OK, so I am a Flying Kangaroo Tragic

Does your M25 induced irritation drop off your shoulders when you board at Heathrow and the Qantas flight attendant welcomes you with a "G'day" ?
(Conversely, do the corners of your mouth turn down when the Flying Kangaroo's cost-saving policy of employing UK based attendants produces a Mancunian "Ehlloh"?)
Do you feel a little moist at the corners of your eyes when they play "I still call Australia home" on the cabin screen?
Are you glad you wore your pink polo shirt when that very nice looking steward singles you out for the rest of that bottle of Moet?
Does Neil Perry's food make you content because you feel like you've never really left the worst food pavilion in deepest darkest Western Sydney shopping centres?
If so, welcome to the world of the Qantas Tragic.
I am a self confessed QT.
In 1987, in the middle of the UK storm that preceded a major stock market collapse, my Qantas flight was the only plane to leave Heathrow. Not only that, it left on time.
That's when I knew I was in love.
(I was lot poorer, but I was on my way home.)
I have been faithful ever since.
Now if only Qantas could match those pommie BA fares from Perth to London, I'd ask her to marry me.

No First Class seat beats your sofa in front of the telly at home

9 million Frequent Flyer Points and counting...

Airport lines are a thing of the past for Tom Stuker. So are middle seats, waiting on hold when calling customer service and missed connections.
Instead, his air travels bring him complimentary cocktails, first name greetings and a hidden check-in process.
This really takes flying too much to the limit.

From a Blogger: How do I get to Platinum?
And an interesting discussion about the benefits of achieving Platinum.

And this is how I would like to Abu Dhabi it to Heathrow

For most of us, the thought of flying conjures images of long lines, cramped seats and questionable food choices — if we are lucky enough to get some food. But for those who can afford it, airlines are going out of their way to add amenities in their first-class and business-class cabins. New seats, new entertainment systems and a bevy of additional services unheard of just a few years ago are popping up as airlines battle each other for these lucrative customers. Emirates First Class
Emi

Less grumpy on the ground

5 Reasons Why Things are looking up...
1. Dinner at The Naked Fig, situated appropriately overlooking the nudie beach at Swanbourne. Checkered history with thumbs-down reviews followed by a Golden Plate. Now all good. Apparently packed for breakfast. BYO night on Thursdays. Very pleasant food and great sunsets. 3.5 stars
2. Lunch at Sentinel Restaurant on St George's Terrace. Steve Scaffidi is my restaurant hero, although I am still mourning the demise of Alto's in Subiaco. Sentinel is, in some ways, similar to the excellent Bar One (but without Mama Scaffidi's gnocchi). Friday lunch probably not the time to try it for the first time with run-off-their-feet staff and a slightly heavy and oversauced twice-baked goats' cheese souffle. But Steve did give me a hug, so I booked in for dinner with a visiting UK supplier next Monday. 3.5 stars, but expect it to improve.
3. Cricket: Shaun Marsh bashed the Vics in a 20/20 match and then rescued Australia in the second One Day Match at Bellerive Oval. I am still depressed about Mike Hussey's injury, still irritated by Michael Clarke and still have sleepless nights about losing the Ashes... but beating the Poms twice in a row, even in a pyjama game, is some cause to smile.

4. Music: The Sting concert at Sandalford Winery on Saturdaynight. Magic! 12,000 people on a balmy night, Sting + the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on the Symphonicity Tour 2011.
Terrific Aussie back up singer Jo Lawry (Fabulous voice, delicious looking and currently doing her PhD in music). A splendid version of one of my alltime favourites: "An Englishman in New York".
Also, finally had it confirmed live that it is not "fields of Bali", but "fields of barley".
5. Humour: Watched Ricky Gervais doing a wickedly funny MC gig at the Golden Globes ceremony.

6 Reasons for Being Grumpy on a Plane

1. Yes, that is the Great Australian Bight below so I must be on a plane.
Three hours out of my timezone and feeling appropriately grumpy.
Even the flight attendant mistaking me for a famous Sri Lankan cricketer has not lightened my mood.
I did once score 3 runs batting at number 8 against the State Schoolboys XI, but that's the height of my achievement.
There is a woman across the aisle who has not shut up for 2 hours. She is wearing a glittery black and white striped pants suit (like a zebra at a circus).
The people you meet when you don't have a gun. Or a Taser. What actually is the penalty for homicide (when you're nor a policeman, that is)?

2. My cricketing hero Mike Hussey, "Mr Cricket", has done awful things to his leg. He will miss the rest of the One Day matches against the Poms and probably the entire World Cup. I am devastated.

