Mr Pablo's future under consideration

The de-box diet

Sydney Morning Herald
By Peter Lowndes
January 22, 2005

Agitation, cold sweats, nausea ... Peter Lowndes barely survived a week without a dose of TV.
'You can also hire a television set for $10 a week," said the woman behind the check-in desk. Two keys, one for our room and another for the bathroom, are handed over to my partner by the landlady.

Being between places, our home for the next eight days would be room seven in a 200-room city hostel.

Now would be an ideal occasion to gauge our inherent dependence upon television, something I have always been scientifically curious about. It's also the non-ratings period, when television flatlines and everybody's love for Raymond, Seinfeld or The Nanny is put to the test one more time.

I have little love for that bunch, but admit to a pious predilection for Richie Benaud. Doesn't everybody love Richie? I could survive without my regular dose of cricket if my partner could relinquish her daily immersion in the festering suds of The Bold and the Beautiful.
In the wise words of Homer Simpson: TV is your friend, although that friend does begin to smell a little during non-ratings time.

"It's just for a week," I consoled her. "We can use the time constructively." Whatever that entails.

Our challenge would be to go where so few had gone before and plumb the depths of the non-television abyss. Which may entail a detoxification of the sort experienced by divers suffering the bends.

And so we set sail that fine Friday, brimming with an optimistic sense of discovery, for now we were heading into uncharted waters.

A transcript of that epic journey:
Day 1. Spirits high on this maiden day. Much productivity transpiring, including a rough draft for a sitcom about a man who is allergic to television called Everybody Loves TV, Except Me, with Ted Danson in mind as the jaded protagonist. Hope to glimpse an albatross at some stage of the voyage.

Day 2. Are reading much, including Moby Dick, Homer's Odyssey and the poetry of John Laws. Entertaining the first mate with sea shanties done in the style of a Laws diatribe.
Gather round pansy prigsBout to give ye a spray,Uncork the Valvoline me mateyWe're bound for Double Bay.

Day 3. Dead calm. Visited a tavern to curb an impending malady that appears to herald the symptoms of "cabin fever". Symptoms include delusions of Kelsey Grammer, quoting the bedside Bible and restless-leg syndrome.

Day 4. The nights now truly starless without Rove guiding us through the mire. No sign of the albatross yet.

Day 5. Dire times. Dissent mounting in first mate, who is sorely missing her beloved Bold and the Beautiful and could well do with a reality slap from Donald Trump or Richard Branson.

Day 6. Rough seas. Nausea and vomiting induced from overhearing Eddie McGuire on television in quarters near to ours. The enemy is near, my friend, and he sports an antenna on his crown.

Day 7. Locked inside the cabin as the situation turns perilous on deck. Crew has turned mutinous and is attempting to lure me from the captain's quarters with bogus sightings of an albatross. The horror! The albatross?

Day 8. Land ahoy! Or, rather, check-out day. Seven nights on the high seas without Friends, Kerri-Anne, Eddie or ad breaks has cleansed mind, body and soul, but only temporarily. After finding our sea legs, we settle later into our new television-friendly abode, complete with two sets, pay TV and numerous remotes.


Team hugs all round, although no hugs for the television set - not until interactive TV is bona fide, anyway. The experiment has been a triumph despite the delirium and seasickness, and it even appears that little was missed on Bold and the Beautiful; Brooke is still the scourge of those Forrester men.

Upon the lounge I contemplate our voyage into darkness; something of a modern odyssey, at times invoking the legend of Homer (particularly that episode where the TV is hocked to pay for a Simpson family therapy session).

It is between innings in the cricket later on that I switch to the Discovery channel and finally catch a glimpse of the elusive albatross. Seems smaller than I had envisaged.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/TV--Radio/The-debox-diet/2005/01/21/1106110924026.html

Doing quality time

By PETER LOWNDES
May 28, 2006
Destination: Victoria Australia Theme: Eccentricities


Peter Lowndes escapes to a former prison site with star appeal.

The notion of an island as an exotic place to escape to has not always been a realistic one. For a while there, islands were viewed as ideal enclosures for criminals, an island's remoteness perfect for isolating and banishing inmates from society and the mainland.

