Windswept

On the 22nd of March, 2010, Perth had a freak storm, causing millions of dollars worth of damage.  My university alone bore $5 million worth of damage, between broken stained glass windows, skylights, glasshouses and flood damage. Ironically, the building worst hit was the architecture and fine arts library, which flooded as it is partially underground.  Not such a good architectural design, as it turns out.  On a lighter note, I’d just started working in the boarding house, and the playing fields were so thickly covered in hail that it looked like it had been snowing.

Since then, Perth has had a tendency to overreact with its storm warnings.  If the government was a cartoon character, I’d imagine it as being the lady in the kitchen who jumps on the chair with a broom and shrieks every time she sees Jerry the mouse appear in the kitchen. Tuesday was my birthday, and the day was shrouded in doom and gloom predictions about the storm to end all storms.  As usual, while it was quite a storm, it failed to live up to the hype.  But that’s an entirely different story.

Two days before that, it was a remarkably windy day, with winds clocked at 105km an hour.  I live near the coast, so when it’s windy, we definitely feel it, as there’s little between us and the ocean to ameliorate its force.  For meals, I walk across the rugby oval to the glass-fronted dining hall which looks out over the playing fields.  It’s a beautiful prospect, and many a pleasant dinner has passed there chatting with the other staff and watching the sunset in winter, and the water-drop helicopters circle in the summer as they try to contain the bushfires.

At lunch, the wind had picked up to such an extent that bits of foliage were rolling across the oval like tumbleweeds as I made my way to the dining hall.  All the doors were closed, so I deployed puppydog eyes to get someone to open the door.  Eventually, someone took pity on me and opened it, after the requisite period of everyone grinning at me through the glass had passed.  

As I stepped through the doorway, a sudden gust of wind caught the door behind me so that it quite literally scooped me up off my feet and I found myself flying into the room with the door pressed against my back.  The journey abruptly ended with the door slamming into the jamb with impressive force, leaving me to make an improved dismount.  

I turned to salute my audience and took a seat to the hooting of the assembled lunchgoers, to in turn mock the would-be doorway travelers as they were redirected to the side door.

Who’s that speed trapping under my bridge?

The Tunnel

There is a forbidden realm lurking under Perth.  It’s known by locals as the “Polly Pipe”.  For those of you who’ve never heard of it, this is an underground tunnel which passes under our CBD, allowing people to cross from the north to the south (and back again, oddly enough) without having to negotiate the clogged arteries of the heart of the city.

I live in an area known as the Golden Triangle by both the pretentious and the sardonic, albeit with different meanings. It is so named because it is a well-to-do area (I’m just a fraud living in an elite suburb where I don’t really belong thanks to living in a boarding house) which is a smallish triangle of land between the river and the sea.  In order to go anywhere outside the GT (i.e. most of Perth), one must travel via one of our two cities; Perth or Fremantle.  Whenever I wish to visit the northern suburbs, the most direct route tends to be via this underground tunnel.

It is a convenient short-cut, and so I frequently use it.  But I have ever despised the experience of passing through it for a number of reasons.   I will outline these reasons forthwith:

Firstly, the experience of driving through that dark, eerily lit industrial space with its emergency phones and warning signs spaced at regular intervals strongly reminds me of a number of disaster and action films. Key dramatic events are frequently played out in such locations, and are generally of the explosive fireball of death variety, with a low-flying helicopter crash occasionally thrown in for good measure. The one that comes to mind the most vividly when I’m driving through it is Independence Day.  Remember the scene where people are trapped in the tunnel getting blown up, and we’re all like, ‘meh, whatever, dude. Such is life,” UNTIL the dog almost gets caught in the fiery inferno, and suddenly we care about that innocent little canine and cheer when he narrowly escapes the flames? 

Secondly, you seem to get two kinds of driver in there - the Speed Demons and the Sunday Drivers. The former take full advantage of the lack of speed cameras and immediately attempt to stage an impromptu car rally, zipping in and out of lanes like the police are chasing them.  Which I think will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  My favourite moment in that tunnel was to see the flashing lights come up behind us in pursuit of a car that had just cut me off in order to zoom off at high speed - right in front of an undercover cop car.  Well done there, chaps.

The latter are maddening, especially as they often seem to travel in slowly paced packs, drifting along side by side like self-appointed speed-regulators, forcing the commuters to do ten under the 80km an hour speed limit because it’s just so scawy in the dark tunnel.

But the main reason the tunnel creeps me out is this: I’m pretty sure there’s an evil troll living in it.  No, seriously.  There’s a unpleasant vibe that hits me every time I pass through the middle of it. Since I get the same vibe around the same point no matter which direction I travel, I’ve decided he’s set up house in the middle wall of the tunnel.  I’ve even picked out the location, just so I’m prepared for when I get trapped in there when the aliens come to destroy the place.  

Oh, now that’s just being silly. As IF the aliens would bother coming here.  Everyone knows the only city worth visiting in Australia is Sydney.  Just look at every single alien invasion movie.  Go Opera House or Go Home.

