Letter to Simon Read- remembering 20 years ago

 

HI Simon/Pauline

Did you know it has been almost 20 years since you picked us up in the pouring rain at Bearsted station, way back in October of 2000.

As people often say, I don’t know where the time has gone. But one thing I do know is that I have thought about England almost every day since we returned in December 2003. J says I was desperate to come home, but as I sometimes tell her, within minutes of arriving at my parents’ house after flying home, I felt ready to go back. And of course, probably for a few different reasons, we never did.

I think about England all the time, as I have already said. I think about each of the various schools, especially MGGS. I think about our frequent trips to London and seeking out bookshops along Charing Cross Road, and Ulysses in Museum Street, and countless others. I think about drives to lots and lots of villages and towns like Hawkshurst and Aylesford in Kent, and Ludlow and Much Wenlock in Shropshire, and Kingsand and Zennor in Cornwall. And I think about the various National Trust homes like Cotehele, also in Cornwall, and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire and Monk’s House in Sussex. And of course all the D H Lawrence houses we visited, such as Mountain Cottage, and Chapel Farm Cottage and The Triangle and the long barn at Greatham, and the various other writers’ retreats, like the Bronte’s, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Plath's grave.

I think about all the counties and our travels in them, including ventures into Wales (my favourite ever holiday), Scotland, and Ireland to meet Colm Toibin, and great short holidays traversing Somerset and Wiltshire and Devon, and up higher, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and even as high up as the Lakes District, northern Wales and Yorkshire and Northumberland.

We lived, distinctly, for periods in 3 main counties if you recall- Nottingham, Newent in Gloucestershire, and of course the beloved Maidstone, in Kent.

Now I arrive at my fondest memory. And perhaps the greatest pleasure of my life. Living with you and Pauline on Gravelley Bottom Road, sharing your upstairs, having lots of day trips, such as the Churchill home, and Sissinghurst, Sutton Vallence, Sittingbourne. Negotiating your terrible shower. Beautiful walks amongst the leaves in the expansive backyard. Playing with Missy and Tiger on the stairs. You kindly getting cars for us. Your mother looking after us and taking us out to get food at Nettoes and not wanting us in the kitchen. The degus’ in their cage. Visits by Caroline and her kids and David, who would find all of this horribly sentimental. Remember our trip to (I think) to Elham for fox hunting protests, where you drove like we were on an autobahn, seeing you work in your garage and going to the dance together, seeing you in banger racing at Ipswich, the local cinema in Maidstone where we saw the Hannibal Lecter film, eating out expensively at the Tickled Trout, and meeting your interesting friends, the car mechanics, the one from Liverpool I think called Paul and the one who died suddenly, who used to go the pub called ‘The Sugar Loaves’, possibly Wayne, and walking along the Medway and seeing Leeds Castle. The list goes on.

I will never forget those days. They fill me with joy just thinking about them, but they also fill me with sadness because of some personal regrets, and how much I miss everything and would love to have it back again. But of course, time marches on and it is difficult to recapture things that you once loved and experienced. I dream, often, of England, and one recurring dream in particular is this one where I am on the verging of coming home to Australia and I am filled with so much dread about having to leave… and yet J says this was not how I was- almost 20 years ago.

I hear that you are still in the house, and Pauline is with you, and even Camilla is close by. What an incredible experience it would be for me to return and sit in the backyard and have everyone around us again. I have lots of photos of this time. We all look young and healthy and optimistic. It feels like another life ago. If you get time let me know what you remember and love to everyone, especially Pauline who was so good to us. In my dreams I am sitting with J, and you and Pauline, and we are in the conservatory, and we have just arrived, a day or tow, and it is cold but I am cradling your book of English villages, and my heart is racing and I feel like I am on top of the world.

I leave you with the foreword to a book I put together about our travels. I must show you some day. All the best,

DH XXX

ENGLAND TRIP VOL 1

PREFACE

I WILL never forget the first days of the beginning of our pilgrimage after arriving in England towards the end of the year 2000. We had got married in Sunbury, spend a few weeks in Sri Lanka, then caught a train to London from Heathrow, then a bus to Bearstead near Maidstone, Kent. Simon Read collected us in the pouring rain at night. The next day, still no doubt jetlagged, we sat in Pauline’s conservatory. She placed a thick hardback in my hand. It was a book about English towns and villages. In my heightened and excited state, I had not fathomed our relative proximity to places like Italy, France and Austria. It was enough that it was England on our doorstep. 

