I Don't Want My Teddies

"If the truth is that we always hated school, it isn't likely that we're going to become college professors. If we're 100 pounds overweight, prospects are not great for a modelling career. Realistically, we need to focus on what can be, not what is impossible. We need to work with what we've got, not what we wish we had. Circumstances such as age or heath may impose limits that weren't there yesterday. So be it. It's today and who we are today that counts. Bucking reality is a fool's game that always ends in defeat."

Believing in Myself.

This is the woman throwing Teddies into the street yesterday morning. I stopped and took a few photographs; I couldn't get the council worker in the same frame and the road is busy at that time of day; vans, trucks, cars kept cutting off the shot. Making material out of other people's madness? Joyous, happy and free. Unchained. I've gone through the turbulence and distress of the speech and the post-event let down, and a voice on high says he's very pleased, courage, strength, integrity, decency; we wowed 'em babe. I couldn't have done it without a lot of help from others; a chain of event. Even my old university friend Jenny who we stayed with was massively supportive; and she's a staunch feminist and a senior public servant. These days.

When I first met her it was the early seventies and we were at Macquarie University in Sydney, a redbrick university I had chosen because I thought it was new and would therefore be unshackled by tradition. I should have gone tradition, but by the time I woke up it was too late to move. At Macquarie I was better known in the bar than the academic corridors, and had the unique privilege of being banned from there on a number of occasions. I was the mad one; those days before computers; and I was always carting around at least ten books and a portable typewriter; and scribbling musical notations in class because I wanted to be like John Bygate; a composer, an artist of brilliance.

Jenny used to wear these multi-coloured velvet capes; wore a particular distinctive perfume which mixed well with the sweat of the day and above all else; that ultimate piece of sophistication, she had a car. I was enthralled, massively impressed. That there were other difficulties, about which I'll be circumspect here just in case; only added to her allure. Vast allure. Swimming in fantasy. We were a gang and we were on the frontier. I introduced her to Keith; who later became her husband and turned from an enormously funny, entertaining and charismatic person to an evil brutal dog; a sub-form of human life; and remains, to this day, living off the public purse. He used to live on mandrax, hundreds of them; and not just a raging mathaqholine addiction. He was the original vacuum cleaner. Any chemical went down his throat.

Fast forward 30 years and he's a pathetic human being. Once a laugh a minute; incredibly handsome, incredibly talented; just an insane wit; he's now an old man in a Housing Commission flat; who since they recently imposed work tests on the disabled - he's on a disability pension for being drug fucked; having a bad back, whatever the excuse - has become even sicker still. He couldn't even make it to his daughter Isis's wedding; although everything was paid for. This miserable, evil, aging sodd was the man I introduced Jenny to 30 years ago. Towards the end of the union; I would go round to visit, to find Jenny fragile and with black eyes, trying to tell me she had fallen into the door handle. He was about to have his legs broken; but instead she went into hiding; in the days when Roger Rogerson had just killed Warren Lanfranchi in a back alley; no regrets from the people Warren had robbed; and the dark, corrupt under-belly of Sydney lapped threateningly at our lives and imperilled our safety.


THE BIGGER STORY:

Further transport chaos and disruption predicted:

ABC:

Bush to arrive early in Sydney for APEC meeting

US President George W Bush will arrive in Sydney four days before the start of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting next month.

Mr Bush will arrive on Tuesday ahead of the weekend leaders meeting.

Prime Minister John Howard has told Southern Cross radio he will hold meetings with the President while he is in Australia.

"He's arriving on the Tuesday night [4 September] but he'll have to leave a little early," he said.

"He'll have to leave in the middle of the weekend because he must be back in Washington to prepare for the Petraeus report to Congress on the situation in Iraq.

"He's got that and he's also of course got on the 11th of September the commemoration of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington."