Back in the old days……

 Whenever I feel like a laugh, I talk to a young person about technology. “Once upon a time,” I say, “If you wanted to call someone, you picked up the handset on the phone, which was plugged into the wall, and dialled. There was no answering machine. If they weren’t there, you had to call back!” Inevitably, their face becomes a mask of horror. “But what if it was, like, an emergency? Like, you saw Kim Kardashian in the street. In Sydney! And you had to tell someone?” This is when I shrug, shake my head, and start with “Back in the old days….”
  Then, I recollect my first mobile phone. It was a flip-phone that was as long as T.V remote control attached to a battery the size of a briefcase. It weighed nearly a tonne. Back then, we thought we were at the cutting edge of technology. You could talk on a phone while walking down the street! Who would have thought that would ever be possible?!
  Then came Facebook. Finally, you could share photos with friends. Of course, we used to do that on slide nights, all snuggled up on the couch marvelling at the magic of transparencies. Believe it or not, these older technologies are cool again. (I’m not exactly sure whether the word “cool” is cool, but that’s another story.) Polaroids are back. So is the pinhole camera. And a handset you can plug into your iPhone.
  I don’t know whether it will stop brain tumours – I’ll get back to you on that. But it’s certainly a hit with the young folk. I listened with rapt attention as my best friend’s 14-year-old son pored over his new iPhone, pointing out the slim shape and fancy features. Then I pulled out my purple handset. “Oh, my GOD! Oh, my God!” he stuttered. “That is so bad, it’s good!” Whatever that means….
  Now, he wants one. Apparently all the stuff I grew up with is retro. Vicariously, I’m hip. Next on the list is the typewriter keyboard for the iPad. I miss the clatter of regular old keyboards.
  Maybe the key is to embrace new technology, while fondly remembering its ancestors. Like Facebooking the next slide night, tweeting a picture of a typewriter, or handwriting, scanning and emailing a letter. Another opportunity to begin a sentence with, “Kids have it so easy these days…”

Can’t always believe what you see.

 When Victoria’s Secrets models are regularly airbrushed to “look better”, surely it’s a sign that the apocalypse is nigh. These women are considered the world’s most beautiful and are paid cash mountains to model underwear. Their only job is to look good. And yet even they’re not “good enough”.
  Erin Heatherton, Victoria’s Secret Angel and girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio, said this about the use of photoshop by Victoria’s Secret, recently exposed online: “We’re not selling reality; we’re selling a story. It’s all about creating this fantasy. Retouching is an essential part of our job.”
  She also reckons body image has nothing to do with fashion imagery. “I think that’s something children should be taught by their parents. It should be taught in schools.” Except that 99 per cent of us don’t realise the images we see have been airbrushed because there’s no fine print to tell us.
  And if women like Miranda Kerr and 180cm Erin Heatherton aren’t considered slim or flawless enough to escape the airbrush, there’s something very, very wrong with this picture.

Lost among the tanorexics.

There are many reasons not to go to Bondi Beach, even if you are British. One of them, of course, is that there are sharks there. Sharks that will not only eat you, they will find out where your family lives and eat them too. I learned this the hard way.
 But it is not just murderous fish you have to look out for – it is also sunbathers. Every time I go to any beach in Sydney these days I am constantly assaulted by these people lying there like a shag on a rock and, like any shag on a rock, it makes me feel uncomfortable.
  Let’s face it, if I wanted to see something bronzed and perfectly formed I’d commission someone to do a sculpture of Angelina Jolie eating a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. But there is no nutritional value in the vistas of Sydney’s shores. Instead one is confronted by an endless horizon of people impersonating a stocking stuffed with pawpaws – which are, incidentally, a food I don’t like.
  There are some benefits to this. One is that these finely honed people never actually go in the water for fear it will mess up their hair – and the women are even worse. This leaves more room for the pale and pasty among us to frolic in the waves and delight in our zinc-creamed cousins from the north glowing like embers beside us.
  However, it also has the drawback that it makes the tanorexics on the beach less likely to be eaten by sharks and therefore play their part in Charles Darwin’s grand tapestry of evolution. Indeed, the beach is a place where a kind of perverse Darwinism exists in counterpoint to the rest of society. But sadly things are changing in the outside world.
  In the good old days the planet was run by fat people and nerds. Alan Bond, Kerry Packer and Bill Clinton did the heavy lifting while Bill Gates and his team of wily computer programmers did the rest. Even in the sporting world there was room for the generous proportions of Tony Lockett and David Boon while for the pencil-pouch-loving among us there was the delightful Bruce McAvaney. But now there is no place at the table for a decent girth, a pain Shane Warne knows only too well.
  In Sydney the problem is more acute. We lost our last bastion of nerdity with the departure of Bob Carr and, while the compellingly spherical John Della Bosca is still with us, embodying both noble qualities in his bookishly broad physique, one must ask: How long?
  The further east you go in this city, the worse it gets. And, if my geography is correct, you don’t get much further east than the beach. Of course the Darwinian principle vis-a-vis humans is that the fittestness we need to survive is primarily mental. (Ironically, I now recognise that my use of the word ‘fittestness’ means I may have only days to live.)
  The point is while the nerdy ones might not necessarily have been the fittest; they could use their knowledge of quantum physics to overcome this. Incidentally, here is a nerd joke I found on the internet:
Q: How many theoretical quantum physicists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: One. One to hold the ladder, one to turn the bulb, and one to renormalise the wave function. I do not understand this but I think it constitutes a serious criminal offence.

  Anyway, on the beach a reverse natural order exists. The fat and nerdy powerbrokers cower beneath their layers while the bronzed and buff beauties who spend all day soaking up sunshine – a category of people who used to be called “the unemployed” – walk like gods among them. And sometimes do a little jogging too.
 And despite my own lean, muscular physique and occasional propensity to brown out, I know I am no match for them here, primarily because of a lack of access to weaponry. Still, maybe it is right that we leave the himbos and bimbos this stretch of shore. It is nothing a little fencing couldn’t handle.