Well shipmates I had better get some thing down ere I shuffle off this mortal coil. That’s sort of poetic stuff, and that’s orright … but where did all those poetic thoughts go that I was having at 0300hrs this morning, comfortable neath my duvet with the rain at work on my decks. Gone! 
  Such is life as Ned Kelly remarked as they hung him. 
  What about a bit of a joke to start. Not exactly a joke but damned amusing. I love clever ‘put downs’ and a good riposte of the kind which the revered Paul Keating was a master. Anyway at the risk of repeating myself here is one from the Flashman novels by Fraser, recently deceased. He remarks of the Hon Speedicut, a former school chum. 
  Flashman: “So now I learned he was in the diplomatic, which didn’t surprise me, for he was a born toad-eater with a great gift of genteel sponging and an aversion to work!” Ain’t it choice? Who do you know it fits? 
  I hope there ain’t no diplomatics among my readers. 
  But I can say I’m sorry. 
  The evening was mild and still as I quietly sat in the companionway with a glass of not half bad shiraz. The sun gone to bed but still plenty of light. I mused. Why am I here? 
  Who am I and why me? 
  Why not somebody else? 
  Why can I not be a famous swimmer like Thorpy and why not a fillum star like Nicole or have a beautiful bum like Kyle Monocle? You know, like, what I am trying to ask is why am I me? We are all locked into this cell that is us and nobody else. I dinna get it. 
  A flight of silver gulls has just swept past looking for the night’s roost, like a squadron of Spitfires homing after the day’s final sortie to harass the Hun. What lovely fliers they are … but what awful people. 
  They are just like human beans you know. So why can’t I be a seagull and soar and squabble and shag with the rest of the flock? Why am I me? 
  The mystery of life remains, a mystery unto the END. 
  As I mused I focussed on some moving shapes coming around Cockortwo Island. Several white sharp-pointed pyramids moving nicely off the steady nor’easter. Ah ha, tiz the evening club race. Lucky buggers to live in this lucky country. No helicopter terrorists no cluster bombs no napalm. Yairs shipmates count our blessings. No oil so we don’t need ‘liberating’. I took another sip of wine and topped my glass. The sloops were moving smoothly … but what’s this? 
  A small group of sluggards now sneaking along behind trying to look inconspicuous. How did they become so far behind and are the skippers saying, “I have done nothing wrong!” Now they are gone into the fading light and we will never know. 
  Where they were is now empty space and I wondered if that joy of presence and movement in just that spot was downloaded into a powerful celestial computer to be stored forever with killions of other presences away back to the first aborigines and even further to the mighty thunder lizards and did pterodactyls once roost on Cockortwo Island; and can I recall their images with the right password? 
  I am computer illiterate so I don’t know what the Hell 
  I am talking about. Shut it! alter ego. 
  The Queen o’ The North is in the north so I am on me pat. I miss her and still feel her presence. How blooming close we become to our constant lovers; I do hate to see people break up, though I have done it myself. Sometimes a thing has a life and then that’s it. A great pity for the wasted years and effort and emotional constipation inevitably left to haunt. 
  No one should be condemned to live alone. 
  Yair, orright there is some peace in solitude too, but when it’s snowing outside and the wolf is howling at the cabin door tiz a great comfort to feel that other warm bum under the duvet beside you. 
  I mused on in the companionway. I did recall when I was suffering the misery of my first mistake and stared into the night wondering from the trillions of dames out there somewhere which one was my soulmate. Was she waiting for me, alone, and does it matter what has gone before? 
  Of course not for we make a new bond, a new treaty, all others wiped from the slate. What do they call it? What do they call it? Aah, a palimpsest or something? Is it all worth the aggro? Of course it blooming is. The thoughts of Chairman ’Arry. 
  It doesn’t mean there is only one person for you; obviously there are many who would suit if one could meet ’em, but there again it’s pure arse as to who meets who and when. This ain’t Dorothy Dix’s column … so that’s your lot as Peter Cundall says on the garden show. 
  The evening darkened and the stars crept out and it got cold so I lit the Tilley lamp and slipped back many, many years, as one does, to wonder what became of so and so and what became of that piece who worked in the cake shop and what of Dolly over the back who dallied with me under the peppercorn tree. Clumsy and ignorant, the maggotism of lust carried us. A nymph of pure beauty hardly marred by the head of a Siamese racing tadpole. 
  Keep smiling.