Maybe it’s only me (on-line evidence shows it’s not), but I find this little glimpse into Gutsy’s rear-dom offensive. I find it hard to stop imagining his hairy dingle dell along with his wrinkled tree stump and crusty old bolders.

Don’t you just hate it when the wife starts a project you know you will have to finish? Ok, so it usually is a job that she has been after you to do for months, without any success. But, still, why does she have to get going today?

Like a cloud in black denim trousers, the Philistine of Mayfield West, walks the streets and reads aloud, quietly, from ancient texts, in search of hapax legomena. Sometimes, as he reads, he dreams of Gaza and the company of poets. In season, he finds tadpoles in muddy puddles in clogged drains and follows their changing.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, Transmit No Evil, Receive No Evil

Then, milking over, with a pair of shire horses and a dray, we’d drag the full milk cans up the hill to the truck stop each morning and bring the empties, from yesterday, back.

My two and a half year old grandson cannot settle. He is distracted by the other diners at an open restaurant. I take him to the sweets counter and suggest that he might like to select a pumpkin. “Would you like a pumpkin, grandson?”

As I recall, my inland childhood home town went to the beach at Christmas. For three weeks and more, whole families pitched tents in a temporary estate of waywardness. People became new neighbours. Rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant were mixed according to some order of space drawn up by rules of happenstance, or perhaps the accidents of a minor official who handed out lots like numbers in a housey game.

Becoming a grandfather makes you aware of what you used to know as a father. Now you must remember the rhymes and songs and charms and bouncing games. Now you must recall the codes of comfort and care. Now your must be open again to the innocent stare of a child.

When I speak, the Voice I hear is not me. For poets, the voice in which they speak can sometimes seem like that of a foreigner. Words appear to just speak themselves and yet in their just being spoken, the spoken words, in the voice of another, become the words of another.

Tony Abbott was standing as a civilian, a politician amongst warriors. And, being amongst warriors, Tony aligned his speech with his audience; something a skilled orator might well do. Rather than set himself apart, as a statesman, Tony went along with the drift of things. Speaking with poets, one might well quote poetry; speaking with warriors, one turns to the workplace vernacular.