The Day The Clown Blinked

So I've sat most of today, absolutely loathing this girl at work who, nominally, is my friend but at work we just don't get on because she asks a lot of open ended sarcastic questions that imply you are failing at your job. Actually what I've done today for large parts is just endlessly watch this video two guys made about Penguin. I didn't watch it for any other reason than it gave me a break from working on my epic 2001 Youtube playlist, but also because it's kind of interesting to see things as they really are, not as my tiny blonde permanent tanned 8ight year old mind would like them to be. For some reason no one seems to have made one about Kilwinning, the place I went to school, which is fair enough I suppose, but I wouldn't mind some sort of visual representation of the place for the sake of accuracy. This visual representation would explain something to me - why when I sketch mentally about the place, I'm always miserable, and it's grey, and I'm depressed and getting an Indian burn or talking to pimped out drug dealers, and yet when it came time to leave and move back to Penguin, where in my mind at least I was happier than at any time in my life, I cried like a baby. I don't think is a logical path to take - it may have had something to do with sophistication though. You see the thinking in Scotland was, and probably still is, somewhat dismissive of outsiders. I love Scotland, I should say that because I've made it sound otherwise, but certainly you wouldn't want to stand out. I went to school with a kid called Martin who looked a bit like AC Slater from Saved By The Bell is he had a flattop haircut. He was quietly spoken with a slight stammer that did nothing to knock his confidence. We were queuing for Yorkie bars in the grim countenance that passed for our recess snack hut, a cupboard from which harassed middle aged women would tell you exactly what they thought of your coupons. Since I was a nervous, slightly fidgety child I would often impart stories with exaggerated punchlines or over impressive social boasts, but in that case, I definitely had a story to tell, that I had been invited to a party, at night, in Kilwinning, with girls and probably a scary movie. Maybe even punch! Martin barely even took his eyes off his Peppermint Aero to tell me it sounded shit, and then walked off. I think that's the difference between Scotland and Penguin. If I had played the party down, he'd have said I was an idiot for not looking forward to it and then walked off. In Penguin, you never had to worry about the deeper meaning of anything, you never had to worry about being put in your place. At least that's how I remember it, although I'm sure it's nonsense, the innocent thoughts of a child - I mean, if you fell off the flying fox, I'm sure someone was discussing what an idiot you were at the bakery the next day...

I can't remember the exact circumstances surrounding the party. The girl who was hosting was sort of an Elizabeth Berkeley clone if Elizabeth Berkeley had more acne, more untameable hair and fainted in the library once a month. That's my main memory of our party hostess, she was always fainting in ever more dramatic swoony circumstances. I think, in fact I know, she wanted to winch my best friend, and I was sort of surplus to requirements in the whole situation. But hey, I'd brought punch, what was he bringing? There's a possibility it was a Halloween party, which would explain the movie, but if you think I'm going into details of my one and only halloween costume, we'll just move on right away. The punch is my most significant memory though, not just because it's a rare example of me mixing a drink that didn't have the word spider in it, as the implications were that at this party, we would all have our first drink of alcohol. Never happened of course - I didn't drink until I was 18teen, which should tell you the quality of my punch, for the most part if sat bobbing quietly in the corner acting as a conversational makeweight during awkward lustful one way glances. Anytime the conversation was muted, it was all hey, punch is in the corner. Her house was a vague collection of wicker furniture from that shop at the end of the Irvine mall that stank of cane seats and drunken staff, and family photos where she was always smiling with a suspicious nervous grin. Her best friend was called Sarah, and she had an upturned nose, which, had I been more musically cognescant, would have resulted in some sort of immature Billy Joel parody. She didn't like me because during one of our classes, taught by my Dad incidentally, we all had to on a pink card write something nice about everyone else in the room and I, and I swear this was innocent taking the piss out of the exercise move, said she had a nice nose. So she wasn't talking to me outside of university style lectures about respecting other people, I was in a cane chair probably being yelled at for continually mentioning the punch, Elizabeth Faint was no doubt fussing over ordives and trying to get my best friend to pash her, and my best friend was no doubt lapping up the attention with a pretty smug smirk and then whispering to me that the whole night was completely terrible and we should run away and leave. As far as parties went, it was hardly the Hooligan X rave at the Ayr Pavillion. Our host tried to get the party started with a tape of her favourite rave tunes, and it chewed up, crumbling in her hands. It would have been prudent to leave, but my Mum wasn't picking me up for another four hours so I had to sit back down, either that or get a pen and try and unpick the cassette. Did I mention I made punch?

