Random Thoughts Occasioned by a Week in Sydney

Lovely room, apart from the Smeg appliances, which look nice but work poorly: clearly the age-old battle between style and substance is not going well at that particular manufacturer. Now, suddenly and no doubt decades behind the rest of the world, I understand Red Dwarf a little better. Speaking of lousy engineering, in our room there is one of those electric kettles with a handle which runs across the top of the lid. The lid is tight, so you can't remove it without holding the handle. Assuming you are refilling the kettle because you have just poured out most – but not all – of the boiling water, the hand with which you are holding the damn thing is immediately engulfed in a cloud of steam which, at 100ºC, hurts. This style of kettle was designed by a particularly stupid cretin, who has obviously never actually been forced to use one of their infernal creations. (Given the chance, I'd boil their head in the f***ing thing.)

I'd better not get started on that Kiwi icon, the Fisher & Paykel washing machine, the agitator for which was designed by the previous cretin's even dimmer brother. At least the Hoover in our room doesn't have that diabolical plastic fin which is expressly designed to trap your shirt sleeves. (Hint: mount the fins upside-down, idiots.)

Food-courts – Well, of course being on vacation we ate in a few. Why do they insist upon having clean-up staff to the exclusion of ordinary trash bins. Why don't they also have McDonalds type trash bins, so that those of us who were brought up to have at least some minimal respect for our fellow-sufferers in this world, can dispose of our own rubbish and stack the tray? McDonalds has them for a reason you know. Whatever else you might think about the joints, you can just about always find a clean place to sit down and have your meal at a McD's, as opposed to the average food-court where one or two harried staff are doing their best to make a dent on several acres of filthy table-tops strewn with trays, food scraps, and all the rest of it.

Sydney has become much more expensive than it used to be.

And at every shop which is ripping you off – $35 for a couple of muffins and some drinks; it's getting as bad as London – you will likely be served by someone with Asian features. But I'm not making the association, here, that you may be thinking. It is the business owner who is gouging you; not the serving staff. My theory is that businesses interested in ripping off their customers – such as the food concessions at major tourist attractions like Taronga Zoo and the Darling Harbour Aquarium – will also be those most likely to hire cheap immigrant labour whose English is, er, not the best. Alas, the unfortunate association created between Asian faces and shops which overcharge is unlikely to produce anything good.

I bought a book called From So Simple a Beginning, a collection of four of Darwin's most significant works, including Voyage of the Beagle and Origin, published by Norton. The book was shrink-wrapped but I read with delight from the back of the slip-case that the text was "The authoritative texts taken directly from facsimiles of Darwin's original first editions" … but upon getting it home and opening it, I discover the text is not, itself, facsimile copy. So the page numbers, for a start, are meaningless. What kind of intellectual cripple came up with that notion? Don't the morons at Norton know anything about scholarship?

The Australians are even more crazy about sport than Kiwis. Every second item on the news is about some bloody sporting event or another. They treat sport almost as if it matters a damn.

Bloody useless bloody mobile phone: I finally figured out that to use it I have to dial "0011" instead of the usual "+" as on, for example, my wife's Vodaphone/GSM handset. Very bloody intuitive, I don't think. Thanks Telecom; thanks for your … consistency.

Lunar Park – a restored 1930s fair ground. All-in-all a pretty good effort, but … no Ghost Train? No hot dogs? Candy-floss in cellophane bags instead of made fresh from the machine? Ok, I can excuse all that. But not the brusque and uninformative ticket staff, for whom English is very evidently a second language. That's just crap. Expensive, too: in round terms $100 for one five year old and two parents whose only requirement was to accompany her on the attractions she is too small to ride alone (which, for a little girl in a strange city, is everything).

Another hundred bucks for the zoo. The fare included the "Sky Safari" gondola ride … which wasn't running, supposedly owing to high winds though I'm not sure I believe it. No sign of any reimbursment though. The zoo itself is pretty good; the concessions though, particularly the food-court, are shoddy and the prices usurious. Take your own packed lunch: pricks like that don't deserve your money. The actual exhibits, though relatively unimaginative in international terms, are quite good: spacious, naturalistic, and the animals look healthy, animated, and, for want of a better term, happy.

The aquarium at Darling Harbour is ordinary by international standards. The guidebook, as is so often the case at zoos and aquaria, is complete rubbish: save your money. A couple of highpoints: one leafy seadragon (he looked lonely, as he was persecuted around his tank by the range-finders of successive digital cameras being wielded by morons who invariably looked perplexed as their preview screens showed them little but the reflections of their flash-bulbs off the glass) and a tank of moon-jellies. I found it amazing to see hundreds of people using cameras to take indifferent images of various exhibits, to the virtual exclusion of using their eyes. What a vicarious existence! I seldom use a camera, these days, and then only to record my daughter growing up. If I particularly want a picture of something, there is nearly always a postcard or other professional image to be had, that is better than anything I could produce myself.

This week, Israel is bombing Lebanon with a ferocity we haven't seen for decades. The locals were holding some sort of demonstration about it the day we left. The general thrust of contemporary liberal thought seems to be that it is the "innocent" civilian population of Lebanon who are bearing the brunt of the attack – implicitly for something beyond their control; as if they are blameless. But they are not. Of course, only a monster can fail to be moved by the pain of ordinary families – hurt and mangled, and deprived of loved ones – but the fact is that, even today, Hizballah parades openly through the streets of Beirut. The Lebanese have provided Hizballah with succour, a base for their operations and, above all, anonymity, for decades. The civilian population of Lebanon are not innocents; they are the authors of their own destiny. If you're going to encourage your house-guest to poke the Big Sleeping Dog across the road, you can hardly be surprised when it wakes up and bites you.

Abbeys Bookshop – excellent, as ever, though looking ever-so-slightly more tatty than I've ever noticed previously. A newish-looking book praising Fred Hoyle's contribution to science fails to include any mention of his ignorant interloping into the field of paleontology, when he inexplicably (and idiotically) challenged the authenticity of the Archaeopteryx fossils. What a muppet. A book which I have recently purchased from Amazon.co.uk for 130 pounds is on the shelves for AUD130 … about a third the price. I could have done without noticing that! I spent some hundreds of dollars; I could have spent a thousand. Had to tear myself away….