This young artist perched himself high up on the plinth of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Below him, tourists were climbing all over the structure, taking photos in front of the lions, but this guy had found his spot and was happy in his own little world.

The Sunday markets in Brick Lane are known for the wide range of weird and wonderful merchandise. And weird and wonderful people. This lady had taken some time out to watch a performance by The Sonic Manipulator. Weird. Wonderful.

Brick Lane has lots of stalls selling bikes, bike parts and bike repairs. They range from one guy I saw who walked up, laid a couple of wheels on the ground and waited for a buyer, to more established ‘mobile bike shops’. The London Underground. Home to some of the longest, steepest escalators I’ve ever come across. And finally, Aldgate East Tube Station.

When we moved to Brisbane in 2002, we needed to buy a house somewhat quickly. It’s hard to find a rental place when you have two large, hairy dogs. I spent a week here looking around, and then Kylie came up and found this place. I made no secret of the fact that I wasn’t overly keen, but we bought it, and in my mind it was only ever a temporary home – until we found, or could afford, something better.

I threw a spanner into the works of that plan when I decided to go back to uni a couple of years later and then worked as a lowly paid teacher for a few years. The temporary home became a little more permanent than I had hoped.

Despite that, the attachment was never there. I’ve never really liked the suburb, never really got to know the neighbours, never really felt like I’d want to stay here for a long time.

So, as we lock the door behind us tomorrow, I’m not expecting that there will be much in the way of emotion. If anything, it will be a relief to finally be moving on.

Although the site was shut down, the Google Group was left open. Every couple of months someone would pop up and post “are you bringing the site back?”. It started to get a little like Bart and Lisa’s ‘will you take us to Splash Mountain? will you take us to Splash Mountain?”. Brandon’s reply was always along the lines of “it’s not really a priority for me now”, so it was a surprise when he sent a message back in April saying that he was thinking of bringing the site back. I guess nagging really does work.

The response was overwhelmingly “YES”, and after a couple of months work the site relaunched this week with a theme of ‘Hooray!‘.

For many reasons, this is an official Good Thing^(TM). Although there are eleventy-thousand different photo challenge websites around, none of them really challenge me to be creative like WeeklyShot did. Others even have a similar weekly theme format, but they’re always more about finding an existing shot in your portfolio that suits the theme. WeeklyShot, on the other hand, encourages you to shoot something specifically for the theme. And it’s damned fun.

I was giggling like a schoolkid the day I went to Bunnings to get the sandpaper to create the following shot for the Pain In The Ass theme.

And no self-respecting 32-year-old man should have as much fun playing with a Barbie Doll as I did when making this, which was shot for the Toys theme. Even if it was a little awkward buying the doll in Target!

Since the site shut down, I’ve really felt the level of creativity in my photography has suffered. I’m looking forward to getting it back.

And now, you can too. I have one membership invite to give away. If you’d like to join, let me know your email address and the invite’s yours.

After a hasty clean, Kylie and I packed Jonah into the car and went for a drive. After what seemed like an eternity, the first call came through. “They want to know whether you have ADSL2″. A promising sign. A few phone calls later and we had an offer, conditional on a couple of things. First – the deck, mentioned in Buying and Selling. They also wanted confirmation that the other major renovation – raising the house and building in underneath – had also been approved.

Another few frantic days of checking things with Council and we had a list of what had been approved. There was something in 1967 called “Dwelling Addition”, but Council don’t keep detailed records for that long, so we didn’t know whether that was the correct one. Back to the buyer with an offer of “it could be it, but we can’t be sure. We’re not going to go through the whole certification process for something that may already have been approved, so make us an offer”. At this point we just wanted the whole sorry mess behind us. The offer they came back with was more than we were expecting, and enough to afford the house we want, so we were happy. But it still depended on the deck being approved. More uncertainty.

Monday night and Tuesday morning were probably the most stressful 18 hours of my life. Not knowing anything much about building, some of the notes on the plans were a little scary. But the inspector turned up around lunchtime and finally, thankfully, approved it.

So, all going to plan. The sale will go ahead, and we’ll be homeless on July 13. We’re hoping to be able to push the purchase of the new house through pretty quickly, but it looks like we’ll be living with Kylie’s parents in Ipswich for a week, or two, or three. I wonder if I can arrange any extended work trips during July.

