Last rites

Well, I've booked my wake-up call for 5 a.m. and my airport shuttle-bus pick-up for 6 a.m. One more sleep and I'm homeward bound!

Judging by all the single mothers sitting in the cafés along Mitchell Street and sipping their Pina Coladas (don't even know how to spell the stuff let alone waste $10 a pop on it!), yesterday must've been "Pension Day". Darwin has a "Canberra-ish" sort of feel to it as, being the seat of the Territory government, it has at the bottom of every highrise building housing the myriad of government departments a constant cluster of so-called "public servants" taking their 'smokos'. My theory is that even non-smokers in the "public service" become habitual smokers so as to be able to cut down on their present-at-work hours (in other occupations known as 'working hours') from the required 7-and-a-bit to probably less than 4 or 5.

Q: Why have public servants stopped looking out of the window in the morning?
A: Because otherwise they'd have nothing to do in the afternoon ...

I have no idea what it would be like to walk around in this hot weather (or, for that matter, in any weather) with hemaroids (hemorrhoids?) up one's butt but I'm convinced it couldn't be much worse than having a heatrash up one's groin. And so I spent the afternoon in an air-conditioned arcade just outside a COLES supermarket, sitting in one of those coin-operated massage-chairs. Except this one was out of order which kind of summed up everything as I sat there with this large sign stuck on the wall above my head which read, "OUT OF ORDER".