The grand final of the Australian Rules football league was yesterday, the obsession of all Melbourne. I and Harry and Neddy and Paul and their friend Claire congregated in the living room hoping, despite lifelong aversion, for a Collingwood victory over the Brisbane Lions, a bunch of bastards. They're a Yankee-style commercial enterprise whose them song is a reworded version of the Marseillaise. Unfortunately they won easily in a dismal game, all the more dismal given that I was counting on it for my whole season's dose of footy.

The pre-game entertainments are always telling. This year the finalists of Australian Idol sang songs, and then the stars of the stage musical We Will Rock You lipsynched numbers from the production - other Queen songs before they shifted into a syrupy, pumped-up version of Waltzing Matilda. Harry and I by this point were exclaiming how completely an embarrassment it all was, for the league, and for the nation, but it went on and on for 45 minutes or so. The culmination, once the teams had run out through their huge walls of streamers built by fans, was a rendition of the national anthem by an appropriately multi-raced young woman.

This reminds me that I'm reading an extremely interesting and compelling essay by Germaine Greer who argues that the only hope for Australia, as it struggles terminally over how to implement a “multiculturalism” that has such effects as ushering in a reconciliation with aboriginal Australians, is for the majority to strive for “aboriginality,” itself. This would take the form of an acknowledgment that the great survivors of the country are the Aborigines, whose early vilification and now well-established denigration by white Australians overlooks the fact that the majority feels a deepseated abhorrence of its forebears' behavior towards the Aborigines, and also recognized, at some level, that its inhabitation of the country is very poorly executed - it doesn't acknowledge its own inadequacy, nor does it admit that it flies in the face of the country itself, and is starting to look very shaky because of that - in terms, for example, of environmental damage, and so forth. Embracing “aboriginality” would mean, as humbly as possible, listening to Aboriginal voices that have, if history is carefully considered, been reaching out to European Australia since the beginning of the colonial era in the late 18th century.

I'm supposed to be implementing the Dr Siddhu nutritional program (see below), but that isn't easy, without being at my own place. It's a simple regime, which he designed to provide a structure to me, who is rather structureless when it comes to eating, unless going out for every meal is a structure. The regime is: one Weetabix for breakfast, and a hot, caffeine-free drink (HCFD). Lunch: consommé soup, with some vegetables in it. Dinner: fish or chicken, cooked in own juices with garlic and ginger, or grilled. Some vegetables. That's it. Two big glasses of water before each meal. Between breakfast and lunch, and lunch and dinner: half a piece of fruit, HCFD. After each meal: brush teeth; close up shop. That's quite a challenge, but the simplicity and the potential for liberation from harmful substances are appealing, so it's being going pretty well, despite having to fit in with family dinners and the like. (Nonetheless, my success is, at best, middling, I'll admit it.)

Today Harry and I went to the last day of the annual Melbourne Show, which this year has been somewhat soured by three accidents on fun-rides, including a collision between cars of the rollercoaster, when a boy's hat flew off and jammed under the wheels of one carriage, stalling it, so that it was rammed by the following carriages. A few went to hospital. The upside of the event was that Harry proved quite uninterested in the rides, today, so that we were able to sit and watch cattle, llamas, alpacas, and Boer goats before shopping for “show bags,” which are the be-all and end-all of children's show attendance: They're shopping bags with a selection of the products of a particular company, such as Cadbury's Chocolates, or Japanese card companies, discounted slightly and sold for a fortune from parents', or amenable uncles', pockets. A few desultory music acts were at two stages at points around the showgrounds, an expanse of about 20 acres adjacent to the huge Flemington Racecourse. They were fairly sorry country acts, or rock acts doing covers of the worst of American 70-80s pop songs. In the large stadium, several rows of custom-altered pickup trucks and stock cars were parked amid strolling country blokes, and a few attendant sheilas, strutting about. The cars were liberally decorated with Southern-Cross and Australian national flags. Harry at a roo burger for his lunch.

