing that Todd was a hit from the start with the ladies. Bishop, citing advice from his lawyer, has declined to speak about Todd or the stabbing incident.

But a spokesman for the school says Todd quickly struck up a serious relationship with an attractive young Chinese female student. Within two months, he had moved out of a fully-furnished, rent-subsidised flat in Caine Road provided for him by the school to cohabit with her, amid an announcement of their engagement. Todd just as quickly lost interest, however, and moved out while his fiancee was away in Europe on a business trip.

'We believe he had become involved with someone else at the school,' says the spokesman. 'Around that time, we were warned by a couple of long-time, wealthy female clients of the school to 'be careful' of Scott. Up until then, we were perfectly happy with him.

'He was tall, good-looking and a good teacher. But right from the start, he seemed to have an eye for the main chance. Some of the women only wanted to be taught by him, and others specifically requested that they did not want to dance with Scott.' While he refused to take calls from his jilted fiancee, she deposited a tear-stained, heart-rending letter at the school, pledging her undying love. 'I cannot sleep. There are no more tears I can cry . . . maybe you just wanted to play. Maybe you just looked at me as a nightclub girl,' she pined.

It is one of a collection of such letters from various female students which turned up at the school and now sit in a 'Scott Todd' file. The file also contains phone bills sent to the school for thousands of dollars worth of overseas calls that ex-girlfriends say he made from their homes.

The spokesman says Todd began living 'the high life', frequenting karaoke bars and expensive restaurants, wining and dining a selection of the school's well-to-do clients. 'Some mornings he'd come in looking like death, and have a shower and shave at the school. Although I must say he always was tidy and well-groomed by the time he got to class.' Teachers were advised to keep relationships with students on a strictly professional basis and signed contracts explicitly forbidding teaching outside the school. Despite this, the spokesman says the school has proof that on a number of occasions when Todd called in sick, he was actually off giving private lessons.

'It was pretty dumb because some of the people were pupils of the school. One woman called up when Scott was supposed to be off sick, saying he hadn't showed up for a private lesson he had arranged with her. One time, he had a row with one of his girlfriends when he was in charge of a social night and he just stormed out, leaving all these people without an MC.

'On December 16, when he had called in sick, we found out he had hosted a big dinner at Hugo's at the Hyatt Regency for some well-known and affluent pupils of ours. We found out when one of them sent in a thank-you note for the dinner.'

TODD'S ill-fated romance with the willowy divorcee Chan Ming-ming blossomed on July 5 with a tryst at the Regal Hotel. She says later that month Todd asked if he could borrow $15,000. On August 16, she says she lent him another $15,000. 'Around this time, I heard rumours that he was a playboy and that he was younger than he said,' she told the District Court.

Paul Bishop and his crew bust a move

Todd was not the only one less than honest about his age, however. He claims the 40-year-old Chan duped him into believing she was 33. Chan staged a test of Todd's fidelity, pretending to go on a trip to Shanghai while remaining in the territory. He apparently passed with flying colours.

On August 29, she lent him another $6,000. She says he also asked her to pay the $3,500 due for that month's rent at his Chai Wan boarding house. She also bought him a dinner suit, using her credit card. Todd told the court a different story, claiming he owed her nothing. He also claimed she was the two-timer and suggested her relationship with Bishop went beyond the professional (an accusation Bishop strenuously denies).

Between August and December, the relationship deteriorated into a sporadic, on-again, off-again affair, according to Chan. Todd maintains the relationship was riven by arguing. He says the relationship ended on October 10, blaming 'cultural differences and interference from Bishop'.

Shortly after Todd moved out, Chan detected a lump in her right breast, which was diagnosed as cancerous. On November 11, a total mastectomy was performed. She did not tell Todd about the operation, merely saying that she was 'going away'. When she was discharged, she telephoned Todd, who picked her up from hospital and stayed with her until December 24, when he said he was returning to England to visit his parents. Chan says when she heard he had remained in Hong Kong, she began to call him.

From here, their stories diverge sharply.

According to Todd, he answered a call from Chan on January 20 this year at the dance school, to be told she had emptied his room at the boarding house to punish him. He discovered she had done so, and threatened to call the police unless she returned his belongings.

The following day, he was conducting private classes at the school, and returned to his room to find his things had not been returned. He left to buy a shirt and, on the way, dropped back into the school. When he arrived, Chan was speaking to Bishop. He declined an invitation from Chan to dance with her. Chan then told him she wished to return a 'plastic holder' to him.

He was about to leave when Bishop asked him to take care of the music while he went to freshen up. At the music counter, Chan joined him, putting her bag on the bench and dabbing at her face with a tissue. She called his name and as he turned, plunged a knife into the right side of his abdomen.

'I remember falling to the ground. She crouched down with the knife in her right hand and was going to stab me again. I remember I took my left hand and knocked her right hand and the knife landed on my right thigh. It looked as if she was going to stab me again, so I took her wrist and shouted for help,' he said. During the struggle, a cabinet full of dance trophies came crashing to the floor.

Chan, however, denied emptying his room and said she merely took back some shirts she gave him and a sweater she knitted. On the day of the stabbing, she called up the school to check if Todd was there, and on learning he was not, decided to attend.

When he arrived, however, she twice invited him to dance, and then came up to the record counter to ask him to return the $36,000 he owed her. He told her brusquely, 'No way' and stamped on her right foot. When she looked up, he was brandishing a knife, which she tried to push away, cutting her fingers. They struggled and fell to the ground.

To bolster her defence, Chan's barrister, Paul Wu, produced photographs of two knives in their sheaves and an empty sheaf at the record counter, all of which were of the same well-known German brand. Bishop gave evidence that when the school opened, someone had purchased the three knives, along with other cutlery, plates and cups. Bishop was unable to explain, however, why they were in a tool-box behind the counter instead of in the pantry with the rest of the cutlery.

IT is 9.20 am on July 5 and I am first to arrive in the crimson and pine surrounds of District Court 29. Two minutes later, the door creaks open and a tousle-haired woman clad in a tight black skirt and an apricot cashmere top swishes into the court room.

Her mouth is set in a nervous smirk but her eyes reflect baffled panic, like a deer caught in a hunter's spotlight. Looking confused, vulnerable and anything but a fire-spitting, knife-wielding harpy, she sits next to me in the front row of the public gallery, shooting accusing glances at my pen and notebook.

Given this golden opportunity to get an exclusive quote or two, my mind promptly goes blank. Finally, I lean over and astound myself with a searing, incisive question: 'How are you feeling today?' Chan Ming-ming utters an embarrassed cough and looks in the other direction, just in time to spot her lawyer, Helen Chung, striding into court. She is whisked away to safety and spared further such searching probes.

The court fills up with reporters and onlookers. A little after 9.30, we are standing to acknowledge the arrival of Judge Chua, chiefly famous for branding a fraud artist a 'typical male', suggesting a burglar study Tom Cruise in Cocktail as a role model, and raising the Chief Justice's ire by asking reporters not to publish a recent stinging attack on Singapore's judiciary. With her big wig and elfin features, she is making heavy weather of looking stern. She gives a precis of the evidence heard during the case, then gets down to business.

'I'm afraid I must reject the defence version of the incident and the photographs [of the knives] as being deliberately fabricated,' she intones. 'In contrast with his flashy clothes, Todd answered the questions put to him in a restrained, matter-of-fact way.' One reporter who covered the case from start to finish concurs, describing his demeanour as 'cold and controlled, although when he was pressed you could see the muscles in his cheek twitching, like he was trying hard to keep control'.

Looking daggers: Not Throstur, the robocop of Rhumba

'The defendant,' Judge Chua continues, 'is an attractive woman of good character. She revealed from many things that poured out of her in the witness box that she had become deeply infatuated with Todd. Her loneliness made her vulnerable and insecure . . . [Todd] fetched her from hospital and stayed with her through much of December, and I think this is to his credit. It must have been traumatic for the defendant to discover she had cancer, and with barely any time to mentally prepare for it, she had to face major surgery alone.' Chan, now immured in the dock, begins to dab at her eyes as the judge sympathises with this 'devastating experience'.

'I believe she carried a knife from home and went to the dance school in the hope he would turn up for the tea dance. Finally, she stabbed him.' In a statement to police given from hospital on the night of the incident, Chan recounted how Todd 'deceived me of my money and deceived me to have sex with him, and I intended to stab him to death and commit suicide.' She later claimed that the statement was fabricated and she had been tricked into making a confession, which Judge Chua rejects. 'I find Todd's version of events is supported by the medical evidence . . . he is 170 pounds on a six-foot frame to her 110 pounds. But she had the element of surprise on her side.' Bishop comes in for a pasting at the judge's hands for his evidence about the knives and for testifying that his visit to Chan's lawyer while a conference about the case was in progress, despite being a witness for the prosecution, was a 'coincidence'.

'I found Bishop a deplorable witness . . . Bishop's statement to police two days after the incident went into some detail about the debris cleared from the floor behind the counter. Significantly, there is no mention of the knives or an empty sheath . . . I think this contrived piece of evidence of the knives was thought up by him. One can only hope Bishop's unedifying display of left-footed canards indicates a lack of practice at lying in daily life.' (Bishop's spokesman says the school's principal maintains all the evidence he gave was 'truthful and factual').

Judge Chua convicts Chan, but releases her on bail and adjourns sentencing until this coming Friday. She voices her 'total sympathy' for Chan and says she is considering community service rather than prison.

NOEL Coward once quipped that 'the only thing you don't move in the rhumba is your bowels.' What the rhumba could not accomplish, however, Chan nearly did - the stabbing has left Todd with a jagged 20 centimetre scar zig-zagging across his abdomen. Several inches lower, and strictly ballroom might have taken on a whole new meaning.

In his only public comment on the case, he told a Post reporter several weeks ago that 'it happened so fast and I was just trying to get away from her. The pain was intense. The first two weeks were hell. I couldn't stand up on my own. I couldn't walk, wash or dress myself . . . I don't know if I feel angry. I would say I'm more confused. I just don't understand why she did it.' He was fired shortly after being released from hospital. Bishop's spokesman says after being discharged, Todd refused to tell Bishop where he was staying or to discuss when he would resume teaching. The school's board of directors met and decided to sack him.

He has since opened his own establishment - Scott's Dancing School - a stone's throw from Bishop's in Times Tower, Jaffe Road. Whether from laziness or cheekiness, the flyers detailing his class schedules are almost identical to those of the Academy of Dance.

'Paul and his wife feel betrayed and heartbroken over what he's done,' says the spokesman. 'We paid him well, set him up in a flat, even gave him free lessons to help him upgrade his qualifications. For less than five hours work a day, he was averaging $35,000 a month. But we don't mind the competition - he's only poached three or four couples from us.' Police who investigated the case and staff at Bishop's school maintain Todd became romantically involved with the wealthy Jenny Choi, who they say helped pay to set up his school. Chan also gave evidence in court that, on one occasion, when she was in bed with Todd in his room, Choi was knocking and whispering at the door. Todd staunchly denies any relationship with Choi, although he has been seen arriving at his dance school in a shiny, chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

THE day before a scheduled interview with Todd, at which he has promised to recount in detail his recent adventures, I receive a call from his secretary. 'Mr Todd will have to postpone the interview. He can't possibly see you. He's really very sick.' Somewhat sceptical, I arrive in the chrome and marble foyer of his school the next day anyway and come face-to-face with a decidedly robust and healthy-looking Todd. Before I can even identify myself, he turns on his heel and disappears through frosted glass doors into a well-appointed studio. Seconds later, his diminutive secretary is sent out to state that there will not be any interview - today, tomorrow or ever. 'Can you please leave. Mr Todd is not interested in talking to you.' I inform her that I will remain where I am until her boss has the good grace to at least explain his change of mind and his miraculous recovery. After several minutes of to-ing and fro-ing, Todd and an enormous sidekick burst through the door. This, it transpires, is Iceland's contribution to the ballroom dancing world - Todd's new instructor, Throstur Johannson. He is the size of - and sounds like - Arnold Schwarzenegger. 'You. Must. Leave. Please. Leave. Now,' he growls, grasping my arm in a cyborg-like claw and jabbing furiously at the lift button. Todd has not uttered a word.

The doors slide open and Throstur none too gently thrusts me inside. As the doors slam shut, I almost, but not quite, manage to resist announcing in my best Terminator voice that 'I'll be back'. You see, sometimes life mirrors art and sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. And maybe, just maybe, Arnie will be available to play Throstur, the Robocop of rhumba.

The King and us

2018-08-21T17:20:00.000-07:00

One of the most bizarre entries in the fairly weird collection of yarns I penned for the South China Morning Post's Postmagazine was joining the Hong Kong Elvis Presley Fan Club on its trip of a lifetime, a pilgrimage to Graceland for the Candlelight vigil and stations of the cross observed each year in Memphis, Tennessee by the true believers.

FOR three nights running now, the King has come to me in my dreams. Conjured by a combination of greasy junk food, Deep South humidity and serious sensory overload, he wafts into my subconscious as a giant, disembodied head. Not beefy, bloated Las Vegas Elvis, but the preternaturally beautiful young Hillbilly Cat. His airbrushed skin kissing the inky lustre of his soaring pompadour like a peach on black velvet; the perfect pink cupid's bow mouth curling up at one corner. And as I'm transfixed by those sad soft glazed eyes, an unshakeable conviction takes hold. Elvis is about to eat me. His lips part to reveal a graveyard of rotting teeth and a grotesquely swollen tongue, drooling hungrily. As the King moves in to chow down, I awake with a jolt and a stifled shriek, a sweaty wreck in a sodden bed.

In his pomp(adour): The Hillbilly Cat

Strange? Sure. But it would be stranger not to have such visions after a few days immersed in the madness that is Memphis in August. For when the going gets weird, it seems the seriously weird go to Graceland. The ante-bellum mansion has become Mecca, Calvary and Varanasi for the ever-swelling ranks of true believers coming to commemorate the death - and lucrative resurrection - of Elvis Aaron Presley.

In these sacred surrounds, the quirky quickly becomes the quotidian; the bizarre, banal. Where within a week, you can attend the Elvis for Everyone Convention, rival Elvis impersonator contests, the Heart of Elvis show, the Elvis Fan Club Festival, the Elvis: Legacy in Light Laser Show, Elvis Video Nights, the Elvis Reunion Concert, the University of Oxford International Conference on Elvis Presley (topics to include The Elvis Connection to Feminine Spirituality and Understanding Your Inner Elvis, along with a guest performance by San Francisco Lesbian impersonator Elvis Herselvis) and, bafflingly, even the Elvis Presley International five-kilometre Run. Where you can stuff yourself with fried peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwiches and empty your wallet on all manner of Kingly kitsch.

But that is to jump ahead of the story. We are here in the eye of Typhoon Elvis with six members of the International Elvis Presley Fan Club's Hong Kong chapter, who have travelled halfway around the world on a solemn pilgrimage to worship at the altar of the King. Meet club founder Regina Cheung, vice-president Katima Khan, and paid-up, card-carrying members Mabel Lee, Elsa Yuen, Tina Lam and, yes, Elvisina Tang.

Despite what might seem the excessive devotion denoted by the latter's choice of moniker, these ladies actually tend towards the saner end of the Elvis fandom spectrum, in that they boast not a single Elvis tattoo or white jumpsuit between them, nor do any profess to have fathered the King's love child or spotted him serving up slurpees in a 7-Eleven. What unites them - and tens of thousands of other pilgrims - is a forgiving and unquestioning love of their idol; a love that transcends the cheeseburgers and amphetamines, that rises above the weird obsessions and the snivelling sycophants. A love that draws them inexorably to Graceland, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee ...

Graceland, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee

IT IS August 13 - a sweaty Memphis morning some 18 years and 362 days since the King toppled from his porcelain throne. We are about to embark on the Graceland tour, which, along with a visit to Elvis' birthplace, Tupelo, and the Candlelight Vigil, has become one of the stations of the cross for the King's disciples.

Graceland perches on a hill to the southeast of Downtown Memphis, set back from the imaginatively named Elvis Presley Boulevard, a depressing street of strip clubs, fast food joints and pawn shops. We have assembled in the plaza across the road - an oasis of the odd and the otiose, encompassing the Elvis Presley Auto Museum, an enclosure where his two private jets are grounded, a movie theatre relentlessly repeating an Elvis documentary urging us to 'Walk A Mile In My Shoes', and store after store after store hawking anything to which Elvis' image can be affixed.

Elvis clocks and Elvis fridge magnets and Elvis pens and Elvis T-shirts and Elvis jeans and Elvis sunglasses and Elvis posters and Elvis jigsaws and Elvis black velvet portraits and Elvis wind-chimes and Elvis badges and Elvis keyrings and Elvis temporary tattoos and Elvis mouse pads and Elvisopoly and Elvis shake-up snowstorms and Elvis ashtrays and Elvis dolls and Elvis limited edition porcelain plates and Elvis teaspoons and Elvis notepads and Elvis sloppy-joes and Elvis toilet brushes and Elvis blow-up sex dolls.

Well, OK, I made up the last two. But you get the idea. Graceland Inc, which Priscilla Presley set up after the King croaked and which exercises a paranoid, litigious stranglehold over his legacy, rakes in more than US$300 million (HK$2.34 billion) a year from this kind of, er, crap.

In part of the plaza, near two immensely fat women signing up people for limited-edition Elvis Mastercards, we browse around the fruits of an Elvis art contest, tributes to the King in pencil, pastels and oils. Outside, under a tent, one of a promised all-day line-up of Elvis impersonators is belting through a slightly off-key Viva Las Vegas.

His reedy voice almost gets lost in the miasma of perspiration and cheap perfume swirling under the tent. Great sweat stains, their epicentres in his armpits and groin, work their way across the red jumpsuit straining over a ponderous gut. All about the plaza, impersonators ranging from the good, the bad to the mind-bogglingly awful - some in civvies, some in full regalia - are strutting about, posing for photographs, practising their moves, and saying, in their best baritone mumbles, things like 'thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen'. Some have a modicum of talent, and might even get to compete in one of the impersonator contests. Others are, without doubt, completely deranged.

Mabel is clutching a handcrafted plaque featuring a white-jumpsuited Elvis partly hidden by an unfolded Chinese fan that reads 'One World, One King', to place in the Meditation Garden behind Graceland where Elvis and his parents lie buried. 'Some people think we're crazy, but we all love Elvis in our own way,' says Katima as we wait. 'This is our tribute to Elvis from the 300 members of the club and all his Hong Kong fans.' Each is clad in matching fan club T-shirts designed by Mabel, a graphic artist with the Provisional Airport Authority, who is still buzzing from meeting DJ Fontana, Elvis' drummer, on the King Creole Riverboat Cruise last night.

Just say no: Special Agent Elvis strikes a blow against drugs

Regina, a sales manager for a sports bag exporter who founded the Hong Kong fan club in 1968, recounts how earlier in the morning the group was handed a thrashing in an impromptu trivia quiz challenge by a group of fans from Michigan. 'You had to identify which movie a piece of dialogue was from - they were too good,' she admits.

Each has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Elvis, however, and my puny attempts to test their Elvis knowledge meet with polite giggles and ready answers. They have all been fans since their teenage years or younger, turned on to Elvis by friends, siblings or a chance snatch of a song on the radio. Katima, a footwear merchandiser, says she has 20 of Elvis' 31 movies at home and will not be content until she has collected them all. Kid Galahad and King Creole are her favourites. 'I have been a fan since I was four,' she says. 'I remember when I was 10 and my brother told me he had died. Every time I watch him in concert I feel sad all over again.

'There is only one king - his charisma, he's unique. We all feel that by coming to visit Graceland we can really show Elvis how much we care.' Katima says the club has three large-scale get-togethers each year to celebrate the King's birth and death and the anniversary of the club's founding on May 1, plus numerous karaoke, film and quiz nights, and the occasional guest impersonator. A quarterly newsletter, Elvisland, keeps club members updated on Elvis happenings. Mabel is unanimously named best singer in the group, and says her favourite songs are Love Me Tender and Danny Boy.

Elvisina says she became a fan when she was 14, and fell so deeply in love with Elvis' music she decided to name herself after him. 'I remember it was early in the morning when I heard he died and I couldn't believe it. There was a black cloud over me for a long time after,' she says. Elsa, a lecturer at the Vocational Training Council, says she would give her life if it would bring Elvis back. She has been appointed to capture the pilgrimage on video, so the club's other members can share the experience upon their return to Hong Kong. Tina, a Jordan housewife, quickly shows herself to be the clown of the group, grabbing Elvis impersonators as they pass for photos and hamming it up for the video.

The Graceland tours leave every 15 minutes, and eventually it is our turn. We are each handed an outsized Walkman and headphones as we clamber onto a shiny, red-white-and-blue minibus and are whisked up the the drive to Graceland's front door. The home's gracious and stately exterior belies the orgy of bad taste about to be revealed within.

Down in the Jungle Room

A bored-looking man named Ray who speaks with a mouth full of gravel informs us he'll be our guide. Then we press our play buttons and are whisked into the holy of holies. A blizzard of facts and figures and Elvis information - some narrated by Priscilla herself - begins which will not let up until we stagger back on to the bus two hours later. 'Graceland is on 13.8 acres ... Elvis bought it for $100,000 in 1957 ... here's the music room where Elvis would jam with his buddies ... here's the hallway where Elvis used to show off his karate moves ... there are 14 TV sets in Graceland ... here's the dining room where he'd enjoy hearty, homecooked meals ... here's the chair where Lisa Marie would have a nap ...' Each new room revealed tops its predecessor for tackiness, culminating with the famous Jungle Room, in all its puke-green carpeted, faux zebra hide-upholstered, swingin' safari glory. Inside, Graceland seems surprisingly small, to the point of claustrophobia. Flash photography is strictly banned, and most of the rooms are poorly lit, but the ladies snap away with gusto.

