I should have more
self-confidence. I am not a dud human and never was. As a child I suffer no dreadful
put-downs by family or friends. But I get no encouragement either. No one
fosters my childhood passions. As a child I am good at those things I want to
be good at. I’m not fussed by the things I have no talent for, like music, drawing,
or anything mechanical.
But a chronic lack of
confidence is present from the get-go. For nine years I blunder blind as a mole
to the bus stop and stare blankly in a radius of about one metre on buses bulging
with eligible girls. I am incapable of uttering one syllable to any of the giggling
cuties wedged against me on the 623 from Chadstone to Elsternwick. Do they
laugh at me?
I have the talent to play
Australian Rules at the highest level but myopia and failed self-belief let me
down.
I should have become a
linguist. For one year and one year only—1963—my school runs a subject, in what
was then form 1, called Comparative Language. We are introduced to language at
its roots and its great traditions—Celtic, Germanic and Romance—and my thirst
for words knows no bounds. I study French for two years, Latin for one and
German for five.
Philology, the love of words, and
that branch of linguistics concerned with the origin and evolution of the
meanings of words might have been my forte. Linguistics, the arcane pursuit of
the origins, evolution and structure of languages fascinates me still.
Language and languages are not
valued when I begin university in 1971 and I see no career or future in them.
If I could return to university tomorrow, this is what I would study. I would
speak Serbian, Portuguese, Italian and Russian.
Hindsight.
The things I should not have
done are another story.
Rock on.
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