An Essay called "Deep Moral Dilemmas and the Futility of Formalisation"

Deep Moral Dilemmas and the Futility of Formalisation

I’d like to begin this very big and ambitious essay by talking about abortion.

When it comes to the highly charged subject of abortion, I imagine that most people in the West today are basically non-absolutist pro-choicers. That is to say, I imagine most people would say that there is some kind of critical period in which it is permissible for a woman to terminate, and after that period, it is less clear that it is morally acceptable. This seems to be a reasonable claim.

Many philosophers writing about abortion like to deliberate over what the optimal moral boundary should be – whether capacity of the foetus to feel pain or consciousness or what. Often extenuating factors come in also, such as socio-economic status, age, health and whether she consented or was raped. I am not interested in exploring any of these matters. Instead, I am interested in exploring the basic beliefs people have about abortion. In carrying out this exploration, I hope to highlight the stark inconsistency of our moral intuitions on the subject. Later, this will serve a deeper argument about the problem of our moral intuitions in general. For now, though, let’s entertain a thought experiment.

Imagine, if you will, a healthy woman late in the first trimester of her pregnancy, roughly 10-12 weeks in (the start of foetushood). Suppose, if you can, that one day this woman contracts a very strange and disturbing urge. For whatever reason – be it insanity, iniquity or both – there is nothing in the world she wants more to do than scramble her foetus’ brains. We can also suppose she has three methods at her disposal. She could hire an unscrupulous and highly skilled surgeon who could use keyhole surgery to get inside the uterus, break through the weak skull and fiddle around carefully with the developing brain; she could ingest some kind of futuristic nanotechnology capsule which heads directly towards the uterus and, when on a conduit towards it, begins to release some kind of neurotoxic chemical; or she could just drink a lot of alcohol and take a lot of harmful drugs. Since her desire is not wanton malice, it is important to her that she does not do so much damage that the foetus dies. Indeed, she does want the foetus to survive to become a braindamaged baby and human. Thus, whichever method this woman opts for, we can be sure she will be careful not to take it too far.

If we assume that all of these methods of maiming result in the same level of pain to the insensate foetus – namely, zero – then I claim we must also assume that they are all morally equivalent. However, it doesn’t even matter if you don’t think, for whatever reason, that they’re all exactly equivalent methods, as long as you agree that they’re all wrong. I believe that everyone would agree that, whatever the method, the scrambling of the foetus’ brains is a profoundly immoral and possibly evil act, because it is a deliberate act of malice intending to cause grievous harm to an organism that will eventually become a human being. As a consequence of this mother’s malevolence, the child will forever be constrained, handicapped – prevented from living a full and fruitful life, or being a fully functioning member of society. It is a cruel act, and one worthy of indignation and outrage.

Next, let us imagine a typical abortion case. A healthy and capable young woman is heading into an abortion clinic during the first trimester of her pregnancy, roughly 10-12 weeks in. She is nervous but has convinced herself that she should feel no guilt. After all, she has a right to bodily autonomy, she has the right to choose.

The procedure is a success. She goes home feeling relieved and unburdened, with a heavy weight off her shoulders.

As I suggested in the introduction, in the second case most people would regard the act as morally acceptable. The woman’s rights obviously trump those of an insensate, insentient proto-human that, like the foetus in the first case, felt no pain as it was affected by external human agency. This conviction is based on our notion of inviolable human rights, particularly the idea of a human’s inalienable right to self-determination.

Yet, here’s a curious fact: in both cases the woman’s act was deliberate and premeditated. Of course, we naturally see a heavy element of malice in the former, and I had to impute a pathology to the woman to even make the case plausible. But in the former case, the foetus survived; in the latter, it did not. Given that it does not normally matter whether someone thinks their act is wrong, just that it is deliberately enacted, we must conclude that both women are responsible for their actions in the morally relevant sense. Given also that what makes the former case bad is the effect in the future, we should obviously be thinking about the future potential of the foetus in the latter case. Therefore, it could be argued that by our standard moral reasoning, we should deem both as morally repugnant. Indeed, it could be argued that we should regard the latter case as more morally repugnant, because it results in oblivion rather than mere injury. The former is removing some potential of the future child, and the latter is removing all.

Now, a pro-choicer, when confronted with this dilemma, might decide that both decisions should be morally acceptable, because – when you think about it – they both resulted in acts committed against insensate, insentient foetuses. Perhaps, therefore, we should not inculpate the woman in the former case at all; she did nothing wrong.

But this seems to me to be too violent a contradiction of our moral intuitions, and in fact obviously wrong. I believe we should not conclude that, because we don’t think the second case is bad, neither are bad. They do seem to be morally concomitant, however. So the most sensible conclusion to reach does seem to be that they are both egregious acts.

What other possible objections can one adduce to this paradox? Well, one response would be to try to further elaborate and refine the view that neither act is bad, in disaccord with my conclusion above. One could argue that we really should discount the future of the foetus in both cases, because all that matters morally is the immediate consequences on the foetus. Typically, in both intuitive morality and formal moral theories, we don’t discount future consequences, as long as they’re not too distant. For example, we would regard it as bad for someone to pollute a waterway even if it was, say, ten years before it came to be used as a resource by a community and deleterious effects were felt. Similarly, it would be morally irresponsible and borderline criminal to encourage a teenager to become addicted to smoking even if it was many years before the habit manifested in noticeably harmful effects on his health. Nevertheless, you might claim that there is a morally relevant difference between harm inflicted against insensate, insentient foetuses and harm inflicted against already living humans (even if there’s a delay on when the “harm” actually occurs in both cases).

Then again, if you’re suppressing one’s essentialist moral intuitions enough not to set an absolute threshold on abortion or to believe in some kind of fixed “ensoulment”, why wouldn’t you suppress them in dealing with this problem? The question is, is there a super-intuitive reason why my other examples of wrong acts with a delayed harm are different from the cases involving a foetus? I don’t think so. Just as you might say you can’t inflict immediate harm on an insensate, insentient foetus, you can’t inflict immediate harm on a person by polluting a lake they will drink from in ten years, or by encouraging them to start a habit that will give them lung cancer in fifty. However, the latter two cases obviously are morally wrong, because they still do inflict harm, just at a delay. Therefore, based on the previous conclusions reached, I submit that this objection also fails. To codify the refutation of the objection:

1.)    Even if you don’t want to say the first case would have an immediate bad effect, we agreed that damaging the brain of an insensate, insentient foetus had some kind of future deleterious effect, handicapping the future child

2.)    There is no logical way of arguing that that act is morally worse than a healthy and capable woman terminating a similar foetus completely, because ending life must trump scrambling brains   

3.)    We typically regard acts that inflict harm at a delay as very bad despite the delay

Therefore, we should still conclude that in both cases, the woman commits an egregious act.

A pro-choicer will be very unhappy with this conclusion, so let us try some other possible attacks on the paradox. Another attempt at resolving it in favour of the pro-choicers would involve implementing what I will call a consequentialist survival model. Contra what I said earlier, one could argue that the two cases are not morally concomitant, because when a woman, even a healthy woman, aborts a foetus, there is no guarantee that, if she hadn’t, the foetus would survive to become a fully-fledged human being. By contrast, if she doesn’t abort it and instead injures it, and it then survives, she has done harm to an organism that is now an infant. On this view, if a woman just like the one in the first case injured her baby and it didn’t survive, then she would not be culpable and the act of injuring would not be wrong. The essential measure here is survival.

In my opinion, this model is weak for two reasons. The first is that, while there’s no guarantee that a foetus in a healthy woman would survive to become a fully-fledged human being, the probability of its anthropomorphosis is not so low that we would, in other moral situations, regard it as permissible. To wit, if there was even a 20% chance that your sick and temporarily insentient grandmother was going to live to once again be healthy, you would not want anyone killing her pre-emptively on the likelihood that she might not. And when we’re discussing foetuses in healthy mothers, the probabilities of survival are much higher than 20%.

The second is the related riposte that this model requires such an extreme strain of consequentialism that not even a self-professed consequentialist would abide it under normal circumstances. Intentions are entirely out the window under this extreme consequentialist model. The very strange implication of this is that it becomes totally repugnant if a foetus is injured through malice and survives, but totally morally acceptable if the foetus is sent into oblivion, even if its existence is also ended through overreaching malice.

Of course, one could argue that neither of these rebuttals to this moral model are actually good, because they are essentially just restatements of the paradox. This would mean that the model actually has the right implications, because it gives some kind of formal justification for the paradox.  My first rebuttal relies on the premise that extreme consequentialism must be wrong, but the moral model assumes that extreme consequentialism is right when one is talking about abortion. So I’m not properly engaging with the meta-ethical assumption. My second rebuttal is basically just saying “The model is weak because the implications are the same strange ones we noted at the start via the thought experiments”. When you think about it, this is also only right, since the point of the model is to defend the strange implications!

And here we reach a fork in the road. We could say that using an extreme consequentialist model to defend the moral difference between the two cases is prima facie wrong, and accept that there is a very good case against late first trimester abortions. Any adoptee of this stance would presumably lower his or her threshold of abortion permissibility, because the relevant index would have switched from consciousness or sensation to foetushood itself. Alternatively, we could say that we should use an extreme consequentialist model to defend the moral difference between the two cases, and therefore resign oneself moral inconsistency, because you couldn’t possibly be such an extreme consequentialist all the time. Which fork should you take?

I am going to defer judgement on that question for the moment, and instead take an excursion into the history of secular moral thought. By the end, we may have a better vantage point to view it from.

  Ever since the Humanitarian Revolution of the Enlightenment, civilised morality has progressed with two major, corollary trends: it has moved away from essentialism, and it has become increasingly reliant on reason over gospel. Since time immemorial, Christians have cherrypicked the Biblical passages that seem most felicitous to them and entirely overlooked the many tenets and parables that seem wrong or aberrant. The Bible is such a diverse and heterogeneous tome that even if you do try to set up an absolutely pious, pure society founded on its guidelines, like the Puritans or the Westboro Baptists, you necessarily fail, and end up rejecting certain tenets. The Westboro Baptists, for example, seem – generally speaking – to prefer the Old to the New Testament (while also hating Jews, despite that group being the authors of the Old Testament).