England, my England. The names and maps ran off the page, like the Melbourne ‘Melway’, but a thousand times more exciting. Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire. Kelmscott, Oxfordshire. Mevagissey, Cornwall. Haworth, Lancashire. Bambridge, Northumberland. Much Wenlock, Shropshire. The names rolled on and on, all inspiring. I used the index and found many names that were familiar because of my research and reading. Morris, Lawrence, Plath, Hardy, Burne-Jones. Towns associated with glorious people. Even little Edenbridge, quite close by, where Lawrence stayed with Edward Garnett. 

My imagination ran wild and I felt like I had entered a new, golden sphere, a little like the character in the Woody Allen film called ‘Midnight In Paris’, who finds himself in 1920’s Fitzgerald-era Paris. Except I hadn’t travelled into the past. The present, alone, was entirely sufficient and satisfying. Pauline’s little conservatory was crackling with life and electricity.

 

 

 

November meanderings

WHEN I am tired or full of doubts, or unwinding, or just want to relax, I go back in time and place to all those things that have given me nourishment over the years. Then I feel renewed and more cheerful and soothed, and I am thankful I have these things to sustain me, these things that I marvel at, these pure and beautiful sounds and precious, comforting thoughts, things that make you feel special and unique, like you have uncovered some kind of corner or something hidden, where there is inspiration and goodness and silence and wonder and shining gratitude where you feel like a knight that shimmers in his armour, or can imagine all the colours of autumn leaves brightly standing out.

I am thinking of… lots of things… as I let my mind drift back in memory lane to events in the past. It is a film and the image goes wobbly and out of focus, and suddenly there it is in colour.

I am standing in this secure web of playing cricket with the other kids in the neighbourhood. We are playing for hours in the late afternoon sunshine. It all happens on a corner. The wickets stand in the middle of the road at one end, and at the entrance to a neighbour’s nature strip at the other (as time goes on they will build a garden on their nature strip to make it more difficult to play cricket). As a car intrudes we scoop the wicket up with one hand to allow the car to pass, and get back to the cricket. Sometimes Sam or Sotto are umpires and they have less idea about what to do than the rest of us. Wayne appeals for LBW, manipulatively and vituperatively, and they nervously raise their finger. The fear of going against his appeal! I like this shot which is like a cover drive (the bowling is slow enough for me to be able to do this), whilst Anthony at the other end smacks the ball over several houses. 

There is the time Wayne smashes the bat against a telegraph pole and creates a sudden end to our glorious games… but that’s another story. It’s all pretty innocent. Sometimes we just stand outside the Arbuckle’s house and chat- for hours and hours about anything. The talking and the listening and the speculating and the mystery of life, it’s all quite fascinating. We are like children in a William Blake poem from ‘Songs Of Innocence’, except we are surrounded by bitumen roads rather than being in the heart of the country:

‘When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.

‘Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies.’

‘No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly,
And the hills are all cover'd with sheep.’

‘Well, well, go and play till the light fades away,
And then go home to bed.’
The little ones leapèd, and shoutèd, and laugh'd
And all the hills echoed.’  

 (William Blake, ‘Nurse’s Song’).

Then there are other images, unravelling. I am still in this secure web. I think it is about the same time. I am still eleven or twelve, or maybe thirteen. I have grown up on a diet of Enid Blyton books. I have devoured them, especially the ‘Five Find-Outers’ series and the wonderful adventure series, like the ‘Valley of Adventure’ and the ‘River’ or ‘Mountain of Adventure.’ I read these books in one or two goes until they are finished. The older siblings, or the adults, are probably watching television. I am oblivious to the other noises in the house. It is all making me go blind. I am on the bottom bunk, without a lamp. But then, at that time, it doesn’t matter. These are the halcyon days of reading. 

Later, quite a bit later, as an adult, I will sit in a lounge room chair with Colm Toibin’s second novel, ‘The Heather Blazing’, and I will revisit those wondrous days of reading with a sense of wonder, enthralled by the writing and the characters, feeling as though I am reading something somehow intrinsically significant, moved by the power of words and moods and staying absolutely still until it is over, like you have finished a sumptuous meal.

