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.

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[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. 

Footnotes to my Terrible Essay on Identity, and my New View on Parfit and Deep Things

Fun with Identity

I no longer endorse the previous essay on "Identity" that can be found in this blog. In fact, I would like to recant it entirely. The way I phrased the problem at the beginning was very misleading. That’s the main problem with the essay: I’ve articulated everything wrong. The question I respond to, “What is identity?” is the wrong kind of question to ask. Nobody could possibly answer that question – it’s too vague. What I was really talking about, as becomes clear once you get about half-way through the essay, are philosophical theories of “personal identity”. Hopefully, my ultimate point comes across. I still do endorse this basic idea that the philosophical approach to such questions as personal identity is flawed.

Now that I’ve read Reasons and Persons, I also know that the stuff I said about Derek Parfit was wrong. In the section on personal identity in that book, Parfit’s thought experiments involving people who are split in teletransportation or people who get brain transplants and whatnot, and his painstaking, laborious argumentation against various common philosophical positions on identity, eventually lead him to the view that “there is no further fact” to identity and that we should accept what he calls the “Reductionist view”, namely, that all that matters when you are talking about identity is continuity and connectedness to “past selves”. I actually don’t disagree with this, and – contrary to my assumption in the essay – I don’t think he strays into mysticism and obscurantism at any point. However, I don’t see why not believing in the Ego and distrusting the intuitive notion of a coherent, immutable self should logically lead one to completely change one’s life and one’s view of one’s place in society and the cosmos, and thereby force the revision of certain moral theories. Yet this is exactly what he claims in Reasons and Persons, and he spends much of the latter half of the book presupposing it.

The fundamental gripe I have with Parfit is that he takes abstract, technical moral philosophy way too far. It is true that he himself thinks that one should actually live by the dictates of the best moral philosophy. But the problem is that no one else does. And it is also far from clear that it is even rational to assume that our moral theories should be perfectly logical, logically consistent and airtight. After all, they’re not scientific theories; they’re just formalisations of our innate psychology. No normal person enacts altruism according to prescribed ratios, agonises over the logicality of their every decision, and worries whether their past decision on one matter contradicts their current one. No one except Parfit, that is. The guy is incredibly strange. And the book is incredibly strange as a result.

I can see why moral philosophers loved Reasons and Persons when it was published and why it has been so influential, because it is a kind of 400 page legitimation of moral philosophy as a fully analytic enterprise. As the book indirectly demonstrates, once you do start treating moral philosophy as if it were quantum theory or something, you do get some surprising results. But, as I said before, if you think about it carefully, it’s far from clear that the meta-theory behind Reasons and Persons – its doctrinal assumptions, if you like – are themselves logical. What the book does, essentially, is synthesise the following: a methodology of exacting analytical rigour, typified by Parfit’s assiduous and fastidious style of argumentation; the bedrock of our basic, primal intuitions about how we should treat other people; and our current scientific understanding of ourselves and the world, which militates against most of our primal intuitions. Now, it is true that a moral philosopher must rely on primal intuitions to adjudicate questions both big and small. For example, one has to use them to determine problems like whether it’s “acceptable” for a moral theory to require us to give 50% of our income to strangers, or whether it would be ok on a drowning ship to save one of your own babies instead of the babies of three strangers. But this fact about moral philosophy is also one of the reasons why going too far with its formalisation is a bit odd. When you do try to formalise moral philosophy, what you’re essentially doing is combining our evolved animal psychology with high-level, abstract philosophy and logical rigour. And the addition of science in Reasons and Persons just makes the mixture even weirder. It is the science in the book that compels Parfit to make radical revisions of ancient assumptions. For example, he argues that the “self” should not be the fundamental moral atom, and he observes that, on account of the “Identity Problem”, it’s illogical to assume morality still applies to effects of acts that will be felt in the long-term. Counterintuitive scientific facts thus become the engine of the “progress” in the book. But how can it be logical to both take intuitions seriously and ignore them altogether? Could there by any method to such madness?

To be fair, I think there is some method in Parfit’s synthesis of intuitions and counterintuitions, though I’m not quite sure what it is. Perhaps he only disposes of what he views to be the inessential intuitions and leaves the most basic ones there. However, even if he does have some consistent scheme like this, it doesn’t diminish the fact that the book does yoke together some very strange bedfellows.

Most importantly, it is clear that anyone outside of the ivory tower of moral philosophy would not regard the bricolage of a book that is Reasons and Persons as having made “progress”. In my opinion, the laymen’s assessment is the right assessment. Not to be too horrible to Parfit, but I think the speculation of Parfit’s fellow British philosopher Simon Blackburn re: Parfit’s 2011 book On What Matters may apply equally to Reasons and Persons. To wit, as impressive as Reasons and Persons is, I think it probably does amount to “a long voyage down a stagnant backwater”. Literally treating morality as some kind of science has got to be mistaken.

In some way, I feel sorry for full-time moral philosophers, because I can’t imagine they have much to do. If they want my advice, I reckon they should branch into neuroscience or cognitive psychology. In general, I think philosophy should become more scientific than it currently is – just as long as it stops before disappearing completely into the maw of phys and chem and preserves its abstract heart. That’s not a novel idea, but I think it’s a good one. Moreover, I think philosophy is more likely to actually make that change than any other of the humanities on account of its history of association with men we now do call early scientists (David Hume and Isaac Newton, for example), and its undergirding by scientific knowledge today.

I foresee a world where no philosopher can be a pure metaphysician. What a paradise that would be!

