Author: dean

A small UK family firm has landed the dream job of making THE bed for Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

I’ve studied a few beds in my time. It’s one subject you can take lying down.

When it comes to considering beds I like to spread myself, grabbing a clean sheet and scribbling frantically. We spend so much of our lives in beds, tossing and turning on them, staring at the ceiling on them, rearranging and changing them: Some people spend so long in beds they get a quilt complex.

We’ve had a variety of beds. I’ll tell you about them. You’re just dying to know, you gigging stickybeak.

One of our fastest beds had castors and would speed around the room like a chariot. We called it Bed Hur.

There is the well-bred bed and the untidy layabout.

A friend of mine bought a brass bed but his wife kept chaining herself to the railings, demanding breakfast. You can’t have that.

Yet the bed is part of our language. Try sleeping late and the language will go on for hours.

I’m one who makes my bed and lies in it. Come around any time and see me shuffling a pack of lies.

Nevertheless I’m fond of my bed. As soon as I’m there you can hear my deep, regular breathing. My family calls me the Wind in the Pillows.

There are a variety of beds. I remember going off on a romantic anniversary weekend to discover our holiday shack had a double decker bed with a ladder.

I just lay there wistfully waiting for a stocking in my ladder.

Life can be a bed of nails but there I am going off on the wrong tack.

So why not turn to mattresses and if you’ve turned one of ours the word “hernia” won’t be something remote in a dictionary.

This week my daughter screamed: “There’s a great lump on the mattress.”

My wife said: “Isn’t he awake yet?”

But like James Bond I’m one of those under coverlet agents.

So I operate in a blanket of secrecy—when I can pull some over on my side.

But a good mattress takes some beating. On a winter’s night I lie there hearing the rustle of spring. But a word of warning. Beware of things that go BOIN-N-N-G-G in the night.

Yet come morning, people grab your legs and you know that your slumber’s up.

What else is there to say? Oh, I know. It’s what my wife croons to me over her Barbara Cartland as the reading lamp blazes down: “Goodnight, sweet Prince.”

 

Max Fatchen

The news that Mrs Margaret Thatcher takes vitamin pills and a glass of mineral water for breakfast could signal the end of that noble institution, the British breakfast.

It also sends a chill clean down the egg-stained dressing-gowns of all those who love the leisurely breakfast, the panoply of salt and pepper, the volcanic toss of the pop-up toaster, and the yellow coagulation of marmalade squelched from the jar and dripped from the knife.

This culinary curtain raiser to the stressful day will not be surrendered easily.

There are those who will defend the bastion of breakfast to the last serviette, to the last plastic tablecloth, sand bagging themselves behind a terrace of teabags and resisting to the ultimate crust.

People are always boasting about a cup of coffee for breakfast, or how they start the day with orange juice; they are usually mean, angular people or they are people who are too damn late getting out of bed, sloppy in their dress, never burnishing their shoes and always rushing off to the train, gnawing health biscuits with the consistency of old bath room tiles.

I recently sat opposite a woman munching celery. It sounded like the breaking of bones and the snapping of limbs. She wore the sanctified look of denial of that pain-in the-neck multitude—the people who go without.

Later in the day she would be biscuit dipping around the morning tea club, snapping at callers, or secretly munching apples, her whole system thrown into disarray by the non-breakfast syndrome.

There is also the jogger, the fibre-mad mugger of breakfast food, who searches my chin for signs of egg each morning or plants an accusing finger on the butter stain on my left lapel.

Breakfast (and particularly Saturday morning breakfast) remains one of the last strongholds of sanity; a bower of egg and bacon where one retreats behind the Crossquiz; where pots of conserve sit rosy-sided in the morning light that streams through the window; where one’s toes curl in their slippers by the one-bar radiator.

Breakfast, glorious breakfast. One can even take a tray to the Fair One who is still reading in bed. These days she’s a dry-biscuit-with-Vegemite-dab freak but there was a time one could set a tray for her with toast and tea and a boiled egg, nestling in its cup and even with a small woollen egg cover to keep it warm and the yolk yellow and fluid.

Oh the joy of the eggtimer, spilling its measured sands and the getting of an egg to that stage of firm white and liquid yellow, the deft cutlass-sweep of the knife to take off the top.

All a part of the breakfast scenario.

Not any more, if Margaret has her way. Women everywhere will be downing loads of vitamin pills, drinking reservoirs of mineral water and ruling us all.

