Straight Outta Perth

GH is

Well, there’s three days of my life I won’t get back. I’m sure Perth is a charming place to live, but when you’re there for a Test match that’s expired in two days you do feel its isolation. Even Athers was feeling deflated. Pete is on the Seven dime so could depart straight away; Cricket Et Al drives expenses down, which that means cheap flights as well as cheap dives. So that left J and I in the same position as oh-so-many winter-pale middle-aged English cricket lovers, impossible to miss as they made the best of their suddenly spare time. Western Australia’s cultural redoubts have, I dare say, never been so well patronised: the museum, the gallery, Freo, Skimpies…..

Well, that was in Rivervale, in the vicinity of the Shit Box From Hell, where the odor of the drain, the hardness of the bed and the roadworks were further incitement to exploration.

Farewell the Shitbox From Hell

Thanks to everyone for their solicitude, by the way, but it was all fine - we did enjoy what the city and environs had to offer. If you haven’t seen it, the Hale Tenger show at the Art Gallery is awesome, the much-vaunted Paolo Pivi show jejune by comparison. Tenger’s I Know People Like This III, for example, curates forty years of images of political violence in Turkey on X-ray film to overpowering effect.