Westport Ho!

I spent the weekend in Westport with a covers band. Westport is a coastal mining town with a population of 3,900 (thanks wikipedia), and visiting it is like going back to a better time when towns had 4 banks and 1 supermarket and 20 pubs (not kidding) and a pint of beer is $5 and a jug of beer is $9 (not kidding) and if it's a special occasion you wear your nice gumboots. Sign on shopfront: "Get Ready for Santer!" Apparently Crissmiss is coming (thanks wikipedia).

On the way over, in the car, Owen and I played the best travel game ever. It is called 'Tractor' and these are the rules.

1. Every time you see a tractor, you shout "Tractor!" and, if you are the first person to see it, you get a point.
2. A Moving Tractor is worth 2 points.
3. A Dead Tractor (rusty and/or obviously not functional) is worth 3 points
4. An Aquatic Tractor (tractor in river) is worth 4 points
5. A Tractor On Fire is an automatic win (this has never happened).

It's a great game. Maybe you should play it. (On the way back we played a game called Have You Eaten? which was not an official game, just a line of conversation that Jin (sulky Chinese guitarist) started and would NOT stop. Jin: "Have you eaten rabbit?" Brief discussion follows. Pause. Jin: "Have you eaten...llama?" Discussion. Pause. Jin: "Have you eaten...swan?" It went on for, I am not kidding, an hour. I had a nap and when I woke up it was still going on. "Have you eaten...piglet?" I got the giggles and had to look out the window for a while because Jin already doesn't like me very much, and he was playing Have You Eaten? with deadly seriousness.)

The hotel we stayed in - which was also where the band played - was over 100 years old and apparently haunted (although I slept like a drunken log). The owners of the place had added to the overall spookiness by painting a Face on the glass door leading to the first floor balcony. The face looked like the product of a union between Legolas (Orlando Bloom version) and David Bowie in Labyrinth. It was more ridiculous than eerie, but our friends the Oxford boys (a pair of tanklike, freckled brothers who came along for the ride) took one look at it and changed hotels. I mocked the shit out of this - they are HUGE and it is a PAINTING - but it turns out they are preacher's children and don't like ghosts. LOL.

Lots of other stuff happened - my favourite thing about Westport was that the sidewalk had spray-painted NO DOGS signs, but the bar the band played in had no problem with the three dogs that came and went throughout the gig - but I am really meant to be working, so more on this later.

In other news, why would you call your child Denis? Or anything else that is only one letter away from the genitals?