How Health and Safety is not an Aussie term

am sitting in my bedroom on my blow up mattress ostensibly talking to my mate on skype, but really hiding from the Canberrian nutters that are letting fireworks off outside my bedroom window. It’s Queen’s Birthday weekend and thus a public holiday and a time to get pissed and eat copious quantities of incinerated barbequed meat and let some fireworks off. Aussies do it all at the same time I am finding out. And by that I mean a beer in one hand, a burger in the other and a lit firework wedged in the armpit. I watched them pile the fireworks on the table for about 30 minutes. If I stood on the table the mound would be about knee deep in things that go boom very loudly.

‘BLOODY HELL!’ I yell at my mate, ‘CAN YOU NOT HEAR THAT? JESUS H CHRIST. THAT ONE JUST ACTUALLY ROCKED THE WINDOWS! I MEAN LITERALLY ROCKED THEM.’

‘Hear what? Why are you shouting?' she asks in her typical, demure, unflappable way.

‘I am shouting because it is the only way to hear myself over the noise. And by noise I mean the war that is raging outside my window. The bombing war that is masquerading as a fireworks party.’

‘No. I can’t hear a thing.’

‘I can’t believe skype is that good. That last one was picked up on the Richter scale. Neighbours have started evacuating.’

‘What are they doing?’

‘Lobbing them at each other it seems. And then lobbing them across the ground. And that house shaker was when they actually lobbed one on the roof. Some sod is going to blow a hole through my ceiling and Cleveland or some other fella in a bath is going to land at the end of my bed in a minute. Oh, hang on...there is some commotion outside.’

'What is it? Do tell?'

'Believe it or not they have just found out that holding a beer in one hand, a burger in another and a firework under your arm is not a good plan. It just went off and hit someone in the stomach. He's showing everyone the burned hole in his jumper.'

‘It’s like boys having fun before health and safety was invented.’

‘It’s like boys having fun before common sense was invented. The only way to watch this in the garden is behind sand bags.’

I am still alive. Just.