Get a life people keep telling me … I’d love to

It’s 12.30 am on a wet, wet Sunday in Hobart. It’s been raining for almost three days solid. Grey is the colour of the sky, underfoot everything is sodden. I am craving a bit of fun. Good, clean, laughing fun.

I’ve done the ironing, I’ve shelled the runner beans, cleaned up a panfull of freshly dug potatoes – I’ve been a very good boy – and now I’d really, really like to go some place where the laughter rings, the music is good and not grossly amplified (the sound of Hobart is background music that sounds as if there is a mad person locked in an attic somewhere praticing the drums, kebumchuka, kebumchuka, kebumchuka, everywhere).

Not a pub, they are full no-hopers draped over the bar like washing in to dry.

A cafe? They are littered with poseurs and latte sippers whispering as if they are giving confession. I don’t want to have to go out after dark to find what I’m looking for; Polly wants a cracker and he wants it now, this (Sunday) afternoon.

Tourism Tasmania churns out mountains of glossy magazines and pamphlets with pictures of boats and buildings, seals, penguins, distant hills, rivers, posy little remote cafes (which when you get there have all the damp atmosphere of a pox doctors’ waiting room).

So where is the bloody good laugh in all of this? There isn’t one.

Nobody sings, tells stories with a joke in them; try doing the latter in a pub in Hobart.You would have more success pulling a pork sausage out of your trouser flies.

All this high-faluting Tasmanian tourism crap is giving me the heebee jeebies. There is a lot of posing going on. So like I say, where is the good laugh? No wonder people drink at home, or gamble on the pokies.There isn’t anything else to do unless you want to write a worst seller or make a forgettable CD, or sit at a computer writing this sort of thing.

Get a life people keep telling me; I’d love to. Where can I get a life with a lot more jolly laughter and fun?

Answers by email to this blog on TT.

At worst it will be a good free ad.