When The Buses Don’t Run On Time

Aside from 7 months in the wilds of Belconnen (ie a township of Canberra) in 1999, I have lived my entire life within a maximum ten minute walk from the 406 bus route, which runs between Footscray Station and Keilor East (side note – I have this propensity to call it East Keilor).

Before moving to Avondale Heights in early 2003, my public transport options were much richer, and indeed during my sojourn in Maribyrnong, I mostly relied on the tram which ran to within 3 minutes walk from my flat.

But in the intervening 22 1/2 years, I have mostly relied on the 406 bus, or its feeder route, the 407, which meanders from Highpoint West to Milleara Shopping Centre past my street.

In that time, I have become very familiar with many of the bus drivers and know them by name. We greet each other and they frequently ask after my elderly mother, who relies on the 406 to take her from her home to Highpoint West regularly.

Having these familiar faces on the bus route is something that I have long taken for granted. They do change over time, and there are very few who are left from when I moved here so long ago, of course, but that is normal in any business.

That all changed drastically in one fell swoop in early July. The depot handling the 406 and related lines switched from the Sunshine depot to the Werribee depot.

So now there is a legion of unfamiliar faces driving the buses around here.

Being new to those routes means that the bus timetables are a rough guidance only, even early in the day, which is quite frustrating.

But more to the point, I miss those familiar faces of the drivers I used to chat with.

Treasury Wine Estate’s Share Price Dives, Again!

Let’s face it, I have never been good at timing the share market. When I buy is usually a good time to sell, and vice versa.

Yesterday I seem to have inadvertently made an accidentally smart choice where I sold 900 of my 1000 Treasury Wine Estate shares at $7.78. Today, TWE shares dropped as low as $7.39 at one point, and currently are at $7.57.

The reason for the sale of most of my shares is that I do not really see them as having great long term growth prospects, and think that most of my capital is better invested elsewhere.

I did keep 100 shares for the same reason I invested in TWE in the first place – because I buy a lot of the product and I want to attend the well catered AGM in October. I just no longer think that owning more than a marketable parcel in this company is worth my while.

I partially offset my capital loss by selling my Wesfarmers shares which have done well since December when I bought them. I then put the proceeds of these sales, along with yesterday’s Rural Funds Group dividend, into 10,000 more shares in WAM Capital. The dividend yield on this listed investment company is around 9%, although it does not show much dividend nor capital growth.

My reasoning is getting large dividend payments from rather boring companies that go nowhere is better than getting small dividend payments from fun companies which are not doing so well.

Footscray Shopping Centre Goes Retro – In A Bad Way

According to one of the historical plaques along Barkly Street, in the 1950s the Footscray Shopping Centre was the second largest shopping district after the Melbourne CBD.

As a child in the 1970s, the Nicholson Street Mall (a new experiment then) was a vibrant place. There was Forges of Footscray on the north side, and the Coles variety store on the south side. An arcade on the south end led to the Target store which otherwise fronted the southern part of Albert Street.

Where the ANZ Bank now sits, there was a Woolworths variety store – precursor to Big W.

All of that went south in the mid 1980s, mostly with the consolidation of the big retailers, opening of Footscray Plaza further to the west of the main shopping district, and the doubling in size of Highpoint West in Maribyrnong, which had opened initially in 1975.

Suddenly, overnight, there were a lot of vacant retail spaces in Footscray, as the major chains deserted for Highpoint.

Drug dealers moved in, and a visible heroin problem manifested itself – syringes littering the streets and people clearly affected by drugs everywhere.

Now, about forty years after all that occurred, Footscray has not been successful in reinventing itself. There are, mostly in Barkly Street, a large number of trendy bars, and there are many Ethiopian restaurants (one of my favourite foods), but there are a lot of issues. This is despite my high hopes a decade ago, when the bars and Ethiopian restaurants really took off.

Yesterday afternoon, I decided to stop in Footscray around 2.30pm to grab a kebab in Nicholson Street (I was on my way to the Rugby Test at the MCG) and I noticed that there were more than ten people sleeping or seated in doorways on the southern end of what is left of the Mall (the Council reopened the part of Nicholson Street between Irving and Paisley to traffic 30 years ago).

This is more than I have seen there before – ever. This is in the part of Nicholson Street where, through the 1970s and early 1980s, the Footscray Lions Club would have a raffle wheel set up for fundraising every Saturday morning and you could win some silly prizes (my father won several sets of cutlery over the years which my mother has still not unpacked).