We are led out through the backyard and into the Trophy Room, a separate building which is an Aladdin's Cave of thousands of gold records, movie posters, costumes, letters from presidents, life-size portraits and other priceless artefacts from the King's reign. The ladies are enthralled and blaze away with their cameras, causing a logjam as tour group after tour group backs up in the twisting corridors.

Graceland Inc is scrupulous about its public image and, as a journalist and therefore a potential threat, I am dogged every step of the way by a wide-eyed young minder named Tonya. As we wait outside the Trophy Room, she informs me in a mint-julep drawl of how corporate nights at Graceland are a 'growin' end a' the business', how Japan is a huge Elvis market and how (this with a totally straight face) 'we keep all aah merch-an-dass very tasteful'.

Half an hour and several dozen rolls of film later, we emerge from the Trophy Room and make our way to the Meditation Garden, where kitsch and pathos commingle in copious quantities. A statue of Christ, engraved with Presley's name, gazes heavenwards in tortured rapture, amid a bubbling fountain, coloured lights and Grecian columns. Around the graves and pathways, thousands of wreaths, plaques and floral tributes have been placed. Mabel reverently deposits the group's plaque close to Elvis' eternal flame. There is no weeping or gnashing of teeth, just the click of shutters.

As the bus bounces back to the plaza, Tina says: 'It was too much to take in at once. My heart is jumping!' Adds Katima: 'Personally, I don't feel so sad. I accept the reality of his death, and I look forward to a bright future in which new generations will come to know Elvis.'

WEDNESDAY dawns even steamier and by mid-morning, as we reassemble at the Graceland gates to sign the graffiti-laden wall, a nasty bout of heat rash from all this walking in Memphis has me itchin' like a man on a fuzzy tree. About half-way along the vast stretch of stonework, we spot a small patch of unsigned masonry, and fat black markers are whipped out. 'Elvis, thanks for your music - Mabel'; 'Elvis, I think of You, Tina'; 'Elvis, Always on My Mind, Regina'; 'Elvis, TLC Always, Katima'; 'Elvis, I'll Remember You, Elvisina'.

Elsa simply signs her name in Chinese characters. My flippant inscription, 'The King kicks good rockin' butt' draws a mixture of giggles and reproving glares. Then it's on to the Holiday Inn, where the biggest of several conventions is in progress. Plenty of cash is changing hands for a mixture of junk and genuine rarities. One dealer has a wall lined with early Sun Records singles, selling for US$2,000 each. In one collection, Regina spots a special commemorative CD released by the Hong Kong club several years ago, which is now selling for US$80. 'We should have bought some more over with us,' she says, not completely in jest. They are in Elvis fan heaven, and will spend hours selecting new additions to their already extensive collections of Elvisabilia back in Hong Kong.

At one stall stands the round and rubicund Al Dvorin, a man who turned five simple words into a career. He is the chap who would portentously proclaim at the end of each concert: 'Elvis has left the building'.

'I didn't want to make anything out of it for all these years, I was happy with my memories of Elvis. But this year I've decided to come out of the woodwork and meet all the fans,' he rasps. It is not clear whether he is joking when he says he is considering suing the makers of Independence Day for using his phrase in the alien blockbuster.

IF ALIENS really have kidnapped Elvis, as the likes of the National Enquirer would have us believe, they have chosen well. What other figure could provide such clues to the quirks and foibles of the most powerful nation on Earth? For that matter, who else this century has spawned a new religion spanning every country and culture? It is impossible to spend more than a day or two in Memphis without beginning to ponder the metaphysics of Elvis. He is everywhere - and perhaps he always was; some pop culture Platonic ideal made material in a tiny Tupelo shack. Is he truly one of William Carlos William's posited 'pure products of America (that) go crazy'? Or just a hick with a four-octave voice and a pornographic pelvis who blundered into the right spot at the right time, the unwitting spark for an incendiary new generation?

Music critic and author Greil Marcus, in his seminal book Dead Elvis sums it up thus: 'The enormity of his impact on culture, on millions of people, was never really clear when he was alive ... When he died, the event was a kind of explosion that went off silently, in minds and hearts; out of that explosion came many fragments, edging slowly into the light, taking shape, changing shape again and again as the years went on. No one, I think, could have predicted the ubiquity, the playfulness, the perversity, the terror, and the fun of this, of Elvis Presley's second life.' In the beginning, we are tempted to say, was the word, and the word was with Elvis and the word was Elvis. There are but two figures born to this world immediately and universally recognised by a single, singular name, whose births and deaths are remembered each year by festive ritual and solemn ceremony - although admittedly, Jesus didn't have the advantage of supermarket tabloids, long-playing records and televised comeback specials to spread his gospel. Presley's transmutation from mere mortal superstar to saint and, finally, saviour, has been pondered, analysed and dissected by a plethora of pundits.

King contrary man: the paradox of Elvis

Yet how a gluttonous, drug-addled hillbilly who didn't even write his own songs became such a figure of worship and redemption remains one of the great mysteries of our time. Certainly his death shared nothing of the tragic grace of Christ's crucifixion - Elvis keeled over on the crapper when his clogged and narcotised heart gave out, discovered face-first in his shag-pile carpet, wobbly bottom aimed inelegantly skyward.

Marcus argues that 'Elvis contained more of America - had swallowed whole more of its contradictions and paradoxes - than any other figure'. The irreverent might add that he also swallowed more burgers, but to mock would be to miss the point. Elvis worship exists, and the congregation swells each day. It has been estimated that by the year 2000, there will be more than 250,000 Elvis impersonators worldwide - which is surely a healthy priesthood in any religion's terms.

IT IS 7.15 pm and in a kleig-lit dressing room adjoining the Memphis Sheraton ballroom, the priests are donning their robes. This the third of five long nights of the Elvis Extravaganza '96 International Impersonator Contest; a sweaty fiesta of sideburns and sunglasses, jelly legs and jumpsuits, swinging hips and curling lips. There are fat Elvises and skinny Elvises, tall Elvises and short Elvises, young Elvises and elderly Elvises. They are divided pretty much equally into Elvis' three main incarnations: the slick-suited and bequiffed young Hillbilly Cat Elvis; the leather-clad, 1968 TV Comeback Special Elvis; and the puffy, karate-kicking, scarf-distributing, rhinestone-encrusted Las Vegas jumpsuit Elvis.

One by one they take to the stage, each allotted - in a nicely Warholian touch - 15 minutes in the spotlight. The audience is dotted with Elvises come to check out the competition. At the back of the ballroom, tables groan under the weight of merchandise being hawked by rival fan clubs - that's Elvis impersonator fan clubs - as big-haired matrons extol the virtues of their hometown Elvises. The Hong Kong ladies are having the time of their lives, clapping, shrieking, singing along and then clinically dissecting the efforts of each Elvis. During the better performances, assorted females cluster around the foot of the stage in the hope of a tenderly bestowed scarf or an eyeful of swivelling crotch.

The judges award marks on three main criteria - the look, the voice and the moves. Most of the impersonators have one, or perhaps two in their favour. Tonight, only Chicago newcomer Travis Morris has it all happening, and as he rips through five early period numbers, the screams could hardly be louder if the King himself was onstage. Veteran Elvises in the audience exchange worried glances and mutter grimly about this pelvic parvenu.

Back in the dressing room, dripping with sweat and gasping for breath, Elvis/Travis is holding court: 'Oh boy, I was really getting the facial thing across. And the moves! I really felt like the King.' 'You were right on, my man,' avers a leather Elvis, on his way out to the stage. Back at our table, Mabel and Elvisina have waylaid 10-year-old Dean from Lancaster, California, already a veteran of five years performing as a jumpsuit Elvis.

'Lang dzai, lang dzai,' they giggle. Then I am waylaid by Frank Iannaggi, one of the saddest, skinniest Elvises I have seen all week, with a stained, homemade jumpsuit and King-sized halitosis, who has spotted my notepad and wants to tell me how his best songs are CC Rider and Burning Love.

By 2am, the last Elvis has left the building, and so do we. 'When you're watching a good impersonator, you can almost believe that Elvis is still alive and it's really him up there,' says Mabel whistfully on the way out.

AT 6 PM on Thursday, we join some 20 diehard fans at the gates of Graceland for a three-hour wait until the Candlelight Vigil officially begins. For those at the front of the queue sporting 'Gates of Graceland Entourage' T-shirts, the vigil began 12 hours earlier, in their quest to be first to pay homage at the King's gravesite. By 7 pm, the queue is stretching for several hundred metres and growing by the minute. Television crews and photographers are thick on the ground, drawing in Elvis impersonators like flies to a honeypot.

Burly red-necked guards are strutting about self-importantly. Speakers set up on the wall blare Elvis tunes, drowning out the impersonators still giving their all in the tent across the road. The Hong Kong fans, in their matching T-shirts, prove a hit with the TV crews, and explain smilingly to a succession of earnest, immaculately coiffed and white-toothed reporters that, no, they are not from Japan. Behind us are dozens of members of the Great Britain Elvis Fan Club - the world's biggest - which is planning a Normandy-sized invasion of Memphis next year for the 20th anniversary of Elvis's death. In front stands LaVera Chapel, of White Lake, Michigan, who has Elvis' name, the gates of Graceland and the three incarnations of Elvis tattooed on her bared arms. She explains: 'I wanna show mah lurve.' An impersonator is wandering up and down collecting signatures for a petition to President Clinton demanding a permanent day of recognition for Elvis.

At 9 pm, a reverent hush falls over the crowd, which has now swelled to at least 8,000 and will not completely disperse until the sun comes up. A member of the Graceland staff steps up to a microphone and explains that a torch is about to be brought down from Elvis' eternal flame, from which everyone will light their candles as they file, one by one, through the gates and up the winding drive to the Meditation Garden. 'Most people are here out of love and respect for Elvis. So if anyone wants to get up to any tricky business, let me just say that we may not get to you before the fans take care of you. The Elvis police are on duty tonight,' he warns.

Then a fan-priestess steps up to the microphone and intones: 'As this day draws to a close, we stand here in darkness, pledging our love and respect to Elvis, a man that gave his love, his generosity, his compassion and his music ... With love, we light our candles in remembrance of this extraordinary man. The radiance reflects the fire in our souls that will forever burn.'

Elvis, Elvis let me be, keep that pelvis far from me

She leads a kind of psalmic response, as a chorus of reverent voices promise 'I'll forever love you ... the rest of my days ... I'll never part from you ... And your loving ways.' Elvisina is dabbing at her eyes with a tissue as thousands of voices swell to the strains of Can't Help Falling in Love. And suddenly we are lighting our candles and filing up the drive, part of a spectral and strangely moving procession. As we pause at the garden, a single fat tear seeps out of nowhere and rolls down my cheek, convincing me that I am suffering total Elvis overload and should leave Memphis very, very soon. 'It was so beautiful, so emotional,' says Katima, as we make our way back down to the gates. Elvisina throws her candle away: 'I couldn't bear to keep it. Otherwise every time I saw it I would start to cry.' '

AND the black rain came down. Water water everywhere. Where no bird can fly no fish can swim. No fish can swim Until the King is born! Until the King is born! In Tupelo! In Tupelo! Til the King is born in Tupelo!'. Nick Cave's eerie anthem is buzzing around my head as we hum through the monotonous Mississippi landscape and past the blurry dots of hick towns no different from Tupelo, except that the King wasn't born in them.

There seems to be a fitting irony in driving to Elvis' birthplace on the anniversary of his death. Two hours out of Memphis we pull up to a freshly painted, neat white cottage. A woman swinging on the porch seat collects $5 each and shows us through. The tour is somewhat quicker than at Graceland, given that the whole house could fit into the Jungle Room with space to spare.

The ladies seem suitably impressed when shown where Gladys Presley gave birth to Elvis and his stillborn elder twin, Jesse Garon. Another souvenir frenzy, and then we are scouring Tupelo for a record store so we can listen to Elvis in the car on the way back to Memphis. I pick up the first tape I see from the dusty shelves of a dusty store with a dust-covered sign proclaiming 'Album Alley'. It turns out to be Elvis In Concert: 1977 CBS TV Special, one of his last recordings before he died.

Katima, Mabel and Elvisina sing along at the top of their voices. And as the King mumbles and slurs his way through his Las Vegas opus on the tinny hire-car stereo, we take big greasy bites of cheeseburgers, and ponder the weirdness and the wonder of Elvis.

However strange Graceland might seem, it pales by comparison to the surreality of Paul MacLeod and Graceland Too, a rambling, crumbling home in Holly Springs, halfway between Memphis and Tupelo. MacLeod claims it contains the world's biggest collection of information on Elvis.

MacLeod, the self-proclaimed biggest Elvis fan in 'the universe, the galaxy, the planets and the world', and his son, Elvis Aaron Presley MacLeod, work in shifts to monitor press, radio and television around the US and the world for any references to the King. He talks like he is on speed through ill-fitting dentures and is clearly stark staring bonkers.

'I started collecting anything to do with Elvis 42 years ago, and I've given up everything in the world to do this. My wife was with me 22 years. Three years ago, she told me to choose between her and Elvis. So I told her goodbye.

Las Vegas jumpsuit Elvis

'By the time I'm done, this house will look just like Graceland. I've got Elvis stuff in warehouses in Detroit and California. Lisa Marie's chauffeur was here just last week. I've got the original carpet from the Jungle Room, I've got one of his diamond rings, I've got the last home movie footage of him ever taken. I managed to get myself locked in his mausoleum when he died. I've got mint condition TV Guides from 1956 that mention Elvis.

'Hey, we're open 24 hours a day. Mostly, I only sleep for four hours a night. I've had a gold suit made just like one Elvis wore, and that's what I'll be buried in.' If MacLeod can be believed, Graceland Too's collection of genuine Elvis costumes, records, movie posters and other memorabilia must be priceless. There are rooms bulging with boxes full of clippings, videos and tapes, which he says are now being painstakingly transferred on to CD-ROM. 'I'm going to take over the whole neighbourhood and turn it into Elvisland. It'll be the ninth wonder of the world.'

The gatekeeper Bill Rowe, a paper mill supervisor from Dayton, Ohio, has been first in line at the gates of Graceland for the Candlelight Vigil for the past 10 years. This year, he took up his position at 3am, 18 hours before the start of the vigil. Other years, he has camped out all night.

'I'm not an impersonator,' he says, despite sporting impressive sideburns. 'I'm just a big-time fan. Elvis really brightened a very dark part of my childhood, man, through his movies, his music. So I feel it's my responsibility to keep the memory alive and pay my respects by saying a silent, heartfelt thank you to him.

'You'd think after 19 years, it wouldn't hit you so hard,' he says, tears beginning to well in his eyes. 'But, man, when you walk up that path and see the lights going into the Meditation Garden, well, the emotions I've kept locked down all year just come bubbling up to the surface.

'I'm getting older so it gets harder every year to wait around for so long. But there's a bunch of us, the Gates of Graceland Entourage, who are near the front of the line every year. We've even got our own t-shirts. Hey, you wanna buy one?' The Blasphemer Three years ago, Memphian Tommy Foster transformed his coffee shop into the First Church of the Elvis Impersonator (motto: E Pluribus Elvi), complete with a Viva Memphis! Wedding Chapel where couples can tie the knot to the strains of a portly Japanese Elvis impersonator, and walls lined with Elvis art installations.

Foster says he is a fan, but tries to season some of the Elvis madness with liberal doses of irony and humour. In his front window is a shrine, which, for a quarter in a slot, will blare Elvis songs through crackly speakers and an Elvis doll spins and wobbles wildly on an old LP amid blinking lights.

'We've done more than 300 weddings here,' Foster says. 'Some of the fans come here and find it all a bit offensive. But that's OK, because I find some of the stuff Graceland does offensive. I had one couple who came all the way down from Ohio, had booked the wedding and everything, but they took one look around and found it too sacrilegous. I had another real redneck couple who said they didn't want no Japanese Elvis at their wedding, so I had to get another impersonator.

'Next year I'm putting together a show featuring only Japanese impersonators. The headliner will be Mori Yasamasa, who's a real great Elvis.' The Elvis-spotter Charles Gauthier is a Boston photographer who has spent the past four years tracking down Elvis impersonators the length and breadth of America. He plans to release his as-yet-untitled book, which he hopes will be the definitive photographic study of this phenomenon, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Elvis's death next year.

'I've lost track, really, of how many impersonators I've met,' says Gauthier. 'I can't even remember now how I got so interested in the first place. It's certainly been a pretty weird and wonderful few years.

'I would say it is very rare to find an Elvis who looks the part and sounds like Elvis. When you get guys like that, they are usually the ones with very profitable, full-time shows in places like Las Vegas.' Gauthier, who is not daunted by having to compete with the more than 3,000 tomes on Elvis already penned and at least a dozen more due out in the next 12 months, says he believes interest in Elvis, and in Elvis impersonation, is growing each year.

Melvis, scourge of Lan Kwai Fong, was not on the trip

'One of the most bizarre things I have seen in the past four years is definitely Graceland Too [see above],' he says. Good Truckin' Tonight Jack Howard of West Virginia has just finished his Elvis act and is dripping with sweat. A forest of hair protrudes from his bright red jumpsuit, which is struggling to circumnavigate his expansive waist. Jack cannot sing to save himself and looks nothing like Elvis, but he wins hands down for the most energetic performance and the best kung fu kicks.

'I love it, man. I live for this,' he pants. 'I mainly do my performance for tribute shows, and occasionally I'll enter a contest. I've got two shows booked at the Italian Heritage Festival when I get back home. 'I only started four years ago, and I'm 41 now, so I guess I'm a bit of a late starter. I wish I'd started when I was younger - it's jumpsuits or nothing at my age.

'I put a lot into my act. I had to go to the chiropractor three times last year. I kept putting my back out with the kung fu moves. This year I got my black belt in karate. I think the moves are the best part of my act.

'I drive a truck and sometimes I'm not even sure if I'm going to make it to a show. Tonight, I had to call ahead while I was on the road to let them know I was coming.

'It's cut-throat out there, man. It's not until you blow away some of the guys who have been doing Elvis for years that you start to get some respect.'

How to miserably fail the SAS Survival Test

2018-05-01T17:36:00.001-07:00

Of all the stories I wrote over a decade in Hong Kong, this piece for the South China Morning Post's Postmagazine was the one that came back to haunt me for years. I'd be out at a club or cocktail party or dinner, and invariably someone's jaw would drop and they'd say: "You are the idiot who did THAT story on the island?"

Bear in mind this was years before Survivor, or Bear Grylls or reality television. I still don't know what I was thinking. I've managed to unearth this from the SCMP vaults. Enjoy.

THIS was the mission: drop a complete and utter city slicker on an unforgiving, uninhabited island for four days with no food, the bare minimum of equipment and the SAS Survival Handbook and see if he can ... well, survive.

The Bible ... for idiots

I chose to accept. There was a certain seductive glamour about such an adventure. One man against the elements. I would go out there a pale, soft, well-fed urban specimen who turns to jelly at the sight of so much as a cockroach and return a lean, bronzed, hardened survivor, able to cope with anything nature could throw my way. Assuming, of course, I returned at all.

It was a decision that, on numerous occasions during those four days, would cause me to curse, shriek, scream, rant, rage, imprecate, fulminate, mutter and howl at my stupidity in agreeing to such a daft and twisted plan. But it was also to prove one of the most intensely challenging and rewarding experiences of my life.

After consulting Hong Kong climbing and survival expert Conway Leung about the best place to conduct a survival test, I decided on Chek Chau (Port Island), a small island out past the Tolo Channel, named for its rust-coloured rocks and directly north of Tap Mun Chau (Grass Island).

It is deserted, and ringed by craggy rocks - broken only by several small, windswept beaches - which give way to vertiginous cliffs and hills covered by dense, almost impenetrable scrub. It was, he assured me, free of the marauding hordes of wild pigs which terrorise some of Hong Kong's remote islands. Snakes, smugglers and illegal immigrants were the main risks.

According to the handbook: "Islands offer a special challenge to the survivor, especially small islands and those lacking resources. The feeling of loneliness is emphasised on an island and the sense of isolation is acute. The problems are mental as well as physical. You will have to overcome some or all of the following stresses: fear and anxiety; pain, illness and injury; cold and/or heat; thirst, hunger and fatigue; sleep deprivation; boredom; loneliness and isolation. Can you cope?"

I had no idea. But I was about to find out - the hard way. On the advice of Leung, and after a thorough perusal of the handbook, which was to become my survival bible, I assembled my kit:

One pair of hiking boots
One pair of hiking pants
Two pairs of socks
One T-shirt (camouflage)
One pair of shorts
One woollen jumper
Two pairs of underpants
One cap
One Goretex waterproof jacket
One large knife
One Swiss Army Knife
Ten litres of water
One ball of string
One spool of fishing line, plus hooks and sinkers
One stick of insect repellent O
ne tube of sunblock
One pack of 10 large garbage bags
One small first aid kit
One small torch
One box of matches
Two packets of tissues
Two notepads
Two pens
One small backpack
One Mars Bar
One brick-sized mobile phone (for emergencies).

Here, then, is the complete and unexpurgated diary of a survivor ...

DAY ONE "From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached." Franz Kafka

11am: Just arrived on the island after a 20-minute sampan ride from Wong Shek pier in Sai Kung country park. The gold-toothed old lady thought I was nuts and she was probably right. The wind is already howling, so it looks like a cold night ahead.

It is Tuesday, November 18, and I won't see another soul until I get picked up on Friday. Got off to a disastrous start.

There's quite a bit of swell today, and as I was jumping off the boat onto the beach a wave hit us and I was thrown off balance, dislocating my shoulder as I landed. I've done it several times before, and putting it back in is agonising (think Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon). So I'm injured before I even start.

