Smoking in Australia: why Bach is the new black

These days I wake up in darkness, fumble my way down a Fallopian-tube corridor, hair sticking up; I bumble into the office room, collapse into chair and whack “bach g string” into the YouTube search box.

I hit the arrow and sit back, just for a second, to let the music wash over me … Then Son-One shouts “dad daddy daaad”, and Son-Two … oooohhhh, yawn; and so the day begins, spilling over with pathos, bathos and whoever the third Musketeer was …

I’m not normally a man for Baroque classics, but I do like Bach’s Air on the G String. These past few early mornings, at least. It’s the blackness, the rain pelting against the windows (what do you think this is, Melbourne? Fricking Aberdeen?). I need something to soothe.

The G string, I’ve found, goes well with muesli and is incredibly family-friendly (Johann Sebastian Bach had 20 kids, incidentally, although 10 died in early infancy).

I find myself whistling it in the street when no-one’s around – the melody, the harmony, the droopy, descending bassline …

For purely auditory reasons, those old Hamlet cigar TV ads from UK have been on my mind, too; particularly the one with Gregor Fisher as the Baldy Man.

He goes into a photo booth, pastes his comb-over into position and poses mock-seductively for the camera; impatient, he leans forwards twice, missing the flash – kaboom – and getting increasingly riled. The third time, his seat collapses at exactly the wrong moment. PMSL, did you say? Next thing, he’s spitting a thick plume of smoke upwards to the strains of Bach.

The message is simple: sadness, frustration and carbon monoxide are all facts of life, but happiness is a cigar called Hamlet.

You have to wonder why Japan Tobacco called these cigars Hamlet. Was it to piggyback on the supposed greatness of will.i.am Shakespeare, or so that orange-fingernailed men in smoke-filled bookies could reflect upon the Danish prince?

And, if so, which aspect of his story? Procrastination (of the sort one employs when chewing a cigar and placing bets) will ultimately end in a premature, thoroughly avoidable, death, thanks to poison being introduced to one’s system; for good measure, your mum will ingest it, too, and your dad … well, he’ll get it in the ear. Happiness is an obscure poison called hebenon.

Jacques Loussier’s jazzy version of Bach’s G string was maybe just there to lift the mood.

Or could it be, as Freud joked to a student, that “sometimes a cigar is just a (mild) cigar”?

The UK’s ban on tobacco advertising in 1991 put paid to the Hamlet series, although it coughed its way through cinemas until 1999. That seems inconceivable now – such is the power of absence …

Ditto:

Smoking in pubs.

Smoking on buses.

Smoking in hospitals.

Smoking at the opera.

These high-culture associations still persist in Australia, where a pack of so-so smokes costs upwards of $18 (£12) – you have to be proper posh to maintain the habit. And a real art lover: the packs come with pictures to die for.

A close-up photo of advanced-stage mouth cancer, with blistered lips and pustulating sores, is one of my favourites; it’s a toss up between that and the socks-off, smile-for-the-camera gangrenous foot – who knew gangrene had such a rich colour palette? It’s quite extraordinary; those little black piggies hang on all the way to market …

Because the accompanying brand design gets in the way of these images, plans are now well in motion for plain cigarette packaging; the artworks, on a luscious backdrop of olive green and “poo brown”, will be far more connoisseur-friendly.

The brand name will still be there, but in a utilitarian sans-serif font. In time, smokes will be known only by their artwork, which (for copyright issues?) is hidden from sight in stores behind little black cat flaps. Can I have Brown Lung? Dying Girl? Clogged Puss Artery? Prized-open Eye?

The big wigs at Big Tobacco are less than chuffed, wheezing, sorry wheeling, out their big guns, smoking hot, to stamp out this move before it gets going. You’d think they’d struggle to find a consistent argument … And yet, there they go, emphysemasising the same point time and again, hacking up the same black gobs, spitting in the face of reason … Angry, did you say? They’re phlegming furious …

Plain packaging will, undercough, sorry, cut, the ability of responsible baccy merchants to price their wares fairly; in turn, we’ll see a deluge of “chop-chop” (illegal tobacco) in Australia, and, you know, cough, erm … oh yeah, young people will buy the fakes instead and … cough, cough, it’s just, cough, excuse me, it’s, oh … Oncolo … gee, wheeze, I mean whiz …

And this on the back of stupid TV ads that show people sneezing blood into handkerchiefs, crying snot. It’s a different way of doing glamour (a bit light on the humour for my liking) but, hey.

