delay

Three busy days in the office culminate with a late-afternoon train trip to Castlemaine for my last training session with a group of local mentors.

A large young man sits opposite. His belly balloons from a tee-shirt that cannot span it as he wrangles a bag into the overhead rack. His neck, a deviationless extension of his torso, reddens under the strain. He wheezes audibly from standing on tip-toe, gulps the life out of a ventilator, and sags into his seat and half the seat beside him.

The 4:15 pulls out on time. I’m reading The silence of the lambs. Many regard it as a masterpiece and I want to find out why. Improbable crimes of ultimate horror are not my cuppa; it is brilliant for what it is, for the genre, and I enjoy the tension.

As we pull into Kyneton the driver asks the conductor over the PA to proceed to the rear car when the train reaches the station. A few minutes later she announces a delay due to medical emergency.

Suddenly Fat Boy is out of his seat and straining his ear at the driver’s door. He tells me someone’s had a heart attack. Now he’s on his mobile, barking orders to his interlocutor to get on the scanner and listen to the ambulance frequency. Immediately he reports that they’ve requested a MICA, so we’ll be late home.

I know my slender time allowance to get from station to elderly citizens hall is blown. I have no contact number for Elaine, the program co-ordinator. I sit philosophically at the front of the lead car, picture mentors leaving the hall, making their disgruntled ways home.

Ten minutes later I’m scrabbling in my bag for my bleating phone. It’s Elaine. I give her the news that I’m blighted by train miscarriages. She says she’ll pick me up at the station.

The mentors are waiting patiently when I arrive, about 25 minutes late. Our topics tonight are mental health, drugs and alcohol, and the strengths approach. Despite my tiredness and suppressed stress about being unpunctual, I facilitate the group nicely. They’re smart as, full of bonhomie and good questions.

A woman visits me at the interval and says I should shut Ray up. I sympathise, tell her I’m patient. He is a pain. At the end of the night he drives me back to the station, tells me we’re kindred spirits and offers me his telephone number. I decline, but tell him I’d accept it if he were a woman.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says.

“I know you didn’t, Ray.” I close the door and make for the deserted platform, a citrus tart in my pocket to devour on the long trip into the night along with The silence of the lambs.

I finish the book at Mitcham. Three stations to go.

Rock on. 

cords

I’m choking in cords. I ride to work, lugging a heavy little laptop on my back; it won’t fit in my rack-sack. On my Collingwood desk is a monitor, keyboard and mouse. I place my laptop on the far right-hand corner of my cubicle and the fun begins.

I plug a blue network cord into the LAN port* and connect my four-port USB hub at the rear of the laptop. I attach the cords from the monitor and the keyboard. I connect the power cord to the wall socket at one end and to the transformer thingy at the other end and connect that to the yellow-rimmed computer socket. A snarl of copulating snakes now occupies the rear of my desk.

I extract more cords from my bag—a USB cord to charge my phone from my computer, and two more USB cords that charge the front and rear lights for my bike, drained after I set off in the dark. And the impossible to control cord for the ear-buds I use when receiving calls to my mobile in a sometimes noisy office.

Interstate travel unleashes another flurry of cordage. There’s a power cord for the camera battery charger, and the connecter for the camera to the laptop because the storage card is incompatible with the slot in the laptop. On trips away I take my private mobile phone which has a recharging cord and head-phone cord.

Cord management is a post-modern art-form, under and on desks, in shoulder-bags and laptop bags, in briefcases, portmanteaux and carry-on luggage. I use small Velcro straps to secure thick power cords and to rope together several cords all headed in the one direction. But some cords defy taming—headphone ear-buds can be neatly rolled but never unroll without needing unknotting.

Some cords I place in small sunglasses bags, a moderately successful strategy. A cord on its lonesome doesn't look like much, but bundle the above lot together and you’ll be hard pressed to beat the weight restriction on the most generous airline. Wifi should simplify things, but doesn’t.

I remember a time before cords, a wondrous age when I wasn’t connected. I knew no better. I dreamed not of pulling a phone from my pocket and dialling Belgrave or Belgrade. I stored questions in my head till I got home and pulled a dictionary or encyclopaedia off the top shelf. I arranged paper-clips and rulers and an old mug of pens on my desk, not my desktop.

What happened to us?

  

Rock on. 

*Pardon me if I get these IT terms wrong. 

limpet

On Saturday I take the Red Star on its inaugural outing on the Mullum Mullum Trail. One kilometre tells me the frame is too big. But what can you do? No other shop stocks the Charge Filter and the importer is pulling the pin on this model. Getting a medium frame is never an option.

I stop in a side street and lower the seat about a centimetre. My legs feel the right length now but still I feel like I’m perched on the bike. In every other way I like it. It’s no lightweight racing machine, but no heavier than the Rocket. The three-by-eight gearing fits my riding style more than clusters of nine and ten sprockets.

The dropped bars are shallow and raked back—more hand positions. The treaded tyres grab the wet gritty gravel path. The brakes need hard pulling but will seat themselves in time. The mudguards keep my feet dry as I whip through a few puddles. Nice.

I buy three books at Eastland, including Robbie McEwen’s autobiography, One way road, stow them in my new rack-sack and pedal home.

This morning I’m primed for my first Red Star ride to work. It’s cold, grey as; I’m rugged up. I’m sluggish, not fit, but the machine runs like a charm. The frame that seemed too big on Saturday seems fine now; I feel like I’m in it, not on it.

