I’m in the nudest McDonald’s in the world. By “nudest” I mean the “most nude”, not a McDonald’s for nudists, though you could be forgiven for confusing the two. I’ve come into the branch overlooking Australia’s famed Bondi beach, and most of the huge number of people squeezed in here are barefoot and in swimwear.
A guy in tiny shorts, who is clearly on steroids because his extreme muscularity has the suspicious plumpness of wet-cured ham, is ordering four beef patties in a plain bun, which checks out. A girl in a thong bikini is waiting for her friends nearby while working her way casually through a McFlurry. Nobody pays much attention to how naked everybody is because everybody is naked.
Being Irish, I’m wearing jeans.
It’s not as conspicuous as it sounds. Bondi is filled with residents and tourists dressed in uniforms signalling distinctly different activities – surfing, a nice lunch at an upmarket restaurant, a spin class, a walk, or lying on the beach.
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Later, a blatantly Irish girl hands me my tiramisu ice cream in the Bondi branch of my favourite ice cream chain (Messina, in case you visit – look out for the specials). I know she is and she knows I am but we don’t say anything about it. We peer at one another’s freckles with primordial recognition. I live in Canberra, where Irish accents are far less common, but meeting one of her own is clearly not an unusual occurrence for this girl. Bondi is crumbling under the weight of Irish accents, and I’ve heard more than I can count these last few days.
There were two lads in GAA jerseys in the gym when I went in. You hear as many British, American and Irish voices here as Australian ones. The night before, an extremely drunk young English woman had loudly stopped me on the street to ask me for Panadol and accuse me of being French. I had to disappoint in both cases.
Based on my shamefully lazy observation (I’m on holiday, like, and this column about the beach is hardly going to win me the Pulitzer), there are largely two kinds of people here – tourists who view Bondi as the heart of Australia because references to it have featured in films and TV since their childhood, and Australians with a lot of money. Really an awful lot of it. The sort of money that will make them feel entitled to hold up the queue while tasting 12 flavours of ice cream before choosing one because of being accustomed to a certain centrality in life.
The Irish girl gives me a stiff nod of approval when I decline her offer to taste eight flavours and just order a scoop of tiramisu in a cone. I can see the ice cream is torn through with a rich seam of coffee liqueur-soaked sponge.
This strikes me as slightly obscene, and I need no more information. Holding up a queue in Cork because you couldn’t decide between vanilla or macadamia cream would result in instantaneous, agonising death by eye-shaming. The legs would go from under you and you’d perish there and then as the queue rolled sedately past your corpse. Instead of shame, people in Bondi have confidence, money, or both.
Bondi will make you feel old and ugly very quickly, but it’s great fun all the same
This place offers some of the best people-watching I’ve ever encountered, and I say that as someone who once sat in a bar in Beverly Hills and watched a man in his late 70s unfortunately total one of his hips while trying to keep pace with his athletic 20-something-year-old Russian fiancee on the dance floor. She was wearing a diamond the size of a Fabergé egg which glittered complacently while they waited for the ambulance.
Back in Bondi, a woman marches purposefully past me in the designated Saturday morning athleisure uniform. She is talking loudly on the phone in the unmistakably oval O’Carroll-Kellyan tones of South Dublin. It occurs to me as I stand in the street in the same jeans as yesterday, eating a cream cheese bagel with both hands (like a raccoon), that her confident swagger would be highly controversial at home. Notions.
I can hear my own grandmother shrieking “she’ll get a cold in her kidneys” at the sight of an actual midriff in the actual street, but then I remember that it’s 27 degrees and everyone’s kidneys are probably safe enough. My grandmother, on the other hand, refused to wear trousers and would climb a ladder to dust the light bulbs in her below-the-knee skirts, directing everyone to look away for the protection of her modesty. I know which sort of woman I’d prefer to be on a Saturday morning.
I wonder whether this non-Irish Irish woman had to come here to Bondi to live as she pleases without anyone shouting at her about her kidneys. Or perhaps she got off the plane wearing a ploughing championship T-shirt and slowly transmogrified within this culture of sun, money, athleticism, perpetual seminudity, and unabashed self-esteem. Is there a Bondirish subculture of confident expats living in exile without a thought about their kidneys, or is there some process of Bondification that happens to Irish people if they just stay here long enough?
A while later, as I peer suspiciously at some sun hats in a charity shop (this is a very sweaty place in which to consider buying a preloved hat), the woman in the changing room next to where I’m standing is having a fight with her boyfriend on speakerphone. The curtain isn’t sufficiently closed and she is visibly conducting this disagreement in her underpants, though shutting the curtain wouldn’t have provided much more privacy. “I had vaginal rejuvenation surgery for you, you ungrateful bastard,” she shouts, not at all quietly, and I consider once again that people around here live a different sort of life to the rest of us.
Bondi will make you feel old and ugly very quickly, but it’s great fun all the same.
If you visit, do leave your jeans at home.
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