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Tim Colwill is a 22 year old human male who resides in Perth, Western Australia. Inventor of the cardboard toaster and the car-powered car, Tim is also an accomplished author, having penned such notable works as Romeo and Juliet, Clifford The Big Red Dog, and The Bible. In his spare time, Tim directs movies under the nom de plume Steven Spielberg and maintains his own standing army of genetically engineered watermelons. Truly it is said that Tim has had an illustrious career, matched only by its ludicrously unbelievable exaggeration.

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Goodbye, Farewell and Amen

// Filed under: Life on Wednesday January 07th 2009, 11:35 pm

Perhaps it is fitting that I leave you on the 60th post of this blog. Perhaps it is not fitting, or perhaps it is mere coincidence, you cry, but I am not listening. I board the train, tears streaming down my handsome and rugged face like rain off the granite mountain slopes. ‘I loved you’ I mouth silently through the window as I pull away, but you are gone, blinded by inconsolable rage, the baseball bat gripped tightly in your white-knuckled hand.

In any case, I am not gone forever. I have simply moved - sideways perhaps, or diagonally. Electronically speaking I have not moved at all, but I digress - most importantly of all, I have moved in. In with my beautiful girlfriend, that is. Yes - it’s a coupleblog. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, after all. I will leave this blog active as an archive of Things What I Have Said and also of Things You Lot Said In Response, but I fear it will no longer be updated. If you want to see what I’m up to now, steer your internet-machine towards http://www.notsounwashed.com. You won’t regret it.

They say “always end on a song”. But instead, I’m going to leave you with a series of previously unpublished drafts that never made it past the care threshold enough to be finished. It’s not exactly the same thing, but I didn’t think you’d notice, so I went with it. I present them to you verbatim and unedited, in chronological order, everything that this blog might have been. Enjoy.

Meme’d:

So I got tagged - tagged, for my very first ever blog meme. However it was too boring, so I’ve decided to make it more interesting in an attempt to assuage my guilt at capitulating to the wonder of peer pressure.

Four jobs I have had
Four movies I can watch over and over
Four TV shows I love to watch
Four places I have lived
Four places I have vacationed
Four places I would rather be right now
Four of my favorite dishes
Four Web sites I visit daily
Four bloggers I am tagging

Terra Nullius, Redux:

And we’re back! In Australia, that is. A long time ago, actually. But, well, you know how it is. Jet lag here, heat-stroke there, Jess everywhere, it gets a bit hectic.

England.

Glorious, glorious England. I had a fantastic time. Though, as I’ve said to a few people, one of the main reasons I enjoyed it was seeing precisely how much better we have it over here. Train tickets, bus fares, road width… Simon’s stolen a lot of my thunder, but I’m going to bleat on some more about the flavoured milk malarkey later, because goddammit, that’s my story, you little bitch.

Where was I.

Oh yes. So, we rolled into England by way of Dubai International Airport. For those of you who have never been to Dubai International Airport, let me describe it for you. It’s a six kilometre-long mausoleum. It goes in a straight line from one end to the other. Housed in it are vast expanses of sleeping, dead, comatose or otherwise waiting people, broken up only by 24-hour shops that charge you AUD $18 for a muffin and coffee, and those ridiculously awesome flat-moving-walkway things, that Simon and I took great delight in scooting along.

Coming from Perth Airport, which services a total of three planes, two of which are bi-planes and the other one a wingless, rusting Boeing 747 which nobody has the heart to tow away, we were quite overwhelmed with the sheer scale of it all. You could walk from our house to our airport in the time it took to stroll from one end of this bastard to the other. This was of course compounded later when, as we were bus’d out onto the runway to the plane, we could see another shed-cum-airport under construction, at only three times the size of the one we were just in.

Some hours later, we pulled into Birmingham airport, in the beautifully green England. Our parents were, in typical fashion, late. We passed the time by staring in perverse wonder at the English orange-flavoured Fanta which is, in a terrible break with common sense and tradition, actually yellow. And smaller. Seriously - the Australian soft drink bottle is 600 mL, whereas its English counterpart is a mere 500 mL. And the Australian soft drink can weighs in a hefty 375 mL, compared to the paltry English 330 mL. If that’s not cause to become a republic, I don’t know what is.

