Category Archives: Tales of the Trev

Think you’ve done something stupid in your life? Well sit back and enjoy the tales of Trev’s misadventures across the globe

Random Rants, Tales of the Trev, Transformatorium

Househusband Tales #4 – Judgement Day

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Dear Checkout-Lady from Woolworths,

I just wanted to write you a quick note, apologizing for the fact that the way I live my life doesn’t seem to meet with your approval.  Maybe I should have explained myself properly at the time, but let me make it up to you by doing so now.

When I came through your checkout, it was during the last part of a very long day.  My family lives on a farm a good 40 minutes from the nearest town we can do a decent shop in – your town.  So when I take my kids there, it usually means we do a BIG shop so as to not have to return soon.  We had already spent the day suckling at the big-business teat and engaging in crass commercialism – having visited Bunnings for plants, Harvey Norman for electronics, Aldi for the first lot of groceries, Big W for toys and Subway for lunch with their mother who works in your town.  Our energy was low and our finances were lower by the time we got to the checkout of your store for the second lot of consumables.

So no, I didn’t have the energy to give a detailed answer when you said to me “So, you are the babysitter today huh?”  I must admit, it never occurred to me looking after my own children was babysitting, I just thought it was being their dad.  But anyway, my answer of “No, I’m the househusband” seemed to upset you.  I guess you expected that a decently dressed male looking after two kids mid-afternoon was just experiencing an aberration to his usual routine. You must have thought that it was a one off and that the next day I would be back pouring cement or desexing camels or some other manly career.  The idea that I look after my kids (no – it’s not babysitting) every day didn’t resonate with your idea of the world.

And then a few minutes later the second unpleasant surprise for you occurred.  You put through a little Transformer toy – a $5 Autobot from the latest movie to come out – and went to hand it to my 4 year old son with a smile and a “Here you go”.  He took it, looked at it, then handed it back to you and said “No that’s for my dad”.  The look you gave me said it all as you took the toy back and bagged it with our groceries.  Not only did this guy you were dealing with not have a job, but he was buying children’s toys for himself?!  Freak alert, freak alert!  No wonder you didn’t make eye contact with me or speak again for the remainder of our transaction.

So yeah, I had better explain myself.

“Please yer Honor, I’m not a bad guy! Just a victim of circumstance!”

 

I worked for a department for SIXTEEN YEARS lady!  Sixteen years of damn hard slog!   And for nearly the past 5 years my wife had looked after both our home and our two children she gave birth to during that time.  She wanted to resume her career and I needed a break from mine so we moved states and swapped roles.  Now I’m the one looking after our home and children while she goes to work – is that OK with you?  I also look after our 120 acre farm and animals if that makes it more socially acceptable. Oh, and I’m self-teaching propagation so hopefully one day both my wife and I can make a living out of it and set up our own plant nursery.   Perhaps in your eyes I should be content with saying into a microphone “Clean up in isle 3”. 

Not an appropriate vocation for men it seems

Why is it that, even in the 21st century,  a woman is applauded for taking on a career yet a man is still treated like a leech if he takes on the role of homemaker? Could you explain that to me Ms Checkout Lady?  Since I’m such an unemployed bum I obviously have the time to listen.

 

As for buying that little $5 Transformer, well yeah, you’ve got me there.  It was for me.  However before we came to your store we had been to a different one where my son had gotten a $20 Transformer and my daughter a $20 My Little Pony.  I’d also bought a relatively expensive thermos for my wife ($45 but it was in her favorite colour which makes it OK) so that I can make her soups to take to work for her lunch. So no, I wasn’t splashing out on myself while the rest of my family did without.  And guess what?  I’ve got THOUSANDS of Transformers at home!  That’s right – literally thousands!  Been collecting them since I was seven years old and I intend to open a museum one day!  So if I restrained myself to buying a little $5 one then for me that is pretty damn good.  And the toy says 6+.  Well I don’t know how good your maths is since you just scan everything, but 39 is definitely on the plus side of 6!

‘Oh Drift, you’ve caused more trouble for me than you ever did the Decepticons’

Why the severe judgment for what I spent that piddly amount of money on anyway?  I wasn’t buying myself booze or smokes. I wasn’t buying myself chocolate or sweets or junk food. I wasn’t betting it on a horse or sticking it in a pokies slot.  I wasn’t earmarking the money to buy weed or pills or get a blowjob in some dingy back alley.  I was buying a little toy.  Out of all the things I could be spending money on – a teeny action figure should rate pretty low on the objectionable scale.

 

So I’m sorry Ms Checkout-Lady from Woolworths (I won’t call you a ‘checkout chick’ since it’s mildly sexist and you looked way too old to refer to as a chick anyway) that my lifestyle choices offend you.  I’m sorry you found the way I go about my existence unsettling to the point you wouldn’t speak or make eye contact with me.  But you know what – I LIKE my life!  I like looking after my kids.  I like tending to my farm.  I like making meals for my wife.  And yeah, you better bloody believe I like Transformers!  And none of this is going to change any time soon.

So if the way I live still offends you, then next time don’t try and make small talk.  Just shut your damn mouth and bag my f*cking groceries.

 

‘Woolworths, the Judgy people, with fresh judgement’s on you’

Got something to say about the above?  Would love to read it in the comments section below!

 

Related Articles

Househusband Tales #1 – Pampering Poorly Perfected

Househusband Tales #2 – Bathrooms are Bull$hIt!

