Another decent weekend for the Roquefort Files (I'm starting to get suspicious. It's all going to come crashing down at some point).

As if my impending birthday wasn't enough to hammer home my advancing decrepitude, I went to my first proper friend's wedding on Saturday. I've known Finlay for as long as I can remember knowing anyone and he always struck me as a bit of a career bachelor, so it was doubly weird to be attending his wedding. The wedding took place in Craigsanquhar House, situated approximately a light year from civilization in what can only be described as the depths of Fife.

I must admit to being a bit misanthropic when it comes to weddings. You start with a load of people who would never normally get together and stick them into a marquee/social pressure cooker for twelve hours. After the initial warm glow of seeing the bride and groom get hitched fades away, make them listen to a DJ that introduces Robbie Williams songs as "Something for the laaaaadies now" as his homebuilt disco lights cause flashbacks to the 70s and miscellaneous epileptic seizures.

This is not, to my mind, a recipe for a successful social gathering.

Thankfully, this turned out to be the first wedding I've ever unreservedly enjoyed1. The service was conducted by a canonical (heh) "genial minister" type, complete with the odd endearingly stumbled-over word in the vows from Finlay and Louise. The meal wandered by pleasantly, with a typical "Oh! You're a war criminal? How interesting!" wedding conversation that was amusing rather than cringeworthy. I met a few people I hadn't seen in years, turned out to still get on with them, and generally got tolerably mangled.

The band, initially looking like a bunch of past-it old buffers turned out, surprisingly, to be a bunch of past-it old buffers that rocked. So long as they could put a swing beat or a country twang into a tune, they belted it out with the enthusiam that belongs to those clinging to a Just For Men'd youth. They threw a few ceilidh numbers in as well, finished off with Auld Lang Syne and managed to be a pain-free as a wedding band could possibly hope to be.

And that was basically it; somehow, a load of disparate people and things coming together to make up something that was genuinely worthy of a couple getting married, instead of the discomfiting car-crash socialising of your run-of-the-mill wedding.

On Sunday I headed home, found out that the exhaust on the Capp seems to be slowly trying to escape, and went for a run in the evening. I can encapsulate my state of mind as tired but happy.

And subconsciously adding another £300 to the Capp's repair bill, obviously.

1. okay, okay, maybe if the best man's staggeringly attractive and elfin girlfriend had been, say, not his girlfriend then things might have been marginally better, but you can't have everything :)
   

(Belated) Random Oz recollections #3:

A few nights into the Roquefort Files' inverted holiday, we wandered along to a predictably sprawling pub/restaurant for some marvellous pub grub. The Brisbane river festival was due to begin a few days before I left, and this pub (the Regatta) was hosting its own warm-up mini-festival called, inevitably, Regattafest.

The most mind-boggling thing about this, for a wide-eyed naïf like your correspondent, was the fact that they were holding a beauty pageant in the bar. Tossing aside for the moment the incongruity of bikini-clad girls strutting up and down a catwalk in what was essentially an Australian-based Wetherspoons, this was an uncomfortable thing to witness. It's possible to get away with just about anything in the name of ironic social comment, but there is just nothing remotely ironic or postmodern about a load of smashed blokes hooting at semi-nude women competing for the loudest cheering.

Pity we forgot to take a camera, mind.

Today, the Roquefort Files are having a self-congratulatory "look how cool my friends' websites are" day, hoping that some of the reflected glory will add to my own tarnished lustre. On with the sickeningly accomplished show.

First, witness the humbly named jjcasswell.com. See the Mafia at work and marvel at our no doubt Freudian tendencies to dress up.

Next up, some tasty multimedia. Martin McDonald, aka Radioplay, is a guy at work who pathologically lies about being unable to sing. Take It To Heart is his latest (and to my mind, best) track, and it rocks. It rooooocks.

Blog Shol is an über-blog, ready to crush the Roquefort Files under the sheer weight of its technological superiority. Smoother than a smooth thing sanded with increasingly fine grades of sandpaper to reveal a hitherto-unrevealed smoothness. The Roquefort Files' miserly Blogspot hosting looks shoddy and plebeian by comparison.

And of course, Craig's own Oz blog, complete with added Orangutans.

Josh, Mart and Michelle have cool pictures of themselves, whereas I have to be content with hiding behind a pint while one of Chris' friends pretends to fellate an imaginary penis. Where did I go wrong?

A few of us went out last night for Annabel's official birthday (like the Queen, you see) to a little Japanese1 restaurant called Bonsai. It's a tiny little place, but it was still completely empty apart from us. The chef was reading the paper when we arrived. No doubt it'll fold like a cheap suit just before anyone realises it A) exists and B) is actually quite good. They made a fairly decent effort to incorporate a bit of a Scottish flavour into some more traditional Japanese dishes. At least that's what I assume was going on with the deep-fried cheese, anyway.