Now, none of this was meant to imply that there aren’t interesting things to say about personal identity, and how our intuitions clash with the scientific truth. In fact, this subject interests me greatly. Another more concrete way of thinking about personal identity is to consider a brief summary of the relevant biological facts:   

The human body is essentially just a bag of billions of cells working together in unison to perform millions of tiny operations all the time, maintaining the function of various systems around the body and keeping the whole alive. It is also teeming with bacteria. Obviously, no one cell has any consciousness or self-awareness. That is the miracle of life: each tiny cog is tiny, insignificant and primordial, yet, together, all of them create a highly-functioning, highly intelligent creature that can perform all sorts of extremely complex tasks. And the brain is no different to any other part of the body in this basic way. The brain is composed of billions of neurons, which are a strange kind of cell with a series of filaments known as “dendrites” at one end, and a kind of conductive tail called an axon that carries electrical impulses. Each neuron transmits electrical signals to other cells across the junction known as the synapse, regulated by the chemical reactions constantly occurring in each. According to our best current understanding of cognition (the computational theory of mind), neurons are arrayed into highly intricate and complex networks of “information processing”, each connected by kinds of “logic gates”, which in turn fit into larger and larger “modules”, each ultimately specialised for some kind of discrete purpose but many interacting with each other in a superstructural global network. This explains all our cognition, our vision, our emotion – everything. It explains our sense of a “soul”. Notably, this soul – at least conceived in the classic, Cartesian sense – must be a highly elaborate illusion.

As a consequence, there’s no objective reason why one should think of a creature as fundamentally ‘one’ – at least in the sense of being a fully self-integrated, autonomous entity (we are obviously 'one' in the sense that we all have one brain). For very good evolutionary reasons, we have the illusion of being ‘one’, and of having free will. We have the illusion that we are the master of the ship, that we are kind of our own self-reflexive homunculus, controlling everything that goes on. (It’s almost as if we are both in the control room, twiddling and tweaking the nobs and pressing the buttons, and yet also the ship itself.) Most importantly, we have the impression of having one infrangible identity. But science tells us we don’t actually have any of this. We’re not conscious of any of the machinations that go into a “thought” or that produce a “desire” or a “belief”, or even any of the reactions and calculations that trigger a decision. As much as we like to vaunt our “consciousness” and supreme sentience, much of what goes on in our brains is completely mechanical – robotic, if you like. The real deep existential truth is that we are very elaborate machines made of smaller machines made of smaller machines made of complex chemical compounds made of the fundamental elements made of protons, neutrons and electrons made of quarks and Higgs-Bosons and whatever the fuck else. That is who we are. Deal with it.

But should this actually force us to change our views about how to live our lives? I don’t think so. Apart from anything else, I don’t think it can. It’s one of those truths that can only ever remain intellectual. You cannot hope to “apply” it to real life. In fact, I have no idea what applying it would even entail. It’s not like it would be as simple as Parfit makes it out to be: describing the versions of you in the past as “other selves” and caring less about your own interests.

Also, here’s a really deep question: if you’re going to apply one deep level of scientific analysis to real life and use it as a basis for how to live, then why not apply even deeper levels of scientific analysis? What is the logical reason for stopping at the idea that there’s no Ego up there in your head? Why not keep going to the level of analysis that says that life and animation itself is a kind of even more elaborate illusion because organisms are composed of cells, and cells aren’t alive? Or that cells are not really best thought of as a coherent, autonomous whole, but an elaborate composition of chemical constituents? Or that atoms are not really best thought of as a coherent, autonomous whole, but as an intricate arrangement of protons, neutrons and electrons? Ad absurdum, ad infinitum.

One philosophical argument I really like making is the one that might best be called the Argument from Commonsense. Just as I have argued that morality is so fundamental to our psychology that it makes little sense to call it a "fiction", I think that perhaps this idea of the self and free will is such a strong illusion that there’s no point even calling it an illusion.[1] This is not a new way of seeing it, of course, but I think it’s a sensible one. The truth is the notion of the self is a tectonic part of our umwelt as an organism. It is not an objective truth, in the most grandiose, transcendental definition of objective that physicists and mathematicians like to use, but it is some kind of truth to us. And since it would be impossible for any kind of organism (or even superintelligence) to see the universe without the metaphoric lens of an umwelt – to somehow simultaneously see all the universe at once through all the frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, to be omniscient and divine and all-wise – perhaps not even the word intersubjective really cuts how important this truth is to us. To me, I don’t think it’s too mystical to say that it lies somewhere between intersubjective and objective. Well, ok, maybe that is too mystical, but we’ve kind of hit a barrier here, and none of our concepts can possibly express anything more. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”   

---

[1] In the same way that it’s probably pointless trying to convince yourself that time’s passage is an illusion, since that belief is central to the way we interpret the world. Can something be an illusion if it is part of the fundamental fabric of our reality? If there’s no other way of seeing things, does this term still make sense? 

Second Extract

Pre-school and other occurrences during the PreEnlightenment, Heuristic-Reliant and Superstitious Age of Partial Bipedalism and Preliteracy

So now that we’re done with Christmas, let’s return to the digressive narrative of my life, starting with pre-school.

Pre-school was possibly an interesting time of my life. How the fuck am I meant to know, really? I remember bits and pieces, interesting snippets, moments. I know that I would have done innumerable things but I don’t remember it with much precision. Nevertheless, nihilism is boring, so I can and will tell you some stuff.  

I went to a pre-school very near our house – in fact, only about 250 metres away, just past the end of our street, across the road and forward about 30 metres. It was called Fox Valley Kindergarten, and it still exists in the same spot today. It was a nice kindergarten, I think, with a small but perfectly varied playground which included a big wooden play area  at the top of the slope, a sandpit, a swingset and some open space on artificial grass for dancing or hula hooping or whatever the fuck little infants do with each other. In this period of my life, I very much had a “best friend”, another blonde boy probably with skin a little more tanned and a shorter height than me (I think) whose name was Dylan Paige. I don’t know how we came to be “best friends”, I certainly don’t remember the first time we met, I don’t know what things we talked about, if anything (do three/four year-olds even talk to each other about things or do they pretty much just make noises?), but I do seem to remember that we were pretty much inseparable on the playground. I am not sure whether this is accurate but I certainly have the impression that, every morning, as soon as we got to the pre-school, we would hop onto the swings and begin oscillating back and forth with big grins on our faces, laughing and shouting. I have one image in my head of us doing this, and I’m fairly sure it’s in the morning. However, like so much that has been said in this autobiography hitherto, it is uncertain.

