Today is my thirtieth birthday and, it occurs to me, I’m not hoping for much out of it. I’m having dinner later with a few friends which will be nice but in truth there isn’t really much else I want out of life than what I already have. I am, after all, currently living within a stone’s throw of beautiful Bondi Beach (well, I couldn’t throw a stone that far, but someone of an acceptable level of fitness could, quite easily I reckon) which, as far as beaches go, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but still it has a lot going for it in terms of golden sand, surf, hot chicks, good food and even a spot at the north end where you can jump off the rocks and go for a little snorkel, see some nice fishies.
Ah – there you go, there is something I want for my birthday – a new snorkel. I lost mine last week in a freak snorkelling accident which left me battered, bruised and bloodied. Well, in truth the term “snorkelling accident” isn’t entirely accurate and does make me out to be a bit more hardy and intrepid than I actually am. In fact I slipped on a rock while holding a snorkel, which almost qualifies it as a snorkelling accident but not quite. I was in the process of reconnoitring a potential new snorkel site when a wave crashed into me, knocking me sideways and forcing my leg into a gap between two underwater rocks. I don’t know if you’re aware of this but when rocks and the ocean get together on a regular basis you end up with an unfeasibly large number of razor sharp creatures - shell-based lifeforms that you wouldn’t have thought could do you much harm until you have the misfortune of scraping one or another part of your body over them.
This is what happened to me when I stuck my foot in the gap. I was attacked by a number of inanimate shells and while I was preoccupied with not getting any other bits of me in a similar pickle my snorkel decided to detach itself from my mask and float away into the big blue. I was equanimous at the time – I lost a snorkel, I could have lost a leg.
The fact that, only moments before, I had ignored my friend Will when he advised me against going into the swell at that particular spot, made the whole experience much more embarrassing. As I limped home, blood dripping onto the pavement from a gash on my shin, I reflected that I still had a long way to go before I was back in the outdoor headspace. After a week back in Australia I was effectively still a pasty limey with no sense of what my body and the elements were capable of – just one step up from the idiot Englishmen who go bright red after a couple of hours in the Australian sun because they don’t bother with sun cream.
My shin ended up getting infected because I refused to stay out of the water to let it heal. In the end a nice Jewish doctor stuck me on antibiotics and told me there was a 50/50 chance I’d have to go into hospital on a drip. I freaked out and decided to postpone my trip to Western Australia on the grounds that I might need to be hospitalised at any moment and if that were to happen I wanted the comfort of familiar people and places. That’s why I’m still here on Bondi Beach, jumping in the ocean on my birthday sporting a waterproof plaster on my sleekly shaved shin, looking forward to celebrating this special day over tapas with my friends a bit later.
I’m happy - but then again, I’m not. I want a snorkel for my birthday and I will jolly well get one when I go shopping this afternoon – that’s the kind of man I am; if I want something I take it! Just like that! The problem is that what I really want for my birthday – the thing that would really make me happy as I settle down to tapas and red wine with my friends this evening – is not something I can simply take. It is something which is utterly ephemeral and thus my inability to attain it makes me feel hopeless. I want to be able to write something - anything will do, as long as it’s good. Ever since I arrived on these golden shores my creativity has withered and waned and now it seems like I can barely string a coherent sentence together, let alone one with a touch of class or an ounce of wit. My spark has gone. My mojo vanished.
I need a muse. Now, a muse does not necessarily have to be a romantic sort of inspiration, but in this case I think it needs to be because I haven’t seen any action in months. My last muse fled many months ago and I’ve been troubled ever since. Actually, she didn’t flee, I sort of chased her away, it was my fault entirely. She was keen and I was scared. It’s a familiar story, it wasn’t the first time I had screwed up a relationship with some potential and missed a chance for love and happiness because I got freaked out. I must hanker for the lonely, soulful suffering of a sad, frustrated artist or something. Either that or I’m stupid, I haven’t quite decided which.