Music. Memories of music come flooding in. When I was young if I wasn’t up the corner like Blake’s children, or devouring sets of books by Enid Blyton or Agatha Christie, I was in the lounge listening to the Marantz stereo, possibly with headphones, music making me deaf just as reading made me blind. The price you have to pay.

The cousins in Bundoora had some Beatles. It was the first time I ever had ‘Sergeant Pepper’ placed in my hand. I studied the numerous faces on the cover with absolute fascination. If I couldn’t quite get moved by ‘For The Benefit of Mr Kite’ or ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’, I was floored by ‘Lovely Rita’ with its delirious panting, astonished by the domestic violence in ‘Getting Better’ and put into a wondrous dream by ‘A Day in the Life’, the dreamy bit on the bus sung by McCartney my favourite bit. Then of course I would buy them all. Still very deep in my memory is going to Northland and taking ‘Abbey Road’ to the Marantz, staying up late when all were in bed, fascinated by the street scenes on the front and back covers, wondering what was next to the 'N' partially by the girl in the blue dress, Lennon’s screams in ‘I Want You’, his groans in ‘Come Together’, the nonsense of ‘Sun King’ and the majesty of the last twenty minutes of the vinyl’s ‘Side 2’:

‘One sweet dream
Pick up the bags and get in the limousine
Soon we'll be away from here
Step on the gas and wipe that tear away
One sweet dream came true today
Came true today
Came true today (Yes it did)’

(Paul McCartney, ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’)

Naturally, my musical journey took other paths. I became even more involved in ‘The Doors’, and by Year 12 it was an obsession.

 I wore a Jim Morrison badge every day. People said I looked like him. Perhaps I thought in a way I was him. I even, somewhat cautiously it must be said, even tried to mimic a bit of his alleged lifestyle. I loved the rockier songs, like ‘Peace Frog’ and ‘LA Woman’, but it was probably the more adventurous or experimental ones I liked, as well as some ballads. ‘The Soft Parade’ and ‘The End’ have always held a fascination, and I can’t remember how many times I’ve crooned along to ‘I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind’, ‘The Crystal Ship’, ‘Blue Sunday’, ‘Indian Summer’, ‘Wishful Sinful.’ Never really the boppy hits for me. Jim’s face has always fascinated me. To this day I often look at pictures, and sometimes find new ones. Young and beautiful, and then equally as handsome, and more poetic and dignified looking, around 69’/ 70’ with that magnificent beard. A towering charisma, for all his faults and his reckless lifestyle.

Then, entering adulthood, and the space is all colour now and fresher and more recent and long lasting. The eldest brother had a Joni Mitchell- ‘The World of Joni Mitchell’- a compilation. It was enough. It wetted my appetite. I was spellbound, and still am, by the wondrous beauty of the words, and the shimmering melodies, unusual instruments like the Appalachian dulcimer- and Joni’s flowing hair and angular features and soprano voice, all creating seductive little hooks. The first songs (from this album) were really ‘That Song About The Midway’ and ‘Song To A Seagull’, the latter with its mesmerizing lyrics centred on place, the alienating city:

‘I came to the city
And lived like old Crusoe
On an island of noise
In a cobblestone sea
And the beaches were concrete
And the stars paid a light bill
And the blossoms hung false
On their store window trees
My dreams with the seagulls fly
Out of reach out of cry.’

Events from the past whirr about me. These are gloriously hungry times, of searching Joni’s oeuvre, internet-less and probably penniless. The album ‘Blue’ came quickly after, and we already had ‘Court and Spark’ (screeching in the lounge room to ‘Help Me’, and emotionally moved, without really understanding ‘The Same Situation”), and other Joni albums, some as they came out, brave efforts like ‘Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter’ (brother’s help again), but then the ultimate floored experience, trance-like, in another world of blissful devastation- the discovery of ‘Hejira’, with no less than ‘Amelia’, ‘Song For Sharon’, and the majestic title track, the groove, the Jaco Pastorius bass, and the sheer love of poetry:

‘I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones

I know, no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone

Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tribute to finality, to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality

In the church they light the candles
And the wax rolls down like tears
There's the hope and the hopelessness
I've witnessed thirty years

We're only particles of change I know, I know
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I'm always bound and tied to someone…’

There’s a lot here because it is really difficult to know where to stop. It’s Joni at her best- an outsider with feelings of melancholia and confusion, a fresh break-up in the incessant quest for love, or safety, or security. And wandering, wandering. Just like another artist… which leads on to…