Time moved slowly. Conversation picked up slightly, although in my case any incremental increase in attention was noticable only because I had a theory that Altern 8 were the greatest band in the world shot down, and because really I didn't need to be there in that living room, they could have managed quite happily without me. Except they did need me, because I was the only one making conversation. Which is how the Lorna incident happened. Someone finally cued some sort of ravey dancey hands in the air like you just don't care track up without the tape dying, and things were going a little better. Still no one drank the punch though. The upturned nose girl still wasn't having any - she preferred Marti Pellow. I was in the middle of some sort of early 90s discourse on the nature of music when all the girls went into the kitchen while I was in mid sentence. I was used to this, I didn't even miss a syllable, but then the hostess was back out into the living room asking me if I would go out with Lorna. Lorna? Who was Lorna? I hadn't even noticed Lorna, and this was a party of five (not that party of five) people. Was she the girl with the Halloween silver face paint on? What does she look like? Why is she hiding in the kitchen? Am I still going out with Debbie? Why is no one drinking the punch? Of course, this was a complex question asked at a strange and awkward time, so I had to respectfully decline the blind date, or my friend did it for me because that was his manner, and then there was just chaos and pandemonium as a silver swish ran out of the kitchen, into the street and burst into tears on the front lawn. I've never made a girl cry since, or had before, and I hadn't done much to provoke the situation, but the party ground entirely to a halt as the girls ran down the road to try and soothe her hurt feelings. My friend, in his infinite wisdom, didn't counsel me to go and be nice to Lorna and score a sympathy pash, but raided through the collection of blank tapes round the base of the TV to try and find embarrassing home movies of the girl who was hosting the party. We found a lot of episodes of Alias Smith and Jones, but dirt, no dice. When the girls returned, without Lorna, I was subjected to a lot of long boring relationship talk, even though I effectively had done nothing wrong and was, I think, spoken for. I tried valiantly to escape with a few pointed remarks about the decline of Stock Aitken and Waterman, but it always came back to my flippant cruelty. Mum was three hours away, my friend was smirking, and there was I, pinned with my back to the rattan, knees pressed up against my chin, listening to a well rehearsed talk that I would become incredibly familiar with over the years. It felt very much like growing up, or it would have, if it wasn't for how I was dressed...

Naturally, the Lorna incident was, as is the nature of early teenage parties, a big deal for an hour of fraught tension and variations of what a bastard I was until the next round of ordives came out. Everything eventually calmed down, and upturned nose girl began a controversial discourse on her first experience with cocaine. With that nose? Anyway, in the midst of our conversation, we had forgotten that the Steven King film IT had been put on the TV. IT of course has nothing to do with computers, it was a film about a killer clown or some such gubbins that I was too cool to think was scary. In fact we took intermittent breaks from our little mini kievs and discussions about the future (I stole most of my ideas from Debbie) that included the words massive a lot. If you've seen IT, the movie not the industry (yes you've done that joke get on with it) you will know that at a certain point, something happens where a photo in a book winks and then begins to bleed. I say something happens, because whatever happened, we weren't really paying attention or expecting it and I'm not ashamed to say it scared the crap out of us. Four people who had spent a tedious amount of time having psuedo intellectual conversations about rave music and inter personal relationships to the soundtrack of a ticking clock had just been reduced to the same scared kids who had hid behind the couch a few years earlier during Gremlins (or was that just me?)...at which point, we had to face the uncomfortable realisation that the girl with the upturned nose had, for whatever reason, jumped into my lap at the moment of film fright impact. We looked at each other, then at her, then at me, then at the punch bowl, and then back at each other, and then she had to slowly unpeel herself with as much dignity as she could, and go back to her wicker chair. No one spoke for a long time - we were embarrassed about the leaping and the screaming and the unpeeling and the shifting and the scary clowning...in fact it felt like no one spoke for hours, everyone staring at family photos and the ceiling and the ground...as far me, I had made a girl cry and had another girl jump into my lap and I had a vague realisation that this was the peak of my attractiveness. My friend had even lost his smirk, so upset was he that he had lost his cool. The Elizabeth Berkeley was just glad she didn't faint, and upturned nose girl was mortified that her righteous proto feminist demeanour had faded under pressure. Someone though eventually had to say something, I mean, Mum wasn't coming for another hour...

