Sunday 16 July 2006

Five Dock really is crap

Poor old Five Dock - it really is a crap suburb. We went for a walk today, wandering through the back streets of the suburb before doing a spot of shopping on the main drag and then taking a different route home. It's just crap from one end to the other. It's hard to describe why - you just have to wander around for yourself to see what I mean. Then again, why bother? It's more fun, interesting and entertaining and stimulating to wander around a good suburb like Paddington or Balmain or Newtown or Leichart (I think I screwed up the spelling of the last place).

So what makes it crap?

Well, to start with, the festy houses. Yes, all surburbs have festy houses, and some suburbs are 95% festy, but Five Dock seems to have some really awful cases of uncle fester in brickwork. I think half the problem is that the locals are in love with the cement mixer. Any flat surface is a chance to lay some concrete, rather than an opportunity to plant a lawn or cultivate a garden. Ok, I hate pushing a bloody mower around on weekends, but a lawn looks a million times better than a green painted slab of concrete, or even worse, a stretch or pebble-crete. Half an acre of pebble-crete with some cement lions in the middle of it is not the height of chic I tell you. If CSIRO was able to develop myxo to kill rabbits, they must be able to develop some sort of virulent strain of concrete cancer that will force the neighbours to jackhammer up all their concrete slabs within a decade. That would be a good start. The lack of plant life around here makes Etheopia look like a jungle.

The next thing is the totally crap cafes. A suburb should either have no cafes or it should have really good ones. If it has no cafes, you simply drive or walk or cycle or skateboard or whatever to a suburb that has good ones - eg, Kings Cross. If it has good cafes, you are in luck. You can just walk around the corner and share in the delights of a lovely place to feed and drink and read the paper. However, if you have crap cafes, you waste part of your life grazing up and down the cafe strip looking for the one place that must be good. I have this rule of eating that says that if their is a cluster of eating places in one area, one of them must be good. It just has to be. You can't have a dozen nosebags in one small area and find that all of them are crap.

Unfortunately, my rule comes to grief in Five Dock. It probably comes to grief in Penrith too. I know that it comes to grief in Campbelltown, because I have tried every cafe out there and they are all rubbish. It used to be true of Goulburn, but then one good place opened up and I was saved.

Anyway, ever since moving down to this end of the suburb, I have been wandering up to Five Dock and sampling the cafes all along the strip and so far, my conclusion is that the owners should all be fed some myxo-infected rabbits. I pity the poor council and a heap of money has been sunk into beautifying the cafe strip to try and create a Lleichardt type ambience with wide footpaths and coffee in the open air and all that kind of thing, and all they have created is a congested road through the middle of the suburb with god-awful coffee and food down both sides. I've eaten better in Wagga. If a bunch of country hicks can serve up excellent coffee and great tucker, then surely the goons up the street can do better....

Hang on - the good place in Wagga was owned by a couple of poofs. Better not mention the name or location in case the locals take exception to a couple of poofs in their midst and decide to run them out of town on a rail. Maybe that is what is lacking in Five Dock - fags. It is certainly the most un-hip suburb on the planet. Not that I am a hop kind of guy - I just like hanging out in places frequented by hipsters. Hipsters are cool with bum bandits, and the queens usually know how to cook up a storm and whip up a latte. They certainly know how to decorate a shop. Hell, if you want to be depressed and feel totally like not opening up your wallet, stroll past the shops of Five Dock. It's been a while since I was in Melbourne, but the shops down there have a look and feel that just make you want to spend all your money. Think Chapel St. With Five Dock, think Sierra Leonne. In the 1970's, we had Green Bans with people lying down in front of bulldozers in order to stop redevelopment. Now, we need to have Ugly Bans, where we steal D9's and rampage through shopping districts at 2am flattening ugly shopping strips. Five Dock has to go.

Either that, or it is time to drop in a cluster of fags. Where is the pink Hercules with the elite unit of poofs in lurid jumpsuits waiting to leap out of the back and parachute down to rejuvenate the eating experience of this area? Trouble is, it would be like that scene in Priscilla Queen of the Desert where the trannies find themselves doing a show in some complete hicksville in the middle of nowhere. I don't think they'd go down very well over here. Maybe I need to go outside and hang a "Pride" banner on the fence in the hope of attracting a few as they zip past on the way to the snow. All I'll need then is a big net and a tranquiliser gun. Not sure what I'll do after that, but it probably involves getting a lease on a shop and fitting an explosive proximity collar around their necks and telling them if they stray more than 100 feet from the coffee machine that it goes off.

Anyway, I'm in a shit mood because I had a coffee in a place called "3 punte caffe" today and it was really unnecessarily poor. The coffee making guy must have bought his coffee machine from the same place as I got my toasted sandwich maker. It was so luke warm, if I had dropped half an ice cube into it, I would have had iced coffee. I also had a vanilla slice, and I got something that looked like a vanilla slice but was in fact nothing like a vanilla slice. It was some sort of cakey shit between the most incredibly tough sheets of pastry that I have ever tried to eat. I was given a fork to eat it with, which I thought was totally unnecessary, as most vanilla slices are a bit soggy. Wrong. I needed a fork and a steak knife to eat the bloody thing. Fuck, what a waste of $4.50. Like I said, we'd be better off having nothing in the area but a bunch or boarded up shops with unconcious winos sleeping it off in the doorways in puddles of piss than these lousy, fucked up excuses for coffee shops.

Obviously someone likes their coffee and cakes because they had some kind of "Finalist" prize up on the wall for some local business cake category, and they are still in business, but they are getting no more business from me.

Bastards.

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