Van Morrison. A simultaneous discovery, and just as profound, when my mind was teeming with new ideas and experiences and questions and reading and thinking. Absolutely ripe for ‘Astral Weeks’. In some ways a similar journey about travel and a the old 70’s search for answers. John Densmore, in his book, tells the story of how he witnessed Van writing the lyrics to the song ‘Astral Weeks’ when they were sitting on a couch at a party together. Near the end of the song there is this heavenly experience:

‘Ain't nothing but a stranger in this world
I'm nothing but a stranger in this world
I got a home on high
In another land
So far away
So far away
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
In another time
In another place
In another time
In another place
Way up in the heaven
Way up in the heaven
In another time
In another place
In another time
In another place
In another face.’

The first thing you will notice is how evocative and expressive and other- wordly or mystical it is. Then how repetitive it is. And that’s Van Morrison. Another realm. His words don’t win him a Nobel Prize for Literature. But they are electric and earth shattering when they combine with the music and the unique phrasing. One of the ‘way up in the heaven’ lines goes for about ten seconds. ‘Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy up in the heaven…’ Sometimes when I read something really good, like some gorgeous prose from someone who knows just exactly how to write- like Fitzgerald describing Gatsby’s world just before he gets shot- I imagine them up in their study on the top floor, putting the pen down, drawing a breath and looking out of the curtains and thinking ‘wow, where did that come from?’ That’s how it is with the whole of the ‘Astral Weeks’ album. Van pens it, gets it down in the studio with Jay Berliner and others, and then walks out with a light heart and a smirk of self-satisfaction on his face (you literally get to see it with Paul Simon during the earliest recordings of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’).

I am having trouble remembering the first time I ever heard the album. By 1984 I was buying each new Van album when it was released. Fortunately, he had the type of 80’s that very few of his contemporaries had. So I listened to this and others throughout the 80’s and I remember living in Adelaide for a while during 1986, and I think this was the time it meant the most to me. The evocative walking up Cyprus Avenue, the ballerina stepping lightly but not like Degas, the sheer joy of having someone you love sitting beside you, walking with abandonment drinking cherry wine, the euphoria of driving down the street in a chariot, the smell of sweet perfume, and then the abrupt, tragic death, ‘I know you’re dying and I know you know it too.’

These thoughts sustain and carry me. They are what make you an individual. They are what nobody else understands. We all have them. You can only hope to feel things, keenly. You don’t want robotic anything. You want a heart and a pulse. No empty spaces. And then one day, when you’re seventy…

ON THE FUTURE

                                    

VAN Morrison, in his cover with THEM of the John Lee Hooker song ‘Don’t Look Back’, sings:

“If I could call back
All those days of yesteryear
I would never grow old
And I'd never be poor
But darling, those days are gone.

Stop dreaming
And live on in the future
But darling, don't look back...’

Of course, he fails to take his own advice, always, it seems, singing about the glories of THE PAST when he lived near Cypress Avenue, on Hyndford Street. For some of us, there will be glories of the past. For me, it was visiting the cousins in Bundoora, waiting for the parents and brother of your first love to go to bed, my football team’s first successes, Enid Blyton, family holidays to Cooma and the like, the first big trip overseas to places like Cornwall and Paris.

But for now, I am in the mood to think about the glories of THE FUTURE. In my mind I have mapped out a plan. The future will be dotted with lots of little highlights that bring memories of nightclubs and working life and raising little kids to shame.

In the future my children will obviously no longer be children. They will be fantastically useful adults who will have children of their own who will provide me with boundless pleasures. M will ring out of the blue and ask if J and I can feed her two little girls, give them a bath, and read to them. During the week I will have caught a tram to Carlton, visited Readings bookstore, and bought them the new shiny picture story book about a red dragon or a purple unicorn that everyone is talking about. It will be really something to be 80 or 90 and have two sweet little kids holding their breath, fascinated, by my aged, husky voice and my long practised ability to adopt character voices.

Then a couple of days later S will drop in- my kids who are now adults will never ring first-and I will be just getting out of bed because of a new habit of sleeping in, and she will make us both a strong coffee with the sparkly machine she bought us for Christmas. She will seek some advice and hang onto my words of wisdom and kiss my whiskered face in gratitude. We will hold hands like we have always done and take a book outside, sitting beneath the oak tree as red and golden leaves of autumn fall around at our feet. She will tell me about how her boys are getting on and where her philanthropic work is heading.

