In a classic example of fate interpreting things too literally and why you should be careful what you wish for, I was awakened this morning by Stephen's alarm clock in the other room and opened my eyes to be greeted by the back of his naked form switching it off. Atop last night's soap operatic incident, which I will expound upon momentarily, I'm pretty much out of patience with the guy.
With a lot of people (eight, plus Chris) working on a farm and sharing one bathroom, there was quite a queue for a shower in the evening. Somewhere in the middle of the order of showerers came Stephen, who emerged from the bathroom wearing Claudia's towel around his waist. She alerted him to this fact, and he said he'd bring it down in a minute (not, presumably, having realised it wasn't a house towel, but also presumably not having been sufficiently cautious - he seems to lack the ability to see the commonly-accepted barrier between mine and thine), and she said he should wash it first. So, upstairs he went, and didn't reemerge for some time, having been listening to music or whatever. When he did come down again, Claudia asked where her towel is, and I didn't catch what he said in return - I'll assume it was an appropriate and true reply - which she didn't understand, as he has a thick accent, mumbles his speech and uses uncommon colloquialisms like "summat" in his speech. When she asked him to repeat it he started getting stroppy and saying that he'd already told her, and when others tried to interject to ask again or try to explain that she hadn't understood what he said, he started into a what's-it-got-to-do-with-you routine. In what was probably a cowardly move seeing as I was best-placed to act as the in-betweener, I stayed well out of it and buried myself in cooking my dinner, but when it resolved itself somehow - I think by Stephen going away and Kathleen appearing from upstairs with the towel in question - and Claudia asked me if I had understood what was happening, I proposed the theory that maybe he's never studied a foreign language and doesn't know how difficult it is to understand a native speaker, assuming that if you can understand English once you can understand it every time. But that's no explanation for turning it into a confrontation - I know the guy has low self-esteem, but this was beyond that. My recent reading of the article in my computer-encyclopedia about the workings of the human brain has given me possibly just enough knowledge to be dangerous, and has me thinking that maybe he's suffering from clinical depression (which is an actual physical shortage of some chemical in the brain, which is why they can treat it with drugs, point being that it's no different to a deaf ear or trick knee in that it's not an intentional attitude thing that you can think away).
Well anyway. Most of the Germans went into Leeton in Claudia and Freddy's van to do some shopping, and asked me if I wanted anything (I was still cooking my dinner on the spiffy-but-slow barbeque thing), so I asked to be brought, if convenient, a rewritable CD-ROM disc, and Claudia remembered that I'd been talking about questing for a cheap plastic travelling soapdish previously, and when they returned they'd found and purchased both of these items for me and refused to accept reimbursement. Freddy says it's payment for the pending use of my computer, which he's planning to use to take photos from his camera and burn onto a CD so he can wipe its memory or put them on the Net from a Net cafe or something (and yes, it appears there is a Net cafe in Leeton). Which is good thinking that I'm a bit ashamed I didn't think of myself - I can burn these diary entries onto a CD and upload them from a Net cafe. More than likely in a day or two we'll make a mass van exodus into town and all spend a few hours in the cafe, if they've got enough machines. Thank crikey, I really miss the Net...
5:55 p.m.
Come to think of it... actually this is starting to sound like the ship's log from Monkey Island ("Day 15: Toothrot is really starting to get on my nerves") but for better or worse my encounter with Stephen has made me examine myself quite a bit, and as this is becoming more of a diary than a pure travel log, it's going in here and my long-suffering audience can go take yet another running jump. Well okay a couple of things happened yesterday that broke the monotony that would exist if stuff like this didn't happen. The one that I was getting to was that Stephen pointed out to me the similarities between our secateurs and a vagina. The whole intercontinental ballistic missile as phallic symbol thing has always really annoyed me - the reason tank guns, for example, are that shape is because if you want to accelerate a lump of metal in a specific direction with a chemical combustion with any degree of accuracy and efficiency you HAVE to do it through a long tube. Not because it makes military men feel less sexually inadequate. So a quick but concentrated lecture on lever physics followed that put a stop to that line of thinking. Then he wondered aloud why oranges aren't more convenient to eat - when they're built to segment why didn't they go the whole hog for convenience, and I asked who "they" are, and he said well God or gods I guess, and I was surprised by how little tolerance I had for that line of thought. He could well have meant God or gods or aliens or random chance or anything else, but I quickly stepped in with a quick, concentrated and uninvited lecture on natural selection and evolution. I always thought I was a bit more tolerant of other peoples' religious ideas than that though. Guess not - might have to work on that.
The other thing was Big Les getting his ute stuck in the mud in the vineyard. The main advantage of four-wheel drive seems to be the ability to dig twice as many deep troughs in the muck to be unable to extract the vehicle from. We pushed, pulled, tied it to another ute, he drove back and forth and back and forth trying to rock it free, we all got covered in muck (especially Little Les, who due to the reddish colour of the mud looked like he'd been half-assedly applying fake tan to his face) and eventually he just managed to drive it out somehow. Oh yeah, that reminds me, Big Les has to go to prison at the weekends for a year, but not during the week. Which I can't feel bad about, because he seems like a nice chap, although I don't like the fact that lots of innocent people die all the time because of people doing what he done, and in fact thespian extraordinaire Bruce Campbell (who replete with shotgun and axe adorns the t-shirt in which I'm currently attired) was recently slightly injured in a car accident caused by a drunk driver driving while barred from so doing. Anyway playing around in the mud trying to extract the ute was kinda fun.
Which brings us neatly to today's monotony-breaker. With six Germans going to a different field to me to do pruning, they have to load up on the back of a ute to get there whereas myself and Stephen tend to squash into the front of whatever vehicle with Chris or Little Les. Well, today I figured I wasn't letting them have all the fun anymore, and I'd ride on the back too. We dropped them at their field and I pulled on my raincoat thingie as Chris pulled off, because the ground is much puddlier further on, and indeed he drove fast through whatever mud and water fate put in our path and I got drenched and it was fun. We did the same again on the way home, only faster this time. My trousers and shirt are somewhat wet, and my jumper had been sitting on the back with me on the first trip and got wet, so I hung it on the bull-bar (or 'roo-bar I believe they're called here) of one of the utes to dry, and then Big Les drove off in that ute and Chris later found the jumper in what he described as a lake (possibly a very large puddle, possibly an artificial pond) and it's really wet and muddy too. Fortunately I was second in the shower and am now toasty and dry and clean.