The Day I Nearly Saved Australia
How the 2006 World Cup made fighting bushfires a cinch
My routine medical found something odd, and I was sent in for tests. An ultrasound of the waterworks. They told me to empty my bladder two hours prior, drink 600ml of water within half an hour and hang onto it.
So I got my trusty English beer glass, one liberated from Southwark during the Football World Cup in the UK a while back.
Oh, I know, but I was barely twenty, there were a bunch of us watching the summer sun sink over the Thames, and we all kept a glass as a souvenir. Very wrong of us, but I’m quite sure over that evening we paid enough for a whole tray of glasses each. And we weren’t thinking straight. Or walking straight, for that matter.
I looked at the glass, now home in Melbourne twelve years later, and more likely to contain a morning smoothie than amber ale, and it read half-pint in faded markings. OK, then.
I made a glass full of weak sarsparilla cordial, drained it over twenty-five minutes, checked Google for the metric conversion – 236 ml – gulped, made myself another, tossed that down, and had another half glass to hit my target.
Geez, 600ml is quite a bit. Now to last the ninety minutes till the appointment on the other side of town.