Some mornings I will wake early and read by the natural light coming through the bay windows. I will marvel at the blue light splashed on the walls from the reflection of the stained glass. J’s hair will look soft and wavy, all grey cascading across her pillow. There will inevitably be either our Afghan puppy or Persian kitten at the foot of the bed making my toes warm and numb. Sometimes, on the street, I will hear early morning conversations amongst neighbours, kids getting ready for school, bells tingling, the comforting crunch of gravel. We will know and treasure all our neighbours. They will visit, like our kids, willy-nilly, and if I am busy tinkering with something, J will attend to their needs.

After breakfast I will sigh deeply and read the paper (still shunning the electronic version), and the morning will melt into the afternoon. Eggs, milkshakes, crosswords, maybe a bit of gardening, but not too much. J will go outside and wrap wire around her tomatoes, and splash a bit of paint below the orchard wall. Watching her labour, I will sit in my great armchair and think wistfully of England, planning another visit in my head, thinking about our last visit, wondering if the lanes of Much Wenlock look the same, the tidy brown cottages of Bibury in the Cotswolds, the black, black graves in the grounds of the Bronte parsonage, the charming low ceilings of pubs like The Feathers in Ludlow, the stone jetty at Mevagissey in Cornwall…

Whoops, it is 3:30 already. J has come in to have a shower. Some books have arrived from ABE books in the mail. I am reminded of my goal- to read one Henry James novel a fortnight until I have finished. I go back to bed with toast and an orange juice and knuckle down with my Afghan and a first edition of The Ambassadors, from James’ third period. I have nearly finished. I drift and fall asleep, and awaken, and drift, and fall asleep and awaken. It is suddenly 10 o’clock and I have finished. My body feels strangely alive and tingly. J is still up, watching television, as I ponder what I will read next.

It is late but I am not tired. I put my dressing gown on and pour a generous whisky and escape the television and wander into the billiard room. I practise slotting balls, preparing for the billiard night that is coming up here in this very room with four or five fellas from the neighbourhood. We all enjoy our whisky and chat about politics and our sports. Tonight, though, I am gloriously alone, pocketing balls, and listening to Mahler’s 5^th symphony, the Adagietto, from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I am transcended. It effortlessly propels my limbs around the table. I’m not sure if it is the whisky, my age, or the music, but I am sighing deeply, then suppressing a sob, in gratitude, for everything good that old age brings. 

FINAL HOURS- A MEDITATION ABOUT THE SEA

 

I saw a photo recently that captured my attention. An elderly woman lies on a bed in an art gallery- as it happens it is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She is mostly obscured, but the viewer can see the tell-tale wires and medical supporting paraphernalia attached to the bed. The sheets and pillow are of that creepy blue hospital colour. She is flanked by medical people and a woman who looks a bit like a gallery guard or curator. Their backs are to the camera and they are looking intently at a famous Rembrandt self-portrait. There are floorboards on the ground and the painting sits on a barren slate-grey wall. The woman’s bed is organised in the way hospital beds can manage it, with the back half of the bed raised so the woman can receive a good view of the picture.

The article tells us that the woman is visiting the exhibition as part of a final wish that has been granted to her. A Dutch charity has been helping people realise their final wish before they die. In the case of the woman in the picture, she has terminal cancer.

It got me thinking about final wishes. I think the idea of seeing great pictures for the last time is a great idea, or would be for me. I would choose a final visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, or the Munch gallery in Oslo, or perhaps the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

Maybe for me it wouldn’t be about pictures at all. It might be to meet a famous person I admire, if they would allow it. Drinking tea in Joni’s kitchen in Bel Air Los Angeles, or beer with Van Morrison in a pub in Orangefield. Visiting a place I have always wanted to see. Where Lawrence lived in Taormina, Sicily. Perusing the Sylvia Plath manuscripts at the Lilly Library in Indiana. Closer to home, Katherine Mansfield’s treasures at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand.