3. Eldest son Toby missed out on the Sydney Theatre award for his supporting role in 'Measure for Measure'. Hugo Weaving won it. No one would have been more surprised than No.1 Son if Hugo hadn't. Very generous lot these actors.
At least the production won a gong, which it richly deserved.

4. Reading all this rubbish about trying to get Julia to impose GST on imports below $1,000. How truly silly. It would obviously cost much more to collect the tax than the revenue it would produce.
But thank you Mr Harvey Norman for bringing to the attention of the Australian public (as if they need reminding) that one can buy stuff overseas cheaper on the web than here in Oz.

What is the agenda here?
(1) The FT suggests it might have nothing to do with trying to get a 'level playing field', just a way of setting in place an excuse for lower-than-expected profits at the next Harvey Norman / Myer etc AGM. Let's face it: The 10% GST is neither here nor there when the price difference is 50% even including postage.
(2) My jaundiced view (and that cute Qantas flight attendant hasn't refilled my glass in, oh at least 5 minutes) is that it simply creates a necessary 'casus belli' (Casus belli is a Latin expression meaning the justification for acts of war) to 'justify' these big companies taking their website business off shore to China or wherever workers get paid 55c an hour. The big companies need that 'justification' to deflect consumer criticism. Call me cynical.

Competing with websites is a nightmare for an Australian independent "bricks and mortar" bookseller like Elizabeth's. 60% of our turnover goes on wages and rent as opposed to less than 10% for a website seller. The long term possible effect of that is the demise of retail as we know it.
Yes, good news for the consumer on purely a 'cheaper price' basis - but we might be losing a pleasurable dimension of our daily life in the process.

We have to work on making the retail experience in our bookshops something not matched by twirling a mouse over a website...
At Elizabeth's, we are certainly doing our best. I mean, we have even put couches in our warehouse shop and will do in our new King Street shop! And Elizabeth's staff not only can actually read, but have at least 3 dozen university degrees between them.

5. GST on books. By the way, (and I have bored people about this for years including Andrew Murray - over an uncomfortable dinner party at a mutual friend's place) I have not forgiven Senator Murray - that terribly bright but misguided Rhodes Scholar Rhodesian ex-liquor salesman who was the architect of the betrayal- and am still angry at the Australian Democrats (who, of course, eventually got their just cream caramels) for selling us out on GST on books 10 years ago.
Even the Poms don't put VAT (GST) on books!
And even if the 10% isn't bad enough, it's the cost of compliance that is a heavy burden on independent booksellers and all micro businesses.

6. Ah, here is another item on the news: "WA Drivers the worst in Australia".
Yes, I'll agree with that. WA drivers see someone trying to merge into their lane as the equivalent of suggesting their sister earns her money horizontally.
It may not be much fun driving in the UK and Europe (unless you're on the autobahn in a borrowed Porsche), but at least overseas drivers know how to admit my little 1.2 litre Corolla el cheapo hire car merging in front of their Bentley R Turbo and do so graciously.
In Oz, I alternate between my terribly bourgeois (but frighteningly twin turbo charged fast) mafia black 335i coupe and my totally silly red 1989 XJS 12 convertible. Which keeps my mechanic in holiday houses at Eagle Bay. 
Maybe that's why nobody lets me in.

Opinionated, ill tempered, jetlagged and homesick...

Travel is only for People who Can't Cope with Being at Home
I have a love - hate relationship with travel.
Sometimes it's hate - hate, like the time I had a particularly gruesome stay in Rome; when I came home I had a T-shirt printed that said "Rome without Romans would be like Sex without Aids".

Would YOU leave this for the M25 ?

Occasionally, it's love - love: Last September I had the best risotto in the world on the Grand Canal and that same day had a drink at Harvey Nick's 5th Floor Bar only 7 stools away from Emma Thompson.

To me, the main problem about travel is that I have to leave home. I love everything about being home. If I were any more parochial, I could be rolled up with a lacky band and thrown free on people's front lawns once a week with local church fetes advertised on my bum.

When I do travel, which is too often, I try not to look down on Perth when the plane banks over the Swan River on its way north. I cannot cope with all that glistening water where I sail, those golden beaches where I walk, those bookshops where I work and  those people and dogs that I love.
Not when the next 6 hours will bring Harry's Bar on the Changi Airport's cactus infested smoking deck (dubiously claimed as Singapore's favourite bar and indubitably its sweatiest). Followed 14 hours later by rush hour on London's M25, living up to its reputation as the the world's biggest long - term carpark, sitting in a hire car without a clue on how to change the radio dial from the inanities of BBC Radio One.