Yet, in the Enlightenment, philosophers began to think about morality with a far more secular frame of mind than they had once done, moving away from theology altogether. Although many still drew assistance from the Bible with a core of secular reasoning, or drew directly from the Bible with a pretence of secular reasoning, some brave souls tried to put aside the Bible altogether. Many of the thinkers in this revolutionary era began trying to deduce what is right and what is wrong from “first principles”, with the founding assumption that morality might turn out to be much like the revolution that was Newtonian physics. In the 17^th Century, for example, John Locke controverted the prevailing assumptions of his day by elevating women above the status of property in the Second Treatise of Government, and suggesting they be both granted the right to look after the home in the absence of a man and the capacity to leave the compact of marriage themselves. Just like his entire political theory, this affirmation of (some of) the rights of women was a product of thinking about morality secularly, without allowing the dirty sediment of religion to muddy the waters – at least not so directly as had been done in the past.

In the 18^th Century, the secularisation of morality took a huge leap forward as there arose many thinkers engaged in the enterprise of establishing a morality wholly independent of the gospel. Immanuel Kant is probably the most famous of these. Kant attempted to formulate a Rationalist doctrine of morality from reason alone, and thereby claimed to have identified the true, ineluctable principles of morality. Admittedly, these principles roughly supported the Ten Commandments, but they were not worded like any moral laws in the Bible and Kant was sure to exclude religious dogma from their deduction. Though now regarded as highly flawed, Kant’s grandiose moral labours would have a massive influence on moral thought for the next few centuries, and even continue to exercise philosophers today. Around the same time in the late 18^th Century, Mary Wollstonecraft was writing a book that what would later be regarded as perhaps the greatest feminist polemic of all time, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In this magnum opus, she famously proclaimed that women were not at all inferior to men. Given the Bible does suggest numerous times, both explicitly and implicitly, that women are inferior to men,[1] this was obviously a highly blasphemous stance. Most importantly, it epitomised the secular spirit of the age: the willingness of thinkers in the Enlightenment to privilege the inviolable principles of pure reason over ancient religious dogma. Because of thinkers like Kant and Wollstonecraft, by the turn of the 19^th Century, morality was no longer the province of a holy book and its public spokesmen; it had become a matter of reason. The age of secular morality had begun. Slavery would be its first victim.

As everyone knows, the onset of the Industrial Revolution brought with it massive social upheavals, and would eventually further propel the moral advance. Although the rights of women were barely advanced in the 19^th Century, there were some notable moral movements of other kinds. Fascinatingly, they were in large part fostered by righteous, passionate fiction writers seeking to nurture empathy for excluded or reviled groups. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is known to have had an enormous impact on the American abolitionist movement, while Dickens novels like Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations achieved enormous success in entreating their readers to ponder the social stratification, injustice, cruelty and absurdity of British society, and the plight of the working-class, particularly children. Never before had so many upper-class aristocrats been made to ponder their privilege and the humanity they shared with the millions of unwashed ruffians below them. In his book The Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker follows most of the historians of the period in adducing this explosion of polemical literature as one of the main exogenous causes of the shift in the zeitgeist and expansion of the moral circle.

With the arrival of the first wave of the feminist movement and its vociferous campaign for female suffrage, this quest to advance moral thought through pure reason redoubled. Within decades, women across the civilised world had obtained the right to vote. Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement began to gain momentum. Black activists proclaimed that they were as human as whites and should no longer be forced to suffer discrimination. By the late 1960s, after the work of such heroic figures as Martin Luther King had begun to uproot entrenched racist attitudes, legal discrimination against blacks had ended across the civilised world.

As soon as the civil rights movement had run its course, the second wave of the feminist movement began to surge forward, using civil rights as its model. Within only a few years, feminists had achieved massive gains in legislation and quantifiable changes in attitudes, leading to an immense expansion of female opportunities and autonomy, and a revolutionary liberation from patriarchal control. The gay rights movement followed soon after, eventually winning for itself the total legalisation of homosexuality and an increasing acceptance of homosexual practices. This has culminated in the phenomenally high levels of gay tolerance that we enjoy in the West today.

The animal rights movement also began to pick up during this period, although it is important to note that, like female liberation, its seeds had been sown back during the Enlightenment. Just as Mary Wollstonecraft rejected the reasons why women were thought to be inferior to men, the 18^th Century utilitarian humanist, Jeremy Bentham, is famous for having remarked, “The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but “Can they suffer?”” In the 1970s and 80s, animal activists began to use such arguments to encourage people to expand the recently expanded moral circle of the West yet further – not just within our species, but beyond it. The movement to invest animals with rights and end their suffering and slaughter rapidly amassed an ardent following. As a result of this movement, vegetarianism went from totally unthinkable for any sane human being to merely radical, and rates of vegetarianism in the West continue to increase (bumpily) to this day.

One is liable to forget just how many dramatic moral leaps have been made over the last centuries, and how much the world has changed in the moral concatenation of the decades since the 1950s. As Pinker argues, people constantly fail to see how much more permissive and tolerant our norms are, and how much better than the past the world we live in now is. The truth is that the expansiveness of the moral norms we in the West have now is utterly aberrant: it is historically unprecedented, and it is unparalleled in any human society ever documented. Collectively speaking (and the internet notwithstanding), us 21^st Century Western citizens are astronomically more pacifistic, empathetic, soppy, mawkish, softcocked, sissyish and abstemious than any other human beings that have ever lived. The rates of violence and tolerance of violence in our societies right now are infinitesimal compared to those of every other society ever documented.

When you think about the evolution of morality, the fact that highly peaceful, tolerant modern Western societies are anomalous is hardly surprising. After all, human morality is fundamentally built on only two selectional mechanisms: kin altruism and reciprocal altruism. These manifest themselves in our myriad moral emotions, such as sympathy, compassion, admiration, honour and sense of justice, along with guilt, shame, anger, indignation, disapprobation and vengefulness. They also manifest themselves in norms and taboos that vary from society to society, circumscribed only by the human emotional palette. While I earlier suggested that one of the main developments in secular morality was the shift away from religion and gospel, in truth, the deeper shift of the Humanitarian Revolution and the rights movements of the 20^th Century was away from our primal moral intuitions, and towards cerebration and reasoning. The Bible is itself merely a bricolage of ancient moral attitudes, so it is no surprise that it features advocacy of massacres and rapes in war, a recurring abasement of women to mere “chattel” (along with its general endorsement of patriarchy) and a general discord with modern, progressive moral beliefs about just about anything (slaves, homosexuals, animals). As with most primitive people, the authors of the Bible extended empathy only to a limited circle and only in certain circumstances, and moral rules were always contingent (none of the Ten Commandments were meant to apply to foreign peoples, for example). A certain essentialism was also a given. All women were regarded as the same and thought of as deserving the same, oppressive treatment, despite women being as varied and diverse a group of individuals as men, and including people who are innately closer to the average of the opposite gender than the average of their own. All foreigners were regarded as one homogenous group, typically with certain animalistic, wicked, demonic or repulsive traits – an essentialist attitude that enabled the complete erasure of empathy in warfare and the resultant pillaging, depredation and rape. All animals were regarded as fundamentally inferior on a very deep level and therefore could be abused or killed with total impunity.  

Importantly, these kinds of barbaric attitudes towards people outside the in-group are more in tune with the predictions of evolutionary psychology than any of our moral beliefs. It would be suicide in the wild for an animal to extend its empathy to human beings outside of its kin or to any party unlikely to have any chance of future reciprocation. Yet it is precisely this that our humanistic norms, slowly built up over hundreds of years, encourage us to do.

So despite the primal impulses to the contrary, us contemporary humans have managed to extend our empathy way beyond our kin and way beyond those who might reward us for our concern. Most of us abjure all violence against other humans, abhor prejudice and discrimination against all races, creeds and classes, revile war as a great moral evil that we must do everything in our power to avoid, and some of us even refrain from eating animals. Every single one of these moral stances would be quite literally inconceivable to a hunter-gatherer.

(And now we return to abortion).

In primitive societies, there is extensive documented evidence of infanticide. You might intuit that this could have interesting implications for abortion. Perhaps before inculcation into our Christian-dominated social norms, we should naturally incline towards an insouciant attitude towards abortion. However, I don’t think this is quite true, and for a few reasons.

Firstly, while the existence of a behaviour in many human cultures is a good indication that the behaviour is an innate instinct, it doesn’t guarantee it.

Secondly, abortion is not actually infanticide (defined as killing after birth), and primitive societies certainly don’t practise abortion widely. One might think that this would be irrelevant because infanticide is basically like a worse version of abortion, meaning that abortion and infanticide should go together morally. But this is not how human psychology works: even if abortion is logically a kind of not-really-infanticide that isn’t as bad, the fact that infanticide and abortion play out very differently makes them very emotionally different, too.

Thirdly, in all the cultures in which it is documented, infanticide is not practised wantonly, but with specific motivations that make sense in terms of evolutionary psychology. Babies are killed if they are deformed or dopey; mothers kill their babies if they think they cannot support them sufficiently or would be foolish to do so with other healthy offspring around; and men murder any previous children raised by the woman they are shacking up with. For a primitive person to abort a foetus would be rare because there would be few motivations to compensate for the great dangers that would presumably be involved. For a mother to get someone to perform some sort of improvised, dangerous abortion on her, she must be willing to risk her future reproductive potential and possibly her life. She would not risk those things on the off chance that her foetus was deformed, and she would not risk those things on the possibility that her future child will not be healthy and hardy enough to invest in. A man would also be unlikely to violently force a woman to abort a baby even if he was sure that baby was not his, because he could injure or kill the woman, and it would not be in his interests to do that.