I don’t feel unsafe there – in broad daylight. But it does seem to me that this is a social problem which is worsening in the area, and that any businesses trying to operate in Nicholson Street run a huge risk of being threatened with violence or having their customers scared off. This is not me being judgemental about people with drug problems (I try very hard not to use words like ‘junkie’) – it is being mindful that someone with problems bashed a local resident to death one Sunday morning in the Mall recently, and that a cafe in Buckley Street closed after the owner was assaulted in his own shop a couple of months back.

It does not help that there are so many vacant shops either – and the number seems to be increasing.

I would like to see Nicholson Street become an al fresco dining location, similar to the Eaton Mall. There are currently three businesses there which seem to have the potential to do that. But not if their potential clientele are being scared off.

Can Lonsdale Street Still Be Considered The Greek Precinct Of Melbourne?

Not discounting time spent in Canberra or interstate, I worked for almost twenty seven years at the eastern end of Lonsdale Street, about two city blocks away from what we call the Greek Precinct of Melbourne.

For those not aware, it is mostly the southern stretch of Lonsdale Street between Swanston and Russell, opposite QV. There is a Greek community HQ diagonally opposite on the north east corner of Russell and Lonsdale, and there is a Greek travel agency upstairs in an adjacent laneway. Apparently, back in the 1970s, the Greek Precinct extended around the corner into both Russell and Swanston, as far as Little Bourke.

I don’t really remember that far back – the city was, until I started working there, just a place for school holiday excursions to the Cinemas (we did not have suburban multiplexes then) or for some specified purpose. I was not really familiar with much then except where the major cinemas were vaguely located (all gone!) and where to find the bus stops to get home to Footscray.

My intimate knowledge of what we now call the Hoddle Grid did not really start til I started working in an office in early 1991, and even then it was several years til I really got to know much else of town – including not really getting to know Chinatown in those early days.

From 1996 onward, when I started working in Lonsdale Street, I was a regular in the Greek precinct, where there were at least half a dozen restaurants to choose between, ranging from ones where you could settle in with a bottle or two of red for a very happy meal, right down to where you could grab a quick souvlaki after a Friday night at the pub.

Some very happy memories of dinners at Stalactites in the mid 1990s with a couple of friends, til I discovered that the eggplant dip at Tsindos was way better (I have a thing for eggplant dip).

And I still chuckle as I remember a boozy work Christmas lunch in December 2002 at Antipodes (a sadly short lived but very pleasant Greek restaurant), when one rather Karen-like colleague drank past her tolerance levels and had to be taxied home by another colleague who was going in that direction. Apparently there was a huge mess in the Ladies’ bathroom.

For a brief while circa 2000, there even was a Greek restaurant on the north side, in the QV development, not long after it opened.

But, as I mournfully observed in this blog last November, International Cakes had closed, leaving two restaurants bookending what was left of the precinct. Bit by bit, particularly over the past 15 years or so, each of the restaurants had closed, replaced by either upmarket bars or Asian cuisine.

Yesterday, I was en route to the Exford Hotel in Russell Street to meet a friend (we were going to go to the Wallabies Vs British Lions Rugby Union Test at the MCG) when I happened to notice that Tsindos was closed.

So I googled it and saw a notice that they had gone into administration in April and have permanently closed down, having been a fixture of the Greek Precinct since 1973.

This makes me quite sad. Tsindos is a place which held many happy memories for me, since I became a regular there in late 1999, quite aside from the amazing eggplant dip.

And its closure has other significance. The Greek presence in that part of Lonsdale Street is now down to a souvenir shop and Stalactites, which has also been there since the 1970s.

Can two businesses constitute a precinct anymore?

I call it with great reluctance – the Lonsdale Street Greek Precinct is now dead, having slowly died over the past decade and a half.

The only positive is that we still have the Eaton Mall in Oakleigh, where I regularly meet some former colleagues for dinner, but which is quite a long hike from my pocket of the Western Suburbs. That is a thriving al fresco dining atmosphere, with at least eight separate businesses extending down the street, some occupying shop fronts on both sides of the street.

But regardless of the Eaton Mall’s existence, it is sad that something which has been such a great part of central Melbourne’s cultural and cuisine offerings for such a long time is now gone.

Bilton School, Rugby – An Infestation Of Treasonous Karens

One of my quirks is that I sometimes self-identify as British, despite my ethnic origins being Italian and having never actually visited the UK.

The basis for this is that until late 1985 when the Australian Citizenship Act was amended, all Australian Citizens were automatically considered British Subjects.

As I never consented to give up that status, I insist on calling myself British.

Hence, as a proud Briton, I got extremely angry when the news broke this week that a 12 year old student, wearing a Ginger Spice inspired Union Jack dress, was prevented from participating in her school’s diversity day.

Here are some of the links:

https://www.warwickshireworld.com/news/people/bilton-school-offers-further-apology-to-the-wider-rugby-community-following-union-flag-dress-controversy-5229212

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7vrgdpllyyo

I am not the only one being angry about this matter – although I suspect the algorithm on Facebook is acting like an echo chamber to amplify my feed.

There is a campaign on social media demanding the sacking of Jayne Delves, the headmistress of this school.

Online images of her suggest that she bears a resemblance to your garden variety Karen. I say that she is much worse than any garden variety Karen, and that she has engaged in anti-patriotic conduct which borders on treason, and that this should be tested with a trial in an English court.

I also suggest, and only half tongue in cheek, that a medieval punishment for treason, which some might call highly barbaric, might be in order in this situation if she is found guilty.

Alternatively, perhaps the Westminster Parliament, font of all global sovereignty (yes I am rather jingoistic), might pass a Bill of Attainder and punish her accordingly.

The Slow Death Of The News Agency

I regularly take the bus route that runs past my street to Highpoint West, so I know a lot of the other frequent bus passengers.

One is an elderly chap who is always friendly and chatty, and who has lived in Avondale Heights his whole life (ie since the early 1950s). He knows a lot of local history that I find interesting – such as when there was just one bus running between Keilor East and Footscray over the wonky old bridge, and that the bus driver would be sipping from a tall beer bottle on the job.

He also said that the only shop in Military Road was the one which is now a news agency, but which at the time was the General Store.

When I moved into this area in March 2003, there were still some hints that the news agency used to be something more – there was a table of books for sale for $2 each. Those were all HSC/VCE English texts, presumably left over from when the shop used to stock text books for the local high school. I picked up some bargains – The Great Gatsby, various Shakespeare plays, and a number of the sort of books which are more obscure but beloved of the cabal of high school English teachers.

That news agency has changed since then. It mostly now stocks a few magazines, hardly any newspapers, some stationary, and a lot of giftware. Most of the business now consists of selling lottery tickets. [They don’t even act as a dry cleaning agency anymore, which is a damned nuisance as I now need to haul my jackets to Ascot Vale.]

That former news agency is not the only one transforming. Earlier this week, I wandered into the news agency at Highpoint West, looking to buy the latest Phantom comic (the 2000th edition by Frew publications actually), and saw that workmen were busy out the back. The shop was being reduced in size.

This is not the first time that shop has been reduced in size – during the COVID it moved from another nearby location in the shopping centre where it was significantly bigger.

Which I suppose is unsurprising. We do not read physical newspapers as much anymore (if I am going to lunch at the Savage Club, I will browse all four major papers in the Social Room whilst waiting for my guests to show up but otherwise I rarely read the paper anymore). Nor do print magazines do particularly well anymore.

Most of the business news agencies now do seems to be lottery tickets. That is even more pronounced at the Milleara Shopping Centre, where the lottery agency sells a few newspapers, but there is a giant queue of ticket buyers just before each big lottery jackpot.

I guess that is just the way things are going. Just like the suburban milk bar has either died out completely or morphed into something which relies on tobacco sales to keep its doors open.

But I don’t have to like it.

What To Do About Nuisance Calls

A couple of months ago, I decided to record my mobile number on the DO NOT CALL register through the ACMA website. This is not the first time I had recorded my number on this service, but as it was several years (sometime before COVID I think), I felt that it was probably wise to try and make sure that my phone number was currently recorded.

After all, I have been getting lots of rather annoying calls from marketers for all sorts of matters.

Like, for example, the Solar Panel business whom rang me as a cold call last October and who then did a very inadequate job of follow up on getting my meter reconfigured (I finally got it sorted out 5 months after they installed the panels).

Or before that, early last year when I got repeated cold calls day after day from a business which was offering to clean my heater. They did not understand (or listen properly) when I explained that I then had a space heater rather than a ducted heater and sent someone who did not know how to clean space heaters.

Moral of the story is that answering cold calls and actually agreeing to become a customer of those businesses something you are going to regret.

But those calls are just by the by.

Recently, I have started getting cold calls which then have a recorded voice say’ goodbye’ before hanging up, or other cold calls who hang up without hanging up.