Of course we deserve it. Surely, some say, this luxurious breakfast is a sign of decadent society, scrambling for eggs and saving its bacon, disregarding the good functions of the body and the uncluttering of the mind.

People come to me, quoting cholesterol as I sit relaxed in my old slippers and handling a Lacy egg, with a nicety of fork flourish and an agile tongue that can reach out and take it from the prongs like a lizard capturing a fly.

I am impervious to lectures when I’m at breakfast. Dogs can howl for walks, telephone can ring, doors can be knocked on, neighbours can come to the window mouthing pointing and sign-languaging, for admittance but I take no more notice than if they were specks on the pane.

I shall not be moved from the breakfast table until the third round of toast and the last slavering suction of the bacon rind.

My eyes flick from page to page of my It Makes Your Day morning daily. I imprint each page with a drop of grease or a sip of tea although I must admit Mrs Thatcher’s frugal repast had me spilling half a cup over the overseas news.

So I’m saying to those who will be saying to me that it’s a good idea to be frugal at breakfast, to be parsimonious for lunch and sparing for supper… nuts, phooey and more toast, baby.

If Colquhoun’s¹ kids want to eat muesli, if some people say there’ll always be an all-bran, if a cup of black coffee is your kick, go to it but don’t rap on my windowpane as I loll, sleek and satisfied and make one last lunge at the marmalade.

Oh and if you happen to be writing to Mrs Thatcher in England do let her know that there is some far corner of a foreign field that is forever breakfast!

Max Fatchen

It was when a young couple we know, a cool, sweet girl and her jolly spouse; it was when they arrived with sweaty hands and a tendency to giggle that I knew something was afoot.

It was when the girl asked, “have you any empty pots?” and my wife replied, “Well there’s our big one but he’s always full” that I knew that there was a lurking motive behind the badinage.

Then it hit me. The dreaded time was upon us again. The season of unreason, the outrageous ripening, the obese bough bending, the pandemonium of the stewing pot.

The apricot orgy was at hand, underfoot and overhead.

Now friendships would wither, now would come the heated, even boiling, exchanges from exasperated kitchens. The terrible prospect of a chutney Christmas. Not all the goodwill or pretty paper in the world could conceal the dreaded outline of a chutney jar. Like lava the apricot tide would flow; the yellow peril in which we would be apricot flammed, apricot surprised, apricot tarted and apricot conserved until our nostrils turned daffodil.

Here they were again, the harbingers of the chutney charade, getting under our guard early, taking wax impressions of our locks and scrutinising our window sashes ready for a nocturnal dumping of their over-production.

I could hear my wife rattling her empty jars.

We are picking tomorrow,” said our young visitors. “The golden glow is in the orchard. We are giving ourselves over to chutney.”

I began singing a little ruminating song:

Chutney comes but once a year
Apricots from far and near.
Will we have a pretty pot?
Frankly, we would rather not.

They had hardly left before I was adjusting the security doors and nailing the window frames. I set a few rabbit traps in the fernery Yes, the fernery. They came in the dead of night last year and left us six jars there. It withered the ferns and shall never forget the awful sequel to a dropped jar in the garden; snails fighting and screaming around the taps as they sought to quench their tormented little throats.

I shan’t forget the kitchen scene when we made apricot jam, the bubbling, hissing, erupting and continual stirring, and that was only from my wife.

The whole terrible upheaval came as quick as Krakatoa, rolling out of the stewpan in a tide of fearsome fruitfulness.

We shrieked and leapt on the sideboard clinging to each other and the eggtimer.

It took hours before the inundation congealed and cooled and, as we proceeded across that sticky plain, we knew it had been a close-run thing.

But we accepted it. Wall-to-wall apricot is something that you learn to live with. Ants carried some of it away. Next day they brought it back.

Now, by examining our floor you can find the various layers of apricot that have accumulated during the years.

I do believe we have pioneered a new science, apricot archaeology.

A somewhat brownish stratum represents the awful moment in ’77 when the apricot caught fire and the air was so thick that we spread it on our toast.

There is the 1981 layer, the year when we bottled ourselves close to madness.

We went out at night dropping pots of apricot through our neighbours’ windows. We left pots on doorsteps. We had no trouble without, guard dogs except for their terrified yelping when I gave them a sniff of our chutney. Our output has since been cut and so has our tree. We offered the tree as an exercise to the Army but the apricot juice kept putting out their flamethrowers.