I went away this last weekend with the family. It was to a YMCA camp at Anglesea. I thought about the picture when I went for a run. I ran down to the main back beach at Anglesea, just at the back of the big car park there. I was almost alone. The weather was cool but invigorating. Not swimming weather, but great running weather. There were two forlorn life-saving flags at one end of the beach, mostly uninhabited. Some people wandered along the coastline taking photos with their dog. A few people were scattered in the water wearing wet suits. I ran along a stretch of soft white sand at the east side of the beach. The landscape curved around there a bit like the mouth of a bay does. The tide was coming in, fast. I had to jump the incoming water after the waves crashed. I watched the water unfurl as it landed on the flat, like a flower slowly turning. The sky was grey and slightly moody, and it was reflected in its coldness by the surface colour of the sea. I thought briefly of the famous picture of ‘A Monk By The Sea’ by Caspar David Friedrich, and then that photo with the Rembrandt painting again. Standing there, breathing heavily and filled with sweat, I was also thinking about the Van Morrison song ‘Coney Island’, and how it ends with ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?’  Here is one of the great views of our time, as good as anywhere in the world, and it is only about two hours from my home. I stood marvelling at that encroaching water, that cool blue-grey sky, and the surf endlessly unfolding, the pale yellow sand, the colours and music of the sea, and felt so much in awe and so incredibly free.

 

  

Resisting The Urge

 

                          

Social media. It’s hard to know how to take it. You don’t want to appear old and reject anything that’s new and popular with young people. Then again you feel like there’s better things to do than ‘speak’ to a bunch of people on Facebook, get into a chat room or begin an Instagram.

Sometimes I think to myself, ‘am I possibly missing out here?’

I went out the other night with a friend of mine. We ate a pizza in Lonsdale Street in the city. He had his phone within easy reach all night- a special expensive Apple one. In fact, he used it a lot of the night. He sent his wife a picture of his dessert and she promptly texted him to ask for him to save some for her. He took a photo of the two of us and posted it on Instagram, and within twenty minutes over a dozen people he knew sent him a message saying that they ‘liked’ the photo (which gave him a real buzz). Next he talked about some items he recently sold on eBay, as well as some items he bought, including a plastic Barbie kit for his young daughter which shipped from somewhere near Sacramento. After  conversations and laughter, or even during conversations and laughter, he scrolled down his phone to check whether or not any ‘friends’ had posted anything,  people within his own immediate circle, as well as female models who happen to be partners of Australian rugby union players.

I spoke to a teenage girl recently- she is about fifteen- and asked her if she read anything during the recent holidays. She said she was busy reading all the time- (encouraging) - and told me it was in the form of text messages- literally about a thousand of them (discouraging). And then I thought about how social she must have been, and how being in a stuffy room brooding in your pyjamas and staying up all night reading or playing computer games would be decidedly less healthy.

I sometimes hear people say ‘I will chat to you later tonight’ and wonder what they really mean by ‘chat’, and whether or not that term has totally changed meaning. People of all ages on public transport get sore necks from bending their head over their phone for hours on end. They almost crash into you on the footpath because they are not looking where they are going.

I know adults who are on Facebook and would never want to give it up. It keeps them in touch, they say, with all sorts of people they would never normally be in touch with, and it serves the purpose of quenching their curiosity about what these people on their margins of their social world might be up to. Instagram seems to be popular with almost everyone. I can see how it might give you a real buzz to see where famous people might be in the world, or what Cindy wore to the races at Caulfield racecourse last weekend.

Then there is tweeting, or in other words the ‘twitter sphere’, which has always seemed to me to be too ridiculous for words. Then last night I became curious and impatient for a new MJ Hyland novel, so I looked at her website, and saw she is tweeting about this and that. For all I know, Sylvia Plath, at the age of 83, might be doing the same thing if she hadn’t decided to commit suicide all those years ago. Jim Morrison and John Lennon, too, and Melanie, who is still alive, does do it, although I’m pretty sure Joni Mitchell doesn’t.

So tweeting is definitely not for me. But there are days when I am sitting around looking at my lovely books, or going for a run, or driving the car somewhere, or reading The Age online, when I think to myself ‘am I missing out on something here? Am I so totally disconnected to the ‘real world’ that it is at a personal cost to me and preventing me from living a more fulfilled life?’  I wonder about this, and there are days when I would like to invite myself into the world of cyber gossip and see what all these people everywhere are up to. I could throw away the old clumsy and outdated Nokia phone I rarely ever use, the one where it is getting ridiculously difficult to read the smudged numbers and letters, and replace it with an Apple 6, 7, 8 or 9, with instant internet access.  I might suddenly increase the number of ‘friends’ twenty, thirty, even a hundred fold.