Househusband Tales #3 – The Library Playgroup

 

Tales of the Trev

Househusband Tales #3 – The Library Playgroup

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Before we moved, both our children went to daycare two days a week which guaranteed chances to socialize with other kids their age.  Since coming to the mountains my son has started Preschool, but with me being a househusband it makes no sense to pay to put our 2 year old daughter in daycare so she stays at home with me.

 

I worried that she was no longer getting to socialize with other kids in her age bracket (she is 2 ½) so was heartened to hear there was a Storytime Playgroup at the local library.  I’m a big library nut and our kids love reading and being read to.  In fact, we have a policy in our house – unless what we are currently doing is super important, if one of our kids brings us a book and asks to be read to, we down tools and read to them there and then.  A love of literacy – every parent should encourage this in their kids.

What story time should look like

 

So after dropping my son at Preschool, I took my daughter up to the Storytime Playgroup at the library which was due to start at 10am.  I was initially heartened to see I was not the only male there, there was at least one other bloke there who has come along with his wife and two boys.  But that was where the good impressions ended.

 

I thought that the sign said ‘Storytime Playgroup’, not f*cking ‘Bogan Junk Food Picnic!’

 

Let me give ya a rundown of the 4 other families there.

Group 1: The Chubbies

Mr & Mrs ‘Yes we will have fries with that’.  Both of them looking comical sitting on little kids chairs which their massive arses spread over the edges of like spilled pancake batter.  Their 2 bulbous boys were given pack after pack of Chocolate Tiny Teddies, I’m not sure their mastication ever stopped!

 

Group 2: The Lone Texter

Did this woman even have a kid?  I don’t know, I assume one of the ones running around unfettered was hers.  I never saw her take her eyes off her phone.  She just sat on her prolific posterior on the floor, leaning her back against a bookshelf (I think sitting up would have been too much exercise for her) staring at her phone, alternating between texting and checking social media. I’m guessing literacy is a closed book to her.

 

Group 3: The Mongoloids

This woman had three kids with her, guessing their ages ranged between 30 and 48 months.  However all 3 still had dummies in their mouths and I’m guessing they won’t be weaned off them any time soon.  She also had them on tethers – you know those awful backpack things with a long rope attached so kids won’t run away in crowds?  She had these on all her kids and whenever one got a bit far away she would angrily snap some verbal instruction and then physically snap on the cord even harder, bringing the kid backwards towards her to land on their arse and cry throughout the next story.

 

Group 4: The Brits

Now here was the only other parent present who was of normal human proportions.  But given what she was feeding her kids frankly this was a surprise.  This Pommie lady, as soon as she sat with her three kids, brought out a multipack bag of Cheetos Cheese & Bacon Balls.  She then dispensed the smaller packs within to her 3 kids, the youngest of which could not have been more than 18 months old.

Apparently a part of any toddlers nutritious breakfast

 

So by the time the librarian came out and started to read, all the kids were either that busy eating absolute shit that they couldn’t hear her over their own chewing, or they were literally reaching the end of their tether and then crying their pudgy little arses off!

 

What the f*ck was going on!?!

 

Now don’t get me wrong, I give my kids treats now and then.  Today for instance it’s been a hot sunny day so I took them to the park for an hour, then on the way home we all got ice creams.  But that kind of sugary snack is a treat, not the norm.  I’m proud to say the amount of sugary treats my kids get each week you could count on one hand. If they want a snack at home, fruit is what is always on offer, with the occasional seaweed cracker.  Banana’s, strawberries, pears, apples, mandarins, oranges – this is what my kids have for a snack.

 

And since when did it become OK to eat in a library anyway?  Last I checked when you go into a library you put your phone on silent and leave all food and drinks in your bag.  You don’t treat it like you are at a AC/DC concert and chow down on crappy junk food while you watch the show!

A good rule – FOLLOW IT!

I hadn’t brought any snacks for my daughter and she was staring at all the other kids food.  The British lady with the facial piercings offered us one of her little multipacks and I politely declined.  As nice a gesture as it was, I was still mentally indulging in some extreme judgment of her and it would have made me a complete hypocrite to accept, even if it would have made my daughter happy.

 

So yeah, stories got read but hardly anyone heard them or paid attention.  A little craft exercise was done which ran more smoothly, though I noted most parents doing all the work for their kids while the children idly watched, rather than coactively helping their kids do it for themselves.  Then Playgroup was finished.

I left there with a bit of a heavy heart.  Given our remote location the only other playgroups for little kids are run by the local churches and my skin starts to burn and smoke whenever I step on consecrated ground.  So that means I am going to have to go back as I can’t let my own judgmental attitude stop my daughter having this bi-weekly activity.

But by f*ck – if I had my way I’d be telling all these cattle to do their f*cking grazing at home!

 

Got something to add?  Would love to read it in the comments section below!

 

Related Articles:

Househusband Tales #1 – Pampering Poorly Perfected

Househusband Tales #2 – Bathrooms are Bull$hIt!

Random Rants, Tales of the Trev

Househusband Tales #2 – Bathrooms are Bull$hIt!

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There are certain laws of the universe that one considers immutable – one of the main ones I have always had no reason to doubt is cause and effect.  If you do A, then it will cause B to happen.  If you throw a ball in the air, it will come down again. If you stick your hand in the fire, it will be burned.

So if you have a room in which you use nothing but cleaning products, then ergo that room should be nothing but clean!

