Mr Sandy Pants turns Japanese
12th April, 2007
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The woman had a Japanese accent - hardly surprising as she was Japanese - and was smiling as she looked at me and said: "Take 43 seconds. Enjoy." It had been a Japanese weekend, beginning at a hotel in Surfers Paradise where I had been so careless as to stand in front of a lift. Suddenly the doors slid open and a second later I was pinned against the opposite wall by a flood of grim-faced Japanese humanity that carried all before it. "Sayonara," I yelled as I slid down the wall and the tide receded.
Earlier that day, while suffering a bout of temporary insanity, I had allowed myself to be coerced by my wife into taking a surfing lesson. Having interrogated my tutor as to recent bluebottle sightings - I have a recurring nightmare in which I get stung in the groin - and having been assured I was safe, I splashed into the water to revisit those halcyon days of my teenage years. Revisit them I did, catching a wave, getting up on one knee and then falling off the board and spearing head-first down the face of the wave into the sand, eventually being washed up onto the shore with salt water and sand oozing from my ears, eyes and mouth. "Just like the good old days," I gasped as I lifted my head, opened one eye and beheld a pair of white, hairless legs terminating in thong-clad feet standing a metre from my nose. I rolled on my side, squinted up into the sun and tried to identify the shape looming over me. A lifesaver perhaps, come to rescue me from my self-destructive impulses, but since when did bronzed Aussie lifesavers have white, hairless legs? I tried to get up but couldn't, not because my legs no longer worked but due to the weight of the several tonnes of sand that had found their way into my boardshorts. I looked up to find myself peering into the lens of a video camera, behind which was a Japanese tourist. As I type this, a group of people is gathered in a living room somewhere in Japan watching a video of a sun-drenched holiday at Surfers Paradise - highrise, surf, Sea World. Suddenly the screen fills with the image of an Anglo-Saxon male of insignificant build, eyes blood-red from the salt water and hair standing on end. Once this footage hits the Internet, I predict a sharp downturn in Japanese tourism to the Gold Coast. "Sayonara," I snarled at the candid camera person as his thongs and pale legs flip-flopped up the beach. The tumble from the board had obviously short-circuited my brain. Only this could explain why a few hours later I was facing the lady with the Japanese accent. "Forty-three seconds," she repeated, and with that the doors to the lift slid shut and terror gripped my heart, for the lift was in Q1, the world's tallest residential tower.
"Ooooohhhhh," gushed my wife.
I harbour an absolute terror of heights but I was with my missus, and a combination of male machismo and peer pressure dictated that I get into the lift. As we ascended and some idiot counted off the seconds, I could, in my mind, as clearly as if the lift had a glass floor, see the vertical lift shaft stretching away beneath us. I was trying to decide which passenger I would throw up on first when the doors opened and my wife ran squealing out onto the observation deck, 78 floors above the beach. I shuffled sideways towards the café in the centre of the large room until I had edged alongside a chair into which I slid very slowly, gripping its edges with both hands. Then I thought I felt the tower move. What if it fell over? What if there was a fire? What if a sudden gale blew all the windows and sucked us to our deaths? All but overcome by paranoia, I shuffled back to the lift, which fell like a rock to the ground floor. Whhhooooossshhh!
"You enjoy?" asked the Japanese lady.
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