...and you can probably guess what I said, and how it went...still, it's their fault, they could at least have tried it...

If it wasn't for two songs you'd get no writing, if it wasn't for wrong judgements you'd be seeing me on Twitter

Somewhat inevitably, there are very few pop cultural artefacts in my home that are in not in some way directly influenced by the thoughts and feelings of someone else. For instance, I got into Beth Orton as a direct consequence of trying to impress a girl and went off her when she went out of fashion. However, recently I have found this to be of awkward consequence - not thinking about Beth Orton, god knows what she's doing, although Alive Alone is the single most played track I use when I want to write. Without Alive Alone and My Beautiful by Lennon, you'd probably be mostly looking a blog of Youtube clips. I'm become a far more independent thinker as I progress through life, as I hope the Cascada clip may prove, and am less likely to be impressed by the recommendations of others. Next to my laptop, which as laptops do is current away from it's normal resting place surrounded by bits of paper and external hard drives, is a book that my uncle has given me. Without going into a lot of detail it's a book from the 1970s which, it has been indicated to me, I will find hilarious. I am now quite sure that I will not as a result of this not being my decision to read this book, but as a result of the implication that this book will be an extension of my sense of humour. My Dad, for what its worth, often says naebody is putting him a box - he doesn't mean this literally, although it will be a hilarious family memory at his funeral - he means that whenever someone applies a label or a personality trait to him, he will rebel against it. No one who wears the safe as houses golf jumpers he wears can truly be an independent spirit, but he did spend a week in London stalking the Rolling Stones and sleeping on Hyde Park benches. In that context, it hardly seems right to talk myself up as some sort of No Logo down with corporations free thinker, especially considering I bought No Logo because someone told me to, when even my own father has bigger credentials than me when it comes to personal freedom. In fact, everything I do is in some way influenced - why do I keep a blog? Someone else had one. Why do I support Liverpool? Craig Johnston told me to. Why do I love Britney Spears? Someone told me not to and I rebelled. And why am I completely incapable of forming an intimate personal relationship and converting all my hopes, dreams and fears into audible conversation? Well, that comes from my Dads side of the family...if only because if it is something I can take personal responsibility for, it's something I have the capability to do something about it. And, to be honest, such difficult questions, well, they aren't really Sunday afternoon questions. Not when there's A League on TV, movies on demand, a million other modern day distractions entirely set up just so you can blame someone else for the choices you made and for not getting off the couch. Especially Robert Downey Jr...

All of which is a slightly intellectual way of saying someone told me to go to a chicken shop and try out the chicken there and I did. A new store is usually a hotbed of excellent customer service and patent gimmickery, and this one is no exception. A middle aged Italian woman is huskily trying to persuade a man in jeans that are slipping floorward due to gravity and not the throes of passion that he should take the time to complete the survey on how effectively he has received his moderately priced chicken. Oddly, they don't give me the survey to complete, which is good by me. One hairdresser in Melbourne, after I filled in a survey, took to sending me a birthday card every year for three years. My waitress is an elphin teenager with porcelain skin shoehorned into a uniform and baseball cap, her sole concession to modernity a nose ring that sparkles under the flourescent light. I don't know what to make of her, the sample size is too small. Certainly the problems in her life appear very similar to mine, too much supervision, too many bodies keeping an eye on her, making sure that the pasta salad she loads into a plastic tub is evenly spread out. She doesn't enjoy this supervision and shoots her employers several filthy looks. A fight breaks out in the store, there's a chicken under the heater in public display, and no one is willing to take personal responsibility for it being there. I know if I had been her age, the miniature doll, I'd have said maybe it flew there and been bollocked for it. I know from her expression she couldn't care less about the chicken, and in my head I construct a mutual back story for her and me - working to live, trapped in a dead end job, care factor about her environment and work regulations zero as rapidly aging teachers used to say to me in the mid 90s. Out the back, a balding Italian man, all sweat and aged wrinkles from grim determination, is making chips and cursing just loudly enough for everyone on the left hand side of the shop to hear. When he comes out, he's suddenly a jolly Italian waiter of stereotypical renown, all jokes and smiles and an overexaggerated accent. The porcelain doll looks tired as she hands over my chicken, as if she's about to impart some terrible secret to me about what's in the chicken, but a woman with a Helen Lovejoy haircut stands directly on her shadow, repressing her individuality through the medium of corporate approved standards, and whatever conversational nugget was about to be imparted between employee and better than usual dressed customer. I step blinking into the faded late afternoon sunset, as two men in suspiciously matching polo shirts have a long and involved argument about the merits of Ricky Ponting. Ultimately, they make several offensive comments about another cricketer, and draw disapproving looks from the porcelain doll, who they've assigned the crucial spirit breaking duty of transporting garbage from shop to skip, with a time limit no doubt imposed...