      

Twenty kilometres along the chain won’t shift to the big chainring. When I jump out of the saddle to pump up to the Belford Road crossing the chain slips, then seizes, and the back wheel freezes. Only the cyclone wire fence holds me upright, separates me from the Eastern Freeway roaring below, keeps me from kissing the bitumen.

I struggle out of the clips and push the Red Star to the top. This is not good. I can’t see anything obviously out of place but when I lift the rear and turn the cranks the back wheel simply falls out of the drop-outs. I snug it back, screw it in tight and close the quick-release. How it undid itself must remain a mystery. Everything works perfectly again.

The ride home is better than the ride to work. I feel strong even though it’s uphill into the dark. Perhaps a happy and productive day at work does this to me. The alternative to riding home would be nodding off on the train.

The bike is a workhorse, sound and solid. It hikes along but sits on the path like a limpet. I’m chuffed.

Rock on. 

weddings

My sister informs me that one of my twin nieces plans to marry. Her fiancé Carlos is to ask her father, my former brother-in-law, a pompous and obnoxious git, for her hand. I do more than scoff. My niece plans on the full white wedding which my sister is expected to help pay for. By now I’m apoplectic.

My son Mo rings to ask about mail still arriving here for him and Katie. I mention his cousin’s intended nuptials. He tells me he will probably soon ask Katie’s father if he can marry her. They’ve been talking about engagement for a couple of months. Katie would like to marry and Mo is happy to please her. It’s an endearing quality in him. He assures me any ceremony will be modest.

I’m sort of chuffed that a lovely young woman wants to marry my son. On the other hand, I hope they realise that it is against my principles to contribute a red cent toward the cost of such an event.

My mother and I come to verbal blows over the whole business. She finds the cost of the ‘full catastrophe’ ridiculous, but regards marriage as you’d expect a woman of her generation to regard it. The prospective groom asking the bride’s father for her hand is a tradition worth upholding, a courtesy. She likes courtesies, politeness.

I regard it as a tradition hung over from another age, both sexist and patriarchal. Why, I ask, should the bride not ask the groom’s mother for her son’s hand in marriage? Is not the underlying notion of asking the bride’s father tantamount to viewing a woman as a chattel to be given away?

I ask my good woman why the bride doesn’t ask the groom’s mother for his hand in marriage. She laughs: because she will never give her son away, she says. Such wisdom. When her former husband Viktor asked my good woman’s father if he could marry her, her father suggested Viktor was asking the wrong person, and told him to ask her.

I don’t care for weddings. I’ve never been to one I enjoyed. Partly it’s my cynicism, that this really is the start of the end. And it’s my belief that marriage is a dead institution, a religious construct to allow churches get their grubby sanctimonious paws all over people’s lives, and a social construct to enable goods and chattels to remain within ‘the family’.

As a statement of two people’s intention to reside in the same house and commit to try to make a relationship work, a business contract seems better than a public squandering of an obscene amount of money.

Include me out!

Rock on. 

nerrina

Love, depicted by John Lennon and Christians alike, is such an easy thing. “All y’need is love” and “Jesus is love”. It’s nonsense, of course. Love is neither easy to describe or explain or do.

My good woman and I drive to Bendigo. It’s a cold Sunday morning and I winkle her out of my winter-doona’d bed with difficulty. Somewhere round Gisborne the car finally warms up. My good woman rolls down the window. Another hot flush. Regulating her world is impossible.

We park at Bendigo’s Lake Weeroona, a shallow artificial ditch filled with muddy water and ducks, encompassed by a path of 1.4 kilometres. Electric barbeques squat under open canopies amid rows of picnic benches. A toilet block, rubberised children’s playground, and trailers dispensing coffee, donuts and hot dogs complete the idyll.

An older model 4WD rolls in, my daughter Gemma at the wheel. Her partner Richie unbuckles my grand-daughter while Gemma brings a picnic basket of sourdough bread she’s baked, home-made pickles and chutney. Nerri looks at me as though she’s never seen me before.

Four years ago I jokingly tell my daughter to look out for a job for me in Bendigo. She does. I catch the train to interviews, take up a contract. I’m delighted to be near my daughter. We have long conversations at my kitchen table, look after each other’s dogs. I am there when the Black Saturday fire takes their house.

She gets pregnant but moves to remote Western Australia where Richie gets a job. I miss Nerri’s birth. They come back to Bendigo, but now my job is done and I’ve returned to Melbourne. I desperately want the bond and relationship with my grand-child that my grand-parents never made with me.

We eat lunch. Gradually Nerri  livens. She repeats the final word of every sentence. She points at things, mostly dogs, and we look. I put her on my shoulders and carry over to the ducks. She’s wary of ducks, not sure about the chocolate-coloured bear my good woman gives her.

We are all in thrall to this 20-month old human. It won’t always be like that. We will disappoint her and she us. Our love for her will change over time as my love for my daughter has changed, from the wondrous love I had when she was Nerri’s age, through the anguished love of a single father for his pained adolescent daughter, to the proud admiring love of her as a mother.

Richie is doing Skype interviews for jobs in the Kimberley. I will lose the presence and company of my daughter again, be a stranger to my grand-daughter, that a few hours like today’s cannot undo.

I am but the bow from which my children have gone forth as living arrows. I cannot catch an arrow, can only guess where it will land. Love, however described or explained, is a ruthless bastard. It breathes life into us and kills us.

