| JANUARY
ROGER: Did you see us on TV as the clock struck 2000? We were the two pixels at the bottom of the screen when,
as the blurb would have us believe, the eyes of the world were glazed
-sorry - riveted, on the fire event at the Woodford Folk Festival.
In previous years the fire event was an almost mystical thing. Pagan actually. Thousands of people sitting in the dark on rugs among the sparse eucalypts, the slopes of the valley's head forming a natural amphitheatre. The twinkling lights of the children's lanterns
- they'd spent all week making them - a magic centipede, winding down the opposite hill. The deep pulse of a didgeridoo, down on the flat, starts up. It will keep going until the aborigine, bent over his
fire-lighting sticks, has conjured a flame 'by concentration out of friction'
so to speak.
It takes ages but the crowd is silent. This is a deeper magic. None of us watching
can do it. He stops rubbing and blows gently, cupping his hands round the tinder. When the smoke turns into a bright flame,
all 12,000 of us cheer and realise we've been holding our breaths. It is a very special flame because of the way it was made and besides, the fire event couldn't go ahead without
it.
Well this year, for the first time ever, it wasn't like that. The fire was lit with a match.
A match! An un-magical match. An anybody-can-do-this match. And why? Because the fire event had been chosen to represent Australia in the millennium TV special and the timing had to be
right. So did you notice the disappointment in the pixels? Did you? Did
you?
The New Year's Eve entertainment was brilliant. It went on past 3am. Since the night was so far gone, we climbed to the top of the hill looking East over the Glasshouse mountains,
along with a few hundred other people, to watch the first sunrise of the new year. Behind us, in the predawn light
of 4:30am, a children's choir (how did they get them up so early?) sang "I Still Call Australia Home", which was hackneyed to death during the Olympics'
advertising but, in that setting, was very moving. Dya Singh chanted lightness into the sky and the Tibetan monks did the actual coaxing of the newly Y2K compliant sun back up over the cloud filled-horizon with their impossibly deep growling. All very spiritual.
The antithesis of Martin Pearson - our favourite funny man at the Folk Festival - who held up a tube of Y2K compliant jelly claiming that it allowed for the insertion of an extra two digits into the
date.
Rene went to prune fruit trees on a citrus farm at Mundubbera. His first
experience of life away from home. I dropped him off at the bus depot, and being too stingy to pay the $10 parking fee, I copped a $30 parking fine in the street instead. The three thousand dollars Rene earned, kept him going for the whole
year.
I had both wrists operated on for carpal tunnel syndrome - numb fingers, wasting
muscle. My choice of surgeons was made on the basis of their age. Not so young as to be inexperienced, or so old as to be incompetent. He was kind and charged a lot less because we didn't have health
insurance. Before the op, we were expecting me to be unable to walk for a while so we hired two
wheelchairs from the Red Cross. One for attending to the calls of nature (it had a hole), the other for gadding about, but I didn't use either for more than a
day.
I had asked the surgeon "If I can stand the pain would it damage the wrist by walking on it straightaway?" He said "No" so I did and it didn't. The nightmare scenario was not-being-able-to-wipe-my-own-backside. I HAD to get it working again, but what a waste. We couldn't think of anything else to use the wheelchairs for - we already had a wheelbarrow!
Coming out of the anaesthetic was weird. Apparently I had a lucid conversation with Jan then fell asleep. An hour later I asked after Jan, wondering why she hadn't come, and was told "But I saw you talking to
her".
They use a memory eraser drug so they can talk to you during the operation but you won't remember the trauma. Jan could have asked me anything!
Remember that scene in the movie 'True Lies' when Arnie was truth drugged? It's the same
stuff! The surgeon was pleased with my progress, and I was pleased with him so I offered him my hand. He shook it a mite too enthusiastically.
It really hurt. I didn't want to wince though, in case he thought I was
fibbing.
February...
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