growth

After months lying in desuetude the garden springs to life. I complete the small retaining wall on the last vegetable bed, till the soil, hack out roots and weeds, break up the clumps of hardened loam, rake and smooth the surface.

In every nook a weed sprouts, and in every cranny there’s a cranny. Nice word cranny. Must use cranny more often. Lots of crannies in my garden. I drag a little wheelie-bin thingy behind me all over the yard, front and back, plucking weeds and lobbing them in.

I ferret round in the garden shed, extract the three-pronged soil-breaker—must be a word for this tool but I’ve no idea what—and scarify—perhaps it’s a junior scarifier—the hard earth under the lemon tree. Mustard spinach will go in there.

I till the two boxed vegie beds and chuck a bag of cowshit in each. The cat regards this as his dunny, the turned soil redolent with cat-piss stench. I cut up metre and a half long wire netting cloches and bed them in to protect the vegie seedlings—parsnip, climbing beans, green mignonettes, cos lettuces, cucumbers, leeks, broccoli, capsicums, chillies, always chillies.

Last in are zucchini and tomatoes. Round the side of the house the snow peas are already ascending the netting surrounding them and the baby spinach are pubescent.

In the dark corner at the bottom of the garden where no vegetable wants to grow I’ve banged in some native shrubs, none likely to exceed a metre and a half. On the back fence outside my kitchen window I pop in two hardenbergias. They’re a favourite. Not much brightens August’s gloom but hardenbergias defy winter.

The last planting is a boronia. My mother raves about her boronias, the all-pervading fragrance; my good woman says the one my mother gave her fills her whole garden with its delicacy.

My nose is a boronia black spot: I just can’t smell it. I bury my face in a boronia in full bloom. Nothing.   

Rock on. 

grand finale

Grand final day. Hawks versus Swans. Go Swans: they play my type of footy, totally team-oriented; they never argue with umpires, remonstrate with team-mates or opponents. There’s no glitz, no glam, just a relentless attack on the ball, or opponents with the ball, their defensive skills paramount.

My good woman joins me just before half-time. She has no allegiance, decides to support Hawthorn: they’re Victorian. So are South Melbourne, I tell her. After two and a half hours of captivating theatre the Swans prevail. They are behind in every vital statistic but in front in making every possession count.

We don’t watch the presentation of the premiership cup but walk the JRT instead. The late afternoon chills, the wind bites. Nothing much is said. We have a truce on words, lest we get them horribly wrong as we have for the past six weeks. Last Sunday we go to the movies, with a moratorium on heavy discussion.

Tonight after six weeks of tortured inability to come to grips with our fractured relationship we have the discussion we couldn’t manage through two counselling sessions and three disastrous dialogues. Tonight we understand what has gone wrong. There is regret but no rancour. We have stuffed it up because we could never express our deepest fears to each other.

In five years neither of us ever said anything that could not be unsaid, not be forgotten, that would be terminal. But we have lost the spark, the thing that ignites us. We didn’t want to lose it, but acknowledge that it is extinguished. Our journey together has come to an end.

Around ten my good woman leaves. We will meet again, but only as friends. We will hug, but only in memory of what we shared for five years. She will no longer be my good woman, though I don’t know what to call her now. Maybe one day she will be someone else’s good woman, but I don’t want to think about that.

In Serbian her name means truth. 

An hour or so after she leaves I take the JRT out the front for a piss. Maybe a hundred and fifty metres up the hill over the road a possum blunders into a transformer. Electrons crack, a magnesium flash leaps into the sky, every light in the neighbourhood goes out.

Rock on. 

nostalgia

My television is awash with former footballers, all week, blokes who played in VFL and AFL grand finals, blokes who won and lost. It takes me back, of course it does, to Moyhu footy ground, some September Saturday in 1980. It takes me back too to the Saturday before at Tarrawingee, half-time and we’re more than six goals down against the bullies of Beechworth, our season good as done.

We get up and win that preliminary final, otherwise the following Saturday would be meaningless to me. Six goals and copping a fearful hiding. The previous week in the second semi we lose by a point. It’s as if the disappointment paralyses us and seven days later we don’t turn up to play.

I remember only one thing of that horrible first half at Tarrawingee. From a forward pocket where the football never comes I watch our full-back Pat McKenzie repel attack after attack, seemingly single-handed. Beechworth’s lead would be 12 goals, not six, without Pat McKenzie. But the rest of us seem powerless to follow his example.

I’ve no recollection of a stirring half-time speech, but after the break we start to play better. Then Gunna breaks out of the centre square and puts a long bomb through, post-high over my arching neck. Somewhere in the back of 17 minds comes a realisation that we might make something of this.

Through that third quarter I’m still camped in the forward pocket, but can’t get near the ball. I must kick a goal in that third quarter but I don’t remember it. At three quarter-time we’re a vague chance. I go into the shed to get something, don’t know what, never did that before. As I shuffle back to the huddle an old Greta fan tells me he once wore the number 12, my number.

I remember the last quarter. You don’t forget booting four goals in a quarter. I remember each one, vividly. As the ball eluded me for three quarters, now it chased me everywhere, taking fickle bounces to my advantage. I kick a left-foot snap from distance, a right-foot snap from the square, leap clean over a pack at half-forward for the only specky I ever take, and that goal gives us the lead.

I judge the flight better than two big blokes in front of me, the ball lobs in my arms. I punt it through the hi-diddle-diddle: Beechworth are on their knees. I go into the centre bounce, roost a long left-foot shot for a fifth goal. Kel marks it in the goal square, blasts it three paddocks away. The game is ours.