I was thinking about getting back in the boat and going home but recall Kafka's words of wisdom (and consider the taunts of my colleagues) so I decide to soldier on. This was one of the few places I could get ashore - most of the island is surrounded by flesh-shredding, barnacle-studded rocks.

The beach is about 80 metres long, and covered in pebbles in pastel shades of pink and purple. Terrific. This is supposed to be a gung-ho survival test, and I wind up on the Laura Ashley beach. It is bounded at both ends by rocky outcrops, and above the high-water mark a small stretch of wind-flattened grass cowers beneath steep, rocky slopes. There's a lot of rubbish washed up - gross. But there's also lots of driftwood - good.

Midday: Damn, it's not even lunchtime and I'm already thinking about that Mars Bar. I brought it because Leung suggested that it would be a good test of willpower to bring one item of food but try to resist it, living only on what you can catch. I had a prodigious pig-out the night before and this morning I ate a tin of baked beans, figuring that if it gets cold, some natural gas might come in handy. I've walked up and down the beach. There's plenty of wood, a lot of which has rusty nails sticking out, so I'll have to watch my step. I saw one dead fish, so there must be some marine life out there.

Now, priorities. I have to work out where I'll sleep. Collect some firewood. I've got a feeling I may be stuck on this beach. Had a good look at the cliffs, they're pretty steep and I don't have a great head for heights. If I fall and break a leg I'll be in all sorts of strife. There's a strange feeling in my stomach: a weird conflation of fear and exhilaration.

Fish traps? Save the bother and head for the local chippy.

1pm: It's getting hot and I realise there is no shade whatsoever. I've made five attempts to scale the cliffs in different spots, and each time chickened out half-way up. The rock is crumbly and bits keep breaking off, so it's a risky proposition. Guess I'm stuck here. There aren't many options for a camp site. Haven't seen much sign of wildlife. I can hear birds, but can't see them. I'm going to keep an eye out for snakes.

The handbook offers detailed instructions on how to kill them, plus this valuable motto: "Overcome your fear and learn their habits. Remember, a snake is a steak!" It also says you should beat squeamishness regarding insects, which are rich in fats, protein and carbohydrates:

"The most useful are termites, ants, beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, honeybees and caterpillars." Yeeeuuuckkk. Still, this is no place for the delicate.

3.30pm: I've established a latrine (and christened it) in a rocky gully. I've fashioned a crude bed on the grass, spreading out four garbage bags and pinning them down with rocks.

I don't think it's going to be a comfortable night. The beach has a fairly steep slope and the grass is rooted too deeply to pull out. Made my first kill. Almost. Found a lizard under a rock and hit it with a stick. Unfortunately I fell for the oldest trick in the book. It played dead for a bit, then ran away. But its tail fell off. I also caught a grasshopper, so I've got some fishing bait. Feel quite confident about tonight, looks like it will be clear. Rain would be a nightmare.

4.45pm: I've made a clearing for a fire, and ringed it with rocks. I've built up a good pile of kindling and firewood. The grass up on the hills is tinder-dry, so I'll have to be careful about sparks. I rigged up a fishing line, using the lizard's tail as bait, walked around the rocks and threw it out. I'll leave it overnight, and with any luck have fish for breakfast. A Marine Police launch has stopped directly out to sea and I'm sure they're looking at me, wondering who the mad gweilo is.

5.30pm: The sun has turned into a red fireball and is swiftly sinking behind the mountains. The sky is a gorgeous palette of orange and pink and the only clouds are high and windswept, which bodes well for fine weather. I flick idly through the handbook. A chapter on camping tells of how centipedes and various other insects love to curl up in groins and armpits for warmth. Great. I see two sea birds fly past. Kentucky Fried Gull? Think I'll get the fire going.

9pm: I've been sitting here watching the flames for three hours. Haven't eaten since 7am. Not a lot in the way of nightlife here. My stomach's growling and the Mars Bar beckons. The fire has died down to embers and the tiny waves are creeping up the beach. It's chilly and the wind is getting stronger all the time. I've got all my layers on - T-shirt, jumper and the Goretex. I thought there'd be no mosquitoes this time of year, but they descended in droves at dusk. I coated myself in repellent but it didn't deter them. Anyway, bedtime.

DAY TWO "The soul is the weakest part of the body." Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky.

7am: In the space of one night - the longest of my life - this has gone from what I thought would be a jolly Boys' Own Adventure to a genuinely wild and desperate fight for survival. The temperature plunged last night and the wind groaned and ululated like a banshee.

Punters were shocked by the contents of the Fat Slags' purses

The forecast had been for a minimum of 12 degrees, but it's always two or three degrees colder in the New Territories. By midnight, despite all my layers and two garbage bags over my legs, I was shivering uncontrollably, teeth chattering like castanets, and the sand beneath me seemed to have turned to ice. I vowed that if by some miracle I made it to morning without dying of hypothermia, the first thing I would do was get on the blower and put an end to this madness.

Meanwhile, shelter was essential. I grabbed my torch and staggered about until I found a decent-sized rock which at least stopped some of the wind. I crawled behind it, wrapped myself in a plastic cocoon of garbage bags and hunkered down. For an hour or so, it was considerably warmer and I was feeling quite smug and snug, that I would make it through the night and kick this island's craggy butt. But the wind just laughed and began to blow harder, warbling eerie scales like some demented tenor. Within an hour, I was shivering again. There were lumps and bumps and twigs and rocks sticking into my back, and despite repeatedly slathering my face and hands with repellent, the mosquitoes managed to bite me in the most exquisitely painful places - eyelids, lips, nostrils, fingers. I could hear all sorts of creatures creeping and scrabbling about, and my imagination ran wild with horrific images of big-fanged, spiny-haired bugs and ravenous centipedes wanting to set up camp in my jockey shorts.

I finally nodded off some time after 4.30am, so numb and exhausted I had become impervious to pain. When I awoke half an hour ago, it was light. I feel like I've been 12 rounds with Evander Holyfield. My back aches. My face itches. My recently dislocated shoulder is throbbing. It's still freezing. And there are two more nights to look forward to. This sucks. I want to go home.

9.30am: I checked my fishing line, or at least I would have if it hadn't become hopelessly snagged on the rocks. Had to cut it loose, so there goes any hope of breakfast. I've made a good shelter now, which I'm sitting here gloating over. The rock I crawled behind was about half a metre high, and had a flat top, so I've piled more rocks on top of it to add another 40 centimetres or so, and covered the whole thing in a plastic bag to block the gaps.

I also found several sheets of washed-up plywood, which I managed to prop up at a right-angle to the big rock, so the whole thing is quite cosy now. Forget willpower - I just scoffed the Mars Bar. But I've decided to stick out at least one more night. I've sacrificed one of my notebooks - stuffed one of the garbage bags with scrunched-up paper to make a "mattress". And I've removed some rocks and smoothed out some of the bumps on the floor of my shelter. After last night, it's just bliss right now sitting in the sun warming my chilled bones.

11am: Have been for a rock-hop as far as I can to both the north and south of my beach. To the south, I could go only about 400m. To the north, I made it around to another beach, which was a bit bigger than mine, but even more exposed, with no shelter at all. From this beach, I could see across to China: hazy peaks like the spine of a deformed, distant dragon, pocked by the crusted yellow scabs of quarries.

I'm down to shorts and have my shirt off now. The sun feels so good. I even managed to find some breakfast: I discovered a bed of oysters, and used my knife to prise them open. Quite small, but I found about eight decent ones. The water here seems very clean, so I hope I won't get sick.

1pm: Have spent some time consulting the handbook. Despite the oysters, or perhaps because of them, my stomach is rumbling and I figure it's time to get serious about finding food. I turn to the section on traps and trapping, which outlines the four fundamental principles of this craft: mangle, strangle, dangle, tangle. There is page after page of complex traps, most of which look like you would need a degree in engineering and a fully-equipped workshop to construct.

So I decide to stick to the simple stuff. First, I make a snare out of the coiled wire from my notebook. I doubt there's anything here worth snaring, but I attach it to a stick and hide it up in the grass anyway.

Then I make a bird trap. I put a fish-hook through the grasshopper, which is beginning to look pretty dry and unappetising, tie the hook to some fishing line and anchor it to a big stick. I put the grasshopper on a rock and hope it looks irresistible to any passing bird. I find the perfect stick to whittle into a formidable spear. It will probably be of no use, unless someone decides to pay me an unfriendly visit.

2.30pm: I have collected a dozen or so pippies (small clams) from the water's edge, so at least I'll have something for dinner. After scouring the beach I found a soft-drink can, which I rubbed against a rock until I could force the top off. It should do as a cooking pot. It's time to check in, so I give my boss a quick call to say I'm okay.

3.30pm: Damn, I think I'm getting sunburned. I didn't think the sun would be too fierce seeing it's nearly winter, but perhaps I've underestimated its strength.

4.30pm: Yep, I'm burned. God, I'm an idiot. I come from Queensland, skin cancer capital of the world. What was I thinking? I had put on some suncream, but I forgot about my legs and my back, which are already a throbbing neon pink.

5pm: I'm going to get the fire going now and cook the pippies while it's still light. I feel much better prepared for the night this time. I've already covered myself in insect repellent, because I don't think mosquito bites and sunburn will be a terribly pleasant combination. My attempts at trapping have been a spectacular failure. The only thing mangled and tangled is the grasshopper, which after a day in the sun looks like some kind of insect mummy.

6pm: Took my spear and went off to see if I could catch a fish that way. Ha. Didn't even see any. But Operation Clambake was a roaring success. Got a great fire going, filled the can with sea water, popped in the pippies and managed to manoeuvre it into the fire without spilling it or burning myself. The water bubbled, the pippies opened and I supped like a king. Kind of. Actually, each one contained a piece of meat about the size of a large grain of sand. The handbook warns that bivalves feed by filtering water through their digestive systems and can build up dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals in polluted waters. Oh well, I'll take my chances. Buzz. Slap. Here come the mozzies.

8pm: I'm sitting by the fire enjoying another wild night's entertainment when I suddenly realise my pulse is hammering like a freight train. Panic grips me when I remember an allergic reaction I once had to clams in a restaurant in Macau, and I'm cursing myself for eating the pippies. I am gripped by The Fear, realising I'm a long way from help if I become seriously ill. Oh God. I don't want to die out here. Hold on, I tell myself. Sit down. Shut up. Get a grip. Panicking won't help. 9pm: I don't feel nauseous, just dizzy and feverish.

My whole body feels like it's on fire, but the wind is beginning to howl again, so it's too cold to take off my jacket. I'm staring at the embers and hallucinating. They take on all manner of strange shapes and forms. I see a frog with a top hat, a devil, a minotaur with a cigar, Picasso faces. A glowing gallery of Hieronymus Bosch grotesques. This is not helping. I think it's time for bed.

DAY 3 "And this also," said Marlowe suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the Earth." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

6.40am: Yessss! I'm alive. But I don't feel so great. It was a hellbroth of a night, peppered with mind-warping fever-dreams, seasoned with shivers and garnished with mosquito bites. I don't think I managed more than two hours of sleep in any one stretch. At one point I remember staring for what might have been minutes or hours at the fat, silver gibbous moon making its ponderous arc through the heavens, convinced it was laughing at me.

I feel weak and hungry, and something tells me it's a feeling I'd better get used to. At least the shelter was a success. It was another windy night, but my construction kept the wind-chill factor down to a tolerable level. It's a beautiful morning. The hills are shrouded in mist and the only noise is the distant hum of the fishing trawlers and the odd bird squawk. One more night, oh Lord. I think I can do it.

7.30am: I've smoothed out a bump that during the night began to assume the stature of K2 as it poked and chaffed against my sun-scourged spine. I feel listless and sleep-deprived. I'm bored and hungry. I've just made a sketch of the vista from my "front door".

Survivor? Bah, Johnny-Come-Latelies. I was first.

9.30am: Just woke up again. Dozed for another hour or so and feel a bit better. The sun is already starting to burn off the mist and cloud, and it looks like another hot day. My legs are the colour of Brenda Chau's Rolls-Royce. I've been reading the blurb in my first aid kit, and it sounds like I had a mild case of sunstroke. The symptoms are fever, rapid pulse, dizziness, seeing things. Yup, that about sums it up. Apologies to the pippies. Another long day looms, and I just want to get it over with, so I can get on with the serious business of getting through another night.

10am: I see some sparrows and take some pot shots with my miserable excuse for a slingshot. The sparrows live to fight another day.

11am: Just returned from another oyster hunt. Found four decent ones. Better than nothing. Feel a little bit revived. My priority now is to make a roof for my shelter so I can spend the day out of the sun.

12.15pm: Sitting under my new roof, feeling very proud of myself. I split open one of the garbage bags into a flat sheet, and rigged it up with the string. Nothing for it but to sit out the heat of the day now. Should also be useful if it rains tonight. Damn, just noticed my pack has been overrun by ants attracted to the Mars Bar wrapper. I lick off the remaining chocolate, along with lots of ants. Quite tasty.

2pm: I'm bored senseless, but at least I'm out of the sun. Just sitting here, drinking lots of water, alone with my thoughts. All this solitary time in the great outdoors tends to turn a man's mind to matters metaphysical, which is probably a great reason for staying in your flat.

I've made myself a bola, which consists of five plastic-wrapped rocks tied to pieces of string. The idea is to whirl it round your head and throw it at a bird, but I think I stand more chance of knocking myself out. My shelter is so successful that the island's mosquito population has moved in with me.

I'm convinced my face is now an amorphous blob, swimming murkily beneath a translucent carapace of sunscreen and insect repellent. My bum is numb, my back aches worse than ever, and I am heartily sick of sitting on rocks and sleeping on lumpy, sloping ground.

4.30pm: Feel better now. Have been drinking water all day and the feverish feeling has gone. I'm ready to face another night. Checked in with my boss, told her I'm still alive and determined to go the distance. It's amazing how quickly you learn from your mistakes in these situations. My shelter feels like The Ritz now compared to my first night here.

5.45pm: Just spent 45 minutes walking up and down the (92-pace long) beach. I told myself it was to make sure I would be exhausted enough to sleep well tonight, but secretly I fear I've become like one of those crazed zoo animals who pace back and forth all day. Ironic, really. Put an animal in a cage and it goes nuts. Put a human in the wild and he goes nuts.

Have found some interesting objects on my beachcombing forays and I now have an impressive collection of sea-smoothed glass and pebbles. I have also constructed three totem poles: the crab claw, the chicken stick and the coral skull. Don't ask me why. Probably because I'm losing my mind.

I have made an interesting discovery. Rancid, sweaty socks, left in a stiff sea breeze all day, end up smelling as sweet as if they'd just come back from the laundry. Or perhaps it's just that my nostrils have been seared to the point of being useless by the proximity of my grubby, unwashed body.

I could have a wash in the sea, but it's too chilly and, to be honest, I can't be bothered. Whom do I have to impress out here? The crabs? The seagulls? Frankly, they don't give a damn.

6.30pm: Fire time again. Ah, another night on the town. Think I might really live it up tonight and throw on a few extra logs. The mozzies seem to be keeping a healthy distance tonight. Maybe it's because I've smeared so much goo on me in the past three days I'm now a walking stick of insect repellent. Tonight's is the most glorious sunset so far.

8pm: The fire's roaring. My thoughts are racing. Three days without seeing a soul is a lot of time inside your own head. I haven't decided if that's a good or a bad thing. One long milky cloud is stretched the breadth of the sky - a fat white snake squirming among the stars.

9pm: The Fear returns, albeit briefly. I look up to see a sampan with a spotlight heading right at me, with someone on board beating an aggressive tattoo on its hull. But it's just a night fisherman, trying to scare something edible into his net. Soon afterwards, a Government Flying Service helicopter is doing a spotlit sweep of the area. One sweep misses me by about 30m.

Tomorrow I'll be off this island! I feel like a child on Christmas Eve. Just one night to get through, but it seems like it will last forever.

DAY 4 "One thing that's certain about going outdoors: when you come back inside, you'll be scratching." P.J. O'Rourke

8am: Had a terrific sleep and feel fantastic. Well, that's a relative term. I still feel like crap, but compared to the past two mornings there's no comparison. I woke up once or twice during the night, which was clear and calm, but dropped off again quickly each time. I think the mosquitoes were just taking a breather last night though, because this morning they attacked with a vengeance. I've got bites on my bites.

My skin has the texture of that place with all the chocolate hills in the Philippines and I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree. Just spent an hour and a half walking up and down the beach doing the caged bear act again. It takes the mind off the hunger, which at this point is considerable, and I might as well present the mozzies with a moving target.

It's an amazing monochrome morning. Grey sea, grey hills, grey sky, welded seamlessly. I awoke to find a bunch of bugs nestled in my hood, but they were just some harmless sand-creeping things and as long as they don't bite or sting, who am I to begrudge them warmth?

The water is like a millpond today, so I'm hoping getting back into the boat will be less painful than my efforts at getting ashore. I know the next few hours are going to drag by. The walking sapped the last of my energy, so it's a matter of just sitting and waiting.

10.30am: Here they come! A little sampan is chugging away, it's prow pointed right at my humble camp site. As the photographer and two of my colleagues jump ashore, I can't wipe away the idiot grin that has plastered itself from ear to ear. And suddenly I'm tucking into a sausage McMuffin and blathering like an idiot.

One thing about being on your own for any period - as soon as there are people around, you can't shut up.

Happy as I am to be heading home, a bittersweet feeling is already seeping through me: that soft, blurry sadness that announces the end of a special experience. I know I'll miss this funny little beach, with it's steely mornings and heliotrope dusks, the faint grumble of fishing boats, the tiny exclamations of midnight waves as they nibble on the pebbled sand.

There's a strange thrill in the thought that one can be so far from Hong Kong's madding crowd - and yet, so near - for the price of a cab and sampan fare. What did I learn from this exercise in survival?

That the mind can be a harsh and daunting landscape to traverse when removed from the distractions, comforts and stimulations of urban existence. That soft, flat beds and cushioned seats are a commodity not to be undervalued. That the elements earn a new-found respect when you can't simply shut a door to escape their embrace. That discomfort is the mother of invention.

That I'm a better gatherer than hunter, and even my gathering sucks. That there are 101 uses for a garbage bag.

Am I glad I went through with it? Absolutely. How much longer could I have lasted? I don't know.

Would I do it again? Hmmm. No.

Andrew Rutherford, design director and a member of the rescue party:

It's Jason, but not as we know him ... we return to collect him. His inane grin and endless chatter about his ordeal seem reasonable and rational given his isolation.

Even his uncanny ability to pinpoint the location of the smallest pebble on the beach ("oh yeah, I saw that on Thursday") doesn't qualify him for the Crazy Mr Kurtz award.

Perhaps The Man With Too Much Time On His Hands Award. Until he takes us on a tour of his "totem poles". Pointing to some coral he has wedged on top of a stick, Jason enthuses about its "remarkable resemblance to an animal's skull". Then a piece of wood is placed next to it which looks "exactly like a chicken's head", and a crab's claw he is still working on.

He points to a fish's backbone attached to a wooden stake which was to have brought him luck while fishing: a kind of offering to Tin Hau.

Becoming more excited, he takes us on a tour of his more personal finds, lovingly set out in his "tent". There is a collection of green and blue glass worn by the sea.

"Amazing isn't it?" Er, not really. Finally his most prized look-alike object: a stone which he swears looks like fossilised human droppings.

Whatever Jason has been getting up to it appears his rescue hasn't come a moment too soon. His reversion from First World to Third, from post-industrial to Cro-Magnon Man, has been astonishingly quick.

Although he doesn't want to cook us for breakfast or offer us to the god of weather, his ways seem similar to those of a witch doctor.

The Great Shark Hunt

2017-04-26T20:14:00.001-07:00

Latest column in The Australian, in which I recall the heady days when Hong Kong was terrorised by a tiger shark and great shark hunter Vic Hislop was summoned to save the day

Shortly after taking up residence in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, I woke one morning to find Vic Hislop, notorious Australian shark hunter, in my bed. Fortunately, I was on the sofa.

He staggered out into the living room; short, stocky, smelling vaguely of stingray. Vic had just flown in from Queensland, and we had put him up for the night in the house my friends and I had rented in Sai Kung, a fishing village and expat hangout in the New Territories.

Nearby Clearwater Bay had been terrorised by a spate of shark attacks and my employer, The Hong Kong Standard newspaper, on a brilliant wheeze from my flatmate, colleague and this paper’s national chief correspondent, Hedley Thomas, hired Hislop to catch the suspected tiger shark.

The Standard’s Great Shark Hunt, as the dinkuses and T-shirts proclaimed, came flooding back in vivid technicolour this week when I read Hislop had broken his self-imposed media exile following the latest tragic death by shark in Esperance, Western Australia. And it’s clear age has not wearied the great shark hunter, nor made him any more sane. It’s time for a cull, argues Hislop, and let’s have a royal commission while we’re at it. The sharks are patrolling both coasts, he warns, and while we are all brainwashed by the pro-shark lobby, “they continue to let the sharks escape after they eat somebody. It’s going to get worse and worse. Make no mistake.”

The night he arrived in Hong Kong, Hislop regaled us with tales of monsters pursued and killed. It was apparent at once that he was possessed of a monomaniacal hatred of sharks not far short of Captain Ahab’s obsession with the white whale. What sticks in my mind from that first evening’s conversation, however, is not so much the gorily graphic accounts of man-eaters hooked and shot and clubbed and knifed, but an encounter with a pit bull terrier in a friend’s backyard.

“Mate, yeah, this bastard dog just comes out of nowhere, eh,’’ he recounted in pure Queensland-inflected ocker. “And he’s coming right for me. I look around, but there’s nothing I can pick up to defend meself. I know I’ll never make it to the fence if I run. So as the bastard jumps at me, I get under him and grab him by the balls. And he lets out this yelp like he’s just been shot. He’s trying to bite me, the bastard, but I start swinging him around faster and faster, and then I let him go. And that does the trick, eh, he just lies there looking at me, and I jump over the fence.’’

