Khmer New Year and the stifling heat of mid-April have conspired to cast a smothering blanket over Phnom Penh. Just about everything is shut: even the roadside barbers have folded up their chairs, unhooked their mirrors, and scattered back to the provinces to pursue the cycle of binge-eating, Buddhist offerings and family activities that marks the nation’s main annual holiday. At the height of noon, the park on Sothearos Boulevard is an empty expanse of rippling heat-mirages crowned with palms, mobile towers and the needle-points of Buddhist stupas. The streets nearby hum with sparse, listless traffic.

Since New Year in Cambodia lasts anywhere from three days to a week, we all crammed like crazy on Friday afternoon, gathering comments and making appointments before next week’s imposed curfew. Afterwards, we went to the sparkling new Phnom Penh Post office to see it blessed by a troupe of Buddhist monks, who chanted for a solid half-hour and showered the Post staff with holy water, jasmine flowers and jelly-cups. The Phnom Penh Centre, one of the city’s few dedicated office buildings, is a horrible eyesore, but the view from the new office on the eighth floor is nothing short of breathtaking. To the east lies the new Chinese-funded National Assembly building, all spires and rearing nagas, flanked by an empty lot (the new Australian Embassy), the Buddhist Institute and the Naga Casino — the latter a structure of monumental brutality, reveling like a pre-meltdown Chernobyl in its gleaming modernity. In the background — a distant brushstroke of aquamarine — lies the Tonle Bassac, thickening into khaki under the punishing sun.

The Front du Bassac apartment slums from the roof of the Phnom Penh Centre.

Westwards, the building gazes over the low sprawl of the city, a view dominated by the 300 metre-long Front du Bassac apartment slums (see March 23’s post ). As I have since learned, this entire portion of the riverfront was planned as a single housing project in the 1960s, and included three sets of apartments, a municipal park and the striking triangular prow of the Preah Suramarit Theatre, gutted by fire in 1994 and finally demolished, to the tearful anger of its architect, late last year. The Bassac slums have also been slated for demolition for some years now, but, like many things in Cambodia, the project seems to keep hitting bureaucratic roadblocks of one sort or another. While slum evictions are commonplace in Phnom Penh (they’re barely ‘news’ nowadays), the Bassac slum community is large and in uncomfortable proximity to the National Assembly. According to the government’s new Land Law, moreover, many of the inhabitants are also in legal possession of the buildings, and with a clutch of Western NGOs willing to raise hell in the courts, there’s little chance of an eviction happening soon and without fanfare. A second set of apartments, more distinguished in design, and better preserved — the old village for the athletes of the 1966 GANEFO games — sits to the north. Beyond that lies the third and most recent block, distinguished by its V-shaped roof, which was bought by the Russian Embassy in 1979 and is now used as housing for embassy staff.

The satisfaction one gets from following sport, like all human activities, is prey to the theory of rising expectations. Last week’s five-goal defeat of the Demons might as well have been a loss for all the enjoyment I got watching the game. Demons fans — who are now savouring anything better than a ten-goal defeat — would undoubtedly have enjoyed it more than Cats fans, for whom anything less than a ten-goal win now reeks of bitter failure. Last year’s Grand Final raised the bar impossibly high; now nothing short of the flawless, dizzying football that clinched the Premiership in ’07 will slake Cat fans’ awakened thirst for opposition blood. But things were different this week: I’ve always liked and feared the young St. Kilda outfit, torn between wanting to see them fail and wanting to see them raise the cup themselves sometime in the next few years. The game that rekindled my interest in football was the see-sawing Cats-Saints match at Skilled Stadium in late 2004, in which we scraped home by five points. Since then I’ve followed the rivalry with white-knuckled attentiveness.

The Saints’ strong start at Telstra Dome on Saturday afternoon was ominous, enough to bring on a twinge of that particular abdominal ache that must be unique to Geelong supporters. But almost as surely as our boys used to slowly, inexorably crumble under pressure, they now find a new gear and deftly brush the opposition aside: the pattern this year has been a slow-to-moderate opening quarter, followed by a blitzkrieg in the second and third and a listless trot home in the fourth. What a pleasure it was, sitting in a fly-blown internet café listening to the live 3AW stream, hearing the crowd rise in my cheap headphones as Steve Johnson, Chappy, Wojak, Jimmy Bartel and Joel Selwood dished out pain to the opposition! Football has become a welcome diversion overseas: home-town cultural indulgence and weekend relaxation rolled into one.