last post

The last of 366 daily posts brings relief. I’m glad not to write another word of this blog. I ran out of things to say, if indeed I ever had anything worth saying, long ago.

At the beginning I was plotting the course of an intriguing year, navigating between the hazards of unemployment, Centrelink and making my business do the plain talking. Instead I stumbled into my ‘dream’ job only to have it turn into a nightmare.

In the second half of the year I suffered days and weeks with nothing positive to write. My mental health sank into Bunyan’s slough of despond. Better to be silent, I thought, but couldn’t be. Many apologies.

I can, however, report that I’ve learned much, a good thing at 61. My friend Carey says in his blog that 2012 defeated him on points. This year defeated me by TKO. But I'm standing again, groggily. More surprising still, I’m girding myself to fight again. A little more craftily, perhaps, in 2013. 

The thought of returning to my job on 8 January is surreal, not at all welcome. I start the year on probation again, with three months to prove my worth to my employers. I will. Nonetheless, I must remember that we work to live, not live to work. This year I will get that right.

Carey says all he wants is a bit of peace and quiet. I share his sentiment. And I am having it now. It’s doing me a power of good. And I have seven more days of it, most to be spent painting the front rooms of my house. Cathartic stuff.

I begin 2013 with two jobs—well, a job and a small business. The job will be better this year. Comrade S kept telling me that we would never work harder than we did in those first eight months. She’s right.

I begin the year owning two houses: the novelty of moving into a solid brick art deco in Carnegie will relieve some of the pain of leaving my beautiful and freshly painted cottage here at the foot of the Dandenongs.

I begin 2013 with two parents and two healthy young adult children in the primes of their lives, one pregnant, the other sure to become a father in the not too distant. I’ll be a grandfather of two in May.

I begin 2013 with two cars and two lots of two bicycles stashed under the loft bed and maybe a bit more time to throw a leg over each of them.

I begin 2013 with one good woman, though she’s twice the woman to me. We nearly fucked it up in 2012, but we got our act together after two months apart. We fornicated as the fireworks went off last New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t ring in the year of fornication promised by a Serbian proverb.

Second chance tonight. Better luck this time.

Rock on. 

number 96

Things are changing here at number 96. I’m moving out in four months, have begun preparing the house for tenants. Dan and Joyce have put their unit on the market. Joyce popped in the other day to ask if I’d prepare an owners corporation certificate as I’m the current chair of our small body.

Dan has been down to 45 kilograms, had all kinds of tests on lungs and stomach, nothing found. Now he’s back to 48 kgs. The smell of Joyce’s Christmas roast leaps the back fence at a single bound. She seems to have done a Boxing Day roast too, trying to fatten Dan up. Dan brings an empty bin down the driveway; he may have put on three kilos but he’s still a shambling cadaver.

Michelle has settled into unit 4. Daughter Shelby sticks the L-plates to the front and rear windows of their silver car and away they go. A bloke in a red Corolla parks in front of her garage; he has the air of a ‘boyfriend’ and a parcel in his hand. Michelle is not at home. He knocks again and again, them pulls out his mobile.

Bullyboy Jim, owner of unit 3, rings my bell recently. He’s almost affable these days, seems to have accepted that we are self-managing and not using a property manager as he would prefer. He’s trimmed all the shrubs along the drive as his contribution to keeping things ‘legal’. The rest of us would call it keeping things tidy.

I drag the Masport, our only common property, from under the house, fire it up in the driveway. It takes about seven minutes to mow the lawns in front of units 2 and 4, ten to do the nature strip. I unlock the electricity box by the front gate, reset the timer for the lights down the drive.

When next I encounter Michelle I’ll put it to her that she should be the next chair of the owners corporation. I’ll still be part of it as I’ll still own unit 1, but the chair should live on site and I won’t any longer.

I’ve been thinking about how to attract good tenants. Teachers at the local Steiner school are possible tenants. My house should appeal to alternative types who want a garden and would look after one.

The odds are that I’ll not live here a third time, but who can say what vicissitudes life has in store for us. I’ve poured my heart and soul into this house and garden. Twice. I love this little house, will leave it in good condition, and can’t bear the thought of it populated by people I neither know nor approve of.

Rock on. 

recuperation

The last Saturday of 2012 is the sort of day I enjoy most. Saturday’s paper, abridged for the holidays, is still the best of the week. I sit at the island bench in a sunny kitchen, read the book reviews, a lovely piece by novelist Cate Kennedy about a trip to Cairns in her car that wouldn’t die. Then I sit and finish Sonya Hartnett’s brilliant novel Butterfly.

About half after ten I step into the garden. I pick a few green beans to go with the big bag already in the fridge. I’m turning them into spicy beans later for my good woman and me to have for tea. A nice cucumber pokes its nose out from under an eggplant. Cabbage moths flit about with no cabbages to alight on.

The gentle sun encourages the newly planted spring onions and the next batch of green and brown mignonettes. Eight celery plants erupt from the milk cartons surrounding them. Lemons like jaundiced teardrops hang from the tree and the kaffir lime scents the whole place.

I get down on my knees and pull weeds from between the pavers under the clothesline and along the ragged brick path to the front yard and carport. I water, weed and wander among the plants.

My empty front room calls but I’m not keen to go in there yet. A drop-sheeted table covered in tools, spakfilla and paint awaits. Instead I sit on the couch and begin a new novel from my sister for Christmas, a crime thriller set in Norway with an 82 year-old protagonist. By page 40 I’m hooked.

