You can’t quite see it from that distance, so lets look a little closer…

Yeah. That’s odd. All the labels on those little bottles of Swisse Snake Oil are all blurry. A printing error maybe? Surely not…

I assumed that this would be something to do with the laws in Australia about advertising medicines, but I was curious, so I asked Dr Google. He told me to have a look at the website of the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which confirms that there are of course all sorts of rules and regulations around the advertising of these products in Australia. And the page on Making a complaint about the advertising of a therapeutic product tells me this:

Advertisements for medicines appearing on television or radio, newspapers, consumer magazines, billboards and cinema films are required to be approved before publication.

Advertisements appearing in newspapers and consumer magazines must include the approval number. The approval number is usually in small print and begins with the letters ‘ASMI’ or ‘CHC’ followed by a 5-6 digit number and date code.

Approvals are valid for a 2-year period.

So does our ad have an approval number in small print beginning with the letters ASMI or CHC? Er. No.

Well that’s interesting.

It’s at this point that Dr Google suggests I take a look at the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code 2007 in ComLaw.

Under section 3, Compliance with, and application of, the Code, we find this:

(3) Advertisements for therapeutic goods appearing in specified and broadcast media must be approved by the appropriate Advertising Services Manager for compliance with the Code (Appendix 3 refers) prior to publication or broadcast, other than:

…

(b) advertisements for those therapeutic goods that may be advertised and which display only name, picture and/or price and /or point of sale, without therapeutic claims; and …

So it appears there is a loophole. You can advertise therapeutic goods without having to get your ad approved, regardless of what dubious therapeutic claims the goods themselves might make, just so long as you don’t repeat those therapeutic claims in your ad.

Presumably these little bottles of wonder pills are some kind of Schrödinger’s Medicine: they simultaneously are therapeutic goods and also aren’t at the same time, depending on what’s on the label. I suppose that’s kind of appropriate, really. Isn’t that how the placebo effect homoeopathy works…

Then again, they haven’t blurred out some of those labels very well. Even I can see that this one says “Clinically Trialled” on the top line and “Omega-3 Antioxidant” on the bottom line, whatever the hell that means:

Although maybe they should go that little bit further with the blurring–you never know what some of these products might be called by the time the consumer gets to the store. As The ABC’s The Checkout pointed out a few months ago, when the Therapeutic Goods Administration cancelled the registration for Swisse’s Ultiboost Appetite Suppressant, they cunningly evaded the ban by simply changing the name on the label…

To prepare for the test, they give you this book to read — Our Common Bond — and can ask you questions on anything featured in the “testable section”.

While the non testable section does at least acknowledge some of the more questionable aspects of Australia’s recent history (such as the White Australia Policy and the stolen generations), the testable part includes frankly astonishing statements like this:

Um. Really? Are you sure about that?

I think I sort of understand what they were going for, but I can’t help thinking this might come as news to the people who were already living here when the white man arrived. Federation might have happened without bloodshed, but I don’t think you can just quietly forget about 1788 – 1901…

My first question on the test itself was this:

Where did the earliest free settlers to Australia come from:
• Europe
• Great Britain and Ireland
• Torres Strait Islands

Hmm. There’s something missing from that list, isn’t there…

Once again, I know what they mean — and what they wanted me to answer — but I can’t help thinking that the first people to settle in Australia freely might be the ones who were already here when the country was renamed around them…

Other sections of the testable content are just amusing. There’s a whole bit on the apparently uniquely Australian concept of mateship, although I’m not sure which roads the authors have been driving on judging by their example:

I don’t think I’ll be trying that in rush hour Melbourne…

Oh. And there’s this. The Union Jack? Really?

Anyway. I passed. It took me all of 2 1/2 minutes, out of my allotted 45, to answer all my twenty questions correctly…

Think I prefer this test instead, mind. And I still don’t know the answer to the bring your own meat barbie question…

For our wedding we asked our good friend Jim, who sadly wasn’t able to make it over from the UK, if he might happen to have something we could use as a reading. And he wrote us this rather wonderful poem.

For the benefit of anyone who might not have got all the references (and for everyone who wouldn’t have seen it written down to appreciate its full double acrostic glory), I present Matt n’ Sally, Married — with footnotes.

Matt n’ Sally, Married

by James Peake

You chose London, Sal, and a handsome pom
Looming above the D.F., ^[1] loitering by the P.A. ^[2]
Looking back at you. The End. ^[3] The night you met.
And from that instant spark, that fun-loving start,
Secret garden picnics ^[4] or Glasto ^[5] under English sun, ^[6]
Not a moment wasted, at galleries or plays, down Dr Who caves, ^[7]
Trading jokes and gossip over cocktails or Corona ^[8]
Then detouring for a doner. Matt, a Woody Grill. ^[9]
And daily a photo for your Flickr project or Facebook wall; ^[10]
Melbourne’s gain London’s loss, but two hemispheres can now toast, Matt n’ Sally.

[1] D.F. The dancefloor. The scene of many of our greatest moments…

[2] I’m not sure if I actually was loitering by the P.A., but I’ll let that one pass…

[3] The End nightclub, in London’s West End, owned by Mr C off of the Shamen, where we met all those years ago.

[4] The Secret Garden, our favourite little hidden spot in Regent’s Park: tucked away down an unmarked passage lies a beautiful little manicured garden that we got to treat as our own when we lived nearby.

[5] Glastonbury Festival. We were there together in 2007, and 2005, and 2004 and an apparently unphotographed 2003…

[6] I assume the idea of English Sun at Glasto must be some kind of joke…

[7] That would be these caves that we day tripped to in 2008.

[8] No explanation needed, but sort of appropriate given our Mexico plans…

[9] The Woody Grill in Camden. Without question my favourite London Kebab shop. A place so good that I once saw a man drop his kebab on the dirty Camden pavement and then pick it right back up again and carry on eating… **

[10] My Photo Of The Day project. Now, unbelievably in its seventh year.

** This was not me. Honest.

There are a handful of tourists wandering around the site when we arrive, but it is quiet enough for us to take photos of the ruins without anyone getting in the way. On the recommendation of Susanna from Coqui Coqui, we hire a guide to show us around. Most of what he tells us, we later discover, is nonsense, but it is entertaining nonetheless.

(As a case in point he tells us that the reason that no one is allowed to climb the ruins is because 5 oversized American tourists rolled down to their deaths a few years ago, even though my subsequent internet research proves that this was not exactly what happened. Still, even though he couldn’t get something from 2006 right, I’m sure his comments on things that happened thousands of years ago are just fine…)

After a pleasant few hours wandering the site, we jump back in the car, grab a quick lunch of salbutes in the nearby town of Pisté and hit the road across the Yucatan to the colonial town of Mérida.

We drive the cuota — toll road — to Valladolid. It is a long straight highway lined with low vegetation that reminds me a little of Cuba. There are almost no other cars on the road, and there is nothing to see except the occasional signs telling us there’s a service station in 84km — quite some walk if you happen to run out of petrol. This makes for an easy but slightly dull drive. We will later discover that there is a parallel non toll road that the locals prefer. A rather more interesting route, it passes through a number of pueblos along the way. But the price for driving the free road is the need to slow to a crawl in each village, punctuated as they are every few hundred metres by topes, Mexico’s lengendary speedbumps.

Our home in Valladolid for the next two days is a quite exclusive perfumery in an average size Mexican town. It is, quite simply, beautiful. This is a hotel of one room — above the shop — and when Susanna, the manager, leaves for the evening we are left in charge of both shop and hotel. There is a step ladder for accessing our giant raised bed, chiffon curtains that billow like something from a Chanel ad, a huge roof terrace overlooking the town, private plunge pool and a giant vintage bath. I could get used to this.