  

Rock on. 

bemboka

Late in 1974 Ro, Rock, Robyn and I leave Kendall Street behind Ringwood Station and move into an old farmhouse in Warranwood, ruined apple orchard country. Bemboka Road snakes its dusty pot-holed way from Kalinda Road at the Ringwood end to the power pylons in Wonga Park. It’s a dream.

I claim a tacked-on room with louvered verandah, sink and shower in the covered gap between house and extension. I come and go as I please, cook my own meals, point the shower-nozzle out the window and soap up under a mountain fern overhanging the verandah in hot weather.

Robyn’s horses Ben and Zack (Isaac) pootle around on five acres and are floated elsewhere each weekend to jump hurdles and prance around on sawdust. Eccentric Ro nurses her motorbike-accident-riven body in the sun around the side of the house. She has bad body odour.

Rock teaches remedial English at Yarra Valley Grammar where our road meets Kalinda Road. He immediately decamps next door to live with randy Kate and her two young sons. They fuck day and night, and at recess too if he has a spare the period after.

Hidden in the bush a kilometre further down Bemboka Road is a large lily-padded dam. Over summer we swim naked, loll about toking joints on the grassy verge. We and our dogs know no boundaries. The Pod produces a pod, eight puppies born under a bench in an old laundry at the back of the house. Grogan, son of Pod, joins us while the others all find owners.

I become Sailor after my character in John Arden’s Live like pigs, and complete my teacher training as a double drama major. End-of-year tours presenting OCERITs (observed community experiences re-interpreted in theatre) to secondary schools around Victoria highlight my callow existence.

Carlton United Breweries employ me at their hop research station on Maroondah Highway on Fridays when I have no lectures. I have long deep-and-meaningfuls with the young researcher over cups of tea in the laboratory, weed acres of hop garden, train runners up strings, water the seedlings and ventilate the glasshouses over weekends.

On Saturdays I man the back flank for Ringwood. Four times we come up short against our arch-enemy East Ringwood, by two points each time in home and away games, three points in the second semi, and eight in the grand final.

Donnybrooks blot Eastern District League games. After a final against Ferntree Gully I escort several team mates from the field and we wait in the sheds until the rest of the team and bloodied club officials arrive. Opposition WAGs pillory my refusal to assault their husbands and boyfriends.

I finish third in the club best and fairest; the word fairest is important to me. The spirit of the game means as much to me as the skills and the fierce desire to beat an opponent.

Rock on. 

the red star

I sit at my good woman’s early-morning table while she prepares for work and her kids get ready for university and school. The Hertz office is at the end of her street. I return the rental car at eight and drive to Mick’s cyclery to pick up my new bike. He makes a couple of final adjustments and adds a bidon cage. I tote the machine across the puddled forecourt and fiddle it into the Jazz.

The rain is incessant, the forecast is for May’s monthly rain total in a day, with a gale-force southerly in the afternoon. It’s not a day to ride. I park the Red Star in the front room, the bike room, and wonder where to begin. First I must abandon all appointments for the day—I’m knackered after two 14-hour days and trips to Ballarat, Geelong and Castlemaine.

After making phone calls, texting texts and sending emails, I descend on the front room and circle the two-wheeler. It needs a pump, tool kit, bell, computer, pedals and lights. And so begins a day of cycle foolery. I have a spare pump in the bike cupboard, but can’t find the clamp. I dig out two bells but the clamps are too small for the handlebar.

The lights are easy. I unscrew the clamp bracket of my recently-acquired Cygolite Expilion 350 lumen headlight from the Red Rocket and fit it to the Red Star. I point the beam where it won’t burn out oncoming retinas, then attach the tail light to the rear rack. A cinch.  

I cut the ties off the wireless computer and transmitter on the Raceline MTB and fit them to the Red Star’s stem and left fork. No fiddling, no fuss. I reset the computer for wheel size, odo and time, spin the front wheel, and black digits pop up all over the LCD screen.

I haul the big box of bike bits out of the cupboard and rummage, unearthing three sets of SPD pedals. One turns out not to be a pair, one won’t accept my cleats, and the other has plastic flats on one side that are the devil’s work to extract. The rummaging turns up the pump clamp and a fine bell that fits the handlebar.

I load a waterproof jacket into the rack-pack, a set of tyre levers, multi-tool, new tube, patch kit and expensive locking device from Germany. To finish the job I peel off every unnecessary sticker—frame-size, frame-maker’s brand, importer’s details, brand name on the forks—but leave Mick’s shop sticker.

To round off the day I pull the knobbies of the Raceline, whack on some slicks, and install a new combination cable lock on the seat tube. I have one too many bikes under the loft bed. The MTB will go: my good women’s kids can ride it to the gym.

And tomorrow I will ride the Red Star.

Rock on. 

transportation

Transport these days can feel more like transportation—in the sense that one is made to feel like a criminal.

The other day I exit Parliament Station and cross to the tram platform on the Lonsdale Street corner. A 96 departs and an 86 rattles up to take its place. I barely break stride as I step aboard and hold my myki on the pad till it beeps. An announcement: more ticket inspectors. In plain clothes. Then the catchphrase: more checks, more fines, more often. Welcome aboard.

Airport pretentiousness gets right up my nose. Flights don’t travel to a destination, but through to wherever they’re going. Now V/line announcers are catching the add-an-unnecessary-preposition virus.