I cruise up to Chirnside Park. I hate shopping centres but this one has a greengrocery that sells every imaginable vegetable. At eight on a Saturday morning you can’t move. It’s frustrating and fantastic. A bunch of coriander in the supermarket is $2.48 compared to 79 cents at the greengrocer. I buy cherries, mushrooms, oranges, the coriander, and strawberries for my good woman.

The JRT and I take a mid-afternoon stroll, no destination, no timeframe. He’s old enough to feel the heat, though it’s only warm this afternoon, and he lags behind. I stop and wait for him a few times. Back home I prepare the spicy beans.

My good woman comes over after six. We sit on the back step and look at the garden. I get my sixth grade reader and read Louise Mack’s Sunrise in the Blue Mountains to her. I have vivid memories of it from grade six but haven’t read it since. I read her Lawson’s The loaded dog as well.

Then together we peel the rippled paper off the crumpled front wall of the front room for an hour. She gives me my painting instructions and timetable. I tell her I’ll set my own timetable and certainly won’t be rushed into anything.

We eat the spicy beans—a bit too spicy for my good woman—and do a bit more in the front room. By half nine we’re heading for bed. My good woman lies quietly as I read her the novel we started the other day. Not long after ten we retire.

I’m recuperating from a bad year. Today is a good day for a recuperating spirit.

Rock on. 

forest

Some time in the 1990s I start writing film reviews. Without seeing the films. Every Thursday for years I consult the papers for movie reviews, and I review the reviews, sometimes up to four opinions on the one film. And so I précis a film’s merits or otherwise in half a dozen lines. The original reviewer’s initials after each précis tell me whose opinion I’m noting.

Ostensibly this ever-expanding document is the place to go to see if a movie is worth bringing home when I go to a video rental outlet, but I never consult it beforehand. Was there any point to this endless chronicling of the movies of the day?

Looking back, I see no motivation beyond the need to write something, anything, regularly. I write creative, funny, acerbic or flattering summaries. I review movies in haiku, trying to catch the essence of each.

As December moves through the days, and now with only four posts to write before my contract with myself is met, I keep asking myself what this blog has been about. Is it just a need to write, something, anything, regularly? Certainly the imposed discipline to write each day achieves that, albeit that it has grown to be a chore.

The original blog about being unemployed at sixty became something else: exactly what, I have no idea. I may keep to the daily discipline, but no other discipline applies. I write about anything that comes to mind on any day. If themes emerge, they are accidental, unintended, fortuitous.

I am sure only that like everything I write, I’m looking for the essence of something, each paragraph, each day, and over the course of a year. The essence of what, though? How to write a good paragraph? Good writing itself? What it is to be me? What it is to exist—what a life is about? Has it been to prove that Seinfeld is right—it’s all about nothing.

What this blog amounts to escapes me because it’s trees and forest stuff. I’ve been planting trees—366 of them—but what sort of forest they constitute is a mystery to me. All I see is today’s tree.

I intend reading my blog, in toto, sometime after March, to see what sort of forest I have here. Some ragged thing replete with vines and sycophants, maybe. Not serried rows of pines, I hope.

A native thing would be nice—some rugged ironbarks, some lemon-scented, white-trunked beauties reaching into clear sky, and plenty of mallee scrub too.

    

Rock on. 

painting

At Bunnings I buy a DIY book titled Paint techniques: great value at $6.98. I read the important parts before making a second trip. This time I stand before hundreds of paintbrushes,  consider bristles, widths and prices, finally commit to three. I purchase a paint pot, drop sheet, roller and tray, a scraper and replacement blades, three six-litre cans of ceiling white.

Today I move rooms. My current bedroom at the front of the house is where I’ll begin painting. It’s the biggest room, has the poorest walls—rippled paper, saggy plaster, holes, cracks, lumps. I make space in other rooms, carry every piece of furniture out of the front room.

I clear the hall. From the ‘third bedroom’ next to the kitchen I clear the huge dining table, turn it on its side, wrestle it out the door, up the hall, into the empty front room. The ‘third bedroom’—it’s not been a bedroom in the twelve years I’ve owned this house—now becomes my bedroom.

I cover the floor of the front room with a huge drop sheet, place an old mattress protector on the table, cover it with a smaller drop sheet, haul all the painting gear from the shed to the front room, array it on the table.

If I can ‘fix’ this room, I can fix anything in this house. This is where I begin. As I move from room to room over coming weeks  I must categorise stuff. Some things will be offered when I hold a garage sale, things like the brand new motorbike helmet I never wore, furniture I won’t need at Carnegie—the loft bed, a red chair, a desk stool.

In the cupboards are clothes I will bag and drop at the op shop. I will box those books I don’t use for reference for my work, stow them in the revamped front room.

A couple of bigger tasks need doing—replacing the bathroom vanity, a missing quadrant of carpet in the lounge, a piece of door frame cut off to accommodate a built-in bookshelf.

The good thing is that I’m happiest at home doing exactly these things. I can’t spend enough time in the garden, or shuffling furniture, or up a ladder. What I won’t do is rush.

Today I spend all day quietly, patiently, methodically moving things. It all works with a bit of thought: this thing first, from here to here, then this, and this.