Her twin works in my local pizza shop. She's the same height, same dimensions, same colour hair, same skin, probably same dipshit boyfriend everyone who looks like that at that age has, a no hoper called Darren or Dave who drives a Datsun and thinks the world would be better if we called all Muslims, although she's sans a nose ring and not shoe horned into a baseball cap. I think her name is Teighan or some such corrupted fancy spelling. The difference is Teighan, I believe, owns the pizza shop or has personal responsibility for all the toppings or something, because she's usually in there on her own. So she does whatever she wants. There's a flickering of recognition whenever you go in there, but she serves you when she wants, and if that means she has to finish reading an article about some celebrity with shinier hair and an ever changing body shape before you can get a small garlic bread, then that's what she will do. I know a friend of mine who swears this is unbearably cool, and would do anything to be with her. Of course, his free spirit isn't strong to enough to take personal rejection so he'll never say anything, but he's attracted to the fact that she's always upbeat and impeccably cool, even going so far as to say that she must have the coolest taste in music, which in his case would be Metallica and other such bands what rock. I think this is one of the reasons I don't ask people out myself, like blue eye shadow girl, since the slightest imperfection can bring the pedestal crashing down. I don't really have the heart to tell him that when I went back into the pizza shop the other day to get my pizza that she was free spiriting her little heart out to Smashmouth, dancing so badly she put my late evening drunken wedding Zulu stylings into the shade. I admire her lack of self consciousness, but I can't find it cool now I've seen such bad dancing. Of course, there's a presumption in my wanderings that the girl in the chicken shop is miserable, that Teighan dancing freely is happy, just as they no doubt take my lack of conversation and nervous darting eyes to mean that I'm miserable when as soon as I get in my car I'm singing along to Shakira, not a care in the world, which in fairness if she saw my bad singing would lead to a long ponderance on human nature in her own blog, although she seems like a Twitter chick. The trick is, she's unsupervised of course, where she supervised after every move, there would be no pizza based self expression. I still remember once ringing a close friend of mine, the girl who inspired my love of Beth Orton, and her being ice cold on the phone. It was the last time we ever spoke, and it's taken me many years to realise, it was really her Mum who didn't like me, and she was in the background. Should I have tried ringing again? Not really - I'd probably spent far too much time constructing the citadel of her perfection, and we'd start dating and there she'd be doing the watuzi to Smashmouth some years down the track or telling me that Big Ms were the devils drink. And we'd argue and mutually realise we were horribly unsuited, and I'd end up writing poetry in a journal and sitting in my base...oh right, you are completely correct Teighan, I should pick up my pizza...it has been sitting there a long time while I've been musing...