Seriously, why the f*ck are bathrooms exempt from the rules of cause and effect?!  I’ve tidied plenty of bathrooms plenty of times but before today, in my new role as househusband, I’d never cleaned one before.  Oh sure it looks clean enough, but when you get up close the friggin things are filthy!

‘Soap SCUM?! Since when is soap scummy? It doesn’t conduct phone scams does it?’

 

Why are they filthy?  HOW are they filthy?! I took a look at all the products we have in our bathroom:

SCENTED SOAP

     FOAMING CLENSER

ANTISEPTIC LISTERINE

     FACIAL SCRUB

BODY WASH

Look at all the words contained within!  Those are words associated with cleaning.  It should be the cleanest damn room in the house!

And the bath!  How can the bath be filthy?!  You fill it full of hot soapy water and then drain that straight down a damn plughole! I come out cleaner after being in the bath, the kids come out cleaner after being in the bath – why doesn’t the bath come out cleaner from being within itself?!

It’s bloody madness is what it is!  I spent over an hour cleaning the bathroom today and I still have the floor to mop!

 

Well, enough of that – I’m not going to be suckered twice!  From now on I’m hosing the kids off in the yard, the wife can shower at work and as for me, well I’ll just stand downwind of people as a courtesy.  Because a world where soap makes things dirtier just doesn’t make sense to me – it seems to be a joke played by a capricious universe that just wants to f*ck with my househusband brain.

 

Go to hell Bathroom – you porcelain-toting bastard you!

 

Have you encountered this freak of household nature yourself?  Tell us about it in the comments section below!

 

Related Articles:

Househusband Tales #1 – Pampering Poorly Perfected 

Tales of the Trev

Househusband Tales #1 – Pampering Poorly Perfected

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After 16 years of being a department employee, Big Angry Trev has retired to his country estate up in the mountains to embark on a career of plant propagation.  Only one problem with that…

… his wife has gone back to work full time which means he needs to care for the house as well as their two small children.

This is the first of many tales about his new career as a househusband.

 

Treat others the way you would like to be treated.

An axiom to live by, one I have tried to embody but by no means have ever been its poster child.

With the wife going back to work its put me in the new position as househusband, a relatively unfamiliar role.  Being a bit lost at sea I thought perhaps I should go with “what I used to wish my wife would do for me when I was the breadwinner” and go from there.

 

I remember what I always wanted.  It consisted of:

  • Bacon, eggs & coffee in the morning
  • A packed lunch
  • A big dinner waiting with a cold beer for when I get home
  • A bit of peace
  • A shag

If I remember correctly, sometimes I used to get a coffee.

 

Now my wife’s proclivities are not quite the same as mine but I thought the ‘do unto others’ angle worth perusing.  To this end in the first week I did the following:

In the mornings

  • I made my wife a cup of coffee just the way she likes it.
  • I packed her lunch for her which changed daily but always included:

– Two types of fruit

– A variety of biscuits

– A drink such as a can of cola or a flavored breakfast milk

– A sandwich that always contained at least one form of dairy, meat and/or egg

 

– Occasionally a thermos of soup

  • I then made the children’s breakfast and generally kept them out of her hair as she prepared for the day.  Then it was kisses goodbye and well-wishes for the day ahead as she drove off.

 

In the evenings

  • Dinner was always on cooking when she arrived home, and always a recipe I knew she enjoyed.
  • A glass of chilled wine was held in my outstretched hand.
  • The children awaited her – clean, fresh faced and eager to tell her about their days activities. Sometimes they held flowers we had picked for her that day.
  • After dinner I would whisk the kids off to bathe whilst she watched her evening shows.
  • When the children went to sleep I had my ‘bedroom eyes’ on and something sexy underneath my dressing gown in case she needed some ‘stress relief’ from her hard day.

 

Omelette made from organic, free range duck eggs- Mr Perfection over here!

Of course, that was me in the first week of being a househusband.  So far in the second week:

  • She got a glass of half-flat wine on Monday, and only then because there was some leftover from a bottle on the weekend.
  • Tuesday the kids and I slept in so she had to make her own damn lunch.
  • Wednesday the kids were filthy because they had been traipsing around the farm with me while I fixed a pump at the creek and we ate red meat because that’s what I wanted.
  • No hot dinner at all waiting Thursday as I needed her to bring home groceries to make it.
  • Today on Friday the sexy underwear got put back in the bottom draw, since it seems to have caused more bemusement than arousal over the last fortnight
Big Angry Trev’s version of ‘subtly seductive’

 

So the first lesson I have learned as a Househusband is:

“It’s easy to start with perfection, but impossible to maintain it”

 Hmmm… maybe this gig won’t be as easy as I first thought.

 

Got something to say?  Would love to read it in the comments section below!

 

Related Articles:

Househusband Tales #2 – Bathrooms are Bull$hIt!

Hobby Farming, Tales of the Trev

A letter of thanks to my former farm

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My dear former farm,

Though I have left you, I want to thank you for all you did for me over the past 6 years.

You taught me many things about caring for the land.  How to put back more than I took out.  The art of growing a tree in the right kind of dirt, the ways of composting and mulching to improve and protect the soil.  The planting of windbreaks, of nut trees, of fruit and vegetables for my family.

 

The necessity of you made me do something that my family had tried in vain to get me to do when I was a younger man – learn to properly use tools.  When you need to constantly build fences and animal enclosures, pirate ships and cubby houses, scarecrows and fire pits it forces you to finally learn how to use drills and circular saws and everything in between.  As for farm equipment, everything from the use of a humble shovel to mastering the subtleties of tractor usage became a daily activity.