Island prisons such as Alcatraz were renowned for being near impossible to escape from. Closer to home, Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour was notorious, and Rottnest Island functioned as a prison once. Of course, Tasmania began as one giant penal colony and island Australia was originally - well, you get the picture.

Most of these places have since been rehabilitated into tourist attractions and holiday destinations. The thought of being marooned on an island, encased by water, now seems idyllic to most, but not to those island inmates who dreamt of little else but escape.

French Island, in Victoria's Western Port, was another island of incarceration, being home to the McLeod Prison Farm from 1916 to 1975. The naming of the island comes from a French scientific expedition in 1802.

French Island itself remains something of an unspoilt and untapped location and two-thirds of the island is gazetted as national park. Whereas nearby Phillip Island is a renowned tourist destination, French Island remains, in comparison, the quintessential deserted island. There are more than 230 species of birds and a significant koala colony, the members of which outnumber humans.

Many of my summer holidays as a child were spent at a place called Lang Lang, across the water from French Island.

We sometimes took an outboard boat across (French Island is accessible only by boat or ferry) to explore the mostly uninhabited island and the abandoned prison site.

One could wander freely from cell to cell and even sit in the diabolical-looking old dentist's chair. Given that it was prominently a reformatory prison (prisoners were encouraged to produce their food on the farm), it did not give off that oppressive "escape at all costs" air of your typical prison. Still, it was a prison and some did not take to being incarcerated.

The old-timers of Lang Lang could recall occasions when prisoners attempted to escape by swimming across the bay to the mainland. Some got stuck in the mud after misjudging tide times. Two-thirds of the island's coastline is mudflats and mosquitoes are in abundance. Not the ideal place to plonk a Club Med. French Island is more in the Club Mud mould.

Once off the island, the escapees ransacked the uninhabited beach shacks for food and fresh clothes. But all they got were tins of baked beans, daggy beach-house flannels and a bottle of beer if they were lucky. Undernourished and in ill-fitting rags, they were usually picked up on the highway to Melbourne.

I visited in mid-January and was informed that Kylie Minogue had bought a property on French Island. She has since bought another 80 hectares, expanding her retreat to 100 hectares. I know, too, that ex-Beatle George Harrison once had a house on Hamilton Island, but seldom used it, and I thought this the likely case with Kylie. She probably has property in exotic and idyllic locations around the globe.

So to hear of Kylie actually heading to her French Island getaway earlier this year left me dumbfounded - even more, the rumours that she might just marry there. Why would she go to a place that has only one general store, 70 residents, is inaccessible by car and has minimal modern conveniences? Sure, Kylie's boyfriend is a Frenchman but French Island is about as Gallic as Paris, Texas.

But the island must appeal to someone trying to temporarily get away from the rat race. And that's all of us at some time or other. Doubly so if you are a celebrity hoping to find a haven away from prying eyes.

Odd, how one man's prison can be refashioned into another's haven. What would the island's inmates make of the organic restaurant that sits on the prison site and the fact that 40 of the remaining cells are used for accommodation? There is also a camping ground at Fairhaven and a few B&Bs. The best way to view this unspoilt island and its remote beaches is on a hired bike or via an organised eco-tour.

I only hope there is a song on Kylie's next album that touches on the convict experience at French Island. Perhaps a tale of swimming for it at low tide (The Tides are a'changing) or getting stuck and waiting for the tide to come back in (Stuck in the Mud with You). Or perhaps a funked-up My Island Home.

TRIP NOTES
* Ferries leave from Stony Point on the Mornington Peninsula or Cowes on Phillip Island. Timetables: http://www.interisland-ferries.com

* A permit for vehicles must be obtained in advance from Parks Victoria: 131 963.

* There is one general store.

* Eco Tours 1300 307 054; http://www.frenchisland ecotours.com.au.
* McLeod Eco Farm 5678 0155, French Island B&B 5980 1209, French Island Farm 5980 1278, camping 5986 8987.