I find such brief, miniature interactions fascinating, an entire world, an entire personality assigned rightly or wrongly in an entirely singular interaction. I've seen Teighan before, but not doing enough to form any further judgements, although she did buy Ralph magazine once, hence my dipshit boyfriend theory. I love peoples attempt to spin an image for you as well, in my case my flippant casual joking is a terrible mask for conversational anxiety. With certainty, the care free dancing of Teighan isn't replicated at all parts of life. And then there was Spud - I say Spud for fear of Kilwinning mob based retribution, the most vicious kind of mob retribution, death by exagerrated story telling. Spud used to be our school drug dealer, he'd stand with his back to the wall at all times, tightly lipped, dressed in the sharpest suit Oxfam could provide him with. Largely he was harmless, although harmless was a relative term for a middle aged man in a pimp suit from a charity shop dispensing drugs to school children. By 2009 standards I think thats harmless, bit dodgy for 1991 though. I often wonder if he was driven out by less permissive times later in the decade. Anyway, Spud would tell all the first years about a particularly bloody knife fight at railway station - I was initially impressed, but in my head I still wondered about the Vanilla Ice stab wound/cat scratch theory of bigging oneself up to outsiders. He was also one of the first people I ever knew who tried to apply the logic of Star Wars to every day life. Considering I couldn't stand up to bullies, I was surprised how sassy I was to Spud, but there was just something not quite right about him that I would often feel the need to call him on. One fateful day, as snow fell on ashphalt and weakly mashed potatoes fell on plastic trays, I asked him, straight out, mano a mano, if he really stabbed someone at Ayr train station. There was just the tiniest flicker of self recognition, just the tiniest moment of doubt, and since it was just me and him around and he knew I certainly wasn't going to be buying crack at a reasonable price, he looked for a moment as though he was about to impart that he'd made the whole thing up, but luckily he composed himself through two sharp tugs on his collar - not a euphemism - and said of course he did what kind of question was that. And who knows, maybe he did, and maybe I really did get off with the girl I took to the pictures to see Home Alone when I told him I did...truthfully, our interactions were so brief, limited to no I don't want any crack and that one conversation, that our knowledge of each other was limited, and a mutual complete character study never really came to pass. I think about that a lot, as people pass me by, just for brief moments, that I really might have it all wrong...

Mind you, she really danced badly though...no one should dance from the arms and have such limited hip movements...I'm getting my pizza from more corporate sources...

Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance (in K-Mart or in Art)

There's a song out at the moment - not The Feminine Complex one soundtracking my watching of lowly Setanta Sports shows - something about being alive and how the singer was moping about the house until she picked up at a nightclub and there was a bitching dance track on , I think it's the new Izzy single - and I imagine it makes total sense in a nightclub, you know, power of redemption through music and all that. Where it seems immensely wrong is blasting over a tinny PA system in the middle of K-Mart at 1 in the afternoon, where it's feel good charms don't match up to being trapped in the middle of a pincer and pram movement round the DVD section just as someone does something to make the entire aisle smell terrible and a little kid arcs directly and unerringly into your lower leg. Alive? That's an ironic joke, tell that to the staff, they don't seem very alive. It's like at work sometimes when you are feeling horribly depressed and down and the radio starts playing Get The Party Started on a rainy Monday afternoon. The best thing about my local KMart these days is they've equipped the shelf fillers with flourescent yellow jackets as if they are about to go cycling in the dark or something, which is almost as alarming as the fact that today blue eye shadow girl was rocking a quite alarming pair of nerd glasses (meh, it's still blue eye shadow girl). Our KMart used to be beautifully disorganised, the DVDs assembled in some sort of surrealist jumble on a wooden table where by any random selection seemed was certain to be a Jim Carrey film, but now an efficiency expert has swept in and it's lost it's shambolic character. There used to be a girl who worked in there, a blonde characterless girl with an alarmingly sharp nose, who's primary function used to be minister of morale - it might just be happenstance and co-incidence, but on the very few occasions I went into the place, she always seemed to be telling some sort of acidic or slightly libellous joke to the shaven headed middle aged man who was supposed to remember cash could be exchanged for goods and services. As I'd stand impatiently armed with a fierce pout and no where else to go (I'd hope they didn't notice that), she'd calmly and casually finish her joke, and then turn on her Clarks issue soft shoes at which point the man behind the counter would finish a sandwich and then serve me while she went elsewhere to tell someone else the joke. Now, she's in charge of putting wrestling figures and soft toys on the shelf, and walks with the embittered air of the disconsolate nostalgia freak, furiously throwing the toys and wishing she could back to her old job, and sometimes it's just fun to watch her as she puts the trolley back in the stock room, reloads, and sees the glory days of her youth and her high fliration beams fade one Powderfinger song and one stacked trolley of board games at a time...