The fourth and most important reason why it doesn’t make much sense to say that we might incline towards a permissive stance on abortion is that the central pillar of pro-lifeism, the notion of the soul, is itself an intuition of innate human psychology. The quintessential essentialist attitude is that all human beings have an essence which distinguishes us from all the other animals, and endows us with all the fundamental human traits. Thus, belief in the soul is a profoundly primitive conviction.

So it seems to me that pro-choice as a position probably relies slightly more on the denial of intuition than pro-life. Like most contemporary Westerners, I believe that pro-choicers rightly dismiss the essentialist, pro-life attitude towards abortion as superstitious, unscientific nonsense, just as philosophers have been arguing for centuries that all essentialist attitudes towards out-groups are superstitious, unscientific nonsense.

Yet, here’s where we return to our dilemma. The paradox raised by the comparison of the two thought experiments was highly useful for illustrating how some kinds of primal moral intuitions still infect our moral reasoning, even when we discard essentialist thinking. Indeed, the application of modern science to morality has really opened up a Pandora’s Box of dilemmas that pose such deep problems to our moral reasoning that people prefer to pretend they don’t exist. Despite what some may like to think, everyone’s morality is still underpinned by numerous essentialist beliefs and assumptions, and science has only complicated the picture. Every reasonable person in the West agrees that it would be best for our morality to be as rational, logical and scientific as possible, so we do allow scientific knowledge to enter the mix – but only with massive constraints. What do I mean by that? Well, here are three examples of monolithic essentialisms that pervade the supposedly well-reasoned and anti-superstitious moral beliefs of us Westerners:

1.)    People are fully rational, autonomous agents fully responsible for their actions

This essentialist claim basically undergirds the entire criminal justice system and much of our intuitive morality, yet you have to define “rational”, “autonomous” and “responsible” in very peculiar ways to even attempt to reconcile this essentialism with modern neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Rationality is pretty much impossible to define scientifically. If you take “optimal rationality” in the way a layman would, to mean something like “Always making decisions based on reasoned deliberation and solid inferences”, it’s fair to say that the average human is light years distant from the ideal. Reasoned deliberation and solid inferences are used in science, but human beings in the real world tend to use heuristics, best-guesses and act on impulse. Meanwhile, autonomy is, scientifically speaking, very close to meaningless. Autonomy is basically synonymous with free will, and no neuroscientist thinks that our most pure conception of this notion fits with our picture of the brain. Indeed, as all philosophers know, our deep attachment to these two words, autonomy and free-will, clashes violently with modern science and raises some very deep questions. How can you really apply the dictionary definition of this word “autonomy” to any human being when none of us have any choice over what genes we are born with, how our brains are wired into the uterus, how we come out of the birth canal, what environment we are raised in, what our parents are like, where we go to school, who we interact with, etc? How can we say we have free will when our brains are merely highly sophisticated computational systems that operate almost entirely under the cover of darkness, with most of the machinations occurring totally beneath our awareness? How can we say we are self-determined when the impression everyone has of being a kind of executive or concertmaster over their mind and body is totally illusory? How can we say that we are autonomous beings when it there is no one real “self” but only a brain composed of a series of highly complex intricate electrical networks arranged into highly complex interacting modules? And this brings us to responsibility. Are we responsible? Probably not – at least not on any normal definition.

2.)    All human beings are sacred. The fact that we even have “human rights” suggests that we have wacko superstitious beliefs about ourselves. After all, what are “rights” from a physicist’s perspective? (Put it this way, they’re not quarks.) Clearly, we invented the notion of rights to make legislating morality easier, using the same logic as the fictions of rationality, autonomy and responsibility, which, as I said, are necessary to undergird prosecution and punishment. Nevertheless, isn’t it completely insane that we don’t accept killing a severely disabled baby or a demented, vegetated old person with sophisticated methods that would cause no pain, but we totally accept killing animals that are more sentient and possibly more sensate with far more macabre and traumatic methods? Literally the only reason people can adduce to defend this discrepancy is the sanctity of life, and that isn’t even a reason. I mean, you would think this is code for “soul” if it weren’t for the fact that irreligious people use it a hell of a lot. In fact, it is a kind of proxy for the soul, but one that makes even less sense, because, unlike the soul, a general “sanctity” doesn’t have any kind of referent. The soul at least resides somewhere in the noumenal realm or something. Sanctity, by contrast, is pure poetry. Basically, if you think about the logic behind most people’s uses of the phrase, you conclude that if they were fully honest they’d have to replace the phrase with the following: “I don’t know what the “sanctity of life” means but I feel it is significant and it seems to solve the logical conundrum of our speciesism. If we don’t have this phrase to rely on, I can’t justify my strong moral prioritisation of the lives of humans over the lives of other animals. I therefore need this essentialism to preserve my moral beliefs.” Now, I do not mean to suggest that we should totally dispense with the idea of human sanctity, because the truth is that we do actually need the belief. If we did truly carry out Jeremy Bentham’s dream and simplified our norm of wrongdoing to all acts that cause suffering, we could not cope. To truly end any prioritisation of human beings over other sensate animals would quite literally extend our moral circle beyond its logical limits. We could not hope to actually implement a morality where every sensate creature was equally worthy of moral concern as humans, and any attempt would probably soon be self-defeating.

3.)    Family members and kin are more deserving of affection, compassion and charity than strangers and nobodies. Can you imagine trying to treat every single human being equally? Can you imagine being a parent and refusing to prioritise the feelings, wants and needs of your children over any other person’s? Can you imagine going to  a nursing home at which your grandparents reside and chatting to every single geriatric without fail, allocating the same 3 minutes and 30 seconds of attention and affection to each, including your own? Obviously, it would be impossible to actually implement anything even remotely close to a literal moral impartiality. But let’s say you made the minimum number of compromises of impartiality necessary to still live a relatively normal and fruitful life. Imagine being a parent trying to do this. Thinking about it rapidly becomes utterly absurd. There is no one abstemious and emotionally repressive enough in the entire world to even get close to any kind of impartial moral ideal. It is quite clear that any greater-than-half-hearted attempt to treat strangers and non-kin the same as family and kin would just not be humanly possible. Yet, importantly, there can be no good logical justification for our massive bias towards family and kin (only an evolutionary explanation for it). All it is is a base instinct, not a well-reasoned preference.  

It should be clear by now that even in this advanced state of moral development, when reason has been entrenched as the default method of moral arbitration for centuries, our moral beliefs are still hopelessly reliant on primal, essentialist intuitions. So what should we do?

If you want my answer – nothing. I am firmly of the view that we should not try to fight these intuitions to the death, because the true extermination of our essentialist moral intuitions would mean the near-total obliteration of human nature itself, and certainly the extirpation of morality. Instead, we should resign ourselves to our fate: morality is not a science, it cannot be formalised and we are forever doomed to be logically inconsistent when applying it. It is a bleak claim, but it is the truth.

I am now finally in the position to judge which fork one should take in response to the paradox I set up all those pages ago. Now is the time when all must be revealed. And the answer is…

Neither!

It saddens me to say it, but the truth is that I tricked you. To me, neither of the forks are quite acceptable. I believe the best one would probably be a third, subtler sidetrack that I never mentioned before – one that is not quite the second, but branches off slightly from it.

Contra the first fork, I submit that the apparent clash of the intuitions is ultimately immaterial. The reason I believe this is that such a clash is not anomalous in contemporary, secular morality. Indeed, we should be used to our morality being riddled with inconsistencies. As I have argued, that has increasingly become the nature of the beast since we abandoned the moral certitude of the Church and started to question our primal intuitions.

But why is the second fork – to accept an extreme consequentialist model that only need apply to abortion – not quite ideal either? It is not quite ideal, in my view, because it is an unnecessary complication of a problem that isn’t really resolved just by bandying around fancy philosophical terms.

So what is this magical third fork then? Well, to be honest, it’s rather anti-climactic. The third fork available to one confronting such a dilemma is basically to shrug the entire thing off and say the following: “It is true that our moral intuitions seem to be contradicting each other here, but at least believing that there is some kind of difference between an early foetus and a human being is better than believing that there is none because of an imaginary thing called a “soul”. Any kind of attempt to constrain the most hard-line essentialism in morality has got to be a good thing, because it brings morality closer to reason and truth, and this is worth the cost of seeding moral reasoning with more blatant inconsistencies. A mixture of essentialism and science is always better than pure essentialism, even if the mix is very dirty.”

Surely, this is our only real option.

[Credit to H. Ramage for steering me back on course]

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[1] Eve is created from rib-bone, for example.

Extract 4

A Series of Unhappy Life Lessons: My First Painful Contact with the Merciless Fist of an Omnimalevolent God
My year 1 class was a composite class called K/1 S, where the S stood for Mrs Sims (yes, I had her again). I remember a fair bit more about this year than the one before.

One thing I remember is that year 1 marked the peak of my friendship with Oscar McKay. I recall going to his house extremely often in this year, perhaps as frequently as every second or third weekend. Fortunately, he was also in K/1 S and I seem to remember that we sat together and did all our work together in the classroom. We were really peas in a pod.  I remember also that we often finished our work substantially before anyone else in the class. I think this was likely not, for the most part, due to our outstanding brilliance, but just because we were always racing and expected to finish tasks first. One image that remains in my mind is of Oscar and I running, equipped with hastily finished paintings, towards the empty black, plastic rack intended for drying them out.  I seem to recall we were chuffed that we had reached the drying rack first, and possibly made some remark to each other about how good we were at finishing things before everyone else.