Aaahh, but what’s the use? When would I ever get anything real done?

 

 

 

Tragic events, different outcomes

                                    

 

Robert Farquarson left the road and drove himself and his three kids into a dam near Geelong in 2005. Oscar Pistorius killed his girlfriend by shooting her several times through a locked bathroom door in 2013. How terrifying for the young boys, Bailey, Jai and Tyler, and how terrifying for Reeva Steenkamp. The Farquarson kids drowned whilst their father swam to safety on Father’s Day. Pistorius opened the bathroom door and found his wife’s bleeding body on the bathroom door on Valentine’s Day. What is the significance of these dates? Were these actions deliberate, and therefore callous, cold-blooded murder? Pistorius got off- manslaughter rather than homicide, the judge in Pretoria unsure whether or not he was aware that it was his wife on the other side of the door. Farquarson was not so lucky. After three trials and various judges and men and women of the jury, he was found guilty of deliberately killing his children, and is currently serving a minimum of 33 years in jail. What a conversation the pair of them could have if they were ever able to get together over some hearty jail food, watching the world go by through thick, black iron bars, or having an intimate stroll together around some prison yard in their bright orange clothing watching out for the menace of bald, tattooed heavyweights.

If we can believe the judge and her intuition, Pistorius made an awful error, mistaking his young wife for a threatening intruder. If so, he probably deserves no worse than his current fate. We may never know how guilt-ridden he feels right now in his first nights in the cell. Farquarson’s culpability, too, must be open to conjecture. Pistorius has his emphatic supporters who swear his innocence, improbable as it might be to the skeptic who finds his story just a little bit hard to swallow. Wasn’t there a quite vocal argument between he and Steenkamp on that night? Did he really forget to check in on her, to make sure she was next to him in their bed like he says he assumed. Did he really think it was her making noises in the bathroom? Didn’t she yell out in severe stress after the first bullet was fired?

It’s interesting how family sticks by you (as they say) through thick and thin. It is probably the way it should be. Farquarson’s sisters are just as steadfastly behind him, despite his equally improbable story. In fact, their fate could easily have been switched. The general public really had no idea how either of these cases might go. Pistorius might have received 33 years, and Farquarson the tentative five that Pistorius received. It is because there were no witnesses to either incidents. How do the rest of us really and truly know? And that goes for supporters and skeptics alike. It’s an awful question to ask, but can the difference in sentencing simply come down to the acting ability of either defendant? To education, money or class? To the fact that one was a struggling Winchelsea nobody, and the other an Olympic star with an eye catching disability?

I have read two captivating books about the Farquarson case lately which, collectively, offer me a number of reasons where Farquarson might have gone wrong. I imagine I am visiting him in his sad and sorry cell.

‘When you were driving the boys home at 7:15 PM after your special Father’s Day outing, you needed to be more aware of the strangers driving behind you- the woman and her family who became witnesses at your trial to your erratic driving. It appeared to them, and no doubt to the jury at your trial, that you just may have been waiting impatiently for that Winchelsea dam to appear on your right hand side, and maybe you were practising your descent, swerving on the road with panic starting to set in. Just maybe you were thinking of drowning along with them, and wondering if you had the nerve to die.

Even before that night, perhaps a week or two before, you completely and recklessly dropped your guard outside the local fish’n’chip shop. Remember your old mate Greg King, the one who, probably in your mind, cruelly betrayed you? You saw your ex-wife Cindy Gambino and thought about her new boyfriend, Stephen Moules, didn’t you, and how he ended up with the shit car and you were lumped with the one that would become a coffin for the boys. Was it anger and frustration that possessed you to tell Greg of your plan to wreak revenge on Cindy, that it would occur on a special day like Father’s Day, that you would hurt her through her own children, that you would go to these extreme lengths to make her suffer for the way she left you feeling after your unhappy split? Greg came and saw you, didn’t he, all wired up for the anticipation of the police, and you were so careful, weren’t you, to ensure you didn’t say too much to Greg that might come back to bite you at the trial- but it was too late, essentially, wasn’t it, because in those moments of frustration you made another of those crucial errors that would lead a jury to put you away for a long time.