Once on board the plane you can wander aimlessly about the aisle but if seated your seatbelt must be fastened low and tight at all times. And window shutters must be pulled up for landing. Is there any good reason for this or are the airlines pulling the pud? You’re a prisoner in their plane and you’ll do as they damn well command. 

Metro, our train service provider, has pulled a great con. To save their sorry arse they’ve tinkered with the timetables, adding minutes to most journey times, so as to reduce the number of trains falling outside the government punctuality benchmarks. Formerly ‘on-time’ trains now actually run early. As a traveller, you can’t win.

And, of course, the Great Myki Fiasco. Hundreds of people incarcerated underground in loop stations, unable to get to the surface because the card readers are inferior and insufficient in number. Blind Freddy could see the problem coming.

Despite all this, we must travel. Or go nowhere. There is indeed something noble about the humble traveller. And even more noble about the traveller as captive of the train, tram or airplane he dares set foot on. It is, as everyone knows, better to travel that to arrive. My view is that travelling makes arrival so much more pleasurable.

Today MM pay for me to hire a car to get to Geelong, then Castlemaine, and back to Melbourne. I  rock in to Hertz’s Vermont office just after eight. And leave at 8:40. Their computers are on go-slow. The women behind the counter are tearing their hair out waiting for receipts to print. I remain philosophical. And a prisoner in their grubby office. What can you do?

Rock on. 

days like these

The radio alarm rouses me at 6:15. I contemplate lying abed for another minute or two or even till the news at 6:30. But no. I need to be on the 7:32 to Ringwood so I swing the legs out from under the warm doona, make to stand, lose my balance, put a hand on the bedside table for balance. The top flips up, catapults the clock-radio, a torch, glasses case and candle across the room.

I climb off my knees and cross the floor to the light switch. I retrieve the flung items and replace them. I cook porridge and make toast while rounding up clothes to wear. The toast burns. I rush it to the back door and Frisbee it into the garden. I cut another slice and continue about my business. This slice burns even quicker. I sling it after the first, cut another piece of bread and eat it raw.

I allow extra time at the station to book my ticket for Ballarat, but the bloke behind the glass tells me the system is down and he can’t sell me a ticket. He suggests I go to Mooroolbark, though I can’t imagine why. The tannoy announces that the 7:32 won’t run today, nor the train after it. I begin to wonder what sort of day this is going to be. The portents are not propitious.

I sit on a cold steel seat and wait for the next train, barely able to see the platform’s edge for the gaggle of frustrated commuters in front of me. At Ringwood I alight and cross the ramp to the Eastland side of the station. The unglued sole of my boot trips me at the bottom of the ramp, pitching me into some street furniture.

  

I’m being picked up in the furthest corner of the underground car park before the Vic MM team motor down Eastlink to Frankston.

The second day’s training is awful. Sasha and I confabulate sotto voce about our misgivings. Neither of us feels we could present this PD in its current format—bloated with meaningless PowerPoint slides and in no order we can make sense of. Just before lunch the participants brains grind to an inevitable halt. Just after lunch I can take no more and abscond early.

The Frankston train to the city is delayed—an incident down the line—but I’ve given myself plenty of time for mishaps. The rest of the trip to Southern Cross and on to Ballarat is uneventful. My last evening of training Ballarat mentors is uninspiring. Only three of ten impress me. But I can’t knock them; they’re volunteers and giving much of themselves.

I do ask myself how a city of 100,000 people can’t do better. Tomorrow I run the second evening’s training for mentors in Castlemaine; all 21 are fabulous. This from a town of 7,000. Doesn’t make sense.

Today is not the best day of my life, but I’ve been philosophical about it since getting out of bed. Nothing has fazed me. In the end it’s a perfectly acceptable day. John Lennon knew there’d be days like these.

Rock on. 

charge

The Charge Filter. Sounds like a powerful cigarette, but it’s a bike the distributor is about to discontinue in this country, due to its popularity, or its misnomer. It’s not a bike to charge about on.

Charge are an English company that specialise in steel frames and single speeds. A few years ago I test ride the Charge Plug and love it. But a single speed with cow-horn bars won’t get me to work in Collingwood and back on rough bike trails.

I think about my ride to work a lot and determine that a robust steel frame is the thing, and drop bars with plenty of places to park my hands during the journey. I need a tough chain and proper mudguards because I’m going to ride whatever the weather.

  

Ten days back I nip into Cycleworks and do a quick lap of the floor. One bike jumps out, although it’s hiding among Mick’s Charge range, the only bike in the pack with dropped bars. I haul it out, look it over, lift it up. No lightweight. But it’s everything else I dreamed up as the ideal trail commuter.

The steel posts and stays, muddies from arsehole to breakfast, a chain you’d see on a hog, tyres not about to disappear into narrow cracks. The componentry keeps to itself—Sugino cranks, unmarked Shimano derailleur, three by eight gearing. Large frame—I’m a medium—but in the same deep burgundy as the Red Rocket.

Today I return as darkness falls. It’s still there. I lift it; it seems lighter this time. Nick puts some pedals on it and I circle the forecourt twice. That’s all I need to feel it, to know. Mick comes out of the back office. We shake, old friends, travel companions in France when plans fuck up big-time.

“Smith Street Cycles told me at lunchtime that the importer is quitting the Filter. You might have the last one left on the continent,” I tell him. “How come you’ve got this oddity in the shop?”

