The Clan of the Cave Bague

It’s all done. Our sponsor was in at Centrelink today and cleared the whole lot up. From now on it’s just a matter of waiting for the bond request letter (which they hope to send out tomorrow) followed by bond lodgement and notification of DIMIA. DIMIA will then hum and haw over it for a day or two before sending out the pre-grant letter and we’re off!

It’s strange how things manage to change but nonetheless remain the same. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, as Rush said – although they said it nicer, with accents in all the right places and I’m on a PC which isn’t kind to foreign languages.

A fair percentage of my memories of the eighties are centered around Dalkeith. In 1980 / 81 I was habitually hanging around in Ralph MacCluskey’s newsagent at the west end of the High Street – it’s now a tanning salon. MacCluskey’s had a full stock of Star Wars and The Black Hole action figures, and I coveted the tiny little models of Dan Holland (fully articulated, I’ll have you know), Chewbacca and VINCENT (Vital Information Necessary CENTralised – the most contrived acronym I’ve ever encountered) like a coveting thing.

Skipping forward to 1982, it was the John Menzies store at the other end of the High Street which was the main attractor to my lack of cash. Spectrum games this time – Froggy was the first and by god was I stunned by those “arcade quality” graphics. The arcades were pretty bad in those days. Glug Glug was another one I lusted after but, being 12, £5.49 was kinda hard to come by. These days, of course, I can pop along to World of Spectrum and download to my heart’s content.

I guess that’s where it all started to go horribly wrong – or right, depending on your point of view. ‘84 onwards saw me covetting the Jethro Tull, Marillion and Iron Maiden albums in the record department. There was something wonderfully nice about buying a nice chunky 12″ vinyl album with covert art large enough to actually appreciate. I think I singlehandedly kept John Menzies afloat in those years.

1986 saw a return to Ralph MacCluskey’s, but this time for more nefarious reasons. I had decided, for some reason utterly unknown to me, that what I really needed was a PIPE. No, really! Bordering on obsessive with Fantasy stories – primarily Lord of the Rings, Dragonlance, and a fair degree of victorian romance, I’d decided that the humble pipe was the mark of a Good Guy. I still have a vivid recollection of the bemused look (followed by the rolling belly laugh) when I requested a “half ounce of best shag” from the gentleman behind the counter. The sum total of my tobacco knowledge came from Tolkein and Sherlock Holmes and, well, it didn’t occur to me that things may have moved on in the last hundred years. So there we have it gentlemen – it was HOBBITS that got me smoking, little furry-footed gits that they are.

Both MacCluskey’s and Menzies are now long gone spectres. Menzies got off lightly because it’s now a WH Smith – which at least sells similar things. But that’s the strange thing about Dalkeith. In a “Mighty Boosh” kind of way, it changes but does it REALLY change. I can still pop out of the flat and wander along the road at any time of day or night without being accosted by Burberry-capped morons clad in nylon sportswear. What members of todays YOOF you encounter are invariably polite and considerate. It’s a nice place – everything a market town should be. And I still think it’s great. Coming home to Dalkeith is still as special as visiting Dalkeith was twenty years ago.

All of which does very little, of course, to explain why I’m leaving to live in Australia. But then I never said I’d make any sense.

As a postscript – it’s strange the way things hang together. I read Lord of the Rings because I liked the Hobbit when my teacher read it to me. I listended to Marillion because I’d read that they were named after “The Silmarillion” and I liked all things Tolkein. I got into Genesis (Gabriel period, natch) because I read they sounded like Marillion (or vice versa, for the purists among you). I listened to Jethro Tull because I saw an illustration of Ian Anderson and he looked like the Jester from the cover of the Marillion Albums. Jethro Tull taught me that they weren’t going to be pigeonholed and I should stop bloody reading about music and start listening to it.

As a further postscript, despite having returned to Scotland nine months ago, I haven’t been back to Dalkeith and have no intentions of ever doing so. I loved it at the time and want it to stay as I remember it forever.

We’re also nervously watching the prices of plane tickets skyrocketing. Top tip: don’t plan flights during the Australian summertime

Gah, this is frustrating. We have a leaving party planned for Saturday. I leave my work a week on Friday. It would be nice if we actually had the visa granted by then! Really, it’s down to the last day or two now, but that day or two of processing is dependant on the Australian tax office whose timescales are…… flexible.

I’ve been in touch with our agents who assure us that our case officer has been made aware of the situation. Everything else is processed – if there was a problem they’d have let us know by now. We’re just waiting on Centrelink. So, it could be all over in the next two days or next two weeks – just have to wait and see.

Monday is the start of my last fortnight at work. Well, technically it’s my last week, but they wanted me to stay for an extra week – which is fair enough. It’s difficult to believe that it’s all likely to kick off next week – assuming our sponsor gets the documentation through from the tax office, we could well be sending off our passports at the end of the week.

It stills seems very far away – this final stage has been nerve-shredding in the extreme.

This is a kinda fighty-RPG-Lite, and it’s not at all bad. So far, my little girly warrior (Bague, natch) has done the first six quests (or thereabouts) so it’s still early days. I did start out with an outrageously large sword which took ages to swing. This was fine and well until I encountered my first really hostile beastie. Needless to say, I swapped it for a nice fast daggery type thing until (presumably) my stats are up enough to use a big chunky weapon. There’s a bewildering (at the outset) amount of stuff
to do, so I’m just sort of fumbling about at the moment. Fun though.

Trollbert has finally reached level 40 and has spent the correspondingly stupid amount of gold on a Raptor to run about on

In other news, Trollbert also popped into Ragefire Chasm to say “Hi” to Taragaman the Hungerer. Taragaman wasn’t impressed, so Trolly had no choice but to set Ookbert on him.

He’s such a bad-tempered monkey sometimes.

eBay can be a tedious place, so I tend to try and brighten things up a bit by leaving cheery feedback. You can have a look at the kind of rubbish I speak here.

As ever, I’m not posting because I’ve nothing to say

We’re still waiting for Centrelink to be happy with the Assurance of Support information. There’s some paperwork our Assurer needs to provide them with which requires processing by the Inland Revenue, so until that comes back, there’s nothing happening. On a cheerier note, though, DIMA have everything they need and have had for several weeks. That will now all have been processed and if there were any issues we’d know about them by now.

So – back to waiting.

Steve Irwin, conservationist and documentarian, died at the weekend after a fatal encounter with a normally harmless stingray. We’re all upset by this – particularly the children. Mr Irwin has been a part of our lives since the children were tiny and is in no small way responsible for the interest and respect they have for the environment around them.

It’s a tragic loss to everyone – his young family, the environment and to his audience, and he’ll be sorely missed.