Thirty years later at a reunion Pat McKenzie tells me I won that game. No, Pat, you and Gunna won that game and 16 blokes you inspired to come along with you.

Whorouly never stand a chance next week in the grand final at Moyhu, no chance at all.

Rock on. 

bakery

The 86 tram stops at the corner of Gertrude and Smith. On work days I alight, cross Smith and walk a block north to Peel. The other day I notice loaves of bread in a narrow red-fronted shop just up the hill on Gertrude, so today when I alight, I walk back along the tram, cross Gertrude, stroll into the bakery. If it has a name I can’t see it.

A suitably hip woman comes to the counter. My eyes dart all over the place: racks of loaves on the back wall, biscuits in jars on the counter, rolls, scrolls, scones and muffins. I tell her I’ll have everything, please. Fine, she says, we can pack up and go home. I settle for an Anzac and a cheese and olive muffin. I’m dangerous in a bakery.

The best food doesn’t come from trees or the earth, on vines or stalks or in pods. The best food comes out of ovens. What separates man from other animals is fire, salt and baked goods.

Fruit loaves, heavy with sultanas and cinnamon. Oh, yes. Sourdough loaves. Until I was macrobiotic I’d not heard the word sourdough. These days every second loaf is sourdough, though few are made from genuine sour starter. Crusty loaves appeal, but my teeth are no longer up to the job. Chewy is good, soft white and pulpy is ghastly.

For a while I had a crush on apple scrolls. Back in 1980 a bakery in Wangaratta round the corner from work made fabulous date scones. And a marvellous dark rye bread. Potts bread grabbed my attention till they went commercial.

There was a marvellous pie shop in Castlemaine in the year I taught there, 1976. The shop’s still there but the cadaverous grey-skinned bloke who baked the pies must be long buried. He looked like each day would be his last.

The first time I landed on Flinders Island as a 15 year-old the smell that greeted me came from the bakery at Whitemark. I’d never smelled fresh bread, or a bakery, before.

Take me to France. The cycling is heaven on a stick and every ride ends at a boulangerie.  The pain au raisins is my favourite everyday delicacy and it fits a cyclist’s back pocket perfectly. Just around the corner from the Hotel Diana in Paris’s Latin Quarter is a boulangerie that sells wonderful flans—pear, fig and pecan. A few of them made their way up to room 32.

Rock on. 

diary

It’s school holidays. For MM staff it’s quiet time. No workshops for teachers. No teachers at their desks to ring or email and liaise with. No school administrators to contact and organise stuff with.

The KM and MM staff in our Carringbush office are taking time off. The two admins are in; so am I. But we have the place to ourselves. I stare at the computer, try to revamp hundreds of workshop presentation slides that are a hodge-podge after 12 years of neglect. I hunt down graphics, delete unnecessary words, unnecessary slides. It’s slow work; not tedious, just slow.

I like being at the office when no one else is there. The admins get on with their jobs—taking delivery of parcels, arranging transport and accommodation for our forays into the country, keeping databases up to date. They print, photocopy and disappear to find coffee.

When on tour MM project officers work long hours, start at seven, set up at eight, run workshops from nine till three, pack up, debrief till after four, then sit in a motel room sweating over the next day’s workshop. So when I’m at the Carringbush office, I’m in no hurry. Ten o’clock is an acceptable start time, four thirty a fine time to knock off.

My diary dates for October and November include fourteen nights away from home. I have two-day gigs in Sale and Beechworth, an overnighter in Wonthaggi. Outside Victoria there’s a two-day conference and a three-day staff meeting in Sydney. That’s the MM stuff.

SKIPS presentations will take me to Newcastle, Brisbane and Perth, each for two days, two nights. Hotels, motels, taxis. I’m not looking forward to it, especially the trips to the airport. I loathe that place. Plane travel is inhumane, but it’s a picnic compared to security check, hauling bags, and mooching around gate lounges.

So I’m taking it easy this week and next, because after that all hell breaks loose.

Rock on. 

86 tram

Platform 4 at Parliament is a long way underground. The top of the second escalator is out of sight from the bottom. After I touch off three flights of static stairs remain to be climbed to the surface in Albert Street. As I climb those stairs I hope and pray that an 86 tram doesn’t roll past.

It’s the same in the afternoon as I trudge three blocks up Peel Street. Every step brings the possibility of just missing the tram a smidge closer. I hate missing public transport. I hate waiting. I carry timetables: if a train departs at 7:52, I time my arrival on the platform for 7:51.

The journey to work passes quickly; the journey home takes forever. Oddly enough, if I average it out, the homeward leg is about ten minutes longer. In the morning I walk to the station, arrive bang on time. In the evening I’m dependent on a tram to deliver me to the station and therein lies the problem.

A tram timetable is wrapped around a post at every stop but tram timetables are meaningless: trams come when they come. A delayed tram is like compound interest; the delay grows exponentially. Waiting passengers accumulate along the route, take longer to load and unload. Soon an empty second tram is right behind the first but can’t pass to absorb the overflow.

One evening on the walk up Peel Street three city-bound trams cross the gap up on Smith Street. I moan. Smith Street’s a cold canyon on a winter night and home is another planet.

The tram is different, different clientele, different ambience to the train. Lovers travel by tram not train. Smelly old bastards use the tram. Asians go by train, Somalis, Aborigines and Muslims hop a tram.