Not everyone supports the fact these ads are government-funded; they reckon they should keep their bloody noses out. When did repeatedly inhaling a potent cocktail of heavy, toxic metals ever hurt anyone? Sure, hydrogen cyanide was used in the Nazi gas chambers but FFS, hippies, war is war …

Actually, the nanny-state argument, especially coming from big smokey babies, is quite compelling: leave us to clean up our own chemo-induced mess; there’s nothing wrong with selling incontrovertibly carcinogenic products right next to the Chupa Chups; stop telling us what to do; where’s your Aussie belief in the fair glow?

Simon Chapman, of Sydney University, wants to introduce a license to smoke, limiting people to 20/40/60 cigarettes a day and charging incremental fees for the pleasure. Smokers would also have to pass a test “not dissimilar to a driving test” (fag, mouth, manoeuvre; three-point-burn; emergency stubb).

It’s a wild idea, but not without its disciples. As with the wheels-version, there would be a theory component to the license, which chain-smokers are referring to as “a Soviet‑style re‑education campaign”.

You can just imagine the poor darlings, shovelling snow in Siberia, their comrades falling over, their purple chilblained feet squeezed into roughly-hewn clogs.

Our smoker looks wistfully at his comrades Malborokov/cough and Peter Jacksonkov/cough, chained together like frozen lungs, before clambering frenziedly over a snow-rotting mound of bodies, resolved to escape or die trying.

And then sun breaks through the cloud.

Our gulag-hound falls to his knees and pulls a pin-striped prison cigar from his pea coat. The striking of a match on his emaciated ribcage coincides with the langorous bassline of Bach, the opening strains of the G string.

For the briefest moment, happiness seizes his soul.

A right royal wedding: gniddew layor thgir A

Hi Will, hi “Commoner” Kate

Know you’re both busy so won’t dilly-dally.

In terms of the republican-royalist debate, I’m neither. I feel vehemently dispassionate about all governing systems until they have some very direct, and very noticeable, impact on me.

If I open the door in my boxers one day to be head-butted in the face by your dad/father-in-law, Charles, or even worse your uncle, “bruiser boy” Andrew, I’m going out on the campaign trail.

Otherwise it’s hot air, ideals that ultimately have to be represented in humans, and humans that can never be ideal (no offence).

The notion of “boycotting” your wedding (i.e. watching repeats of The Mentalist rather than your ceremony on TV) is ridiculous. All the same, if your wedding sucks (as if!), I’ll change the channel or play with my phone.

I’m sure neither of you care. You have already made this clear in several ways, both to myself and my recently-adopted compatriots. You have got things back to front, upside down. How so? Here’s so:

1) You’re getting married at 8pm. Let me repeat this: 8pm. Who gets married at 8pm?

I’ll be at my mother-in-law’s for tea, and hope to be watching your big moment over a bowl of ice-cream while Charlie the labrador (not your dad/father-in-law) licks my leg. Pure pomp, you might say. Then I’ll drive my family home.

I don’t expect to see any street parties or bunting as I do this because it’ll be really dark, not to mention the fact that we’re too tired because:

2) We didn’t get a day off, thanks to the stupid time of your wedding, which rendered redundant any argument for paid leave. We got Anzac Day off, though, which meant a five-day break last weekend, so that was something. But there were no royal weddings, and the TV was pretty poor.

3) It’s autumn. Who gets married in autumn? A spring wedding would have been far more symbolic, far more in keeping with the rejuvenation-of-Britain PR angle your people are milking (quite rightly) for all its worth. Lambs are born in spring, daffodils etc.

Instead, leaves are blowing from trees and the temperature’s hovering miserably in the low 20s.

Anyway, good luck. I’ll be watching, not ­reluctantly.

Paul

(PS, should it not be “More Common” Kate).

I am dag, but am I bogan?

I seem to have drifted into a space where I’m a dag. In some ways this is nice.

Who hasn’t grown up at the opposite end of the world watching twice-daily episodes of Neighbours and not wished they lived in a world where people could say: “you’re such a dag, Mike,” even though you’re name’s not Mike. The point is: you could have been Mike. We all could have been Mike.