When we were in year 1, Oscar lived in Turramurra, in a quiet, secluded street somewhere near Duffy’s Avenue, where Harrison Wearne lived. In my mind’s eye, I see an impossible image of his house elevated very high above the ground, with the stairs to its front deck reaching up maybe fifty metres. Even though this image is false, I do remember that the entry to his house was elevated and that one needed to ascend some stairs to reach it. In front of the house lay a fairly big front yard, I seem to recall. Again, in my mind’s eye, I see this front yard as an implausibly large space, with gigantic hedge trees lining the neighbour’s abutting driveway, and a gigantic trampoline somewhere in the approximate centre of the space. I think they did have a trampoline but I’m beginning to think that the distortions of my image of the house, which are mainly alterations of magnitude, might have something to do with this dream about the house I remember having many years after I had stopped visiting it and probably after the McKays had moved out of it. I don’t know why I seem to remember my impression of the house in the dream better than my impression of the house from real life – I guess it’s just one of those quirks of memory (or quirks of my memory).

I only really have a few snapshots of what happened when I visited this house. I think I remember playing in the front yard, possibly on the trampoline; I remember being in the kitchen with Greg McKay (his dad) and looking at all of Oscar’s hundreds of Yowies[1] arrayed on the top of the fridge; I remember eating a delicious, moist chocolate cake on their elevated verandah; I remember having an egg and bacon sandwich prepared for me, and then eating this strange creation, replete with gooey barbecue sauce, and not finding it particularly tasty; I remember being aware of the presence of Oscar’s two younger sisters, Mia and Imogen, and how Oscar found them annoying; and I remember he got an Xbox at one stage and that we played this zombie-killing game on it that Oscar was really into but that I didn’t really enjoy that much. I have fairly vivid general impressions of his parents. I recall Greg was a tall, thin, bespectacled, serious, rather uptight fellow who possibly tried to engage me in boring conversations, and that his mum, called Gabriella Waters-McKay, was a very short, squat, dumpy woman who was possibly too compliant with Oscar’s perpetual wishes for yowies or dinosaur figurines. In fact, I remember one specific incident that attests to her pliancy in this regard. For some reason, Oscar, Gabriella and I were all at Westfield, and Oscar had implored that she stop and buy the two of us a chocolate. A perennial novelty-toy-fancier, Oscar, seeing that they had no Yowies, desired that she instead buy him the inferior substitute, a Kinder Surprise. I did not think a Kinder Surprise was a very good choice for a chocolate at all, because there was so little substance to actually eat, and the toy inside would undoubtedly be plastic and crap. I remember this divergence on chocolate preference confronted me with the thought that I was a different person from Oscar, and that his obsession with toys contained in chocolates was weird. Nevertheless, as a shy little boy anxious not to cause the slightest fuss or bother and thereby draw attention to myself, I told Gabriella that the same chocolate would be fine for me thanks too. And she went off and bought them!

That wasn’t a very interesting story, was it? Oh well. So that’s Oscar though.

I have a fairly vivid memory of the moment in year 1 when I suddenly figured out, in a rather epiphanic, light-shining-down-from-the-heavens kind of fashion, what ‘left’ and ‘right’ actually were, or at least how they worked.[2] I think the left-right binary was a fairly big theme in year 1 schooling, and that Mrs Sims often referred to the concepts and tried to help us understand them. One thing that complicated this mission, however, was that every time we journeyed to the computer lab on the ‘big-kids’, 3-6 side of the school, the teacher who led the computer classes would always swivel her whole body around when she mentioned ‘left’ and ‘right’, and I had no idea why. She would always say things like, “So you want the thing on your right, which is, of course, my left” and turn around and put her arm up as she did so. It was a ritual that I simply could not fathom. It was utterly inscrutable to me. I assumed that ‘left’ and ‘right’ had something to do with her turning around, or turning around in general, but the exact connection I could not deduce.  

Anyway, I did eventually work it out, and the story of how that happened is rather simple, despite how earthshatteringly momentous the discovery was in the overall scheme of my life. Basically, I was sitting down on the floor, surrounded by my classmates, as Mrs Sims, who was sitting on a chair above us, discoursed to us about ‘left’ and ‘right’. I remember we were right near the play area, and there were building blocks somewhere behind me. At some point, I recall she said something very simple about the concept that I’d undoubtedly heard before: “Think of it this way: ‘right’ is the side of your writing hand – except for you, X and Y (the left-handed abominations) – and ‘left’ is the other hand.” Even though I’d heard it before, I’d never understood its significance. But now I suddenly grasped it. ‘Yes’, I remember thinking (or something to that effect), ‘Yes! The right is the area of the classroom stretching out in front of my writing hand, and the left is the area of the classroom stretching out in front of my other hand. Yes, they’re my ‘right’ and ‘left’ hands! I get it! Even when I turn, I can still identify left and right! It’s a relative concept! I get it!’

Never have I had a profounder thought in my life.

I do remember wondering, though, why no teacher had ever been able to simply explain ‘left’ and ‘right’ to me before, because once I understood it, it did seem really easy. I kind of do blame my teachers for that. Mrs Sims wasn’t very hands-on, as far as I recall it. To be fair, she was a pretty good teacher, and I know I liked her. I liked her so much, in fact, that I even made that fatal primary school error of calling her “Mum” once. Fortunately, I think I might have been mumbling when I said it, and she thus probably wasn’t sure that I had called her that – but I certainly found it mortifying at the time. Anyhow, one piece of evidence that she didn’t have a very good understanding of who I was was the parent-teacher interview at the end of the year. This was one of those interviews which both the parents and the kid attended. The main thing I remember about it is that she seemed unaware of my accomplishments. She knew that I had done quite well in a spelling test – which, incidentally, I remember in part[3] -- but didn’t seem to know that I often finished things in class very quickly, and didn’t have a particular high view of my abilities generally. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how well I was doing academically in year 1, but I kind of get the impression that, with a whole composite class to look after, Mrs Sims overlooked a few of her students, and I was one of these. Certainly, the next year, when I missed out on a place in the so-called ‘Independent Class’ (a special class they dissolved the next year, I believe), I suddenly found myself dominating my class academically, and being in fact completely intellectually isolated. So I imagine that I was probably doing quite well in year 1; it’s just that Mrs Sims was too occupied to notice.    

Another specific memory I have of year 1 is the process of writing and then delivering a speech about my favourite animal. When Mrs Sims announced that we would all have to give a speech on our favourite animal and our reasons for the choice, I think I was probably pretty excited. No doubt I thought that I would be able to prove to everyone in my class why the cheetah is the greatest animal of all. Fast, strong, sleekly spotted, sharptoothed, deadly – could you imagine a more perfect creature? Back then, I used to tell my parents about my homework and school projects, and I remember getting a lot of assistance from my dad for this one. From memory, I did actually write the first draft myself, but my dad then made lots of emendations and embellishments, most notably adding some colour to my dry statistics. Indeed, I remember one specific amendment he made to my work that had to do with the diet of the animal. I had written that the cheetah has to eat 50 kilograms of meat a week (or whatever the stat was), and my dad said, “Your classmates won’t understand that. How about you put that statistic in perspective by saying how many sausages that is. Follow it with, “That’s 500 sausages per week!”” I remember asking him if that comparison was factually accurate, and he said “I don’t know”. This empirical laxity didn’t exactly impress me (to say the least). But I did keep this in the speech, and I was very much looking forward to wowing my class with my glittering new speech when the performances began. But then as I was sitting on the floor, listening happily to other people’s pathetic paeans to their stupid zoological favourites, Max Holiday-Smith got up and announced that his favourite animal was – that’s right – the Cheetah! NOT THE CHEETAH! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! WHAT WAS I GOING TO DO? WHAT ON EARTH COULD I DO?[4] When I found out that Max Holiday-Smith’s favourite animal was the cheetah and that he was going to be able to talk about it and I wasn’t, I was desolated. I think even at that time, I had known that any big cat was going to carry the taint of popularity, since few other animals delight little boys as much as the big cats, the most violent, bellicose and athletic land-dwelling creatures in the world. Nevertheless, I had hoped and prayed that nobody else would have picked my sacred animal, and God had betrayed me. He had fucked me over, as per usual (he keeps doing so up to the present day; he fucking despises me). When I came home to my dad that night and told him of my mutilated ambitions, I was probably on the verge of tears, or perhaps even well into the property (? surely a property of some sort is what you enter when you move past the verge). I remember that I was utterly devastated. I had been so fiercely and so ardently attached to the wonderful paragon of paragons that was the cheetah and was thus in such a state of distress that I was unwilling even to entertain the possibility of choosing another creature.

What about another big cat? No. Not the leopard? No. But it’s so similar to the cheetah. Yeah, but I don’t like it as much and it’s not as fast. Not the panther? No. The eagle? No. The eagle’s a predator, you know, with a big wingspan and sharp claws. But it’s not cool enough. A shark? No.

Eventually, I think my dad was a little tired of trying to pull me out of my catatonia. I imagine he probably ended up saying something like, “I know you’re really upset that someone took your favourite animal, but you’ve got to make a choice. It doesn’t have to become your new favourite animal – it’s just an animal you’re making a speech on.” And then, at some point, I know that either he or I had a brainwave, resulting in the suggestion of a more interesting animal that still shared many of the admirable attributes of the cheetah: the snow leopard. I wasn’t immediately sold on the snow leopard, but I remember looking it up on Google and seeing its colour and possibly thinking about an ancient ancestor of the snow leopard I had seen in Walking with Beasts, and I eventually decided that it was good enough for me – that I was content with calling it my “favourite”. One of the facts about the snow leopard that helped persuade me was the similarity of the colour of its fur to my own snowwhite hair. Being superstitious, like all children, I think I suspected that I might have some deep affinity or connection with it on account of this isomorphism, that it might even be my “spirit animal” in some transcendent sense (even though I didn’t think in that Tumblrish vocabulary when I was six). Eventually, when the speech was done, I even questioned whether I should permanently change my favourite animal. I’m not sure I ever made a firm decision either way, but at least that shows you that I had accepted the terrible disruption.

I don’t really remember how the speech went, but it was probably alright, I imagine. I was always a better-than-average speaker, despite being a worse-than-average socialiser.

Here is another memory, already documented (like so many others) in a third-person Potrait-of-the-Artist-style form.  The Oscar mentioned in it is Oscar McKay. The Daniel is Daniel van den Bovenkamp, a boy who’ll get closer scrutiny later.

“Tom was sprinting along the patchily grassed field, in pursuit of Oscar, who was running ahead, now just behind the big brown tree. Tom was gaining on him, ever-so-slightly gaining on him as Oscar approached the artificial grass playground. But no! Tom felt something connect with his right foot, he was falling, his head was falling towards the big fat root, OW! He was lying on the ground and his mouth felt wet. He quickly felt it with his right hand: blood. He was bleeding. And gum, he could only feel gum where his teeth were. He had no front teeth! He was missing his front two teeth. Oscar was coming back towards him now. Tom looked down: his uniform was covered in pine needles. Now Daniel was coming back too. Daniel had run miles away when they were playing tip but now he was back. Where were his teeth? He looked back down at the root-riddled, pine-needle-covered ground; he could see no fleck of white. Now Ms Terville, that grumpy woman – or was it a man? because they always called her Mr Ville, maybe she had a sex change – who had long, creepy fake fingernails and who looked after the Special Needs kids, was coming over to help him too.

“Are you alright?” she said, a slightly concerned expression on her face.

“I fell on this tree root and – I think my front two teeth have been knocked out.”

“Ok. We’ll, uh, get you to the nurse.”

She grabbed his arm and helped him up just as Oscar and Daniel arrived.

“What happened?” Daniel said.

“I knocked my teeth out when I tripped on the root.”

“Ooh” Daniel said, as he and Oscar winced.

Ms Terville held Tom by the arm with her creepy fingernails and they left the playground together. Tom was worried about having no front teeth and kept touching his mouth.

Later, when he was in the Nurse’s office, Daniel and Oscar brought in his teeth and he thanked them.

After that, he got picked up by his grandpa and grandma because his parents were at work and they couldn’t do it. At their house in Lindfield grandpa made him a banana smoothie which was nice.

The day wasn’t so bad after all. But he didn’t have front teeth for another two years.”

All of that is true. Yes, I really did get my two front teeth knocked out on a tree root. It was a pretty traumatic moment. And I really did have my teeth brought in by Daniel and Oscar, who had to search for them among the pine needles. And I really did get a banana smoothie made for me by Poppa, which was pretty surprising and very nice. I remember that I was quite sad about having to go to Beama and Poppa’s house rather than my own, with my own parents, but it ended up being alright.

What is the stupidest thing you have ever done? Whatever it is, I bet what I did during a school assembly some time during year 1 trumps it. And there’s something very strange about my memory of it. I don’t remember what the teachers were talking about at the school assembly where this moment of unutterable idiocy occurred. I don’t remember who won the “Student of the Week”, and I certainly don’t remember how vigorous the rendition of the school song and national anthem were. But I remember what I did. And I shudder to recall it.

I know that I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by my peers. I recall that there had been a big fad going on at the time involving tying people’s shoes to each other, as a kind of prank. This was terribly fun because it either caused the victim to trip over (if they weren’t aware of the knavish escapade) or waddle around in an amusing fashion (if they were). As per usual, I remember feeling on the periphery of this new, exciting craze, and I wanted to be in the centre. As I recall it, however, I wasn’t exactly clear on how to tie the laces to each other. But as I sat there during the dreary sermon that one, average assembly, I decided that I would attempt the act on my own shoes, just to see if I could do it.
I first took one lace – I imagine the left lace of my right shoe – and looped it around the right lace of my left shoe. Thereupon, I realised, with a surge of joy, that I could pull it through to make a weak knot. I did so. I then decided to strengthen this knot by repeating the action a couple more times. I was pretty proud of myself. Next it was the other pair of laces. These would be harder since they were farther away from each other.[5] But soon they were done, too, and the self-pranking was complete. I was very pleased. What a genius I am, I thought. Maybe I can try this out on some unsuspecting wretch. Mwahahaha!  

And then something dreadful happened. From the front of the hall, I heard the words “Stand up for the school song”, and immediately saw that the assembly was ending, and that I wouldn’t have time to untie the dense knottage. As I tried desperately to pick at the big tumid clumps of shoelace, I suddenly cognised, with an almighty ventral thud, that I had somehow cemented each shoe to the other with a bond that wasn't just strong, but was unbreakable. My knot was more sturdy than the the lattice of carbon atoms in diamond, more adhesive than the most super of glue, more involute than the most advanced computer chip of the day.
       What infernal creation had I wrought? How had my own works turned against me? 
       What had I done to earn the starring role in this real-life parable?
       After more failed scrabbling to try to unpick one of the black, cancerous clots, I ratcheted myself up with great difficulty. The circumambient glares perforated my soul. However, as the opening notes of the school song sounded on the piano, I realised that I had no other choice but to sing along with the rest of the children. I betrayed as little as I could in my euphonious, cherubic voice:

“Red and black, our colours shine,

This is our school, yours and mine,

Here is where we spend our days,

To learn and sing our fifths with praise,

Warrawee School [Warrawee School]”[6]

The anxiety was only building inside me as the song lilted along. Soon, I would have to attempt to exit the assembly hall with welded feet. As the song meandered through its insipid middle verses, I was beginning to internally castigate myself. Tying laces isn’t such a bad thing to do, but you’re meant to do it with other people’s laces, as a joke, I thought. I hadn’t even gotten a laugh out of it, and nobody else had either! Nobody knew! And that was only going to further imperil the act of trying to waddle and totter out of the assembly hall in a huge, jostling throng. Teachers would get angry and demand an explanation; my peers would mock me when they found out that I had enfettered myself. It would all be one colossal catastrophe!

When we did all begin to shuffle out, I remember being still really anxious. I didn’t want anyone to know what I had done to myself, but I couldn’t help attracting glares: my gait was severely handicapped and my speed was dramatically reduced. As I slowly toddled out of the hall, I remember being asked by one of my classmates what the matter was, and being too embarrassed to truthfully reply. I think I went red. But my classmates didn’t care that much, and were soon gone from sight, already on the way back to class. It had become one of those moments of total despair when you really don’t know what to do and everything seems utterly lost. I saw no way out of the situation, and as I approached the assembly stairs the full, horrifying gravity of the situation hit me. What if I couldn’t even get down the stairs? What would I do then? Cry for help? You must remember that I was so shy back then that the thought of just telling Mrs Sims what I had done to myself was basically unthinkable. Well, I think I did countenance the thought (so it wasn’t literally unthinkable), but I could not bring myself to follow through with it.

So what ended up happening was that I slowly tried to kind of pivot myself down the stairs, very gradually, one at a time, all the while hundreds of other kids glided past me effortlessly, without a care in the world (oh to be one of those joyous, innocent little things!), most not stopping to glance at the strange child who seemed to have become suddenly crippled. Eventually, I remember being one of the last kids left on the stairs. Mrs Sims was now looking up at me, enjoining me to come down in a pretty terse and unsympathetic tone (not realising my situation). I prayed that she would notice that I had my shoes tied together, but she did not. I was still completely mortified, and I don’t think I could get any words out. I was stupefied. It was too awful.

And I don’t really remember how I got out of the bind (as it were), but somehow I did.

Nevertheless, the trauma lingers. It haunts my every waking hour.

---

[1] That is something I haven’t mentioned: Oscar liked to collect Yowies, and got me onto the habit, too. Yowies are, of course, a type of ovoid chocolate with a small, plastic, disassembled animal toy inside, a bit like a Kinder’s Delight but better.  Sadly, I think they might have gone off the market. I certainly haven’t seen them in a lolly shop since – well, probably since 2003. Anyhow, Oscar had the lot. He had all the Yowies – fucking hundreds of them. 

[2] Whether there’s a difference between those things sounds like the sort of deep, philosophical problem I don’t want to get into.

[3] In particular, I have this one memory of having to spell the word ”Said” and realising that it wasn’t spelt phonetically and thinking back to a book (the Cookie monster book, in fact) in which it was written in order to get it right. Once I had written down the correct spelling, I remember looking over at Oscar’s sheet to see if he had got it right, and he hadn’t: instead, he had written “Sed”. I recall feeling rather superior and a little disdainful of Oscar. An elementary error, I thought!

[4] I should inform you that I’m having my doubts about whether this story I’m telling is historically accurate. I think, in fact, that I might have found out that Max Holiday-Smith was going to do his speech on the cheetah before we actually began doing the speeches, and that – since Mrs Sims had prohibited duplication – she had to decide which of us would do our speech on the cheetah and arbitrarily chose Max. If this is true, then what probably happened is that my dad and I only started writing the speech after I had been forced to pick another animal. But I’ll continue to ignore that possibility as I recount the memory.

[5] Or maybe I tied the left lace of my right shoe to the left lace of my left shoe, and vice versa. Can’t remember (unsurprisingly).

[6] Ad absurdum, in increasingly quaint and fusty verse. Can’t quite remember all the lyrics – I’m getting them in fragments. I’m sure the whole thing’s in my brain somewhere; I would just need to hear it once for all the lyrics to reassemble themselves. And at this age, I might actually understand them. At the time, I didn’t really know what most of the school song meant. Incidentally, it was the same with our equally quaint national anthem. “Australians all let us rejoice”, Wealth for toil”, “Girt by sea”, “Land abounds in nature’s gifts”, “Beauty rich and rare”, “In history’s page let every stage”, “Advance Australia fair”, “In joyful strains then let us sing” – what? As a kid, I think I was typical in actually not knowing what half of what I was singing meant, and always doubting whether I was pronouncing the words correctly. And I’m sure I did get some of the words wrong. I think I always (confusedly) sang “Our land abouts in nature’s gifts”, for example, not being familiar with the grammatically unusual and fairly obscure verb “Abound”. 