I think I only have one other distinct pre-school memory set in the playground and, fortunately (for your sakes, you dopey cunts with tiny attention spans), this one doesn’t involve Dylan. Instead, this one involves a boy who would later attend Warrawee Public School with me, called Alex Jarmyn. In it, I am at the top of the playground, past the wooden play area, just in front of the big fence which separates the pre-school from the big dusty area next to it. I am standing on some woodchips, I think. A boy (Alex) is coming towards me. His face is freckly, he is taller than me (I think).  

“I’m four,” he says. “How old are you?”

“Three,” I say.

And that’s where the memory ends. Ok, so it’s a little banal but I find it fascinating. I would. I’m a huge narcissist and I’m totally self-centred.

I do remember a fair bit about what went on inside the pre-school’s only building. I remember we had nap times, and that they were truly dreadful. I think it’s easy to forget the horror of the pure, black dread that a child feels when told to do something that they don’t want to do – but it is real. I remember also that our main teacher (at least, I think she was our main teacher) used to teach us songs like Frère Jacques and made us point to parts of our body and call them funny names (only years later, when I saw the words tête and main and jambe and bras, did I suddenly realise that I had been taught French all those years ago[1]). I used to find what we did with this woman really hard, I think, but it seems in retrospect that she might have been a very ambitious pre-school teacher and I can only admire that. I remember, too, that we did a lot of art in pre-school (a fact which I imagine is utterly commonplace). I have one very particular memory of decorating the large square of fabric that my dad used to use to cover his bedside table. This is how I recall it in my mind:

I am sitting on one side of the classroom, surrounded by other infants sitting down, and drawing, probably on a piece of scrap paper, images that could be used for their tablecloth designs. The area around me seems crowded, perhaps filled with materials and drawings. Perhaps I am stumped on ideas for my own tablecloth, struggling for inspiration. Suddenly, a burst of creative energy sees me beginning to draw some sort of machine-vehicle-robot-thing. It has red wheels, each with one spoke, that are attached to red sticks that lead up to a red square with two little futuristic blue wings (or perhaps they might better be called unknowable “design elements”) on either side of it, and inside it, as if it is a movie screen or something, there is this weird green creature whose body consists of a circular head, an insectile abdomen, two stick legs protruding from the bottom of its head and some sort of cloudlike item on its head, either another body part or a hat.

Here it gets a bit hazy. After completing this drawing, I possibly put my hand up to signal to Mrs Laurie that I have come up with a design or else she comes over of her own accord. Either way, she looks at the design, I explain it in some fashion and she deems it adequate to imprint on the actual tablecloth.

I don’t know where the fuck this design comes from – what sort of subconscious machinations inspired it – but I know I described it with near-perfect accuracy just then because I am staring at the tablecloth now. Apart from this one bizarre, inexplicable machine-thing, which sits lugubriously in one corner of the cloth, there are eleven other weird texta drawings scattered around the cloth (three on each side), as well as these weird little floating creatures which I remember were intended to fill up space and were meant to look identical to each other (though they are so fucking far from identical it's rather funny). In case you want to know what some of the other big drawings look like, what follows is a description of some of them:

The drawing a few centimetres away from the machine-thing, in the middle of that side of the cloth, is of a green person with green dots for eyes, a flat green mouth, no ears, strangely straight and thick long green hair (length of hair presumably signifying female gender), an armless green torso with blue button-like dots traversing it diagonally, and two green stick legs with green stick feet. This person is inside some 2-D red cave-like structure (probably reflecting my interest in cavemen and the show about cavemen called The Gogs), with red stegosaurus-like spines along the top and side of it (which I think are meant to be rocks) and weird blue circle-like things inside it, above the person.

The next drawing along, in the other corner of that side of the cloth, is presumably of some sort of family, possibly my own. On the top left is some half-red, half-blue stick figure of the same basic design as the one in the cave but with stick arms this time, plus weirdly elongated dots for eyes on a small, bald head. These latter design features which make him (I say “him” because the baldness suggests it’s meant to be the dad) look a little like one of the Canadians from South Park. Next to him is a blue figure I am inferring is probably a female. She has an even smaller head and looks kind of sad in her squished-up face. Her hair is short and possibly a bit like my mum’s at that time. Below these two parents are three other smaller figures that I fear might be meant to look like children.  The one on the far left has a blue torso, green stick legs, green stick arms and a red head without any face. The one in the middle is kind of faded but it seems to be some sort of green vaguely ranine thing with one stick arm. Perhaps it is meant to be Barry, our very old black cat; that would be my best bet.[2] The figure on the right is all in blue and has the most interesting hairstyle of any of the figures described yet, with both a couple of spiky strands as well as some flat ones. Perhaps this is meant to be me. Who can tell?

The next drawing, in the middle of another side of the tablecloth, is possibly the most fascinating, due to what I think is a rather macabre subject matter. A blue stick figure with two rather weird strands of hair extending outwards from each side of its head and red arms with flames or orbs of blood on the end of them stands in what I think might be a cave (reflecting the Palaeolithic theme). Strewn in front of the cave are rows of blue (attempted) circles, each containing a single blue dot. Although I am not sure, I suspect these simulacra of dotted circles are meant to be skulls and therefore that the figure is meant to be some sort of barbaric, bloodthirsty caveman. That would definitely be my style.

I suppose I will spare you descriptions of the other eight drawings. Suffice it to say that they are just as exquisitely drawn but that they change up the themes a little, even introducing some floral notes (I was a complex individual).

I really love this tablecloth, and I also feel it’s a very good memento, particularly considering that it tells me the date it was made: namely, 2001. I would have been four for most of 2001, of course, and 2001 was also significant for being the year before I began primary school. Indeed, the tablecloth, being a rather significant project, may have been the last thing I ever made in pre-school. That would seem to make sense. Perhaps that’s why I remember making it.

I have one another memory of an event that happened inside the pre-school building, and it is probably even more interesting than the one before. You know how they say that all little infants are basically solipsists? That they are oblivious to the existence of others and only ever think about the suffering inflicted on them? Well, I am by no means sure, but I think this moment that I am about to describe may have represented the first time I felt real empathy. Here’s how the memory plays out in my mind:

I am sitting down on what I think is green carpet, surrounded by other pre-schoolers.  Up in front of us is our teacher. She almost seems to be on some sort of platform but she is probably just sitting on a chair. She is talking about the dangers of sliding on carpets, warning us not to perform the action and soberly informing us of the possible consequences, the potential for carpet burn. “Come here, Daniel,” she says (or something to that effect) “Show the class what happens if you slide on the carpet.” Daniel hobbles forward and pulls up one trouser leg so that his bloody knee is exposed. It is a grisly sight: bloody and wet and oh so painful. Daniel winces and I wince with him. I shall never slide on the carpet, I tell myself, I shall never.

And that’s the memory.  

I remember only one other ‘event’ pertaining to life in pre-school: the birthday party of this very Daniel. I think I was actually pretty good friends with him in pre-school so it’s no surprise to me that I was invited to his party. Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything about him, really – I don’t remember how he behaved, what his voice was like, what he said his interests were (it’s basically the same with Dylan, too, I think) – but I do know that he was of Asian ethnicity. I also have a vague picture in my mind of how he looked when I knew him then, although I’m 95% sure I wouldn’t recognise him now, as an adult, if perchance I bumped into him on the street. For all I know I could have bumped into him on the street recently. He might have walked past me at Sydney Uni. The repeating refrain: who can know?

I suspect I might remember this birthday because it was the first real kid’s party I had ever attended, but it may not have even been that. In any case, there are two scenes in my mind which I think come from the same day. The first was being in front of one of the passenger doors of their white four-wheel-drive and having to take a really big step just to reach the rubber platform from which you could enter the car, and thinking, probably before and after this, about how my dad disapproved of people who bought four-wheel-drives. The second was being in their house and looking at all the wonderful, exciting range of junkfood arrayed on the table (a bowl of Cheezels being one image in particular that remains in my mind), but being told that I, along with everyone else, must wash my hands before eating it. I remember thinking this demand was rather odd, and at an age where my worldview was constructed by me parents, in whom I also had absolute faith and trust, I thought that it must be stupid or anal[3] for his parents to insist on kids washing their hands before eating if mine did not.

Anyway, that’s it: that’s all I remember of pre-school and my friends there. Was that interesting? Probably not. But who cares? I feel only contempt for you. This book is not for you; it’s for me. Your only purpose is to fawn and hold your mouth agape in stuporous awe and slavish admiration of my fearsome intellect and literary brilliance. If you dare voice dissent, if you dare question my authority, you might as well not be reading this book. I am in control. I am your leader, your dictator. You are obedient, passive, submissive, obsequious. If I really believed that there were many other people with even the slightest degree of intelligence or insight into anything, do you think I’d bother to publish all the stupid thoughts I have put down in this book? All these thoughts truly are stupid to me – they’re obvious, they’re banal, they’re things I think all the time – but I have such contempt for you readers that I’m assuming they’re not stupid to you. Think about that. Mull over that. You’re probably too stupid to even understand what I’m saying. You probably think this paragraph has been clever. It has not. If you think otherwise, I loathe you – but, at the same time, I would like you to buy this book, and, to some extent, I want you to adore me. I want to be worshipped, I want to be revered. I want to be godly! But I can only be godly if other people truly are inferior to me. Therein lies the problem.

It’s a problem particularly pressing for writers of a particular kind of onanistic, ostentatious fiction of which this is hopefully not an example.  The truth is that if one is majorly concerned with looking clever to your reader, seeming more intelligent than them, one must believe, at least on some level, that one is more intelligent than one’s reader. (If one doesn’t believe that on any level, one simply is not capable of being concerned with looking clever.) And that arrogance necessarily entails a sort of contempt for the reader.

Hey, look at me, look at me, look what I can do, look at me, I am the greatest… and you, you there in the crowd, you really are thinking this is great aren’t you, you really do think I am the greatest.

Ha! You fucking imbecile.

(When I wrote this, I thought it was an intelligent digression but now I think it’s stupid. My past selves are in general contemptible to me. This dates to a Wallacian phase now long passed.)

What else can we say about my infancy? I suppose I have a few interesting details and a couple of anecdotes. One interesting detail is that we went to Perth when I was three and I remember nothing of this trip. Another is that the Sydney Olympics happened when I was three and I basically remember nothing of them, although I do remember Strawberry Kisses by Nikki Webster very well (but that was probably still being played well after the Olympics because it is such an exquisite piece of music) and I know, due to my parents’ memories, that we did go to a few unimportant soccer matches early in the tournament. Another detail from this period of my life is that I was attacked by a magpie or crow in a park somewhere in the inner-west when I was maybe three or so. If only I could remember this! It might make for some interesting reading. I mean, I sort of feel like I can vaguely remember it, but unfortunately for you I’m too decent and honest a person to pretend that the memory is any sharper than that. Another detail is that we, as a family, continued to head back to Marrickville and its surrounds pretty often, I think, and would go the Greek bakery every time. There the baker would always give me and Miranda a free sweet pastry, which I really liked. I think I might have a memory of this happening when I was also only three or so. Another detail (broadly stated) is the names of the TV shows I would have been watching during this very early period. Some of these would have been The Gogs, The Hooley Dooleys, The Wiggles, The Teletubbies, Postman Pat, Morph Files, Pingu, Batfink, Playschool and Thomas the Tank Engine. There were definitely many others, and I probably watched some of those more than the shows I’ve listed here. Frankly, I don’t even know if I watched The Teletubbies, Thomas the Tank Engine and Playschool a great deal (or even at all), although I do know that they were extremely popular when I was an infant so it seems likely. I briefly mentioned The Gogs before, but I’ll do it again, because the show is rather wonderful. The Gogs was a Claymation series first given wide viewership on the BBC in 1996. It concentrates on the lives of a family of cavepeople, possibly meant to be Neanderthals (given the Neanderthal-like facial structure of the mother and father, with very prominent brow ridges), possibly just Homo Sapiens or very possibly neither (this actually seems quite likely considering the show is quite loose with historical accuracy generally[4]). In any case, as Wikipedia puts it, with an unusual elegance (apart from the tense inconsistency), “The Gogs revolves around a family clan of dumb, primitive and socially inept cavemen in a fantasy prehistoric Stone Age setting, and contained [sic] much dark comedy, various toilet humour-based gags and gross out situations; for example the cavemen losing control of their bodily functions. It also featured [sic] their often comedic daily struggle for survival, and attempts to advance their technology and society, such as creating fire, and often failing miserably, comically and absurdly in the act.” While that summary paints a fairly good picture of what the show is like, I feel that describing this family clan in greater detail will be highly illuminative yet also undetrimental to possible enjoyment and I will thus do that now.