But be careful what you crave.

I recently turned round a computer screen to show a woman something I thought was quite funny (a man dressed as a gnome, sitting in a car, pulling a gangsta pose, since you ask).

It was one of those situations where you have to hold on to your titters; where you know, as soon as the other person’s face starts contorting, you’re going to piss yourself.

Then, amid all the frenzied chortling, she said: “You’re such a dag.”

She slapped her knees as she said it. I slapped mine. If we were Swiss we might have slapped our hands together, then our knees and started yodelling. But from that point, for me, things changed.

Something that had never bothered me in all the years of Neighbours-watching snaked up through my body, wrapped itself round my brain and started squeezing; its tongue a forked question: what’s a dag? WTF is a dag?

It struck me that I should ask the woman. And so I did.

“It just means you’re really daggy,” she said, still laughing. “It’s nothing to worry about – I’m a dag too.”

This was comforting, but only to a degree.

I decided to quiz people discreetly. It was like the first time you heard someone on Home and Away calling someone a spunk and had to check they hadn’t actually meant “spunk”, that “spunky” didn’t, by extension, mean covered in jizz. You knew it didn’t – how obscene would that be? – but you needed to be sure.

I had a word in the ear of someone who used to live in the UK and is fluent in Australian and British.

“It’s just like ‘naff’,” he said.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Ha, ha …” Naff?

That’s the problem with questions – people sometimes give you answers.

A man dressed as a gnome, sitting in a car, giving a gangsta pose: naff. Was I naff for reshowing it? Transmitting this man’s japery? Stupid man. Naff bastard gnome.

But could “naff” really be the meaning? The Urban Dictionary’s fine, but you can’t always trust it, so I looked up “dag” in the Oxford Concise Australian Dictionary: “a lock of wool clotted with dung …” Hmn, that’ll be right … Now, what’s this?

Yes: “colloq. An eccentric or noteworthy person; a character (‘he’s a bit of a dag’ ).” Yes, I’d settle for eccentric and noteworthy – but I don’t think that’s what a dag is.

I kind of thought it meant “dafty” or “spoon” – something like that. You’re such a spoon? Yeah, I could live with that. You’re a dafty-pants? Yup, that’s ok.

But could the dictionary have it so terribly wrong? Why not?

I looked up “bogan” and it said: “a gormless person” (versus the Urban Dictionary’s definition: “a hideously repugnant and unintelligent … beast”).

Both seem wrong although, oddly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bogan.

My wife assures me they don’t exist in the numbers they used to; they are the lesser-spotted bogan.

I’ll point to someone – mullet, skin-tight jeans, Sherrin footy balls tattooed on their eyelids – and whisper: “Is that a bogan?”, to which my wife will reply: “no”.

The temptation is to transplant “neds”, so that ned-like people would become bogans.

You don’t see many neds here – sadly, in my opinion – and maybe that’s why you don’t see many bogans.

It’s also used as an adjective. Someone’s choice of clothes can be bogan, as can their hair. If they’re wearing sawn-off shorts, for example, their heaving chest on display, their skin green with rage, they’d be … erm … Hulk bogan …

Apologies: that’s such a daggy thing to say.

You can be daggy and a bogan, incidentally; but I’m not sure a bogan can be spunky, except in the eyes of another bogan, particularly is he/she says something daggy.

I won’t know for sure until I see one.

This brings to mind the old adage: if you can’t spot the bogan at a party, the bogan is you, especially if you’re drinking James Boag’s.

How does this make me feel? Not awesome. Not awesome at all.

Google makes me SEO happy

One of the joys of writing a blog, as opposed to writing on bits of looroll you let the wind rip from your hands as you step from a Portaloo, is the little box on your dashboard – with WordPress at least – that shows the search engine terms people have used en route to finding you, the actual words they tap into Google.

I look at these regularly, searching for hints (over and above Site Stats, that love-hate numbers game of the blogger) that people like what I’m doing, or have at least thought to look for me.

In my case, I’m glad to say there are quite a few instances of people keying in “Paul Dalgarno” (and a not-surpising-because-it-happens-a-lot number looking for “Paul Delgarno”. Sure, I sometimes imagine snapping off the finger that’s typed the erroneous “e” but mostly I kind of like it: it makes me feel Cuban, like Scarface, and hard as nails.)

Some people type “innocent in australia” too, but the vast majority seem to have stumbled on to the site by accident. They’ve come to it blind and grappling.

An awful lot could be described as “miscalleneous” – search engine terms such as “sliding partition”, “mothers and sisters forego food in India”, and the diminutive “buh means”.

Sometimes I try matching the search term to the post, a wonderful game. When I see “craig mclachlan”, for example, I assume the person has ultimately clicked on Go Neighbours, go Yasi, a kind of kamikaze; when I see “adelaide drop dead”  it must have led them to Adelaide you’re drop dead gorgeous …

The philosophy behind search engine optimisation involves making your posts, and particularly your headlines, rich in terms people are likely to be looking for anyway.

The first time I really tried to do this was with Oprah Winfrey and the Stanford Who’s Who. I was thinking, of course, that a percentage of people who punched Oprah Winfrey into their search engine of choice would find me, and that I’d become an internet sensation, and that Oprah would invite me on to her show. I had it all planned, you see.

On the day of posting I received the lowest readership figures of my blogging career and, I sincerely hope, my career as a professional writer.

It was a shock to the system. When no-one reads your blog, three things go through your mind:

1. I’m not getting paid for this.
2. Everyone hates me.
3. I’m not getting paid for this and everyone hates me.

Now, some months later, that same post is one of my most-read and, in time, will almost certainly be number one.

Not for the Oprah part but the Stanford Who’s Who. Barely a day goes by without several, sometimes many more than several, searchers stumbling on to my site with search terms such as:  “Stanford Who’s Who Australia is robbing me”; “Who is really behind Stanford’s Who’s Who?; and “Stanford who is who is legitimate”.

In case you haven’t read the post (ya punk!), I don’t endorse the Stanford Who’s Who; in fact I’m highly suspicious of it. But shit, what a goldmine.

As is fecal matter generally. My site is fourth IN THE WORLD, yes, IN  THE WORLD, for the search term “crack the shits” thanks to the post Cracking the shits. I know, I know, stop boasting … pride precedes a fall …

Sometimes I find myself trying to picture the people making the searches and find it helps if I break them into types, a la:

The inquisitor

Many find themselves beached on the shore of the site with questions such as: “are thongs innocent?” (which leads them to this post); or the even more philosophical: “is australia innocent?”

With a certain class of inquisitor – “what happened to the innocent convicts on the first fleet?” or “what is a australia day to write and at least not that long?” – I hope they haven’t taken my account of Australia Day too seriously. I wonder what their teacher might have said (because surely they’re teens trying to plagiarise) if they submitted a carbon copy of the post in question.

The sexually depraved/chronically bored

I feel ambivalent about these searchers. On the one hand, a reader’s a reader; but on the other, it’s a peculiar soul who wants to see a “nude woman in stirrups please”.

Someone else typed in “turboteats”, which I thought I invented in a post about turbo-birthing.

I’m unconcerned that someone out there was searching for “black booty bouncing nude” (for who among us hasn’t?) but am slightly taken aback that they then clicked on a post called Sydney (let’s whisper this), I love you.

I can only hope he/she found what he/she was looking for.

The precarious

I’ve come to think of these searchers as “people in trouble”. Consequently, I feel guilty they’ve wasted time on my site, and only half-hope they’ll become life-long readers.

There are many people in this category, including whoever wrote: “my license was seized in melbourne airport”; and “I’m under snow in scotland”; and the very suspicious: “8.40pm accident heathmont”.

Call me a cynic, but could that have been the person who caused the accident trying to see if it had been reported? And then reading my blog!

The slayer

These are search terms that make me feel glum. Such as: “possible causes of gurgling in throat and coughing up mucus in the elderly.” (Is it too much to hope they had a chuckle reading Kids are plague crow snot goblins that cause man flu?) The same post snared “crow cough and hot head fever in kids” and the charmingly illiterate “plague crow am we good?” Poor things. Sniff.

The silver bullet

These are by far the saddest of all; so sad, in fact, that the category can only handle one search term at a time. Until recently it was “find me friendly anyone in Melbourne” which went some way to breaking my heart. But that was replaced just last week by someone who must then have read the post When will I be famous?: “i want to be famous but i missed my calling.”

Oh, what was your calling, dear reader? Don’t despair.