Our tree is still bearing—down on us mostly. But our main threat comes from outsiders. I have installed electronic sensors. While they will not react to fires or people demolishing the house, they screech in electronic dread at a the first whiff of chutney or the scarifying scent of the dreaded jam.

All the while there lurks the memory of picking and preparing. Cutting the apricots in sections. Panning for their fruity gold. Rolling their stones and saluting their kernels.

So never come to our door hoping for pot luck.

Once more unto the peach, dear friends.

Out, out damned chutney.

We have declared our street an apricot-free zone!

 

Max Fatchen

There is a little fernery in our garden, flanked by bamboos; a miniature rain forest where I go when I feel desolated by the every-day and anaemic with elections.

We call it The Grove.

The bamboos stir and rustle in a papery dance and their green pennants ride against the harsh sky and they slice the sunlight with slender shadows.

The ferns sprawl in old pots or hang in weathered baskets. They are silent, undemonstrative, tranquil. While the bamboos shuffle and shake, the ferns remain dense and distant, primeval almost.

This grove with its dim interior excites me with some kind of mystic wonder, in such a grove perhaps Greek and Roman gods were wont to assemble to make love or plan mischief.

Sometimes, even, I feel like a paunchy Pan but when I look around for wood nymphs to pipe to they are mostly at the supermart or in at the neighbour’s.

There is a little touch of damp, a dab of moisture in the grove.

In the humid afternoon, languid sparrows and superior blackbirds sit around the bath’s circular rim like drinkers at a bar.

They beak-dip, ruffle their feathers and rearrange their social order with the mandatory peck.

Familiar voices filter

through the kitchen’s wire screens.

“Where’s your father?”

“He’s in the grove, acting the Greek god”

“Well that figures, he’s built like Mount Olympus.”

There is a small, ornamental seat in the grove. I rather fancy it, I have bent its thin strands of steel into my shape.

I sit there, an oracle to be consulted; an old earth father with a mossy mind; deep truths are lodged in my consciousness born of the world that rampages on the edge of the path; that froths beyond the fernery.

I whisper my wisdom to the passing ants.

Keep cool, keep still and keep out of sight.

So I sit and listen to the wind interrogating the bamboos.

A sparrow is poking about in a ferny tub. What are. you seeking little feathered Diogenes?

Perch on a branch and I will tell you what’s with the world. Conflict and confrontation; exploration and desecration; the scrimmage for the image; the monetary mirage and silicon. chips that pass in the night.

That’s what.

A neighbour enters the gar den and darts suspicious glances at me.

Conversation again filters through the wire screen

Did you know that your husband is in the bam boo grove again among the ferns?

Oh, it’s just that he is going through his classical period. He is all myths. Today he is Apollo. Tomorrow, Fat Cat.

Oh, sea terrors of mythology, Scylla and Charybdis, have I got a couple of right terrors for you.

A honey-eater dips in the bird bath, rippling its water, producing a mini-spray. Ah, little Aphrodite of the tadpoles. Sweet sipper of nectar.

If I were Bacchus I’d be tippling with you, with beaded bubbles winking at my brink.

I must make do with mineral water and mango. It bubbles and beads as I sip it slowly and toast all the beautiful birds.

Goddesses where are you?

Oh, there you are!!

See, it is Diana, the huntress; equipped with a five-pronged spear known in mortal circles as a garden fork.

When you’re ready, Earth Father, you can cast a few thunderbolts at the snails and stir the fecund earth.

Such is the gist of her communication. Then she is gone, to hunt the elusive hip pocket and the wild, shy allowance.

Just a little more time then.

But the bamboos rustle suspiciously and close ranks and the ferns remain enigmatic.

It is time to go.

By the bird bath, I notice a dove.

All the Hawkes are in Canberra!

 

Max Fatchen

My country cousins rang this week with their silo serenade-full of joybells of barley and wonderment of wheat and seasonal greetings.

The great moment had come when the procession of farm implements had left the field like Roman legions leaving the battle, the column of tractors, the triumphant trucks, the snouted harvesters that had nosed their grain into semi-trailers.

It was over. The paddocks, the patient paddocks, silent reapt and straw strewn; with sheep in an ecstacy of activity, searching for the barley lying in the stubble. It was all over bar the shouting and the recollecting.

The mighty machines were asleep now in their sheds.