There are six main characters in The Gogs and each has various comic strengths that serve to make the show so great. Perhaps the most prominent is the mother figure. She is a strong, muscular, domineering, rage-filled, violent, rather ursine black-haired matriarch, and is basically the leader of the family, constantly having to compensate for the physical and intellectual incompetence of the men around her (in fact, as far as hunting prowess goes, she is more of a man than they are). She wears a leopard-print tunic, a tooth necklace and fur slippers. Her husband (or husband-like figure) is a smaller, similarly black-haired man who, despite a reasonably athletic physique and a big manly, hispid head, is utterly cowed by his wife and, while a proficient hunter, possesses skills that are repeatedly shown to pale in comparison to hers. He wears light brown rags, and a similar tooth necklace and pair of fur slippers. Their eldest son is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, extremely dopey young man (or possibly teenager) who is also utterly cowed by the matriarch and an even more hopeless hunter. He often tries to impress his family in various ways and always fails. He dresses in almost identical clothes to his father but he is much smaller. Their only daughter is a very solitary, taciturn, pacifistic teenage girl with a very lanky body and a tiny head covered in flocculent, brown eye-covering hair who (despite her miniature skull) shows signs of incredible scientific genius, for example drawing on a rock, in the first episode, Einstein's famous equation E=mc² as well as miraculously prescient blueprints of a car, a plane and a helicopter. Unfortunately for her, her physical weakness and strangeness ensures she is victimised by the rest of the family, or left behind when the family is fleeing from danger, and her attempts to make technological advances for her family are always thwarted by filial violence. She wears very similar clothes to her mother, although they look very different on her radically different body. The youngest offspring is a baby boy with an ovoid, glabrous head, big blue eyes, a single, very sharp tooth and overactive orifices: a big spherical nose out of which streams a constant flow of sticky, green snot, and a bottom that farts frequently and produces implausibly massive poos. He tends to cry a lot (as in the first episode when his family simply can’t get him to shut up), manages to get himself involved in a lot of daring adventures (as in the episode when he is transported along the ground by a mole), and, fortunately (for him), succeeds often, with his switch-on-able sweetness and cuteness, in bringing out the powerful maternal loving and protective instincts in his otherwise fierce and violent mother. Finally, the old man of the family is a gruff, grumpy, ill-tempered, hot-headed, crude, senile character who has the most wonderful appearance: a long, lanky body, topped by a head with a bald crown which nevertheless hosts a pair of bushy white eyebrows, a bushy, white handlebar moustache and a white beard so long and flowing that it performs the function of clothes, almost always obscuring his crotch area no matter how much he exerts himself (and he does exert himself a lot, showing few signs of physical deterioration). This character almost always carries a big wooden club with him, of which he makes frequent use to bash people’s heads so hard they disappear into their bodies.

The reason I know all this – with only minimal assistance from Google Images to increase the precision of my physical descriptions, and a bit of help from Wikipedia to jog my memory about the nature of the characters – is that I have watched all the episodes available on Youtube twice within the past year, and, more importantly, used to watch the show a hell of a lot before the age of six. Truth be told, I’m not sure I really liked it that much as a kid. In fact, I think I might have even found it a little terrifying. After all, it was set in a rather bleak environment – a kind of ugly brown and green landscape full of mortal danger and various bodily excretions – and all the characters were, at various times, either perpetrators or victims of rather extreme violence. Plus, as Wikipedia has just informed me, the show was not even really designed for infants and eventually got released with a PG classification. Nevertheless, I do remember my dad liking it when he watched it (and my dad had a huge influence on what I decided I liked), and the main reason I do know that I watched a fair bit of it is that when, on a whim, I decided to go on Youtube and type The Gogs into the searchbar about a year ago and subsequently clicked on Episode 1, I recognised everything about the show straight away. Indeed, even as I continued to watch more and more episodes, I was still finding that almost every scene brought on a pang of ancient recognition. I even knew the plots of certain episodes just from their beginnings. I found this rather amazing.

I exhort you to watch it. If you do, though, don’t just watch it illegally on Youtube like me; instead, pay the money like my parents once did when they bought the VCR version which, I believe, is still sitting somewhere in the garage, having been unplayed for many years. Intellectual property rights are important. People deserve remuneration for things they make, particularly if they’re brilliant like The Gogs.

There are also three other TV shows on that list that bear further elaboration for various reasons.[5]

Actually, I typed that sentence above a couple of months ago, but I hereby renounce it. We have reached a cross-roads. It is at this point that I realise that my ambition of creating a truly thorough documentary account of my life can never be realised. All I will say is that The Morph Files and Pingu were, and indeed are, terrific shows that I highly recommend. Also, that Batfink was a show that my sister and I both watched quite a lot, I think, and that I remember very distinctly a quote from it (that was probably repeated hundreds of times): “Your bullets cannot harm me – my wings are like a shield of steel”.

Now seems a good time to move onto an account of the babysitter/nanny who looked after us children for a number of years, from when I was probably two or three to when I was six or seven. Her name was Kirsty and she was probably the most awful person I’ve had to deal with in my life. Unfortunately, I don’t remember a whole lot about her apart from that. I’ll do my best to recall, though. Here is a stream of facts.