While they lived next door the kids fell in love with Jonah, our Golden Retriever, so yesterday morning Kylie and I took him over for a visit. We spent an hour or so down at the local park with Ibrahim and the kids, and when we got back, Leidia insisted we stay for lunch. She thought she’d give us a treat with some Sudanese food – kissra with molokhia.

Kissra is made from rye flour and wheat flour and is like a soft, slightly rubbery (but not in a bad way) crepe. It was placed in the bottom of a bowl with the molokhia spooned over it. How to describe molokhia? Simply describing the ingredients – chopped molokhia (or spinach) leaves, garlic and other spices – doesn’t do it justice. Think of the green ectoplasm dripping off the draws of the library catalogue in Ghostbusters, and you might be close.

Molokhia - photo from Munaqaba Modesty

I tried to eat it. I really did. But with each tiny bite I just couldn’t suppress the gag reflex. As much as I didn’t want to be rude, and despite the evil eye that Kylie was shooting my way, I made the call that pushing it away would be far less offensive than throwing up.

The watermelon was nice, though.

Writing The Great Cricket Swindle has sent me on a path of nostalgia, thinking about other childhood hijinks. Today’s going to be all about Lionel and his farm.

Lionel was an eccentric old farmer, who’d appear at the local school fete to give tractor rides on the oval. Everyone knew who Lionel was, but outside of those fete days, you never really saw or heard much of him.  

For a while when I was around 8 or 9, I spent quite a bit of time hanging out with the Luskin Way kids, particularly Jon Tompson. Jon’s house, on the northern side of Luskin Way, backed up against Lionel’s farm. We’d quite often jump the fence and go and run around in the mud. We’d stand at the edge of the pig pen, taunting Doris* until Lionel came out and yelled at us. And of course, Lionel would put us to work – feeding animals, spraying nisects - all while we were thinking we were just goofing off on the farm.

Some mornings, if I’d slept over at Jon’s, we’d jump the fence and go and make ourselves at home for breakfast with Lionel. One day Jon dared me to run in through Lionel’s front door and out the back, grabbing a slice of toast on my way through. After that, we didn’t go to Lionel’s much. He probably had some words to Jon’s mum.

I’ve just been looking at Google Earth to get my bearings and make sure I had the street name right. Sadly, Lionel’s farm is now just another block of houses. I really shouldn’t be surprised. Even at the time, the cynic in me noticed how the newly constructed part of what is now Bimbadeen Close came to an abrupt end at Lionel’s fence. As though the developers were just waiting for him to drop off the perch.

View Lionel’s Farm in a larger map

But back to the point of the post. Let’s look back at the facts:

• Eccentric, reclusive old guy
• Lives alone on a suburban farm
• Allows kids to come over and play

If there was someone like this in your suburb now, would you let your kids go near him? Or would that be the street you wouldn’t let them walk down? If we ever have kids, I want them to be free range kids. I want them to be able to ride their bikes around the neighbourhood, to walk themselves home from school and go to the park on their own. I want them to leave the house in the morning and spend a day having adventures, only reappearing when the sun’s going down.

It makes me sad to admit that letting them hang out with somebody like Lionel is probably where I’d draw the line. But I’m glad that my parents, and those of my friends, didn’t.

*The pig’s name probably wasn’t Doris. Blame A Country Practice for hardwiring the association Pig = Doris into my head.

Television

• I was on Romper Room when I was 4. One of two Heath’s on the same show. What are the odds?
• During the mid-90s, I was occasionally credited as ‘statistician’ on Channel 10′s coverage of Newcastle Falcons’ basketball games. I was basically just the guy who ran the stats out to the OB van. (That’s ‘Outside Broadcast’ for you non-media types)

Newspaper

• I had a photo published in the Courier-Mail’s ‘Queensland in Pictures’ section a couple of years ago

Magazine

• I once wrote an article on the Two-thousand-and-something Mountain Bike World Championships for Australian Mountain Bike magazine
• I had a photo published in the Walkleys magazine in 2008

Film

• In 1993 I was being shown around a sound studio in Sydney. At the time, they were doing the sound editing for the Kevin Costner produced stinker Rapa Nui. I helped carry some film canisters from the back of some guy’s car. Surely that counts?