It was all downhill from there. We procured a junk — the Great Shark Hunt Mothership — and armed Vic with all manner of hooks and lines and sinkers. We scoured the wet markets of Sai Kung for suitable shark bait: stingrays and groupers. And as the Chinese press worked itself into a frenzy, thus began two fruitless, sanity-sapping weeks on board an increasingly reeking junk with Hislop.

I fear I may be partly to blame for Vic’s self-imposed media exile. I was charged with penning his daily dispatches and succumbed to a creeping lunacy, inventing all sorts of wild rubbish to keep the story going. As I milked the Ahab angle, Vic fell ill with flu. After a couple of days, he began to question what was appearing in the paper under his byline, so I took to hiding his glasses.

It soon became apparent that the shark had left town. Despite Vic’s increasingly desperate efforts, the stingrays were left unmolested and the groupers ungutted. “I’ll fight on, vows sick Vic” was one of the last headlines, before we stuck a cheque in his pocket and pushed him on to a plane.

I mention all of this by way of warning, lest a groundswell grow to summon the great shark hunter once again. The shark menace may indeed be growing, but for Hislop the Hong Kong scoreline hangs around his neck like a decomposing albatross: Shark 1, Vic 0. He would be best advised to limp quietly back into his self-imposed exile and retreat to his memories of great whites vanquished and pit bull balls crushed.

Five steps to make Australia great again

2017-04-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

Latest column in The Australian, in which I burn the midnight renewables to come up with five simple ways to make Australia great again.

Recently I was on holidays and ventured north to my banana-bending, daylight-non-saving, cyclone-prone state of origin, the one-time hillbilly dictatorship known as Queensland. As a hard rain fell and biblical floods gathered, I spent most of my time watching television with my dad. This meant a non-stop diet of Andrew Bolt, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Latham’s Outsiders (before his latest self-immolating spontaneous combustion) and hour upon hour of question time.

And people, it got me questioning, where is the love? Where are the leaders? Between Malcolm Turnbull’s search for his inner mongrel and Bill Shorten blowing, sucking and turning his back, it was depressing stuff. We live in an age of political pygmies, paralysed in the eye of a sharknado of stupidity, self-interest and hypocrisy. My holiday passed in a blur of North Korean nukes, Trump tweets, radicalised ratbags, flash floods and gender fluids. The main climate change has been to one of fear and loathing. We the people must rise up and reclaim our nation. So I’ve been burning the midnight renewables to come up with a list of simple measures to make us great again.

1. Ditch honorifics. The whole business is outdated and absurd. Honour should be earned and learned. We are what we do, not what we’re called. Dubbing me “Mr” does me no real honour, and half the knights are errant. Arise, Sir Scumbag, cast off thy title and get on with it. We can solve this First World problem in one fell swoop. Let’s dispense with confusion, neuter the identity politics and dispense with titled entitlement once and for all. When HSBC offers customers a choice of 10 titles, New York City recognises 36 genders (could someone explain the difference between a gender bender and a gender blender, both of which are official in the Big Apple, where getting it wrong could mean a lawsuit) and the University of Sydney now has 57 varieties, it’s all gone Pete Tong, if not Boy George. Why mess with “Mix” and “Mux”, “Mx” and “Mre”, “Msr” and more? Let’s head this lawyers’ picnic off at the pass. Henceforth, you are your surname. We might also consider a simple Balinese style of first name, and save parents the agony of naming. One through four for all, in order of birth, and for the larger family, repeat. Call me Gagliardi or One, but don’t call me Mr or Mux or late for dinner. Done?

2. Formalise the pub test. Policy today often hinges on whether it passes this acid, beer-stained examination. Let’s locate the best hotel in which this powerful and mysterious test can be performed, and codify and enshrine it in law. It will streamline debate and lawmaking if all bills can be sent by express post or carrier pigeon to the nominated pub for testing. Pubs in Newtown or serving Coopers Ale, and especially Coopers Hotel, Newtown, are exempted.

3. Appoint a Reasonable Person. Let’s make this abstract legal twaddle an actual position, with a reasonable salary and a modest office, perhaps in the pub-test pub to achieve economies of scale. The Reasonable Person would be the ultimate everyman, a fair-minded, fair dinkum champion of the fair go, even-handed, honest as the day is long, and tolerant but only up to a point. A meditator and a mediator who can put the om into ombudsman, the pleb into plebiscite and some commons in the house. The successful candidate should possess a built-in bullshit detector and have no truck with trough-snouting, truffle-snuffling, nest-feathering fat cats, gender-bending, virtue-lathered culture warriors and identity politicians or garden variety corporate greenheads. Bankers, wankers, spin doctors, witch doctors, campus bullies, tin pot dictators, turd polishers and voodoo economists need not apply.

4. Pivot to China for power tips. We’re selling the Chinese all our coal and oil and they are making us look silly by inventing hi-tech, ultra-super-mega-critical clean-burning technology while here business flees for brighter places and we’ll soon be reading with candles. It should be obvious to even the greenest inner-city chardie sipper or state Labor premier that we are heading back to the dark ages. If we must have wind farms, let’s harness the only inexhaustible source of hot air and set them up in Parliament House. In the meantime, let’s frack our brains out and get the good oil. Call it the New Enlightenment.

5. Channel our fists of fury. Let’s round up all the one-punch thugs and budding delinquents and send them to boot camp, turning them into a fearsome force that can KO al-Qa’ida and rope-a-dope Daesh. We could dispense with Sydney’s lockout laws, revitalise the city’s night life and deliver a Bruce Lee one-inch punch to jihadists and terrorists. I give you the King’s Hit Regiment.

What ever happened to the heroes?

2017-04-26T19:59:00.000-07:00

Latest column in The Australian ... No more heroes anymore

It is said that a prophet is not without honour except in his own town. And in every age, heroes are beset by the slings and arrows of cowards, snipers and trolls.

It was a bad week for prophets and heroes recently. It began with the fall of a titan of free speech, the late great Bill Leak, and there is nothing I can add to the avalanche of accolades and praise and laments that followed the death of The Australian’s artist, cartoonist and satirist non pareil, save to register my disgust with the legion of online trolls, perpetually offended political correctness sticklers and armchair culture warriors who exulted in his death and danced on his grave from behind their firewalls of anonymity.

A few days later, the father of this paper’s national chief correspondent and a long-time friend, Hedley Thomas, died. Hedley Sr had been a helicopter pilot flying dangerous missions over the jungle during the Vietnam War. Before the war he had flown Sabres and Vampires. He changed to choppers after breaking his back from the infamous configuration and G-forces exerted by the ungainly fused-tail Vampires.

The treatment of young Australian servicemen upon returning from Vietnam still rankles. Whatever one’s views on the rights or wrongs of supporting an ally’s questionable war, surely these brave chaps deserved better than the jeers and curses and howls of condemnation they were greeted with at home.

Later Hedley Sr fitted the prophet without honour mould, having served and consulted in the Middle East. His personal over-the-horizon radar was unerring; he was one of the voices in the wilderness warning of the rising tide of Islamism a decade or more before the twin towers went down in New York City and the world was knocked off its axis by evil.

On Thursday I was honoured to attend the funeral of my own uncle Vernon Fisher, a shy and self-effacing man who never spoke of his wartime exploits until towards the end of his long life. He died in his sleep at the age of 94, having cheated death three times in short succession on his way to becoming the captain of a Short Stirling bomber for the Royal Air Force.

After a trip from Brisbane to Perth crammed into hammocks on the lowest deck of a relic of a ship with raw sewage coursing down the inside of its hull and swirling in rancid eddies on the deck, Uncle Vernon and some of his mates refused to reboard the ship, preferring to take their chances on another. A few days later, the floating sewer was torpedoed and went down with all hands.

Upon arriving at Southampton and joining the Bomber Command, he decided to have some photos taken in his smart new uniform to send home to his family. Hours after he picked up the proofs, the photo studio, along with the entire side of the street, was flattened by German bombs.

And during his first week training as a Stirling pilot, he was barely aloft when two engines failed, necessitating a crash landing in a field with a full payload of bombs.

The Stirling was an ungainly beast, and with its wings clipped to fit in the RAF hangars, it did not have a very high cruising altitude. This put it not only at peril from the flak from German anti-aircraft fire but in the path of bombs dropped by the much higher-flying Lancasters.

A few months before his death, he told my parents the story of losing his instruments and bearings in thick cloud and fog somewhere over Germany. The cloud cover was so thick and the instrument failure so total that he lost all sense of direction, and wasn’t sure if he was flying in circles, straight ahead or straight down. He had all but given up hope when the clouds parted and he glimpsed the north star, allowing him to correct his course and level the plane.

The service of Australians in Bomber Command was overlooked until it was formally recognised in June 2012 with a memorial in Green Park in London, unveiled by the Queen.

Uncle Vernon never marched on Anzac Day, feeling it wasn’t appropriate, having served in the RAF, not the RAAF. He didn’t quite live to mark the passing of Anzac Day 2017, but on April 25 I’ll be sure to raise a glass to his memory and utter a silent prayer of thanks to Uncle Vernon and his like, and to the memory of Hedley Sr and even Bill Leak, all men who followed their own stars and fought in their own way for the freedoms and a way of life the cowards, snipers and trolls seem to place scant value upon.

Hell is other passwords

2017-04-26T19:48:00.000-07:00

Latest column in The Australian, in which I go slowly mad trying to remember lost passwords.

To continue reading this column, please type in your password. Did that sentence just give you the heebie jeebies, the screaming meemies, the abject abdabs or provoke an incipient conniption fit?

Passwords have become the bane and precondition of modern existence, a daily exercise in memory dredging and hair-tearing, desk-pounding, expletive-laden frustration that at times can send one to the brink of an existential crisis.

Passwords, can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Without them, you can’t pass “Go” and you might go to jail. Lose them, and you could lose everything. Your finances, your secrets, your online personas, your very life and soul.

I lost all my passwords recently. Oh, I’d listened to all the experts, read the articles, was smugly self-assured that I was ahead of the password curve and doing everything humanly and digitally possible to protect myself and my treasured little snippets of gatekeeping gobbledygook. I’d recently updated all my key social media passwords. My staple had been a dead dog’s name and a series of digits (I had seven dogs and they’re all dead, hackers, and no, it wasn’t my birthday, and I’m broke anyway, so don’t waste your time).

Not particularly secure, but easy to remember. I changed them to things I thought I would remember, with digits and the requisite non-alphanumeric characters. Then I encased the lot in the digital steel of one of those safe apps, which cost me $10 or so, a hefty spend in the app world.

All good, until the morning I woke to find a vacant space on my springboard where my digital safe used to be. I grabbed my iPad in mounting panic. There, too, the app was gone. I refreshed. I scoured backups. I consulted the oracles of Google. Nothing I tried could locate or revive or restore the missing app. After wasting an entire morning on this quest, I uttered the saddest sound a human being can make, a tired, defeated shriek of impotent rage seguing into a mournful howl and tailing off into a whimper of futility.

When the tears dried, a moment of rational thought saw me track down the app’s maker, which I was able to glean from old reviews. Sorry, the company’s rep told me, Apple just kicked us out of their closed shop and we don’t know why.

That was it. No warning or opportunity to back up or change to another app. Either the app makers were lying and had committed some digital treachery, not a particularly reassuring thought when they are the holders of the keys to your banking details, life-enabling encryptions and the odd compromising photo or two, or Apple was an unreasonable, stony-faced god which had turned its back on them and me.

Either way, I sensed a losing battle. And so the long process began, getting password reset forms sent to email addresses. Of course, I had four email addresses and do you think I could remember which emails I’d used with dozens of websites and apps and platforms and portals?

Eventually, my digital life was restored. I was consoled by the fact that I wasn’t alone.

“It does my head in,” confided one friend. “I not only have to remember 200 of my own, I also have to remember passcodes for my kids so they don’t access material they shouldn’t. My head is full of this stuff. I actually don’t think there’s any room for anything else.” Said another: “It is impossible to live a modern life if you forget your Apple ID and I’ve done that twice.” Another took to writing them on random slips of paper and stuffing them in a shoebox. Old school, perhaps, but disappearing-app proof.

No less than a former editor of this very newspaper shared his deepest fear: “Passwords. I worry about forgetting them as I get older and I won’t be able to get into any of my accounts.”

Digital bad luck and trouble also ran in the family. From my brother: “I had a doc with all my passwords in and secured with a password. And forgot that password. We have seven laptops (two personal, two school, three work ones), four phones, three iPads, a PC, a server, three Kindles, an Xbox and each device has at least a password or passcode.” So lock up, back up, and hope for the best. It seems there are now three certainties in life. Death, taxes and passwords.

Songs in the key of old are easy listening

2017-03-09T18:39:00.000-08:00

Home Truths column in The Australian, in which I advance my pet theory on music and ageing.

For years I have advanced a pet theory whenever the conversation swings to music or ageing, or ageing music. Jason’s first law of techno dynamics states that you start to get old when you close yourself off to new music. I watched it happen to friends from as early as their 30s, with the musical shutters slamming down and them being content to wallow in their personal easy-listening golden oldies playlists, their inventories of coming-of-age anthems, getting-laid grooves and breaking-up-is-hard-to-do laments.

A jobbing DJ until recently, I made an effort to keep abreast of new sounds. Not so my mates. I would smugly note another old codger in the making as glazed eyes and bored expressions greeted my enthusiastic encomia about the latest rebirth of cool. Namechecking this left-field genius or that must-listen new album won no kudos. Ah, but let them stick a dime in their life’s jukebox, baby, and watch the flood of emotion take them over.

There are sound scientific reasons why it’s so comfortable to hermetically seal yourself off in your sonic tomb of personal greatest hits. Our brains are wired to send us spiralling into an maelstrom of nostalgia and a gamut of emotions the second we hear the familiar strains of a song that means something to us.

Some call it the “Proust effect”, for the writer and his madeleines, the taste of which, dunked in coffee, transported him back to his childhood in such vivid detail. Tunes and rhymes stick in the grey matter (ask any advertising jingle writer) and when a life-shaping event is thrown into the mix, the memory is indelible and all the more powerful for being what Art Institute of Chicago composer Robert Snyder calls implicit memories, outside our control or consciousness.

Since returning to Australia, I’m still trying to figure out if the stylus of indifference has skittered off the vinyl of personal discovery for the last time, marking the start of a music-free old farthood, or if I’m just in one of my periodic funks where I temporarily lose interest in anything that comes in beats and bars.

Throughout my alleged adult life, there have been seasons marked by the sound of silence, when groove wasn’t in the heart and David’s sacred chord might have pleased the lord but left me cold. Eventually, some epiphany or recommendation or article or review would pique my interest or stir my passion, and once more I’d be alive with the sound of music.

Three times in the past week, powerful memories have flooded back to me via music.

The first sonic spell was cast by Wizard, whose See My Baby Jive came on the easy listening station as an old mate and I sipped single malts and reminisced about our earliest pop memories and our musical coming of age. It was a time when K-Tel compilations reigned, their lurid covers emblazoned with rubrics like Unreal, Superbad and Ripsnorter, often across a piece of bare female flesh. The Wizard track was on Unreal, and hearing it again unleashed a concatenation of other 70s memories from the same record, the likes of Sweet (Fox on the Run), Suzi Quatro (48 Crash) and, er, Gary Glitter (I Love You Love Me Love) as I relived an era when music was performed by people with very long hair and satin bell-bottoms.

A day or two later, I read an article on Trainspotting 2, the sequel to Danny Boyle’s 1996 flick based on Irvine Welsh’s dark masterpiece, and all I could hear was the thundering drums that introduce Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life, along with the film, seguing into Bedrock’s For What You Dream Of and Brian Eno’s Deep Blue Day. Now I was back in Hong Kong, discovering raves and drugs and special clubs, along with the intoxicating thumpy-thump of electronic music.

The third bit of time travel with its own soundtrack came as I flicked through the menu of ABC’s iView and stumbled over David Bowie: The Last Five Years, an affecting and deftly executed look at the final act of an artist who changed many lives, including mine. Snatches of classics from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane were enough to send me spinning back to north Queensland, where a callow lad had somehow fallen in love with ballet in an age of poofter-bashing and virulent ocker machismo. Bowie made it all seem normal and possible and cool in a place that didn’t take kindly to men in tights or boys embarking on a real-life version of Billy Elliot.

Perhaps my love of music is about to come flooding back. And maybe it’s time to embrace new genres, starting with Songs in the Key of Old, and Swingin’ Hits for Grumpy Old Men.

Donald Trump is to blame for everything

2017-03-09T18:32:00.000-08:00

Home Truths column in The Australian, in which I realise bad luck and trouble can be laid at the feet of one tiny-handed speaker of post-truth to power. Blame Trump!

After a 2016 of moderate to extreme suckage on both a personal and global level, 2017 dawned with a rosy optimism and a feeling that things could only get better. It was time to put to rest a year where heroes dropped like flies, zeros rose like champagne bubbles and my health and wealth barometer plunged sharply southward, and go forth into the new year and prosper.

But suddenly, in short order, everything has gone to the dogs. A blissful visit from my overseas-dwelling girlfriend was cut brutally short when her mother collapsed and was rushed to hospital for heart surgery. I was confronted with having to deal with the reality of divorce for the second time around. And then to top it all off, from a reasonably busy street outside a major shopping location in broad daylight, some bastard with a boltcutter stole my bike, the one gadget in my life that had brought some happiness and a sense of freedom (after a shaky start with a bad crash), allowing me to begin to get fit again after a bout of pneumonia.

My bike had carried me to Bondi and Botany Bay, over the Parramatta River and along the Cooks River, through mangroves at Homebush, around the Iron Cove and, thrillingly, over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Kirribilli, Mosman and Manly, from Gladesville to Ryde, and Rydalmere and Clyde.

I’d felt my legs grow stronger, along with my lungs, as hills that had thwarted me and seemed like endless mountains gradually become molehills. I rode it to work and back, on errands, and on my days off, I’d head off into the unknown with a vague new destination and Google Maps as my guide. Having laughed at first at the warriors, it wasn’t long before I invested in a couple of pairs of padded Lycra bike shorts, for added comfort after hours in the saddle.

There were even some sleepless nights where at some ungodly hour I wheeled my bike down the stairs as quietly as I could, flicked on my flashing lights, and coasted out into the night, gasping like a madman up the steepest hills I could conquer and shrieking like a werewolf down the other sides.

Basically, I just wanted to ride my bicycle. It had almost become an extension of my body. So when I turned a corner, returning from shopping, to see a void where my steed should have stood, the air went out of me like a punctured tyre and I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. All that was left was the snipped lock coiled on the ground, testament to the brazen crime, taunting me.

I was subsumed by a towering rage.

A primal scream curdled in my throat as I snatched up the broken bike lock, and then a great shadow passed across the sun and I was struck by as vivid an epiphany as any of the hallucinatory visions in the Revelation of St John.

To err is human, to forgive divine. But truly blessed is he who shifts the blame onto his fellow man. Suddenly it all became clear. There was no point blaming myself, or railing at the gods. I didn’t need to blame Canada or the Kiwis, or blame it on the boogie, or the bogeyman.

I realised my problems, along with most of the troubles plaguing our planet, could be laid at the feet of one man: Donald Trump.

Things were just fine until a few weeks ago, then that doofus as POTUS took office and everything went pear-shaped. So I blame that tiny-handed speaker of post-truth to power. I blame that chump Trump. He’s been blamed for everything else. The seers have moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. A Penn State professor, Michael Mann, visiting Sydney last week, warned Trump might well cause the end of the world. So he might as well take the blame for my missing bike.

In the future, the last surviving remnants of humanity will send a killer cyborg back through time to take out the antichrist superstar, the devil’s apprentice who is to blame for all human misery and who ushered in the end times.

Until that day, when anything goes wrong, I simply unfurl my bony finger of blame in the general direction of Donald J. Trump.

Amazing grace. Sweet catharsis. The yoke has been lifted. A great weight removed. Try it. You may like it. Just blame Trump.

Hang on, your call is important to us

2017-03-09T18:27:00.000-08:00

Home Truths column in The Australian, in which I go to war with the illuminati of idiocy otherwise known as Optus. Eventually the forces of good (me) triumph over the forces of darkness (Optus). But the struggle was long and hard and somewhat sanity-sapping.

Dear Optus,

In a previous article in this newspaper, I called you “an Illuminati of idiocy, your unblinking eye staring from a pyramid of pure stoopid”. It now appears I was too kind.

Our short and turbulent relationship began when, arriving back in the country after 25 years abroad, I acquired a prepaid mobile SIM card at the airport. Why you, Optus? Perhaps it was the slick branding, with your patriotic green and gold logo and your insistent importuning in the affirmative: Optus. Yes.

It’s not that I object to your company being owned by people from a place William Gibson famously described as Disneyland with the Death Penalty (yes, Singapore, I mean you). It’s not that on consumer websites, thousands of people seem to dislike you even more than I do, with a proliferation of “I hate Optus, worst phone company in the world” posts, or that you secretly cut broadband users’ speed, or that you broke the hearts of English Premier League fans with your pallid promises.

After a brief honeymoon, things went sour for us so quickly, Optus. My head is still spinning. I tried to talk to you but you just wouldn’t listen. Surely a “telecommunications” company should have the ability to listen. Didn’t the branding agency that probably charged you millions of dollars for that snappy one-word tagline mention that it’s all about engagement? A two-way conversation? And that doesn’t mean a bunch of backslapping tweets and bleats on Twitter.

Would those millions have been better spent on customer service? Was I being too selfish in asking you to come and connect my home broadband at a time when I would actually be home? Apparently so, for three times I informed you, Optus, that I worked afternoons and you would have to come in the morning, and three times you sent unanswerable emails informing me you planned to come between 1pm and 5pm.

