Did you ever watch that BBC show Little Britain? There was this sheila being interviewed by the uniforms after her flat had been broken into and she had been ravaged and robbed. She was no beauty queen – but I dinna like to say much as you all know I revere wimmin. The uniforms asked her what the perp looked like. 
  “Aaah!” she says. “Aaah! He was GOOORGEOUS, he was!” 
  Which leads me to this morning on Sydney Harbour. 
  Aaah! Just GOOORGEOUS! I was feeding my school of bream what have lived with me for years. Years, I say. 
  Enough porridge for two and they get their share … little ones and big ones alike. Suddenly, but slowly, a shape loomed up from the deep. And another and another. 
  Jeezuz wept, kingies! I havna seen any for a long while and these, too, were gorgeous, being graceful and at least a good metre long. 
  They were feeding in the bread and the porridge alongside the bream. No fishing tackle ready so I leant over the gunnel – Driftwood has a low freeboard – and as one bugger cruised past I simply grabbed his tall firmly and hoicked him into the cockpit like a real gun tuna fisherman. I did. His mate came to have a look and I got him in too. By this time they were beginning to wake up but another reckless kingie paid the price. 
  They looked lovely in the cockpit and my taste buds were waking up to the potential of fresh fish. I looked at them and they looked back at me. With their beautiful eyes. 
  Am I a rotten killer, I thought? Their eyes were accusing and I felt really, really rotten. One at a time, but swiftly and care fully, I slid them back into their own milieu. I looked at them in the water. With my eyes. And they looked back at me. With their eyes. And then they sort of smiled at me and swam for the open sea. All together now … Aaah! 
  Yes, well, what is not so gorgeous round here is the governance. The OED says, the action or manner of governing; and one sees reference to good governance which must then have a corollary of bad governance? 
  So which do we have in The Premier State (soi-disant) I ask? 
  Another good thing about me is that I never whinge. 
  No, no, no. Well, hardly ever, and what I write is merely comment. Orright, sometimes bitter comment. 
  I am bitter about a few things and people, and definitely bitter about the murder of Port Jackson and its resurrection as a yuppie pond of plastic fantastics and nascent waterfront slums, the shoreline a lattice of private pontoons and rickety jetties. 
  I ain’t saying I wouldn’t like to idle my few remaining days away at a cottage on a beach with some green sward falling to an easily pulled dory, happy in a quaint boathouse. No, I ain’t saying I wouldn’t … but how effete can one get? 
  Was there ever a time when our government was our quasi-mother and father and looked after our interests instead of the brigands of business and tribes? I’d like to think so but it seems that any association of persons becomes cliques and regimes of self-perpetuating Power. 
  The loyalties and hatreds of the Sussex Street coven seem immutable and there is no succour from the rival gang. We persist in looking for and believing in a new Moses to lead as from the wilderness we wandered into at our own whim. Shipmates, believe me there ain’t no free lunch and there ain’t no Super-mensch and there ain’t no neo-Moses. 
  The funny thing is that we all believe if only we had a few thou more or even a mill or two our problems would be solved and that if WE were in power we could fix it all overnight, and that somehow politicians are different. 
  Who was it said, “We have seen the enemy and it is us!” 
  So if we were in power we would be helpless victims of the SYSTEM too? Say it isn’t so ’Arry. 
  Have you ever seen little Sabot dinghies planing? Nor had I, and I built and sailed two with my nippers in another life and another world. 
  A steady twenty knot nor’easter and white caps over the fairway … two modern carbon fibre masted Sabots only metres apart sailing back and forth in the fierce winds like Mobikes doing wheel stands. 
  The wee bows in the air and the young studs hanging way out in the stern quarters, bums in the water to balance the forces. God, such lithe, agile youth … about 14 or 15? 
  You can imagine the speed and agility necessary to come about without going tits-up, and they kept going for over two hours in the ferocious gusts.