Have you ever noticed how the world shoulders its way into a seat at your break- fast table?
I was sitting quite peaceably among my marmalade and toast when suddenly I saw Mr. Fraser sitting sternly opposite me while President Carter spread himself another slice and commented on the lack of peanut butter.
Then we were on a supertanker at the neck of the Persian Gulf and I can’t say it was a very nice day, but hot and tense.
And anyway before I could draw breath we were chasing a suspicious fishing craft, but this time it was in the Arafura Sea and I was in an Orion, and then I’d tripped over an oil find in Central Australia and there was Mr. Goldsworthy talking about rights and Mr. Bjelke-Petersen looking for dissident Liberals and Ansett was making a bid for my typewriter, milk was rising and if I wanted to fly to Europe I would have to trade in my wife, my car and my poodle.
The price index was up so high that you needed a satellite to see it, that’s if the satellite hadn’t been peppered by an anti-satellite in the Star Wars of outer space.
By this time I was sidling towards the frying pan, but the egg fell from or my nerveless fingers at an oil company’s profit of SA1752m. Then there was the plight of the speckled duck and I thought: if only someone would protect me, and maybe they would if I went to Bool Lagoon, but there was too much bool around already and I wondered whether I should have bacon, that’s if the mouse sneering at me from the stove didn’t snatch it and another mouse was already nibbling at the President’s Coast and the Dow Jones averages.
Don’t be silly, I told myself, you’re just sitting alone at your breakfast table with an old faded tablecloth and your old faded mind and the sun is breasting the hill and you are full of fancies just because you are listening to the news or you are reading the paper and you have a bad attack of the Daily Disasters.
Why, here’s a nice story about a poodle drinking beer, but isn’t that the way? We are all being driven to drink or around the bend or someone has escaped from somewhere and someone is picketing something and interest rates are rising and why shouldn’t I just sit here, my jaws motionless and my eyes showing more white than a washing powder advertisement.
There was a blackbird on the bough and it looked as though it was dressed in black satin and sang in a happy, haphazard un-Nato kind of way. For a moment I wished I’d had wings and a beak instead of an old dressing-gown with a frayed cord with my Western education and my faltering faith.
(Mr. President, not more toast please, this is not a White House Press breakfast),
My toes squirmed in my slippers and another mouse minced by, prob- ably down from the Mallee for the weekend and then it turned into a rat and gave a speech about the strength of Sterling.
I took a quick swig of coffee between a hijack and a kidnap, before the last of my brains ran out in a frenzied soup.
(Shall I look towards the hills with the new grass and the dimpling mushrooms and the operatic magpies?… but magpies set me worrying about whether we can hold Tim Evans at full forward. Perhaps I should lift my eyes to the slow clouds or tune my ears to the quick traffic on the nearby road.)
For whom the road tolls and it tolls for us alli
But it was just another trying day in the Persian Gulf so I eased my way in to flush my tanks with coffee.
Another day, another news service. The child from next door was out on the road and walking in her pyjamas with the innocent abandon of the little rebel she is.
I waved to her and she came in and I wanted to tell her about the Persian Gulf, but she had come to remind me of her birthday. She didn’t even mention Redcliff and the environment.
She had her tensions. Jelly beans were dearer; the teacher was an old bat.
“Why are you hunched up and looking so frightened?” she asked. “You look just like my Daddy.”
Said the radio news reader: “And here again are the main stories.”
Anyone for peanut butter?
Max Fatchen