Coping with the everyday

“Living’s mostly wasting time and I’ve wasted a share of mine”. Townes Van Zandt, sadly departed country legend, knew more than most about time and talent wasting.

Like many of his ilk, Townes spent a lot of time looking at the world through the bottom of a glass.

This document could stop with that advice but, in the spirit of this healthy age, I offer a dozen less destructive ways to make your day at least a little different from the one before.

1. Make Wednesday night, drunk night. Forget Friday and get plastered on Wednesday (why should you ruin Saturday with a hangover when you could suffer on company time?). At least work on Thursday will feel different from every other.

OK, make that 11 less destructive ways.

2. Cereal. Try a new one every week. Start at the top left hand supermarket shelf and work your way through them. You’d be surprised how the prospect of a new box of cereal can lift the weary heart. On Monday, anyway.

3. No undies day. I’ll say no more - just don’t get involved in a car accident or you’ll never hear the end of it from your Mum.

4. Spend the day only eating round food. There’s more of it than you think. Bowl essential.

5. Latinate. Make up words and see who calls you on them. Not many, is my guess.

6. Apply for employment for which you are manifestly unsuited. I’ve still not heard back from the Dallas Cowboys.

7. Draw up a list of time wasting activities.

8. Borrow the MD’s dictafone and hit the streets to interview strangers.

9. Disability day. Affect a disability for a day. Try a few out and see which handicap is right for you – speech impediment in the call centre, deafness in the class-room, uncoordination on the assembly line or rictus in social work. You’ll be amazed how the day whizzes by.

10. How much cooked meat is too much?

11. Ring up your ex-lovers out of the blue. For legal reasons, only repeat annually.

12. Sprinkle a little sand in your bed and wake up thinking you are on holidays. During winter, deploy twigs and sharp pebbles to give the illusion of camping.

You see, there’s no need to succumb to the humdrum. Try something new. Try something old. Try someone else’s.

If all else fails, fall back on the tried and tested - lie in bed with a bottle of whiskey and the remote. In fact, bugger the remote. You’ll lose it anyway and halfway through your vision will go.

After all, as Townes sang, “To live is to fly, low and high”.

Baby body

I well remember the day my self-image fell apart. As I walked on to the beach for a swim, one of my friends called out, a little shocked and, I reckon, a little too triumphantly, 'Look out, here comes baby body'.

The group laughter was loud, lusty and, frankly, went on a bit long. I immediately turned crimson, rearranged a towel over my paunch and walked into the ocean to swim to Tonga.

Despite energetically embracing the pleasures of young adult life, I believed I was blessed with the physique of the sportsman I possibly had been.

Obnoxiously pleased with myself, I had failed to notice the ample contrary physical evidence.

After several days deep reflection on the changes inflicted upon my body by my embrace of a sedentary and sybaritic lifestyle, I decided what I was going to do about it.

Absolutely nothing.

Thirty years later, though I make occasional concessions to common sense, I remain committed to a life of consumption.

Perhaps I consume to fill a moral vacuum, to distract myself from personal failure or to assuage my bitter guilt at the cruelties I’ve inflicted upon others.

Then again, perhaps I consume because I adore cheese, Tokay, grass fed steak, scallops, wood fired Peking duck, mushrooms, snapper, eggs, cream, brioche, Riesling, any sausage, the wines of Burgundy and Alsace, smoked haddock, sauerkraut, sashimi, dumplings from gyoza to Shanghai, cassoulet, onion tart, beer, oysters, salt beef, pickles, biryani, labna, holy basil, mango, tomato and soft shell crab.

Never have I had to struggle with my weight - I’ve simply refused to step into the ring with it. After all, have you seen the size of that bloke?

I’ve got a big head (figuratively and literally), so a big stomach doesn’t bother me. (Repeat x 10 each night before bed)

What does bother me is that my shirt keeps coming untucked.

What bothers me is that once my waistband overcomes the friction at my belly’s apex, it slips to the floor as swiftly and silkily as an oyster down a throat.

What really bothers me is that when I bend to do up the Velcro straps of my comfortable shoes I emit a silly involuntary whistle and turn puce.

I’ve had some positive feedback.

A woman I know seems to quite like my tummy.

As they say it’s as big as a whole other person, some children of my acquaintance have assigned it a name and personality. When they see me, they give Angus a pat and ask him how he is. They profess affection for him.

As I see those vital people flogging around the park or punching their trainer’s hands, I realise I’ll never be like them.

They’ve buns of steel and abs of iron. I’ve the body of a reader.

Though John Cheever wrote of a man who can’t decide at what arbitrary point to locate his belt line and, in Quintets for Robert Morley, Les Murray (not a small chap) has written with his usual grace and wit about the fat, it’s not literature but journalism that’s given me most heart.

The apparently brilliant, astute and talented Tobsha Learner (she of exceptional taste) claims in the Times that not only are fattypuffs funnier, more modest, cleverer and better company than thinifers, we are better in the clinch as well!

I knew I was gifted in all those departments but had never attributed it to my gut.

OK, the article is really a love letter to her boyfriend, but it makes a compelling and serious point which I will be happy to confirm with any single and attractive young women* who care to volunteer.

* No porkers, thanks all the same.