Yesterday I took Harry, Paul’s first, 12, and Ciaran, Michael’s second, 12, out to the country home of some old family friends who have been out of touch most of the last 33 years, or so. Deirdre and Alex live on 12 acres of farmland about 7 miles the other side of Queanbyan, which is to Canberra as, say, Burien is to Seattle. They grow olives, feed the 4 chooks who gratefully produce about 6 eggs a day, and in general lead a relaxed kind of life. The property, like all the ones in this and most parts of Australia, is home to plenty of kangaroos, who alternately stand about like timeless sentinels, staring imperiously and a little disdainfully at anyone who comes into view, and bouncing about the terrain, although the movement is so effortless and smooth that they seem to be gliding at about 15 miles an hour – certainly faster than any human could run.
The boys amused themselves either by feeding the chooks, monitoring the kangaroos while keeping their eyes peeled for echidnas (gentle, shy creatures: spiny ant-eaters, cousins of the platypus, and with them the only egg-laying mammals), or scouring the waterhole for Murray cod (which have probably by now eaten all the trout, because there has been a 100-year drought, and the level is very low). No snakes, in the cool weather, although the property has plenty of browns.
Harry likes to sit quietly in any adult company, taking it all in, in his mild-mannered, shy way. He responds delightfully when asked a question, demonstrating that he has been listening intently, and speaking with evident contentment and a delightful turn of phrase. Ciaran is an original who will venture a detailed opinion about anything and everything, and is certainly the most conversationally precocious of 12 years old. His only real deficit is that he butts in, continually, in his eagerness to contribute his expert opinion on just about anything. He is extremely fastidious, both in terms of
And is highly quick-witted, somewhat in emulation of his father; but he derives the tendency most clearly from his mother’s late father, Clarry, in Tasmania, the most naturally gifted and hilarious of demotic storytellers. While Ciaran will veer off onto always fascinating tangents rather than take the road that threatens to lead to an area of his unknowing, Harry, with whom not knowing sits easily, is more likely merely to respond to new and surprising information about which he is less than expert by saying “Is that right?”
We used to visit Deirdre and Alex and their 3 sons, sometimes down at the coast where they still have a house. One of their sons, Jonathan whom we used to know as Jossy, turns out now to live about 100 yards down the same street as Paul, in Melbourne. I have a very strange and striking memory from age 3 or so (as I’ve ascertained through indirect checks with my mother). I and she were visiting Deirdre who at the time had a very young infant. I recall vividly a scene – not only the house, but also the light, the direction I was looking, how Deirdre was sitting, and so forth. But the single strongest element, still so clear that I seem almost to be there, was of her breast as she fed the baby. It must have been the first one that I really noticed, because my memory of it is so clear – a slightly orange-tinged, freckled skin, and a notably conical shape. What effect the memory may have had on my conception of the breast, in general, I can only speculate.
Of course, I did not bring up, in yesterday’s company, this particular recollection.

Over the weekend my parents hosted their 50th wedding anniversary festivities. My mum’s brothers Tony (with wife Margaret) and Geoff came up from Tasmania. Tony is a long-time member of state parliament, after a high-profile career as an Aussie Rules football star and then successful coach. He has seven children, all of whom seem to have achieved successes in recognizable, recognized professions. Geoff has never married; lived with his mother and father until his mother died when he was 18 or so, and with his father until he died at 92, about 10 years ago. Now 66, Geoff gets a pension, which he seems to spend on cigarettes and gambling, which reportedly leaves him without cash at least a few days before each fortnightly pension check, making him then dependent on Tony’s family for survival. Some telling stories came up about Geoff, which are all the more pertinent to me given that, as Geoff told my sister-in-law Jane (an expert at squirreling personal information from even people she’s barely met) that he reckoned that just as he was his generation’s hermit in the family, I would be mine (“please don’t let that happen,” pleaded my mother, when I told her). Of course, his prediction was hardly news to me; I’ve been contemplating that prospect for decades, ever since I realized that there was a history of hermits in the family. One of Geoff’s father’s 13 siblings was a severe hermit, up in the hills, where he died at age 90 or so, propped up against a tree for three days before he died after a heart attack. When my mother said to her father, ‘Oh, Dad, I’m so sorry; you must be terribly upset,” he replied “Nah, he lived tough, he wanted to die tough.’
In any case, Geoff is a very personable fellow, although rather set in his ways, and with a history of such. He eats, with little variation, steak or sausages with potato, pumpkin, and peas. To offset his expenses after his father died, in a small town outside Hobart, he took in a lodger. He couldn’t charge him much, because if he had more than about $100 in weekly earnings, he’d lose his pension. So, he told the lodger that the deal was, he had to share the cooking, and he had to make either steak or sausages, with potato, pumpkin, and peas. Well, on one occasion, the lodger failed to follow this formula, so Geoff kicked him out – fired him, as my mother puts it.
Another suggestive incident is that Geoff, although he was here for the 50th anniversary proceedings, was not at the original wedding. He was 16 at the time. He explained this to Jane by saying he didn’t go because his older brother opened his suit. “He opened my suit, so I didn’t go,” he related, as if this really was a perfectly acceptable explanation.
I commented to Geoff that I recalled, again very strongly, how they made toast when I was 10 and my family visited him and his father in Huonville, on Wilmot Road, just up the road from the bike shop they operated, and from the swimming pool they managed in the summer (and from which, empty, Michael tried unsuccessfully to fish a terrified bandicoot, before my father took over and, to my astonishment, easily accomplished the task by picking up the animal and depositing on the lawn). I said, ‘I remember that you used to make your toast over your open fireplace, in a sort of cage, like a fish barbecuer.” He brightened considerably and said he still had the contraption, and had used it until he left Wilmot St. for a small apartment a few years ago, and that since leaving he missed that toast most of all.
In any case, I don’t smoke, or gamble, so perhaps my fate will be different, although, as I have often commented, I do sense the Fletcher hermit gene lurking in my destiny, and this perhaps has exacerbated my tendency to frequent intense loneliness, despite a bevy of very lovely and beloved friends.