Let’s go back to the fatal evening when the driver of that random car has driven past you and has seen your children’s bodies crammed into the back of your car. Perhaps there were a few little coughs, perhaps there were no coughs at all, certainly not a ‘syncope’ as you described it later, as your car swerved maddeningly to the right, left the highway, avoided most of the trees, and plunged into the terrible, cold, black, black water. You might remember you switched the lights and the engine off- well somebody did and it was unlikely to be the boys all the way in the back seat. At your trial you conjectured that it might be so. There were so many ‘I don’t know(s)’ and ‘I can’t remember.’ None of this helped your cause.  You said you started coughing and coincidentally left the road just as that dam appeared on your right side. You said you coughed so much that you blacked out and then freakishly found yourself in the water. How is it that the path the car took on its way into the water was so miraculously unobstructed? Why didn’t you attempt to arrest the long slide into the water by using your brakes or altering your steering? Are you seriously saying that the whole time you lost control of the car, until you found yourself in the water, you were somehow unconscious? Once in the water, did you attempt to rescue your little children by opening their doors, or hauling them into the front with you, or at least grabbing little Bailey and swim to the surface with him? Did you, conversely, panic and alter your position, and leave the kids to drown as planned, but extricate yourself from the car because self-drowning was too terrifying? Why is it that you couldn’t really answer any of these questions in court, but kept saying ‘I can’t remember.’

After wading to safety and out of the dam, you decided not to keep looking for the children. If you recall you staggered, wet and deathly cold, to the highway and flagged down a car. There you made another fatal error which would come back to haunt you. You weren’t interested in phoning the police. You were desperate to be driven by Shane and Tony to Cindy’s place, car-less and children-less, to inform her with a certain amount of rambunctiousness that her children were dead- “I’ve got to tell Cindy that I’ve just killed the kids.”  You saw her face fall and heard her wailing screams. Back at the tragic site, with her and soon Stephen Moules, all you wanted was a cigarette. You stood there looking on, shivering, whilst he (not even yet the step-father of the boys) waded fruitlessly time and time again into the freezing water.

There was, of course, no hope. When the police arrived you were taken by ambulance to Geelong hospital. You didn’t do too well here, either. When you were interviewed you kept asking ‘what will happen to me?’ when the question the police expected to hear was ‘are my children really dead? have they been identified?’ (they had, by Stephen Moules). There was no mention by you of your poor children.

Later, you just couldn’t get your story straight. This is why the homicide squad moved in. Robert Farquarson was acting odd the whole time. He seemed to be more in preservation mode, rather than acting like a typically grieving father. Each time you rang Cindy, who was hungry for an accurate account of what really happened to help her in her elusive quest for peace, you sounded vague and uncertain, seemingly more interested in what she was thinking rather than any serious attempt to honestly recall.

I read your accounts in the books I have read, and I see what little choice the jurors and judges have. But what if they are wrong, and the loyal instincts of your family members are actually right? Then you should be joining Oscar Pistorius, the man who received the lucky break, in a much more truncated jail sentence.

 

 

 

MOST PEOPLE ARE GOOD

MOST people are good, despite what Nick Cave says on one song from his ‘Boatman’s Call’ album. Every day I see strangers, and given the right brief and random opportunity, people will smile at you or leave you alone and respect your right to be left alone or encouraged smilingly. The true test of whether people are good or not is this witnessing of warm or benign strangers. Of course, sometimes it takes a little effort on your part. It helps to look decent, have your children trail next to you (if you have any), smile and look content yourself, exhibit kind eyes, to not look aggressive or arrogant, and to look calm and safe.

The news these days is full of stories about people who want to hurt other people. Some of them want to cut off your head. Others just want to rob you, take your money at the ATM, sexually assault you, or say something racist or demeaning, or glare or swear at you at the slightest provocation, or steal your parking spot or your spot at the ice cream line, or smirk at your taste on books, films or clothes, or frown at your vulnerability or the way you wear your heart on your sleeve, or your political choice or your desire to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, or the way that you hum or sing whilst you walk, have a foreign accent, or laugh meanly when you trip on the pavement, or glare menacingly when you try and start a conversation, or give you a parking ticket or traffic infringement notice at the drop of a hat, or accuse you of snobbery if you like a foreign film or wear a smart suit.

But this is just the news. Most of the time I find that people are really good. They either don’t mind you and seem not to notice you because they are on the phone or have plugs in their ears, or they do notice you and their face opens up and smile and make your day.