After Peter denied Jesus three times, a cock crowed and they took Christ away to be crucified. After you denied me three times, Optus, I decided to take my business elsewhere.

Unable to get an actual human being on the phone, I visited one of your green and gold, gizmo-laden, deal-dripping stores. There, I informed one of your scant, overworked and distracted staff that I wanted to cancel all business with you. I paid what you told me I owed, not to mention a penalty exceeding $100 to get out of my short-lived contract, and walked away, believing we were through.

It wasn’t you, Optus, it was me.

Why, then, did you decide, from your ivory tower of ill-communication, to continue sending me bills for a broadband service that had, to my knowledge, never been connected or used, to the tune of almost $300 a month? When for all those months I can clearly provide the bills that show I was paying Telstra, who was able to handle the complex task of scheduling a morning meeting to hook me up to home broadband at the very first try, for the very same service?

Why, when I tried to call seeking an explanation, did you put me through several circles of automated telephone response hell, and when an actual human did answer the line, it was someone reading from a script in a call centre sweatshop in Manila, where you have outsourced your customer service, along with your brand’s reputation? Someone who asked inane questions for 30 minutes then put me on hold without warning as I sat for another 30 minutes listening to a grating jingle until I rang off in disgust.

And why, just before Christmas, at a time of celebration and goodwill to men, did you set the debt collectors on to me, charmers with names like the Probe Group who threatened to blacken my credit record and drag me into court for three months of bills for a service I didn’t once use?

Ironically, after three months you disconnected my “service” for unpaid bills, when that was all I wanted you to do in the first place. Another visit to your store resulted, after much investigation, in you agreeing I didn’t owe you anything at all. And yet just yesterday another missive from the Probe Group arrived, probing for even more money you now agree I don’t owe.

It wasn’t me, Optus, it was you. No means no. Optus. No.

It's a sticky wicket once you hit 50

2017-03-09T18:18:00.003-08:00

This column in The Australian, was meant to be a light-hearted and somewhat exaggerated look at hitting the big five-oh. But boy did I get under the skin of the 70-is-the-new-50 brigade. It was the number one read piece on The Australian's website that day, and the almost 300 comments are more entertaining and revealing than the column itself.

In a little over a fortnight, I’ll be turning 50. And let’s be clear about this — 50 is not the new 40, or the new 30, or this season’s orange or the new black. Fifty is just 50, and it sucks. Half a century, the big five-o, call it what you will, the plain fact of the matter is, barring exceptional genetics and some luck, your life is way more than half over and there’s not much to look forward to except a long slow slide into decrepitude, forgetfulness and aching in the places where you used to play.

More people you know, and more of your heroes, start dying. You talk about the television shows and movies you grew up with, and get blank stares from younger folk (call yourself a millennial and I’ll punch you on the nose). You might still feel 21 inside, but you get out of a taxi in slow motion and you have become strangely invisible to the opposite sex (unless you are turning 50 and a squillionaire, in which case, party on, Bruce Wayne).

You stop going to bars and clubs, because everyone is younger and better looking and you can’t understand a damned thing they are saying anyway, even if you could hear them. It’s pointless going to restaurants because you can’t read the menu, and by the time the waiter deigns to notice you, you’ve forgotten what you wanted to order.

All your friends are married, often several times over, and are becoming grandparents at a rate of knots (or dealing with their daughter’s puberty and their wife’s menopause at the same time). If, like me, you find yourself a swinging single at 50 (well, parts of you that never used to now keep swinging after the music stops) you face a terrifying new world of dating apps, where Snapchat is the new chat-up, Tinder isn’t something you use to start a fire and Grindr isn’t just the reason you need false teeth.

Slim-fit jeans are no longer an option, a Michelin Man roll of lard settles around your middle that simply won’t be shifted, and putting on socks becomes a physical challenge, involving grunts, groans, torn hamstrings and wrecked backs. (Pro tip: lie back on the bed, feet in the air, and apply sockage, to avoid hamstring and back injuries. There may still be grunts and groans.)

You consider buying a belt-maker’s leather punch so you can put that extra hole in your belt without skewering your finger on the pointy end of your scissors. You know you have to exercise — and let’s not forget, procrastination is a form of exercise, like denial is a river in Egypt — but you no longer bother with macho pursuits like running marathons, kiteboarding or surfing, and instead opt for walking, cycling, lawn bowls or sports involving carts with someone to do the heavy lifting and tell you when it’s cocktail hour. Aching limbs take longer to stop aching, and the hangovers get exponentially more brutal.

You are strolling down the street in good spirits when you see some bent and wrinkled old fart — and realise you went to school with them. Worse, you catch your reflection in a shop window, and it takes you a minute to realise the bent and wrinkled old fart is you. The end is nigh when younger folks start calling you “sir’’ or “ma’am” and stand up for you on the bus or train.

Your thatch may be silvered and thinning, but there’s plenty of new hair growth to deal with, on your back, up your nose and in your ears. Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t some risible cinematic sex romp but a backyard barbecue with your mates.

Old age and treachery may beat youth and exuberance, and youth may be wasted on the young, but then so is your codgerly wisdom and sage advice. Although there may be nuggets to glean from your contemporaries — never waste an erection, always take the opportunity to pee and be extra careful when you fart was the sum total of hard-won knowledge imparted by one
50-something friend. Take half a Viagra … so you don’t pee on your shoes, advised another.

But perhaps the worst thing about turning 50 is a creeping lassitude and a growing sense of weltschmerz with a light sprinkling of ennui. You stop worrying about all the things you were going to do by 50 and just think, bugger it. Your personal too-hard basket gets bigger and easier to put things in. For example, this column was to be 50 Reasons it Sucks to Be Turning 50. Instead, I give you a handful of half-baked reasons and some grumpy old man rambling.

A Visitation from St Hip

2016-12-06T15:45:00.000-08:00

Latest Home Truths column for The Australian. In this bumper Xmas edition, it's a very hipster Christmas .... Original in the paper is here, http://bit.ly/2heQYAu or read it below.

With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore

’Twas the night before Hipstmas, when all through the flat,

Not a being was stirring, not even a gnat;

The leggings were hung by the chimney with care,

(Hand-knitted alpaca from wool traded fair);

The hipsters were nestled all snug in their futons;

On frames of limed oak — got a great deal from groupon;

Hipster chick in her keffiyeh, bloke in his beanie,

Both toasted from roasting hand-stuffed pulled pork weenies,

And making preserves from those damned sugar plums,

That hip friends would soon smear on sourdough buns;

(Artisanly-baked in a wood-fired stove,

With foraged birch twigs to leaven the loaves,

From a starter at least a hundred years old,

Bubbling and yeasty, a true bespoke mould);

When out on the patio arose a great clatter,

The hipsters both stirred, wondering what was the matter.

Probably just a drunk neighbour popped round for a natter,

And perhaps a chilled chardy with a camembert platter

‘It’s only 5am, you have come a bit early’

Said the bloke in his beanie, nudging his girlie

‘Hipstmas brunch doesn’t start until at least ten

Take some organic melatonin and sleep until then.’

But the clattering built to a rattle and hum

And some kind of engine’s low throbbing thrum;

So he sprang from his futon and threw up the sash,

While applying some salve to a purulent rash

(The price hipsters pay for a true Hipstmas feast

When they’ve only just found they’re allergic to yeast);

His vision was blurry, like peering through raindrops,

So he had a quick hit from his ethical eyedrops;

But the fantastical sight on the lawn was still there

A shimmering chimera lit up like a fair

The moon on the breast of the freshly scythed grass

Lent a lustre and glow through the fake leadlight glass

And what was it sitting there in the backyard?

Glimmering bright like a mirrorball’s shards?

‘Totes amazeballs,’ said beanie man to the keffiyeh

‘On our lawn is some dude in a flaming red Prius’

With a shiny tanned driver, all buffed up and slick

He knew in a moment he must be St Hip.

They could tell from the cut of his hand-distressed jorts,

And perched on his head was a trilby of sorts,

His shirt said something about A Bathing Ape,

As he smiled as sucked on his peppermint vape;

The dude leant on the pedal and revved up the engine,

Wound down the window, elbow on the ledge, and

striking a pose like some bearded brigand,

He peered over the top of his vintage Ray-Bans;

‘Yo Beanie Man, how’s it hanging, old son?

I come bearing gifts, in my Prius there’s tons

Of all the good things you need for your feast

And have you considered some gluten-free yeast?

Cos the rash is now spreading all over your face,

It’s really not cool, man, it’s not choice, bro, or ace.

Now, I can’t hang around in your fake spray-on snow

I’m St Hip, and I’ve got lots of hip places to go.

And hipster bitches to see, man, and all of them know

That I curate my own organic Scandinavian mistletoe.’

He grinned like a spiv as he popped open the boot,

His eyes, how they twinkled, his tan dark as soot;

His cheekbones were honed, his abs were well toned,

His beard looked like something Ned Kelly has loaned;

The roach of a joint was clamped tight in his teeth,

His skin was all shiny with Oil of Reef;

He spoke not a word as he bent to his work,

Heaving stuff from the boot with a clean and a jerk;

He filled up their leggings with fine hipster things,

Schnitzels and strudels all tied up with strings;

Moroccan couscous, hard cheese from Santorini,

Some big fat Greek yoghurt to smear on the weenies,

Some taramasalata and some baba ganoush,

And some smashed avocado on the buns for to smoosh,

And hand-packed in biodegradable cellophane,

Tiny plum puddings with handmade marzipan;

He gave them a smile and said ‘Merry Festivus’

As he climbed back inside the cherry-red Prius;

And he screeched out the driveway like a bat out of hell,

Leaving nothing but gifts and his patchouli oil smell;

And Beanie Man turned back to the keffiyeh,

And said: ‘This is totes the best Hipstmas eva!’

Hell on Two Wheels

2016-11-28T16:50:00.003-08:00

My latest Home Truths column in The Australian, in which I discover riding a bike isn't just like, er, riding a bike. Here's the link to The Oz: http://bit.ly/2fYTRB1

I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike.
I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride it where I like.

Queen, Bicycle Race

Well, thanks for nothing, Freddie. Some advice that turned out to be. I’m sure the immortal strains of Queen’s paean to pedal-powered transport were echoing in my head last week on a dark, stormy night as I coasted out of the office carpark on my gleaming new machine and my flashing red USB chargeable taillight slowly faded into the gloom.

I’d only bought the damn thing two days earlier. With my half-century on this planet approaching like a fat-bottomed girl riding a fixie down the Alpe d’Huez and a recent fortnight in a hospital bed laid low with pneumonia, I had a mini-mid-life crisis. It was either buy a Porsche or get a bicycle and attempt to get fit after several years of indolence and a life-threatening illness.

As I have no money and can’t afford a Porsche, the decision was an easy one. So off I schlepped to the local bike shop in Glebe and handed over $600 smackeroos (a Giant Cross City, for the bike tragics; a middle-of-the-road mountain/road bike hybrid designed, as its name suggests, to cross cities.)

Traversing urban expanses by bicycle is a perilous pursuit, and I don’t mean in the Velodrome sense. I last regularly rode a bicycle as a youth in Townsville. I can still remember the excitement of my 13th or 14th birthday, waking up to find a gleaming new dark green Speedwell racing bike with a ribbon tied round its tape-wrapped handlebars and a card affixed.

More memorable, though, later on that same birthday, sated with cake and drunk with the freedom conferred by my two-wheeled steed, was the jarring impact and hammer blow to my teenage pride and pimply dignity as, looking down, marvelling at the magic of the derailleur gears, I ran at a fair clip straight into the back of a parked panel van.

“If it’s rocking, don’t bother knocking,” the sticker on its bumper said. “If you’re bleeding, don’t bother pleading” might have been more appropriate, as I scraped myself off the rough bitumen and wiped the claret out of my eyes. It’s funny the things you remember as you become living proof of Newton’s law of inertia. A body in motion tends to stay in motion, as a smug Reebok ad informed us, but they left out the corollary: Unless acted on by an unbalanced force.

Pop quiz, bike dweebs: When the unbalanced force of a teen speed demon collides with the stationary mass of a shaggin’ wagon, the square on the hypotenuse equals:

a. the total surface area of road rash incurred
b. the number of individual bits of gravel to be plucked from your oozing flesh
c. the amount of buckle on your front wheel
d. all of the above

It wasn’t my only crash. Later in my teenage cycling phase I would skid into a ‘Chinee Apple’ bush, a savage and racist shrub endemic to North Queensland, with bitter, bile-tasting fruit and covered in thorns an inch long. I also rode, on two separate occasions, into rose bushes (smaller thorns but just as pointy).

It’s clear I’m an early adopter when it comes to two-wheeled smash-ups. My first proper ride on my new Giant was from my inner west apartment to the Surry Hills headquarters of this august organ. The commute to went off without a hitch. Unfortunately, not so much the fro, on the aforementioned dark, stormy and treacherously drizzly night. I came to grief on the designated bike path of The Goods Line, a poor man’s High Line, where hipsters can stroll where goods trains once trundled. Some well-intentioned idiot had, days before, I was informed while lying bleeding on the concrete, cleaned years of leaf litter and gunk out of the old train tracks, leaving a bicycle wheel sized slot to bring riders down to earth.

Which is where I discovered another law - gravity. The forward motion of my bike ceased as the front wheel dropped into this perfect cyclist trap and that energy was transferred to my left hip, elbow and head, in that order. I went down so fast my head had bounced off the concrete with a crack like a rifle shot before I even realised I was having a prang. Praise the lord for compulsory helmets.

I still want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride it where I like, with the exception of anywhere within three metres of train tracks, thorny bushes or the rear end of stationary sin bins.

Breaking Bad on the Boardwalk Empire for The Wire's Mad Men in Peaky Blinders

2016-11-08T16:14:00.001-08:00

Latest piece in The Australian, in which I out myself as a decadent and depraved television binge-watcher. Yo McNutty! Omar strollin' ...

My name is Jason and I’m a television binge-watcher. It has been six hours since my last tumble down the fibre-optic wormhole: half of Game of Thrones, season two, since you ask.

When season one of Game of Thrones was released I devoured the entire thing in one slack-jawed sitting, eyes glazed and unblinking like Malcolm McDowell getting a spot of Ludovico’s technique in A Clockwork Orange. I was late for an important meeting the next day, a waste of space warming a chair, occasionally muttering “winter is coming”.

I knew I’d hit my rock bottom and things would have to change. Night after night I’d find myself up until 3am or 4am, sometimes later, jabbing at the remote occasionally to fast forward the credits, just another Netflix narco flicking at the lever that supplies the dose, a Boardwalk Empire bonobo with Roku raccoon eyes, victim of some nightmarish experiment, skulking into work with a blue-screen burnt-in hangover of plot lines, ever vigilant for the merest hint of a spoiler.

The rot set in with 24, the Kiefer Sutherland vehicle where the contrivance of things unfolding in real time across 24 hours led to concentric circles of plot holes and convoluted twists until each season collapsed in a black hole of silliness and viewers were left shaking, twitching and rubbing their eyes, wondering what just happened. But 24 was just an appetiser, a loosener, a gateway drug to harder hits. I got truly hooked on the glowing cathode crack pipe of The Wire, the gritty five-season trawl through decaying Baltimore and its urban blight, with its street-smart, note-perfect writing, penned by a former cop and a journalist.

The Wire - The Greatest Show Ever, taught at Harvard and Duke - was a risk for HBO, a truly groundbreaking idea that dispensed with the pat TV ending forever, and instead sprawled out over each season with novelistic story arcs, characters who would appear briefly and bob back up seasons later, where even a quick bathroom break could rob you of some rich detail or plot point.

A season in a night? Sometimes I did more. Soon, you stop talking like a normal human and begin to inhabit the world of your obsession. When I was deep into The Wire, starting the whole thing again for the third or fourth plough through all five seasons (I eventually watched the whole thing five times), I mainly conversed in terms like “Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit”, “Yo McNutty”, “Snitching Bubs!”, “Omar strollin” and “po-po”. Just writing this brings the old urges back and I have to restrain myself from doing the old Snot Boogie once more.

The flip side to losing yourself in a new world is the gaping void when the credits sound for the last time, a crushing, soul-sucking emptiness as reality closes back in and the real world reasserts itself. So you move on to the next series.

After The Wire I simply had to delve into The Sopranos, the series that started it all for the confirmed binge watcher (four times — just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in). I mainlined Mad Men (three times, gorging on the drink porn and period costumes, the genius casting of an unknown Jon Hamm as Don Draper, the light glittering through cut-crystal decanters and glowing amber liquor), dreamt of Californication, and I broke bad for the nihilistic Breaking Bad, where you could vicariously get high on meth as you began your binge, a double-whammy for the incipient addict. Better call Saul.

Strange and deviant behaviours begin to set in. There are few things more depraved than a man or woman in the depths of a Peaky Blinders bender. The nanny state should institute lockdown laws for late-night sofa loiterers who are ruining their lives and spiralling ever deeper into trouble. Never mind the one-punch, HBO and Netflix are a donkey punch to the body politic, an insidious menace in our midst and doubtless responsible for more lost productivity and shifty sickies than all the crack in Hamsterdam.

Ironically, five years after The Wire premiered in 2002, HBO released a series called Addiction, marshalling some of the hottest documentary filmmakers of their day to tackle the subject. They delved into the world of crack, booze, meth, smack and sex addicts. But they roundly ignored the addiction they largely created and continue to fuel.

My name is Jason and I’m a television binge watcher. Until my relapse, I hadn’t binge-watched for three years. Last night, I paid to stream Game of Thrones, seasons two through six. God help me.

Burns Night turns into dark night of the soul for grumpy old man

2016-11-08T16:07:00.000-08:00

Home Truths column in The Australian, in which a bit of Robert Burns leads to an existential crisis and a lousy turn as the Serial Killer of Glebe

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

An' foolish notion:

Robert Burns

To A Louse, On Seeing One On A Lady’s Bonnet, At Church

Never mind the Haggis. It’s the first two lines of the last stanza of Burns’s great equaliser that packs the knockout punch, nails the human condition and bears frequent repeating whenever one is in danger of developing airs and graces.

It’s a perfect puncturing of ego, a skewering of delusions, a dousing of the bonfire of the vanities, and a delousing for swelled heads everywhere. It’s pure existential nitty dread. For nothing screams ‘unclean’ like a head full of lice and I still recall the appalled horror the first time the fine tooth comb was dragged through my flowing 70s primary school locks to reveal dozens of the wriggling translucent little ticks manque.

Some 200 years before that moment, the great Scottish bard is sitting in church when he observes a louse - an impudent, crowlin ferlie, plump and grey as any groset, struntin rarely over the gauze and lace of a fine lady’s bonnet.

I don’t make any great claims about my own Scottish roots, any more than I do about my Italian, Irish, English, French or Danish ones. But I have always felt an affinity with the strange, compelling and sometimes indecipherable verse of Burns, and not just on New Year’s Eve, soused with single malt and Auld Lang Syn. (I also felt an affinity with the early, brilliant works of Irvine Welsh, before he fried his brain and went silly. Between the weird words and abstruse vocabularies of the pair, I grew to understand the guttural utterances of my Scottish colleagues after moving to work in newspapers in Hong Kong).

The immortal lines popped into my head the other day as i was striding (well, limping) along the high and low roads of Glebe, on a glorious, crisp, blue-skied spring day, feeling about as perky as a soon-to-be-50-year-old racked with assorted afflictions had a right to feel. There was a spring in my gimpy gait, a twinkle in my eye and a magnanimous smile twitching at my lips. If I had a Tam O-Shanter, I would have grabbed its big red pom-pom and doffed it to each passer-by.

But then the giftie gie’d me a big reflective plateglass window to glance into as I strunted past. And all of a sudden I saw myself as others no doubt saw me. My smile of goodwill was a twisted grimace, the twinkle in my eye a crooked, baleful squint (perhaps from the sun’s glare off the chrome bits of flotillas of designer prams the size of SUVs pushing to and fro), my greying buzz cut was textbook grumpy old man, and my stride was a herky-jerky hobble, a few stutter-steps removed from the legion of walking-stick wielders, the Robert Zimmerframes, Lean-hard Cohens and assorted poet laureates of pain, decay and decline.

The joy went out of my moment, squashed like a crawlin ferlie on the tip of a comb’s tooth. All I needed was a hook in place of one hand and a long black trenchcoat, and I could be the evil serial killer of Glebe. Perhaps little children already cowered behind curtains that twitched as I shuffled past. “Mum, look, it’s that weird old grumpy guy”.

I know what they did last summer. The hills have eyes. I consider dropping into the make-up effects store on Broadway to secure some props, grow into my role, still dazed at how my inner ebullience could outwardly manifest as a worn, torn fellow I barely recognized.

Since that day, for it never rains but it pours, Slife has been a litany of doctor, dentist and physiotherapist appointments, pipers due to be paid after ignoring their calls far too long.

We are all falling apart and hurtling towards the great unknown. The best we can do is keep our dignity, allow our pain and suffering to increase our compassion and understanding, and retain an ability to laugh at life’s absurdities, infelicities and great gaping injustices, while waving a middle finger in the direction of one’s higher power occasionally.

Oh, and keep your hair clean, and your fine tooth comb handy. For as the great bard warns:

O Jeany, dinna toss your head,

An' set your beauties a' abread!

Ye little ken what cursed speed

The blastie's makin:

Spring brings ant army assault, amorous avians and randy pandas

2016-11-08T16:01:00.003-08:00

Home Truths column for The Australian's Life page, in which the rites of Spring go seriously awry.

Spring has sprung. And in the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of ant poison and how to get rid of pigeons practising the kama sutra on the balcony.