Tonight I sleep in a new bedroom. Tomorrow I prepare to paint.  

Rock on. 

well-being

Most of my life I consider myself the sanest person I know. Neither right in everything, nor righteous (well, just a wee bit), but ever so stable mentally and physically. They go together, of course.

On a teachers’ college drama tour in 1975 a now well-known playwright tells me she thought I was the sanest person she had met, then recants, but doesn’t tell me why. I still don’t know why she even saw fit to say anything about my mental health.

While laying bricks in the extension we build on Carol’s mud-brick house in 1985 she tells me she suffers depression. I’ve been living with her for a year, but I’m shocked to hear it, both naïve and inquisitive enough to ask exactly what that means. I am 34 and have no idea about depression.

It’s not really until studying for a graduate diploma in adolescent health in 1997 that I first acquire a formal knowledge about mental health and well-being. Even then, it’s sketchy, has no practical application, and based in no real-life experience, albeit that I teach a kid with OCD, girls with eating disorders, one who suffers panic attacks.

In 2000 I’m one of a team of four who devises a program, SKIPS, for primary school teachers and grade 5/6 students abound kids who live a parent with mental illness. I begin to expand my knowledge of mental health and illness. I listen to the stories told by our guest speakers, people with schizophrenia, bipolar, depression and anxiety.

Until 2006 I still think I’m the sanest person on Earth. I now have a fine working knowledge of mental health and well-being. One day I walk out of a school with my SKIPS co-presenter Julie, having just elicited the elements of good mental health from a bunch of grade 5/6 students, and realise my mental health is rat-shit.

I have some minor symptoms of depression and anxiety; I’m stressed by my job, burnt out. I attend four counselling sessions, listen hard, figure out a plan to regain my emotional well-being, execute it, and recover very nicely, thank you. It takes a couple of months.

In the six years since I’ve come to believe that mental health, like physical health, is less robust as one ages. Stressors are less welcome, less easily accommodated or overcome. Physical deterioration, especially for someone used to physical prowess, contributes to a less robust self-regard.

My mental health deteriorates this year. Now, finally, with time away from work, a little space to consider the bigger picture, I see the causal factors. I can see the things I need to do, as I did after a bit of cerebration in 2006, to put things right.

It’s a big thing to admit that you are not well, mentally. Time, rest and care will put things right.

Rock on. 

daughters

We gather at my sister’s house. We are not a tribe, or clan; just a family. My sister has said she thinks the family she and I grew up in to be dysfunctional. I can’t think why she feels that way. We weren’t perfect, but not in any way dysfunctional. That said, we were not a close or loving family, placed no emphasis on ‘family values’.

We have grown to four generations. And here we all are on Christmas Day: my sister and second husband Tom; me, my good woman and her daughter, joining us for the first time; my daughter, her partner Richie and little Nerri; my mother and father; my son and partner Katie; my nephew Callan and partner Prue; my niece Elise and fiancé Carlos. Elise’s twin Melina and her partner Mick are working.

No one has organised who is to bring what. Mo and Katie produce dips, chips and antipasto; three salads appear—green, beetroot, and potato; my mother’s cheese and tomato pie and my good woman’s mushroom pie occupy the table’s centre along with a chicken inside a turkey from Prue; a huge plate of roast potatoes, pumpkin and carrots come from my sister’s oven; dessert is chocolate meringues, a Christmas pudding and a Christmas cake; a ginger and treacle cake, rum balls, custard, cream and brandy sauce.

At one point all sixteen of us seem to be in the kitchen; at other times it’s just the women, me and my nephew. My son is out fixing the pool filter, the other males and Elise huddled round the dips. Small parties wander into the garden, an acre plus of it full of heritage-listed trees. The new Caddy is inspected and admired.

The stealers of the show are the daughters. My mother’s daughter, my sister, hosts a great show: crockery, cutlery, immaculate table, house all in order. My daughter, pregnant again: what pregnant woman isn’t a centre of attention? My daughter’s daughter, Nerri, two years and four months, talking as she’s not talked before. Someone remarks that she’s not a small child but a small person. My good woman’s daughter Sasha meets at least ten people for the first time, greets everyone as if she’s always known them, is genuinely pleased to see them. It’s more than I can say for myself.

Prue is someone’s daughter, but I don’t know whose. She’s a recent addition to us; my nephew’s partner, sixteen years his senior. In three years she has embraced us and we seem to be embracing her.

Later I sit quietly thinking how pleased my mother must be near the end of her life to look down the table at us all, her legacy, four generations. No arguments or fights break out. No animosities lie hidden or dormant. We don’t all love each other, but we treat each other with respect for who we are and what we are collectively. My mother would call us ‘nice’ people.

The implication is that it is quite sufficient to be nice people. She’s dead right.

Rock on. 

greeting

In 1997 I pen a new year’s greeting slash report and post it to friends. You know the sort of thing—bullet points about what’s happened with your family over the past year. It ends with a salutation for the year ahead.

The recipients are folk you know but don’t see all that often; in fact, some I haven’t seen for 20 years. Since then my new year salutation has evolved, but the list of recipients has not.

Every now and again someone responds. Even rarer is meeting someone I haven’t seen for yonks who tells you how much they enjoy reading my new year greeting. A more regular respondent likes the fact that my kids and I are ordinary people doing ordinary things, with the joys and tribulations we all face all the time. The encapsulation beguiles.