1. I was in Japan briefly with work2 a couple of years ago, staying in a dormitory belonging to the company I was visiting (let's call it Bingy Corp). Very odd - it was a student residence sort of place, and was populated entirely by junior engineers that worked for Bingy Corp. Anyway, I digress. It had a beer vending machine. This, I can attest, is genius. Typical after work thought process:
   
   
   
   1. Mmm. Could murder a beer.
      
   2. I shall buy one from the beer vending machine.
      
   3. Hot damn.
      
   
   
2. argh. Almost typed "on business" before I caught myself.
   

That was a fine weekend, I have to say, even if the travelling was restricted to the slightly damp north-east Lothian coast, and involving absolutely no pubs whatsoever.

It kicked off with a rather boozy party for Annabel's birthday on Friday evening. Devon had hired a tank of helium (astutely hidden in her room for the duration of the party) and the ceiling of the hall of their flat was festooned with balloons dangling streamers down to about head height. I spent half the party trying to work out the word on the tip of my tongue meaning "visually arresting spectacle", but what with the beer and White Russians the most eloquent I got was "Wow. Cool". After that, my conversation degraded rapidly.

We got back to the flat about 4 or 5 am, and Josh, Antonio, Veronika1 and I stuck on some tunes and blethered for a while2. I finally hit the sack at about 7.45 am. It was getting light outside...

On Saturday, Veronika had asked me if I could take her out to Rosslyn Chapel, so we headed off about 4 pm, after a semi-traditional post-boozing fry up. I've been to Rosslyn three or four times now, but it still never fails to impress me. Living in Edinburgh (when compared to, say, Brisbane), does convey a sense of permanency through all of the 18th/19th-century buildings and tenements, but Rosslyn is 15th century, and in a different league entirely. The 19th century additions (a rather tacky statue of the Virgin Mary and the organ loft) just look clumsily...I dunno, sanctimonious when seen with the rest of the stonework.

Anyway, the chapel closed at 5 pm, so we drove out to Gullane beach. We wandered along the beach for a mile or so, chatting about nothing in particular, and I had a bizarre "Shit! I'm grown up!" epiphany. I mean, for Christ's sake,

• I've got a car. I've got a sodding mid-life crisis car, regardless of how much I love it.
  
• I'm wandering along the beach with a lovely young lady, and actually having a proper conversation. About grown-up stuff. I'm not even - Jebus - trying to be clever or charming.
  
• I'm 26 in exactly 16 days. I justify this part of the "Shit! I'm grown up!" experience as follows: if I were to go out with someone 4 years younger than me - i.e. 22 - then that seems fine. However, if a girl (ha! A woman) of 26 was to go out with me, and they were still 4 years younger than I was, then I'd be 30. Dear God.
  

There is no hope for me3.

I combatted this by taking the roof down on the way back, and grinning like an idiot whenever the turbo started to whistle on the way out of a corner. Pity it started raining about 5 minutes after we set off. There was water on the inside of the windscreen. How the fuck did it get there? Was it raining backwards? I have no idea.

The rest of Saturday was more standard - food, a bit of faffing around and a couple of videos (The Life Of David Gale and Two Weeks Notice. Both surprisingly good) with Jeff, Devon and Veronika.

Sunday was a fairly undemanding day. Apart from a bit of computer maintenance (probably better categorised as the spending of £120 on failed computer maintenance), we watched another couple of films - Pitch Black (still very good on a second viewing) and Dead Man (very Jim Jarmusch. Weird but good). I'm filmed out at this point.

And so, dear diary, back to work.

1. Veronika is a young Slovakian lady staying in our boxroom, although not for much longer. When she arrived with her stuff six weeks or so ago, I answered the door, recognised her and said "Ahoy!", as is my sailor-inclined wont.
   "Ahoy?", she immediately replied.
   "Er, yes. Ahoy. Why?"
   "Did you know that 'Ahoy' is Slovak for 'Hello'?"
   
   Well, bugger me. 'Ahoj' is indeed Slovak for 'Hello'. Who'd have thought it?
   
2. for "a while", read "another three hours". Josh pointed out (correctly) that it was getting a little ridiculous when we couldn't work out how to turn Jeff's idiosyncratic stereo down at around 6.30 am. We decamped to my room, and turned my stereo down to approximately the lower threshold of human hearing, which seemed eminently more reasonable.
   
3. actually, despite all the whingeing about getting old, Gullane beach was lovely - Fife just visible across the water, the sun setting as we drove back. When I got home that evening I stuck on some Fountains of Wayne and Teenage Fanclub and frankly, everything was all right. I am a hopeless sentimentalist, and it's great :)
   

Craig, a genius ex-colleague of mine, has just jacked in the rat race and jetted off to the land of Oz for a year. So far (T plus 4 days), he's seen giant orange monkeys, drunk beer and made a young lady friend, which are three interesting things that failed to occur in the entirety of the Roquefort Files' sojourn there.

Still, Ulysses1, eh? Damn, my holiday reading habits are fly. Beat that, Craig.

1. post-Oz progress: gave up on chapters 1 & 2, went back to wilfully, impenetrably academic introduction in vain hope of understanding what, exactly, the fuck Joyce is on about.
   

The Roquefort Files' next trip to foreign climes/pubs has come to fruition: Amsterdam in December for a spot of pre-Christmas carousing. After that, a few agonising months away lies WINTER, and thence snowboarding. Hot damn...

Jesus, I'm definitely back now. Winter in Brisbane (a most civilised 20° - 27°) has given way to late summer in Edinburgh (something godawful like a low of 10° and a lack of any visible light).

Random Oz recollections #2:

The mighty Brisvegas, as seen from a speeding ferry. Actually, now I think about it, all of the water-borne transport in Oz seemed capable of absolutely caning along. Fast boats, big pubs and an innate ability to cook steaks well. This is a fine country...

Is this me or Doug? - it's almost TOO FAST TO TELL. How much faster could we be going? The answer is none. None more fast.

And finally, proof that booze was partaken of. Thankfully, I'm on the left.

Just a quick post to point out the spiffing new 'comments' link on the sidebar, helpfully provided by enetation.co.uk, a free web annotation service. I'll tidy up the format to match the main page once I get the hang of style sheets.

See? Shorter and less interesting. Everything is proceeding as I have forseen.

Random Oz recollections #1:

Chris and I were watching The Sopranos one evening, and some homie type character actually had a line consisting entirely of the word "Word". I haven't laughed so much in ages. The conversation went something like this:

Mafia dude: "So you'll do it?"
Homie #1: "Yeah, G. We'll wax the mofo. Aiiiight. Bo. Check me one time."
Homie #2: "Word."

Complete comedy genius.

Back to normality (or at least work) now. I expect that these entries will steadily diminish in A) excitement value and B) length from now on.

I got back after something like 30 hours of travelling and waiting around in airports. The last flight, from Singapore (#Apore!# Ha! Bad joke. Cheers Chris) was the worst - I was in the middle seat, so neither legroom/aisle or good view/window. The aisle seat was occupied by a largish old woman with limited mobility to say the least, who, by the end of the flight, was smelling uncomfortably like stale urine. The bloke on my right had been in jail for carrying a spent shell case through Singaport Airport, so at least had an interesting story to pass 5 minutes of the 13 hour journey.

Still, smelly old women and criminals aside, that was a pretty bloody good holiday.

I finally got back to the flat around 1 am and dragged Annabel off to the pub for a drink. Nice to note that the default booze volume is once again the mighty pint, and not a freakish Aussie half-pint 'pot'.

PS: Chris was kind enough to burn me a CD of all the photos he took while I was in Oz, and I'm tempted to see if I can display some here. Not sure if Blogger/Blospot will host remote images yet...I must try to get my Freeserve web space back up and running to host some photos (and possibly this blog if I can). Mmm. Techie crap.

Singapore airport at 5.23 am, I can reveal, resembles every other airport I've been in at any time of day you care to choose, except that I can't shop for Gucci and Rolex because the duty free shops (catering exclusively for the stupendously rich) are closed. It does have free internet access until 6 am though, so fair play to it.

My last few days in Oz were pretty low key; I drove up the coast to the Sunshine Coast, a kind of retirement-home mirror image of the Gold Coast. Less ostentation, older people but otherwise much the same, and consequently not entirely enthralling. Still, I spent an enjoyable few hours wandering around and reading1 on the beach.

Actually, scratch "pretty low key". On Wednesday night, Chris and I went whoring, as his affectionate term for crawling round strip bars goes. I'd never been to one of these places before (and I'm twenty five - talk about late starter) and it was a bit of an anticlimax really, although I suspect we weren't really pushing the upper limits of class for Brisbane's adult entertainment venues. It was pretty odd - each time we rocked up in a new place, the novelty wore off in about ten minutes, and after that we might as well have been in any other marginally seedy, squelchy-underfoot bar you care to imagine. Minus the naked young ladies, obviously, but there you go. We did meet a garrulous lawyer called Mel (hi Mel, sorry we ran away from you) who proceeded to latch on to us (hi Chris, cheers for inviting him along :). He decided to buy me a green, $29 cocktail - presumably, my pretty far-gone state wasn't far gone enough for his liking - which I choked back. Next bizarre drinking buddy was a goateed maniac called Patrick, who gave me a cigarette and pushed me over the nutter threshold for the evening. I grabbed Chris and we buggered off as fast as the cabbie would take us. Lucky to get out of that one alive, I reckon.