It occurs to me that suffering is a good source of inspiration, but I’d go for a good muse over suffering any day of the week in order to get my creative juices flowing. Suffering sucks but it does tend to focus the mind in a way that shagging rarely does. In an ideal world what you need is a muse who makes you suffer, which, funnily enough, is exactly what the last one did, hence the reason she was chased off. Geez, what a vicious circle, but I don’t need that kind of muse in my life!
The creative process is very naturalistic when you think about it, a seemingly endless cycle of birth, growth and death, rebirth and regrowth as ideas come and go, wither and flourish, are abandoned to be replaced by better ones, but there never seems to be enough consistency in my creative life for me to hold onto an idea for more than a moment – or enough consistency in my personal life for me to be able to hold onto a girlfriend, it would seem.
Self-belief is a factor too, and it’s a problem I have, one that I struggle with incessantly. People are certainly complimentary enough about my writing – it’s awesome when someone writes to me and tells me how much they were touched by something I’ve written. It’s the best feeling in the world to know that you’ve made that kind of connection! Maybe, I think, just maybe I do have a talent! But if that moment of self-belief is followed up by a month of writer’s block then that spark is diminshed.
That’s why I need a reliable muse, a regular shag, a girlfriend, a serious relationship, a life partner – whatever you want to call it. I’ve realised that a man can only achieve so much on his own, it must be through the love of a good woman that he can realise his true potential… isn’t it? I could be talking absolute rubbish here – it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a relationship, as you may have gathered, so forgive me if this is claptrap - but having someone believe in you and support you through the good times and the bad, and for you to be the same thing to them – that seems to me to be what life is all about, when it comes down to it. The rest of it is just trimmings.
Travelling alone, for example - isn’t that sort of a half empty experience? I mean, I have all these thoughts and feelings about what I’m seeing and doing out here and my only outlet of expression for them is this blog! I need someone to bounce this stuff off so all you guys don’t have to put up with it! I guess that’s why the blog is so important to me despite the fact that only a handful of people read it, it’s the only way I can share my experiences with the people I love – indirectly. This is the way I have begun to think on this trip, this is the reason why I’ve decided that continuing to travel alone will not benefit me in the long run.
A snorkel and a muse is all I want for my birthday this year. I’ll have the snorkel by this afternoon, I guess I might have to wait a bit longer for the muse.
Showing posts with label Bondi Beach. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bondi Beach. Show all posts
Thursday, May 3, 2007
The Beautiful Bodies of Bondi Beach
The first thing that struck me when I arrived in Australia – after the adrenaline rush I experienced from jumping in the cool, clean ocean for the first time had subsided – was that everyone on Bondi Beach was bronzed and beautiful. This realisation opened the flood gates to massive insecurity because, looking at myself, I realised that after ten months in the UK with little exercise inbetween bouts of beer and curry consumption, I was pale and somewhat chubby, particularly in the vicinity of my belly button.
While I appreciate that I was neither blessed with classic good looks nor hit on the head as a child with an ugly stick, I feel I’ve been able to hold my own over the years in the swagger and pout department and I’ve received my fair share of sideways glances from girls, which I sincerely hope related to some degree of attraction rather than, as I sometimes fear, disbelief at my profoundly average dress sense. However, returning to Australia and immediately feeling generally hairy and unattractive was quite a shock.
Better men than me would have shrugged their shoulders and not given it a second thought and while on one level I did dismiss my paranoia, take off my shirt and parade my pale pecks, the feeling that I was generally unattractive to the average Bondi beach babe did niggle at me. The fact that seemingly every girl in Bondi is beautiful did little to assuage my fears. I came to Bondi Beach for the first time in 2004 and, after a few minutes taking in the scene on the beach front, I felt like banging my head repeatedly against a brick wall because of sheer sensory overload – this many beautiful women in bikinis – it did not compute, my system crashed.