Downstairs in the shop it feels as if you have stepped back in time. Everything is displayed on vintage cabinets under giant glass bell jars.

We split our time between chilling on the roof terrace watching the birds ride the currents above us, exploring the perfectly preserved colonial town on foot, eating salbutes at the market (only 8 pesos!) and taking advantage of Susanna’s restaurant recommendations. It’s tough.

It had never been our intention to stay in Cancun, but it’s really the only realistic entry point to this part of Mexico, and with our flight arriving at 5pm, we didn’t think it terribly wise to set off on the road to Valladolid and drive for two hours in the dark. By the time we have obtained our small red motorised metal box from Hertz at Cancun airport and set off for the town, it is already going dark. Half way into town, it begins raining. Hard. Visibility is reduced to a few metres, and, in a scenario that will be repeated throughout Mexico, we cannot find our hotel. The Tom Tom, we later discover, is directing us the wrong way down the right street. We pull over at a farmacia and I run out in the torrential rain to ask the locals if they know where our hotel is. Even though the hotel is on the street we are on, and I am waving a piece of paper with the street address written on it, the staff at the farmacia do not know where our hotel is. They tell me to keep driving in the wrong direction.

Some time later the street becomes a different street and we realise we must be going the wrong way. We stop again. This time I ask a man in a garage who at least directs us back in the direction we came from. At this point I spot for the first time that the piece of paper in my hands also contains some GPS coordinates. We drive back towards the coordinates, and again–briefly–fail to find the hotel, before realising that it is almost where the coordinates say it should be, just on the opposite side of the road. We pull into a parking spot out front and check in.

Eschewing the dubious charms of the zona hotelera, we are staying for our one night in downtown Cancun, in the hope that we might discover some local colour. For dinner, we head to nearby parque las palapas and hit the food stalls: we try salbutes and panuchos — small round tacos cooked fresh to order, topped with your choice of meat, tomato, onion and salsa picante. We quickly decide that salbutes con conchinita pibil (marinated pork) are our street food of choice (slightly softer than the panuchos, which seem to break when you try to fold them over), although for some reason Sal is unable to remember their real name and will call them salt-em-bancos for the rest of the trip.

After filling up at the food stalls for the equivalent of about 7 aussie dollars, we find a couple of bars, chat to one of the owners, drink our first tequilas of the trip, and discover our new favourite Mexican beer–the beautiful chocolatey delight that is Bohemia Obscura–while listening to a band play covers of rock classics in a bar called the “route 666 bikie bar”, just down from our hotel. The bar is full and we are the only gringos there. A waiter asks where we are from and we tell him that we have just arrived from Australia.

“¿Es su primera día? ¿Que te parcece?”

What do I think? It’s pretty good, I tell him, finishing my beer. It’s pretty good.

Even after a lengthy wait to clear customs and immigration at LAX, we arrive at our hotel in Santa Monica several hours prior to leaving Melbourne (thank you, the international dateline), and head out to explore. We spend our first day wandering in and out of the shops and spending some US$ travellers cheques left over from our 2008 trip to South America–this was our emergency fund, but as we never had an emergency we now have a small present from the us of five years ago.

Every time we produce one of these relics it sends the shop assistant into a spin. “Travellers Cheques? No one uses those anymore”. Each store somehow has a different procedure for cashing them, but one by one they accept them and we leave each store with free stuff, and free US$.

As the sun sets we walk out to the beach–past the wooden Baywatch huts–and down to the end of the pier, past the rickety funfair, past a caricature artist who shouts an offer to “make me smaller” and Sal taller, and a guy dressed as Uncle Sam playing music and pulling funny faces. We stick around to watch the sunset before heading for dinner at the quite excellent Tar & Roses, where we sit at the bar eating beautiful glazed ribs, lamb belly and roasted chicken.

Later we retire to a bar called Chloe where we help the barman–an impossibly handsome young man with a floppy fringe that seems as if it is straight out of a daytime soap or some teen pop band–to name a new cocktail, and chat to his girlfriend about her love of Top Gear and her plans to visit the UK to see it being filmed.