“Everyone wants carbon, super light. I just like this bike for what it is. It’ll ride quick enough.”

You might think he would say that, but not Mick. Mick doesn’t sell bikes; he waits for you to buy them. I take him over to the racks and panniers, waste ten minutes there.

“Give me a price, Mick.” He takes $250 off the number on the docket. “OK, let’s commit.” I buy a rack and top-bag that clips onto the tray. Oiled canvas. The credit card does what it can but can’t hide the fact that the next statement will be exceed my paying capacity.

Mick thinks he remembers my measurements. The Filter will be set up by Friday, early. That’s local service for you. It’s first ride will be to Collingwood the same morning.

My good woman rings not long after I get home. I tell her I bought the bike. “Did you give it a name yet?” Negative. “It will be the Red Star.” After Red Star Belgrade. She has no interest in football.

“The Red Star it is.”  

Rock on. 

part-time

I go to bed just after ten and read for a while. As soon as the lids start to wobble I turn out the light and sleep. The first piss is at one on the dot, the second at five o eight. I lie there a few more minutes, know no further sleep happening, and get up. Breakfast is done by six ten, my briefcase packed the night before. I go to work early.

I choose the 6:57 as a fine vehicle for travel today. It’s a Monday and I don’t work Monday. I spend four hours working from my desk at home on Friday, and I don’t work Friday. My work days, as a point sixer, are Tuesday to Thursday. Last week I’m at a three-day national meeting in Sydney with my colleagues, the MM project officers from every state and territory.

Tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll go to Frankston to watch my colleague Viv deliver MM level 2 training. I’ll catch a train from Frankston to Southern Cross and on to Ballarat for the third and final training session for mentors up there.

On Thursday I’m breaking out, my first solo gig, an intro to MM for bigwigs from the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development in the eastern metropolitan region at Deakin University in Geelong. From Geelong I drive to Castlemaine for a second training session for mentors.

So why all the extra time, working Monday and Friday? Catching up and keeping up is the answer. Three of us service this state, Victoria, but two of us are learners and the other, Viv, has carried the program for five months since her fellow project officer left in December. So I travel and travel, learning, in order to be productive as soon as I can be.

All that travel—Adelaide, Newcastle, Darwin, Sydney (twice) and deep into the Wimmera—means almost no time at my desk, no time to read, to bone up on the content, to prepare materials, to search the net for back-up research, to learn to use the reporting software. So I work. Work on my days off, days I’m not paid for.

I’m not about to poke myself in the eye. When I first work part-time in 1999, colleagues insist I don’t fall for the trap of working full-time and being paid part-time. Somewhere in the back of my head is a scoreboard of extra days worked. I miss two days with a cold but have three up my sleeve. No problem.

I’m new in the job, nine weeks. I’m alternately excited and overwhelmed. I want to be productive as soon as I can be. So I work. It’s a million miles from where I thought 2012 might go for me.    

Rock on. 

subscription

I don’t remember the exact day that I gulp down my scruples and pay a subscription for television. Until then I watch the ABC, occasionally SBS. Channels Seven, Nine and Ten offer no show I have the slightest interest in. And they pepper every show with ads. My father engendered in me a hysterical hatred of advertising.

For years I am a denier; people aren’t going to pay to watch TV. But as more and more sport is trashed by the commercial free-to-airs, I can’t help but regard subscription television in a new light. I commit when SBS loses the rights to the English Premier League highlights show.

Since then the AFL rights move to Fox. In the beginning they telecast the three least appealing games of each round, then four as new teams come into the competition, and this year all nine games live. With no ad breaks. And in HD. This year I step up to high definition; it’s like having a new pair of glasses.

The EPL begins with one game a week. As Arsenal is a major player they often feature late on Saturday night. With the advent of the ‘red button’ five games are screened simultaneously, plus Sunday night games and the ‘late’ game at five on a Tuesday morning. ESPN brings me the European Champions League.

The A-league kicks off a new adventure in Australian football. For the first two seasons I’m a Melbourne Victory member before I move to Bendigo. I relinquish my membership and extend my viewing schedule as Fox covers every game live.

Each weekend in season, were I inclined, or able, I can now watch nine games of AFL football, five games of A-league football, and as many as seven games in the EPL. Throw in AFL 360 four nights a week with Gerald and Robbo, On the Couch, Fox FC with Simon, Bozza and Robbie, the EPL and Championship highlights shows, and sundry previews and reviews and the JRT is getting fat.

The grand irony is that none of it matters. They’re all just games. The sun will come up tomorrow after Carlton get a shellacking. The Gunners will frustrate and disappoint through another fruitless season. I alternate between the Heart and the Victory. All the postulations and post-match dissection don’t amount to that hill of beans. Yet I remain transfixed.

The unscripted drama of association football has me by the goolies. The Blue blood in my veins prevents me looking away as Carlton’s blood stains the floor. Some obscure Heart left-back will capture my imagination. I must know what Gerald thinks about the issues of the AFL day.

It’s crazy, I know. But I subscribe. Oh, how I subscribe!

Rock on. 

ringwood

1974. Two blokes, two dogs. Rock finishes his teacher training at Mercer House, the place where teachers for the independent sector train. He gets an outdoor education position at Yarra Valley Grammar. We move out of the Caulfield Grammar boarding house and look for a place to live in the eastern suburbs.