She was probably in her early 20s, she lived in South Turramurra with her mum (and possibly her dad) in a house that was likely quite small but had a sizeable pool out the back, she almost always had a very stern expression on her face, she was not affectionate, and, finally, upon reaching a certain age, I classified her as a Class A Bogan (“a certain age” being long after I last saw her, by the way).

As I suggested, all the facts point towards Kirsty being a rather ghastly person, although I did not have the experience, the finely tuned misanthropic judgement skills, the authority or the vocabulary to ever think of her as such when she was actually my nanny. Instead, at that time, I think I may have thought of her as “mean” but mainly just looked upon being with her with an intense dread, and not just because that entailed not being with my parents, whom, at that age, I still cleft to with animalistic fervour. It really was just awful for me, being in her company, more than for Miranda. I think this sibling disparity was mainly because, as far as I can remember, every time we went to her goddamn house, I was sent straight to bed in what I think was a greyish room, in a big bed, and wasn’t even allowed to whisper quietly to myself. Indeed, every time I did start whispering to myself, at a volume which I thought was very quiet (something I did, you should know, because I was imagining stories in my head and wanted to speak in various people’s voices – like maybe one voice might have been the voice of some soldier and another might have been the voice of a monster (this is really only hazy in my mind, although I think I do recall that they were usually quite vivid scenarios involving death)) she would storm into the room with what I remember to be a very angry, sour expression, and command me to stop talking and go to sleep. It’s quite odd, this memory, because I do definitely have the impression that this was an incredibly routine occurrence, and that she’d often have to come in multiple times per afternoon as I’d still continue to whisper to myself in what I thought were ever quieter, almost imperceptible voices – although they clearly weren’t. The funny thing is, though, that at the time I remember being almost baffled as to how she could hear me, because I truly did think I was whispering at a volume no human could possibly hear from another room. I think I might have leapt to some supernatural or paranoid conclusion that she was some sort of Disney-movie witch or otherwise non-descript fiend who had eyes everywhere, or could just somehow hear me because of some power, no matter how quiet my voice.  Either way, her constant suppression of my enjoyment and horrible castigation meant I really did fucking hate going to Kirsty’s house. It was rather traumatic.

Despite how long I spent in her thrall (and I think it was a traumatically long time), I have surprisingly few memories of being with her. I suppose I have very few memories of my childhood in general, but it’s a useful literary device to create such an apparent “paradox” (in the loose sense of that word) because I can use it as a basis for a witty comment about how I must have “repressed the trauma”. Unfortunately, I’ve just eliminated that possibility by being so self-conscious. Anyway, one little illustrative quirk that I do (seem to) remember is that Kirsty always equipped herself with those weirdly bleached-white, fake fingernails that a lot of women used to have a few years ago. I used to find those just a little bit creepy as a child, and, to be honest, still do. I also remember that we went to the Macquarie Centre quite a lot. The Macquarie Centre’s a large, popular and fully fitted-out mall (which even has a very well-used ice-skating rink) in the middle of a bleak, barren industrial complex in the godforsaken “suburb” of Sydney known as Macquarie Park. I used to hate going there. I have this one strong memory of trailing behind her, desolation filling my soul, as she marched through the horrible, porcelain-white, faux-palatial wasteland towards further whiteness, the eternal nothing. I don’t precisely remember a specific source of dread, but I know that it was real as any dread or horror or sadness I feel today. It does seem that she was truly a horrible woman. I have little doubt that she was the worst kind of person to occupy the job of baby-sitter, because it seems clear that she didn’t possess a maternal instinct or magnanimous spirit. If she found me cute, I certainly don’t remember her showing it. As I recall it, she only ever seemed to evince sneering contempt towards me, and spoke always with disdain. Not the right way to treat a child.

I think my mum always used to comfort and console me when I spoke of the horror of being with Kirsty, but my parents still employed her for a long time. When they finally disengaged her, I think my mum felt bad for putting me through such torment – certainly whenever I brought up the subject she used to say sorry. But it was too late… I am damaged.

You know what I haven’t mentioned yet about my early infancy? Toys. They were, unsurprisingly, a very important part of my life when I was a young infant. I had figurines, lego, toy replicas of larger objects, a remote-control car – the works. My favourite toy at probably around the age of 4 was Action Man. I don’t really know who the fuck Action Man was (as in what his fictional identity was), although I know he wasn’t from a movie, like an Indiana Jones doll or a Harry Potter figure or whatever. You can look him up on Wikipedia if you want. All I remember is that he was a tanned, ripped dude with a wrench in his belt (I think), and probably a proper weapon of some kind, and that I often pitted him against various other more nefarious figurines I had at my disposal, which probably included plastic animals and other homunculi and so forth. You know the idea. Perhaps this began when I was a bit older, but I know that at some point I paired Action Man with the blue remote-control open-topped jeep I had, enabling him to go on daring missions to save the planet against the baddies and so on. Again, this was probably when I was a bit older, but I remember that (at some point) I used to have a lot of fun using that remote-control car to transport peanuts to my dad. Transporting peanuts to one’s dad might sound vaguely slavish, but the fact that I could put the peanuts on the two car seats and transport them remotely made it tremendous fun.[6]

We always had a fairly significant lego set, but oddly enough I don’t remember really playing lego at home. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that I was never really the engineering type and lacked the attention span or creativity to make building intricate structures with lego interesting. In any case, that’s all that can be said about my toy habits as an early infant. There will be occasion for mentioning toys again, however, so if you happen to be a toy fetishist leafing through this book for descriptions of toy use, do not despair. In fact, I’ve got a terrific story to tell about toys. Get your toys out.  