Tomorrow I drive back to Melbourne, 400 miles, with Harry, who has remained behind with his cousins after Paul, Jane, and Neddy returned on Monday. The trip would be fairly humdrum if, unlike me, you didn’t find the scenery gorgeous – rolling farmland and bushland in seraphic light, at this time of year. Neddy, 6, of course finds it a little tedious, and he has trouble conceptualizing 400 miles, and fractions of it, so he and his father have devised a method of making distance and time more readily comprehensible. They refer to trips in terms of schloomper-doompers and super schloomper-doompers, where the latter is twice the former, and the former approximates to about how far you can go before you get really fed up, need to pee, and will probably need a milkshake to mollify you sufficiently that you’ll get back in the car and undergo another. Canberra, from Melbourne, is about 3 super schloomper-doompers. We got away, coming up, with only two milkshake or fish-and-chips breaks, so we did fairly well. I now have my rental car, so will be undertaking some major schloomper-doompers myself, soon.

I've been to see the redoubtable, inimitable Dr S Siddhu - as, apparently, have half the residents of Melbourne, to sort out one problem or another. His reputation extends far into diverse sectors of the city's demography, and his success is renowned. About eight years ago, my sister-in-law and eight of her friends went, one at a time, to see him, to address their inability to stop smoking; only one (my sister-in-law) went for more than one 50-minute appointment, and only one (not my sister-in-law) has ever smoked again.
A small, trim, neatly bearded and coiffed man, with rather intense eyes whose pupils are strangely difficult to differentiate from his irises, and even the whites of his eyes, Dr Siddhu dresses in a semi-formal jacket and tie, and is at once easily nimble and calmly unhurried. He is a former surgeon in Malaysia where he grew up, who came to Australia, worked in leading medical research labs, at various hospitals, and as a general practitioner, all increasingly in the area of “psychosomatic wellness,” which has been his specialty in private practice for 25 years. His office is a snug room, with waiting room fashioned from the front lobby, in his sizable home in a very fashionable suburb of Melbourne. The house looks to be of about 1870 vintage, a two-story brick building with attractive grille work, and all the appearance of financial solidity and independence. Inside his office, after greeting his clients with a rather tentative handshake, or perhaps just an overall sense of withholding or only partial self-disclosure, he beckoned me to a seat in front of his large desk, behind which he retreats. From this point, he is seen in half-light, and partially obscured by a desk lamp, so that one has to pay close attention, with a slightly crooked neck, to catch everything he says.
His message is one of self-doctoring, and of compassion, affection, and responsibility to oneself, in connection with whatever the issues presented - insomnia, anxiety, smoking cessation, weight control. Of these I nominate the first and third, and he proceeds to ask me a variety of trenchant questions that appear aimed to pinpoint just the most general facts and dynamics of my past and present. Why do I not sleep? Why do I not become trimmer, fitter, and (this last emerges only later) taller? The last commands my attention, to some degree, because I've been most easily resigned to limited height, of all my shortcomings. His only partly metaphoric meaning emerges later.
My attention is sharply on his clearly practiced, though impressively tailored messages. He has seen many people in a wide array of psychological and physical states, and is dedicated to helping people relieve themselves of dependancy on medicine, substances, destructive habits, hope for salvation by anyone but oneself. Impressively, he sketches out these remedies to depression, overweightness, anxiety, sleeplessness... with no hint of cantish, Tony Robbins-like proselytizing. The foundation of his approach, it later emerges, is an amalgam of spirituality and dependence on the body's own ability to be well. The various elements of this are announced by what one sees in his office (through the said half-light). On walls, above a large disused fireplace, are photographs of various generations of his extended family, amidst images of various spiritual guides of the usual Indian-diaspora variety, along with others of the likes of Padre Pio. Prominent on his desk is a small sign, facing me, that reads: “It is time to make up your mind.” I get the idea, and am fascinated by the juxtaposition of ancestral spiritual guides and Padre Pio, so am quite willing to attentively consider his take on spiritual health or receptiveness.
He describes, then, at one point, his understanding of the appearance of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. There, in the grotto, he suggests, an apparition really did occur, but when hoardes of people go there, most are motivated by a desperation to bask in a potentially saving grace that they do not find because their attention is to physical, objective manifestations of the apparition, which of course cannot be detected. They then miss another manifestation of some kind of palpable holiness, he suggests; but it is one that can be felt only on a spiritual plane, with the appropriate and necessary preparation within oneself.
Surprisingly, all this seems quite reasonable, even to an excessively analytical, religion-embittered soul such as myself. So I determine to be more open to, and more successful than I normally am, the hypnotherapy session that then follows. Having learned of my remoteness from its effects, he employs more ramped-up techniques than he has in my case in the past, and than he normally does, according to various former clients. As I sit in his oversized, reclining armchair, he sits in a plastic moulded chair beside me and proceeds, for example, with a technique involving counting down from 10 while holding my right wrist, or placing his left thumb on my forehead, talking about a differential of warmth and coolness from one hand to the other. Most notably, however, he counts down from 10, quite quickly, interspersing odd phonemes, of indeterminate significance, between the digits -- something like: 10....9... i'm-a 8... 7...”
And so forth. There follows a variety of reinforcements of the program he requests that I put in place, which includes ritualizing eating and also standardizing the contents of my diet. He will not control, or force me to follow this, he emphasizes, but he will assist me.
It strikes me that being able to record all this (and I could say much more) underscores one pillar of my inability to relax more into life, to leave past anxieties behind, and all their manifestations, but I nonetheless leave believing my life can only improve from here, that I can and will wait for no one to save me but myself, and that some of the major pitfalls I regularly encounter, such as mixed success in contracting and maintaining close relationships, despite my awareness that I have some quite well-honed skills for the task, will continue to be resolved, with beneficial, real-world outcomes. I am encouraged to find that when I wander into a Rivers shoe store a block away from Dr Siddhu's office, to begin to buy my new supply of the comfortable, eminently walkable shoes that I love so much, I fall easily into delightful conversation with the lean, lithe Jessica on the shop floor. We talk about the benefits of cargo pants, with which she, too, has recently replaced habitual jeans. Jeans really aren't that comfortable, we agree. I don't venture that, yes, and they really can be an armor for blokes like me who are loath to present their physicality to the world through less heavily fortified fabric. But I do say, when she adds that it took her a while to get used to the light fabric of the cargo pants, that I, too, had that experience, and in fact for a week or so, I was shocked every time I looked down, to see that someone else appeared to be inhabiting my lower half, and for a month or so, I often stopped short, suddenly imaging, until I quickly doublechecked, that I was wearing nothing on my nether reaches, at all. Jessica blushed a little, but we parted with the expectation that I'd return next week, when back in Melbourne, to report on my new shoes, and to purchase some more.

Melbourne -
I arrived after the long flight, which was comfortable enough -- so much so, in fact, and so rare an opportunity simply to sit, that I found myself wishing it would last longer (I slept comfortably in the this-way-that-way business-class seat, aided by one lovely Ambien). I must admit that the airline's treatment of its business-class passengers, with tasty food, replenished water supply, and so forth, was exemplary. Exemplary, that is, of the way they should treat everyone and anyone who flies their friendly skies, including the herded masses to the rear of which I am usually a part.