Very annoying.

So… being both a grumpy late middle aged man and the retired middle ranking bureaucrat that I am, I have decided to take steps about this using the skills I acquired from 33 years of employment in the Federal Government.

First step is to start making records. I started an excel spreadsheet a week and a half ago, on which I am recording dates, times, phone numbers, and details of the calls. So far, I already have five calls recorded in a ten day period.

The next step, once I have enough data, is to lodge a complaint with the appropriate section in the ACMA.

I am not planning to leave it at that. I will be publishing those phone numbers on this blog once I get enough data to make it worth the effort. As well as that, I will be updating progress on whether ACMA take action and what sort of sanctions might occur – assuming that Federal Privacy Laws (which were amended to become rather obtuse in 2012) allow the ACMA to provide such updates.

Forgetting Tom Clancy

You see lots of crazy stuff on social media. My Facebook feed (and I am a relative newcomer to FB) alternates between regaling me with AI generated stories of family conflict which approach Greek tragedy in their proportions (who would have thought spending one kid’s college fund on another or wearing white to your stepsister’s wedding was such a common cause of drama?!?) and some very very politically incorrect memes and videos (the nicest one is an AI generated Bigfoot working as a barrista who throws some woke hipster through a window for using they/their as her pronouns).

I was on Google+ for six years, til it closed down in early 2019, precipitating my creation of this blog. Whilst, probably due to the lack of deep fake AI video and AI generated drama stories, it was not as puerile as what I waste my time doom scrolling on Facebook, some of the real authentic content generated by my fellow ‘Plussers’ was pretty bizarre.

One fellow who sticks out was on a mission, according to his G+ profile, to ‘return America to God’. He once asked people on our G+ community (I think I was on an American Conservative community) what sort of Bible was acceptable to read. You see, a preacher in the Deep South (whence he came) had warned people over the radio that if they read anything except the King James Version, then they would go to Hell….

And we claim that Forrest Gump is a fictional character.

This fellow also reacted rather weirdly to the death of popular American techno-thriller writer Tom Clancy, he of late Cold War classics like The Hunt For Red October and The Cardinal Of The Kremlin. Tom Clancy was in his late 60s, and died of complications from a heart condition. Or so we have been told. This KJV Bible thumper did not believe this. Obviously Tom Clancy was too young and too rich from his books and movie rights to die of natural causes before reaching his 90s. Ergo he had been murdered, either by the US Government or other sinister forces, because ‘he knew too much’.

[Really, I need to rejoin MeWe, where the really crazy people post online.]

Which is as good a place as any to reflect on Tom Clancy. I first was exposed to his writings through the great thriller film of Red October starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin circa 1989, followed by Patriot Games, which starred Harrison Ford. Soon after in September 1992, I acquired a copy of Clear And Present Danger in a giveaway from a bookstore in the CBD when I bought some other book. That more or less hooked me, and by August 1994 I had devoured the rest of the Jack Ryan novels to the point where I bought Debt Of Honour in hardback.

Debt Of Honour is where Tom Clancy started to get a little silly – his protagonist Jack Ryan transforms at this end of this novel from reluctant spy to accidental US President. The next few books cover his challenges as President.

I have occasionally said that if you want to understand the way the average middle class American’s mind works, you need to read Tom Clancy. I expect that Jack Ryan serves as an avatar for Clancy’s own beliefs, which are very much American, particularly on matters like abortion and the death penalty (state’s rights on the first, and generally pro on the second).

Tom Clancy’s views also changed over the course of his literary career. In Patriot Games, which was written in the mid 1980s, one character has to talk Jack Ryan down from killing some terrorists who had just tried to murder his family. The argument is that he needs to avoid vigilante action and trust in the Rule of Law (ie state sponsored executions) to do the job for him. Similarly, in Clear And Present Danger, Jack Ryan is the opponent of illegal black operations against the Columbian cartels sponsored by rogue elements in the NSC and CIA.

Put simply, bad guys deserve to be dead, but you do it within the law, not without some sort of Due Process.

But by the time he got around to writing his sequel series, his views had changed. He started a sequel series featuring a shadow agency supported secretly by Ryan as ex-President, containing a safe full of undated presidential pardons for immunity and funded by insider trading facilitated by the actual intelligence community. This series starred Ryan’s son and nephews as assassins employed to secretly take out terrorists and other enemies of the state.

This late conversion to vigilantism, along with the over the top nature of the latter books, lost me as a fan of Tom Clancy.