A number of months ago, I had the privilege of rewatching footage of myself at the age of four that I had not seen for many years. We still have the video that I saw (and then saw again and tried to reproduce in literary form) on the family computer downstairs. Basically, it is a video entirely filmed by my dad of the family visiting this place called “The Animal Kindy Farm”, one of those zoos catering to kids where you get to feed the animals. I don’t know where it is – somewhere on the western outskirts of Sydney, I think – but my parents tell me that we visited that place a week or so after 9/11 took place, after going to a Lebanese restaurant, in order (according to my mum) to show solidarity with the Muslim community.[7] It’s a very moving video for me, and I really enjoy watching it. In the video, “I” (whatever that means (and in fact I’ll discuss what that means soon)) am a boisterous, rambunctious, talkative and ebullient little boy with a bowl of hair white as snow. My parents are basically recognisable, and my sister is a lot more quiet and undemonstrative than me. We all seem to be pretty happy as we walk around the farm, past the various pens, particularly me. I call llamas “baby elephants” and do other tremendously cute things like that, and make lots of delightful noises and seem quite clever for a four year old. A great watch.

I had actually seen this video many times since it was first recorded, but until that day a few months ago when I rediscovered it on the Mac downstairs (where my dad had only recently uploaded it, I think), there had, as aforementioned, been a long hiatus. Thus, suddenly seeing real video footage of “me” at such a young age again was really affecting. I was so moved by it, in fact, that either that day or a few days later I started trying to turn it into a short story in the third-person that I could add to my autobiography, which (the autobiography) I had provisionally, half-ironically titled “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. Here is that incomplete short story, mostly written in the third-person dramatic monologue that is characteristic of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

“When he was four and still in pre-school he and his family took a car trip out to the Animal Kindy Farm. When they arrived and his dad parked the car, he pushed open the car door and climbed out into the bright sunlight. Behind him and around him, his sister and his parents were getting out too. His dad walked round to the boot and retrieved his video camera, while his mother and sister started to talk.

The ground below him was dusty and there were little tufts of grass here and there. Above, there were cars next to each other, in lots of different shapes and colours. Around them and around the place were gum trees with the droopy green leaves which were familiar. To his left – through a great wire fence – was the Animal Kindy Farm, and he could already see some camels in the distance. It was all so big and exciting.    

He turned around and noticed his dad had turned on the camera and that it was now pointing it at him. His dad spoke to him: “Where are we?”

He replied, loudly, hoarsely: “At the Animal Kindy Farm!” He needed to impress the camera: he started running around from side to side; he spoke again: “At the Animal Kindy Farm, we’re at the Animal Kindy Farm.”

His dad started walking towards his mum and sister with the camera. Tom turned around.

His mum spoke while pointing to a tree right near them: “Bluegum.”

His sister nodded. Then she spoke, exuberantly: “Let’s see if I can see a camel – oh, there’s a camel!”

He was a bit annoyed coz he could have said the same thing but he hadn’t and now his sister had got the attention of mum. He was excited though. He started running around and then jumped in the dirt a bit.

His mum spoke again: “A bluegum farm.” Then she looked at him: “That’s a good way to dirty your pants.”

He heard but didn’t reply because his sister had climbed onto the bonnet of their blue car and was lying flat on it and he really needed to join in. He climbed and wriggled on top of the bonnet and now he and his sister were lying together, side by side; it was warm. His dad pointed the video camera towards them as they lay there.

His mum spoke to him and his sister: “It’s warm, is it?”

He nodded and so did his sister.

His dad spoke: “Will we go inside the farm, children?”

“Yeah” he said, then his sister too. He wanted to hear his voice some more so he said “Yeah” again, this time extending it into a slow drawl. As he hopped off the bonnet he emitted another hoarse noise: “Woooerh.”

“Badly scripted by Aitken films” his dad said. Then Tom saw his dad pressed the red button on the camera which stopped it recording.

After his dad and mum had talked to the person at the counter and asked for tickets and the paper bags full of fodder which smelt funny and that he and his sister could use to handfeed the animals, and after his mum and dad had paid for them, they entered the Animal Kindy Farm. Inside it, they were walking along a wide tiled pavement next to pens full of hand-feedable animals. The very first one pen, on the right, was the goat pen. He saw his dad started recording again when they arrived at it.

“Give him some food, Miranda” his dad said.

“Ok” she said softly.

He had to be heard. “I’m gonna see what sort of food – ”

His sister spoke, while holding the paper bag full of the fodder: “Do you have to put your hand in it?”

He had to be heard. After putting his hand in the fodder bag and feeling its unusual texture, he decided to shout: “Aw yuck!”

He was now kinda nervous about feeding the goats coz they had big teeth and they were sorta scary-looking. But he watched as his sister walked forward confidently, with a hand full of fodder-cylinders, towards one of the white goats, and he watched as she slowly but precisely put her hand in front of its mouth, and he watched as it licked the feed off her hand and she screamed slightly out of shock, and he watched as she turned around towards mum and dad and started laughing. He needed to do it himself. He walked up to the goat next to the one she had fed and thrust his fodder-filled hand in front of its face. It too licked his hand, and he too made a noise out of shock then began laughing, louder than his sister had.

His mum, enjoying her offsprings’ laughter greatly, began to laugh herself.

He needed to be heard. He shouted: “Ewwhyarck!”

His sister had grabbed more fodder from her bag and was now feeding another goat. She laughed again as it licked her hand.

He did the same but did not laugh, instead making the noise “Zaararahehe!” Then he said, loudly, “This is very animal ‘cept on land.” That didn’t make much sense.

As his sister was putting her arm out to feed another goat, his mum said to her: “Don’t – keep – make sure your hand’s out straight.”

His sister followed his mum’s advice and fed the goat – this time without making any noise.

He was looking in his fodder bag. He suddenly saw something interesting and needed to be heard. He shouted: “Hey, it’s got all different stuff in it!”

His dad, who was still videoing, just said “Yeah.” Then he said “Do you wanna go see something – ?

He was excited. “I wanna go an see something else, I wanna feed some more from my packet.”

His sister spoke: “Can we come back to the goat? – coz it’s really cute.”

“Yeah” he said and his mum said it as well. 

