Blessed to be a witness

Thursday, 18th August

Bad dish, good dish

Good dish

We'd picked up a leaflet advertising Parkes the town, rather than just Parkes the famous dish. Amongst the delights the town offered are the Motor Museum (closed), the museum of Henry Parkes (closed), the public library, and the pool. I suggest to the city elders that they instead concentrate on what the town is famous for, and nothing else, because there clearly isn't anything much to appeal. When we arrived, we discovered that the famous radio telescope dish was a good 20-odd kilometres away and was just about to shut, so we decided to treat ourselves to a nice meal instead, rather than cooking in the van. We strolled into the centre of the town and chose the most likely-looking place to eat of the two or three establishments that weren't shut tight by 6.30 pm.

The hotel restaurant was straight out of the Fawlty Towers school of design. Stained carpet with clashing orange designs, the panels of which didn't quite meet. A draft from an open doorway, and peeling wallpaper. We should have known immediately that it wasn't promising. That we waited ten minutes for the menu with no sign of any waiting staff should have been a second sign. That there was a laminated leaflet on the table advertising a gimmick of the restaurant - serving food on piping-hot slabs of granite - that showed lurid technicolor people enjoying lurid technicolor food, images that could have come straight from the pages of a 1950s copy of 'Cooking With Lard', should have clinched our decision to walk out. Unfortunately, however, a waitress finally emerged and we felt obliged to order.

Ever since we arrived in Australia I've been seeing "curried sausage" on various menus. It sounded intriguing, so I ordered that. M ordered a fillet steak with pepper sauce. After another long wait, the food arrived. Perfectly passable slices of large sausage and perfectly well cooked rice were muddied and besmirched with the most disgusting 'curry' I've ever seen. Now, some people that know me may call me a food snob. I prefer to think of myself as someone who merely loves food: whether it's egg and chips in a greasy spoon or an amuse gouche in a Michelin-starred restaurant, I care only that it tastes good. This did not taste good. Gelatinous brown gloop clung to every part of the plate. Utterly soggy vegetables disintegrated under my knife. It was like eating vomit mixed with phlegm. M's steak was largely lumps of fat with tiny bits of very tough meat. The sauce was nice, I thought, but the limp yellow strands of I-don't-know-what (sauerkraut? We genuinely couldn't tell) that smelt like old socks and tasted what I imagine old socks to taste of, was not. We ate as much as we could and queasily went to play pool.

I retired to the bar - a brightly-lit formica-and-linoleum horror dedicated entirely to gambling - for a cigarette. I can't recall the circumstances in which it happened, but two young men ended up chatting to us. Scott and Chris were possibly the most unpleasant people I've met on this journey. Never mind that they were perfectly pleasant, if amazingly ignorant. I didn't even mind that they regularly slaughtered dozens of kangaroos and left them to rot, since they justified their actions because they work on a farm and "the 'roos are pests". But after about an hour of talking - at eleven at night - they revealed that they were on their way to the coast to go fishing. Which was no reason to think askance of them. Except that the person driving them to the coast, about a six-hour drive away, was Scott's heavily pregnant girlfriend, and that at four that afternoon they had "escaped" from her and gone to the pub. Without telling her were they were. Eventually the girlfriend and her mate tracked them down, but rather than the guys aplogising for delaying them, they told the girls they were going to have another drink. And the girls capitulated with compliantly resigned expressions. Another hour on, and they eventually decided to leave, and the girls meekly followed. They gave us their email addresses - and we gave them fake ones back.

The next day we visited the place that was the one reason actually for being in this godforsaken town. Twenty kilometres distant, the 64-metre dish, a radio telescope, looms magnificently over the huge fields of grain for a long time before arriving there. Its elegant sweep sits, unusually, on a salmon-pink cylindrical building. If it weren't for the film, of course, we'd almost certainly not have gone to see a working radio telescope; however, a sign within the small but informative visitors' centre rather sniffily informs one that the events as portrayed in the movie, wherein the small Australian dish was used to transmit the first pictures of the Apollo 11 astronauts stepping onto the moon, since the US was on the wrong side of the world at the time, didn't quite match reality: in particular the power didn't go out, and the director of the centre at the time wasn't an idiot. The centre also mentioned that most of the astronomers lived in the town of Parkes. I have no idea how they don't go insane, with people like Scott and Chris as neighbours.