We are in a much-surveyed society. People are always trying to bring us down to ticks in a column; to put us among the percentages of affirmative or negative; to gallop us willy-nilly into some poll or other.
Strangely, they have passed me by; I have been left unsurveyed, uninterrogated and no- body has asked me for a thing except money. Yet I am one for airing my views. I have a lot of views and even more air.
Now it has happened. In an Interstate airport departure lounge. Questioned and collated at last.
The courteous woman questioner interrogated me on my travelling habits which, as anyone knows, are highly questionable anyway.
She called me “sir” which was a mistake because it makes me arrogant and big headed.
I waited for the first question as a cricketer awaits the first delivery, leaning slightly forward in my seat, my eyes on the interviewer and my mind poised ready to give the full face of my intellectual bat to whatever she tossed up.
“Have you been out of the country lately?” she asked.
“I’ve been asked to leave a number of times,” I said, “But this is my land. Mine, mine, you understand. My sweat has sunk into its soil, my taxes into its Treasury. My rates have built its roads. My power bills have lit its streets. My water fees have saturated its mains. Next question.”
“Have you been to a resort lately?” she said, keeping her nerve.
“I’ve been to the last resort,” I said. “I am always there, strolling the boulevard of bafflement, promenading in fiscal peril, surfing on the seas of uncertainty, trying to keep my head above water. All that glistens is not the Gold Coast, girl. Next question.”
“Do you carry your credit card?”
“Why should I take a card.” I cried, “The cards are always stacked against me. Other people always have them up their sleeves. Not even a royal flush in the toilet.”
I sat there, poker-faced.
She was a trier, this girl, flinging all her training into the fray, remembering the warnings of her instructor about the hard cases, the tangent shooters Such was I.
She took a deep breath: “What did you do on your last holiday?”
“Mostly I sat on a jetty,” I cried, “a poor splintered rampart, redolent with memories and smells, a graveyard of decaying squid. No glittering casino here with the call of the croupiers. No Richard Burton arriving in his luxury yacht with Liz on the bridge. Not your Monte Carlo. Instead at the mercy of tide and super- mart, at the whim of finicky fin, taking the ruff with the smooth.
Max Fatchen