Life's better in boardshorts

What’s so good about Australia? 

I freely admit that I’ve never actually been asked that question. So, that being the case, I suppose it’s a bit of a waste of time - and a waste of a blog post - to answer it. It’s the blog equivalent of talking to myself. I’m blogging to myself! I’m answering a question that I’ve never been asked. I'm blogging about a hypothetical.

I suspect that the question isn’t asked because the answer is just assumed. Australia. It's where the sun shines all the time ... and there’s a beach around every corner. Plus, the Aussies are soooo laid back.

The truth is that when you move lock, stock and barrel to another country there’s very little point comparing where you are to where you’ve come from. 'Country comparing' is a slippery slope to unhappiness. If you start to compare things as soon as your arrive in a place you're quite naturally comparing the familiar with the unfamiliar. 

And the familiar will usually win hands down. 

You really have to give a new place time for the comparisons to be valid. If you start comparing straight away it’s always only going to end in tears. That’s because you only tend to remember the good things about the place you’ve come from, and you tend to compare these to the bad things about the place you’ve arrived in. 

In a new place the bad bits tend to stand out like a sore thumb. You can find yourself reminiscing and wandering down memory lane. Unfortunately Memory Lane can be a rather unreliable place.

I've been in Sydney for 15 years. My 15th year anniversary was on May 2nd 2012 to be exact. 15 years! I reckon that's probably enough time for me to offer a humble opinion on what's so great about the place. 


It’s also enough time for me to really understand what I miss (and don’t miss) about England.

Before I do anything, I need to say one thing - I’m definitely not an armchair critic. I’m not just 'chipping in' from the sidelines of Sydney. When it comes to Australia, I’m fully in. And I have been since Day 1. Since May 2nd 1997. When I moved Down Under I really did move. I sold up in England. I closed all my bank accounts. I didn’t rent a storage unit. I flogged the lot or shipped it over and I moved. Lock stock and barrel. There was no going back. (Well, there was really. I could easily have just hopped on a plane and whizzed ‘home’ in a heartbeat - a 23-hour heartbeat). 

What I mean is that when I emigrated I fully intended to give Sydney 'a real good go'. And I have. I’m a fully-fledged Aussie now. I became a citizen as soon as I was legally entitled to, bought a place and I’ve voted in every single State and Federal election since. Mind you, voting is compulsory down here and there’s a fine of about $50 if you don’t vote, so on occasion - due to the lack of candidates with the requisite number of brain cells - I have voted reluctantly just to avoid the fine. Voting-wise my heart hasn’t always been in it. But Australia-wise, my heart has always been fully-in. 

So, back to the today's conundrum; what’s so good about Australia?

I reckon it’s this. 

Life is better in boardshorts. 

I saw this in a surf shop window. It was the tagline for an ad for, well, boardshorts. The boardshorts being spruiked were a little too garish for me - too much flouro orange and green. They weren’t my style. I like my ‘boardies’ plain. I don’t need people staring in the direction of my legs. I’ve got some of those funny veins that you get when you’re getting-on a bit. I didn’t like the shorts. But I did like the tagline. 

Life is better in boardshorts. 

I think it’s spot on. It sums Australia up for me. Australia doesn’t take itself too seriously. Of course, stuff is just as serious Down Under. There’s crime and war (Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest) and inflation and traffic jams and road rage and all that stuff. 

But there’s also the beach. 

And the beach is one of life's real ‘equalisers’. 

When people are at the beach, doing whatever they like to do on a beach, you have no idea who they are, what they are or what they do. They are stripped naked - sometimes a bit too naked, depending on the beach (email me and I’ll tell you where to go!). There’s very little ability to show off your wealth or status or seniority on the beach. A beach towel is a beach towel is a beach towel - and these days even the ones that say Versace were probably bought in Bali or Thailand for a couple of dollars. The beach is different from the City. 

I lived In London for a while and in The City there was a competitiveness that spilled into anything and everything. It was inescapable and all-pervasive. You could see it in what people wore, what stuff they carried with them, where they drank, ate, where they lived and how they spoke.  It was all-encompassing. You got sucked into it and it was difficult to escape. To be honest, the last time I went back to London all people seemed to talk about was money. And houses. And how much money houses were worth. It might have been the people I was with. But it was an obsession.

There’s a bit of this in Australia. Not much. But it’s there. The difference Down Under is that you can actually escape it. You can go to the beach. It’s nowhere to be seen at the beach. It can’t be. Everyone’s in boardshorts. In Sydney, when the sun comes out most people head to the beach to surf, sit, sip coffee or mooch around. Of they chuck a ‘sickie’ - called ‘mental health days’ down here - and skip work altogether. No-one did that in London when I was there. No-one. Ever. It was all money, money money in London. No-one had time to spend it mind you. They were all too busy earning it. 


I reckon that if someone built a huge man-made beach someone in Central London the whole place would chill-out in a heartbeat.

Billy Bragg - that quintessential of all English 'folk poets' - wrote a song a while back called The Beach is Free. You either love Billy Bragg or else you think he's a tuneless, Communist-flag-waving muppet. But I reckon he hit the nail on the head. There aren’t too many places left in the world that are totally free and open to everyone regardless of anything and everything. I think that 'the freedom of the beach' is one of the last real levellers left in life.

You shouldn’t compare countries or cities. It really is a road to nowhere. Most places have at least something going for them. Well, there's Bracknell in England. That didn't have much going for it when I lived nearby. But, apart from Bracknell, most places have something to make you think 'Yeah, I could live here'. But I reckon that when that 'something' is the beach, it makes a world of difference. 

That's just my view. And of course I love the beach so I suppose in many ways I'm a wee bit biased. You might feel the same way about the countryside, or the snow, or wherever. But I bet there's something about somewhere that makes you think, 'that's where I truly feel most at home'. 

And we all know one thing for sure; there's no place like that one place where you really feel at home!


Hope you have a great week.

Pip pip

Ps ... that's the end of my little look at Sydney. For now at least. I might return, blogwise, in the not too distant future!