Some years I struggle to find anything worth saying and opt for humour. Once or twice I find nothing good to report, so in time-honoured tradition, say nothing. No greeting, no report.

Over 15 years the new year salutation has become more elaborate. A series of dot points morphs into a PowerPoint presentation replete with photos of the events recorded.

I pull out my last effort—2010. The first slide summarises an uneventful year: no illness, no bushfires, no moving house, no relationship breakdown, no job loss, no bankruptcy. This year has been its powerful opposite, anything but uneventful.

Between me and my good woman, my son and his partner, and my daughter, her partner and their child, we endure relationship failure and atonement; we buy houses, a first for my son, a first in partnership for me and my good woman; we resume old jobs, take on a new job, and look in vain for a job all year.

We attend auctions, a wedding, and travel interstate with a vengeance. And of course, we have a new pregnancy, a second child and grandchild on the way.

So I copy my 2010 greeting and start rewriting it for 2012. I write the text in Word first. Now I must cut and paste the textlets into a PowerPoint presentation, hunt up the photos to go with each entry.

Rock on. 

carnegie

I grow up, late childhood and adolescence, in Ormond. It borders Carnegie. I never think of either as particularly fashionable when I live there. But a child thinks nothing much about where he lives. It’s just a place to plonk your school bag, deposit your muddy footy boots.

Even now it’s not fashionable in a Collingwood or Prahran way: it’s not chic. It is desirable, convenient to much, well served by infrastructure. For my good woman Carnegie is an investment—she has a thirty per cent share. For me it is the next place I will live. My Croydon house becomes my investment from 26 April when I move back to the streets of my childhood.

I suspect that like my purchase of my house in Croydon, my good woman and I have bought the last affordable house in Carnegie. It sits in a quiet tree-lined street, surrounded by more expensive, well-maintained California bungalows. But it has location coming out of its arse, and location is all.

It’s a project. We begin with a carport and are looking for one in art deco style. We won’t move any walls but we’ll remove a window and replace it with a door and window. That door might eventually open onto a pergola. There is no garden, front or back. Like here at Croydon, I begin from scratch.

We’ll put small gas heaters in the useless open fireplaces, double-glaze the windows, restore the exposed brickwork the previous owners painted over.

And here at Croydon I will do what every householder does before vacating their existing premises: turn it into what they always hoped it would be but never got around to. I must replace the failed vanity in the bathroom. I could replace guttering but probably won’t. I must get a plumber to fix the drains.

The rest of it is patching, painting, and plastering. I have no particular plan of attack. I said it would begin on Boxing Day, so I have a couple of days to firm up the thoughts I have about how and where to begin. My fear is that I will enjoy the practical work so much that I will not want to return to my real job.

The irony is that without that real job, none of it would have happened, and none of it will happen.

Rock on. 

croydon

In the roll call of places I have lived, I have left out one house—this house. I occupy it for eight and a half years before moving to Bendigo, and for eighteen months since returning from Bendigo.

When I buy it, it’s the last affordable house in Croydon. I watch the papers for months after signing the contract and not one place I can afford or would want to buy comes on the market. It’s a revamped 1920s weatherboard cottage sitting on a huge, odd-shaped, barren block, no driveway, no garden, no fence. Three units are to be constructed behind it in time.

The revamp is superficial; it almost rocks on its eighty year-old foundations. It’s painted white throughout, new but cheap carpets, a bathroom refitted with a second-hand vanity and impossibly narrow shower stall. 

By the time I move in—Friday 16 July 1999—it has a front fence, a surrounding fence, a drive has been laid and a path to the front door. Six months later I watch the units go up from my kitchen window. All three are investments and tenants move in. My daughter lives with me for a short time before life’s deeper water calls her away.

I don’t love my little house immediately but over the years I grow to love it dearly. It has character, and my lifetime’s accumulation of books and stuff add to its bohemian charm. I sweat the creation of a garden, hefting bluestones for borders, purloining old bricks from empty blocks where I walk the dogs, wheelbarrowing soil, sand, toppings, mulch and rocks.

I construct vegetable beds from sleepers, plant natives in the front yard to shield me from the road and the footpath, watch the hardenbergia grow up and become the back wall of the carport.

A few lovers come and go, a few jobs with the same employer in Ringwood. I supplement my road bike with a commuter, the Red Rocket. I ride to work each day on the Mullum Mullum trail, wending along the creek under the trees: no better way to start a working day. In the end I pedal everywhere in and around Croydon. The dud Subaru I hate gathers dust in the carport.

I shuffle furniture round the house for eight years till I get it just right. Then I leave. Leaving is a wrench. If not for a new job in Bendigo I would never leave.

Three and a half years later I return. The house is grubby, grimy, much of the garden gone. I sigh deeply and begin again.

Now my good woman and I own a house in Carnegie. In four months I will move into it. Some time in the further future my good woman will probably join me there. My Croydon house must be tenanted again. I dread that.

Rock on. 

castle

It’s good to wake up at home in my own bed after seven nights in other beds, albeit that my good woman is in them. The JRT and I open the door last night just before ten. After eight days away, fine trails of cobweb criss-cross every room. They catch in the hair as I unpack bags, enter rooms to put things away.

Eight days away and still no messages on my landline. Seems pointless having one. When I move house I will no longer use Telstra as my internet provider so I won’t need the landline they force me to pay for.