I like the way a tram sweeps round a corner, from Smith up the Gertrude Street hill. I like that my tram, the 86, runs along Gertrude, recently dubbed the chicest street in Melbourne. I peer through the spattered window and I can see why: it’s down-market Trendsville out there.

The tram grows on me.

Rock on. 

detailing

Mulga Bill forsook the “good old horse that served him many days”. I am about to forsake my little horse, the Honda Jazz. Over five years it carries me to and from Bendigo, escorts me and my good woman to remote parts of this state, and gives me no reason whatsoever to part with it.

But somewhere a container ship bobs on the ocean, a Volkswagen Caddy stowed in its hold in its own custom container filled with bubble-wrap and polystyrene padding. The Caddy is due at the end of October. Never in my life have I had, and never again will I have, the chance to own the perfect personal vehicle.

On the way to my first up-close encounter with the Tour de France, I walk down a steep narrow road in Verdun, a village contiguous with Les Cabannes in the French Pyrénées. Parked on the roadside is my dream vehicle. Instantly I’m hooked on Europe’s small vans. With my new job comes the capacity to purchase one. Decision made.

On Friday a local RWC tester issues a clean bill of health for the Jazz. Now for the fine detailing. Yesterday the interior gets the treatment. Today I open all doors, scour the door wells, scrub grit from tight places with a toothbrush, then soap and rub and hose down the exterior from antenna to wheel-nuts.

I take four photos, write forty words, register for an online car sales site and press Submit. I enter the Jazz’s vital stats and after half an hour’s wait for approval my Honda is for sale. Comparable vehicles at comparable price have travelled much further. The Jazz has carried my over 47,000 kilometres. Nobody but me has ever sat in the driver’s cockpit.

It’ll be a sad day when it goes. 

Rock on. 

offline

On New Year’s Day I reckon I’ll break my promise to myself to post every day for a year. After 266 days my promise is intact. It’s a leap year so I have 100 posts remaining.

Talking to my mother on the phone, I refer to things written in this blog, reflections on the state of my life. I explain the difficulty after 266 posts in 266 days of knowing how repetitive I’ve been, whether I’ve used this title for a post before, or three times.

Only occasionally have I reread a post, but only to check the accuracy of what I’ve written, to make sure I’m quoting myself correctly, to check the date of a post. Despite the fact that few consecutive posts chronicle consecutive days, I hope the whole hangs together with coherence and consistency. But until I read it all, about March next year, I just won’t know.

Do I find myself running out of things to write about? Yes. I thought I had enough opinions to last a year, but I don’t. I tire of commenting on current events or current affairs. I’m sick of writing about stuff I’m doing each day, though that was the aim on day one, albeit to measure the progress of one man’s journey.

Lately, when I’ve been feeling as low as you can go, when the woman I love and I have ground to a halt, the point of writing escapes me, the motivation to write is six feet below zero, to mix metaphors. But write I must.

Today I struggle to post because I’ve lost my interweb connection. I eliminate possible causes by trial and error but cannot diagnose the problem. I stare at the monitor in frustration and disbelief, and marvel at my reliance on being online.

Rock on. 

spring

It’s the spring equinox. Sure enough, the weather is truly vernal. Sky cloudless, azure, the overnight chill gone before I've eaten my porridge. I hear the ticking engine of a stationary truck at the top of the driveway. A removal van, and its Chinese truck jockey has pulled up the post with our street number on it. I realise they’re about to back down to unit 4. Feo and Alvena are leaving.

I collect the paper before the truck backs over it, read till after eleven. From my kitchen window I watch Joyce hug eight-months-pregnant Alvena, then Feo. Dan is not to be seen, avoiding hugging anyone, I guess. As the truck departs I grab a plumber’s spitter and start gouging out the hole for the post with our number on it. I’ve been intending to reset it for ages.

That done I set to pulling weeds in the back garden, Apart from a 20 minute break to whip up some pasta for lunch the garden fills my day. I pick lemons, trim the lower branches. I plant snow peas garnered from last season’s crop, install wire cages for them to climb on. The bike I should be riding props up the wall in the hallway.

  

The second AFL semi-final provides a radio backdrop to my afternoon, a rare twilight game with five hours of build-up to the first bounce.

I finally build the low retaining wall for my last garden bed. I  haul bluestones, solve the jigsaw of piecing them into some sort of straight line, driving in wedging stones, accommodating the natural fall of the ground. Late in the afternoon the cat comes over the fence, digs the fresh soil, parks his arse, christens the new bed.

Just before the twilit game begins I pack the garden tools away, leap into the shower, swill away the dirt.

No ride, but otherwise a marvellous productive day.

Rock on. 

windmills

My good woman forwards me an email from one of her work colleagues. It’s a graphic of a Chinese proverb: When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills. She adds no comment, doesn’t need to. For six weeks I, or we, have been building walls. Is it possible we could build windmills from the current wreckage of our relationship?

I’m not much into proverbs; for each there is an equal and opposite, like Out of sight, out of mind and Absence makes the heart grow fonder. No doubt when the Chinese coined their walls and windmills proverb they knew nothing of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Chinese opportunity is Spanish futility.

I wonder about the difference between a proverb, a saying, an adage, an aphorism, and a truism. The proverb is well-known, expresses an obvious truth or piece of advice. A saying seems to be interchangeable with a proverb. An aphorism is succinct, but most sayings are too. The truism apparently is so often said as to be meaningless.