At any rate, we were soon on the motorway up to Worcestershire to see Gran. Dad of course got lost - which is easy to do in English farm country, because somebody had the bright idea to grow six metre tall hedges along each side of every road. Even if you wanted to see where you were going, it’s an almost complete impossibility. Assuming you don’t get front-ended by another car coming around the hairpin country bends on what is, essentially, a one-lane road, there’s no way you can see any of the sights as you drive through the countryside - assuming your idea of “sights” doesn’t include hedges, that is.

Eventually we got to Gran’s, and spent a few days there. Our beautiful childhood memories of orchards galore had long since been shattered by bulldozers to make way for asparagus fields. Fields and fields of the stuff, and what they didn’t eat, they piled up as mulch around their trees. It was great to be on the farm again, though - freshly picked strawberries, clotted-cream ice-cream, potato chips so deep-fried I could see through them. It was magical.

After we’d adjusted to the time difference, which was difficult given it stays light until eleven fucking p.m. you bastards, we eventually made our way down to Hathersage, which is about eight miles out of Sheffield. We spent four nights there, three in a neat little youth hostel, and the last one in the local pub which, though more expensive, actually had a working shower - and a working television, which allowed us to fully experience the horror of English Big Brother.

Seriously, what the fuck, you guys.

We were fortunate to be right next to a train station, so we ended up seeing Sheffield entirely more than we’d like - especially since trains only run every two hours back to Hathersage on Sundays (despite departing down that, actual, train track-line every fifteen minutes - they just didn’t stop at Hathersage, go figure). We also found our way to Warhammer World to meet up with some of the ever-lovin’ Golden Throne crew, and had a fantastic time.

After that, we bus’d our way down to the wonderful city of London - we were going to catch trains, you see, but, well - they wanted forty-seven pounds for the privilege of letting us sit on their poorly maintained, cramped trains for six or so hours, and frankly, I’d like my first mortgage to actually be on a house. Anyway, soon enough we were soon deposited in the raining Victoria Station, where we confusedly made our way to the Underground, and then to our youth hostel.

This youth hostel was an interesting experience. Our youth hostel back in Hathersage could have been generously described as “a cottage”. Because that’s… pretty much exactly what it was. But this.. this London-based monstrosity. It had security doors. And five floors. And elevators. Over half the people there were school-children. Another quarter were seniors, disabled person’s groups, travelling families or half-crazed English people looking for somewhere cheap to lodge. This place was a goddamn enterprise.

Our lodgings reflected this business approach. Three beds, stacked on top of each other in the corner of the room, such that your feet are lying underneath or on top of someone elses like some fruity human Jenga game. We were bunked down with a silent, bitter, ascetic English man who introduced himself (finally, on the third day we were together) as “Hi, sorry I don’t talk much, I’m a miserable bastard”, a German exchange student who was studying dentistry at a local university, and Orbie, a charming if boring man from The North, who enjoyed telling everyone about himself and then interspersing it with small gaps of breathing.

London is an interesting place, and fortunately I had help seeing most of it with the aid of the magnificent Ross Lewis, who not only took Simon and I around but actually presented us with a bag of English goodies to snack on and marvel at. Many photos were taken, and will be made available in a coherent form in short order, be assured.

With London wrapped up, we were off back up to Worcestershire for the 90th - finally introduced to our cousins whom we haven’t seen since the 80th in 1996. Understandably, they’ve grown up somewhat in the ten years since then and proved most excellent companions - Frankie and Giles, our drunken English cousins, and Chelsea and Emily, our self-proclaimed indie-music loving Canadian cousins. Together we formed the well-rounded waitering team for our Gran’s 90th, held in the Little Whitley Village Hall.

Of course as luck would have it, it was a Britishly-hot day (which basically means there’s more humidity than

No Subject:

Have you ever noticed that nearly half the Mortal Kombat characters were created simply by changing the colour of the costume of an existing character? No? Well, there you go.

Man, blogging! Who does that these days? It’s so passe. Anyway.