I recently dug out the last of my Tom Clancy novels, the hardbacks, from the box in the wardrobe in the back room which doubles as my study, and donated them to the street library in Canning Street. After all, I am not going to read them again, and I might need the room in the wardrobe for something else.

One of them, Executive Orders, is still there after an entire month – that is the one where Communist China and India and a reunified Iran-Iraq conspire to overthrow America. Which got me wondering as to how relevant Tom Clancy, former Cold Warrior, in the post Cold War world?

[Also, why is it the only one to remain, despite being free to take? Is it something to do with the US flag on the jacket in this hyper erratic second Trumpian presidency?]

Clancy was a late comer to Cold War spy literature, and the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that he had to transition across after only three novels. Len Deighton never really bothered to keep writing after the end of the Cold War, but he had done all his best work by then. And Frederick Forsythe, for all that his best work was in the 1970s, was able to focus on other issues than the Cold War.

Both however, in keeping the scale of their writings small, rather than grandiose, were able to avoid becoming increasingly preposterous the way that Clancy did. [Note that I don’t mention John LeCarre – I plan to read his Smiley novels now in retirement.]

I also note that only four of the novels got to film adaption – and Sum Of All Fears had to wait years after publication and then had a delayed release due to 9/11. I think that even Hollywood could not suspend disbelief in relation to what Clancy wrote in his later novels.

And thus I farewell Tom Clancy and his novels from my life, and hope that his posthumous ghost writers (I hope not literally) stop producing more utter tosh to clutter shelves in my local bookstore.

On Celebrating Bloomsday In Style

I suppose my first exposure to the writings of James Joyce was similar to that of most other people of my generation, through the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back To School.

In it, the hot English professor played by Annette Kellerman walks into the lecture theatre on the first day and starts reciting from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses:

…and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

During it, Rodney Dangerfield starts to get rather excited, and repeats yes as he fantasises himself and the professor together.

Since then, I have actually read most of James Joyce’s writings, particularly Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Remarkably perhaps, I completed this feat by my mid 20s.

All of the action in Ulysses takes place on 16 June 1904, and over the years, devotees of the writings of Joyce have taken to observing that day as Bloomsday, a secular Irish festival (as opposed to St Patrick’s Day, which is a religious Irish festival).

In any event, it being an Irish celebration, it is pretty much an excuse to drink, or so I have been led to believe.

Yesterday was Bloomsday, and this time, for the first time in my life, I actually remembered to celebrate it, something I have been intending to do for several years.

As I am a recently elected member of the Savage Club, I try to attend convivial lunches there. Yesterday, the literati of the Club, who normally discuss poetry or a particular novel together, held their annual Bloomsday lunch, something which they have been holding for over a decade.

And so, instead of showing up at some random Irish pub, I booked myself a seat at the lunch and settled in to enjoy myself.

And it was done in style. Over lunch, with generous refills of the wine glasses (I did start with a Guinness in honour of it being an Irish event), we listened to recitals of passages from Joyce, and to renditions of some of his favourite songs – including Cole Porter’s I Love Paris.

I did ask the chap seated next to me about whether Bloomsday is actually celebrated in Irish pubs the same way St Patrick’s Day is, and he said that they probably do, but that 99% of the people celebrating it would not have read any Joyce, whereas 99% of the people at our luncheon would have read a lot of his work.

I am not planning to discover whether Bloomsday is observed in Irish pubs next year. Instead, I will return to the Savage Club for their next celebration of James Joyce. Much more in keeping with both my interest in literature and with the literary origins of the Savage Club.

Last Train From Mariupol

I have now listened to Flying With Angels, the current and newly released Suzanne Vega several times. That is the benefit of deciding to rediscover the use of a CD player after several years and to start playing the albums of my favourite singers again in full.

There is a song which is quite thought provoking on it, Last Train From Mariupol, which directly addresses Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine in 2022, and which was written shortly afterwards.

As this is a serious issue, I will share the lyrics here:

[Verse 1]
There’s a last train from Mariupol
Mariupol, oh, Mariupol
Last train from Mariupol
See how the platform is heaving

[Verse 2]
Who’s on the train from Mariupol?
Mariupol, Mariupol
Who’s on the train from Mariupol?
All of humanity fleeing

[Verse 3]
I heard God himself was on the last train
Mariupol, Mariupol
God himself was on the last train
Frightened by all he was seeing

[Verse 4]
There’s a last train from Mariupol
Mariupol, Mariupol
Last train from Mariupol
All of humanity grieving