fear

Many people believe Churchill said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, but it was his wartime contemporary Franklin D Roosevelt. Despite the bombs, people take heed. These days no one is listening and advertisers and so-called current affairs television lead a faux assault devoted to convincing us to quiver in our silk slippers.

The advertising industry drives a nationwide campaign, probably world-wide, to generate profound feelings of insecurity and inadequacy in us, especially in parents. If a parent, read mother, doesn’t wipe the benches with a particular brand of sanitary cloth, she’s neglecting her children’s welfare.

A work colleague returns to her desk from the ‘bathroom’ aghast at what she sees there—a woman who washes her hands inadequately after using the toilet: she uses water but no soap! The fear of germs, spermatophobia, is rife.

I’m a victim of the germ-fear. On entering a public toilet, I wash my hands before putting them anywhere near my cock. I don’t want the myriad microbes from the doorhandle on my nice clean knob. When the last drop is finally wrung out I make a grand exit without further ablution.

Meanwhile current affairs television peddles urban mythology, the disease or paedophile story ‘every parent should see’. Manufactured sensationalism that sells the program, sells advertising, sells fear. Dumb-arses buy it. Beware the spider invading suburban houses whose venom causes necrotic limbs to drop off like lizards’ tails.

Parents fall for the current affairs fiction that our streets have never been meaner, despite copious research proving the opposite. They deposit their precious offspring at school gates from multi-air-bagged behemoths rather than allow children to walk, discover their neighbourhood, ride a bicycle down quiet side streets.

The poor timorous creatures balloon while billboards advertise snacks as the food you eat while waiting to eat, premised on the fear of feeling even the slightest pang of hunger. Modern kids don’t know hunger, nor satiety.

The nanny state is not governments making laws protecting us from ourselves, though things are dire in that regard. It’s about us saving ourselves from our own irrational and undeserving fears.

Fortunately the germs I meet strengthen my immunity to every goddam lunatic notion floating by out there in the public arena. Bring on some filth.

Rock on. 

nicholson

I don’t know how old I am when we leave McConnell Street and move to 44 Nicholson Street, a fortress of white Mount Gambier stone on a steep service road above a cutting. My mother walks me to the kindergarten behind the famous Fletcher Jones factory. I remember making a daisy chain on the grass outside the kinder, but nothing else.

Prep, the grade before grade 1, is called Bubs at Warrnambool State School. I am nearly five and a half. My teacher is Miss Confeggi. My mother likes her and so do I. A naughty girl sits at her feet and picks at Miss Confeggi’s stockings. Her bad behaviour shocks me. In my last week in Bubs I get mumps and miss the end of the school year. My mother takes me to the Botanical Gardens. I have a sister but she is yet to figure in any memory.

Grumpy Lucas drives the school bus. He parps the horn in the cutting below the house when my mother has not got me ready for school on time. I make a shortcut by digging some steps into the cutting, my first sign of practicality.

The Kellys at number 52 are devout Catholics. Mrs Kelly wears a stained apron and smells warm and milky. Grattan Kelly is my best friend, using the Seinfeld criterion—he’s the only other boy in the street. Grattan attends the Christian Brothers College and complains of ‘the cuts’. He is eight.

A boy at school called Billy drags a calipered leg behind him. He has polio and I hope it doesn’t happen to me. I walk two miles across town rather than use the school toilet. I use my pants along the way.

A new school is built on the other side of Nicholson Street—Warrnambool East. I start grade 1 in Miss Lawry’s class. I am diligent about spelling. The schoolyard is a vast paddock pocked with sandstone. Boys lie on the ground and piss into cavities in the stone.

We get a corgi and a duck. My sister and I teach Sammy to clamp his teeth into the washing on the rotary clothesline. We spin it, lifting the dog into mini-orbit. The dog is dispatched to a better home but the duck, Dabbity, shits on our back doorstep for ten years.

Warrnambool Football Club’s coach, Leo Turner from Geelong, lives next door. I kick a football of rolled up socks up and down our backyard, obsessed. When we get a leather football at school I lead the horde chasing it and kick it further than any other boy can.

One night we gather on our fortress’s upstairs balcony to see the lights of the Westralia, my father’s ship, pass on its way to be scuppered. I know nothing of the war, barely ten years past. A television aerial is erected in the front yard, the first in Warrnambool. I crane my neck to see the top of it. My parents watch the seven o’clock news and turn it off.

I watch the steam trains chuff along the embankment behind the school and over the Flaxman Street bridge. A diesel is a rare event. I play cowboys and Indians in the paddocks and crouch on a ledge in the railway cutting with sooty smoke billowing about me.

Suddenly, for no reason I understand, it ends and we move to Melbourne. I am seven and my halcyon days are over.

Rock on.

shopping

I have a love-hate relationship with shopping. I hate consumer megaplexes with food courts full of people with obese wallets and waistlines. I like sauntering along mean strips of shops on Main Street. I hate shopping for others and love shopping for myself. Today I shop with gusto. It’s all about me.

My son Mo and his partner Katie return from their round-Australia trip before Christmas. They live with his mother while looking for a place to rent. Now they have that place. Sometime this week a truck will remove the furniture they left here when they headed north last May and I moved back here from Bendigo.

I’m about to be without shelves for my bed linen—none of which is linen—and a television and a microwave. The good vacuum cleaner goes; it’ll be sorely missed. Sundry items, like a flowery wall-clock, won’t be missed at all.

Until eight days ago I dare not contemplate replacing these things. I have no job and no bank balance. But a healthy income stream starts on Thursday, so today I’m maxing the credit card in anticipation.

I wake at half five. Damn, the shops aren’t open. I pedal to the gym but the pool is out of order and the swimmers have migrated to the cycle room and all the bikes are taken. I pedal home and start shuffling clothes in the built-in cupboards in the two front rooms to accommodate towels and sheets and doona covers. I unplug the microwave and lug it out to the carport.

    

My good woman is along for the ride. First, the television. I’ve contemplated not having one for about eight and a half seconds. A known brand is clearing stock from its Nunawading outlet where my good woman bought a telly two months ago. I buttonhole a small Filipino salesman at the door and buy the same model: no discussion, no fuss.

I can’t go to my first day on the job in Adelaide with my grubby backpack, so we visit a luggage showroom in a converted service station and each emerge with a lightweight case on wheels that satisfies the carry-on dimensions for 90 per cent of the world’s airlines. My good woman’s is solid silver, mine black with orange trim.

I score two fine shirts and pair of strides for $15 all up at the Lutheran op shop in the square near my good woman’s place. All appear to be new. I’ll wow them in Adelaide at the national staff conference.

“Over there, in front of the potted palm, with the CEO. Who’s the spiffy dude in the zany pink business shirt?”

“Think he’s the new Victorian state project officer. Class act, eh?”

  

Rock on.