The Breaking of The Fellowship

I've finally done the right thing, and ditched morgan. It was hard and there were tears, but he was holding me back from my true potential and we both knew it. So, at the moment, I'm in Canberra lifting furniture 12 hours a day for a living. It's fairly good work, pays nicely and most importantly it keeps me occupied. Because frankly if I didn't work every hour that God sent me this city would send me over the brink of madness in no time whatsoever. It's a desolate wasteland whose only good point is that there are roads that lead away from it. Not that I would ever want Canberra destroyed, though. You see, it's actually a very shrewd move by the Australian people. Canberra is the capital city, and as such the govornment sit and reside here, thus it's full of politicians, buearucrats and public servants (And not much else, there's no coast, it's a small city and could hardly be called cosmopolitan). You can tell this from just driving around town, there are literally more 'no parking' signs than people. However, since Canberra is a nowhere town in the middle of nowhere, it means that the politicians live miles away from the people, and what's wrong with that? Canberra's architect (yes, the city was designed, it has an awful sterile feel as a consiquence) was also clearly a drugged up spirograph fanatic. Most cities are based on squares, which is perfectly logical when you think about it, what with squares having lots corners, making life very easy if you miss a turning. Canberra is, for whatever reason, based on some kind of series of concentric circles, the circles being centred on the Parliamentary house. Not only does this make navigation and utter bloody nightmare, since the circles don't always join up, meaning if you miss an exit you're screwed, but it also means that you spend most of your time in Canberra orbiting the politicians, which no doubt boosts their collective ego immensely and only further convinces them that they are the most important people in the world, instead of the inconsiquential busybodies that they really are. In summary: Canberra, don't go there.

The only other thing of note to happen in the last few days was that Friday was "Australia Day". Having been to a fair few sporting events where aussie nationalism was on display (The Ashes) I was pretty sure what to expect, and wasn't really all that far wrong. It was basically a load of drunken aussies stumbling about and wearing their flag, singing waltzing matilda and going on about how great it is to be australian. There were loads of events and concerts and that, and even the newspapaers went all mad for it going on at length about "What it means to be Australian". Apparently, this includes "Democracy, freedom of press and a fair judiciary". I'd have thought that this also was what it means to be French, Greek or Japanese too, but there we go. Apart from the drunken flag waving and fairly meaningless generalities, there's not a lot to Australia day really. I suppose this is due to the fact that it's a young nation with no real history or culture to celebrate (unless you count a love of bbq and the beach) and any indigenous culture that did exist was crushed fairly effectively. As such the Aussies seem to cling to their flag and their sports teams perhaps a little too fervently. And as Samuel Johnson once said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel". I have no idea who this man was, but it's a nice enough quote, no?

I think that, at the moment, my opinion of Australia can best be summed up by a line from a sketch on the program The Day Today. "Nice video, shame about the song".