Beach culture breeds hot bodies, it’s a simple scientific fact. In the UK our bodies are almost completely covered for eighty percent of the year and so the only real opportunity for us to feel self-conscious about them is during the brief hop out of bed to retrieve the prophylactics. Even in that awkward situation it isn’t necessary to expose yourself if you’re fortunate enough to be blessed with the necessary planning skills and the optimism to have placed your johnnies handily in reach by the side of the bed.
In Bondi during the summer, depending on the kind of swimsuit you favour, between seventy and ninety percent of your body is on display one hundred percent of the time. Therefore it is in your own interest to do the requisite amount of exercise or beer and curry abstention in order to keep yourself looking trim. I had forgotten this small but important fact, so while the bodies of friends and strangers alike rippled, mine wobbled, and within hours of integrating this alarming new reality into my consciousness I was radically reassessing my pulling potential.
As time went on and my body browned but did not buff up – I was drinking a lot of beer and not a small amount of curry… after all, you can’t break the habit of a lifetime. I continued to feel insecure about my shabby physique and began to rationalise it all to myself. I even began to write a disparaging little poem about what I initially perceived to be a very shallow and body-conscious culture but eventually realised was a self-protective opinion I had formed as a result of pure and simple covetousness.
I resolved to get into shape. On one level this was quite easy – Australia boasts a brilliant selection of good, healthy food - but unfortunately also one of the tastiest beers in either hemisphere in the form of Coopers Pale Ale, which I continued to consume during my weeks down under with some considerable aplomb. The only time I engaged in any premeditated exercise my efforts were met with disaster. One morning I decided I would jog the length of the beach in order to get to my favourite snorkel spot. I think I had it in my head that this would be the first day of the rest of my life and all that nonsense, that it would be a turning point and that everything that came after would be good and pure and sexy.
I loaded my bag with everything I needed for a run and a swim – snorkel and mask, towel, sun cream, water bottle – and set off down the hill. Halfway along the beach I started to struggle; my rucksack was feeling heavier by the moment, my chest was hurting, I was gasping for breath and I was presumably quite red in the face if the smirks of the beautiful people I passed were anything to go by. This is the pain barrier I thought, keep going and it will get easier! As if by magic it did start to get easier. For a split second I was amazed by the fact that my bag suddenly felt significantly lighter, then I realised that this was because it was suddenly empty. I stopped and turned and observed my stuff strewn down twenty metres of the beach getting washed away in the surf – the zip on my bag had broken and everything had fallen out.
Cursing, I dashed into the surf and endeavoured to collect my belongings one item at a time before they all got washed out to sea. When I found something I placed it a safe distance up the beach before charging back into the water to find the next item. Soon I had recovered everything except my mask and snorkel, which was the only thing to have fallen out of my bag which had any monetary or personal value attached to it. Forlornly I scoured the swell and was beginning to give up hope until I spotted a flash of blue some thirty metres off the shore. I could see a blonde person donning a mask that looked suspiciously like mine. I dived into the ocean, Mitch Buchanan style, and swam out to confront this Aussie beach bum who had the audacity to sport my mask. In fact he was very nice about the whole thing, happily handed my mask back and complimented me on it’s quality. This was just as well because there was a moment there when the guy might have had to intervene and save my life – I was out of my depth and there was a rip tide pulling me in the wrong direction.
I made it back to shore, my pride only slightly wounded, flushed and tired from the swim which, after the run down the beach and the frenetic dash to retrieve my belongings from the surf, had left me feeling thoroughly drained. I looked for my stuff but saw only a girl waving in my general direction. I approached her and saw my collection of sodden belongings covered in sand in a sorry-looking pile at her feet. She explained that while I had been struggling to get back to the shore the tide had come in to the extent that my stuff had been washed out to sea again and she had been compelled to go and collect it. I thanked her profusely but didn’t bother to stay and try to chat her up. It didn’t seem like there was much point.
