And this.

Gumtree at its absolute best.

How do you decide which shade of black to wear?

Flat hunting, or as Australians call it 'House hunting.' I have had more than one irate Australian breath heavily down the phone at me and tell me, in a quiet voice, that 'I think you'll find this is NOT a flat.' It is.

It's a delicate dance, this business. First there is the online application, which involves scouring Gumtree for potential dwellings and dwelling-mates. It's a difficult task, trying to find the gems amongst bovved entries such as 'exhausted guy needs room in cool flat ASAP!!' However, things can be whittled down pretty quickly, once you count out outer suburbs, share rooms, flats with cats, anything south of the river, ads which describe the house as 'damp but cosy' and people who use the wrong 'your' in the opening paragraph. There are also ads that will never be answered by anyone, like this one

Gumtree fail.

Once you've found one that looks suitable in a pinch, there is the delicate task of describing yourself as a potential share houser. Usually its a matter of sounding like you are employed but interesting, independent but part of a team, clean but not anal, enjoys an early night but is also the life of the party, intelligent but non judgemental. What ends up happening is that, in a desperate bit to stay neutral, you end up saying nothing about yourself.

"I Like my music, chilling out, sometimes up for a drink or a party, but saying that not a complete party animal. I'm a pretty easy going sort of person. I likes to sit down and have a cuppa and a chat, but also likes own space."

Sometimes your don't hear back, sometimes you do. And then begins the city hopping trek of meeting and greeting your prospective housemates. In this step, you sit on opposite couches, asking dull questions and laughing politely at each others jokes about the state of the front garden or the abstract painting over the fireplace. Occasionally you are offered a glass of wine but this a rare and privileged exception. Usually, the interviews are kept to a 15 minute maximum after which the next ad replier will be knocking at the front door. Sometimes, the house dwellers will take down notes on in an exercise book as you speak; sometimes they will ask you to leave the room while they discuss your living potential. Usually at this stage, I am sweating like a demon after a 20 minute bike ride and all the questions I want to ask have vanished into the ether. I am left with inane queries such as:

"So, like, what's the general vibe of your guys flat...I mean House?"
"Oh you know, its like, pretty chilled out. We like to hang out together sometimes but we also like our own space."
"Mmmm yeah that sounds great."

What you really need to is to cut the crap and ask the questions that you're actually curious about. Like:

"Are you one of those people who leaves their washing in the machine for days after its finished, because I fucking hate it when people do that."

OR "Would you be annoyed if I brought home a party of friends to listen to funk music at 3am or would you get amongst it?"

OR "Do you boil your mooncup in a pot on the stove?"

At one house, I was forced to sit on the veranda and read from a book of poems. The poems were written by the dizzy head flatmate who told me she inspired a song by the alternative band Beach House. At another house, I sat and talked to the creatures who lived there about their desire to have a 'gangsta party.' Their desire ran so deep, it seemed, that they had already spray painted neon gangsta graffiti over two walls of the kitchen. In one area, the paint had dribbled down and left a neon pool of yellow on the top of the stove. I smiled and went on with the questions, unable to tell them that I would rather fall down a flight of stairs than live in their spare room. As I left, I realised that the stool I had been sitting on was actually a broken, rusty TV.

But its all worth it in the end, all the dull interviews and the hectic bike rides and the flowery poetry. There's always another door to knock on.

And this is why I love Shallow Grave.

Trams

One of the girl singers from ABBA has put out a solo album. It's called 'My colouring Book' and listening to it is like staring at a colouring book where everything has been coloured in with manic highlighters, both inside and outside the lines. It's quite lovely but I have to have at least one strong, black coffee to get me through it. 'My Colouring Book' works as a nice contrast to The Shaggs, a no-talent prepubescent girl band from the Sixties who were overweight, acne scarred and sang tuneless songs about Halloween and their lost cat, 'Foot Foot.' It's rather a cruel name for the band given that none of them are even remotely shag-able.

Yesterday on the tram, I was reading a play called 'Wiping my Mother's Ass.' It is exactly as it sounds and is not a very good play. A woman with a pinched nose sitting across from me give me a dirty look when she saw what I was reading. She was reading some kind of Vodafone pamphlet. The man next to her didn't have anything to read but seemed quite intent on examining his fingernails. He was weedy and wore a suit that was slightly too big for him. From time to time, he tried to read bits of the Vodafone pamphlet over the woman's shoulder. After a few minutes of this, the pinched face woman closed the pamphlet and shoved it deep into her handbag. She gave the weedy man a sharp, angry glance and turned her neck to stare furiously out the window. The weedy man got off at the next stop and the pinched face woman reached into her handbag and went back to her Vodafone pamphlet. I went back to Wiping my Mother's ass. It wasn't that great.

Playing pool

Monday is a good day for the Fitzroy community pool. I swam a bunch of laps and watched people. There are no aqua joggers but a lot of people seem to have taken to wearing flippers in the lanes. They swim very fast but you'd expect them to. It's the fast swimmers without the flippers that really impress the rest of us. The ones in speedos with Adonis figures. There seems to be a congregation of them at the start of the week, flexing and talking about their girlfriends at the start of the fast lane. They don't swim that much but I guess they don't have to with bodies like that. Sometimes, when they get tired of standing around in waist-high water they lie down on the bleachers, arms behind their heads with their arm pit hair exposed. I find it pretty sexy despite myself.

All this I witness through quick glimpses, occasionally taking extra long between breathes and take every chance to de-mist my goggles. In the medium and slow lanes, less attractive people swim with less impressive strokes. They stop more often than I do but with less pervy intentions. The life guards amble around the sides of the pool not doing much. They are also unattractive but might be less so without the wrap around sunglasses and yellow polo shirts.

I sat with two of the Adonises in the sauna. Their conversation was dull but their aesthetics pleased me. One had a loud voice and a smattering of chest hair, the other--James according to his mate--was soft spoken with serious pectorals. I sipped from my water bottle and pretended to stare into space. It was an excellent seven minutes and then I reluctantly had to exit before the temperature made me pass out. I tried the steam room but was sorely disappointed by the lack of Goodbodies on display, only a small Asian woman in a brown bikini. We smiled quietly at each other and after a few minutes, went on our separate ways.

The woman at the front desk is called Annie. She is a rather dull looking woman with a mess of hoop earings in her ears and she wears sweat pants. She works behind the desk every day of the week or so it seems. I wonder if she goes swimming in the pool. I wonder if she pervs at the Goodbodies. I would get probably not given that she has extremely thick spectacles and is probably legally blind if she takes them off. But you never know.