He still wanted to feed one last goat before they moved on though. He put his hand out in front of the two goats that were eagerly poking their heads through the fence. He noticed that he had already fed one of them. The one he had fed forced its head ahead of the other one; he jerked his hand back. “I want the other one.” He put his hand out again. As the wrong goat thrust its head towards it again, he jerked it back. “No” he said, imperiously. It happened again. “No.” … “No.” He finally got the right one and was satisfied.

He saw that his mum and his sister had already begun walking towards the next pen, which was full of big tall black furry animals. His dad was still filming him though, and they walked together over towards the black furry animal pen. As they approached, he still couldn’t work out what sort of animals they were but decided to say, as a hopeful guess, “He’s a baby elephant!”

His dad replied to him, in his pedagogical voice: “They don’t look like baby elephants, Tom.”

He wondered what they were… he suddenly got it: “No, they’re baby giraffes.”

His dad looked like he found that amusing. He wasn’t sure why. He had probably got it right. “You gonna feed one?” his dad asked again.

“No, this” he said, as he approached one of the black baby giraffes with food in his hand. When he put food in its mouth it licked his hand really vigorously: “Awokk! It’s realleh soft.”

“Try it again, Tom, I didn’t see that one” his dad said.

As he outstretched his arm towards one of the black baby giraffes again, his mum, who had been talking to his sister, said “Tom, you gotta open your hand out.”

He did and then, as the black baby giraffe started eating the fodder, he felt it nip his fingers slightly. “Hey!” he exclaimed while rapidly retracting his hand from the black baby giraffe’s mouth. “Don’t eat my fingers!” he said, imperiously.

Just after this, the donkeys, who were in the pen adjacent to the black baby giraffe pen, began grunting and eeyore-ing loudly.

“Even sounds like you, Tom," his dad said. 

His sister, who had been feeding some black baby giraffes of her own, heard this and laughed. 

Tom enjoyed being talked and laughed about. He wanted to make them laugh more so he emitted another inhuman noise: “Ohwehoh!”

“Come and say hello to them” his dad said.

He heard this but stood staring at the black baby giraffes. 

“Come on.”

He began to walk with his dad towards the donkeys, and as he approached them decided to comply with his dad’s request by shouting “Hallooolihhh!” at the pen. 

“Come and say hello” his dad said to his sister. Tom turned around towards them and saw his sister was approaching from behind, with his mum.

As his sister approached one of the donkeys she said “What does that one feel like?”

His dad replied: “Well, we’ll soon find that out.””

There ends the story. I was not particularly proud of it. In particular, I thought the dialogue was poorly rendered (to be specific, there are too many “X said”s coming before the actual spoken words) and I was not entirely sure whether I should attempt to use my four year old idiolect consistently throughout the story (as I would have to in order to pull off the third-person dramatic monologue style).

One other anecdote needs to be aired before I graduate to memories of primary school. It occurred when I was three, I think, so I possibly should have included it earlier, but (bizarrely) it didn't cross my mind.

It all started when the rents announced their intention to take us to Yum Cha. That context tells me it was most likely a Sunday (not that that matters very much). Soon after revealing the plan, I think my mum suggested to my sister that she put on her yellow dress. But my sister was very reluctant. At that age, she wasn't particularly keen on dresses, so this wasn't very surprising. What's important is the opportunity I saw in this gender failure -- a chance to claw ahead in the parental-gratification stakes. As Miranda complained and remonstrated with my mum, I boldly entered the fray, pronouncing that I would like to wear a dress myself. I was declaring to my mum that I was happy to fill the void left by a failed sister. I knew that such a daring and outlandish stance would attract attention. And so it did.

But it wasn't all good attention. It will come as no surprise that my mum was not that eager to authorise my preference -- at least in the beginning. Indeed, despite the logic  of the situation -- the fact that she should have been glad thatsomeone was willing to make use of the abundance of children's dresses in our house -- she did start off rather reserved. So much so, in fact, that once she established I was serious, she tentatively attempted to undermine my preference, even proposing to me that I wouldn't really like wearing a dress, and would probably regret it. Nevertheless, I stood firm. I was very insistent, and I was very determined. I did countenance the possibility that I would regret it, but I decided it was better to just be consistent and brave any approaching storms with the stoicism of a man (in a dress).

In any case, the doubts that I was experiencing faded into insignificance when I considered that my declaration had actually drawn all the attention away from Miranda. Soon after I announced my desire to wear the dress, my dad had been recruited in the deliberations, and my mum was (I think) in the throes of deep, philosophical concentration, presumably engaging her feminist conscience in some fashion. So I had succeeded in one regard, even before a decision had been made on whether I would be allowed to go to a restaurant in a dress. And in the end, I was allowed to go to Yum Cha in a dress.
Once I got there, though, I don't think I enjoyed it that much. I think it just made me a little nervous, more than anything. I also know I never wore a dress in public again (however, there is a picture of me wearing a pink tutu on the verandah).

So now we're done with my infancy. 

---

[1] Yes, as far as I recall it, I wasn’t even aware that we were learning a mysterious language called “French” when we were doing these exercises. I seem to have somehow missed that memo.

[2] Which means it’s meant to look feline rather than ranine.

[3] This is obviously using my current, 18 year-old language. I really don’t know what words I would have assigned to the parents’ concern with hygiene at the time, but I feel that the ones I did use captured my general feeling at the time. That said, I was probably not nearly mean and bitter enough to use words with the connotations that stupid and anal have.

The impossibility of truly documenting my past has been highlighted again. It is a ghastly spectre that haunts me constantly.

[4] Indeed, one episode depicts the germination of the idea behind Stonehenge, while in various episodes the antagonists are dinosaurs (including one particularly enjoyable episode in which the men are chased around by a velociraptor) and in another the family sleeps inside the skeleton of a woolly mammoth. If you know anything about prehistory at all, these details will immediately strike you as totally incongruent.

[5] I’m sorry if it seems a little weird reading a novel where this bloke is just talking about his favourite TV shows as an infant, but you’re reading it you fuckhead. 

[6] Note: not an endorsement of slavery.

[7] Who, at that time, were apparently copping a lot of flak and racist slander and so forth.