From the archives

I have been trawling through my old emails lately (from the pre-blogging days) and have come across some rippers.

I am going to publish some of them from time to time. Just for old times sake.

From March 2004:

Julia, the new squeeze, like many chicks, is a vego. She doesn’t frown on me eating meat, which is a good thing, since I would have to dump her if she did. The only saving grace is that she is a good cook when it comes to cooking veggie food. I do not live on a diet of lentils and soy lumps when I am at her place.

On Thursday night, she had a few people over for dinner and whipped up a three course feast. It was missing the pork roast with crackling, but I wasn’t complaining.

At 6am on Friday, I was up and heading for Bondi for a swim. I have a little routine at Bondi, which includes parking in a side street at the northern end of the beach (because it has no parking meters) and then walking past a newsagent that opens at 6am to purchase the Financial Review. Thus armed, I walk down to the beach with flippers and goggles and bash some waves for a while. I then retire to a café at the northern end of the beach and sit down to breakfast and a coffee with the paper. I can be in the car and heading into work at 7.30am before the traffic starts to build up. All in all, a good start to the working day.

Except for Friday morning. I am walking down the hill when a little snapping turtle starts to make its presence felt in the colon. I reckon I can fit in 45 minutes of body surfing and breakfast before I need to do anything about it.

How wrong I was. About 10 metres further down the hill, the snapping turtle suddenly gets a lot larger and a lot more insistent about wanting to go for a swim in the porcelain swimming pool. When it started knocking at the back door, it was not the polite “tap tap tap” that you get when the Mormons turn up at your door. It was more the pounding on the door that your mother makes when you are 16 years old and she knows that you have a girl in your room and you are up to no good. I was in serious trouble. I could see the red brick dunny block at the northern end of the beach next to the surf club – it was less than 100 yards away – but I was starting to think that it was beyond my reach. The sun was only just peeking over the horizon, so it wasn’t very light, and I was walking past some bushes on the side of the footpath, and I gave very serious consideration to just dumping there and then Damien style.

After all, I had a newspaper, and I could have just ripped out the latest stock market pricing section and used that.

Thankfully, I made the dunny block with a few seconds to spare. The northern end dunny block is possibly the most horrible toilet east of India. It has half height doors to stop people shooting up in the stalls, and there is never any soap, and you don’t want to look at what is lurking on the floor too closely. The only way you would ever get Dave in there is if you encased him in one of those full body plastic suits that scientists use for dissecting the Ebola virus.

Thankfully, I am not that squeamish. I could have squatted in the bushes and waved nonchalantly at a bus load of Japanese tourists as they cruised by with cameras clicking and flashed flashing.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was sure that the snapping turtle was about the size of a Bilson Bomb. It certainly felt like it was as big as several 440gm cans of baked beans laid end to end. I was pretty keen on inspecting the damage, but just as I stood up, the lights switched off automatically and left me in the gentle light of dawn filtering in through the breeze blocks. I could barely see the bowl, let alone what was lurking inside.

My options were to flush the evidence away, or to leave it there and see if the Wentworth Courier had a story the following week about “Bondi cleaners discover new Guiness World Record blind mullet”.

That aside, there are obvious perils to not eating meat. For years, I have listened to veggies prattle on about how being a veggie makes you regular and that meat is really bad for you – how it sits in your guts and ferments and doesn’t come out for weeks or even months.

Good. That’s the way I like it. I am going on a pure steak diet. I like my snapping turtles to be kept on a very tight leash.