Sometimes my good woman says, “In Serbia we have a say.” I don’t correct her as she wants me to, tell her we call it a saying not a say. I’m compromised: she wants to speak English like a native; I prefer her endearing misconstructions.

First I teach her the difference between literal and literate after she tells me she wants to be literal. I teach her split second to replace her split of a second. We both know what she intends. She still says without of when without will do.

But this is diversion from the real issue: can I find opportunity rather than futility in our situation? I know that both in work and love I have an eye for small shortcomings, allow them to grow and fester, to burst like boils, then apply the balm of walking away.

My good woman and I cannot get our act together these last six weeks. The first time she walked, the second time, last Sunday, I did. Our intuitive understanding of each other, despite our different cultures and native tongues, has disappeared. How to find it again: how to begin, where to look?

Rock on. 

half-time

Rock comes round just after seven with a box of fish and chips. We sit at the island bench, polish them off, retire to the lounge with cups of tea. He’s here to plan a bike ride with me, and then to talk about the big things. We haven’t talked about the big things for a while; too busy, both of us.

I fire up the interweb and we study distances along the new Goulburn High Country Rail Trail, settle for overnight in Yea followed by a longish day to Mansfield, no ducking off at Cathkin to Alexandra. The first half-day from Tallarook to Yea is 38kms, the second from Yea to Mansfield 83kms. Hybrids with knobbies or MTBs will get us there.

Ride organised, I ask about him and his (third) wife. She moves out next week to live in a rented house on her own. The move’s been coming for some time. They get on fine, no animosity, but also no passion, no intimacy. They’re best when off camping or exploring the outdoors, but that’s not how most people live most of the time. So they’ll live apart, see each other as they feel the need.

After ten plus years he describes their relationship as being at half-time.

I reflect about where I’m at with my good woman. Right now it’s a mystery, will probably be so for a while yet. Much is unresolved. Our ability to speak the same language has left us. For the moment it seems better not to speak.

We’ve agreed to spend Sunday afternoon together. We also agree that no heavy conversation will occur; we will simply spend time together, do something: walk, movie, meal? I hope we laugh; it’s been too long since we laughed.

Last Sunday I think it’s game over, but perhaps it’s half-time, time for a breather, time to recoup energy, to pause to reflect on the game-plan, maybe to explore other options.

Rock on. 

hillside

Rock picks me up from my parents’ caravan, takes me down to his red cedar shingled home at Blind Bight on the mozzie coast of Westernport Bay. He and his new wife Jenny help resurrect my sunken spirit. They arrange for Annie, single mother of six who lives at the corner of their street to take me home and fuck me. She’s great therapy. But I can’t live at Blind Bight.

My mate Robré suggests I occupy a room in his house at Hillside Road, Rosanna. My broken shoulder is functional again, I have a new bike, bigger, a CX650. My kids are in Tasmania, but Tassie’s been a disaster for me. I need a place to live, a base from which to rebuild my life. Hillside is the place.

Sharing the house is agonisingly depressed Erica, a nurse somewhere nearby. A failed relationship with an unfeeling boyfriend has unhinged her. One afternoon I come home, follow a bloody trail to her room, find her slashed behind the knees but alive. Her family pick her up, clear her room, and she never returns.

Her more upbeat sister Steph certainly does. She wants my cock in her but I don’t want to put it there. Give her marks for persistence, but not timing. She arrives while I’m making a leather bag in Rob’s wonderful shed and listening to a football semi-final, demands sex. Reluctantly I relent.

I have a job working with unemployed kids in Moorabbin. I alternate between riding the length of Burke Road or trains from Rosanna to Moorabbin. The train is my reading room.

Six months after I return from Tasmania so do Marilyn and my children. She’s never going to build on the land we own at Mt Cygnet. She moves into a communal-type house full of dope-smokers at Panton Hill, further north-east of the city than Rosanna, but a good run for me to see my kids. They are grubby urchins, like all the Panton Hill tribe, most with names more appropriate to weather forecasting.

Some time in the new year, 1984, Marilyn asks if I’ll have the children, tells me she’s not coping. I ask how long would they be with me. There is no room at Hillside; I would need to rent my own place close to work, organise child care for a one year-old and a three year-old. She can’t tell me how long; I tell her I can’t take the children.

She moves out of Panton Hill to share with a former nursing colleague and her criminal boyfriend at Kangaroo Ground. Soon Marilyn is not living in the house but in a tent five metres from the swift-flowing Yarra. She has lost her mind. In June she calls me, asks me to have the children. I specify one year minimum, the length of a lease, and pick them up as soon as I can.

Within days I rent a place in Gardenvale and 19 years of being a single parent begins.

Rock on. 

lunch

We wander up Peel Street. The KM staff outnumber us MM staff by eight to four, and one of our four is a student, Mister T for Tom. We are eating at Yim Yam, Thai, my favourite lunch spot on Smith Street. The office is locked.

The last time we eat as a team, six months ago, is the first time we meet, five new KM staff and two new MM staff. I memorise all the names around the table at a swish little basement place off Flinders Lane. The next time we are all together—not for lunch—is a week later at our employer’s staff conference in Adelaide and I remember all the names.

Because we all go on the road to present mental health and well-being professional development workshops across Victoria we see little of each other. Fourteen of us share our Collingwood office, but five is a crowd on any given day. Some days it’s just the two admins and one project officer.