I'm at my brother Paul's, with his two highly engaging children.
Neddy, 6, is as compelling and diverting as diminutive.
He is given, for example, to counting out his money with actuarial precision and attention. He keeps an impressive stash of it ina chest that he places carefully in a corner of the space under his loft bed (which he can mount by a variety of methods, all using adjacent furniture, as he proudly will demonstrate). He opens the box and the contents glitter like a pirate's chest of children's adventure tales, and then he lifts out of pièce de résistance, a small wallet in which he stows his banknotes. He in fact has fewer of these than he thinks, although their number recently swelled by 50%. He had two carefully folded five-dollar notes, but then his mother, in a pinch, borrowed them, to pay a bill. She thought she could have them back before Neddy returned that afternoon. Alas, he got to the cache before her, and immediately discovered the disappearance. When the incident is discussed now -- and it's very fresh in his memory -- his mother tries to explain that she borrowed the notes, but he interjects ”stole!” He finds occasion to repeat this accusation several times as the story is told, and when his mother explains that she was going to return the money, that day, so it really was borrowing, he reiterates ”stealing!” and then embarks on a disquisition on the evils of theft, particularly as committed against him. If you take someone's money, he explains, that's wrong; in fact, it's a crime. When he discovered the infliction upon him of this serious infraction, he descended into two hours of unconsolable grief -- lots of waterworks -- and his mother was able to assuage his loss of faith in motherhood, humankind... or at least the security of his strongbox, only by offering him a third $5 note, as a kind of interest. Neddy now agrees that in future, any impecunious members of his family -- which is to say, any of the other three -- will at the very least leave him an IOU so that his faith isn't further compromised.
Ideally, however, they will keep their hands off his treasury, altogether. After the Loss of Faith in Motherhood incident, he was so outraged that, although he cannot spell, although he can spell out words and even many pages in books, he penned an erratically spaced sign reading:
Nobode a lahad to
go en my
barade
He allowed, to me, that the last word, “bedroom,” had given him particular trouble.
He posted the sign on his door, filling some of the spare white space beneath by affixing a playing card of Shakira, the grandiosely blond, polyester-wrapped-curvaceous, and generously bosomed pop star.
He does a very serviceable Elvis impersonation, and in any case is impressively dramatic, as I expect many children of his age are. He combines this with an ability to completely shut out the world, especially when it suits him, as when asked to get ready for school. (In this, he resembles my brother Michael, in whose ear, when he was, say, reading, I could shout “MICHAEEEL!” and still he wouldn't notice, which used to drive me to utter distraction, while also stunning me, who was utterly distractable). If he happens to hear, say, a very mildly stated request to get his clothes on, he may launch into an extraordinary series of exclamations, such as “YOU HATE ME!” or “OK, OK, I'm gonna have to eat five Mars Bars.” Why, is unclear. His melodramatization is so grand that his big brother Harry, 12, may simply stand back, openmouthed and awestruck.
He swears freely, from plain “That's crap” to full-bore “Oh, fuck!” - all used with unerring context appropriateness.
He is football crazy. His room is a shrine to his beloved Essendon Bombers (he inherited the preference from Harry), many of whom he can name before elaborating on their accomplishments. He likes to watch the early morning news (at 7am) and last week, I'm told, he reacted with huge, voluble dismay when it was reported, as he subsequently reported to his then-no-longer-sleeping parents, that the Bombers' superstar fullback, Dustin Fletcher, had been suspended by the league tribunal for 3 weeks, for striking. The Bombers then lost badly in the quarterfinals to Port Adelaide, whom Neddy considers a lock for the premiership. Yesterday he hauled up his neighbor, a middle-aged woman and also a die-hard Bombers fan, on her way into her house, and inquired whom she would now back for the flag. He told her he considered Port the likely winners, and then proceeded to show me how to do a “snap” (for goal), by holding the ball at an odd, reverse angle, and then kicking across one's body. At the park, I notice, he employs no other kick, consistently, but when the ball flies only a few yards and then bounces in any direction but mine, he pursues it like a terrier after a manageable rat.
He is given to the expression, “it scared the fleece out of me,” which he finds quite a versatile punctuation to all kinds of reports from his daily life. It's an oddly antiquated Australian turn of phrase that hasn't been current since about 1965, when the country started to depend on sheep for fewer than all its fortunes.

Today I visit, again (after semi-successful visits fuor years ago), to the highly reputed Dr. Sarjit Siddhu, hypnotherapist to half of Melbourne, from what I can tell. He can do it all: stop you smoking in about 20 minutes, never to start again; help you overcome insomnia or any other form of habitual anxiety...; lose those extra 50 pounds. I'm banking on remedies two and three. Although high unsuggestible, I have faith in his magic method of counting backwards from 10 with incomprehensible mutterings between the digits.