Rogue's Yarn with 'Arry Driftwood - Thy kingdon come...and they will be done
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife? Or perhaps maddening crowd? Does that pertain to your faithful scribe … alone now, upon the waters, as one is amid millions of other souls, but apart; almost a mere spectator of the road-rage and hubbub and frantic endeavour of the worker ants.
Wait one for “I’ve lorst me fred” as that old bastard Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell) in Till Death Us Do Part, used to say. You canna avoid visitors, even afloat.
You can’t be a cottager and a boatman, truly. Not at the same time anyway. But I have still a peasant’s yearning for the soil and ample water for chooks and a garden. And yet? And yet, I say, how restful and serene to gaze at night beyond the forrard hatch at the everlasting stars of Banjo Patterson, and perhaps some happy clods too, and feel the gentle movement of faithful old Driftwood. Then I do count myself a winner in life’s lottery. I do!
Which reminds me that I won 30 million last week. But I gave it all back! For as I said to Mary in the newsagents … What’s the point of 30 million at my age? So I gave it all back, like a sports fisherman releases his catch. Yes, I know alter ego, at my age fantasy and reality blend and marry and divorce and marry again. Tis so.
Fantasy? Hmm! I may repeat my dream of a fertile creek-bank Eden of ducks, chooks, fruit trees and berry vines interspersed with a productive kitchen garden to assuage my deep yearning for dirt, and resting at peace is a 10m small Gardner-engined timber trawler; awaiting my skilled hand to take her to the bountiful fishing grounds known only to me and my golden skinned missus, mother of our two or three, or more if we were in the Mood, child prodigies.
At peace in our peaceful Eden, the nippers schooled by nature and Correspondence School, our sea-catch and surplus fruit avidly sought by those in the know for cash at the front gate. A secret bush clearing where in the balmy moonlight we danced and loved the night away in the state we entered Life, naked, playing delightful airs in counterpoint and laughter on pan pipes.
Halcyon days and privileged by the GODS we were. For what does it cost to plant and nurture one’s own Eden in the mind … for iron bars and stone walls do not a prison make. ’Arry! Pullease wake up t’ yerself … sorry!
So Correspondence School? Yes! And School of the Air in my day. Who the hell decrees these worthy terms are to be supplanted by euphemism and slosh.
For I note that Correspondence School is now ‘Distance Education’. Orright that one does have some meaning but why? The Oxford: correspondence course, noun, a course of study in which the student and tutors communicate by post. Now what is wrong with that? So it’s email, now. So what! Is it not still communication … post … from couriers who carried communication by horseback from Post to Post and many of us are still correspondents. So up yaws, Distance Education … Bleaah!
Of course it is mostly from the United States of Euphemism ie, rendition in place of abduction or kidnapping, faithfully repeated and given legitimacy by the parrots and galahs of the Meejah. I can find nothing remotely connected between abduction and rendition. It’s kindergarten-speak like day wun and day tu and how cum. And the worst sicko is like … so I’m like … and she goes like (even goes has supplanted says). Like, give up ’Arry! Sorry, again. I’ll go up the Rozelle flea market then and bugger the lot of yez!
Two more afore I go: no one ever wins anything now … they take out. And we don’t see or view, we catch. Great but painful listening to the half-literate sports commentariat.
Anyway, I did walk up to the flea market but didn’t see anything I wanted and the androids have butchered a beautiful mature shady tree to install plastic swings and things for the weeuuns … who should be concentrating on lessons and not playing around.
The Prime Minstrel says we need to get smarter and we canna afford olde people in the future as we have got too expensive for the rich to pay for us.
Those so-called distillation plants, I suspect, are really crematoriums and I have seen tankers of gas being driven into their compounds and camouflaged. I have. I saw ’em last night in me sleep!
Climate change? I could tell yez a lot about that but I’m afeared of the Spooks. Inarguable that we are seeing slow but massive changes and Mother Gaia is obviously sick of us spreading like cancer. Can anything be done and is it our fault? A qualified Yes to both of them questions, but, but I say, nothing will be done! Why ’Arry? That beloved term of us Lefties … Vested Interests!
Tis basically down to population! And the only mob serious about that is The People’s Republic. But what outrage from Vested Interests in the West. Religious nutters and economic nutters rule … and nothing will be done … ’cept Thy will.