wet

Bom Dia,
welcome to the Bush Tucker Trials,

from down here. I know that should be G'day but that's far too obvious.

I am delighted to be back in the sun burnt country that claims itself to be the Lucky Country.

In many way it is.

Sunburnt that is.
In others it is extra ordinarily lucky:
Space, resources, food, mullet haircuts being in fashion for over 40 years, crap cars being cool, total obliviousness of how daft the life saver hats look, blonde girls with enormous breasts, the ability to say "look" before every sentence as if you know what you are talking about even if you haven't a clue - that kind of thing.

But I have come "home" to find that in one respect the luck has truly run out. The place is parched dry.

In the state that was until recently my home - Queensland - there are Level 5 water restrictions.
It is deadly serious. A matter of life and death.

Practically it means rationed 4 minute showers and no watering of anything other than your liver with quarts of XXXX lager. Strange then that the first night I was here a huge bowser was parked outside my flat and two guys (not the Blackburn Rovers footballer Tugais in case you made a mistake) were hosing down the plants in a rather feeble traffic island. ( I love government hypocrasy don't you?)

There is a ban of putting cigarette butts anywhere except a bin or it's an on the spot $150 fine. Smoking is banned almost everywhere and for this time of year temperatures are about 6-7 degrees hotter than usual.

In Canberra the Roo's are killing dogs again to stop them drinking the water in the lakes and even the biggest rivers are running dry.

The fifth biggest continent on Earth can't provide enough food for 19 million inhabitants. So they are importing it from China. That is really scary. It's as if the whole of Europe only had the population of Paris and London combined. The rest was desolate. NOW DO YOU GET IT?

Or if you are American imagine Wyoming everywhere but with no steers just snakes. The bad lands. Now what good are your fucking Chevrolets 67 small block's and your Hummers? Arnie was right!!

Last year when I was living here the council on the Gold Coast allowed some folks to wash their cars for the first time in 5 years but that seems like madness now. All the dams are empty and whilst no one prays openy for rain it won'r be long before they are waving sticks and jumping up and down like Sitting Bull on an ants nest.

It is Global Warming writ large and in living colour.
The colour is Red.
The colour of blood and the desert soil in the outback.
It's fucking scary.

UK was dry for 6 weeks before I left.
Singapore is supposed to be having a wet season but isn't.
Aus is as dry as a witches tit.

What the hell happened to all the rain?

Anyhow, I can't fix it. Even if I have contributed about a billion tonnes to CO2 during my travels. Its a shitty legacy we will leave for our kids.

So:

Advice number 1 Learn to sail or you will never go anywhere again when the oil runs out in 2050.

Advice number 2. Invest in property in rural Lancashire where it never stops raining.

3. Buy a shot gun and man traps to keep all the thirsty bankers oil barons and airline execs away.

4. Learn as much as you can about Aboriginal Aussies survival techniques - you will need them.

We all know about the Grub sucking and the boiled/baked/fried lizards and it has a universal reaction of YEAAACH but if this continues we will all be doing it. (I wonder if we really will need to drink our own piss before too long?)

When the cows die and your toilet runs dry you are going to be out there eating maggots and caterpillars too.

Don't laugh. This is serious!

Anyway, Today I woke - at a weird time as usual when traveling - and I am off to live the life of Nero and sample the delights of a Food and Wine festival on Caxton Street. Bands will be playing and nosh galore and we will all fiddle whilst Brisbane burns and I bet it will be fucking brilliant.

The day I arrived I went out for lunch and it ended up as a 12 hour bonanza of beer and chilli.
Lots of chat - catch up - business and we even saw a really good band from Cairns but I am buggered if I can remember their name. Cabaret or Blue something. Singer was Latvian I do remember that but after 10 hours and 10 pints of something in a green bottle you tend to forget.

I drink to forget what I have already forgotten which is shit 'cos I remember then. In vino veritas means that you end up embarrassed and hungover which is bad when trying to entice new artists to work with you.

So, there you have it. A day at the races - the race to extinction as it turns out - is neatly combined with a day at the pub.

Drink my friends drink! For tomorrow we die - but before that we have to eat worms again.