Excalibur, the tractor, the tyred tyrannosaurus was in his huge metal shed again, the den where he’ll sleep until ploughing.

He never missed a beat, towing harvesters, shifting mini-silos, a mastodon of might, a diesel dinosaur. Moist dawns and searing sunsets, young farmers perching in his cabin, enveloped in his mechanical magic. Let him sleep then.

The phone gave a little crackle.

“Are you still there? You’ve had a book or something published,” my country cousins, giggled, “How much corn to the hectare?”

Laughter. Let them be, I thought. Last year it was so different. But the old Earth has revived again as it always does. The punishing drifts and the frail stalks and the drought were receding into time although the wounds would linger.

I knew that my country cousins had stood in the paddocks, just for a few moments with all the engines turned off and only the wind gusting over the granary of their dreams

It’s a wonderful thing about farming that, at the end of it when the crop’s in, you can look out on your land and think about what you did right and what you did wrong and whether you cropped too early or too late and then give praise because, in a wonderful way, it all came right in the end.

And the neighbour did the right thing too.

So you all stop your trucks and utilities and the old farm cars that live a dusty, oily life with eager dogs on the back seat. And everyone has a yarn.

A long, rambling recollecting yarn with much chin rubbing and head shaking and people sucking straws the way farmers have done for centuries.

When they had sickles and tied sheaves by hand there were straw suckers, farmers gathered to talk of harvest home.

This communion over the harvest is a kind of prayer for the land.

Before everyone rushes off to look at new machinery. Before they see about booking the beach house or testing the outboard of the trailer boat in a big waterfilled drum.

First, you must stand in your pad docks and give thanks, not consciously perhaps but, in that almost shy way that farmers have sometimes, that habit of kicking the soil with their boot in an affectionate salute to the stubbled dusty miracle under their feet; the soil, touched by sun, badgered by wind, nurtured by rain, with the seed and the coming to fruition until the army of machines and men marched over it and the grain flowed from one machine to another and from truck to silo and from silo to ships and then to foreign parts.

Finally everyone goes home; trucks and implements to the shed; dogs to their bones; cockies to their meal tables, sitting by the window where they can still see the dim outline of the paddocks in the twilight.

The harvest moon comes up big and yellow and dreams through the summer sky. Showers hiss and people sing under them and some old dog gives the moon a bit of a howl and gap toothed, serenades a canine sweet heart bone-languishing across the paddocks.

Harvest is home. The crops are bumpers.

“We guess you’ve been bulk handling the Christmas pudding,” my country cousins said. I blew them a fat, mince pie kiss by courtesy of Telecom.

Bless them and their harvest and the wide wonderful old land.

And while I’m about it, bless also plum puddings and mince pies!

 

Max Fatchen

Wayside stops are those soporific spots where you veer carefully from the highway to a cement table and seat, a granite rubbish bin and lots of time if you care to take it.

They are roadside respites, parking bays in which we drop anchor to catch our motoring breath instead of driving ourselves mad just driving.

And certainly at this time of year. Take it easy—flourish your tea flask. Sit and soliloquise among the crumbs. The birds will love you. Your arteries will expand.

So pause, why don’t you? I’ve become connoisseur of rest areas. I’ve been resting round as long as I can remember. These days I’m doing about a litre of tea and half a kilogram of sandwiches to the parking bay.

I have also become interested in their ornithology because the magpies wait around me and the crows caw coquettishly, hoping for a crust. The rubbish bins, too, have an interesting archaeology of plastic and tin, card- board and tissue.

Some halts are spectacular with scenic views but some have just trees and a hot paddock behind the fence; but you may also become bewitched by the blue sky, the wandering, white clouds and the chances to tidy your thoughts.

We wayside stoppers are becoming a kind of cult; tea addicts of the highway, sips that pass on the right; ramblers of the radials.

Personalised number plates form an immediate conversational opening for wayside stoppers.

Coming from the Festival State I become festive and friendly even with people from the Garden State and we exchange a few sly digs.

We draw together defensively at the sight of the arrogant “The Premier State”, its occupants boasting about Nev Wran, the Bridge and the Opera House. We fire back with Bannon, Barossa and the Playhouse while the Victorians hit hard with their art centre and Lou Richards.

Yet we are not there to bicker and they soon drive off with a brief, placatory wave to be replaced by a Sunshine Stater bringing a breath of Bjelke and the Barrier Reef.

