Before I tell you about my Peninsula mini-break, let's just take a moment to note how hard I worked on the title to this post.
Okay, we're done with that now.
After an awesome Christmas, we crashed and did nothing, except perhaps bounce on a trampoline, on Boxing Day. The day after that, we packed more food than strictly necessary and a few clothes into our parkability-rich, boot-space-poor car and drove down to Rye for four days in a beachhouse with two good friends and their three endlessly engaging children.
The last time we all spent a long weekend in this beachhouse together was last March. Whilst there were many good things about that trip, the experience was soured by a gastro bug which we all shared with each other and which almost put a couple of us in hospital. We were a little stunned to be invited back after that. It turns out we have lovely friends.
I do enjoy a good beach house. This one had been furnished on the basis that the owners are seriously concerned about the local crime rate so they try to ensure that there is nothing in there that is worth stealing. They have done pretty well, which means that the place is comfortable and daggy and therefore exactly what a beach house should be.
There seems to be some rule that beach houses must be decorated once and once only. That would explain why the room I shareed with Honey Bear has three U2 posters, all from the late 80s (does it freak anyone else out that Rattle & Hum is a 20 year old album?) and nothing else on the walls. The most bizarre one is from the "Unforgettable Fire" era and features a bunch of snow covered trees and a picture of the drummer standing around and wondering how Adam, Bono and Edge managed to avoid turning up for the photoshoot, along with the ridiculous caption "Ice, your only river runs cold". It made no sense as lyrics and it makes even less sense on a poster. I suppose I should just be grateful that they used this instead of the opening lines of "Silver and Gold".
The other feature of beach houses throughout the universe is that there must always be a large collection of books and nothing to read. I always take a book when travelling, which alllows me to avoid the horror of finally having a few minutes to read something and discovering that the most interesting book available is Tim Allen's "Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man". Seriously, people, where is
Slash's autobiography when we need it?
I think that one of the things our children love about this holiday house is that, while at home TV viewing is rather limited, our friends tend to have the thing on constantly from 6.00am until bed. I saw more cartoons in four days than I had previously seen in two years, but that's fine. What I did object to was that once the children had gone off to play outside the adults somehow ended up watching the Pussycat Dolls performing live on Channel 7's Sunrise. Leaving aside the obvious point that anyone who rhymes "movies" with "boobies" should not be allowed to release a single called "When I grow up", I was simply appalled that Sunrise how somehow managed to assemble a crowd of 100 people who were actually willing to cheer during this terrible crime against lyrics.
If I ever get hold of these people's names, I will go to each of their houses in turn and speak severely to them.
I am not kidding here.
Appalling though the Dolls may have been, their efforts at inappropriateness paled into insignificance compared to the old Warner Bros cartoons that we were silly enough to let the children watch. Our friends' children, and particularly their 3 year old son, are obsessed with the Big Bad Wolf. They have managed to dig up a really, really old version of the story of the three little pigs, which is fine although during the final chase scene one does start to wonder where the third pig, in constructing his brick house, found time to build an elevator.
It's the cartoon that follows that causes the most concern. It features Porky Pig and is set somewhere Arabic and it is the most deeply offensive thing I have ever watched. The basic plot is that Porky gets a tip that a particular fort is going to be attacked by Ali Baba and his mates so he sets out to warn the garrison. On arrival, he discovers that the occupants of the fort have nicked off back to America for a convention but he decides to hang around and defend it anyway.
The politic messages are as unsubtle as they are appalling. In one scene, a huge, evil looking Arabic dude scales the side of the fort. When he reaches the top, Porky belts him with a large mallet and he falls back to the ground. He briefly considers scaling the wall again but thinks better of it an instead walks around the fort holding up a sign saying "This fort unfair to Arabs".
And if that sounds offensive, and it does, there's more. The cartoon also features a character who is also vaguely middle eastern in appearance and has a giant artillery shell strapped to his head. He shows an incredible level of enthusiasm for running into the side of the fort and blowing himself up. His dialogue is limited to "Oh boy on boy oh boy, now's my chance/what a break" etc.
Just in case anyone thinks that I am reading too much into a simple cartoon and this is not really an early depiction of a suicide bomber, let me add that the last time this character appears, he accidentally blows himself up, along with Ali Baba and all his troops, and the cartoon ends with debris still flying everywhere.
The first time this character appears, he is standing next to a sign and yes it actually says "Suicide Squad".
It turns out that America's appalling attitude to our Arabic brothers and sisters was with us long before George W Bush. If you ever suspecteds that W learned most of what he knows from Porky Pig, I think you can mark down that theory as validated.
Bad lyrics and offensive cartoons aside, it was a very good holiday.
It usually takes me a few days to start unwinding before I can relax and really enjoy a holiday. My wife suggested that I kick-start the process by drinking a lot of red wine, which worked pretty well the first day by left me drinking rather cautiously on the second.
We took the children bike riding a couple of times each day, which was fun but which did not lower my stress levels in any way at all. Things improved once Bundle found out where the brakes were and how to use them. Chasing two four year olds down a hill, on foot, with a major road at the foot of that hill, while carrying a two year old, is an experience that I probably do not need to have more than once in my life.