A rock 'n roll guide to the leaders: Part 1 K. Rudd and Irish pop

Something about Kevin Rudd bothers me and, until recently, I hadn’t been able to pin it down. What is it about him that gives me an involuntary shiver? When I see him why do I get the creepy feeling my nervous system has hitherto reserved for unexpected encounters with larger lizards?

He does share the lizard’s liplessness. Has anyone measured his blood temperature? Hell, has anyone tested for blood?

His skin has that waxy sheen not seen since the Politburo presided at seventies May Day Parades.

Being no oil painting myself and remembering the injunction against judging books by covers, I decided it was unfair to condemn the man on looks alone. But then I saw him limply air punching in a soft roundhouse style at the news the Australian cricketers had won the World Cup. Even some children of my acquaintance emitted a collective and involuntary “eeeewww” at that.

That half hearted air prod got me wondering about him again. Anyone who works so hard at being seen to be good can’t be.

Anyone who so loudly professes his commitment to balance must be imbalanced.

A person who conspicuously needs to show he is capable of love (by licking his wife in public at every opportunity) is only capable of self-love.

There must be a cavity at his core - a soft centre that’s not there. Trying to be all things to all people leaves you being nothing at all.

I couldn’t help but think he reminded me of someone I’d met or seen or heard about. And when I remembered who it was, bugger me if that bloke wasn’t called Kevin!

All that need be said about Kevin Rudd was sung by The Undertones, the infectiously enthusiastic Irish rockers of the late seventies and early eighties.

These purveyors of perfect 2 minute pop precisely nailed a lot of teenage experiences – just listen to “Teenage Kicks” or “Here Comes the Summer” and try not feeling the old stirrings of longing and angst.

In “My Perfect Cousin”, Feargal Sharkey, the band’s lead singer bemoans the goodliness of his cousin Kevin. Read this in your head at top speed in an Irish falsetto, imbued with the timbre of a 44 gallon drum being dragged over concrete and the exasperated tone only teenage injustice can inspire:


Now I've got a cousin called Kevin
He's sure to go to heaven
Always spotless clean and neat
The smoothest you can get them
He's got a fur lined sheepskin jacket
My ma said they cost a packet
She won't even let me explain
That me and Kevin were just not the same

Oh my perfect cousin
What I like to do he doesn't
He's his family's private joy
His mother’s little golden boy

He's gotta degree in economics
Maths - physics and bionics
He thinks that I'm a cabbage
Cos I hate university challenge
Even at the age of ten
Smart boy Kevin was a smart boy then
He always beat me at Subbuteo
Cos he flicked the kick and I didn't know

Oh my perfect cousin…

His mother bought him a synthesizer
Got the Human League in to advise her
Now he's making lots of noise
Playing along with the art school boys
Girls try to attract his attention
But what a shame it's in vain total rejection
He will never be left on the shelf
Cos Kevin he's in love with himself

I bet Kevin Rudd did like The Human League and, worse, didn’t have the guts for the haircut.

Better than read it, let the boys sing it for you. Play it LOUD!

Cocktails – teetering on the brink of disaster

I used to think the best part of a martini was the olive.

In those days I drank them for effect. I still do, though the result I now seek is more anaesthetic than pyrotechnic.

Let there be no mistake, incaution still leads to remarkable and unfortunate consequences.

My youthful appetite also involved affect.

John Cheever warned of the sorrows of gin and the dark vision of his melancholy characters, surely, was attributable to the pitchers of martini they swilled, their inhibitions dissolving as the ice in the blue oils; short-term fulfillment and long-term guilt the inevitable consequence.

But there was also much joy, romance and, at cocktail hour at least, hope.

I affected sophistication. Suburban Brisbane, blessed with happiness and safety, didn't notice.

There wasn’t much sophistication in evidence the night dinner guests arrived to find their hosts sprawled on the lawn in the dark, martini making paraphernalia littered around our supine bodies.

There wasn’t much dinner either.

As we were in our early twenties, the shaker was revived and we were quickly forgiven.

We’d only sat down for a sundowner before we began cooking.

False bravado, public kissing, nudity, regretted copulation, abuse, declarations of love, drunken dialing and fisticuffs follow cocktail capers.

In case of residual doubt, cocktails get you very pissed very quickly and, unless you have wide experience of them, they should be approached with respectful caution.

For me, a mysterious alchemy occurs between the second and third martini.

One moment I'm the personification of urbane sophistication, wit and charm, captivating my companion.

The next, an olive up each nostril and a cocktail umbrella tucked behind my ear, I am propositioning the Maori bouncer.

An old friend called from the duty free lounge asking what tipple to bring. I suggested the makings for martinis.

He was silent for a while, running through his memory bank . Then he said, “OK. But I’ve packed a book for this holiday, not a crash helmet”.

Now I know what cocktails can do, I'm (nearly always) sensible. Alas, as a visit to Kings Cross on a Friday night will attest, lots of people, usually young women, haven’t acquired this wisdom.

If young motor cycle riders need to work there way up to big bikes, so young drinkers should work their way up to calamitous cocktails.

I suggest each bar have two cocktail lists. The first, readily available, may only catalogue the fruity, fancy and mainly harmless for the young.

Those of us with crinkly eyes should be able to ask for the “other list”.

In there will be found serious drinks that young people don’t even like – the Vesper, the Rusty Nail, the Negroni.

Inevitably, all this writing has made me thirsty.

I am off to see my favourite barman, Charlie, for a martini, very dry, with a twist.

Possibly, three.