I know that if I do glance down, I will have an uncontrollable urge to find the nearest exit - which the cabin crew has kindly informed me could be behind me.
I admit to frequent temptation to summon the nearest hostess (in my case, invariably the young lady who looks remarkably like Leigh Matthews) and utter vague references to Semtex packed in promising bulges  in my board shorts. Which will explode spectacularly once it exceeds a 5 kilometre limit from Royal Perth Yacht Club.
I have resisted. But only so far.

It does not help that I am by nature not a particularly pleasant, patient, tolerant sort of chap.
This immediately excludes my travel plans from any special deals offered by Air India, Garuda Airways, Royal Brunei, any airline owned by bogside Irishmen, Formule 1 airport motels and any aeroplane seat further back from the pilot's bottom than 8C.

Unfortunately, until Platinum Frequent Flyer status saved my life (as well as simultaneously ruining it), the early years of my globetrotting were run on a budget that stretched no further than stand-by on Aeroflot.
This led me, as a callow youth in a really cool leather jacket, to attempt numerous flirtatious relationships with airline personnel of both (or maybe even three) genders, in the vain hope of moving from the seat nearest the luggage hold (where cabin crew could occasionally share a drag on a fag) to somewhere nearer the pointy end of the 747.
The very rare occasions on which my latest variant on the personas of a wonderfully charming, down-on-my-luck Vietnam Vet / Country Vet did get some traction, I confess that I did nibble nonchalantly on chilled caviar while sneering at the poorest parts of India 30,000 feet below me and those very ordinary people in Cattle Class 100 feet behind me.

Qantas Business (theage.com.au)

However, it only intensified my fear of having ever to go back to my seat in a row number higher than my revered great-grandfather's age. Which, invariably, I did have to do.

I also have the attention span of a five-year-old whose ADD tablets have been swallowed by the cat:
I can be persuaded to abandon crabbing in dinghy in Mandurah for trout fishing in a loch in Scotland, but by six o'clock I will be sulking about not getting to Edinburgh in time for a single malt and a MacDonald's.
At the Louvre, Tate Modern and MoMA New York I have spent more time in the giftshops than the galleries.
(Do you know it only takes 19 minutes to see the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, seven mummified pharaohs, go to the 'loo and graffiti a reactionary but succinct assessment of architect I. M. Pei's absurd glass pyramid on the exit doors?)

To be honest, I admit I have succeeded in acquiring a taste for a number of things, even when a disconcerting 20,000 miles away from my favourite seat at the yacht club bar:
There is nothing quite as serene as a day shopping in New York City when you have memorised the exact locations of the public lavatories in Bloomingdales, Maceys, Barney's and Saks of Fifth Avenue.
I also love practising that sharp short right-arm jab with the Nikon zoom lens to the nose of gypsy pickpockets on the Piazza della Signoria.
When surrounded by a gaggle of Japanese tourists and German guides in Bavaria, I adore asking all and sundry if they've lost any good wars lately.
Yes, I do love all that.

But of course the thing that I really love, is coming home.
What I hate, is having to go away to do it.



Relevant links:
Why it's hard to leave Perth, Western Australia
Where we work: Elizabeth's Bookshops Australia
Leaving Home (for sale)
Proud Dad: Toby Schmitz (Actor & Playwright, Sydney)
Proud Dad: Rory Schmitz (Artist & Gallery Director, Berlin)
Qantas Platinum Frequent Flyer

Vale Patricia Badock

My much admired mother-in-law Pat Badock passed away today.
Much loved mother to Elizabeth, mother-in-law to Harry, grandmother to Toby and Rory.
She was a great supporter of her family and of Elizabeth’s Bookshops from its foundation in 1973.
She sewed together the Honan squares that were the floor-covering of our first bookshop in Nedlands, was a lender-of-last-resort on many occasions and was always encouraging, supportive, enthusiastic and very proud of the Elizabeth’s brand.
On Friday morning, 7th January 2011, she passed away just after winning her last hand in a game of bridge. Such style!
We will miss her very much.
You saw in me what I hoped to be. With love, Harry.

 

New Year's Eve on Sydney Harbour: Make Your Mark

New Year's Eve

On "Tamara", Neville and Janie Wittey's 45' Crowley classic cruiser, gorging on seafood brought by rubber duck from the Sydney Fish Markets earlier in the day.

Enjoyed the hospitality of the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron - excellent as usual - but a bit worried about that Australian flag still up on the flag post after sunset. (Would have got one blackballed at the Castle in Cowes and would raise a few eyebrows at Royal Perth and Freshie.)