Taking the children to the beach and watching them jump in the very cold, very small waves and giggle was, of course, endlessly delighful, as was simply watching the five of them play together. It was quite remarkable that, in the course of four days, there were a handful of occasions where there was a little bit of angst over whose turn it was with a particular toy but there was not one single actual fight.
We had four of the five children sleeping in one room. Getting them to go to sleep was not always easy, and I am convinced that bunk beds exist solely for the purpose of causing parental nightmares, but after the first night this arrangement worked really well and the adults had our evenings off to watch movies and stuff.
We started with Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce in "Traitor". It was watchable. Don Cheadle is a fine actor but seems to always look a little sulky in any role he plays. On this occasion, he character had good cause to be miffed so it worked out okay. Th enext night, we watched "The Bucket List". It made me wonder, again, why anyone thought Jack Nicholson needed to make another movie, and why Morgan Freeman failed to learn, after being in "Evan Almighty", that it is time to start reading the script before agreeing to star in turkeys like this. Or, preferrably, refusing to star in turkeys like this.
I lost count of the reasons to hate this movie but I will give a special mention to the dumbest conversation about faith ever scripted. Morgan Freeman's attempts to convince Jack Nicholson that there is a god made me want to turn atheist on the spot. If the beach has been within walking distance or if I hadn't knocked off an entire bottle of red that afternoon I suspect I would have actually thrown the TV into the nearest ocean instead of just wanting to.
I attempted to avoid the end of this movie by going to bed at 10.00pm but sadly every decided to do the same and so I had to watch the end of the accursed thing the next night.
Fortunately, on our last night there we watched "Burn After Reading". The Coen brothers do blackly comedic farce as well as anyone and this was nearly as good as that Lebowski film, although with less 'dudes'. So as to avoid spoilers, my reaction to the various twists and turns throughout the first 94 minutes of this film may be summed up as follows:
This is stupid, this is taking for ever, I hate these characters, nothing is happening, still nothing, I really don't care about any of this, okay that line was mildly amusing, still nothing happening, I'm not sure which character is less likeable, but it's a close race between Frances McDormand's and Tilda Swinton's, John Malkovich's a credible third, back to nothing happening, whoa that was unexpected, no, I'm bored again, wow Frances McDormand is getting on my nerves, where exactly could this possibly be going, I may need to go to sleep now, what the hell? etc
Then came the final two minutes, which made me laugh so hard that home brew nearly shot out my nose even though I hadn't drunk any for around five hours. I continued to do this for several minutes and everyone looked at me like I was insane. It is impossible to explain why this movie is so funny but you simply must see it.
The other thing that occupied a large amount of my time was playing big bad wolf to the children's three (or, more often, five) little pigs. There were two equally popular versions of this.
One was played outside. The children would stand in a trailer in the back yard. I would attempt to blow it down and in the course of this the children would push me so that I would fall over and roll down a very small incline for the length of the back yard whilst going "ooh" and "ow" in a comic manner. The children would either remain in the trailer and shoot me with imaginary guns or, more likely, a couple of them would wait for me to stop rolling and then jump on me.
And shoot me with imaginary guns at close range.
The inside version involved all five children sitting on top of the bunk bed. We would do the usually introductory dialogue of the 'little pigs, little pigs' variety. I would then fail to blow down the bunk bed of bricks, find the windows all locked, and hit my head whilst attempting to break down the iron door. For a finale, I would climb down the chimney, stick one foot in the pot of boiling water and run from the room screaming "Ouch".
I liked this version becuase I usually then had a few minutes to drink some coffee before one of the kids came down to the kitchen to ask me to do it again.
I did notice that one of the children had, at the age of three, a bit of an obsession with killing. Happily, this was generally limited to wolves. On one of the many, many occasions on which I climbed down that imaginary chimney, he informed me that I would die because he had filled the water with "killing things", which included:
1. Guns
2. A big fire
3. Poo
I never found out how exactly he planned to put a fire inside a pot of boiling water, and I was not about to suggest a layer of oil on top. I also failed to discover what exactly was so deadly about the poo. I don't want to know.
The absolute highlight of this game came on the morning of our last day when, after going through this routine five or six times, I told the kids that this would be the last one for a little while because the big bad wolf was getting tired.
So they decided to set up a bed for me on one of the couched in the loungeroom. Bundle put a cushion at one end for my head, one of his friends put one at the other end for my feet, Cherub turned out the lights so I could sleep and the boy who had recently wanted to drop my wolf character in boiling poo and fire sat next to the couch and sang me a lullaby.
After several very pleasant days, we packed up on the morning of New Years Eve and, after one last bike ride for the kids, we headed for home. We stopped in Mornington to play on a beach that was almost entirely deserted and to shop at the gluten free supermarket, conveniently located next to the fullest carpark in the world. We arrived home in the afternoon and had just enough time to unpack the car and grab showers before driving across to the other side of town to spend New Years Eve at my little sister's place.
Did you all have a good New Year's too? I hope so.
