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A rugged encounter
There are times when it is perfectly acceptable to mock a person for their physical appearance and this could well be one of them. While it may be common knowledge outside our sphere, it transpires that Australian cricketer Doug Bollinger is also known as Doug the Rug for reasons that became obvious when his Chennai team tasted success in the Indian IPL cricket league the other night.
Bollinger has been previously mentioned on our travels, he is one of those is thoroughly dislikeable Australian players, a real lad, full of it, looks indulged and gives the appearance of being completely self-absorbed. So, while things are going his way, all is well and good, but when not, look out, and that’s just what happened here.
Doug, we learned, has something called “replacement hair” and things turned more than a little bit sour when his Chennai teammate Suresh Raina tried to remove the rug during celebrations after the team’s win against the Kolkata Knight Riders. Bollinger furiously extracted himself from Raina’s grasp, and with both hands brushed back the hair which had “clearly moved off the scalp for a brief period.” Reports are that he is so sensitive about his hairdo that, when asked recently by an Australian journalist whether he was worried that the ferocious Wellington wind might play havoc with his thatch, he tersely refused to answer the question.
Of course the papers have had a field day after Doug’s hairy or rug-ged moment? "Bollinger keeps his Head" trumpeted the Australian Associated Press after his "hair-raising encounter", while Raina was credited with being after a scalp of his own.
Also none too impressed are the tourism people in Margaret River, about two and a half hours south of Perth by car. A little like New Zealand’s Marlborough, the landscape around Margaret River is dotted in vineyards with boutique wineries popping up in every nook and cranny and the town’s main street awash with craft shops and trendy eateries. Without a doubt this is the place in Western Australia for wine, its Semillon Sauvignon Blanc rather good, and with that, the region has a new found popularity among the upwardly mobile as a trendy weekend destination. Imagine then the shock to have the region’s service industry described in the autumn edition of a no less august a publication as the Western 4 Wheel Driver as people so unfriendly they have stony faces that look like they have been sat on by a rutting stag. “Talk about service with a frown,” says the magazine’s editor, Nick Underwood, tourists are clearly seen as the “human equivalent of weeds.”
With subscribers in such far-flung places as Oman and Cyprus, W4WD is clearly a magazine of international influence, and Underwood would not have enhanced the region’s prospects with his continuing descriptions. Along with about twenty others, his first encounter with locals left him needing “something to wash the bad taste of indifference from [the group’s] memories” and so they pulled into a winery only to be “accosted by the person in charge who must have just taken a swig from a seriously corked bottle of Chateau Vinaigrette”. That person told him he couldn’t just turn up with a large group; they needed to phone in advance. “Fair dinkum,” continued Underwood, “it was all we could do not to speed as we bore north to open shops and better attitudes.”
It was as well we didn’t stop as we passed through Margaret River one recent Sunday; we hadn’t phoned ahead, the place was chocker and we would not have wanted to be served by people who looked as though they had been sat on by a rutting stag. The winery we stopped at had run out of the particular tipple we were seeking and the young woman told us it was unlikely it would ever be made again because the winemaker didn’t like it one little bit. That was, despite it being their only variety to sell out completely and the subject of requested orders. As Mr Underwood rightly surmises, the customer is not always right.
On a completely different topic, a study has shown that the longer couples are married, the less time they spend talking to each other. According to The Sunday Times, the survey reveals that older couples restrict their conversation to about three minutes per hour, the topics limited to the weather and practical things like passing the tomato sauce. As would be expected, young lovers hardly shut up while newlyweds are down to 40 minutes of chat per hour, couples together sixteen years at 16 minutes to the hour and veterans of twenty years or more down to five minutes.
On that basis the Braithwaite-Churtons should be at about 4 minutes per hour, which seems quite a lot really.