Suite at the Hilton, dahling Somewhat optimistically, the locals (or at least Gary, Sal’s friend Anna’s uncle, who took us on a tour of the city) like to think of Perth as a kind of mini Sydney, without the fancy bridge and concert hall, obviously, but with an impressive harbour, and lots of sunshine. The ...

Skippy The Happy Kangaroo Although we have only just returned to Melbourne, it will soon be time to leave again to travel over to Perth, which everyone says is very nice. We spent the last few days travelling away to Colac, a small country town around 2 or 3 hours away from the city, to ...

Melbourne As the photos, when I finally get round to uploading them, will testify, it’s been bloody hot here mate. I mention this only to illustrate my first observation about the natives–they do like to talk about the weather a fair bit. When they aren’t talking about house prices, that is. Perhaps it’s just a ...

Singapore Nothing, I think, could quite have made me hurry through terminal one of Singapore’s Chiangi airport like the words “free” and “internet” being prominently displayed together. Sadly, the long line of people who’d got there before me, combined with the approaching take-off slot for my flight on to Melbourne meant that it was all ...

New look Oh, just wanted to say that (as hopefully you will have noticed) I’ve been making some minor changes to the weblog recently. Hope people like the new (slightly tweaked) look. Let me know in the comments if you have any major objections and/or thoughts. Cheers!

You Need A Holiday! Somewhere In The Sun… What with Rob’s recent posts from his secondment in Hong Kong, and my counter having finally reached zero (meaning I am now allowed to go on holiday), the Paste weblogs are about to become truly global. Assuming that the crew of my BA flight this evening haven’t ...

Messenger. The. Shoot. Don’t. McDonald’s is apparently really very cross that a new edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary includes the definition for the term “McJob” as “low-paying and dead-end work” (and this is reported as “news” despite the fact that this meaning for the term was coined by Douglas Coupland over 10 years ago–frankly I’m ...

So. Prince Charles, then. WARNING: If you’re waiting to see this story in the British media, and you don’t want to know the score, please look away now… (and if you do want to know the score, you can find it here). So, as I’m sure everybody knows by now, even if they don’t get ...

As is traditional, last night we celebrated the failure of a terrorist plot 400 years ago by blowing up a whole pile of stuff in the back garden. Because there’s nothing quite like a really, really, loud rocket for encapsulating 17th century Catholic disenfranchisement. The standard of our fireworks this year was generally pretty good, ...

Last night was something of a lesson in asking questions first. It might, for example, be a good idea to find out which part of the venue your friends are going to be in before buying an overpriced last-minute ticket (er, then spending more money to get another one, also for the wrong part of ...