Proposition

Don't know if anyone's seen this movie, but there's a great moment in The Proposition when Ray Winstone, as the newly-transplanted policeman from the UK, stands out on his porch with his morning cup of tea and surveys the vast landscape of the Australian outback around his isolated property. There's the sound of flies buzzing around, the heat is already unbearable even at breafast time and there's a sense of foreboding in the air that you could cut with a knife. Ray simply looks out and asks, "Australia. What fresh hell is this?"

The same sense of bewilderment and trepidation was upon me this morning as we set out on our family trip to Ikea. On a Bank Holiday Monday. Almost anti-climactically it was pretty quiet and a not altogether horrific experience.

Talking of Nick Cave, which we were in a round about way due to his involvement in above movie, I've had one song in my head all day and it's the song that him and his Bad Seeds kicked off their set with the last time I saw him play live. They awed us with a monstrously, and I do mean monstrously, heavy version of this recentish Cave Classic.

Note: I have found it useful today to vary repeated renditions of this song by simply substituting the names of your children with 'Lazarus' when it comes to the chorus. The word 'Dig' can also be subsituted with the verb of your choice if you're feeling up to it.