So who else worked today? Nobody? Nice. I did, of course. The prestigious Murdoch University is so prestigious that it doesn’t actually recognise the Foundation Day public holiday. Take that, our forefathers! We spit on your pathetic riverside colonies of 1829. Everyone else is out there respecting the place up with their lackadaisical slackness, and I am forced to fist the past by slaving away in an air-conditioned office in a comfortable chair. What is the deal with that.

Speaking of untidy segues, can I speak for a minute about how much I hate the advertising slogan “More than just…”. What is it about this slogan that makes the most absolutely mundane, one-purpose stores decide it’ll be great to inform the world that they do “more than just one vague product”? Let’s take an actual example here, from the radio.

“Find your shopping and entertainment at Southlands Boulevarde! More than just shopping!”

Having been to Southlands Boulevarde, I can clarify for you that when they claim to have “more” than just shopping, they can only be referring to the fact that they also offer the convenient service of parking as well.

Oh hey, I said I’d talk about this ages ago, but I never did. So here it is.

Basically, the street in which we live is going to be re-zoned from its current status as semi-rural to its new status of light industrial, meaning that - in a nutshell - our entire street will be demolished to make room for the expansion of the neighbouring suburb’s industrial area. This is all part of The City of Gosnells‘ plan to cope with the expected population increase in our area across the next 20 years, and by and large this is a good thing.

Other people can expect to be rezoned to a higher housing density, subdivide their property, sell it, make a tidy profit off it all and basically retire on the winnings. We however, along with everyone along our street, can basically expect to get shafted. Shafted that is, to the tune of compulsory government accquisition of property at negligible market prices. I mean, we’ll pick up more for it than that which we paid originally, to be sure. But that’s to be expected when you buy property twenty years ago, and that property is basically a graveyard for scrap metal.

Twenty years. That’s how long we’ve owned this place, and how much work has been put into building and shaping it from a giant shitheap into a sprawling, beautiful garden home. All for basically nothing. Just enough time to raise two children, who then get to stand by and watch their childhood home vanish under the inexorable advance of industrial expansion and ridiculously soaring house prices.

It’s not all bad news, though. The back half of our property is designated as part of a wetland, which means it must be protected under Federal law. And under that same law, a buffer zone of 200 metres must be established around all protected wetlands, which would encompass most of our property. So the tricky question is, would we be allowed to live in this buffer zone?

Let’s talk about the new craze sweeping the tubes. Lolthings. Lolcats. Lolpresidents. Loltapirs. Lolcode.

Elekshunz:

Why shouldn’t you vote for John Howard?

Non
Core
Promise

Turn, and face the strain:

Ch-ch-ch chaaaanges….

Well, fuck. I honestly don’t know where to begin. Two-double-oh-seven has been an incredible year, and never more so than in the last two months. I guess it sounds a bit simplistic, but I’m happy. I’m really, genuinely happy for the first time in a long time.

Take My Cash (Please):

The Western Australian rental housing market is exciting and rewarding.

Let me give you an example.

Let’s imagine you’ve

Medical Over-Achievement:

I can’t tell you how thrilling it is.

I can’t begin to tell you how good it feels to blast into the BLU spawn area as an ubercharged Pyro, a faithful medic at your back, your flamethrower spitting burning death at your enemies. The quick ones disappear back through the door to their supply cabinets to salve their burning flesh, but some kind of spiteful, irresistible curiosity draws them back out again into your lethal embrace. Then the dance begins - to the supply cabinet, then back to the door, then back to the supply cabinet again. Has he gone? Has the ubercharge run out?

This all lasts for only ten seconds, of course. But ten seconds feels like an eternity, the crackle of the ubercharge mixing with the whoosh of ignited gas

But I didn’t used to play the Pyro. And I would never have known this

By their very nature, Achievements are designed to be arbitrary. A goal that is purely coincidental, running parallel to the main game. Players should be able to look back at their Achievement List and smile, remembering fondly the first time they burst into a room, flamethrower at the ready, and ignited five helpless enemies at once.

It’s been good, people. Stay with me - we’re not done yet.

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