Then a car from the State of Excitement and the Fair Maid of Perth alighted from the driving seat. We asked about the Pilbara but she looked at me coldly when I said I was from the Festival State.

“Where are your balloons, playboy?” she cried. And went on her exciting way west.

But mostly we sit quietly sipping into our second cup and fondling our egg and lettuce. There is a dreamy wind through the mallee trees while the semi-trailers tyre-sing past, looking for helpless little motor cars.

When we see them pass the wayside stop we sit very still. Their drivers are the doyens of distances, the princes of prime movers. Our little car sweats quietly, through its sump. T

Soon sound returns to small things. A magpie comes and beaks a crust while a crow watches me intently.

My wife turns on the transistor. She wants to hear Dr. Hackett’s Body Program and to know about the beautiful construction of her kidneys.

She wants to get back to headline land; to the symphonic variations of daily living; onwards to waiting relatives, with a backlog of chat. So I mark one more place on my directory of wayside stops.

The magpies and crows are indifferent to our departure; they prefer station wagons swarming with children spurting pies and crumbling chips.

Farewell small oasis, silent cement table, stately granite bin. We’ve had our wayside pause.

Parting is such sweet sorrow especially when I know that out there in the bitumen jungle, sleepless and immense, the semi-trailers are waiting.

 

Max Fatchen

Such things as butter and cream and milk are so pack aged, container and cartoned these days that the romance of manufacture escapes one.

Which takes me back to our underground dairy in the country with its mysterious annexes of preserves and shelves of honey and the shining separator that night and morning, flowed with milk.

Anything underground these days is seen in the light of a nuclear shelter. But the only fall-out on the underground dairy were the petals of the flowering almond tree above it in spring and the rain in winter.

The dairy had a steeply sloping roof and you went down stone steps through the door with a latch and into its cool tranquillity.

The separator was a machine of Scandinavian origin; from Sweden we were told by the traveller who sold it to us. It had a handle and flywheel, two spouts, and whirling aluminium, or was it tin? dishes that fitted over a spindle and spun at a furious speed and sent the cream rich, yellow and nutritious, into its container and the milk skimming into a bucket.

As you worked up speed the fresh milk ran from its bowl atop the machine into a smaller reservoir with a float and then fed into the magical works below. For a child it was a source of wonder; the separator had a plaintive, whining song, perhaps reflecting the Nordic temperament of its inventor made melancholy by long winters and stark pine forests with Lapland a tundra or two away to the north.

Later one would wash the separator parts, dismantling the machine with an air of importance before fitting it back together again, ready for the next milking.

The cream would be necessary for the next process in the butter churn, again with a handle and a wooden beater inside. Again more rural delights, the smack of the beaters, the butter congealing and appearing inside until the yellow in was ready for loving attention by two small paddles with which our parents beat the substance into shape, beaters that left tiny squares imprinted on the oblongs of butter.

There was something personal about it all. The grass was home grown, the cow was milked in the rickety shed, an operation of kicks and interruptions for abdominal necessities. So it went until the butter was there in its cool safe, in yellow, accessible rows carefully cubed in grease-proof wraps. All our own work with the help of the cow and the machine from Scandinavia.

Some cream was kept. One luxuriated with cream and its dolloping delight.

For, in the inner annexe, the jars of honey, jam and the bottled fruit caught the light through the windows at ground level. Quinces flushed a deep red, peaches yellowed and mellowed, all of them smug and syruped, waiting for the summons to the Sunday dinner table when the guests were there and the cream appeared in an heirloom jug and the butter sat in a sliver dish. Products of the farm. All our own work.

There was a meat safe, too, in the underground dairy. It was heavily fortified by fly wire, for the country files were small, fast interceptors while the old blowies drowsed in lazy but watchful reconnaissance outside, longing for an open door or an uncovered leg of lamb. But security was good; doors stayed bolted; safes were as unassailable as a strong room.

Sometimes at night we’d creep into the dairy for another oblong of butter and pause a moment to observe the moonlight through the little windows, a dramatic moonbeam falling on the separator aglint with mystery.

The cows were long gone to pasture, charging their udders for the milking dawn.

There was a cheese rapped in muslin, and lay, a white ghost, on shelf, and its scent wafted into the night and sent the mice in the nearby haystack mad with logging and bringing some brave adventurer on tiny frantic feet to fling itself into oblivion in the claws of the old farm cat that guarded the pantry.