Extract 3

The Garden of Kinder and the Emergence of Sisyphus 
I remember very distinctly a conversation I had with my mum about whether I should stay at pre-school or move onto primary school. It took place in her and dad’s bedroom, on dad’s side of the bed, which is just in front of the huge mirror that slides open to reveal a wardrobe. I think this is probably one of the longest memories I have from the age of four, although it must be said it isn’t totally clear. I am fairly confident that the dialogue went something like this:

Mum: do you want to stay in pre-school for another year or go to primary school?

Me: I want to stay in pre-school.

Mum: Mrs Lawry thinks you should stay in pre-school and repeat, but I think you should move on. I think it would better for you.  I think you’d like it.

Me: But Dylan’s staying in pre-school.

Mum: But you can meet lots of other friends in primary school. And Dylan will be there the next year.

Me: [Pauses]. Ok, I wanna go to primary school then.

The room fades and the memory is gone. Anyway, the important information to take away is that my parents enrolled me in primary school in 2002, when I was still only four (though I would turn five in February).

The first day of primary school is oft mentioned as an important landmark in one’s life and it is no different in mine. Imagine if I had not gone to school. Naturally, I would not be writing this thing right now. Imagine if I had gone to a different primary school. Maybe I would not be writing this thing right now if that were the case. Who fucking knows?

I do know that there are some lovely pictures of me on the morning of my first day of school, posing in my school uniform on the driveway. I seem to be very happy and jocular. My stomach is puffed out and I am laughing and playing with my hat.  The world appears to be simple, and everything is right with it. It is a world without letters, a world without numbers, a world without English or Maths or Science – a world without any codification, unification or simplification. A world that is utterly enigmatic – yet also rather simple for that reason. A mysterious, wonderful world. A paradise.  

And now it is but a sterile promontory, a foul congregation of pestilent vapours.

Unlike most people, I actually do preserve some memory of my very first day of school. I certainly don’t remember much of the day – as far as I’m aware, only one moment – but it is a mildly interesting moment so it bears mentioning.

The moment I remember was perhaps the most significant moment of all: the departure of the parents. I think it might have been just my mum there with me, and I really can’t see in my mind too many other faces of children or parents, but I do know that, somewhere on the right side of my frame of vision, Alexandra Thompson, the girl with the droopy eye who remained throughout primary school the smallest person with the quietest voice and shyest manner, was crying and cleaving to her mother despite spirited attempts to draw her away. I also seem to remember that I, by contrast, was perfectly calm and happy and was looking down in disdain on this crybaby. I feel like this moment dragged on for rather a while, and Alexandra continued to cry for a very long time despite the continued efforts of both her mother and Mrs Sims to reassure her that it would all be ok, that she would see her mother at the end of the day and that no one was going to bite[1]. Eventually, Alexandra must have been consoled and calmed down and hence conquered the primal part of her brain telling her that, since she was without a doubt the runt of the pack, she was vulnerable and needed maternal protection. Actually, come to think of it, maybe Alexandra Thompson’s mum eventually resolved to spend the day at Warrawee. I don’t even know. That seems perfectly possible.

So I suppose now is as good a time as any to begin describing Warrawee Public School, and life within it in Kindergarten.

Warrawee, as the school was colloquially known, was, by the standards of most Sydney primary schools, probably a little below average size in terms of student population. It did, however, cover an above-average space for a primary school. This big ratio of space to population was one of its attractive features. The suburb of Warrawee, in which the school was located (obviously), is a rather small locality held snugly in between the larger and better known suburbs, Wahroonga and Turramurra. The school sat on the little stretch of Pacific Highway regarded as being within Warrawee, not too far away from Fox Valley Road (a very useful, semi-major conduit off which Strone Ave branched). It was a school separated into two halves. The Northern side (closer to Fox Valley road, and Wahroonga) contained one very big building, possibly the oldest one in the school, and a few other small ones scattered around its asphalt space. It also possessed a dismal brick toilet block and a little irregular field of grass set down from the rest of the playground, in front of which lay some weed-infested bush. This Northern side of the school was just for the senior students, the ones from 3-6 up. All the classes from year 3 to year 6, as well as the class for the older “special needs” students, lay on this side. I think, as a Kindergarten student, this side of the school was a place of wonder, full of the venerable, almost majestic ‘big kids’ I only saw when I was dropped off or picked up, or during the weekly assembly. The Southern (or junior) side of the school lay on the other side of Blytheswood Avenue and had far more playground space, and a far more interesting playground. Straight after crossing over Blytheswood Avenue, heading south, you would encounter Blytheswood Oval. Truth be told, this was not really an oval at all but a rather small field of imperfectly maintained grass big enough to fit a Netball court but not a huge amount more. Nevertheless, it was a pretty useful space (the Warrawee fete was always held there, I believe, as well as PE sessions and ‘League Tag’ practice), plus it had a cricket net over on the highway side that was invaluable for the PSSA team. If you walked past Blytheswood Oval, along the wide concrete path that snaked by its residential (non-highway) side, you would eventually come to a low metal fence with a gate, just in front of which lay a large rectangular asphalt space which extended about 100 metres to the right. On either side of this space lay a series of variously sized buildings. The first building whose face you would have seen, on the other side of the asphalt, was the old assembly hall. This was a fairly large white wooden structure, slightly raised above the ground with a series of brick supports, and fronted by a lovely little garden. Everyone would have to go up its wooden stairs and into its green-carpeted interior to attend assembly every Friday, as well as drama class and perhaps occasionally PE, too. A few metres to your right, as you stood there in front of the gate, would be a hopscotch indicator painted on the ground. This was used frequently. To the right of that would be a fairly large building which I think was the administrative hub of the Southern side of the school, containing the nurse’s office and possibly a staffroom. Either inside that building or in a building just adjacent, further along to the right, was a classroom always occupied by a year 2 class. When I was in year 2, the so-called “Independent class” filled the space. You would now have to begin to walk onto the asphalt and around to the right to see the other buildings with any clarity. Quite soon after beginning this walk you would encounter a big, deciduous (and therefore non-native) tree in a raised garden bed made with thick planks of wood. After passing that, you would see classroom-buildings on the left and the right. All of these classrooms were pretty unassuming brick structures and probably aren’t worth mentioning in any detail. It should be said, though, that behind the buildings on the right lay the Warrawee after-school-care, a place I spent a lot of time at and will mention later. If you kept walking through the middle of the asphalt space, past these buildings on your left and right, you would finally see in front of you a grassy square, at the end of which lay another classroom-building that always housed Kindergarten students and probably still does. Down to the right of this lay yet another classroom-building. Although similar-looking to the others, this one was unique for the reason that it was the perennial domain of the Warrawee Public School veteran Mr Terrason and his year 1 class (he always had a year 1 class, I think). If, when you were standing in front of the Kindergarten building, you turned left, you would be heading towards the huge playground of the Southern side of Warrawee, called Finlay Oval (like Blytheswood, this was named after the road just adjacent to it). This oval was basically a huge field of patchy, dirt-dappled, perpetually trampled grass, fringed on the Kindergarten side by a kind of forest. If you walked back along the grassy field back in the direction of the Assembly Hall, you would get to a really cool playing area with a sandpit, and a fairly large artificial-grass-and-wood jungle gym, with a slide, monkey bars, a tunnel, a sliding pole, a platform from which you could jump down onto some wood chips and thereby demonstrate your mettle – and all the other requisite features of such things. Of course, it would be most convenient to get to this side of the playground using the gate just to the left of the Assembly Hall, which I didn’t describe earlier in order to minimise confusion. Then again, this gate was always locked and therefore inaccessible to students.

Unless you really concentrated hard on all that, you probably don’t have a real sense of the specific geography of the place – but no matter. All you really need to know is that it was a very nice school.

The more important matter is what I remember of Kindergarten apart from that snippet from the first day. Well, the truth is not much, although I do have a few interesting memories.

I think one of these memories is a vague one of learning the alphabet. As I was not one of those really precocious kids who teach themselves to read before school and my parents were too busy to educate me on such things, I believe I was part of the majority who only learn the alphabet once they start attending school. Even if I don’t actually remember learning the alphabet, I do remember that there were a series of big plastic cards with each letter in big, bold coloured font and a picture representing each one (like a cartoonish picture of an apple for “A”) attached to the wall on one side of the classroom and that these were probably alluded to in the process of teaching by Mrs Sims. Speaking of Mrs Sims, perhaps I should expatiate on her for a while.

I think Mrs Sims was a dark-haired, bespectacled, fairly plain-looking and kindly middle-aged woman (at least, that’s what she was like when she was teaching me in kindergarten). I don’t remember much of what she did but I think she was not really ever stern, because I assume I’d have more of a memory of that if that were the case. As is no doubt standard, I do remember that we spent a lot of class time sitting on the carpeted floor, perhaps being quizzed or playing instructional games, and a lot of it sitting at desks, mainly doing things with pencils, paint, scissors and glue. I think there was always a white container bearing a stockpile of drawing materials in the middle of each desk. I also remember that, in our classroom building, there were actually two classes which were, I think, perhaps only separated by a thick yellow curtain. Maybe I am remembering this wrong, but I seem to recall this curtain being drawn back and both classes being allowed to intermingle on at least one occasion.

I think the discipline and concentration that kindergarten demands is a bit of a shock to most little kids. I seem to recall that we were all constantly being told to cross our legs and pay attention, to stop picking our nose, to put our hand up before we spoke etc. Being absolutely still and concentrating on only one stimulus with one’s entire attention is certainly not a skill that comes naturally, and I imagine that being a Kindergarten teacher must involve a lot of frustrating repetition as you have to constantly try to pull in line a room full of kids mostly preoccupied with their interior worlds, the snot on their fingers, and that little strand of carpet fluff floating beautifully through the air.

‘Pretty fluff,’ the child thinks as it reaches for the little strand dancing in the air, and thereby uncrosses his legs.

“Pay attention, Tom!” commands Mrs Sims, “And cross your legs again.”

Fortunately for me, I have managed to preserve much of that childhood whimsy, interior-world preoccupation, inattentiveness, distractibility and wonder at all things big and small. Some people do manage to do this, but many do not and hence make a lot of money.[2]  

Funnily enough, I remember rather well this one very particular moment (probably mostly because I told people about it a fair few times when I was a child) when Mrs Sims asked the question, “Who knows what the tallest mountain in the world is?” I was sitting, presumably cross-leggèd, in, I think, the back left side of the room, and staring at Mrs Sims as she sat on a chair above us all. I don’t think I had any idea of the answer to the question, but this pale, black-haired boy called Matthew Heron, who was sitting with perfectly crossed-legs somewhere to the right of me, threw up his hand. I can still see his posture in my mind and it seems perfect: his arm is almost vertical and his back is beautifully arched; there is certainly no hint of the sort of slouching that kids do and are reproached for.  Mrs Sims pointed at him.

“Mt Everest,” he said confidently.

“That’s right,” Mrs Sims replied, “Very good, Matthew.”

All I know is that I was tremendously impressed by this, and I think it prompted me to think that he was very intelligent – perhaps a genius. Come to think of it, he might have answered multiple questions. Obviously knowing one fact is obviously not sufficient to merit the mantle of “genius”, or even “vaguely smart person”, but I am also not sure whether I realised this when I was (barely) five.

Speaking of my age, I suppose being four when I started school and then turning five on the 19^th of February was probably a pretty hefty disadvantage in Kindergarten, because neurons are being produced very rapidly in those years and thus being a few months younger can be a fairly significant disadvantage. But I do think I managed alright (and there were probably a few kids younger than me in my year in any case). Unfortunately, unless my memory deceives me, I was somewhat let down by my parents in Kindergarten on the matter of reading. As most people probably know, the system that primary schools generally use to teach kids to read is to set them the challenge of advancing through a series of “reading levels”, each of which represent a gradual increase in difficulty, with the parents constantly having to sign a sheet of paper to verify that certain books have been read in order for their child to progress. A major component of this system was the regular reading sessions at school, with stay-at-home mums coming in to get through a book, in turn, with all the kids in the class. Another detail I seem to remember[3] is that everyone had their own “reading folder”, which presumably contained the books you were currently reading and the piece or pieces of paper verifying which books you had read and how many levels you had progressed through.

Why I said I think I was “somewhat let down by my parents in Kindergarten” is that I am pretty sure that, due to their busy lives and full-time jobs, they neglected to pay much attention to their obligations to fill out the paperwork and follow the protocol. One reason I think this is that I seem to remember being quite unhappy with the lack of attention that my parents were giving to my reading levels in Kindergarten and felt I was at an unjustly low level because of this. But I also recall a couple of memories that seem to directly testify to this impression of mine. The only memory I have of one of those occasions when a stay-at-mum came into our Kindergarten class to read to all of us kids in turn is one of those testifying memories.

This memory starts with my being informed that it was “[my] turn” to go into the reading room (or whatever the fuck it was called) and thus having to move away from the drawing or painting that I was occupied with and nervously amble towards it. It definitely would have been with a certain nervousness and trepidation that I did amble towards the room because, as I offhandedly mentioned, I was fucking terrified at that age of meeting strangers, even if they were benevolent mothers with very active maternal instincts. I remember the room was quite dark and the woman was pretty nice, and I seem to recall the book she had for me was a “level 8” one[4], which (as I recall it) I knew immediately was way too low for me. As I was cripplingly shy, I know that I certainly did not voice any dissent or frustration, or even make clear that the book was below my standard. Instead, she opened up the book, which for some reason I still remember perfectly well was some Cookie Monster book featuring telephones, and I read it flawlessly in my quiet, meek voice, presumably evincing no sign of the burning rage and despair I felt at my parents’ inability to be like all the other parents and record what reading level I was actually at. I still feel a vicarious upset for my five year-old-self even as I write this. That may sound absurd but I think it really was very saddening, and I think such experiences probably laid the foundation for my quite rapidly formed view that if there was one thing I did not want to be it was a lawyer like my parents, who worked all day and always seemed to come home unhappy. This unhappiness seemed particularly evident in my dad, who always arrived to pick us up from after-school care angry stressed and upset, even though his work day would typically finish more than an hour before mum’s.

Anyhow. The second probative memory is a little more banal. I believe it was a conversation that occurred in year 1. I don’t know where it occurred but I think I remember the participants and roughly what was said. Matt Gore and Kimbrian Canavan were the former, and I believe both of them were not in my class, but that I was perhaps aware that both of them were among the leading intellectuals in the school. Anyway, what it basically amounted to was Matt, I think, boasting that he and Kimbrian were already past level 30 reading level (which was meant to be the maximum), and me thinking, because I was already developing a pretty strong ego at that time (whenever it actually was) that the fact that I was only just 30 (or whatever the fuck I was at that point, I think it was quite high and that I had caught up) was not because they were smarter than me, just because they had parents who cared more or got lucky or something. You see in year 1 I think I was beginning to see myself as pretty smart[5], however that’s another story that will be covered in good time.

I suppose another interesting thing to mention about my Kindergarten experience is who my friends were, and what they were like. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely clear on these facts, but I do have some idea. I think that a quiet, black-haired, pale boy called Oscar McKay was my first really good friend.  I certainly know that we were extremely good friends and basically inseparable in year 1, and I am fairly sure that the friendship began in Kindergarten. The most important thing to say about Oscar at this time was that he and I shared a mutual fascination and obsession with dinosaurs. I think I was already enamoured of dinosaurs from about the age of four but I know that watching the wonderful, unsurpassed, life-changing BBC documentary Walking with Dinosaurs on video, and then watching it about fifty more times, and then buying its follow-up, Walking with Beasts, as a birthday present for my dad when I was maybe five.^[6] Given this shared passion, I can only surmise that most of our conversations revolved around dinosaurs, in particular Walking with Dinosaurs (which I think he might also have watched) and interesting facts to do with dinosaurs. I imagine the words Brachiosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Pterodactyl, Iguanodon, Velociraptor would have been just a few of those very frequently bandied about in these conversations. I am also stunned as to what kept this relationship going for so long, because I am sure it was a deeply limited and one-dimensional one, and also as to what keeps any Kindergarten relationship going, considering Kindergarteners are all indescribably vapid, possess almost no topics of conversation and lack the faculties to express anything interesting even if they did. I suppose, though, at that age, you’re still at the stage where friendships don’t really consist of much conversation, mainly just collective activities, like playing in the sandpit together, or running around and giggling, or playing tip, or alternating going down the slide etc.

I think Matt Gore, that person who possibly made the boastful comment in year 1 and who will be mentioned in depth later, was also part of this group in Kindergarten (in other words, I think it might have been a trio), but that he was cast out by Oscar for some reason in year 1, and also never really invited me over like Oscar did, which is perhaps why I don’t remember so clearly being friends with him at this stage. I might have had other friends in Kindergarten but I’m really not sure. I certainly don’t think I was ever good friends with any girls. One of the weird quirks of our school was that the boys and girls remained almost perfectly segregated in the playground pretty much until the very end of year 6. Nobody had a boyfriend or girlfriend at Warrawee, even in year 6. Patrick Sweeney, the son of a very manly plumber and also a person who will be mentioned later, did hang out with the girls in Kindy and year 1, and Edward Poate, a boy who is now gay, hung out with them right up until some efforts were made to remedy the situation by the other boys in year 5 or 6. However, these were definitely the exceptions.

Only one more distinct memory that I can be sure came from Kindergarten is coming to me right now. It is a very simple one, and for some reason I have the impression it occurred quite early in the year, possibly even when I was still only four. I am fairly sure what it represents is the first time I ever had banana-flavoured milk. More importantly, this first time I had banana milk was probably the single best gustatory experience I’ve ever had in my life.

All the memory really consists of is me sitting on the stone steps in front of my classroom and slowly sipping the yellow carton of milk, which I had probably just bought from the canteen (it might have been my first ever solitary purchase), and savouring with immense pleasure the slow trickle of sweet, synthetic substance.

Ok, so yes, this was a joyous experience, but it is also completely banal and it could have been replaced by countless others. As always with childhood memories, the cognitive temptation is to think that the reason you remember them must be that they were, in some way, highly significant moments from your life, perhaps even formative ones, no matter how small or banal they are in their basic facts. The reality is, of course, that this is not the case: the banana-milk-sipping memory changed nothing of my life, and there were probably countless other more interesting moments that occurred on that very day, not to mention all the others in my year of Kindergarten – it’s just that my brain has simply not deigned to preserve them.

Only a few months ago, when I was still attending Sydney Grammar School, I bought some Oak banana-flavoured milk at the “tuckshop”^[7], and it was fucking awful – I decided immediately that it was far and away the worst Oak flavour. But I think, despite my revulsion, the sweet, synthetic taste did bring back some memories. Indeed, with that first sip through a black straw probably eerily similar to the one through which I would have sucked all those years ago, I did experience a kind of brief flicker of powerful spiritual feeling, something ineffable that probably just sounds to you like some kind of joke but was, for a transitory enchanted moment, real and true.

And then it was fucking gross and I was just waiting in the handball line like any other miserable cunt, thinking banal thoughts about History and English and homework and sadness.

Naturally, I do have other images and impressions from Kindy in my mind: I remember finger painting in this room with others and seeing sparkles on black pieces of cardboard, I remember feeling tiny compared to other kids in higher years[8], I remember it raining just after the school bell went one day and seeing everyone running around in their cool blue and yellow raincoats, and feeling disdainful of my own ugly, uncool yellow one. (I also remember asking my mum to buy one of those blue and yellow raincoats for me (perhaps my first acquiescence to peer pressure) and her eventually obliging, taking me to David Jones in Hornsby Westfield, the same place where we used to buy shoes.) I don’t remember much else from Kindergarten, so now I shall move on to my memories of another thing that I did in that same year (2002).