We’re not all ex-teachers. Comrade R, the KM co-ordinator, is a social worker, male. Two KM project officers are speechies, female, small. Mister T is a psych student. Two KM staff live and work in Ballarat. Most live in the inner suburbs; only Comrade D and I live on the fringes, she in the south, me in the east. The new KM admin comes in each day from faraway Harkaway.

Before and after lunch I organise my desk, labelling countless folders of PowerPoint slides and notes, tagging suspension files, sifting and sorting documents, filling my recycle box with notes bequeathed to me by previous workers dating back to 2002. My closest colleague, Comrade S, has crap all over her desk and shelf, claims to knows what it all is and where to find anything. I believe her.

Tomorrow I tackle a myriad files and documents strewn across my computer desktop and in the half dozen flash drives my employer has burdened me with. After six months I think I know what is important and the system I need to file it.

But lunch is today’s highlight, fish patties in green curry, sweat running down my forehead, a paper towel mopping the back of my neck. I don’t need to memorise anything, just to find out a little bit more about my colleagues.

Rock on. 

whoa!

Some days it’s hard to figure out how life got like this. Like what? Well, like some weird out-of-control personal assault from every direction. Monday is an NWD, non-working day. I’m not in Collingwood, but I am at my desk at home. I have a number of communications to make.

I email Kylie, Manager of Personal Lending at my bank, tell her I didn’t buy an apartment on Saturday. She commiserates, and answers my ancillary query about the blank counter cheque in my wallet, advises me to check if my car dealer will accept it when my new VW Caddy is delivered.

I ring the dealership, speak to my man, John. He suggests I avoid possible screw-ups by bringing a bank cheque instead. Later, walking the JRT, I pop into a small workshop in a side street to book the Jazz for a roadworthiness check on Friday. It’s nearing the time to advertise it for sale.

I email the Greta Football Club, ask them courteously to desist from sending me emails about pie nights and finals catering. Spam, spam, spam, spam.

I ring the couples counsellor, leave a trembly voice message that my good woman and I will not be seeing her on Friday: we have gone separate ways. I also leave voicemail for Saturday’s auctioneer, request a meeting to discuss my real estate needs closer to the MM office in Carringbush.

A steady stream of work emails; some I delete, some I deal with. People want attention. SKIPS needs me to go to Newcastle and Perth to train presenters in October and November. Dates and flights are twined around my MM commitments via an all-day tag match by phone, SMS and email.

I make four unsuccessful phone calls to Telstra’s support line to resurrect my Bigpond email account, mysteriously vanished in cyberspace months ago. I actually re-install Office, then try to negotiate the vagaries of my own computer settings to resolve the problem, but it’s all frustration.

In my real-time mailbox is a paper letter from Telstra telling me I’ve chosen to buy a T-hub for $360 via a repayment option of $15 a month over 24 months. When I upgrade my internet allowance the other day I am told that I will be given the T-Hub. Gratis. It arrives two days later. Fight brewing.

I unsubscribe from a weekly news magazine that begins as a six-issues-for-a-dollar offer and morphs into a full-on account that I must cancel. I’ve been lazy, let them fleece me for months. Their website’s links won’t let me unsubscribe; in the end I email their subscription department.

I cancel my gym membership, having met my contractual obligation. My job and the gym don’t fit. Cancellation warrants a phone call, an email and an online form that I must email back to them. Adobe email me to tell me my purchase a year ago of a program I never use will be automatically renewed soon. Tracking down the means to delete this renewal requires herculean perseverance.

Late in the afternoon I get an offer to write the content for a website. Am I interested? Yes, I am. Then a call from Bendigo about the double-page monthly staff newsletter I’m about to write for my former employer. The deadline is set for 10 October.

Tomorrow is a work day. Relief at last. Rock on. 

anguish

Relationships hang on so many things, and so many things are undone when a relationship ends.

Kids, money, work pressure, where to live and how to live can tear a partnership down. The demands of the need to build a life together are so damned difficult for young couples. Yet in their twenties, thirties and forties this is what most husbands and wives do, what partners do, and do it all at once. Some survive, about half don’t. It’s a wonder anyone gets out alive.

It should be easier for older people trying to be partners—kids left home, financially independent, the family home paid off, all the fluffy romantic fantasies of young adulthood about relationships blown away like the seeds of a dandelion. Double the degree of difficulty if one person’s unencumberedness is nine years advanced on the other’s.

Turns out it’s not so easy to begin a long-term relationship at 56, and sustain it. Humans are humans, can complicate anything. And then there’s the silent killer. Everything else in a relationship can be hunky-dory but if the physical desire of one partner fails, even if physical attraction wasn’t the keystone of the thing to begin with, the whole edifice can be a pile of rocks in no time.

A loss of desire renders all other aspects of a relationship null and void. Why is it so? Why does everything hang on physical desire? Does friendship depend on physical desire, laughter, good conversation? Making physical, sexual love probably occupies less than zero point five per cent of our time together, but everything else is consigned to the dustbin with its lack.

I have lost my good woman and I have lost my best friend. With her I lose my contact and friendship with her children. I lose the person with whom I holiday, watch movies, take walks. I lose my contact with the Serbs. I lose all that future we talked about, but in the end seemed unable to come to grips with, the travel, a life together.

My parents and family lose a woman they liked, my friends lose someone they watched enriching my life.

Some relationships survive without physical passion and desire because all the other commitments to family prop them up, glue them together. My good woman and I have no common children, house, culture, finances, yard, pets or bed. Now we have lost each other and the anguish is beyond words.