Kendall Street is a dead-end on the south side of Ringwood railway station; number 34 is the last house in the street, a run-down weatherboard opposite the back gate of Ringwood Primary School. The place has an old milk bar attached, the former tuck shop for the school. A milkman’s horse and cart still clip-clop past in the early hours.

Rock paints his room navy blue. I move into the shop. Furniture is minimalist—packing crates for clothes storage. Robyn and Ro move in to help pay the rent. Rob’s a primary phys ed teacher and master horsewoman. Ro studies phys ed at the same teachers college where I now study drama, having fallen out with the phys ed department. They don’t like my beanies and bare feet.

The dogs romp endlessly. I bake bread on Monday nights in the old Rayburn in the kitchen. Rock and I smoke dope when we can. The girls do their own things—Robyn show-jumping, Ro dancing. Rock alternates between Ringwood and Yarra Valley’s outdoor ed centre at Lake Glenmaggie. He brings two feral cats, Sodom and Gomorrah, home from the Heyfield tip.

Life is carefree, great fun. No one is married or has a mortgage. We pile the dogs into a four-wheel drive and explore the Avon wilderness and the Macalister River behind Lake Glenmaggie. I play on the half-back flank for Ringwood in the tough bruising EDFL. I rekindle my relationship with Cate, my first girlfriend.

My dog, The Pod, disappears one day and for the following 23 days. Finally I track her down via a local vet, a day from death at the North Melbourne lost dogs’ home. She has a broken leg set in a huge plaster. The vet tells me the local ranger brought her in after she was hit by a car. He pulled his gun but couldn’t pull the trigger. She lives another 16 years.

One night in third term Rob tells us that an old farmhouse next to the property where she agists her horses at Warranwood is coming up for rent: five acres, sheds that could be stables, set among abandoned apple orchards. We break our lease on Kendall Street and somehow get our bond back despite the navy blue walls.

Bemboka Road, here we come.

Rock on. 

flâneur

Since 1854 the French word flâner has meant to stroll, loaf, or saunter. So a flâneur is one who saunters. Indeed, a flâneur is now one who does a little more than saunter since the French poet  Baudelaire proposed a new meaning: ‘a person who walks the city in order to experience it’.

Baudelaire’s ‘gentleman stroller of city streets’ plays a double role in city life: he is a detached observer, and as such, has a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. The concept is French, so I can’t help but think of Paris. To be a flâneur in Paris is dead easy.

I emerge from my hotel, look left or right and simply make a series of random choices about where to proceed. A distant landmark attracts my attention, or the immediacy of what is going on in a side street. The result is not-quite-aimless wandering. I stumble into the wonderful rue Mouffetard Sunday market entirely by accident.

The modern flâneur always has a camera. Susan Sontag, the American essayist, says in her 1977 essay On Photography that the photographer is “an armed solitary walker reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world picturesque.” She’s nailed it.

The art of the flâneur is to come across the unexpected. Nothing major or of great moment might arise, in which case the trick is to be alert for small delights, hidden beauty. But always the next move is unknown until it reveals itself. A map is essential, but only consulted in order to find a way back to your lodging when the random sauntering is done.

Can one be a flâneur in other places, risky places? Kolkata, Chicago, Capetown? When in Alice Springs my daughter goes running with her dog Indie, no map, no idea where she’s going.  She blunders into a town ‘camp’ and the unfettered Indigenous curs attack her.

My new job has taken me to Newcastle, Sydney, Adelaide and Darwin, but with little time to play the flâneur. Time is crucial. Strolling cannot be hurried and a spare twenty minutes or even an hour is insufficient for a proper reflective ramble, or photography.

The early morning, including dawn, or an entire afternoon are the best times to be a flâneur.

Rock on. 

central

My MM colleague Sasha and I stand outside toilets at Sydney airport fruitlessly cajoling our smartphones to direct us to our hotel. Later we pick an exit, any exit from Central Station and I promise to find the hotel by wandering in the right direction with my wits about me.

We obey traffic lights, cross several roads, and manage a fairly direct path to our destination, only to find a subway direct to Central Station at the hotel door. We eat lunch in the sun on a balcony outside our conference room which looks up George Street right into the heart of the CDB.

As a Melburnian, my default setting for Sydney is to bag the place. But my 24 hours in central Sydney produce nothing to criticise and plenty to like. Neither the straight-line grid of Melbourne nor the flat sprawl of Adelaide can match Hobart’s feel of history. Sydney has it too in its higgledy-piggledy centre.

Just after six this morning Tracy and Cathy and I walk through the Haymarket to Pyrmont Bridge and back to the hotel. Central Sydney is a bewildering spaghetti of stairways, paved terraces and criss-crossing pathways. We walk along Darling Harbour with buses on a flyover miles overhead that disappears into the sixth storey of the surrounding buildings.

A marvellous historic pigeon-spotted plinth sits at the end of the Pyrmont bridge, a set of utilitarian concrete stairs leading off one way and a glossy glass walkway in the other direction. Such an incongruous, jangling mix of architecture, yet in Sydney it just doesn’t seem to matter.

The traffic has a different character here. Horns are honked, as in Asia, for no apparent reason: it’s just noise-making; no one is going anywhere. If honked in Melbourne, you’ve caused offence: it’s the aural equivalent of a fist through the windscreen.

The Melbourne-Sydney similarity is the Asianisation of the inner city: Chatswood, Box Hill, central Sydney at night, the Melbourne CBD. The majority in George Street is Asian.