My inevitable boak the next morning was green.

So, after feeling absolutely bloody dreadful for most of today (yesterday?), I'm on the way home.

1. at last count, I've scythed through two Christopher Brookmyre books, Dead Air and Espedair Street (Iain Banks), Fury (Salman Rushdie) and a whopping two chapters of Joyce's Ulysses, which is the most unimaginably obtuse book I've ever tried to read.
   

Bit of a fun-filled extravaganza over the past week or so - water sports (and a lot of dubious pirate lingo) aplenty. First up was a trip down south to the Gold Coast, a bit of a surfer's mecca startlingly resembling Miami as portrayed in GTA: Vice City. Interesting when video games get to the point when they can be used as a point of reference, isn't it? No? Fair enough.

Anyway, the Gold Coast is this town/city whose appearance coincides exactly with Miami Vice and Cocktail; luxury yachts and high-rise blocks of million dollar flats all over the place. Someone had mentioned hiring jetskis the day before, so Leyla drove Doug (another of Chris' itinerant Scot accomplices) and I up there. Leyla dropped Doug and I off at the beach on the Broadwater (basically the mouth of the river running through the Gold Coast) and a couple of semi-mullet'd blokes picked us and ferried us across to their floating jetski houseboat/boat house affair anchored in the river.

They gave us lifejackets and waterproof anoraks and plonked a couple of jetskis in the water. I was simulataneously raring to go and slightly apprehensive at the fact that they were going to dump us on these aquatic motorbikes with absolutely no instruction, but they did anyway. I think my assigned mulletee said this to me: "Right, plug this in. Hit the start button. If you fall off, let go. Off you go then." So I did. They turned out to be incredibly easy to drive; turning the handlebars caused the thing to lean into the turn of its own accord, and the hardest thing to do was just hang on - I don't know how fast they went, but it must have been 30 mph at least, and flicking it into a turn at that speed challenged the old arm muscles a bit. We hooned1 about for our allotted half-hour and then wandered around the town for a while. I can almost imagine living there; it had an odd ski-resort feel about it, as I suppose any town purpose-built for spending holidays does. I suspect the 40° C heat in the summer might be my downfall...

Anyway, the next day we headed up the coast instead, so that Doug and I could go whale watching. This sort of thing always struck me as being a vaguely superfluous new-agey points-scoring exercise, but it was actually geniunely enjoyable. The tour company ran a boat called the MV2 Eye Spy that was eminently capable of hooning (main discussion on outward journey: could a jetski keep up, and where would it run out of fuel?). Once we got to the far side of Moreton Island, the boat slowed down and we started seeing the whales - first just the mist of water as they spouted (thar she blows) and then their backs and dorsal fins as they went under. I think I was slightly underwhelmed by the size of the whales - the boat was reasonably big and the decks high enough above the water so that it was hard to really get a sense of how big the whales were, but it was still a pretty impressive sight.

On Saturday, we took Doug back to the airport. He'd been on a four month trip more or less around the world and was heading back to the UK. Note to self: do something similarly irresponsible. Saturday night was a birthday party for the brother of Chris and Leyla's next door neighbour, in a cavernous (all pubs in Brisbane are cavernous, by the way. Cavernous taverns) sports bar. It seems that everyone in Oz has a better half, whether husband/wife, boy/girlfriend or whatever. Being single is usually great; absence of financial/behavioural responsibility will do that, but I felt unnervingly weird amongst the happily almost-married crowd. Ah well, we got drunk and someone threw up, so otherwise pretty standard issue boozing.

The next day, we hired a two-man kayak and headed for a nearby river. I drove Chris + Leyla's 80s Mazda 626 for a while - it felt like a tank compared to the Capp and I had to restrain myself from jumping on the brake with both feet when we came to traffic lights, but apart from that it was reasonably straightforward. Chris and I kayaked up the river for an hour or so. It was a warm, calm day and it felt like a pretty damn fine way to travel. Not sure how it would translate to Scotland (cold + midges) but I reckon I might give it a try.

That's probably everything up to date. More on my triumphant return to Edinburgh.

1. it turns out that "hoon" is actually a noun in Oz, meaning "ned in tastelessly souped-up car". Genius. Hoons therefore hoon a lot.
   
2. obviously an acronym for "muthafuckin' vessel"