I stare at the ground, sightless. The JRT barks, but I can’t hear him.

auction

We gather in front of the building, on and across the narrow street. The auctioneer, Edward, young, smooth, dapper, rolled up papers in hand, gets us underway right on one, punctual, asks for a bid of 400. A middle-aged woman standing front and centre gives him a nod. She means business.

At twelve thirty the front door opened for the house inspection. For 30 minutes 30 or so people file in and out, shuffle past each other into the tiny bathroom-laundry, open cupboards and wardrobes, stand in front of the gas-log fire, peer out the windows, silver birches to the south, brick walls and roofscape to the east.

By coincidence I receive an email last night from Linzee, former Berengarra colleague. I mention I’m going to an auction in Richmond. She emails back that she’s an aficionado of Richmond real estate. She and her husband own a Richmond investment property, her son’s place is nearby.

When I climb the stairs Linzee is at the top. Her son and his girlfriend turn up a few minutes later. Nice to have company I didn’t expect or ask for. We chat as we poke about in the house.

Back in the street, the auction. No second bid. The auctioneer gets to ‘going twice’ so I stick up a finger, but the 410 bid isn’t mine. Someone on the other side of the street gets the nod. Suddenly the bidding ramps up and we race by tens to 490—and stall. At ‘going twice’ the auctioneer retreats to the house to consult the owner.

The middle-aged woman has the bid and is not going to be beaten. The auctioneer offers to up the bid by one thousand only and a new bid comes from behind the fence. We increase now tentatively by thousands to 495 then suddenly by five to 500. The determined woman has the bid still. All the time she’s giving running commentary on the auction’s progress on her mobile.

At 510 the place is hers. It’s 100 grand more than the bank is prepared to lend me. I’m a spectator, as I expected. Linzee, son and girlfriend and I stand around a while and chat. The girlfriend thought it would go at 700 plus. The son advises me to attend every auction going to get the hang of it all.

Rock on. 

serendipity

I wrote on 18 May about the art of the flâneur, aimless wandering in order to serendipitously discover city life. Apparently there are now apps devoted to being a flâneur. Install Serendipitor on a smartphone and it will tap your location and issue instructions for your peregrinations—“Pick a person and follow them for two blocks.”

I discover this in an article in last Saturday’s big paper. GetLostBot monitors your routines via your phone’s GPS capability and suggests the coffee-house round the corner rather than your usual. It’s the enemy of predictability. MeetMoi connects you with strangers on your walk, giving commands like “look for someone who seems lonely and ask to walk with them for a while.”

Apparently these apps are tapping into recent findings from happiness research. If we suspect a bad outcome from something—exam results, a medical test—we can’t live with the uncertainty of not knowing. But if the outcome is going to be pleasurable, the pleasure of anticipation outweighs that of knowing the good outcome then and there. A pleasure delayed is a pleasure doubled, sort of thing.

An ambiguous pleasure, like which way turn at the end of the street, gives rise to the ‘pleasure paradox’: while we desire to understand the world, that robs us of the pleasure of unexpected events. The article’s author finds it strangely exhilarating to be told to carry out random activities, like asking to take a stranger’s photo.

To me these apps are actually anti-flâneur. Surely the whole point of being a flâneur is to use one’s own imagination about where to turn, and how to behave when one reaches an unknown place or destination. Having your phone decide? No thanks.

I go to the Google store to download any one of these apps. The outcome: not found. Not one of them.

Rock on. 

extempore

It takes all afternoon to pack our boxes. We fill the boot of the hire car in the basement car park at 5:30 and I negotiate us slowly through peak hour and dusk onto the Calder. Comrade S needs sustenance for the journey. I can hang out for a good meal in Bendigo but Subway at the Calder Park service centre gets the nod. I put $72 worth of unleaded in the tank’s tank.

Comrade S says she’s not received her hotel booking details. I drive, she dials. Turns out we’re booked at separate accommodation, same chain. They swap her to the serviced apartments I’m booked at. We check in just after eight. Comrade S retires to her room; I have much to do, a trip to find real milk for a cup of tea, a visit to tomorrow’s venue to check the layout and facilities.

Back at the apartments I prepare slides, notes and myself for tomorrow. Long after midnight my gritty eyes droop: I’ve been awake for 21 hours. Sleep comes quickly but doesn’t last. At 5:30 I’m sitting, shitting. More hasty preparation and another nervous shit before I meet Comrade S at the car, its windows iced.

We breakfast in Pall Mall, wheel our trolleys and boxes into the venue just before eight. We put paper and textas on tables, set up the data projector, check sound, vision, registration table and name badges in the foyer. Again my bowels intervene. When I take the floor at nine I look serene, feel anything but.

Our ‘audience’ for the next two days are pre-service teachers, not the easiest participants to work with. The workshop is designed for core groups of teachers already in schools. We modify our presentation. Day One is all mine. The pre-morning tea session hums along and the words flow. I’m not so sure of my material or myself after the break, but the participants don’t twig.

After lunch I’m winging it. Then my voice cracks and my command of the room is gone. For the final half hour I stand at the lectern and microphone. At three thirty they’re out the door. We store our gear in a back room behind the stage. Comrade S and our student, Mister T, drive back to Melbourne—commitments. Comrade S drops me at the serviced apartment.

I’m completely knackered. I stare at the wall, my brain empty.

Rock on. 

seat of my pants

Daphne, the Publication Coach, is a great advocate of getting in early. Whether it’s a school essay, doctoral thesis or journal article deadline, her credo is start writing the moment you know the topic, don’t use an outline and don’t edit as you write. I’m with Daphne one hundred per cent.

