Returning To Normal

The kids are back. The dog couldn't stop wriggling with excitement. This time there was no delays, no planes pulled off tarmacs in obscure parts of NSW, no weird excuses. We arrived at the airport an hour early; sat waiting, the terminal almost empty late at night. Even in the last ten days they seem to have grown. I wait and I want. Proud dad. I wish everything could dissolve into a cosy little cottage in the country, yellow climbing roses over the door. Instead we're faced with car parks that demand you pay outrageous sums of money at the pay station before you exit; they can't even be bothered to take your money in person. The meaning of it all has bypassed us. The Sydney that we loved, the bohemian paradise of 30 years ago, has gone, swamped by a thousand extra people a week in a city already choking on itself. With incompetent and self interested politicians ruling imperiously over a state of chaos. And the oppostion equally as incompetent. The kids are suddenly tweenagers, 12 and 13, not the georgeous little things that thought you were God. I feel much more normal now they're back. Despite everything. I'd love more, if it wasn't for the difficulty of living with someone, the chance that you are going to lose everything. No sane bloke would get married these days; it's not worth the risk. If you were a gambling man you just wouldn't bother. If you could clone them, perhaps I would create another little clutch, the proud bantam with his little gaggle. As it is, nothing is straight forward. At last the boy is back in school. At last the dog has had it's life's meaning restored. I'm still in pain from the accident, which threw me forward to being 95 in agony on the floor, unable to get up for half an hour as the chair collapsed and I fell backwards onto the kitchen bench. A couple more inches and I would have been a paraplegic. Or never gotten off the floor. Struggling to a press conference on international security at the Four Seasons Hotel days later, I thought this is insane; half the city's officeworkers take a day off at the first sign of a sniffle and here I am struggling to work with a cracked rib - and finally went to the doctor. Someone told me a story yesterday, of their grandmother who fell in the shower and she was there for 30 hours with the water running on top of her before she was found. She died a few weeks later; of pneumonia perhaps. Things are in transition, settling back to normal, and I'm glad no one can get to me anymore. The Christmas holidays are rapidly approaching, and I can hardly wait for the long summer days uninterrupted by anything as inconvenient as work.