 

You provided me the true experience of food.  Just how incredible so many things taste when they are straight out of your garden and grown by your own hand, rather  than having been grown on another continent and then shipped thousands of miles, put in cold storage, handled by dozens of people etc etc.  I never knew just how intense simple things like watermelon or mandarins could taste when it’s so fresh and been grown right!

 

You brought back to me the pride of properly caring for livestock.  To see the ducks growing, the chooks laying and the goats frolicking in their field in their thick winter coats – all given plenty of food, water, space and shelter to keep them at the peak of happiness and health!

 

You reminded me of simple pleasures that I had forgotten from living in the big city for so long.  Things like there is a night sky absolutely full of stars, the joy of swimming in a dam on a hot day or climbing a tall gum tree, the relaxed freedom of rambling around a paddock in a clapped-out ute.

 

You were the first farm that was truly mine.  When standing upon your ground everything felt right, I felt truly at home.  I felt a connection to the land that fellow farmers and country folk can relate to but rarely speak of, something almost spiritual.  Something sadly that your average gardener of city-dweller can never truly understand.  Just like someone cannot truly grasp the feeling of parenthood until they become one, nobody cannot truly grasp what it feels like to stand on the ground of your own farm, feeling the earth beneath your boots and surveying how you have shaped and changed and molded the land around you for the better.

Thank you for everything you taught me and gave me.  And most importantly thank you for giving my two children a safe place to spend their first few years of life – no matter how far away we may go there will always be some Mallee dust in their veins.

 

It broke my heart to leave you, but I know we leave each other better than we found one another and I never forget the life lessons you taught me.  You will always have my thanks and my love.

Tales of the Trev

How I learned to challenge my own preconceptions

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As a young man, I thought it was a sign of strength of character to stick to your guns.  That if you held an idea about something, you stuck to that idea and you didn’t let anyone mess with it.  You fought them tooth and nail and showed them that you were right and they were wrong.

Only one danger to that – what if you are the one that is actually wrong?

This is a short story about how I held a strong perception about a certain group of people and it took one experience to show me that my opinion was total bollocks.  And that group of people are hippies.

 

That’s right, hippies.  And I figured I had them down pat.  Long haired, pot smoking yahoos that never did a day of work in their lives.  Smelly, filthy people putting more faith in a healing crystal than an aspirin and would lecture you about how you should eat nothing but lentils.  Tree hugging nudies who deserved a good kick in their chakras.

I was 24 and living with a couple in Yarraville.  Good friends who when they heard my first marriage was breaking up turned up with a moving truck and said “We are getting you out of here”.  I’d been living with them for several months and was healing nicely from being used as an emotional punching bag for so long.  With New Years coming up, they were going to Confest and wanted me to come along.  Confest is best described as a hippy festival that takes place twice a year along a piece of river bank in the bush in southern NSW.

Did I wanna go?  Hells no!  If I went to the bush it was to do proper camping, catch some fish and maybe shoot a few rabbits.  I wasn’t going to no damn hippy festival and see blokes walking about with their tackle out!  I especially wasn’t going to go when they told me there was no meat allowed – bugger that!

But my friends wore me down and I ended up going along.  I made ‘filthy hippy’ jokes the whole way to the point my mate Michael was asking me to give it a rest, and I had a big store of dried beef jerky (the proper stuff from a butcher at VIC Market, not that rubbery crap you get at a servo)  hidden in my bag.

When we got there I was very non-plussed.  Taking tickets on the gate were indeed two naked people, a man and woman in their late 40’s if I was any judge.  As we parked and lugged our tents to find a spot, I was even less enthused when I saw the ‘workshops schedule board’ and saw there was actual tree hugging on it!  As we walked past there was indeed people there embracing trees with their eyes closed.  Oh gawd, I thought, I’m stuck here for a week with these friggin lunatics!  This is gonna suck!

We found a spot and set our tents up, me grumbling to myself the whole time.  I was an alpha-male stuck with a bunch of fruitloops in the middle of bloody nowhere.  I figured since I was stuck, I might as well make the best of it and went for an explore.

Over the afternoon some things started to confuse me.  There were naked people yes but plenty of clothed people too.  You could smell pot coming from the odd tent but certainly not all.  People were openly friendly without trying to convert me to crystal worship or lecturing me on the evils of a good steak.  I was very taken aback when I stumbled across a cricket game in progress which I quickly joined and even managed to take a catch or two.

 

What was going on?  Where was all the self-righteous condemnation for me not being one of them?  Besides being perhaps a bit more openly friendly that is usual, these all seemed like normal people, that couldn’t be right!

 

Well guess what – it WAS right.  It was right and I had been wrong.  I had a brilliant time over the following week!  People were really friendly, no one was in your face about anything, there were no people drunk out of their brains or off their heads on hard drugs.  I had lots of great conversations with people who turned out to be very intelligent and well informed and seemed to have made their own minds up about issues rather than simply subscribing to some ‘hippy dogma’.  Yes there was no meat allowed but I think people probably just pretended they couldn’t smell dried beef on my breath.

The Swan-Sarong Song

A few days in and I had had a go at a lot of interesting stuff I had not considered trying before.  I wandered round in a sarong, very comfortable in the heat.  Hell, on occasion I just disrobed and went for a walk in the nude which I found to be quite liberating!  I went to a few workshops (though not the tree hugging one) and learned about yoga and crafts and all kinds of stuff.  I learned to fire-twirl and developed a real taste for properly brewed chai tea.  All these things I would never have tried if I had stuck to my guns, dismissing them out of hand and therefore never enjoyed experiencing.  Come New Years night I danced hard into the wee hours of the morning, covered in sweat and body paint as a dozen guys smashed out a bestial rhythm on their bongo drums – it was primal and it was bloody fantastic!

“It’s 5am, do you know where your hippies are?”

I left Confest on the 2nd on Jan, my mind reeling from the previous weeks experience.  I had been wrong all my life about hippies.  Oh sure, there were plenty that did exist that fit my preconceptions but it turned out there were way more that didn’t.  And they all seemed to be onto such a good thing, it was probably one of the most chilled out weeks of my life.  Just a bunch of happy people being happy around other happy people and not bothering anyone else.  Instead of continuing to condemn them I had actually learned from them.  So if I was wrong about hippies, what else had I always believed that I could be wrong about?

I learned to examine my own opinions, looking for flaws in my own arguments.  I learned just because you believe something strongly, whether that be about a group of people in general or because it’s the popular thing to believe or it’s what your parents taught you was right, it doesn’t make you correct.  I’m not talking about abandoning your ideals, I’m talking about challenging yourself and making sure that if you believe something that you are right on the money, not simply believing it as that’s the comfortable thing to do.  Of course it can work both ways, while some people hold irrational prejudices, don’t believe something just because it’s a politically correct thing to believe either.  Find out the truth for yourself – good or bad.

 

This has served me well in all the years since.  I’ve learned to admit when I’m wrong.  I think it’s made me more intelligent, or at least better informed on issues as I’ve learned to examine something rather than letting someone else or popular opinion mold my own.  A lot of the time popular myths are wrong, for instance I went to France a couple of times and the people there were quite polite.  Besides one old street lady  no one was overtly rude and it turned out the French weren’t a bunch of sex obsessed, cheese eating surrender monkeys.  Back home I walked down the street one day in Broadmeadows and saw a big gang of Lebanese guys on the corner.  I nearly crossed the road then thought “Hang on – the only times I’ve been punched in my life was by other ‘Aussies’”.  So I continued walking and they couldn’t have cared less about me, let alone get violent or try to sell me drugs.  Preconceptions smashed.  I think the show A Current Affair might need to fact check things a bit more.

 

So challenge your own preconceptions, you might be surprised what you find out.  And as for the long-haired fruitloops at Confest…

… I went back the following New Years and met a very pretty one.  It’s now 14 years later and we are married, have 2 kids and organically grow all our own fruit, nuts and veg on our hobby farm in the countryside (they go well with meat).  God bless the hippies!

Big Hippy Trev (my god I was fit back then!)

Got a similar story?  Would love to read it in the comments section below!

*Please Note: I have subsequently been informed by Ms Emily Taylor that meat is indeed now allowed at Confest except in some of the communal kitchens – thanks for the update!

Tales of the Trev

Why Footrot Flats meant so much to me

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Today I shed a tear for a man I had never met.

 

I woke up this morning to see on social media that Murray Ball had passed away.  A minor celebrity that Gen Y or anyone outside New Zealand or Australia has probably never heard of.  He was a Kiwi Cartoonist who had written a few books but was most famous for being the creator, artist and writer of Footrot Flats, a newspaper comic strip that ran for a few decades and inspired an animated movie.

Murray Ball and The Dog

So why did this cartoonist whom I never met mean so much to me?

Growing up on a farm in Australia there was not a lot of media one could relate to.  We only had two TV channels and I had no concept of Cable TV, let alone the internet that would come along decades later.  Everything on TV was from America or the UK, the exceptions seeming to be the news and soapies – neither of much interest to a young boy.

But there was Footrot Flats.

Whenever Mum would buy the paper, when she had finished with it I would grab it to read the comics section and my first port of call was the Footrot Flats strip.  Here was something I could relate to.  There was shearing and herding cows and sheep. There were magpies and pigs and feral cats.  There was marking lambs, making sure the sow didn’t eat her young, dealing with droughts and cutting hay.  It didn’t matter it was set in New Zealand and not here in Australia, it was still my world.

And it was funny!

Footrot Flats was laugh out loud funny!  It didn’t rely on the same joke every strip (yes Garfield we get it – you like lasagna and don’t like Mondays) and after the first few years the strips became stories that actually progressed.   Through a series of 6 to 8 strips you would find out how The Dog (the only name the main character ever received, except for the one given by Aunt Dolly we were never told) was dealing with the latest rivalry with the Murphy Dogs, or trying to get to Jess when she was in heat, or was observing Rangi going through the first crushes of puberty.  That was the other beautiful thing of Footrot Flats, the characters grew.  Pongo grew from a screaming kid always trying to push The Dog around in her pram to an outspoken feminist teenager dealing with what she perceived to be a misogynist society and her burgeoning bisexuality (she had a major crush on Cooch’s Cousin Kathy we never saw the face of). Wal and Cheeky Hobson (whom I blame for my lifelong penchant for comically large breasts) went from dating to being engaged to eventually breaking up when she left Wal for the male stripper at her hens night.  The characters grew and changed and evolved over time, both in the way they acted and the way they were visually represented.  As I myself grew from a kid to a teenager to an adult these characters grew with me and they seemed a reassuring constant in my life.  Then there was The Dog.