The very next day I handicapped myself in a freak snorkelling accident (which I describe elsewhere in this blog) and so for much of my remaining time in Bondi I was unable to do much more than mope about, drink beer, eat pies and watch DVDs. Apparently someone up there felt that exercise was bad for me and so I bowed to their better judgment and stopped… well, it seemed like a reasonable excuse at the time but now I’m not so sure.
Despite my initial enthusiasm I didn’t get far with the poem either before apathy-induced writers block descended and I lost my creative mojo. Artistically, athletically and romantically my trip to Australia was a failure but that didn’t stop me having the most amazing time, inbetween the occasional bout of toe-curling self-doubt which came about more as a result of an unexpected culture shock induced paradigm shift than because of paranoia associated with my inferior physique.
One of the reasons I love Australia so much is because of the outdoor lifestyle I can enjoy there. This is the reason I’m giving serious thought to moving back, why it feels like it might be the right place for me to be over the next few years: I’m never happier than I am swimming in the ocean and walking in the countryside – I know this about myself now, as I get older I’m beginning to understand what it is that makes me tick and what my limitations are. Call it a cop out if you like but the lifestyle I’ve become accustomed to in England doesn’t give me much scope to motivate myself to get out and about and be active and healthy. I know I can change my lifestyle but I think that would be really hard. If I move to Australia I won’t have to change myself – the lifestyle out there will change me.
To be honest it does also have a lot to do with the weather.
While I appreciate that I was neither blessed with classic good looks nor hit on the head as a child with an ugly stick, I feel I’ve been able to hold my own over the years in the swagger and pout department and I’ve received my fair share of sideways glances from girls, which I sincerely hope related to some degree of attraction rather than, as I sometimes fear, disbelief at my profoundly average dress sense. However, returning to Australia and immediately feeling generally hairy and unattractive was quite a shock.
Better men than me would have shrugged their shoulders and not given it a second thought and while on one level I did dismiss my paranoia, take off my shirt and parade my pale pecks, the feeling that I was generally unattractive to the average Bondi beach babe did niggle at me. The fact that seemingly every girl in Bondi is beautiful did little to assuage my fears. I came to Bondi Beach for the first time in 2004 and, after a few minutes taking in the scene on the beach front, I felt like banging my head repeatedly against a brick wall because of sheer sensory overload – this many beautiful women in bikinis – it did not compute, my system crashed.
Beach culture breeds hot bodies, it’s a simple scientific fact. In the UK our bodies are almost completely covered for eighty percent of the year and so the only real opportunity for us to feel self-conscious about them is during the brief hop out of bed to retrieve the prophylactics. Even in that awkward situation it isn’t necessary to expose yourself if you’re fortunate enough to be blessed with the necessary planning skills and the optimism to have placed your johnnies handily in reach by the side of the bed.
In Bondi during the summer, depending on the kind of swimsuit you favour, between seventy and ninety percent of your body is on display one hundred percent of the time. Therefore it is in your own interest to do the requisite amount of exercise or beer and curry abstention in order to keep yourself looking trim. I had forgotten this small but important fact, so while the bodies of friends and strangers alike rippled, mine wobbled, and within hours of integrating this alarming new reality into my consciousness I was radically reassessing my pulling potential.
As time went on and my body browned but did not buff up – I was drinking a lot of beer and not a small amount of curry… after all, you can’t break the habit of a lifetime. I continued to feel insecure about my shabby physique and began to rationalise it all to myself. I even began to write a disparaging little poem about what I initially perceived to be a very shallow and body-conscious culture but eventually realised was a self-protective opinion I had formed as a result of pure and simple covetousness.