Sorry, Lord Alfred Tennyson, but love is on the back-burner for now. My rites of spring began one morning last week, as I slowly stirred from my slumbers to become aware the floor was moving. “Ah that’s nice,” I thought, as i stretched luxuriantly and rolled over. Seconds later, I bolted upright, all thoughts of somnolence banished. I fumble for my glasses and the scene becomes clear. The floor isn’t actually moving, of course, but a motorised column of fat shiny and rather large black ants was streaming in from my bathroom, hup-two-three-ing around my bedroom and goose-stepping somewhere under my sofa. Somewhere in the column a barrel-chested sergeant-major ant was no doubt shouting: “I don’t know what you’ve been told. The best stale crumbs come with some mould.”

Now, for a single fellow living alone, I thought I had been doing a creditable job of keeping my flat spic and span. But I’d clearly forgotten to clean under the sofa, and as I dragged it aside, the full horror was revealed.

Flakes of parmesan cheese, flecks of cold cuts, mouldy sultanas, pizza crust, random elements of myriad mueslis, slivers of chocolate and an Arnott’s Family Assortment of biscuit remnants, all served up with a light dusting of, er, dust. OK, a heavy dusting. A Watership Down of dust bunnies. But it doesn’t deter the ants from their 10-course tasting menu, and I briefly ponder scattering a few blobs of lemon sorbet on the floor as a palate cleanser. Word has clearly got out about this Formicidae smorgasbord south of my couch. I grab my iPad and find Rentokil’s site, where I ascertain they are almost certainly common black ants, famous kitchen scavengers also partial to some dog excrement and effective spreaders of salmonella.

As I read, they keep streaming in like there’s no tomorrow. Nor will there be. I’ve got nothing against the humble ant, as long as he stays in the garden, doing his invaluable ecosystem thing, returning everything back to ant poo. Come into my home, possibly covered in dog poo, to get all up in my shizness, and the gloves come off. An invasion of this scale demanded a thermonuclear DEFCON4 scorched earth response, a blast of borax to the thorax, or something similarly noxious to Pink Panther the little blighters for good. Off to the corner store I trotted, returning armed with baits with complicated instructions (in Japanese only), floor cleaner and some spray in case all else failed.

Two hours later, I have squished countless ants along the trail so the stench of fallen comrades will say “Abandon hope all ye who enter”. This strategy is compromised by my frantic mopping of the floor half a dozen times, replacing the dead ant tang with a forest fresh pine scent. I deploy the baits and resist the choking final solution of the aerosol.

The very next morning, I stir from sleep to hear a strange feathery shuffling sound in my bedroom. I had left the door to the balcony open to pick up some breeze. Instead I have a pigeon playa and his chick getting pige-y with it in my bedroom. And not just once, either.

A skewed deja vu sets in as I leap out of bed, waving my arms like a lunatic and screaming. The birds are gone in a flap of oily wings when I have a big idea.

I grab my K-mart pressed metal life-sized sulphur crested cockatoo ornament off the mantlepiece and perch it on the balcony at a menacing angle. Slightly bigger than life size, it does the trick and the pigeons do not return.

I have faced worse beginnings to spring. My first year in Thailand, I suffered through an eruption of cockroaches like the scarab scene in The Mummy, a bristling red plague of ticks that covered my walls, and then a sneak attack by termites, who ascended to a second floor bookshelf and chomped through most of my vinyl record collection’s cardboard sleeves, all within the space of a few soul-scarring weeks.

The irrefutable proof that spring is here, however, is not daylight saving or the chirp of birds, but the publication of the season’s first randy panda story. In any case, spring is most definitely in the air, and right on cue comes the season’s first randy panda story. Right on cue, Adelaide Zoo’s star panda pair are getting ready to do the wild thing. Pandas are not nature’s porn stars, however; they rarely mate in captivity, can’t sign in to Tinder, and regard ‘eats, shoots and leaves’ as a dietary requirement not a notch on the cubbing den’s bedpost.

Male pandas are known for their relatively small penises, so one wonders what heartless handler would have come up with a name like Wang Wang, who as I write is doing handstands to pee higher into the bamboo the better to impress his putative panda mate, Fu Ni, who is bleating, chirping and indulging in water play, all good signs.

In the spring, a young panda’s fancy lightly turns to the pissing contest known as love.

Kitchen ambition causes souffle apocalpyse

2016-11-08T15:44:00.003-08:00

Home Truths column in The Australian, in which I find a souffle doesn't even rise once.

“Just as the pangs of hunger struck, he came upon two people – one a sailor, the other a penguin – in the act of eating a pudding. But this was no ordinary pudding. It was a cut-an’-come-again pudding.”

Is there any Australian of a certain age who, upon finding themselves living alone and solely responsible for his own sustenance, hasn’t found themselves fantasising about The Magic Pudding? I must confess recently, after some disastrous attempts to exercise my vestigial culinary muscles, I have found myself lost in reveries of cut-and-come-again puddings; not the warty-looking, glowering bowl-headed character of Norman Lindsay’s much-loved children’s book, but elaborate sticky date affairs, glistening towers of creme brulee, rice puddings shimmering in an ocean of creme fraiche.
It’s also a comfort food thing. As a teen growing up in Townsville (someone had to) the evening’s highlight was a packet Puffin Pudding for dessert, either a rich blueberry or a piquant lemon or a creamy butterscotch, heaped with vanilla ice cream, best consumed while watching The Kenny Everett Video Show, The Goodies or Doctor Who.

It was in this narcotic haze of nostalgia and near sugar coma that I convinced myself it would be a worthy weekend project to attempt a souffle. I was filled with the false confidence of a short-lived teenage stint where I became obsessed with baking cakes, after my grandfather, Vincenzo, a fellow of Italian and French provenance with Frank Sinatra eyes, entrusted me with his secret sponge cake recipe that unfailingly won first prize every year at the Brisbane ‘Ekka’.
Having mastered the humble but tricky sponge, I moved on to more ambitious cakes, vast cantilevered multilevel flans, great creamy fruit-encrusted confections, gaudy pavlovas that could have graced Liberace’s white baby grand.
But like a misjudged sponge, I rose too fast. One afternoon, putting the finishing touches on my most elaborate creation yet to take to a party, a family argument began and in a hissy fit of teenage angst I smashed my cake to bits with my bare hands, never to bake again.
Can a souffle rise twice? Not in my kitchen. In the annals of souffle disasters, this was a Challenger, an Exxon-Valdez, Soufflegate. Despite poring over the best advice of the legion of celebrity chefs on a recent Saturday afternoon, and arming myself with eye-wateringly expensive ingredients from Glebe’s finest artisanal organic gourmet deli supermarkets, my souffle collapsed into itself like a star in some distant galaxy going supernova and then turning into a black hole, leaving little but a molten gooey cheese-like compound and a burned crust I still can’t get off my best saucepan.
In hindsight, it was a tad ambitious. Well, OK, it was hubris with a dash of arrogance, a pinch of blind optimism, a generous squeeze of futility and a light dusting of utter idiocy; Sisyphus trying to roll a thousand dung beetles up the north face of the Eiger.
I should have started more humbly; a salad, perhaps, or a stir fry. A souffle is a dish known to trouble the best chefs — even the great Jacques Pepin has a souffle disaster story, in his case with a live TV audience of 2,500 people as witnesses. He whipped up his souffle and put it in the oven, which he failed to notice was set to self-cleaning, at a toasty 725 degrees.
Pudding, incidentally, originally referred to savoury dishes. It comes from the French boudin, meaning “small sausage”, which might explain why the French have spent centuries overcompensating in the kitchen.
Which brings me to my recent discovery of the ultimate low-maintenance meal for the modern singleton, the manna from heaven that is STAGG Chili. Most canned goods carry an implicit whiff of loneliness and loser-dom. Campbell Soup is dandy if you’re Andy Warhol but for the rest of us, it’s just salt in the psychic wound and a reminder that you’re not Jamie Oliver cheekily whipping up another perfect feast for a posse of braying hipsters with perfect skin, dressed by J Crew.
Go STAGG and you’re a Rat Pack of one, a swinging single with places to go and people to meet. “Just one taste and you’ll fall in love with STAGG Chili. Made from juicy beef, succulent red tomatoes, jalapeño peppers and onions that will make your mouth water.”
It might not be cut-an’-come-again but it does what it says on the tin.

Love me Tinder? Thanks but no thanks

2016-11-08T15:44:00.002-08:00

This was the first in a new column I have started doing every second Monday for The Australian's Life page. It's called Home Truths.

Sympathy for the Gerbil

(With apologies to the Rolling Stones)

Please allow me to introduce myself

I'm a man of no wealth and poor taste

I've been around for a long, long year

Packed some love handles on my waist

Pleased to meet you

My pick-up lines are lame

I don’t like pina coladas

And I don’t play video games.

Consider the hamster. Watch his little legs fly as he gets that wheel spinning. Round and round it goes. When it stops. nobody knows.

From the outside, the brave new world of modern dating looks terrifying. A cross between a giant hamster wheel for humanity and a game of musical chairs. For a misanthropic social misfit and soon-to-be double divorcee like myself, it’s all about as appealing as a bucket of cold, congealing spew.

Unfortunately, these days options seem limited in the love stakes. If you resist the lure of the apps and their promise of zipless hook-ups, how else might one meet the love of one’s life, or at least get a leg over?

I’ve never been one for the glib chat-up line and the mysterious, shy guy of hidden depths pose doesn’t seem like it would cut much ice in heartless, shiny Sydney. The idiots who recently pronounced it the world’s friendliest town must have confined their research to bright eyed, perfect-skinned teens in swinging backpacker hostels, without considering the lonely reality of the singleton creeping up on 50.

Speed dating? Nah. It’s bound to be more start-up than hook-up, full of Bondi hipsters with bushranger beards and bow-legged Staffies to pull them about on their Malibu skateboards while they sip artisanal iced lemongrass chai organic lattes, cruising for linked-in connections and networking like mad. And that’s just the women.

I read recently in Fast Company that old school matchmakers are making a comeback in the hipper boroughs of New York City. People like Erika Gershowitz, of Three Day Rule, who prowls the pubs and clubs and tapas bars giving out cards and introducing herself. The outfit has six locations and 19 matchmakers, apparently.

Three Day Rule clients get face time with the matchmakers who bone up on their preferences. They get fashion consultants, professional snappers for their profiles and best of all, someone else to do the actual dating for them. "Dating is a numbers game," says Gershowitz. "We essentially go on bad dates for people."

Professional help, yeah, that might be the ticket, but I don’t think they have expanded to Sydney yet, and I can’t quite rid myself of images of Fiddler on the Roof, with some hook-nosed Barbra Streisand type skipping from shtetl to shtetl in her shawl, singing ‘Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch.”

Ah yes. There’s bound to be a catch. And the matchmaker catch is a cool US$15,000 to a flat-out ridiculous $US250,000 for their ‘expert’ services.

I even ventured recently to the Gympie Music Muster, which has developed a reputation over the years as a place where finding one’s significant other or at least a warm body for the night is like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel.

Well, they must have rolled out the barrel when they heard I was coming, and rolled it right back in again. It muster been love .. if you look like you belong in the country and just stepped out of an RM Williams catalogue.

Because all the hooking up seemed to be confined to improbably tall and ridiculously fresh-faced young people, clad, to a man and woman, in Akubra hats, moleskin trousers and oilskin dryzabone cowpoke clobber. Now I can certainly appreciate the erotic potential, the frisson, the friction, not to say the frottage, of a well maintained oilskin or the velvety touch of the slightly frayed moleskin.

But for an ageing cityslicker in a non-descript pullover and a plain black coat, it was strictly voyeurism only. As the achey-breaky, boot-scootin’ players got lucky, I just got colder and colder, as the mercury flirted with the lower single digits. The closest I got to some muster love was an involuntary threesome when the tallest, shiniest and face-suckingly, neck-lickingly smoochiest new hook-ups, both cowboy-ed up to the nines, their cuban heeled RMs adding extravagent inches to their towering, ramrod-backed physiques, marched backwards, lips in a death-lock or perhaps a kind of vacuum-sealed vapour lock, without breaking stride or seeing who might be in the way, ploughing a perfect row through the crowd, and driving their combine harvest of cowpoke passion right over the top of me.

I limped off back to my tent, cold, wet, and with what felt like a broken metatarsal, cured of any notion that the starlight, campfires and booze, not to mention the country and western music, might help me get off the one-way train to Singletown, where lonely singletons go to die, or at least be found in their flat weeks after the fact, half-eaten by the neighbours’ Alsatians.

So one day soon, it looks like I may have to enter the world of online dating, along with everyone else. According to a recent Pew study, almost half of the public knows someone who uses online dating or met their significant other that way.

Vanity Fair, in an in-depth look at online dating recently, commented on how the Tinder-like, swipe-for-love apps had reduced the search for love to something like Uber for sex. "You’re always sort of prowling," one charming twentysomething named Alex told the magazine. "You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”

That sounds even worse than loneliness. So for now, Tinder remains on the app store shelf, and my love life remains a one-man bonfire of the vanities.

Kafka on Crown Street

2016-08-11T05:52:00.000-07:00

My latest piece in The Australian, on the challenges of getting back in the system after 25 years away http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/return-to-australia-kafka-on-crown-street/news-story/71f7c20ce194e0d37a70986aa475eeb2

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. — Franz Kafka

I’d been back in Australia less than a day when I found myself slip-sliding in the slime with worms of a new bureaucracy. At least it was a new one for me.

While Australia was having its nanny state revolution, I was off toiling in Milton Friedman’s laissez-faire paradise of Hong Kong and later in Milton’s Paradise Lost with prawn soup, the lawless melange otherwise known as Bangkok.

I had assumed this usurping of the public service and the law by nannies and ninnies to have been greatly exaggerated … until, back in Sydney, I stood, quaking, under the gimlet gaze and granite face of the woman welcoming the great unwashed at the Australian Taxation Office in Martin Place.

Battle of the cleaning bots

GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Surfing’s ultimate rebel

FRED PAWLE

As I stuttered through my story of returning after 25 years abroad, my fantasies of being received like the prodigal son fled with the shark-like widening of a smile that bypassed her eyes and heart to arrive, unburdened by the milk of human kindness, at her thin, bluish lips.

I hadn’t pitched up for a hand-out. I had a proper job and I wanted to get back in the system.

I waved my true blue, supersized and very expensive Australian passport, complete with extra pages for frequent flyers, holograms of national symbols and feral pests and smart-chip technology.

Less than 24 hours earlier, I had tiptoed towards immigration at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport on tenterhooks. Given my port of departure (Bangkok) I half-expected to be hauled off to have my trousers Malcolm Frasered and to feel the clammy touch of the latex glove, maybe even end up on that reality show where earnest ockers in airports did their best impressions of Cops.

But I sailed through the automated gates and Minority Report face scan and waltzed through Customs, with nothing to declare except my admiration for this new, zipless, ultra-efficient Australia.

My smart passport had passed muster with the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. Was it enough, though, for the ATO’s panjandrums of PAYG? Not on your Dame Nellie Melba or a stale piece of pavlova.

“Computer says no,” I could see her thinking. I would need to prove my existence with three pieces of identification, totalling the mystical score of 100 points, to obtain the sacred tax file number and — O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! — be permitted to join the ranks of tax-paying-as-they-go Australians.

Had Canadian sage Tyler Brule been right when he recently pronounced Australia in danger of being over-sanitised, wet-nursed and fatally dumbed-down? I needed a driver’s licence (unlikely, since I hadn’t driven in a quarter of a century), an Australian property rental tenancy agreement (impossible on my first full day in the country) or utility bills (ditto).

The best bet, old sharkface said, was a Medicare card, so off to Crown Street, Darlinghurst, I traipsed, to stand in a queue for 30 minutes, and sit in another one for 40 minutes. When I’m finally handed a sheaf of forms, I can barely bring myself to look in case it asks me for a tax file number.

Fast-forward the promised three weeks — no Medicare card. After peering into a mirror to make sure I’m still there, I return to Crown Street, where I’m told my paperwork was in order but had failed to pass through the bureaucratic blood-brain barrier to the place where people actually make Medicare cards, so it would take another month.

Head spinning, I stagger off to the Immigration and Border Protection Department, a sombre establishment near Central Station covered in public toilet tiles the colour of Uluru and emu shit. My private health insurer had informed me I needed a “certificate of movement”. I’d have been better off trying the Ministry of Silly Walks or that artist who sprays paint from his bottom.

Four hours of automated non-response telephone hell spread over eight calls and two weeks had convinced me of the impossibility of getting a human being on the phone. So I join another queue, at the head of which awaits a man smiling like the Cheshire Cat. It’s not a form I can fill out: just a form telling me to apply online. I should have read the reviews: “Moribund administration … waste of taxpayer dollars … ridiculous”.

None of this prepared me for the brutal business of renting a flat. Real-estate agents? Fakes, showponies and big fat liars, chimerical figures who emerged from their shiny chariots to sneer at my desperation while waving more forms in my face, forms directing me to online forms with compulsory fields I couldn’t fill out, forms created by xenophobic sadists unfamiliar with the ways of modern nomads.

Then there was Optus, its unblinking eye gazing from a pyramid of pure stupid, expecting me to sit stranded on the hard shoulder of the information superhighway for six weeks waiting for broadband, setting up then cancelling appointments, always between 1pm and 5pm despite my pleas of only being free in the mornings.

At least this national telecommunications company had someone answering the phones — someone in Bangladesh who kept telling me everything would be all right without actually being able to answer any of my questions.

Still, I remain of good cheer and take it as an article of faith that one fine day, if the gods are smiling and all the lemons align on the great poker machine in the sky, I will be allowed to pass Pokemon Go and receive my tax file number, and thus be filled with the chest-bursting bliss of being a real person in the land of my birth and accorded the inestimable privilege of being able to pay tax. On that same glorious day, perhaps Optus will send the Mad Hatter, the Walrus and the Eggman to rescue me from my rabbit hole and hook me up.

Until then, I will loiter in the shadows of a country born of convicts, living out In the Penal Colony. As Kafka said: “From a certain point there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”

Vive la revolution. I am the slime.

No Town and Country For Old Men

2016-07-03T09:34:00.004-07:00

My first piece for The Australian since joining full time - a skewed look at the Australian election, and perhaps quite fitting, given the skewed and rather strange cliffhanger of a result. The piece as it ran in the online edition is here: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/federal-election-2016/federal-election-2016-no-town-and-country-for-old-men/news-story/052d51c868022dcd8ea9d543dd587d6f

PRETTY VACANT: STRANGE DAZE
AT THE TOWN & COUNTRY

It is nippy in Bippy’s, where the great headkicker and political Mr Fixit Richo - ailing former Senator Graham Richardson - once held court, and where Latham the Barbarian, Paul Keating’s potty-mouthed heir apparent as political polemicist and insulter-in-chief, may have sharpened the barbs that would be unleashed upon conga lines of suckholes from all sides of the political divide.

The restaurant out front of the Town and Country Motel, Strathfield, is freezing as I sit alone, finishing my Wheaties under the impassive gaze of two plaster cherubs in Akubras, one clutching a bounteous bunch of grapes, the other a sheaf of wheat that looks more like cricket pads. The dark chocolate wainscotting, held together in places by great swathes of sticky-tape, almost reaches to the ceiling, where a glass bead game of chandeliers depends, oozing pure 70s.

My breath makes foggy clouds, or perhaps it’s the ghosts of elections past getting restless. Local gossip has it that Bippy’s was something of a Labor Party bolthole in years gone by. It certainly affords a weird perspective from which to watch the election for someone just days returned from a quarter of a century living and working in the light and heat of Hong Kong and Bangkok.

A day earlier, as I sat in the Coffee Box at Strathfield Mall, a flashback of horror flickered across my consciousness. A spot of Googling reminded me that I was sitting almost exactly where Wade Frankum began 10 minutes of mayhem that became one of Australia’s worst massacres, turning around to repeatedly stab a teenage girl before shooting seven dead and injuring six more with his semi-automatic rifle before shooting himself in the head in a parking lot after saying ‘I’m sorry’.

Today, Strathfield is a bustling centre and a kind of Little Korea, a bulgogi-fuelled battlefield where local politicians pen poison letters, sleep with spanners under their pillows and sweep their homes for bugs as they vie for the pork barrels they feel are due Sydney’s third-most-connected transport hub.

Since Richo’s heydey, other Labor right powerbrokers and gladhanders have made Strathfield a happy hunting ground, men like Fast Eddie Obeid, the backroom kingmaker with more false fronts than Hugo Weaving in Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, his son Moses, who tried to part the waters and build a marina, and mates like Eric Roozendaal and dirty trickster Joe Tripodi, a saturnine presence who looks like Pete Sampras recast as the painting in The Picture of Dorian Gray, not to mention their various Triproteges.

FIX IS IN: RICHO INDICATES THE
PERCENTAGE OF VOTER CONFIDENCE IN
TODAY'S POLLIES

As these names - vague headlines to me - swirl around the room, it’s getting trippy in Bippy’s. I gaze at the political landscape and it seems populated by pygmies and nitwits. Mama’s little baby may love Shorten’s bread, but no one else seems to be buying it. As for Malcolm in the Middle, the one percenter and self-styled smartest person in the room - meh.

Where is the blood and thunder, the power and glory, the invective and insults that made Australian politics worth following? Where are the characters, the mates, the friction in the factions?

When I left Australia, ‘Old Silver’ Bob Hawke had finally been prised from the levers of power by Paul Keating, and parliamentary discourse would never be the same. For the first decade I was away, Australian politics seemed worth following, if only for the ever-more inventive insults and epithets that dripped from the curled lip of Keating. Parliament was a house of shivers waiting for spines, debaters being flogged by warm lettuce, where feral abacuses ran amok, souffles rose twice and bums were araldited to seats.

Even the desiccated coconut Little Johnny Howard cocked his unruly eyebrow and uttered immortal lines on occasion, likening himself to ‘Lazarus with a triple bypass’.

Let’s not even besmirch the memory of immortals like Gough Whitlam, with his ‘well may we say God save the Queen’ and ‘Kerr’s Cur’ one liners, or the never-repeated feat of ‘Little Digger’ Billy Hughes, who sent the Speaker of the House into a fatal apoplexy by telling Australian second Primer Minister, Alfred Deakin, “at least Judas had the decency to hang himself.”

Today, a charisma bypass and the removal of a sharp tongue seems to come with preselection. The best thing I have read since returning to these shores a nanosecond ago is Tom Dusevic’s cogent, mordent and prescient essay in these pages in 2011, bemoaning the rise and rise of political ‘monoculture’ on both sides, full of ‘minor leaguers’ with ‘stunted’ intellects; lacking “gravitas, broader interests and their methods are those that served them well in student, union or factional politics: stunts and tricks.”

There are no tricks at the Town and Country, not since they ran Lorna out of town, Lorna Doon, who had been working in the world’s oldest profession until the ‘bag full of condoms’ incident, closely followed by the strange case of the cleaning lady and the bed covered in sex toys.

“Lock your door and watch out for Lorna,” had been the advice from the motel’s affable new proprietor, who added: “It’s a classic, isn’t it? It’s like a little slice of the 70s trapped in amber. Bippy’s is straight out of Underbelly or Goodfellas.”

Bippy’s was named, he says, for the cars that would beep as they came over the hill, and as a parody of Beppi’s, the famed Darlinghurst restaurant that has hosted Frank Sinatra, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Rihanna, Pink, Julio Iglesias, Joe Cocker, Billy Joel and most recently by Hollywood funnyman Ben Stiller, as well as being a favourite of John Howard, Bob Hawke and Julie Bishop, and where Kerry Packer and Sam Chisholm reportedly had a standing every Friday lunchtime in the wine cellar room.

Beppi Polese, the proprietor, died recently. It’s a safe bet he never dined at Bippy’s. Richo did, though, as did Latham. I peer into the dining room’s gloom, expecting to see Ray Liotta or Joe Pesci, or perhaps Alfonse Gangitano.

COTTAGE INDUSTRY: THE JONES
AND RICHO JUGGERNAUT

Instead, I hear the hard nasal drawl of Richo, Minister for Kneecaps, a man who knew a thing or two about tricks, political and otherwise, the Labor right’s one time capo di capo, about to keel over from chondrosarcoma but still wanting to go mano a mano.

This is no ghost though. I’ve accidentally clicked on his latest Whooshkaa podcast. And his words cut through the buzz of static in my brain, succinctly summing up my thoughts, and oh-so-colourfully describing the colourless monoculture of Australian politics over the past decade.

“Australia, hasn’t fallen in love with Bill Shorten, they won’t wear him. (Kevin) Rudd … that hopeless arrogant turd who paraded around hating everyone and treating everybody with contempt. he goes and you get (Julia) Gillard, who was just Rudd in a skirt, who disregarded everyone who ever told her anything sensible, always made her own calls and was always wrong, a hopeless politician. Then Tony Abbott … with Prince Philip and his knighthood, and the 2014 budget which was an attack on every Australian who didn’t have a quid. Turnbull, who might be bright but isn’t smart. All those bad leaders in a row - we’ve lost faith in our political class.”

Richo might have been a foul-mouthed grub with unexplained millions stashed in a Swiss bank account, a tad too chummy with the likes of Fast Eddie and dead Rene, but in the great Keating tradition he could call a spade a spade in the most entertaining way.

It’s nippy in Bippy’s as I sit in the restaurant at the front of the Town and Country Strathfield, feeling like an alien, contemplating my return to the country of my birth and my incipient return to journalism, on the eve of an election that sounds like a whooshkaa.

I’d love to have a beer with Richo. Richo’s me mate.

Els Hath No Fury: An Audience With Golf's Equanimous Everyman

2016-06-21T02:03:00.000-07:00

Sports writing is one facet of journalism left largely unscratched by my scribblings. There has been the odd moment though ... a fruitless week chasing Eric Cantona from Bangkok to Pattaya and back in search of an interview that never was, covering a State of Origin match from the 'Pig Pen' of Lang Park in Brisbane, interviewing tennis pin-up Anna Kournikova and on this occasion, travelling to Shenzhen for an audience with the man they call 'The Big Easy'. The story originally appeared in Mission Hills Magazine.

Grey sheets of rain have turned the Mission Hills greens to slate and it’s classic South China spring weather; at once cold and humid. The sort of day that could have a sun-loving South African like Theodore Ernest Els wishing he was back home on the veldt.

But the Big Easy, true to his nickname, was equanimity personified. With the inclement weather forcing the cancellation of a planned walking tour of his signature Savannah Course, he instead treated members to a sterling display of big hitting at the driving range. “Oops, in the water,’’ he quipped, as another ball almost disappeared from sight, missile-straight, then plopped down at the far end of the sodden range.

His dry and ready sense of humour and laid-back demeanour make the current world Number Three a crowd favourite where ever he goes, and he quickly endeared himself to both staff and members at Mission Hills. Even after a long day fulfilling numerous commitments around the club during his recent visit to inspect progress on the Savannah Course, he was happy to sit down with Mission Hills Magazine and discuss how 2001 is shaping up so far.

THE BIG RASPBERRY: ERNIE GETS SHIRTY BUT
ONLY IN JEST

He placed a creditable sixth at the US Masters - a showing that he was happy with following on the heels of a disastrous preceding month. “I kind of went from mediocre to bad to worse,’’ he says of his pre-Masters slump in form. “Before the Masters, I shot an 81 at Bell South Classic, which is my highest score in three years. I wasn’t even going to play the Bell South, as I’d had a poor run at the Players’ Championship the week before. Before that I was at Bay Hill and I finished 60th, and before that was Miami, where I finished 25th .

“So I thought I’d go and play in Atlanta the week before the Masters, as I was very uncomfortable with the way I was playing. I thought I’d go there to work on my driving, which was really hurting me a bit, to work on my grip, how to get it back in a neutral position. And I felt I had to do it in tournament play rather than have a week off and stand on the range. It feels great on the range, but tournaments are another thing.

So I was pretty happy that I bounced back at the Masters.’’

It was a rare blip on a great run of results. Indeed, were it not for a phenomenon named Tiger Woods, Els’ tally of two US Opens would be bolstered by a string of other majors. Last year alone, he placed second in three majors: the Masters, British Open and US Open. Last year also saw him clinch the US$2 million first prize at the Nedbank Golf Challenge at Sun City, where he edged out Lee Westwood in a play-off. Earlier this year, he placed fourth in the Accenture World Matchplay tournament in Australia and third at the Mercedes Open at Kapalua.

Then the rot set in. Els is famed for his fluid swing and natural rhythm and it was a rare and worrying moment when they temporarily deserted him. His solution: Keep it simple, stupid. Instead of panicking and turning to a battery of coaches and advisors, Els worked with his dad to get back to fundamentals. “My dad, he’s known my game since I started playing, he knows my basics. We worked together before the Masters and got things back to where they felt good. When you play badly and do bad things for a while you lose a bit of confidence and that’s what happened.

“You know, we play such a crazy, funny game. When you're playing well, people kind of leave you alone. Once you make a bad score or have a bad week, and it turns into another bad week, it might only be your putting, or some bad thinking, or your swing, and suddenly everyone wants to tell you what's wrong with your game. It's happened to me, and I've had to stand up and say, hey guys, let me work it out on my own. I think it's a problem nowadays. You can overanalyse. There are a lot of things in this game and a lot has to do with the way you think.’’

Famed coach and Hall Of Fame inductee Bob Toski once summed this up perfectly, if inelegantly. “Ernie Els? The only thing you can do with Ernie Els is (expletive) him up.’’ Els concurs. “I'll go with what Bob says, you can screw yourself up quickly. I've seen it happen to other players. Sometimes you shouldn't take it all too seriously.’’

Els says he enjoys the pressure of the big tournaments and he is feeling good about the rest of the year’s challenges. “I regard myself as a player for majors. I enjoy the situation, I enjoy the nervousness, the tension.

You know, I had a lot of opportunities to win golf tournaments last year. I won twice, once on the European tour, once on the American tour and once back home. Three times. So I had a good financial year, put it that way. I didn't win as many times as I wanted to, but as I sit here now in April and look back at last year I've got to be pretty pleased.’’

The US Open is looming and Els says he’s ready. “It’s in Oklahoma this year. We played a PGA there in 1994 and we played a tour championship there. I think I finished 25th for PGA then the tour championship I won there. So I've had a good one and a bad one at that place. I hear they've lengthened the course. The greens are very fast. It's going to be very hot too. That course reminds me of courses back home. I know it pretty well and I don't think it suits my game at all. It's a bit of a fiddly course if you know what I mean, you have to fiddle some shots, nine, 10, 12, a lot of thin holes and a lot of dogleg holes. It's a funny course. I've started working on some shots, to gear game to the course. Your short game is very important, so I'm starting to try to shape shots with my irons.’’

NATURAL TALENT AND CHARM TO THE LEFT PLEASE

Els says he’s delighted to be back at Mission Hills. “I remember watching the World Cup on television when it was here in 1995, and then I played here for the first time in 1998 on the Johnny Walker Super Tour. I think it’s great to be involved here, and to watch golf developing in China. A signature course is the kind of thing people can remember you by.

“What do I think of golf in China? Well, it can only get better. I’ve heard there are a billion people in China, so the only way is up. There are probably 80 to 100 golf courses in the country now. It only takes one man or woman to come out of China, play abroad and hopefully get on the US PGA tour and off you go. Look at what Se Ri Pak did for Korean golf. She really put that country on the map golfing-wise. What’s happening here at Mission Hills should tell you something. There's a lot of enthusiasm going on here for golf, five very good golf courses, facilities unbelievable. You can take it a long way, start producing talent, get a good base, get young players to start playing the game and who knows how far you guys can go here.’’

With a wife and two-year-old daughter, Els says family life has changed his priorities and helped him focus. “I really enjoy my life right now. My time spent at golf is a lot more focused than it used to be. I don't spend all day every day at the golf course, but when I do spend time at the golf course I like to work hard and get a little bit more intensity in my workouts. There's definitely some meaning in my life. I'm 31 years old now, I've got a good 10 years ahead of me and like a lot of other players I think there's a little bit more urgency in my game right now. Having a family definitely hasn't taken anything away, I think it's made me better.’’

Els has homes in South Africa, Orlando and London, with another planned in the Bahamas. "We split our time where the golf takes us really. My family still travels with me. Little Samantha is only two years old, so it will be a couple of years before she has to go to school and I'll try to take her with me as much as possible. ''

I feel compelled to mention the "T'' word, and on this subject Els is philosophical. He doesn’t spend sweaty, sleepless nights pondering what could have been in a world without Woods. Nor does he believe Woods' unprecedented feat of holding all four majors at once is an official grand slam because it's not in a calendar year. "Call it what you may, it's an unbelievable achievement, never been done before. I guess you can call it any kind of slam but it's not the grand slam. But you can't take anything away, it's unbelievable. Phenomenal. It's probably a Tiger

Slam. Call it that.''

THE BIG QUEASY: ELS AND THE TIGER
BEFORE MOJO LEFT TOWN

He says you cannot let Tiger intimidate you, or it's curtains. "There's definitely a lot more pressure from outside when you're playing with Tiger, there's a lot more focus on your group, on your match. One thing you cannot let happen is to get intimidated by who you play with. You go out there and play 18 holes and that's going to take you about four-and-a-half hours. So if you get intimidated or scared on the first tee, then you're going to have problems all day.’’

It emerges that Els has a friendly rivalry with fellow big-hitter and Mission Hills course designer Vijay Singh. "We play a lot of golf together, myself and Vijay. I've played with him ever since got on the tour in the US, and before that we played together in Europe for a while. So I've known him the best part of nine years now and regard him as a close friend of mine. We play a lot of games together and we have a lot of gambling games going on when we play together. And he's one of the best when it comes to gambling. I've paid so much money to him in gambling debts." So who hits the ball further? The 6'4'', 15 stone gentle giant chuckles. "When I'm on, I can hit it further than him.''

But back to Tiger. Can he be stopped, or is he just beginning to write the most incredible chapter in golf's long and colourful history. Els stares out the window for a moment, and when he turns back, there is an unusual intensity in his blue-grey eyes. "I'll tell you one thing man, what can stop Tiger is very good golf. He's still winning but he's not winning by far. He's just scraping through now. With a little bit of luck and hitting the right shots at the right time, guys could have beaten him. It's narrowing down a lot and I think it's closer than most people think.

"I want to be ready when the situation comes my way, to grab that situation and run with it. The thing on my side is that I've won majors myself. At certain points in major championships, you have to hit the right shot at the right time. That's what you've got to do.''

FORE: HEADS UP. PERFECT FAMILY INCOMING

Els is happy to sit back and wait for his chance, as the golf world waxes hyperbolic about the Tiger Slam. He has the tools, the power and the talent to carve out his own place in golf's annals. An Easy Slam, perhaps? "I'd like to win the Grand Slam myself,'' he admits. "I don't know how long it will take, but to win all four majors at least once, that's my goal.''

Tuk Tuk dress revs up Miss Universe then runs out of gas

2016-05-29T17:07:00.002-07:00

This piece originally appeared in Fah Thai, the inflight magazine of Bangkok Airways. Khun Aniporn did not go on to lift the worldwide title, making the top 10 cut but not the final five for Miss Universe 2015. Her dress, however, stole the show, winning Best National Costume, adding to the legend of Thailand's loved and loathed icon, the tuk tuk.

"Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and remove one accessory." —Coco Chanel

This sage advice from the greatest fashion icon of them all should be easy to heed as Miss Universe Thailand Aniporn Chalermburanawong gets ready for the biggest beauty pageant of them all - Miss Universe 2015.

Miss Aniporn will take to the stage at the Axis Theatre, Planet Hollywood Resort in Los Angeles dressed as a tuk tuk, complete with handlebars, working headlights, rearview mirrors, chromium accents and racing stripes, flags and streamers, tights in a tread pattern to resemble tires, a klaxon ‘ahooga’ multi tone horn that plays the Thai National Anthem, and a mobile smoke machine that shrouds the entire stage and auditorium in a thick, choking smog.

OK, I made the last two up. But the rest is all absolute fact. The ‘Tuk Tuk Dress’ will be worn by Aniporn in the “national costume” round at the pageant in December in the United States. It was the winning design from 356 entries in a contest held by Miss Universe Thailand.

The Miss Universe Thailand organization announced the winning design on its Facebook page recently, praising the outfit’s metallic look and use of 3D design technology. “The tuk-tuk dress will flash lights like a real tuk-tuk,” said Kaveerat Kunapat, a spokeswoman for Miss Universe Thailand. “It will be one of a kind.” She said a five-member panel of judges that included fine arts professors, fashion designers and Miss Thailand herself wanted to break from the past style of traditional Thai silk dresses and present something ‘eye-catching but still representative of Thailand’. Comments on internet forums have been less kind, with one critic notably describing it as ‘something out of Transformers’.

The man responsible for this two-stroke of genius, which has been lauded and ridiculed in equal part in the fashion crime courts of the internet, is Hirankrit Pattaraboriboonkul 35, a cultural scholar and aspiring designer, who denies he nicked the idea from George Michael’s ‘Get Funky’ video, which featured Thierry Mugler’s famous handlebar bustier dress, later adopted by Beyonce for her 'Sasha Fierce' schtick.

“I created this dress to make our representative more visible on stage and different from our past costumes with its pop-art design,” said Hirankrit. “I thought it was time to make a break from the past with a fresh and direct pop approach.

“I spent three days designing this dress and researching national costumes from previous years,” he said. “This is my first year joining the competition.” Apiporn agreed the costume would help a foreign audience recognize she is from Thailand.

Should she fail to bring the title back to Thailand, it might also facilitate a fast getaway.

My iPad Wants To Kill Your Mama: a wordsmith talks pictures, Insta-art and keeping it surreal

2016-05-17T13:56:00.001-07:00

This is the full interview I did with Dusit Hotels' Eight magazine on my new passion, digital art, for its latest issue, themed 'Renewal'. I have written for Eight before, most recently my essay on the colour red, but this time the tables were turned. After a lifetime spent asking the questions, it was a bit odd being the interviewee, not the interviewer. Then again, a writer who spends all his spare time creating images on his mobile devices is pretty odd too. This is much longer than the piece that was published. Contains all sorts of opinion, rants and detailed stuff about apps, so be warned.

Where were you born?

A city in Australia called Brisbane, but referred to by its inhabitants as Brisvegas,

Where were you raised?

I was raised in Brisbane and then Townsville, which is North Queensland, a nondescript army town in my day but a nice town these days by all accounts. Did all my high school in Townsville, then hightailed it for three days on a bus to Melbourne, to take up my place at the Australian Ballet School. After injuries and a lack of talent convinced me I would not be the next Baryshnikov, I returned to Brisbane and slunk into journalism, on a suburban weekly and then the Courier-Mail, one of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited papers.

What do you do full time?

I have sold out more thoroughly and convincingly than most, having gone from journalism not straight to PR, where most washed up hacks go for better pay and a bigger expense account, but via the equally soul-staining wastelands of advertising, where the only truism worth knowing is that you can’t polish a turd.

What pants, shirt, shoes are you wearing right now?

Slightly frayed boxer shorts. A faded Batman t-shirt. No shoes. I was working at home today you see. But I still got dressed up for this interview.

What kind of phone and model do you have?

I have the latest iPhone, 128G 6S and I have the latest iPad mini 4 and have been looking with beady eyes at the new iPad Pro, a great outsized thing that will work with the iPencil, Apple’s about turn and middle finger to Steve Jobs’ refusal to entertain anything to prod your screen with other than your fingers. I’ve tried various styluses (styli?), both low tech and (allegedly) hi tech ones that pair with some apps and allow pressure sensitive strokes, but I keep going back to my right index finger. Call it Neo-Pointillism.

What apps do you use to do your insta-art, or what are your favourite apps

Well, increasingly I spend most of my time using Procreate, which is the sine qua non of digital painting applications. It’s just brilliant. Really well thought out, with the brush and opacity sliders and colour picker at your fingertips, a beautiful interface and a dazzling array of brushes, with an engine that makes painting seamless and just like the real thing, except for the lack of mess and the one huge advantage of digital painting: the back button. I also used Art Studio a lot for painting. You see often start out with only the vaguest idea of where I’m going, and I might begin by mashing two pictures together using Union, part of the Pixite family and the best for photo blending, masking and mashing up two images together.

Mummy and Daddy Are Drinking Beer Again
and There Are Monsters in the Bookcase
(© Jason Gagliardi. Digital painting in Procreate).

Pixite also make some of my other favourites, like Lorystripes, a series of elegant and whimsical stripes and ribbons and things you can insert into images and move around in 3D, Fragment, which is amazing when you have run out of ideas, sometimes I use that on shuffle and see what it throws up, it’s all kinds of geometric shapes and complex prisms and organic forms overlaid onto images with many adjustable parameters Tangent is a cute one the do which lets you do simple graphic design overlays and patterns and such. Matter is for inserting three D objects into images with masking capabilities. And their latest I’ve been messing around with a lot, Assembly, which is a naive art almost childlike thing which lets you build up intricate images from building blocks of shapes.

Steampunk Butterfly Boots (Painting in Procreate)

Some of the apps which throw up weird and amazing ideas I never would have thought up staring at a blank piece of paper include Circular, which gives images a great swirl, and Glitche, which does unspeakably weird things to pictures. I use various depth of field apps, mostly Tadaa lately, which can keep some of your shot in focus and blur out the rest, like a SLR camera can via its depth of field. I take my shots with a mix of the native camera in the iPhone, ProCam, and VSCOCam. Stackables is a go-to for beautiful overlays and textures and lighting, which has replace Mextures as my go-to app for that sort of thing.

Filterstorm Neuea and Polar have nifty filters and effects. IColorama is another standout, just amazing manipulation effects. Snapseed is probably the best all round photo editor, very versatile and has a great feature most lack, which is the ability to adjust contrast, saturation and brightness just on a piece of an image that you highlight, not the entire image as well as use a brush to change saturation, exposure, dodge-burn and temperature on just the bits of a shot you want to tone down or emphasise.

I did use a lot, it changes a photo into a bunch of

different painting styles, but these days I’d rather paint myself. The computer painting apps that do it for you always look a bit weird, as the computer doesn’t know what its subject matter is, it’s just following algorithms. Enlight is another good all-rounder. Big Photo can bump up the size and DPI of images, handy if printing out big.

Reflect is a cool app, allows you to put reflections in various water bodies and shiny surface. Glaze gives good glaze effects, decimate is a weird one but never quite warmed to it, prefer Glitche. Path On is cool, lets you draw a path onto an image and then put text in the font, size, style, colour etc into the image along the path you drew.That probably covers my key ones. Some pieces I might use 10 of those apps in combination. Others I might just paint onto a white ‘canvas’ on my ipad from a photo I took. Paintings can take a while … a couple of days, or a long all-nighter. I regularly find myself crawling into bed at 5am gasping at the time, as painting becomes like a meditation, you get so focused and wrapped up in what you are doing.

Which is your favourite app and why? What's your technique?

Argh. So hard to pick one. Procreate for it’s amazing seamless painting experience. Union is my workhorse. And Circular, Fragment and Glitche are great for unlocking creativity and summoning weird stuff you might never otherwise have dreamed up. I often noodle around, blending images, distorting them, and then something will appear that gives me an idea. And I might use painting over an image to bring out what I saw a bit more, or I might paint from scratch using a photo or photos of mine for inspiration. I also do straight iPhone photography, justediting with filters and the usual editing parameters.