The Dog.  The main protagonist of the series whom we saw the majority of life in Footrot Flats through the eyes of.  An intelligent and thoughtful character, who seemed to be beset on all sides by characters who were much tougher than he was that were likely to give him a good hiding if he looked in their direction.  Yep, to a kid who was always the smallest and skinniest boy in his year level at school and seemed to lack the aggression that all the other boys had an abundance of, he was a character I could relate to.  A character who would try to become friends with the tough PigDog Major and instead of receiving friendship would get beaten to a pulp.  For little Trev, between the ages of 8 and 16 that seemed to be my life in a nutshell.  Not only would The Dog make me laugh, but he gave me a character to identify with.

Even as I became a (reasonably) well adjusted adult who moved off to the big city and had plenty of friends and girlfriends, my love of Footrot Flats never waned.  It was a little bit of country life I could carry with me always.  I always checked the bookstores in case the newest compilation book had come out.  Footrot Flats was pretty prolific, there was always a new compilation book each year as well as the odd Weekender book.  When Murray Ball stopped writing Footroot Flats there was still the odd art book released and I bought the Footrot Flats movie the moment it came out on Blu Ray.  Ah the movie, it was absolutely brilliant!  Let me change that, it IS absolutely brilliant!  To this day, despite the fact I know they survive I still get a bit choked up when the other characters think The Dog, Horse and Jess are dead and I groove along as they surf back into life!  As for the song ‘Slice of Heaven’ – it’s hard to find a Gen X’er in this part of the world that doesn’t adore that song!  Truly timeless.

 

When Ball finished writing Footrot Flats he wrote some other books, funny yet heavy with social commentary and a huge dose of his distinctive comic art thrown in.  I have ‘The Flowering of Adam Budd’ and ‘The Sisterhood’ in my collection and every few years they get taken down for a read.  Ball was a funny, intelligent and perceptive writer who used both the written word and the visual medium to comment on society in a way that kept you turning the page.

But it was Footrot Flats that always remained dear to my heart.  It was a part of my childhood and a companion growing up.  My bookshelf boasts nearly every Footrot Flats book ever written, even the books about the movie.  So when I heard Ball had passed away this morning I felt an acute sense of loss, a man who had brought so much joy to my life, whom I had never met or had the chance to thank, had left this world.

 

So let me say it now: “Thank you Murray.  Thank you so much for meaning so much to me for so long.  I wish I had taken the time to track you down to at least write an email to say what a wonderful creation you had brought into the world.  You may always remain a legend in New Zealand, but there is also one little Aussie boy, now a man, who will never forget you”.

 

Did you used to read Footrot Flats or any other of Balls work?  Or have something to say about his passing?  Would love to read it in the comments section below.

Tales of the Trev

My immortal words on the Big Screen!

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Back in the days when I still held hopes and dreams of being a brilliant actor – adored by the masses and mobbed by beautiful women wherever I went, I mainly scored the highly glamorous  work of being an extra on different TV shows.  Name a bad Melbourne-made Aussie cop show from the 90’s and chances are if you watch a few episodes carefully enough you will eventually spot me milling around in the background.

I did however appear in three movies.  One was ‘made for TV’ (On the Beach) and two went to cinema.  In one I was just an extra (The Road to Nhill) but in the other I auditioned and actually scored a speaking role!  This is the tale of how I ended up there and the immortal words I got to utter on the big screen.

There is zero chance you have seen this film…

The movie was Strange Fits of Passion, a very teenage-angsty flick.  It was being shot in 1998 for a 1999 release.  Quite a lot of the people I was doing Drama with at La Trobe Uni auditioned for different parts but if memory serves I was the only one who achieved success.  Yes I got picked but I’m not sure, given the role I auditioned for, that this was a compliment.

I auditioned at some studios in St Kilda along with probably a dozen other guys.  When I went in they had a camera set up to film me and asked me to riff some ‘sexist abuse a yobbo would yell at a girl’.  Now, being a country boy while at the same time dating a woman whom I secretly loathed, I had me a plethora of inspiration to work with.  I looked down the camera and let fly with the kind of gutter talk that had never before or since passed my lips!

I was thanked for my time and told they would be making a decision in the next 10 days.  However 40 minutes later as I was driving home my mobile rang – it was my agent calling:

 

“Trev, we don’t know what you did in there but they said you are perfect for the role.  You got it!  They shoot in two weeks”.  I was officially Hoon No. #2

 

A fortnight later we are shooting on Little Flinders street in the city.  The police had the road closed off and were redirecting traffic.  I sat there in my flannel top and footy scarf in my actors chair awaiting my scene as the stunt driver pulled up in a two door car.  I got told to sit in the back  and to then lean up and over the driver’s seat so that from the waist up I was hanging out the window.

We did about a dozen takes, each time doing a blockie to come back and shoot again.  It was very cool to be doing 70kph in a 40kph zone whilst hanging out the window  from the waist up, all in front of police who not only did not stop me but blocked traffic so I could do so!

 

So here we are, the scene and my immortal lines:

The heroine of the movie is at her lowest ebb.  There is a fine mist of rain.  She walks down Little Flinders street in Melbourne with her head hung low.  As she passes a construction zone where someone has spray painted “Kill yourself – it’s cheaper” she looks up to see the man she craves silhouetted at the end of the alley.  As she starts towards him a car slowly drives by which distracts her.  There is a handsome yobbo hanging out the window who yells at her:

“Show us ya pink bits baby!”