This cat never stirred far and had none of the nocturnal adventures that seemed to make neighbouring cats suffer and yowl in marital torment.

It just sat waiting for milk and mice, tabby jowls lit by the moon and its claws quiescent, claws that unsheathed, could strop stockings into a maelstrom of ladders or tatter the sides of the old settee.

The dairy at right was mysterious indeed, with its ghostly shelves of jam and its boulevards of butter, the shadows of trees moving in a silhouetted dance on the whitewashed walls.

One stood and listened and almost heard the earth itself sighing and moaning for the great cares it bore, feeding the needs of cows and cats and human kind.

One would tiptoe out at last with butter in hand to receive a “where have you been child” as some guest, butter madness in his eyes awaited this culinary reinforcement, his knife poised, ready spread.

My butter now comes from the supermarket It awaits me in its legions in massed refrigerators; its labels bannering its brand like a thousand others. My cream is one of a battalion of cartons stamped with its USE BY code.

There are no singing separators to work their magic, no spinning works, no high-pitched song. Milk still comes from cows they say and one must be thankful at least for that.

A home there is no underground dairy and we shan’t be building our fall-out shelter just yet.

When open the refrigerator door the light comes on with awful efficiency and I notice there are no moon beams on the butter.

 

Max Fatchen

In that acute financial atmosphere known as home this old artful dodger smiled a sad, defeated smile at the new Federal steps to make people pay all their taxes.

Far down through the misty computers of time my spools gather dust in the Treasury like scalps in a tepee, broken symbols of a man who never dared but always shared.

Tax avoidance avoided me, deductions deduced me as hopeless and then there are the fiscal near and dear who have held out their pudgy hands ever since they could lisp “20 cents”. Even as I lifted her veil after the wedding bells rang out among the supercilious steeple pigeons, she asked me if I had my cheque book.

She has been my cheque mate ever since.

It seems I never had what some of my friends call business acumen. I thought this was a kind of pimply rash but according to crafty-looking acquaintances who look out the corners of their eyes, speak out the corners of their mouths and cut corners and throats if they get half a chance, it is the art of financial footwork.

After all, all work and no play makes tax a dull ploy, if you’ll pardon me, Mr. Howard, for a brave pun.

I have never formed a family company. Who wants to and why should I? I’m in their company all the time. Income shared is income spared, says my tax consultant. Down our way income snaffled is income raffled.

The simplistic assault on the dollar in our house does not require the merger of banks, or cool accountants looking sideways at the Taxation Act. It’s merely an upending of trousers, a milking of wallets, change recovery from the carpet and a chartering of cheques for that frail little outpost of penury which my smiling acolytes call my current account.

Friends have told me of tax avoidance schemes but I know of only two worthwhile ones; hiding in the Himalayas or sitting in a diving bell at the bottom of the Mindanao trench. Even then they’d find me.

Why haven’t the tax people enlisted my family—determination, detection, the reading of expressions, the pumping of the intended victim, pocket picking, hard-luck stories, mugging in the kitchen—all the paraphernalia of persuasion and extraction is theirs to command.

Daddy. I’ve taken my allowance.

Darling child, leave Daddy now while he takes his tea and beats time to his blood pressure.

Mind you, I have friends with tricky personalities. They are always talking about tax lurks. I know where it lurks, in dark corners, where it hisses at me. “Psst, like filthy amendment?”

I said to the nice girl in our bank “Do you think I might have a little interest?”

“If you were 30 years younger and had hair you might,” she said. She went on bundling her notes.

You see, I am not one for Mr. Howard’s men. On the great tax map in the Treasury a small tattered flag is attached to me with the caption “Occupied Territory.”

Soon will come the clump of June 30 jack boots, through the winter mist will loom that dark, terrible form.

Have I dodged anything this year apart from my relatives? Have I formed spurious companies, claimed for my dog and cockatoo, made numerous business trips or maintained a harem on the Gold Coast?

And what about developmental works, what about depreciation? There’s been plenty of that and phrases such as “layabout,” “rat,” and “never does a hand’s turn” spring to mind.

What about wear-and tear of plant? Well, you try telling them about our diseased aspidistra and our balding maidenhair!

Indeed, I am a man with more money than cents. I have a shoebox of old cheque butts—not for fancy footwork but full of financial arsenic and old lace. So please don’t come knocking on my door. Please don’t interrogate me!

Like the plague, I just want to be avoided.

 

Max Fatchen

I often envy caterpillars that have their own on-site cocoon.

