I’m quite ready to ditch the topic of all things Australian after the miserable petering out of our feeble efforts in the cricket.
I’m still trying to find the best synonym of “humiliating” to describe it. On a scale of one to ten, with one being “Well played, chaps! It was a close run thing but the opposition were just a little too strong.” And ten being “You poor bastards, what an absolute drubbing, lucky there’s no tradition of downtrou in cricket…”, where did this game actually lie?
Anyway, I will mention an incident that happened last Thursday evening. We were having dinner at a posh restaurant and we could hear some Australian voices behind us. The group were in town for the cricket, according to our waitress. Remember this was Thursday night so the cricket wasn’t going too badly for us at that stage (we had Australia on 275 for 9 or something similar). They were two middle aged couples, and they were describing the love life of a young man they all knew. Apparently his relationship was in trouble. He had asked his girlfriend to marry him but she had said no. “So gutting for the guy! I’d be absolutely devo.” I wondered what “devo” meant but then I figured out it was short for “devastated”. This is an example of the Australian tradition of cutting words and names and then inexplicably adding an “O” on the end, viz” “Davo”, “Johnno”, “blotto”. I’m guessing the booze shops that call themselves “Bottle o” are Australian in origin, or are wannabes, which is surely worse.