“Give us a headjob ya uptight slut!”

Then as the car continues down the alley he looks back and chants “Shows us ya tits!  Show us ya tits!”

She looks back down the alley but her dream man has gone.

 

I got paid $52 an hour for that gig (a lot of money for a struggling actor back in 98′) and got to watch myself say it on the big screen to boot!  I may have never become a star, but I will always have that warm memory from my short lived career.

 

Update:  My mate Kenan actually found this movie on youtube!  If you wanna hear the line and see a red beanie blurring by which is yours truly, you can find it here at the 32:20 mark!

Tales of the Trev

Redback Spider killing Blind Snake – my morning surprise!

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This is the tale of an amazing natural sight I saw yesterday.

 

It’s 9am on a Friday morning.  The missus has left for work, I’ve gotten the kids up, fed and dressed and it’s time for me to start the farm chores of the day.

I grab my keys and go open the shed door, anxious to get the more onerous of the jobs over with before the temperature reaches the forecast 37 degree’s – typical for the Mallee in January. Just inside the door is my big beer fridge and close to that is a black crate I’ve been using to sort my Transformer books and DVD’s (yes, as well as being a hobby farmer I’m also a big TF nerd).  I notice immediately that there has been a big web spun between the crate and the fridge that wasn’t there the night before.  There are a few bits of twig and dry grass in it.  Also a great big Redback Spider is busy in the web, hungrily sucking on the tail of… a snake.

A snake.

A bloody snake!

I’ve got a real thing about snakes.  I didn’t used to, affording them due respect so they wouldn’t bite me but otherwise not worrying about them.  However several years ago I lost an immediate family member to a bite by a juvenile brown snake.  Combine that with the fact that I live on a farm and have two small children, I’m pretty damn paranoid about them now.  Don’t want to lose my kids or for them to lose their dad the way I lost an older sibling.

I recoil immediately but morbid curiosity quickly brings me back (that and I’ll want to be able to grab a beer that evening).  It is indeed a young snake and quite dead.  We only get three types of snake on our farm that I’ve seen; brown snakes, red-bellied black snakes and blind snakes.  While I initially think it is a brown snake, as they are the ones we seem to get most commonly, I realize upon closer inspection this is a Blind Snake, in particular a Ramphotyphlops australis.  I’ve usually encountered them when I’ve been digging up various big bull ant nests around the farm but they are known to come to the surface on warm humid nights, which is what we had experienced the night before.  It’s grey, about 20 centimeters long and as stated, very dead.

Holy Hell!

The Redback Spider, which judging from it’s size and the nearby egg sacs is a female, has cocooned the Blind Snake’s head thickly in webbing and the rest of the body to a lesser extent.  The snake at its lowest point is hanging about an inch above the floor and the spider is chowing down on the tip of its tail – maybe where the skin is thinnest and easiest to suck the undoubtedly now pureed innards out of.  It’s a pretty disturbing sight but fascinating none-the-less.

I dash back to the house to grab my phone to take a picture.  Of course with a child’s instinct to run towards danger both my kids follow me back out.  I manage to take a few photos whilst blocking my daughter (my son is old enough to know if Dad says ‘Stay back – it’s dangerous!’ to do so but my daughter just gives a frustrated yell and tries to push past to see what all the fuss is about).  I then reach for my watering can.  Whilst having a spider that can take down snakes seems to be very desirable, having one right in the doorway to the shed all the family goes in and out of 50 times a day is most certainly not.  I instruct the little ones to look away and then Daddy turns spider, snake and web all into a memory with a couple of decisive bangs.

 

And that’s the story, one of the most amazing predator-prey events I’ve seen up close!  It even led me to make this meme:

After all this I wondered how the spider managed to get the snake off the floor and into its web.  Subsequent research I’ve done says that Latrodectus hasseltii (Redbacks) attacking and killing snakes is a very rare occurrence but it does happen. I believe the incident I witnessed however may actually be the only recorded case of a Redback taking down this particular species of snake.  Apparently the process with other species usually involves the Redback turning it’s abdomen towards a snake slithering on the ground after it gets caught in a trap line and shoots web all over it.  As the snake thrashes and becomes more entangled the Redback slowly hoists it up into the main web where it can then bite, kill and feed at its leisure.  Despite the fact that Blind Snakes are not venomous I assume this happened in the same manner and it makes the above meme all the more appropriate, don’t you think?

 

Care to comment on the story you just read or have a similar story of your own?  Would love to read it in the comments section below!

Related Blog Posts:

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Redback Spider kills Blind Snake – television news report

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Meaty Goodness!, Tales of the Trev

Big Angry Trev VS the 1.5kg Pork Schnitzel!

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I’ve had a love of German food since I first visited the country many years ago.  While the French might win on exquisite taste, the Germans win on cooking up succulent huge pieces of quadruped, wrapping it in cabbage or breadcrumbs and washing it down with a enough beer to sink a footy team.  I had some brilliant feeds in Germany, so when I heard there was a food challenge to be had at the Hofbrauhaus German restaurant in Melbourne I simply couldn’t resist.

The challenge: To eat a 1.5kg pork schnitzel, a bowl of chips and a liter of German Bier in 45 minutes.  If you do it, your meal is free and you get a t-shirt.  If not, it costs you 75 big ones!