In February or March 2002, I joined an under-6 soccer team at Kissing Point. When I say, I “joined” an under-6 soccer team at Kissing Point Sports Club, I really mean to say my dad signed me up, of course. And the main reason he did this was that he had never been very good at sports himself when he was a child and teenager, and wanted to protect me from the sort of subtle playground bullying that he had experienced throughout his school life as a result of this, particularly on those occasions where playground teams had to be selected by two merciless captains – usually the most athletic kids in the school – in which, if you were unco, utter humiliation awaited. Another significant reason my dad chose to sign me up for soccer at such a young age was that, when he did start playing soccer and cricket for Sydney Grammar School, and then soccer for Sydney Uni, he really enjoyed it, and he wanted to expedite the arrival of that enjoyment in my life. I am happy that he did do that all those years ago, when I was just a small, stout, little blonde-haired boy who also wasn’t particularly co-ordinated and whose physique somewhat belied his strength, because I’m sure it did save me from some suffering (including possibly self-hatred), and did keep me fit and healthy. Moreover, playing team sport was a source of great enjoyment for me for many years. That said, my father’s protective instincts would eventually transmogrify, with tremendous irony, into something far beyond protection: the flagrant prioritisation of his feelings and desires – his vision of the person I should be – over mine. I’m tempted to say more about this now, but the elaboration shall come in good time. For the moment, suffice to say that I had almost total trust in my dad and, while a little leery of meeting new people and a little uncertain of the activity he was getting me into, I think I was mostly happy and excited to start this game called “soccer”, the same one that he had played for so many years and that my sister had played for two, and at the same club as them, too.

So what do I remember of my first season of soccer? Well, snippets – as has been the way of all things so far.

I’m pretty sure I was in the under-6 Cs in my first season… not that your team’s grade means anything when you’re 5 (or 6, as the case may be) when not only are you all still weak, tiny, doddering creatures, but also likely don’t even know the rules, let alone any of the game’s skills. Anyway, I remember that at least one training occurred on a field called Comenarra Oval, which is a fairly large patch of grass with a cricket net at one end and a little kid’s playground and changing room at the other sat at the bottom of a hill, bordered on one side by a big cliff and on the other by the winding road known (at least in that South Turramurra stretch of the road) as the “Comenarra Parkway”. One issue with this Comenarra Oval is that, despite being located at the bottom of a steep hill in the rainiest suburb of Sydney, it doesn’t have a special drainage system. The main consequence of this is that, after only a few hours of heavy rain, one can easily find the place a total swamp, and, after a few hours of studded-shoe playing, a veritable quagmire. Of course, none of this really has much bearing on my memories of my first soccer season. What I was going to say before is that, since I can remember one training session occurring there, I can only assume that all of them did: that that was our permanent home. If it wasn’t, it could only have been Aluba Oval, the administrative and spiritual centre of KPSC, on which its clubhouse sits. Again, this doesn’t really matter that much; I just have an unhealthy desire for thoroughness and an obsession with detail.

Kissing Point has, for as long as I’ve been aware of the club, been represented by the colours of the French Flag: red, blue and white. The club’s default soccer kit in 2002 was a lovely design which mediated wonderfully between understatement and gaudiness, and made good use of the congruence of the club’s colours. It consisted of a vertically striped shirt (alternating between stripes of red, white and blue), shiny blue shorts, and blue socks capped with two red stripes. I think I really liked putting that uniform on of a Saturday morning and feeling the pride associated with being part of the same big club that my dad played for. I should say that I just made that up but I imagine that’s probably how I felt.

It seems to me that I only really remember one game and one training session from that first season in any detail at all. The training session that I remember was at night, and I know at some point we were all trying to kick the ball into a cone-demarcated goal guarded by our team’s main goal-keeper (who was a girl). I remember that she kept diving onto all the balls screaming towards her with tremendous skill and bravery, and that she kind of resembled some sort of ground-dwelling mammal, maybe a mole, in the way she would jump onto the ball and then lie down, pressing it firmly under her, all coiled up.[9] I think the other training-session memory, also set at night, on Commenarra, probably comes from the same training session, but, to be honest, I’m really not sure. In any case, it marks the moment I learnt the term “nil” for the first time. I think what happened is that we were playing a little game on a cone-delineated field (and this was probably at the end of the training session because games characteristically only occur then), but I don’t really know what was going on in the game. I doubt I even knew what was going on in the game then. I mean, I don’t think I was a very useful member of the team, and this is a team where one kid would just spend the whole time picking daffodils and the rest would just follow the ball aimlessly around like a swarm of bees, each eagerly awaiting their turn to boot it forward, with scant regard for the goal, their team-mates or the earnest cries of their overinvested parents.^[10] Anyhow, the memory possibly takes place just following a goal, and all it consists of is the redheaded boy in my team whom I would later encounter in crosscountry circles and soccer matches many years later (and never speak to at all, stupidly), coming up to me on the pitch and exclaiming to me that the score was “two-nil”^[11]. I know I must have replied, “What does nil mean?” because I remember he then said something like “It means no goals”. So yeah. I found that datum tremendously interesting and I evidently never forgot it.

Apart from one brief memory of walking along a pavement with my dad and a taller boy from my team and his parents after a soccer game, I seem only to have one set of vivid game-day memories from my first season of soccer, and they all come from the same game.[12] There were good reasons why I remembered this game, as you shall soon see.

It’s really interesting how many details I seem to be to recall from this game, given how few I recall from the others. I remember that we played it at the St Ives Showground, against St Ives, who had a green and white kit that I really liked (I think). I can even see in my mind’s eye what side of the showground we were on. Most importantly, I remember that I was chosen as goalie, perhaps for the first time in my life. I remember that the first few times I wore a goalie jersey, I was amused by the appearance of muscularity it gave one, and so I probably made a demonstration of that in this game, doing the classic muscle poses and laughing and so forth. When we were shaking hands with the other team, I know that I must have noticed Matthew Heron was playing for them for the first time, and I seem to recall that we exchanged a knowing glance with each other, and possibly uttered a few words. When the game began, I remember that Matthew Heron was extremely good – so much better than anyone else on the field. He was fast, he was skilful, and he dribbled with a superhuman facility – he carved through our team like a knife through butter. And every time he broke through, he scored. Again and again and again.

Perhaps it was only 4 goals he scored against me, but it certainly felt like a hell of a lot. Nothing I could do could stop him. I dived left and right, hurled my body across the mud, prostrated myself before his feet – nothing could halt his infernal charge. The ball just kept hitting the back of the net. He was, truly, a demon.

I can still see him running down the field towards me – his jet black hair flapping in the wind; his pale, diabolical face emblazoned with a manic grin – everything about him radiating determination and certitude. He approaches the goal now, alone in an empty space. Suddenly, everything slows down. We are the only two people in the world now. All in existence has been reduced to this space in front of my eyes; it is just me and him now, a single battle to decide it all. He draws back his foot, I ready myself. He strikes –

within an instant, it is done. I look behind me and the ball is in the back of the net. The whistle howls, the crowd yells. I am lying there on the muddy ground, filthy and destitute, like an amoeba wallowing in its slime. I know that I could have done nothing to stop the shot.

He is just too good.

I believe that to be a superb allegory for my life.

---

[1] Incidentally, is “[Pronoun] won’t bite” a peculiar Australian idiom or is it an expression common to basically all English speaking nations? I suddenly realised just now that I heard that phrase very often when I was a child. My dad was always telling me other adults weren’t going to bite (and thus that I shouldn’t be afraid of them). This always pissed me off, of course, because I knew they weren’t going to bite, but that, instead, they were going to try to talk to me – something equally as terrifying.

[2] Good joke.

[3] To be honest, a lot of these details come more directly from later experience, I think. A lot of my description is inference.

[4] You might think it’s freaky that I remember the level, and so that I dispel that thought two things should be clarified: 1.) I’m not absolutely sure it was level 8.

                 2.) I also think it’s freaky.

[5] Although I sort of feel like that more happened in year 2 which is making me think the memory might be from there – but I’m also fairly sure that the reading level scheme didn’t last into year 2 so I’m doubly confused.

[6] A present which, once opened in bed on May the 1^st, actually seemed to anger my dad, prompting him to moralise about how when it is not your birthday but someone else’s you are meant to think about them, and that it was thus a very selfish and immature thing to do. This lecture really made me upset, and I think straight after it I admitted I wanted the present I had chosen but that I also thought he might. I mean, in hindsight, I reckon it was pretty rude of him to not even pretend to appreciate the present I had chosen.

[7] Note: not canteen. With its whole traditional, old-fashioned, antique Great British Public School vibe, SGS always uses fusty jargon like that.

[8] Actually that’s probably inference again.

[9] In fact, I think she reminded me of the mole protagonist of one of my all-time favourite childhood books, The Story of the Little Mole who knew it was none of his business. In this book, a mole wakes up with poo on his head and asks a succession of animals if they did it, resulting in a series of pedagogical insights about the varying texture and shape of different species’ scats, until he eventually discovers the culprit.

I think this book, in combination with the mole in The Gogs, might have sparked a small obsession with, or perhaps affection for moles. Evidence of this investment in moles is the fact that I always acted as a mole when I played the Saturday and Sunday morning game of burrowing among the sheets with my parents in their Kingsize bed and trying to imprison them in a cocoon of sheets, an enterprise I baptised “Mole Security”.

[10] Admittedly, this is typical of Under-6 soccer teams.

[11] Or some score close to that. It might have been one-nil.

[12] I’m 90% sure this game is from that first season, but I suppose it is possible that it is not. Again, be apprised of my patchy memory.