Chinese girls in mini-skirts stride by with money on their minds. Young Asians suck slurpees on the Lilydale train.

A time long ago I worked a summer job carting an importer’s bills of lading to shipping and stevedoring companies before lodging them at the Harbour Trust. I walked and knew Melbourne. Much of it has grown foreign to me, but it quickly becomes familiar as I travel to the inner suburbs to do my job.

I am an observer of Sydney. It is no part of me.

Rock on. 

perversity

Groups bring out the perverse in me. No matter how much I like or respect the individuals who comprise it, I can’t comply with a group. I won’t like it’s collective decision, and if I do, I’ll quibble.

My perversity is innate. I am born tidy, keep a tidy room even as a little boy. It’s not obsessive, but it is important. I reject God and gods at nine, and kings and queens not long after. None of my friends is even thinking about this stuff. I subscribe to Hansard as a 16 year-old. I aspire to kick the winning goal in a grand final, but never aspire to money.

During adolescence I reject my peer group instead of my parents; I reject them as an early adult, which coincidentally is when I finally become an adolescent. I reject alcohol while 96 per cent of my late adolescent peers embrace it with gusto.

I’m not perverse in rejecting rules or refusing to do as I’m told: I can be compliant. I’m just perverse in being determined to do those things I deem important my way.

A day of meetings and groupdom stirs my inner contrarian. The second day of our three-day MM meeting closes with an optional yoga session led by the lovely Annette from Adelaide. I retreat to my room. Sasha texts me to say we’re congregating in the bar at 6:30 before setting out for dinner. Bars bring out the oppositional defiant in me.

Three of my colleagues have glasses in their hands. Annette approaches.

“Would you like a drink?”

“Nup.” So instant and final. Everyone laughs. Viv embraces me, celebrates my perversity, then ticks me off for my lack of grace.

The pre-dinner drinks go on. Robyn and Olivia arrive, pull frocks out of shopping bags. Oohs and ahs.  I excuse myself, wander into the night, descend a glass staircase into the Central Station subway and into a bargain book shop.

Some time later my phone rattles in my pocket. Sasha texts: We’re just about to leave. We’re heading to Mamak, 15 Goulburn Street. I text back: Just coming out of subway. Her reply: Think you mean subway food not train so will let everyone know. Enjoy your night in!

Eight of us in a long queue outside Mamak think better of it and walk round the corner. A Chinese woman seduces my female colleagues with an offer of two free bottles of wine on the table. No, not Chinese again. I bid them farewell. They assure me they’ll miss me and I assure them they won’t.

I eat an ordinary Malay-Thai meal in a deserted café. The solitude soothes me and the quiet thrills me.

Rock on. 

chinese

Chinese is not my cuisine of choice. Only Mexican ranks near it. My heart is unglad at the end of a long, long day to see that we dine at the Golden Century somewhere in Sydney’s Chinatown.

About 40 KM and MM national staffers trek along George Street to Sussex Street after our meetings end. As I enter a building that promises little a voice behind me says, “Hello.” I hello her back.

“You don’t remember my name, do you?”

“Jodie from Ballarat.” I greet her friend and colleague Cheryl in the same breath.

“Of course,” says Jodie. “You remember everyone’s names. It’s very impressive.”

We ride an escalator to the first floor. A young woman ushers us to a large alcove at the back of the restaurant. Chinese waiting staff with non-Chinese names like Hanson and Angelique line the walls as we troop past toward the large round tables topped with lazy Susans.

The safe option is to shuffle into a seat beside someone you know and feel comfortable with. The alternative is to park your arse next to someone from other states seen across the room who might be interesting. It’s a crap shoot.

I plonk myself next to no one and take the chance that someone finds me interesting. I end up flanked by Jodie and Cheryl. A waiter pours green tea for Cheryl, offers me none. I pour my own tea. It’s stewed and bitter. I chat with Cheryl, then Jodie, until the crescendo of intercourse makes talk impossible, my throat dries and I have a coughing fit.

I gaze blankly around instead. Reds and whites slake thirsts, wet throats. There’s no water. I summon a trainee waiter and two jugs arrive reeking of chlorine. No food appears, starvation is imminent. I’m thinking badly of this Oriental eaterie and wondering if I’d be missed should I climb out the toilet window.

Then without fanfare platters of steaming snow peas and white fish, prawns and zucchini, scallops and beans are placed on the lazy Susan. I fill my vegaquarian plate knowing that mountains of duck and pork will follow. And inedible broccoli stems. But the fish is delish and I am more than satisfied, especially as the grub is on the company.

The hubbub subsides as mouths fill and teeth and tongues go to work. I converse again.

Just after nine we saunter back to the hotel. I have been awake since 4:50 this morning and will be up early to chase Tracy as we reprise Newcastle’s early morning walk of six weeks ago.

Rock on. 

facebook

In 2010 I set up a facebook account to communicate with mentor co-ordinators across the Loddon Mallee region. Doesn’t work. Last year in France my room-mate—Frank, policeman, 51—convinces me it has value. I give it another try but quickly tire of its banality. I’m just unsocial and a dud networker. Although 901 million people use it, I’m one of many millions to switch off.

If I hold out, will I lose touch with younger relatives who use facebook as their primary means of communication?

Facebook will continue its relentless pursuit of us because if enough of us tune out it becomes a postal system that delivers only to one side of the street. Thus it loses some of its facility and people will spend less time with it; it will sell fewer ads.