When I come out of my cocoon I’m no butterfly but pretty much the same as when I went in.

And then people say, “Your rest doesn’t seem to have done you much good.”

Take a recent example.

My cocoon and refuge of which I have often spoken and intend to mention again often as I feel like it is my seaside shack, known cynically among my family as bathrobe Mansion, with front facing bacteria and hot and cold running cockroaches.

But it suits me and I wander dreamily along its beach in my fishing clothes followed by a respectful cloud of flies, seagulls and small scavenging animals.

I was thus engaged recently on my beach when I saw some figures appear in the distance.

My not-inconsiderable intuition told me that they were friends; that they had winkled my holiday retreat out of the wife back home; that they had come over for a breath of fresh air and while they were here they thought they’d call on me.

And while they called on me they thought they might put up the tent and spend the night; and while they were spending the night they thought we might have a late session and they’d tell their interminable stories, drinking my tea to the last bag, consuming my biscuits to the last crumb, trying my patience to the last shred and borrowing most of my bedding.

You can imagine the sight of them caused me to take to the sandhills. But they had their dog, Alby, with them; Alby the Implacable; Alby, Leg Raiser Extraordinary Alby who could pick up my scent in a pickle factory, Alby who could track me through the Bolivar treatment works.

“Go find him, Alby,” they screamed.

At last the quarry was cornered.

“Look,” shouted a child, “there’s a big sandhill wearing a T-shirt.”

Moments later I was greeted with a gritty kiss by the panting young and a triumphant peck by their mother, Merciless Muriel.

“You cunning old devil,” said her husband, known among his enemies as “Hullo-Old-Friend-Old-Friend” Fred.

Back to the shack we went, so peaceful beside its sighing teatree, the soporific sea dim- pling to the sly suggestions of a sea breeze with the seagulls sitting in small disgruntled committees keening about the catering.

Oh we had a rousing night and my friends stayed and stayed and laughed at their jokes until the moon set and my head fell forward into the sugar basin and I had sweet dreams.

 

When morning came I was bellying my way over the rocks with the faint-hearted idea of hailing a passing vessel and escaping by sea but Alby, out for an early leg raiser, summoned a band of mini-Goths, shrieking: “Mum said you’d make us breakfast.”

It was a terrible time with children shouting for “lacy” eggs which proved to be those fried with a filegreed outer edge. I glared at them darkly through a hole in the toast. Merciless Muriel was just “dying” for a cup of coffee so I gave it to her in an instant and sprinkled her with soiled cereal which quietened her temporarily.

She then fell upon the Crossquiz which was always my Saturday joy and which I usually shared with a particularly erudite cockroach.

Now the air was filled with Muriel’s enquiries about the wives of Henry VIII and what physical feature had the biggest mouth in the world. I stood there swaying in my thongs and the answer burning my lips.

“Hullo Old-Friend-Old- Friend” Fred was astir in one of his glorious range of sensual T-shirts, the erudite legend Sun, Sex, Sand and Supper lettering his spilling girth. He was into the farm fresh eggs and poring over the sporting pages and calling for more toast and quarrying the quince conserve from its shrinking pot.

Meanwhile I stumbled to and fro among beach balls and in one awful confused moment mistakenly poured white anti-infra-red lotion into my cup and had a quick touch of suntanned intestine.

Then a child dropped a plate and I knew morning had broken.

Later I staggered with the garbage bag to the central rubbish area.

No wonder the garbage bag was so heavy. I found two kids inside it looking for bait.

Meanwhile Muriel had consummated the Crossquiz and Fred was old-friending a couple of campers and the child ren were ransacking my fishing box while my gentles raced for safety under the refrigerator.

The day proceeded to be one of those awful scenarios on the jetty, extracting splinters from kicking feet and longing for a tidal wave that would sweep us all into oblivion and at least wash a few faces in the process.

Muriel and Fred said: “We think we’ll stay another night. The children seem very attached to you.”

I must say my escape in the early hours was a planned withdrawal, prickling with tension, inching my way past the tent people and a slumbering, meaty chunked Alby recharging his kidneys for the morrow.

I left the area, my car lights off and my vehicle in low gear, using the back roads, until I was safe.

My wife was surprised at my sudden return.

So I took her in my arms and cried passionately, “Hullo old friend, old friend, old friend”.

Sometimes there’s even no place like home!

 

Max Fatchen