She begins with a mind map, a blank page, on which everything she might possibly write about the theme is randomly bunged down on the page, no order, no organisation. That comes later. Apposite things can be joined with arrows or dots or circles or whatever as their apposition emerges.

Now write, and write early.

The idea is to finish this sucker with days to spare so you can put it aside, appraise it in the clear light of at least 24 hours not thinking about it or looking at it. Now comes the polish.

While I’m with Daphne one hundred per cent on all the above—great theory—my actual modus operandi is diametrically different. I procrastinate and then procrastinate some more. It’s always been that way. I don’t want it to be, but it is. It’s like I’m addicted to not doing.

I don’t remember school essays but I must have left them till the last moment. Tertiary deadlines I avoid by doing almost entirely practical subjects, physical education and drama. I’m sure I learn lines for the plays I act in at teachers college on an ‘it’ll-be-all-right-on-the-night’ basis. I never fluff one.

My practicum report for my graduate diploma at the age of 46—the whole diploma hinges on this—is written in scraps but the final work is only complete at 5:15 on the morning of submission after 12 hours unbroken writing and editing.

Here I am at 61 with five days to spread 100 PowerPoint slides across my desk, sort them, revamp them, edit the notes, slot them into nice clear plastic folders, so that when I stand up tomorrow to present the stuff to 65 pre-service teachers in Bendigo, I know my stuff backwards. I have just wasted five days.

Right now it’s between four and five in the morning. I’m writing today’s blog post. How good is this? Well, yes, but I got out of bed at four to start the work described in the previous paragraph. This post is my procrastination about the main event. It has been ever thus. I fly by the seat of my pants.

I love sport because the contest is unscripted drama. Presenting to an audience for me is always the same: unscripted, unpolished, seat-of-the-pants drama.

Rock on. 

petcheys bay

From Cygnet you can go over the hill to the east through Nicholls Rivulet and Oyster Cove. On a clear day the scene goes all the way across Bruny Island to the Tasman Peninsula. Or you can go over the hill to the west and look across the Huon estuary into Tasmania’s dark and wild heart. Petcheys Bay lies on the Huon shore.

Nothing much happens at Petcheys Bay: apples grow, drizzle dots the silent sluggish Huon, an occasional car stirs the brown gravel road that runs around the coast, south, east, then north through Lymington back to Cygnet. It’s here in December 1982 that I find myself for a month in an apple pickers’ hut looking after my two children, aged three and one.

I have blown up my marriage with Marilyn, returned to a lover in Victoria who doesn’t want me, come back to Tassie while Marilyn goes home to NSW to have Christmas with her parents and siblings. For me it’s a month with my kids before I lose them again when she returns.

Although I hate Christmas, this one is the loneliest day of my life. It holds no significance for my children. Too young. I drive to a vantage point up the hill, gaze into the distance, feel nothing in particular, return to our pickers’ weathered paradise.

The new year turns. In January Rock and Lummo drop in en route to walking into Federation Peak via Breakfast Creek. I drive them to their start point in the wilderness. Ten days later they return for a day or two. Rock tells me he loves watching me ‘work’ with my children: no fuss, no bother, no baby-talk, no bullshit; gentle care, quiet doing.

The kids and I spend lazy days at the water’s edge, fossick along the roadside, fly a kite into a tree, forever, dodge endless showers of pissy rain from the west. This January has no warmth.

Marilyn returns. The plan is for me to find a place to live and work in Hobart, an hour’s drive from the land we have bought on Mt Cygnet where she and my children will live. The Honda CX500 Shadow takes my away over the hill, house-hunting. I inspect a couple of share places, try to imagine myself in them. No dice. I attend a job interview in Glenorchy. No dice.

I stay a night at Petcheys, bestride the Shadow again next morning. Finally sun with some warmth. I opt for the longer ride around the Channel coast, focus too long on the oyster beds at Gordon, miss a 90-degree left, crash the bike. It’s a write-off, me too: four days in Hobart Hospital, ballooning shoulder the radiologist describes as ‘mashed’.

Marilyn drives me back to Petcheys Bay one last time. I lie on my back, can’t move, can’t sleep. She fucks me one last time, weirdly frenzied, a death throe for a relationship. I fly back to Melbourne to convalesce in a caravan on the turnaround in the steep driveway of my parents’ home at Menzies Creek.

At 32, I have reached the nadir of my life.

   

Rock on. 

ambit claim

Just showered after a 52 km ride in the Yarra Valley, I plonk my bod in the comfy red chair in my home office. The work phone rings in the dining room where I’ve set up the work computer. The number on screen means nothing to me, nor the young woman’s voice that says hello, nor her name. The real estate company name is my clue.

Will I be attending this Saturday’s auction of the apartment I inspected last week? Yes, I will. Would I like to know the details: the section 32, all applicable fees and charges? Yes, I would. She says she’ll email the document to me. Indeed it drops into my cyber-inbox the moment she’s off my phone.

Over a toasted tomato, cheese and onion sanger I scroll through it: the encumbrances (none), caveats (none), the rates (higher than expected), the owners corp fees (higher than expected), and the minutes of their previous meeting (interesting).

I need to get off my arse and visit the bank. If I bid at the auction (unlikely), and happen to be successful (extremely unlikely), I’ll need a deposit. I also need to know how much I can afford to bid.