And now, I can add radio to the list. I helped out tonight on the ZZZ radio show Televised Revolution. Two of the three regular hosts were unavailable, so Dan Beaston and I filled in. It’s probably best summed up by this tweet from @dylanjoel4:

@TV_Rev I think Simon and Dennis chose these fill-ins to ensure that they would still have positions upon their return. They are very bad.

Maybe it’s time I got myself an agent. Wonder if Max Markson’s busy.

No nine year old is going to sit still for 3 hours and watch a game of under-12′s cricket, so me, my other brother Ben and some of the other siblings had our own match up against the toilet block wall. We were right into it, especially when bowling – rubbing the ball on our pants to get that red stain, just like Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson did.

On the way home from the game, mum and dad dropped me off at my friend Richard Hudson’s house. I’m not sure why, and to this day I don’t know who it was, but Richard had another friend there. It may have been someone from his baseball team. Let’s call him Babe Ruth. Some might say not much has changed, but at the time, I wasn’t particularly comfortable around new people. Combine that with the natural conclusion that Babe was muscling in on my friendship with Richard and you might be able to understand the reason for what happened next.

Richard noticed the red stain on the front of my shorts. He looked quizzically and asked “are you playing cricket this year?”. There was no way I was going to say “no, we were just playing on the sidelines and rubbing the ball on our shorts”. That would just look silly and childish, and knock me down a peg against the more athletic, genuine sports player Babe Ruth. So of course, I answered “yes”.

“Who for”, he asked.

“Redhead. Under-9′s”

“Who’s your coach?”

“One of the kids’ dad, Mr Thirkettle.” (This was a brilliant piece of on-the-feet thinking – Thirkettle was the surname of a kid in Luke’s soccer team.)

“Who’s the captain?”

“Me.” <backpedal> “Well, we take it in turns, it was me this week.”

“I should come and watch you play one week.”

“No, Mr Thirkettle doesn’t really like anyone other than family coming along. It’s too distracting.”

I’d gotten away with it. But what I didn’t think about was that a cricket season extends over a couple of months. This lie would have to last.

Around the same time, I’d started taking piano lessons every Tuesday afternoon. This meant that I could no longer come over and play after school on Tuesdays.  Cricket’s way less gay than playing piano, so as far as anyone in my class knew, I had cricket training on Tuesdays.

Just like the Brady kids’ house of cards, this whole sham came tumbling down a few weeks later. Unlike the events that fateful day at 4222 Clinton Way, it wasn’t our lovable, scruffy dog Tiger who brought it all crashing down. It was my younger brother Ben. Adam Hitchcock came riding past while Ben and I were in the front yard one Tuesday afternoon. He asked if I wanted to come for a ride, and just as I was about to say “Can’t, got cricket training”, Ben piped up with “nah, he’s got piano practice”.

I took Hitchy aside and spilled the beans, asking him to keep it quiet. But the cat was well and truly out of the bag. By recess time the next day, everyone knew about the budding pianist-slash-liar in their class.

Thinking back, there were surprisingly few repercussions. I wasn’t teased for playing piano (anymore than I was for my glasses and my duck-like running style), and the whole cricket sham barely got a mention. Within 9  months, I was using my musical talents to accompany the school choir on xylophone, proud (or at least less ashamed) of my undeniable geekiness.

Two years later and I was at a new school. I even joined the senior boys cricket team.

Of course, I’ve been published before – newspaper, magazine and all over the web, but it’s nice to see one of my photos in a book. Especially a book about advanced photographic techniques.

This is another highlight in what has been a pretty cool couple of months photography-wise. Some paid work with more on the way, shooting a gig in London, and now this. Consider me well chuffed.

So it was unusual for me to be so excited about the pending release of Red Dead Redemption when I saw some of the preview videos earlier in the year. But excited I was, and I went out and laid down some cash at EB Games a couple of days after it was released. A week or two later and I’ve gotta say, I’m already a little bored with it.

Sure, it looks fantastic. Yeah, the story is engaging. For a while. After that, it just seems to have become so much more of the same. You get on your horse, spend a couple of minutes riding to a point on the map, shoot or lasso some bad guys. Rinse and repeat.

Maybe it’s that I’m not a regular gamer. Maybe I need to give it more time. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. Maybe I just need to go and meet the Irish dude at the dock and head over to Mexico. I’ll stick with it for a while and see what happens, but it hasn’t quite lived up to the hype for this very occasional gamer.