I am, however, interested in the notion that people already define themselves, and have different types of relationships, depending on the media they use as their primary means of communication: letters—longhand or typed, email, SMS (Send a Message to Someone) or facebook.

Resistance for some of us is generational, not driven by unease with the technology. I no longer write letters by hand. I occasionally use my electronic amanuensis to scribe letters I stick stamps on and drop in the red box outside the milk bar, but predominantly I email.

I don’t want a deluge of email. I'm in touch with friends and colleagues and they know how to find me. I already struggle to keep up with them.

I don’t want another medium to check frequently. Facebook is a chore, added to a life without any added hours in the day.

I don't want the obligation of shooting the breeze with someone I met briefly 12 years ago who stumbles over me while searching for validation in numbers.

I neither want nor need new ‘friends’. ‘Friending’ is superficial. When I write to someone, I write to that person, not a group, and I’m taking the time to sit down to do it. The act has meaning.

Doing facebook means not doing something else. Like life.

Rock on.

boarding

In 1972 I become a resident master in Caulfield Grammar’s boarding house in East St Kilda. I’m studying to be a physical education teacher at Rusden Teachers College. The boarding house can’t attract enough school staff to live in, so appoints former alumni training to be teachers, rent-free, for supervisory duties.

The year cements my nascent friendship with Rock, already in the boarding house for a couple of years. Seminal events take place during my first year away from home. Rock and I write Harry Suckill van in orange paint on the side of my mini-van in the boarding house car park. We don’t know why, but the gesture seems important to us.

A late adolescence breaks over teetotal goody-two-shoes little me. I smoke dope for the first time and never look back. Rock knows a long-haired Monash Uni student who brings some laced heads to my tiny second-storey room one night. After a few tokes I spiral to the floor and hallucinate for hours, vomit on my new rug. I’m so limp they can’t lift me.

One freezing midnight Rock and I escort a dozen senior students to the sticky black south wicket. We transform it into a mud bath. The curator is livid. Rock introduces me to classical music and I buy works prefaced with canon and capriccio but my flirtation with dead composers dies quickly.

It’s a year for nuding up and Pink Floyd forms a backdrop to all manner of naked activities. Another night we lure twenty naked boarders up a tree on the front lawn. We start a drama group for the year 9 and 10 boarders and put on a play for their parents. T-Rex and smashing guitars feature.

During the mid-year holiday I cross the drive to Rock’s room. The window is open wide, the heater and radio on. His red MG reappears in the car park three days later. He’s been deep in the Wimmera exercising his oversized dick with its Nazi helmet on some former schoolmate’s sister.

I have noisy and frantic sex in my narrow bed in my narrow room with a buxom manic fellow physical education student. She parks her dinged-up white Fiat near the door to the dining hall. A fellow housemaster, a strutting Christian bantam, rails at my libertinism.

My iconoclastic state of mind tells me not to play footy in 1972. I can’t stay off the field, so I umpire instead. I’m a damn good interpreter and enforcer of the rules and spirit of the game.

Rock and I are harmlessly but crazily irresponsible. We hide under the bench of the locked kitchen, eat gallons of ice-cream, and determine that life is meaningless but we wouldn’t be dead for quids. We’ve stumbled on the Absurdist theory of the meaning of existence. It never leaves either of us.

The year sails by and I know I won’t be invited back. In early December the students go home to ancestral country properties in Wycheproof, Horsham, Deniliquin. Rock gets a labrador and I get a blue heeler and we romp through the empty polished corridors.

We move out the week before Christmas, the next phases of our lives about to begin.

     

Rock on. 

sticklerism

Guilty, your honour. I’m a stickler, a pedant, a member of the society for insisting that certain words be spelled a certain way, that apostrophes are important, and that every man, woman, and his or her dog should know where to put one. They aren’t difficult.

Three shelves of my library are devoted to style manuals, dictionaries, etymologies, commentaries on language and idioms, with titles like Usage and abusage, Weasel words, and the Dictionary of phrasal verbs.

I dub myself the Style Guru and write columns in 257 staff bulletins for two different employers over 12 years advising and beseeching colleagues to use less words, à la William Strunk, to eschew obscurantism and avoid pleonasm, sticklerism of the highest order.

That said, I’m a bit AC/DC too, play both sides of the fence without sitting on it, bat for both teams. I’m a word-slut, indulging myself in my own idiolect. I know, and insist, where an apostrophe should go, but I also know language is not set in stone, never has been.

I worship at the altar of English’s marvellous malleability and revel in the freedom to create my own words, my own particular and unique way of using language.

Enter Robert Lane Greene. I’m reading his You are what you speak, subtitled Grammar grouches, language laws and the power of words, wherein he sticks a sword right through the hearts of sticklers, those who don the cloak of authority and make rules about how people use words. His erudition impresses me no end.

Why must we not split infinitives, end sentences with prepositions, or begin them with adjectives, he asks. At what point in time should we freeze spelling? Eggs would still be eggys if we did. Or Eggys. Or eyren. His Countimen still worship Mr Shakespeare’s deeds, but, prithee, no longer Speake or spell as he did, nor pronounce deeds as ‘dades’ as he did.

I take your point, Mr Greene. Sticklerism has no place, but neither is there a place in writing or speech for jargon, euphemism or weasel words, whatever they are.

My rule will continue to be that communicating with an audience is everything. If the words don’t speak to someone, then better words must be found or better ways of putting them together.

Rock on.