    

I step up to the counter and pose my questions to a rotund woman named Dora. You’ll need to see Kylie, she says, our lender. She waddles off, comes back to tell me Kylie’s having a cow of a day, no lunch yet and it’s after three. Can I come back in 20 minutes?

I trot off to the bike shop for new cleats and a scan of the merchandise for anything I don’t have by the boxful in the bike cupboard at home. On my way back to the bank I spy two desperate women sucking fags in a dank gap about a metre wide between buildings.

I sit on the bank sofa for another quarter hour. Kylie finally appears, moans as she escorts to an office, not hers. She looks a bit the worse for wear. I recognise her as one of the women fagging between buildings, can smell it on her.

I explain my finances and she takes my plastic card, calls up my details on screen. She whacks heaps of figures into her spread sheet; I’ve no idea what she’s mumbling about most of the time. The upshot is that if the bids don’t go beyond the real estate agent’s estimate, I might be a bidder.

The bank is well closed when we emerge from the office that isn’t hers. A blank counter check is drawn up. I fold it carefully, slide it into my wallet. It would seem that anything is possible.

Rock on. 

riding

Finally the days lengthen and the sun has some warmth. I can ride to work in daylight and return home from work just before it gets dark. A month ago I leave at 4:30 and arrive at my door in darkness; now I leave at five and need a light only for the last 30 minutes.

Nicky sends me a text message on Wednesday asking am I riding Sunday. That message usually arrives Friday. She’s keen to get out there; me too.

The Dandenongs are lost in mist from my kitchen window as I eat hot porridge. Nicky rolls into my driveway at nine and we ride up the hill for the first time in a long time. The bitumen is wet all the way. There’s no pace on; Nicky sits on my wheel and we chat. Riders fly past us on their descent. Bikes line the footpaths outside the coffee palaces of Olinda and Sassafras.

Over the top we descend the One in Twenty taking wide arcs into the bends and back off the pedals. Spray off the front tyre dampens my shoes. I keep my luminous slicker on from go to whoa. Back in Croydon at 11 the road surface finally dries.

This afternoon I wheel three bikes out of the bike room into the backyard, hose them, soap them up and rinse them off. I dry each bike with a towel, return them to their support stands under the loft bed. I have ridden each this week and clocked 150 kilometres, my first week in triple figures for at least a month. The aim is always 200, but the chances are slim.

It’s good to be in the saddle. The legs have no form but they’re not dead. The week ahead offers little opportunity to ride.

Rock on. 

astonishment

I ring my mother to remind her to read an article in the still-a-broadsheet about the dangerous former seminarian who looks likely to be our next prime minister. She thinks his party will have the good sense to piff him out before the election. We agree to disagree. Eventually.

She asks what I’ve been doing, have I been away this week? No trips, I tell her, but I’ve been to a counselling session with my good woman.

She surprises me, sees no value in counselling. I explain that it can help us reflect on our personal shortcomings (and strengths), how they contribute to our relationship shortcomings. For my part I’m trying to figure out what about me I can change and what I can’t, and why I can’t get beyond a certain point in a relationship even when I’d like it to be long-term.  

My mother still isn’t buying, thinks no good can come of it, just more insecurity. Then she astounds me by saying that I should stick to shorter-term relationships; I seem to be better at them. Given that she’s been married for 64 years, I ask her on what life experience she bases this belief. I also counter with her strongly expressed desire that I don’t end up a lonely old man.

She knows I’m more than capable of and don’t mind living alone, that I can cook, do housework, fix things, budget and pay the bills. My father can do one and a half of those things, my mother two. She also knows that like her I can fill my days with all manner of relatively meaningful activity.

But she’s not so sure I should be considering another place. But that’s another story.

Rock on. 

coupling

A month ago my good woman and I are ‘a couple’, much and all as I don’t like the connotations of coupledom. Today we go to couples counselling. Kew.

At 5:11 the cat tromps across my pillow, the dog wants a piss, me too. After dealing with it all I don’t sleep, but start wondering about today’s first counselling session. Who starts, what questions, what do I have to say? Do I really want to be there? Can I see the process reaching any useful conclusion, especially if I’m asking these questions?

More questions find their way out of the gloom in the back of my head. It seems to me that my physical desire for my good woman died when the possibility of living with her went west. It went west when the doubts set in about whether I would, should or could live with her.

Perhaps I lost physical interest because I just lost physical interest. I recognise a pattern here: the same symptom has occurred before with others. Perhaps this time it’s taken longer, not because my good woman is better looking or more sexually attractive than others, but because we seemed so well suited.

Perhaps my diminished physical desire is a reflection of a diminished interest in maintaining a relationship. Is it that I just want to be on my own again, tired of the imposition a relationship makes on the things I like doing.

Am I that shallow, that selfish, that ambivalent about the value of being with someone else? Am I just a flawed individual, incapable of a genuine long-term relationship?

I catch the train to Hawthorn, read a Jack Irish crime novel on the journey, keep my mind off other things. I check the real estate while walking from the station to the counsellor’s rooms. It’s a preliminary session. Madame R is a psychoanalyst, asks if she might make notes. I tell her she can make a video if she likes. No smiles: you don’t joke about confidentiality with psychologists.

We tell our stories in fits and starts: each claims at times to have been misrepresented; the counsellor asks clarifying questions. A slightly different picture of our problems emerges in the presence of a third person.

Two more sessions are booked. I come away no more hopeful than I was at 5:11 this morning.  

  

Rock on.