You Are Still Alive
You are Still Alive. Redfern Gateway to Waterloo. So read the signs in a funny little alley I never knew was there. Of course Redfern was never the gateway to anywhere. We live in an astonishing and turbulent age. You can be in Redfern in the morning, fly 1200 ks to Broken Hill, drive 77 kilometres out of town, transmit pictures and stories and be back the next day doing yet another presser for yet another minister in the uncomfortable foyer of the government offices. We live in an astonishing and turbulent age where everything has layered over itself in rapid cascades of information and drama.
"Anna looked weary. 'Ill be so glad to be going, to get away from you all,' she shouted over the noise of the plane. She would say anything to wound. Meeting him having the kids, were the worst things that had ever happened to her. She was determined to let him know what a colossal failure he was. It was his fault they weren't rich, living like the people in her favourite magazine, Vanity Fair. You'd think, the way Anna went on, she'd been living on the Champs Elysees being courted by the fabulously rich, wonderfully entertaining, beautiful European playboys rather than in a flat above a rock band in Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia. 'I lost my outh when I met you,' she said; and when he failed to respond: 'I can't stand the way you just stand there.' He bowed his head under the tirade and counted the hours. Go, by all means go!
"It wasn't just his own hypocrises, the stabs of passion and memory - the sexual trace elements, guilty, pornographic images - or the uncertainties that he felt over his love for her that bothered him, but the hypocrises of everyone. He was sick to death of Sydney. The too-bright harbour, the soullesss business heart, the idi9t tourists gawking in the Cross, the rotten little junkies, the wasted displays, the North Shore middle class, their truly horrid wealth and self-possession, he was sick of the whole damn lot.
"It hadn't always been so."
THE BIGGER STORY
Prince Harry won't go to Iraq, and Britain is divided over decision
The Associated Press
Published: May 17, 2007
LONDON: Some said it was a sensible judgment and should have been made long ago.
Others said the decision not to deploy Prince Harry to Iraq was ridiculous, and that backtracking handed "a victory" to insurgents who had threatened the third in line to the British throne.
The decision not to send Prince Harry to Iraq was debated on talk radio and the Internet on Thursday — just like the original announcement that the 22-year-old tank commander would serve with his Blues and Royals regiment in the southern city of Basra.
"I think the general public — and to a greater extent the military — are quite annoyed at how things have been handled," said Amyas Godfrey, a military expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.
Some military families expressed their unhappiness at what they saw as special treatment.
"It is not safe for any of them out there," Gella Tomlin, the wife of a British soldier, told the British Broadcasting Corp. "Who do I need to speak to in order to stop my husband being sent there later in the year?"