The dog is pleased to be home too, although my good woman’s kids look after him well, take him for more walks than I manage in recent weeks. They learn some of his idiosyncrasies—his love of heights, flapping his ears in the dead of night when he needs to piss or poop.

With a load of washing in the machine before seven, I unpack the remains of our trip, ring the vet where the cat is still on holiday. I pick him up at eight thirty. His delight to be home is palpable. He purrs for hours.

Thirteen murky millimetres sit in the rain gauge. Caterpillars leave only leaf skeletons on the broccoli plants. Weeds sprout through every crack, between every vegetable. Lettuces of all varieties reach for the sky like Jack’s beanstalk. Green beans dangle off the trellis. Gargantuan zucchini lie in the dirt where only shrivelled dicks sat before.

So much to do. I barely start one job before launching six more. I put two slices of bread in the toaster, hang out the washing.

The smoke alarm tells me the toaster hasn’t behaved well. I can’t see the far wall when I enter the kitchen. Eyes watering, I piff the charred bread out the door; it’s till smoking ten minutes later. The hand towel hanging above the toaster is seared. Smoke billows through the house. An hour later a haze remains, and the smell.

Apart from picking up the cat I stay at home all day, pottering, tinkering, dickering. This is my place, my castle, for four more months.

Rock on. 

questions

My good woman can be shaken but not stirred. She promises to take an early morning ride with me along the coast from Narooma to Dalmeny before we pack and depart for home. But when it comes to it, she refuses my shaking, tickling, cajoling. Too much wind, she pleads.

She’s right, of course. The wind whips the noisy branches outside. It’s cool too; maybe rain will fall. I tog up, extract the Cervélo from the back of the Caddy, click in and roll down the hill to Forsters Bay on the inlet behind Narooma, picking up the bike path there.

The path winds along the inlet shore before ducking over the Wagonga Inlet bridge where it sets off for the surf beach, through Kianga to Dalmeny 6.8 kms north. The path is wide, concrete, well-constructed. The foreshore is clean, ordered, well maintained.

The ride back pitches me into the face of the southerly guster and, at the end, up the steep hill to our accommodation. My good woman is up when I get back. We breakfast and hit the road with 650 kms to home. I drive two-hour stints with short breaks between. 

The populated southern NSW coast finally gives way to the long stretches of unpopulated forest that is eastern Victoria. Somehow my good woman and I spend the better part of a two-hour stint talking about the longest relationship of my life, with Carol. My good woman asks interesting questions. She should; she’s a psychologist.

I find myself exploring long forgotten aspects of that relationship. More amazing is what the memory dredges up when put to the test: the dates of events thirty years past, the names of Carol’s lovers, thoughts and feelings I had about it all.

Carol’s parents died early at 61 and 62. She will be 60 in January. I’m sure she thinks about her own mortality, especially as she has lupus and is recovering from an operation to insert a pacemaker when last I spoke with her. Two days later her femoral artery bursts. I ask her straight up what she thinks with each operation. Whether she’ll survive, she says.

My good woman poses a canny question. When the two of us fell apart in August and September, did I see Carol? And did I owe Carol some care as her health deteriorates after a relationship of 22 years?

The answers are both no. One word that took me a long time to elucidate.

Rock on. 

mileage

In the old days—in other words, when I am a kid—distance is measured in miles.

Decimal currency starts on 14 February 1966; anyone my age can still sing the jingle. “Out go the pounds, the shillings and the pence … ” A shame to lose our quids, florins, deenas and zacks.

No one remembers when we shift from weights avoirdupois—from the Norman French avoir de pois, literally "goods of weight", the original goods being wool—to metric. And we don’t remember when we forsook miles for kilometres: no date, not a year nor even a decade comes to mind.

Being driven home to Warrnambool as a small boy, I count off the miles as each post flits by. These days I get a rare thrill to see an old mileage post by a railway line or along a now bypassed highway. Extraordinary to think that only Americans still measure distance in feet, yards and miles.

Miles live on, at least, in our vernacular. A good footballer still kicks the pill a country mile. A country kilometre doesn’t cut it. And somehow we all understand, we intuit, that a country mile is longer that a standard mile.

Today my good woman and I cover many miles, country and standard, from Hawks Nest, through sluggish Newcastle around nine, along congested motorways to Sydney. My good woman is my navigatrix through Sydney from Hornsby where the F3 ends, from north to south, on roads with numbers, sometimes names, but foreign to both of us, Serb and fifth generation Australian alike.

Finally out of Sydney’s clutch, we stop in Kiama. My good woman, fresh from nine hours watching The Lord of the Rings, likens it to Hobbiton—hilly, busy, colourful and clean, everything just as it should be. Only the wind that blows the gizzards out of salad rolls, detracts.

The hinterland, when we emerge into it, splendidly verdant, takes her breath away. But we can neither tarry nor linger. Two hobbits in a Caddy, our journey home is long and I would put miles behind us this day.

We struggle through the endless road works of Nowra, the town somewhere to our left behind signs and barriers; Batemans Bay likewise. We stop for afternoon tea in Ulladulla. Is there a better town name on this continent? Only Monkey Jacket, a location near Hawks Nest, tickles my fancy as much.

Over tea, coffee and pear and ricotta cake we consider where to roost for the evening. Narooma is always my preferred destination and just after six we arrive. It’s miles from anywhere and I like it all the more for that.

Rock on. 

cars

My good woman and I are unfolding the beach mat on Jimmy’s Beach, Hawks Nest, NSW, when my mobile phone rings in my bag. By a miracle I extract it, fumble the cover open and swipe the screen in time to take the call. It’s Georgia. She would like to see the Jazz. She likes the colour, can drive a manual.

Georgia is my first serious prospective buyer of my now second car, three months after it went on the market. I tell her I’m on a beach in New South Wales, but will be home in two days on Friday. We arrange that I will call her Friday morning to arrange a viewing time.

I always intend the Jazz to be my last car, until the chance to purchase a Caddy presents itself in the form of a much larger salary. I think back to my first car, my mother’s rather sedate Morris Major Elite, HOC 509, bequeathed to me at the start of 1971 when she moves up to an Isuzu Bellett.

A couple of years later I buy something more appropriate for a wild-haired young man—a minivan, KYF 175, beige, barn doors at the back the leak carbon monoxide into the cabin, push-button ignition on the floor, failing engine mounts. Doped-up Rock and I paint Harry Suckill van on the side in orange paint. Neither of us has a clue who Mr Suckill is.

Next comes a white Kombi, KWB 270, that sleeps me around during my first teaching career in my mid-twenties. I kill it moving pregnant Marilyn and me to South Australia in 42-degree heat. Back in Victoria with a baby, Marilyn and I buy a Holden HT Kingswood. Her father is a mechanic, a Kingswood man.

The vehicles of life with Marilyn and Carol bringing up young kids are utilitarian, characterless, the identifying number-plates lost to me. The Mitsubishi van Carol and I buy to transport four kids is BKZ something.

A second Kombi, split-window, has oodles of character—JPX 414. I’m a fool to let it go. An ancient orange Nissan Patrol, a grey Kingswood, the Valiant Barge, and a couple of Subarus come and go during the sixteen years I bring up my kids on my own. The first Suby is a gem, the second a lemon, bought only because it’s a school vehicle offered to me at a ridiculously good price.

Which brings me to the Jazz, the first and only new car I buy, and plan to be the last, until it isn’t. Five years to the day after buying it I put it on the market. But nobody wants to buy a manual. Lots of Asian girls call, but all want an automatic. Then, finally, Georgia.

Hang on, Georgia. I’ll be home soon.   

Rock on. 

pedalling

I’m nodding off on the couch, mid-afternoon, Horrible Hotel, Hawks Nest. My options are to read or to ride. My good woman has quit the room—can’t stand it—and gone to the beach. I can’t sit on a beach and read, cold breeze, sand in every orifice; sitting here I just fall asleep.

I don the bike gear, leave the key under the mat, portage the bike down the stairs, click in and turn the legs. I push through the back streets of Hawks Nest, round the curve leading to the Singing Bridge over the Myall River, roll down the arc into Tea Gardens.

Yesterday’s ride, the first for far too long, in the heat of the late morning on a slow, mottled surface, dead-legs me. Today is better, the air cooler, sun nowhere, the road surface kinder. Not so the first climb out of Tea Gardens after 6kms of pancake. It ramps up to ten per cent, gets me standing on the pedals. I drop height quickly on the other side.

I ride reasonably hard for 30 minutes before turning the bike around. This is an hour and no more. It’s tempting to push too hard, too early, but this is novice training after so long away. I need legs that can go again tomorrow and the day after that. I need legs that want to pedal, not groan at the thought of it. I need to harden up the arse, gone soft sitting on chairs at desks.

The ride back is pleasant enough. The ten per cent hill is ten per cent the other way, seems a little longer. I detour to the riverfront in Tea Gardens, check the eateries. My good woman and I eat out tonight after three days serious food deprivation. We are determined to lose weight, regain some shape. No amount of fruit fills me.

Not much is open at six fifteen on Monday night in Tea Gardens; nothing is open in Hawks Nest except the restaurant at our resort, somehow unappealing. We pull up at The Boathouse at 7:45 to be told the stove has been turned off. The pub is the only option. The food is good pub fare, local blackfish for me, doughy calamari for my good woman.

For the first time on this holiday I go to bed not feeling hungry, ravenous. Before bed we soak muesli for breakfast tomorrow. Bring it on.

Rock on. 

hawks nest

It’s a measure of our tiredness. On previous beach holidays—Surfers, Noosa—my good woman is up at sparrowfart walking along the sand. Not here. She remains firmly rooted under the sheets, kicking them off as the hot flushes come, pulling them back as dawn’s cool goose-bumps her.

I’m awake as always between five and six. I move soundlessly around our two rooms, slink the blinds down, shift bags, close the door and leave my good woman to drowse as long as she needs.

Our accommodation is modest: it’s a euphemism. The rooms are tiny, old, partly refurbished. The carpet is a grey scum, the bathroom vanity disintegrating particleboard. I sit on the can with my knees against the wall in front of me, thankful to be shitting after two days without.

Our open windows face east but the sun struggles to penetrate the salt build-up. Odd patches of discolouration mark walls and ceiling. The dank smell when we enter yesterday for the first time sours my good woman’s face. She’s all about the nose, is offended by odours that don’t register with me at all.

I’m on holiday: our accommodation is fine as far as I’m concerned. We have a fridge and microwave, cutlery and crockery. The television and DVD player work; last night we watch the first of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I can sit at this tiny round table and type these words. The crashing waves form an endless backdrop.