Now I was pretty confident going into this challenge.  It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve eaten that much pork in one sitting.  When in Germany my girlfriend and I visited an old monastery where the only food you could order was Pork Knuckle with Sauerkraut and you ordered it by weight.  I ordered a 1.5kg portion with a stein of Bock beer to go with it.  We sat down with a bunch of Bavarian’s who told me in no uncertain terms that I should not have ordered the Bock beir, as with it being so heavy there would be no way I could finish that much meat.

Half an hour later they gave me a round of applause for out-eating them in their own country!

 

So yeah, I was pretty confident going into this.  No-one that I had talked to doubted my ability to meet this challenge, though some thought the bowl of chips might trip me up.  So on a Monday night myself and my good friend Matt went to Hofbrauhaus to show them how it’s done.

We were seated by our waitress who may have had the Bavarian Beer Maid costume with the requisite, and possibly mandatory, pushed-up cleavage but came across as a young, timid Aussie lass who probably has had one too many customers try to pinch her butt in her short career. The manager, again, not German, definitely Indian and still had a decent accent going, came and explained the challenge to me.  He also had us move tables as the one we had been seated at was not big enough to accommodate my coming plate, which we thought was pretty cool.

MEAT!!!
MEAT!!!

Soon after, the manager comes back out ringing a big cow bell, followed by a man carrying my huge plate!  My mouth watered at the sight of so much meat!  He set the timer, told me I had 45 minutes and wished me luck.

I never saw him again.

With only 45 minutes to eat a kilo and a half of pork, a ton of chips and a litre of bier, I hoed straight in.  First pitfall – this meal was at about a thousand degrees!  I didn’t have time to wait for it to cool so I cut half of it into large mouthful sized pieces so it could cool somewhat and started shoveling the overly hot meat into my mouth.  I could feel it burning the roof of my mouth when the rough schnitzel coating was scraping against it but I persevered.

meattt

About 400gm and 10 minutes in into the 1.5kg the food had cooled enough that I could now actually taste it and here is where the trouble began.  This was a BAD schnitzel.  I mean, it tasted TERRIBLE!  The hard coating of it genuinely tasted like bad KFC (is there truly any other kind?) and upon examination it was not grade-A pork within but rather this really fatty, low quality meat.  Matt hypothesized that maybe you can’t get a piece of pork that big without it being fatty but I’m assured by my friend Margie – who like me grew up on a farm – that you can have non fat-ridden pieces of pig meat that large.

Now up until now I had NEVER had bad German food.  All the food in Germany itself was brilliant and the few times I’ve visited German restaurants in Australia the food has been pretty good.  I also don’t think I’ve ever had a particularly bad schnitzel either.  So for this giant one to taste as bad as it did was a massive surprise and the one eventuality I did not prepare for.   Since the waitress was Aussie and the manager Indian, I’m guessing there were no Germans in the actual kitchen because I guarantee that no German chef worth his salt would have served up this monstrosity.

I continued to eat but with every mouthful I felt queasy.  At about 600gm and 25 minutes in I realize that if I manage to eat the whole thing I am going to be seriously ill.  Matt and I had tickets to see Henry Rollins at the Arts Centre for about 90 minutes hence and all I could imagine was me missing half the show because I’m in the toilet vomiting.  That’s when, to my shame, I realize I am not going to meet this challenge.  None of the staff have come back to check on my progress, which I found a bit suss considering the big deal they made of it.  Since I am not going to eat it I offer Matt a bite to gauge his opinion on the quality of the food.  Matt takes one bite of the Schnitzel meat, screws up his face and says “No, that is seriously disgusting.  Don’t eat it man, you’ll be sick”. 

 

And that’s it.  That was the end of the challenge – I didn’t even finish half!  Once again, even when the 45 minutes expired (we had timers on our phones) no staff had come back to check progress which leads me to believe that between the heat of the food and the low quality they really didn’t expect me to finish it.  If I’d had a bag with me I could have just tipped the boards contents into it and claimed I’d eaten it all – would have saved me $75.

Afterwards I was shaming myself for not having eaten it all, and seriously examining my own perceived self-image and who I was as a person if I could not eat a 1.5kg pork schnitzel. But then I realized, it’s like someone saying “Here, have sex with this person whom you find to have an offensive, horrible personality and a body to match” and you can’t get an erection.  It’s not that you are suddenly impotent – you just can’t bring yourself to have sex with that train wreck.  And that is what this food challenge was.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t eat a kilo and a half of pork, it’s that I couldn’t bring myself to eat a kilo and a half of that foul shit.  I did drink all the beer though.

Pretty poor fare from Hofbrauhaus.  I’d been there once before about 8 years ago and while the food was not fantastic it hadn’t been bad either.  Oh there could be excuses for why this schnitzel was so bad.  Maybe their usual supplier of top quality huge pork pieces had nothing this week so they were forced to go with a dodgy guy.  Maybe they treat their chefs like Men’s Clubs treat their strippers – they use their top quality ones on Friday and Saturday nights when business is busy and then use their rough ones (the chefs that couldn’t make toast and the strippers with acne and cesarean scars) on slow nights like a Monday.  But I don’t think there is any excuse for a German-styled Pork Schnitzel to taste like bloody Kentucky Fried Chicken, especially when you are paying $75 damn dollars for the meal!

So overall quite a disappointing experience.  But just in case I am giving myself an excuse I don’t deserve, I think I’m going to cook up a kilo and a half of good pork soon and chow down, just to prove to myself I still have what it takes.  Will keep you crazy kids updated and post proof that my gastronomic prowess is still alive and kicking!