I do everything from (fairly) straight portraits to weird and surreal stuff that is not easy to describe and can’t always be explained. I do love surrealism, looking at the world through a skewed lens and holding up a cracked mirror to the absurdities and mysteries of life, although I’m not sure I agree with Andre Breton’s contention that the only surrealist act is to walk into the street with a gun and shoot random people. Dali’s melting clocks are more my speed, or his Lobster Telephone.

The Pixies are my favourite band, all things considered, Frank Black’s crazed lyricism and loud-soft-loud aesthetic are perfect for his meditations on matters like surrealism, aliens and obscure Californian cults. Debaser, on Doolittle, arguably their best album, is the first song, in which he starts shrieking about slicing up eyeballs, the opening scene of Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou. Great stuff. Inspired. I had a project to make an Insta-art piece for each of the Pixies songs on their four great timeless albums. So far I have done two (I Bleed and Motorway to Roswell). I am going to do something similar for local electro band Wasabi Bytes - an album cover and an illustration for each song which will become part of the liner notes.

What got you interested in digital art? What themes in today's digital-first society inspire your imagery?

It’s my thesis that the smartphone and tablet revolution has fundamentally changed art, by making all of us artists, or at least much more aesthetically aware. Whether you are slapping a retro filter on your holiday happy snaps or painting elaborate abstracts on your iPad, these little tools in our pockets and bags have led to a big shift in making us all more attuned to design and art and creative acts. There’s also a disposable Warholian aspect to it. Warhol said in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. I think in our future, everyone will be famous for 15 seconds - the span of an Instagram video.

Has art always been free?

No, it’s often been very expensive, when you consider the profit margin on a rotting shark carcass and a couple of aquariums, which is all Damien Hirst needed to rake in the moolah. Well, that and a nifty title. One of my theories on art is that it’s all in the title and blurb. There’s a brilliant thing I came across called the Arty Bollocks Generator. You put your name in and it generates an instant artistic statement. Here, I just looked it up and got one:

My work explores the relationship between Pre-Raphaelite tenets and unwanted gifts. With influences as diverse as Rousseau and John Lennon, new variations are crafted from both mundane and transcendent narratives. Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by the traditional understanding of meaning. What starts out as vision soon becomes corroded into a manifesto of distress, leaving only a sense of decadence and the inevitability of a new synthesis.

As spatial replicas become frozen through frantic and diverse practice, the viewer is left with an insight into the edges of our era.”

The same site offers an ‘Artist Certificate’ approved by the Artistic Practice Licensing Authority. The holder must agree to produce occasional works of art, or at least talk about doing so, study treatises on real artists to understand how hopelessly short of their standards you fall, constantly compare your work to others and question whether you are good enough to be a proper artist, and constantly mutter about how someone will expose you soon.

That is hilarious. Describes my feelings about the whole thing quite well. I don’t know if mobile phone art is art per se. Depends on your definition. I’m sure artists who slap real paint on canvas look down their noses a bit at the digital painters. I DJ a bit, and there’s a snobbery and pecking order, like DJs who came of age beat-mixing on Technics decks with vinyl records tend to look askance at those who never knew anything but the MP3 and the autosync button.

You've managed to find some success from digital art, how do you think that local people can benefit from being able to create works of art on the phone. Do you think that you are influencing local people in BK to do the same?

Well, how do you define success? I put my stuff on Instagram because I need the little hits of approbation from random strangers, although this business of being spammed to within an inch of your life by cretins flogging fake instagram followers is bizarre and wearing thin. I’ve had two modest exhibitions, the latest being the illustrations I did for a book, Slave to the Bean by Bill Barnett, a Phuket-based hospitality consultant who writes columns on the horrors and inelegances of modern travel and hotels. In a nice post-modern twist, he was the consultant to the owner of the hotel where the exhibition is, Ad Lib in Sukhumvit Soi 1. Another hotel in Pattaya that will launch early next year has plans to put my stuff in its 90 or so guest rooms and lobby. I’m working on some more Thai-flavoured pieces for that. But I’m not fielding calls from MOMA or waving Charles Saatchi away as he tries to shove blank cheques in my face.

I just do it because I feel compelled to and because it clears my mind and makes me feel better, following a year or two of personal upheaval after my wife of 15 years decided to disappear, along with all my savings and worldly possessions. Art as therapy is not to be sneezed at, cheaper than a shrink and at the end of the day you have something to show for your time. It is also a great procrastination technique.

I’m not sure my stuff would influence anyone for the better, although I suppose there might be a cathartic release or at least some schadenfreude for anyone looking at my stuff and thinking, wow, things might be tough but at least I’m not in that guy’s head.’ Would it be beneficial for Bangkokians to get into smartphone art? I suppose so. It would be more beneficial that wearing coloured shirts and killing each other.

My tastes run to surreal, as I mentioned. One recent piece I titled Vagina Dentata Santa Meets the Grinch, which was in a quite abstract style which begins with a loose idea and only really takes shape as I go along, and ideas begin to crystallise. I love this approach … being open to where a piece takes you. As long as it turns out well. I am also obsessed with photographing Bangkok streetscapes and the spaces between the Skytrain platforms and the streets and buildings, slivers of street life glimpsed through dramatic vanishing points. I covered the entire Asok intersection with Sukumvit in about 60 of my shots of Chinatown for one piece. I recently painted an image of the late Lemmy of Motorhead fame, as some abstract thing I was noodling with suddenly looked like Lemmy seated on a great skull throne. And that led to a more serious portrait attempt too.

You mentioned how everyone will have 15 seconds of fame, which echoes Andy Warhol, and his quote "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Andy's art was also technical with silk screens and he in a way he modernised art. Do you see his as an inspiration? If so, to what extent?

Warhol was an inspiring figure and also a rather insipid, weird and tragic one. Anyone who can make soup cans into art is all right by me, but you won’t catch me sitting through his movies that involve watching paint dry or one shot of someone sleeping for 12 hours.

What's the art scene like in Bangkok?

I don’t know. I am not part of it. There is a pretty cool burgeoning scene around Charoen Krung Road, with places like Speedy Grandma, Serindia and Duangkrit Bunnag’s Jam Factory across the river. There are art-hopping walking tours done regularly around those galleries, which is cool. I went to S Gallery in Sofitel Sukhumvit the other night for the opening of Genii Loci, a mixture of painting and installation pieces. A very interesting chap with his finger in a few artistic pies runs that, Martin Guirly .

If you could, how would you renew the art industry in Bangkok?

Free iPads for all! And do away with the greedier commissions some galleries gouge from artists. I’ve also been toying with the idea of starting a regular night say, once a month, for Insta-artists, with DJs, big screens or projections with artists creating stuff in real time and showing their process, a themed challenge for the night, prizes, collaborations. Oh, and let’s turn all the go-go bars into life drawing classes, and all the short time hotels into art installation venues.

What's your favourite colour?

I don’t really have one. It depends on my mood. I recently wrote a 1,500 word essay on the colour red, which can be read here: http://twocountriesonecistern.blogspot.com/2015/02/red-ink-essay-on-colour-red.html. A lot of my stuff does tend to be very colourful.

Does all your phone editing eat up your battery and what do you do about it?

Yes, it’s ridiculous that we have these ultra slim phones then have to carry around a bulky battery charging pack to keep it from going flat in less than a day. I go through my battery in half a day sometimes if I’m doing a lot of work with my iPhone. IPads last longer. Mine is often good for days.

What are the exact dates and name of venue and addresses of your next show?

Current one is Slave to the Bean, and it’s at Ad Lib, Sukhumvit Soi 1, until the end of the year.

I also had a one-night exhibition of my stuff at the last Sunn party, at Live RCA, which was a techno party about 1,000 peoople came to. I had a whole wall to show my stuff on, so used that as a chance to test the waters and see how people responded.

Other than instagram, what social media sites do you go on to look for inspiration? Where do you post?

I am a member of Mobitog, which is a global group of smartphone photography and art lovers who take part in competitions and challenges, critique each other’s work and discuss all matters mobile phone and tablet art related. It’s very supportive and there are a lot of talented people on there. There are different competitions, like one for black and white or mono shots and edits, a themed abstract contest, and fun stuff like redoing classic album covers.

I also watch a lot of tutorials on painting, Procreate has a great forum and youtube is full of stuff. I used to paint badly in oils as a youth, ambitious and quite awful copies of Turners and Constables, apart from a brief obsession where for about a year I painted nothing but pictures of KISS, the rock band. I then painted nothing from the ages of about 18 to 48. So there’s a lot to learn but the painting aspect is what I find most rewarding and challenging. I bought a set of acrylics recently and have had a couple of goes at painting with real paint. The best thing about digital painting is the undo button.

Instagram is a double-edged sword. It’s great as a place to showcase your work, but it’s been overrun by idiots trying to sell fake likes. Also, it has fostered the trend of online one-upsmanship, especially with these ‘travel’ blogs where modern-day solipsists traipse the globe taking selfies in soft focus, often with bonus duckface.

The greatest ignominy would be to join the growing ranks of the dead and injured who were too busy gazing at their screen to know what was happening around them, or who came to grief while doing something silly, dangerous or both to get the perfect selfie. I’m guilty of it myself, catch myself walking down flights of stairs while editing or painting. It’s dangerous, especially in Bangkok. I’m trying to give it up.

ends

A portrait of the artist as madman

2015-11-22T12:47:00.000-08:00

This piece originally ran in a recent edition of Fah Thai, the Bangkok Airways magazine and one of the spiffy publications of the INK group.

Chalermchai Kositpipat is crazy like a fox. What does the fox say? “I am simply a painter … a small unit in human society, hoping to contribute by a small measure to the planet earth.”

That is Chalermchai in Thai National Artist humblebrag mode. But the creator of Wat Rong Khun, the White Temple in Thailand’s northernmost province of Chiang Rai, is prone to more bombastic and bizarre soundbites.

“A living treasure”, “world masterpiece” and “a must see for every human being” is how the self-styled “creator of food for the soul of all humanity” describes his work, begun in 1997 and so far costing a reported THB 40 million, all funded by the artist. It is his meisterwerk and magnificent obsession, a visual epic poem and a hubristic shrine to his own talent, draped in ancient allegories and limned with pop culture references.

Lanna Rococo meets Buddhist Disneyland on Ritalin might best sum up the style, all white plaster and shards of glass and curlicues upon flourishes, like a wedding cake dreamed by Dali and left to melt in the Siamese sun. Visitors run a gamut of gods and monsters, cross a bridge over hell, depicted by 500 outstretched arms, and enter the red and gold ubosoth, an inner sanctum where the struggle between good and evil gets a Warholian makeover:

George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden glitter in a demon’s eyes as Doraemon watches the Twin Towers burn. Spiderman, Superman, Elvis, Michael Jackson, Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, The Terminator, Kung Fu Panda, Ronald McDonald and Hello Kitty are there, dodging space ships and ancient ogres.

Chalermchai uses western pop culture to highlight the delusion of desire and to poke the glazed eye of rigid tradition. Thailand’s most successful living artist has seen his paintings fetch over THB 500,000 at auction, and counts among his collectors HM King Bhumibol Adulydej.

A serial talk show guest, the artist made a recent appearance on left-field lifestyle program The Toilet Show, little knowing he would soon be starring in a toilet show all of his own. It began with his ban on Chinese tourists at the White Temple, announced to journalists along with a rap sheet of Chinese potty atrocities. The headlines plopped into the public domain and splashed around the world. WeChat whizzed the straight poop to every last Chinese with a smartphone. It was a gut-punch to national pride, a strain on bilateral relations and threatened to put the skids on the torrent of free-spending Chinese tourists – the one thing propping up Thailand’s moribund economy.

Chalermchai, possibly persuaded by the powers that be, rescinded his ban later that day. But “Waterclosetgate” was off and running, a gift to the press that kept giving. The original furore was fading when the artist made another statement, announcing plans to build separate toilets for Chinese tourists, branding Thailand's northern near-neighbours as bathroom barbarians at the gate for the second time in a month.

His latest flash-bang exploded earlier this month when he took aim at a photoshoot at the temple involving a stunning Chinese model and a traditional white gown. To a layman, the images were gorgeous. To the artist, it was Lair of the White Worm. “She looks like a mother of a white snake,” he raged. “Ugly! So ugly.”

Thailand’s tourism industry is on tenterhooks, wondering what will anger the National Artist next. Some ascribe his volatility to the shock of seeing his life’s work reduced to rubble in the May 2014 Chiang Rai earthquake, and the strain of recreating his masterpiece. He may also have been thrown off balance by the death of Thawan Duchanee, yin to his yang, the fellow National Artist who created Chiang Rai’s other artistic masterpiece, ‘Baan Dum’ or the ‘Black House’.

Chalermchai now sits atop of the Thailand art world without anyone of similar stature to keep him honest. He sees himself as a misunderstood genius. Others dismiss him as an attention-seeking diva who almost single-handedly scuppered the biggest tourism boom in Thailand’s history, and a rabid nationalist with an agenda to push through his art.

Ironically, the immortality he sought to achieve by bringing his own personal Xanadu into being has been achieved instead thanks to the viral nature of the internet, a public tantrum or two, and his accusation that the world’s new superpower and oldest civilization has failed to master toilet training.

Mr Dojo Rising ... Meet MMA's hardest Nutt

2015-09-15T00:38:00.000-07:00

My latest piece in the South China Morning Post, on the full mental racket that is Full Metal Dojo, a potent cocktail of brutal cagefights, hot girls, hard rock, full beards and cold beer. Jon Nutt is the Dojo's high priest of hucksterism and hype. I meet him in 'the coolest city in the world' - Bangkok, says Nutt - to get the lowdown on throwdowns, takedowns, staredowns, and shakedowns, not to mention System of a Down. Link to the SCMP story is here: http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-entertainment/article/1857244/mixed-martial-arts-and-rocknroll-hit-thailand

SWASH & TURNBUCKLES: JON NUTT, MODERN DAY
SAMURAI AND PIRATE OF PIZZAZ MEETS PT BARNUM AT THE NEW
CIRCUS FOR MODERN GLADIATORS, FULL METAL DOJO

Jon Nutt has a reddish beard and a piratical air, although he professes no family connection to the 17th-century English pirate who cut a swathe through Newfoundland and Labrador before his capture in 1623.

The latter-day Nutt is content with cutting a swathe through the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) with his Full Metal Dojo show, which he somewhat breathlessly extols as the ‘fastest growing show on the planet, in the fastest growing sport on the planet, in the coolest city on the planet’ – his adopted home of Bangkok.

The most recent incarnation of Full Metal Dojo, two weeks ago, was held in the Sukhumvit Soi 12 club Insanity, formerly known as Insomnia, packing in a capacity crowd in excess of 600 people.
The first, although probably not the second, of the two conditions is almost certainly a boon in the world of MMA, a fighting style which sees two men or women of more or less equal weight (although often from wildly different fighting backgrounds) enter an octagonal cage and, with few rules and no holds barred, ‘get it on’ over three to five five-minute rounds.

The fighting discipline reached its global apotheosis with the show Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), in which the leading exponents must bring to the ring a mix of striking and grappling skills to have any chance of success.

Full Metal Dojo follows a similar model, although Nutt has made it his mission to spice up the showbiz pizzazz; his shows are a full metal racket that combines the bareknuckle fighting with hucksterism, live bands, DJs and copious quantities of food and booze. The Insanity show, Full Metal Dojo VI – For Those About to Rock, was the sixth outing in just over a year for the Full Metal Dojo machine – justification, in Nutt’s world, for his seemingly rather ambitious and exaggerated claim.

WAI A SWORD? JON NUTT PERFORMS AN ARCANE RITUAL
IN THE DOJO INVOKING THE WARRIOR SPIRIT OF THE SAMURAI,
BEFORE PERFORMING A SEK LOSO SONG, HIP HOP STYLE

Six weeks earlier, Full Metal Dojo V took place on Bangkok’s outskirts, at a venue called Live House, tucked away in a warren of local bars with bands, art-and-craft shops and independent fashion boutiques known as JJ Green, near the popular Chatuchak Weekend Markets.

I walked into Live House, after 60 minutes wandering in fruitless if entertaining circles trying to find the place, to see a fight start and end, with a brutal uppercut and a knee to the head, inside four seconds.

Nutt is on stage, red beard bristling, wild-eyed and spouting a Barnum-esque hype which is utterly bombastic and strangely compelling. The DJ throws on bursts of songs, veering from the traditional ‘luk thoong’ folk genre to grinding heavy metal and industrial noise to sugary pop, in between Nutt’s stream-of-cagefighter rants.

He doesn’t just talk the talk, however. Later in the evening, in a bout billed the ‘Battle of the Beards’, he will take on fellow American, Thammasat University lecturer, PHD student and MMA coach, and FMD umpire and friend, Dana Blouin, a squat bear of a man with a beard more Orthodox Jew than piratical bristle.

TIST UP: BAR OWNER AT JJ GREEN
GOES STRAIGHT FOR THE MARKETING JUGULAR

Blouin, when not getting down and dirty or keeping things clean in the dojo, conducts research in low power IPv6 wireless networks, Total Recall-style memory devices and the ‘Internet of Things’.
Blouin is a straight grappler, Nutt more of a striker, with kung fu, tae kwon do, karate and Muay Thai under his black belt, not to mention high school wrestling and latterly, the go-to-style of the successful cage-fighter, Brazilian Jujitsu, or ‘BJJ’.

I meet Nutt again in between Full Metal Dojos Five and Six, and he still seems amped on the lesson he handed Blouin … a knock out in just over a minute of round one. “My wrestling coach sent me a message, saying that was a classic ‘Sea Wolf’ move right there,” he enthuses. “I had him in north-souths, I sprawled, grabbed the head and swung around, this is the ‘battle of the beards’, right? I was going to go for the guillotine but I didn’t have it, he was holding my wrist, he had wrist control, I wasn’t going to grapple with him.

“I grapple and it’s all over. I mean I was doing so much at that event, production, announcing, refereeing, line production, singing – I do a mean Thai national anthem, and a hip hop version of (popular local singer) Sek Loso – so the most relaxed I was all night was actually getting taped up for the fight and waiting for the bell.

PICK AND MOVE: THE FULL METAL DOJO MOVES UPTOWN WITH A POST-DOJO
POOL PARTY AT THE HIP NEW MOVENPICK BANGKOK SUKHUMVIT SOI 15

“I knew that if I didn’t relax, the lactic acid builds up, so be calm, stick to the game plan, focus on your breathing, and from first strike of the match, me kicking him in the leg, and I knew I was going to throw two combos, low kick and a hook, at whichever side he was circling, so I hit him with left low kick and left hook, and he had come out like I did with high hands, I hit him with the kick and his hands dropped, you could see it shook him up, and then the hook. I backed up to put on a show and get my breathing going, he came in and shot (tried to take Nutt down), I hit him with a punch, he grabbed my leg. Then another strike, and I submitted him.”

PLEASED AS PUNCH: NUTT INTRODUCES TWO THAI
FIGHTERS ABOUT TO 'GET IT ON' IN THE DOJO.

The pair had a drink afterwards, and remain good friends, Nutt says. “I’m not an asshole, so I’d never hold it over his head.” His whole argument is that it’s a sport, not a brutal, barehanded fight, and that combatants should be best of chums afterwards.

“We want to break this into Thai market and have this considered a sport, not a fight. Thais haven’t jumped on it as Muay Thai is their national sport. It’s not because they don’t like MMA, but they don’t know how to gamble on it, and they’re not sure of the rules.”

Gambling is strictly forbidden in the Full Metal Dojo, and Nutt says Mixed Martial Arts have been backed all the way by the military junta still running the country and responsible for a period of mixed martial law.

“What can I say? They are very anti corruption, and I’m very anti corruption, and we’ve had military presence to help out at all of our shows in Bangkok, which I’m grateful for,” says Nutt.

He is a veteran of 11 years in Thailand, the first half of that stint dividing his time between Koh Phi Phi and Phuket, with flits back to his home in Los Angeles, although he hails from Boston originally. “What tipped me over to Thailand all the way, last time I was back in LA, my friends took me out to Koi or some fancy place like that, and the first girl I said hello to, the first thing out of her mouth was ‘What kind of car do you drive?’. “

Nutt says he’s a passionate advocate of combat sports over team sports in terms of lasting damage to the body. “Combat sports lead to bumps, bruises and broken noses, other sports lead to major life-altering injuries. American football has given me a shoulder that will never be the same, my L5, L1 and L6 are so jacked up it’s going to be a problem later in life.

“Oh and did I mention that it’s a thrill? When that bell goes off, and the other guy goes into action, you take a deep breath, and it’s a rush, man.”

METAL MACHINE MUSIC: NUTT FINDS
MOJO IN DOJO AT MOVENPICK BANGKOK
SUKHUMVIT SOI 15 PRESS CONFERENCE

His longer-term mission is to take the live buzz of his shows to television, and to have them shown on a respectable regional show, at least for starters. “I’ll take my Full Metal Dojo, and put it up against any other fighting show in the world, even Ultimate Fighting or King of the Cage, for sheer energy and entertainment value.

“We try to promote local bands and DJs. So at the last shows, I used a band called Silly Machine, Metallica, System of a Down songs, and the singer was nailing all the high notes.”

Part of Nutt’s mission, longer term, is to build on Thailand’s reputation as one of the world’s best places to come and train and fight in MMA. He is also planning a longer-term assault on the world of MMA, from the deep ranks of talent of Thailand’s Muay Thai fighters. “I’m certain of this – the future of the lower weight classes in MMA is the Thai fighters.

“I’m on a mission to find the best from the four regions of Thailand, and beyond, those in Burma, Cambodia, Laos, the Malay peninsula. This is where warriors live, true Nak Muay. Give me three to five years, and we’ll have Thai fighters dominating the lower weight divisions of the UFC.”