Mid-morning my good woman hauls her boogie board to the beach while I haul my sorry fat arse onto the bike and up the road to Mungo Brush, dead straight, dead flat, behind the dunes. It feels like I’m pedalling uphill every stroke of the way. The bike bumpety-bumps along the grippy, pitted bitumen, the sun belts down; there is no shade.

I’m so unfit. The journey back to fitness must begin somewhere. I’ve done a few press-ups lately but chances to ride have not happened. I feel crap but at least I’m in the saddle.

Rock on. 

beach

My good woman tells me to drag her out of bed at six for an early morning cliff-top walk along the escarpments of Katoomba and Leura in the Blue Mountains. We must quit our villa at ten thirty. She’s not a morning person and it takes till seven to get her out and functional enough to walk.

We stop at every lookout, descend the Giant’s Staircase, look down at the wheeling white cockatoos, circling then plunging into the canopy below the cliffs. The tourists won’t be here for a while yet. We feel like locals with our villa 100 metres from the viewing deck.

The Caddy loaded once more, we roll down the drive, cut across to Leura, buy an elegant yellow tote bag for my good woman, a red belt for me. All morning and into the afternoon as we circle Sydney’s northwest, wind our way to Wisemans Ferry, punt across the Hawkesbury, my good woman slides her new bag out of its protective cover, admires its lines, feels its texture.

From Wisemans Ferry it’s 55kms of rough road along the Hawkesbury before joining the Pacific Highway, skirting Newcastle, turning off for the northern side of Port Stephens. Some time around five we roll into the forecourt of the resort we have cut-price coupons for. Will that mean a cut-price room?

It’s not a flash room, a hike from the car, up a set of stairs, no view, dank stagnant air. My good woman slides the windows open. Her face speaks to her disappointment, her silence tells me everything. She’s out the door and off to see the beach without unpacking.

The afternoon turns grey, the sea leaden to match. It pounds down thirty metres from shore, runs silently up the hard beach. Low tide turns the beach into a road.

We make for the point, a steep mound at the end of a long spit between the ocean and Port Stephens proper round the corner. At its narrowest the spit is all sand, low dunes, coastal scrub. We wander in, sink to our ankles in the fine silky grains. Progress is treacly.

Back on the littoral my good woman turns shells, picks up the more colourful, checks their intactness, pockets them. The flying salt mists my glasses, glazes my forehead.

We are here: the beach.

Rock on. 

therapy

Retail therapy: shopping for gratification. It solves nothing, but can feel good. It’s symbolic, spending the hard-earned. My good woman and I don’t intend to spend, but our first full day on holiday is a release: we let go.

We’re camped in a ‘villa’ at Echo Point, Katoomba, the Three Sisters a breath away. I wander down to the vast lookout ramp before the busloads of tourists: the whole blue expanse of the Blue Mountains is on view here. It’s impressive, brings tears to my good woman’s eyes when she ventures down an hour later.

After breakfast we walk two kilometres into town, buy a hat each. My good woman deposits her old hat next door at the op shop. Up over the hill near the station is the Savoy, another art deco coffee palace. I order scrambled eggs and mushrooms on toast, my favourite eating-out breakfast. My good woman has a macchiato, three layers of coffee that could kill a cockroach.

We buy tickets for the trolley bus tour. We two are the only people on the bus. Our Irish-accented guide breaks into his spiel before we broach the roundabout. If it weren’t for the lovely brogue, I’d tell him to shut the fuck up so we can stare out the windows.

We’re supposed to gawp at the retail delights of Leura’s mall and the splendour of the golf club resort but it doesn’t blow my skirts up. We alight somewhere and wander off to a lookout point, stand in the heat, gaze sixty kilometres into the blue-hazed yonder.

In the late afternoon we drive back to Leura. It boasts a leathergoods shop, rare these days. As a former leatherworker in a distant alternative existence I can’t get enough of the smell of it. My good woman tries several bags but resists the urge to buy. I have no intention of buying till my eye finds a small tan man-bag, enough for wallet, coin purse, phone, maybe camera at a pinch.

The bookshop next door is just as good. I emerge with a book bag and two books.

It’s late afternoon. We leave tomorrow morning but know that we will be back in the leather shop and book shop as we head off from the mountains to the beach. My good woman wants to buy me a belt; I want to buy her a bag.

We are not big spenders, and right now we’re inclined to keep our hands out of our pockets, having borrowed $600k two days ago when our new house in Carnegie settled. Nonetheless it feels to good to indulge ourselves today.

Rock on. 

cherries

My good woman and I hit the road just after seven in the morning. You can feel the heat to come building. We must cover 860kms today, from Croydon, across the border into NSW, around the back of the Blue Mountains to Katoomba. We take 13 hours to get here.

The heat belts down on the new Caddy, the first car I’ve owned that tells me the outside temperature, as it breezes up the freeway. It stays in the mid-thirties all day until we scale the Blue Mountains after dark. Up over a thousand metres we drop into the mid-20s.

Mid-morning we stop and wander round Euroa, buy bananas and orange juice for the journey.

From home to the NSW border I stroke my good woman’s right leg. As the heat builds she strokes me with those scented towelettes, removes the sweat and grime of the journey; the alcohol evaporates, cools and soothes. Sticky hands and gritty neck feel OK for an hour till she repeats the exercise. What a boon companion she is.