I tell a lie.  The aliens DID come to Willeton... But then the council tore down their home after years of peaceful coexistence, forcing them to go elsewhere to sell real estate.

The Willeton Spaceship - cnr Karel Ave and Leach Hwy

So, anyway, the troll.  I actually kind of like the idea of a hulking great troll lurking in the shadows of the tunnel.  I’ll take trolls over tolls any day of the week.  And no matter how much bad juju I’m driving through by entering his domain, it still beats trying to negotiate the back streets of Northbridge. The council seem to be trying to make it into some real-life version of The Labyrinth, with its constantly-changing-direction one way streets, black and white zig-zaggy sculptures arching over roundabouts and a variety of people who don’t seem to have jobs wandering around in a range of looks from cyber to steam punk, goth to lolita, and a few who definitely wouldn’t have looked out of place in the goblin king’s kingdom.

Then again, maybe I'm just slightly claustrophobic, and that’s just a monitoring office occupied by a bitter and disgruntled transport worker named Joe.

The elixir of life

I am that most common of creatures; the coffee addict.

Like millions of others in the world, I am one of those morning zombies who struggles to deal with t).he world without a caffeine injection to get me operating at normal speed. While I am quite happy to drink instant in a pinch (preferably Nescafé), I favour freshly ground coffee and the french press at home and, like all addicts, I have my favourite haunts picked out for that perfect cup on the go, and I’m generally faithful to the love of my life - the cappuccino (except at uni where, for some reason, it's twice the price of a latté).

My favourite haunt in Perth is a few minutes away, conveniently located in the same complex as my chiropractor.  The small café is perhaps overly hipster in ambience, with an industrial front room with bell jars displaying red velvet cupcakes (I confess I love this feature), a back room of vintage, mis-matched furniture primarily of the seventies persuasion, and a unisex bathroom which reminds me of 90s bizarity Ally McBeal. Every time I go in there I expect to be confronted by a baby dancing to “Hooked on a Feeling”. 

The Horror.

However, the quirky decor holds a certain appeal, and pales into insignificance next to their phenomenal coffee.  I’m pretty sure that the coffee beens are hand picked by fairies, polished by Nubian princesses and gently reduced to grounds by the crystal-plated hooves of unicorns.  It’s that good.

The owners seem to be a bunch of coffee obsessives in search of the holy grail of coffee.  In the summer they offer a cold filter coffee which, rumour has it, takes a full 24 hours to filter and is one of the few coffees I’m happy to drink cold, black and unsweetened.

While we’re on the subject, coffee should Never have sugar added to it.  Ever.  Is that coffee too bitter, or are you just too weak? If it’s the former, it’s just bad coffee.  Either man up and down it with a grimace to get your fix, or Throw. It. Out.  Sugar in coffee in an Abomination.

The owners are a curious mixture of bogan and bikie in appearance, and are possessed of some of the most ocker Australian accents I’ve ever encountered (in Perth anyway). I have never been addressed as anything other than ‘love’, and their laid-back attitude means they never alter their work pace, whether the place has one customer or twenty - nothing fazes them. They refuse to buy into the whole nametag thing, so I have no idea of ANYONE’s name. I love it.

While they offer all your regular coffee options - long black, latté, cappucino, machiato, espresso... they also offer select house blends in a cold filter (in summer) and a pourover (in winter).  Though twice the price of a Normal Coffee, I am, more often than not, seduced by the strange, and tend to cave to temptation and opt for one of these 9 out of 10 visits.  When meeting a friend for coffee, this tends to be something of an antisocial choice, as the pourover tends to come out a good ten minutes after a Normal Coffee, by which point the other person has pretty much finished with their coffee. Yet still I am seduced by the pretentious, but oh-so-living-up-to-its-pretension, cup of fresh-brewed black coffee.

When it finally arrives, the pourover (I usually opt for the V60) comes cradled gently in the arms of one of the staff, served in a large stemless wineglass on a black saucer.  It’s generally accompanied by a verbal chemical analysis worthy of a wine afficionado; “now, love, this is yer V60; it’s a blend of yer Rwandan and Costa Rican coffee beans with a hint of blackberry, gently ground by the loving hands of a Franciscan monk while riding a zebra.” Or something to that effect.

I tend to get a bit uncomfortable during this part, as it makes me very conscious of the fact that I have unwittingly joined the ranks of the hipsters by paying $7 for what is, effectively, a black coffee.  But, like a desperate crack addict looking for “one more fix”, I keep coming back because the act of drinking one of those nectar of the gods coffees is something of a religious experience for me.  

You give thanks for the wonder that is life in your way, and I’ll do it in mine.

I tend to nurse the coffee like a broke drunk, dreading the moment when the last drop is drunk and the joyful experience is over. Because then begins the internal bargaining - do I get another, or acknowledge that:

a) it’s indulgent enough to buy One of these coffees, let alone Two, and

b) I should really limit my caffeine intake to no more than five a day, and preferable less than three. (I try, honest I do.)

Hey, we all have our drugs.  Mine’s at least legal, and is only hurting me.  Unless I can’t get my fix.  Then Stuff Gets Tense.