L's World 1: The Edge of Reason

The rain has dried and the crops are dying. Then the snow fell. She wept as they took her horses to the next farm as she could no longer afford to keep them. She feels trapped in her winter wonderland, the servants and chauffers sent off to work elsewhere. The frost under her feet has stretched for more miles than her delicate feet could cope. The time has come for the Baroness to find another mode of transport.

I just spent $130 and a weekend with 15 year old pimply boys stuck in a run down smokey room in Woden having speed-kills-don't-drink-don't-this-don't-that drummed into my head. I know its not drummed in their heads cos most of them spent the weekend doodling pictures of Ren and Stimpy - or whatever they watch these days - on the course book.

Apparently we are the most priviledged state in the entire Australian federation to be chosen to go on a pilot program of compulsory road safety course before we can get our L's. Sure I can understand that you should know this stuff before you go on the roads, but a whole weekend?? and with that GIT with the handlebar mustache that is so patronising and so annoying to be have to listen to hour after hour, using ridiculous metaphors like driving is a lottery that is full of black tickets with names - like death, permanent brain damage, jail, etc etc, and we are about to fill in more names on those black tickets (fine, if you use it once, but for every subject??); if those tax payers dollars to fund the recouperation of Melanie's injuries would be transferred onto one dollar bank notes and pile up, you know how high? as high as Mount Everest, you know how high Mount Everest is? that's how many bank notes it takes to look after her for the rest of her life. You want that? Do you think your mum, your dad and brothers and sisters, your cousins and the dog next door would want that? No, no, no. Not an Everest worth of bank notes. What the fuck?

All I am glad for is that there are actually a few other people who have left their Ls as late or if not later than I have. There's a 30 year old from Melbourne that has taken trams her entire life till she joined the public service here, and a 45 yo star wars fan that's never had a problem taking buses for 20 years from Isabella Plains. I remember how annoying those adult students were during my undergrad years who would sit at the very front of the class and answer all the questions (and get them right) and ask all the questions (and get them right as well). Fuck I feel like one of them when the kiddies on my table glanced up from their doodling at me as if I was a WEIRDOOO when I questioned the gender analysis of road fatalities in Australia 2001 - 2005. Well at least I'm not starting a carpet-laying apprenticeship next week cos I DROPPED OUT OF YEAR 10!!!!

I politely let the younger ones through the knowledge test before me. The computer that I was going to use for my knowledge test breaks down, and so does the next one and the next one. The entire system shuts down and the GIT has a bit of a breakdown (does he do this when he drives too?). I repeat what I always knew in my head. To err is human; to fuck things up big time requires a computer. And bureaucracy is a mistake of a mutant produced by the struggle between humans yearning to become computers.

I start to write another letter to Jon Stanhope in my head (NB: international readers - he's the fearless leader of our magnificent Territory/minor kareoke celebrity who sports a crew cut), and find myself doodling a picture of a snow flake in the course book.

How rediculous, she thought. The Driving Baroness!?

Melbourne June 06

I am in Melbourne for a worktrip, and have scored perfect time with the long weekend to stay on for some shopping and catching up with mates.

This city is so murcky and bleak in the winter it really can be quite depressing if not for the smell of coffee and vietnamese noodles drifting into the streets. The view infront of me is a smudge of grey, and its chilled into my bones. The air particles feels like flakes of ice, condensing on the tip of my nose. My little cold is not appreciating this at all and I've been on strepsils and pseudoephredrine to keep me running.

Hopping inside a tram is like being surrounded by a bed of amber. These old classic style ones glow with the dim lights and the wooden seating. Young women in coats and boots texting away, old men in burets with their walking sticks, blokes in stubbles and hoodies talking about shakespearian deaths, and me, bewildered clutching a tram map, hands full with bits and pieces of shopping, food, a big bunch of flowers for my lovely hosts. This is so Melbourne, you can't feel like this any where else in the world.