Original article:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/victoria/doing-quality-time/2006/05/30/1148754975470.html

On Bland Street, each day is a flavourless feast

By PETER LOWNDES
964 words
Jan 20 2007
The Sydney Morning Herald (Saturday Spectrum)

IMAGINE, IF YOU can, being rendered incapable of different-iating between caviar canapes and Vegemite on toast. Imagine being impotent to the simplest culinary pleasures, such as the barbecue in Barbecue Shapes, or to be oblivious to the flavour and character in a glass of fine wine. Forget smell, too, for aromas such as freshly baked bread and coffee impart no bouquet.

Once, I could not drive past a winery or walk past a tasting station without sampling the wares on offer. I considered myself something of a card-carrying epicurean but am now an outsider in the club. There is no reason to splurge on the palate any more, since the palate no longer pontificates upon the morsels that pass its way. Appetite remains, but without taste. The pleasure of eating has elapsed, which means fancy food makes as much splash as a tin of baked beans.

The term given for this particular malfunction of the olfactory system is anosmia, which comes from the Greek; an(no)-osmia(smell). Although there are variants to this affliction, anosmia is defined as a complete rather than a partial loss of smell (hyposmia). A further variant of rotten-egg proportions is phantosmia where everything smells foul.

It is commonly held that 70 per cent to 90 per cent of what we call taste emanates from our sense of smell or the olfactory nerve. As taste is largely determined by smell, so a loss of smell in this case also bequeaths a loss of taste. Try eating with your nostrils pinched and you get the picture.

"We underestimate the importance of smell to our wellbeing," says Professor Tim Jacob from the school of biosciences at Cardiff University. "There are suggestions that it can influence mood, memory, emotions, mate choice and the immune and endocrine systems. Anosmia can affect people socially, psychologically and physiologically. It can lead to a loss of libido - because a lot of human interaction is down to smell - and weight loss or gain, because people with no sense of taste can forget to eat or eat too much."

The frustrating thing is that I do not know how I came to acquire this particular disorder that now plagues me. It was just after I had finished my wine appreciation class and was out celebrating with the rest of the group that I became afflicted. One day I was the consummate connoisseur and the next I could not smell or taste a thing.

I initially put it down to a minor cold and the previous night's revelry but grew concerned a few days later when my senses were not restored. The most common form of smell loss is a blockage caused by nasal polyps, although damage to the olfactory nerves via a heavy cold, head injury or trauma has the same effect.

My only prior knowledge of anosmia came from a British backpacker I had worked with years earlier. He was incapable of taste, yet stoically accepted his situation and consumed whatever his girlfriend served up.

He indicated, however, that for one week each year his senses would randomly revisit him and they would splurge at a few fancy restaurants. Still, the rest of the year was devoid of the culinary pleasures many of us take as a given. With that bit of dreaded knowledge in the back of my mind I sought a remedy for my condition.

I consulted a local doctor, who diagnosed me to be suffering from sinusitis and prescribed a treatment involving an array of nasal sprays. After a few weeks, and with scant improvement, I sought more specified advice and arranged to see an allergy investigator.

Allergy investigators endeavour to pinpoint the particular cause of an ailment and are considered helpful if a patient fails to respond to conventional medicine. He undertook a skin prick test on me, in which I was exposed to an assortment of moulds, pollens and susceptible foods.

He presented me with a list of products that should be taken out of my diet, which included milk, chilli, mushrooms and yeast products. I drank no alcohol, assuming that the yeast in beer was a likely culprit, and even reached a new personal best of 10 consecutive days without a drink.

It was suggested that my condition may have something to do with the environment I lived in, too. Unable to pinpoint a culprit, he suggested shifting house as an option, a suggestion I thought more befitting the predicament of someone living in a haunted house.

After a year without taste and smell I resign myself to life on Bland Street, which is not unlike a prison sentence; the chow is the same gruel each day and the booze may as well be fermented from potato peelings. I live in hope that my taste buds will be free again some day but, for now, mine is a flavourless feast.

Losing your sense of smell at the age of 35 is daunting and, although there are reported instances in which taste and smell actually returns to sufferers, I am for the most part forlorn.

There are, however, a couple of positives that need to be noted, although they hardly counter the negatives. The first is that I am spared all those putrid smells omitted by the world and its inhabitants. The second is that I no longer need abide by the draconian rules related to food and wine matching. I can quaff a plum cabernet sauvignon with a dozen oysters if I should so choose. I am in poor taste after all.