I resolved to get into shape. On one level this was quite easy – Australia boasts a brilliant selection of good, healthy food - but unfortunately also one of the tastiest beers in either hemisphere in the form of Coopers Pale Ale, which I continued to consume during my weeks down under with some considerable aplomb. The only time I engaged in any premeditated exercise my efforts were met with disaster. One morning I decided I would jog the length of the beach in order to get to my favourite snorkel spot. I think I had it in my head that this would be the first day of the rest of my life and all that nonsense, that it would be a turning point and that everything that came after would be good and pure and sexy.
I loaded my bag with everything I needed for a run and a swim – snorkel and mask, towel, sun cream, water bottle – and set off down the hill. Halfway along the beach I started to struggle; my rucksack was feeling heavier by the moment, my chest was hurting, I was gasping for breath and I was presumably quite red in the face if the smirks of the beautiful people I passed were anything to go by. This is the pain barrier I thought, keep going and it will get easier! As if by magic it did start to get easier. For a split second I was amazed by the fact that my bag suddenly felt significantly lighter, then I realised that this was because it was suddenly empty. I stopped and turned and observed my stuff strewn down twenty metres of the beach getting washed away in the surf – the zip on my bag had broken and everything had fallen out.
Cursing, I dashed into the surf and endeavoured to collect my belongings one item at a time before they all got washed out to sea. When I found something I placed it a safe distance up the beach before charging back into the water to find the next item. Soon I had recovered everything except my mask and snorkel, which was the only thing to have fallen out of my bag which had any monetary or personal value attached to it. Forlornly I scoured the swell and was beginning to give up hope until I spotted a flash of blue some thirty metres off the shore. I could see a blonde person donning a mask that looked suspiciously like mine. I dived into the ocean, Mitch Buchanan style, and swam out to confront this Aussie beach bum who had the audacity to sport my mask. In fact he was very nice about the whole thing, happily handed my mask back and complimented me on it’s quality. This was just as well because there was a moment there when the guy might have had to intervene and save my life – I was out of my depth and there was a rip tide pulling me in the wrong direction.
I made it back to shore, my pride only slightly wounded, flushed and tired from the swim which, after the run down the beach and the frenetic dash to retrieve my belongings from the surf, had left me feeling thoroughly drained. I looked for my stuff but saw only a girl waving in my general direction. I approached her and saw my collection of sodden belongings covered in sand in a sorry-looking pile at her feet. She explained that while I had been struggling to get back to the shore the tide had come in to the extent that my stuff had been washed out to sea again and she had been compelled to go and collect it. I thanked her profusely but didn’t bother to stay and try to chat her up. It didn’t seem like there was much point.
The very next day I handicapped myself in a freak snorkelling accident (which I describe elsewhere in this blog) and so for much of my remaining time in Bondi I was unable to do much more than mope about, drink beer, eat pies and watch DVDs. Apparently someone up there felt that exercise was bad for me and so I bowed to their better judgment and stopped… well, it seemed like a reasonable excuse at the time but now I’m not so sure.
Despite my initial enthusiasm I didn’t get far with the poem either before apathy-induced writers block descended and I lost my creative mojo. Artistically, athletically and romantically my trip to Australia was a failure but that didn’t stop me having the most amazing time, inbetween the occasional bout of toe-curling self-doubt which came about more as a result of an unexpected culture shock induced paradigm shift than because of paranoia associated with my inferior physique.
One of the reasons I love Australia so much is because of the outdoor lifestyle I can enjoy there. This is the reason I’m giving serious thought to moving back, why it feels like it might be the right place for me to be over the next few years: I’m never happier than I am swimming in the ocean and walking in the countryside – I know this about myself now, as I get older I’m beginning to understand what it is that makes me tick and what my limitations are. Call it a cop out if you like but the lifestyle I’ve become accustomed to in England doesn’t give me much scope to motivate myself to get out and about and be active and healthy. I know I can change my lifestyle but I think that would be really hard. If I move to Australia I won’t have to change myself – the lifestyle out there will change me.
To be honest it does also have a lot to do with the weather.
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