Somewhere north of Holbrook in the grim gravelled yard of a fast food place an old bloke sells cherries, my favourite fruit. He’s a long way from Young where he says his cherries come from. We purchase ten dollars’ worth, endure his interrogation—the bikes in the back of the Caddy, our occupations. He takes me for a technician. Lonely selling cherries a long way from home.

The cherries become our lunch as we push into the early afternoon heat along the concrete two-lane through the rolling hills of southern New South Wales to Gundagai. We eat by a dingy billabong of the Murrumbidgee. I live out the childhood memory of my first trip in the family car up the Hume by having a milkshake in the art deco Niagara Café. Half Gundagai’s main street is art deco.

Not long after we leave the multi-lane freeway for back roads through Cootamundra, up onto the plateau where the cherries grow at Young. We pass countless roadside vendors till I can take no more: we stop and purchase a chilled box of two kilos of lush big black cherries.

The heat never lets up through Young and Cowra. My work phone rings but I don’t answer. We stretch by the Lachlan at Cowra, detour for a quick wander round historic Carcoar. A community event is on: families spill from cars, the smell of barbecued sausages ignites the air. My good woman falls in love with the town, and so do I.

I gun the Caddy back out on the highway: still such a long way to Katoomba. It’s a long way to anywhere, but with my good woman beside me tis better to travel than to arrive, though when the arriving finally happens it’s pretty good too.

Rock on. 

gembrook

After two days running training for prospective presenters with The Lizard I sleep like the dead, wake with a start. I hang the washing, water the pots, eat, drive to Gembrook. I’m taking an early morning walk with my former premiership team-mate Carey.

We stroll along, a colour contrast, Carey who could blend into the bush in every sense in work shirt, dark green pants tucked into black socks and work boots, me in open sandals, pink short shorts, black polo shirt.

   

His blog tells me that he knows everyone in Gembrook, where he’s lived for 30 years; everyone his age or older, anyway. A little whirlwind of JRTs accompanies us—snappy Snowy who’s 12, Pip—the apple of his master’s eye—at five, and my own Mister J, whose twelfth birthday is next week. It’s a quiet walk into town, nattering away.

We mosey through J A C Russell Park next to the Puffing Billy station. Carey isn’t keen on the tourist railway; they mucked him round one time, and the word tourist is anathema. He leans on a sign, bends it one degree south. One day it’ll fall over he hopes. There are too many signs; most carry no weight, no message that can’t be done without, he reckons.

Some of his favourite views are gone, disappeared behind new houses. He sighs. Back near Carey’s place, the dogs flush out a rabbit, have no idea where it’s gone. He tells me about the New Zealand flax plants on the roadside. Later we wander through his acre and a half. Every plant here has a purpose, a role.

The business Carey ran then inherited from his father is growing herbs and plants that end up in floral arrangements sold by florists—Queen Anne’s lace, cerulean blue cornflowers, cuttings from this and that and here and there. A tiny pair of snips arrear magically in his hand. He snips stems quickly, efficiently.

He likes things as they were, as we who grow older do. Retirement beckons. He wants to be free of people’s demands on his time, council officials who don’t know what they’re doing, doctors’ imprecations should he not behave as they would like. Let life have its way with us, he says, wicked or otherwise.

I follow his small Suzuki as he heads off to work. Shrubs slap the sides of the small van as it bumps along the dirt track that is his lower drive. We pull up at Hannah’s. Her husband died, left her a half acre of north-facing vegie garden and orchard. Carey tends it for her, the rich ochre soil pushing up broad beans, pansies, kiwi-fruit.

The sun warms us as we wander through the rows. It’s getting on for ten o’clock. I know he has a business to run, but right now I doubt either of us really wants to leave this place, this moment.

Rock on. 

done

Yesterday and today The Lizard and I are on our hind legs in front of twenty people in a light and airy presentation room in West Melbourne. This is the home of the independent schools of Victoria. It’s slightly snooty without trying to be. They can’t help themselves. This is where former private school principals come to die.

Two of them attend the two-day SKIPS presenter training though with no intention of ever presenting the program. They’re here to decide if The Lizard and I are up to their standard they require to get a future professional development gig with them. I think we pass: every evaluation rates The Lizard and me as five out of five. Only the catering scores higher.

Last night I sleep the sleep of the dead. I am so tired and the end of the longest, toughest six months work I can remember is so near. Maybe some time in the past I worked this hard, but at 61 with seven interstate trips in seven weeks I’m beyond tired. No amount of sleep refreshes me.

Still it goes on. At home I check my MM emails; requests to do this and that still sit in my inbox. Tomorrow I must make phone calls to regional venues, confirm dates, times, bookings, forward the findings to our MM admin officer or she’ll scalp me.

The one task I cannot face is my performance appraisal. I procrastinate, though procrastination suggests I have had time to do something but have not done it. Without sufficient time to do everything, this task I leave till last. I suspect that when I drive away on holiday two days from now it will remain in my inbox.

Forget all that: today is my last full day’s work this year, a year’s work I never guessed possible at Centrelink on 2 January, expecting only to cobble together a meagre income from my business and casual and part-time pickings as they arise. Instead I have an intense job, as demanding as the pay is good, and my business burgeons.

It is done. I am done. Almost completely done.

Rock on.