On our second day we collect our convertible from the hotel a few blocks away, and set out to drive the city–first to Rodeo Drive, where the shop assistants are all too friendly for us to have the opportunity to say “you work on comission, right? Big mistake…”, and then on into the hills, along Mullholland and Ventura, past the lookout down to the city and the Hollywood Bowl, where we hear a tour guide point out the alleged houses of Meg Ryan and Ice T.

We travel on to Sunset, along Hollywood past the Chinese theatre and the stars, before looping back to Venice, to the indie boutiques of Abbot Kinney, which reminded us of Brunswick or Smith Streets. All the while ignoring the Tom Tom’s insistence that we take the shortest route–the freeway–instead choosing the suburban back streets where we admire the large Spanish style houses and manicured lawns. I had been nervous about driving in LA but it turns out to be easy and fun. Having the top down on a sunny day probably doesn’t hurt.

It didn’t quite turn out like that.

There was something rather poetic, though, about the shabbiness of the way things drew to a close. It had seemed, from this distance at least, that throughout the games, from the moment that Opening Ceremony began right up until 5 minutes to 9 on the Sunday evening, Londoners–heck maybe even the whole of the UK–had shrugged off the default British cynic mode and embraced the wonder of it all. No more was there talk of security lapses, of G4S, of LOCOG and the brand police. Now we just focused on all those great performances. On those Six Super Saturday Gold Medals. Mo. Jessica. Bradley…

Now suddenly it was all coming to a close and as it did so it seemed as if the organisers were saying to Brits everywhere: it’s ok. Things will be back to normal tomorrow. Here is something you can be sarcastic about again.

It was what we had all feared the opening ceremony might have been. Essentially those embarrassing twenty minutes from Beijing with David Beckham and the London bus, only padded out to three hours. Not so much a Symphony of British Music as just whoever happened to be available and said yes, with some shocking sound production to boot.

Where the Opening Ceremony was a socialist indie kid fantasy with a subversive hint and a sense of humour, this was a return to a world of MOR mediocrity and the cult of vacuous celebrity (I mean, come on, Kate Moss and Russell Brand? These are your role models to #inspireageneration?)

The Opening Ceremony had the suffragettes.
The Closing Ceremony had the Spice Girls.

That is about about all you need to know.

This is a bit weird, innit? You all sitting down like that…

So says Mr Gallagher, three songs into his set, to his hitherto entirely seated audience at St Kilda’s The Palais theatre.

Do you have to sit down? I mean, have they told you that you have to sit down?

<pause>

Well stand up then…

<audience rises en masse…>

Thanks Noel. Someone had to say it. Thus began an entertaining hour and a half of old Oasis songs, stuff off his new album, and the occasional spot of banter. I was pretty happy with the mix of songs — including as it did, acoustic versions of Whatever and Supersonic, as well as a smattering of those great early B-Sides (Talk Tonight, Half The World Away, It’s Good To Be Free…), although it apparently wasn’t good enough for some of my fellow audience members, who started yelling out song titles at random in between tracks.

I’m not doing requests, says Noel. I didn’t spend 20 minutes last June working on this setlist for you lot to shout out random shit.

…Especially if you’re not wearing any merchandise, you cheap bastards…

One person who was wearing the merchandise was the kid sitting a couple of rows in front of me with his mum and dad, wearing his brand new Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds T-Shirt. He must have been about 14, and therefore wouldn’t even have been alive the first time I saw Oasis live (back in December 1994 at the Liverpool Royal Court…) Sheesh. That makes me feel old. Where did all that time go?

Bloggers terrorizing politicians? Well that will never do. That’s your job, isn’t it Rupert?

Also, while I’m at it Rupe, do try to remember that if you’re going to make claims about what results a particular Google search returns, you might not want to do that on the internet, where such claims are laughably easily verified.