My school that I went to in Kilwinning wasn't exactly a glamorous school. It wasn't terrible, but it was kind of crumbling, there was a much exaggerated threat of inter religious violence, my diet for a month was three packets of M&Ms and a can of coke and no one really minded, and chancey characters with names like The Big Yin, Interscope, MacSexy and Sarah would freely sell drugs from underneath whichever giant block of concrete they could find to hind under. However what was good about it was, for the most part, the people would conjure up stoicism in the face of what could have actually been quite depressing circumstances. Kilwinning wasn't exactly Las Vegas, but on certain days it felt wonderful to be there when, say, someone would read a particularly outrageous story in English or would cheek the Maths teacher in a way that just didn't happen in Tasmania. I think the main thing I got out of Scotland, apart from losing my permatan, was that sense that even though you were ten, you were incredibly adult, and I liked that, something I really remember thinking when little eleven year old girls in pig tails were discussing oral sex and alcohol. That was the biggest adjustment I had to make when I was in Scotland - especially at school discos, which were a sort of Degrassi like experience compared to the more genteel world of Burnie where someone would hand crank a gramophone and play some sort of waltz and then everyone would get a packet of Twisties. In Scotland everything seemed like preperation for real life. The discos were inside a big assembly hall, and you would be ruthlessly assessed for pash (or winch as it were) suitability. I was completely off the ball though and thought that these events were for dancing and chatting, and so, with the lack of accumulated wisdom that all my twelve year old self had, I would get on down to the latest hits of James or whatever without realising that I should have been cultivating a much more enigmatic image while staying in the corner, buying bags of candy hearts from the DJ that he assured me were drugs, and maybe just deigning to speak every so often to comment that everything sucked. I was certainly dressed well enough, in my expensive Italian FILA boots, but clearly something was missing, an education of sorts, maybe some kind of life lesson, because my winching days never seemed to materialise in Scotland. The closest I ever got was with a girl called Nicola, a slightly nerdy but still pretty cute girl, but I blew it with some sort of terrible joke that she didn't get and then I had to cover the situation by saying that we had pashed...it was lucky I was moving away back to Tasmania by that point, because there were only so many dances in a circle I could ruin with my over enthusiasm...and to be honest, while I loved the place, there was part of me already thinking that if this was all there was in life, sorry Peggy Lee, I really shouldn't keep dancing nor break out the booze...mostly because the DJ sold me the booze and it turned out to be iced tea that smelled funny...

Art in Kilwinning was a subject you survived - our teacher was an alcoholic which from a school where the Chemistry teacher had a vision impairment wasn't so bad. He had a lot of rough days and behind on the shelf above his head were a number of empty and clean vodka bottles that he claimed were an installation. He would quite often nod off at his desk, and he had a ruddy red face and jet white (well jets aren't black if you think about it?) hair and a big wart on his cheek. One thing you couldn't fault was passion for art, which was big as his passion for concealing things in hip flasks. He was very firey if he was motivated, and I know that he was always angry at me because he thought I was good at art and wasn't trying, and then he found out I actually was rubbish and went on to other things. I did get an A off him once, but I didn't have the heart to tell him what he thought was a hippo was actually meant to be a rocket ship, and claimed it proudly. The days he was asleep the art room would descend into a biblical anarchy - mostly involving a student going to the toilet and coming back and sitting on their chair which in their absence would be covered in paint. My memory for a long time told me we drew a nude model, but then I remembered it was just some girl took her clothes off for something to do. Our teacher understandably sick of the disrespect he received would come in his tattered suit, judge the mood of the room and give up if he sensed any untimely rowdiness. I always remember that suit, a strangely stained number that spoke entirely through the streaks and marks, but I also know that no matter how his body or addiction failed him, or how hopeless the situation was trying to teach the classic painting styles to Kilwinnings future crack addicts and petty criminals, there was also dignity in him, and oddly, it was in his tie...it might sound stupid, but no matter how messed up his suit was, or how unkempt this hair, his tie was always straight and perfect...funny how that sticks in my mind...guess you have to focus on something in the midst of flying paintbrushes and sights out of the window that no blog should have to repeat...

It seemed as though we would just go one like this forever, on some sort of alcoholic rollercoaster where one day you got to paint and the next day you were lucky if you weren't covered in paint. One day though he came in with a briefcase, a new suit and a steely resolve. Even out smartest kid, a bit of a twat called Brendan with a smart mouth who was always pretending to be stoned when the strongest drug he ever had was a Halibut Orange, was moved to a blissful period of silence by this new man who had wandered in. His twelve steps were all in the direction of us, and eventually he pulled up a (thankfully not covered in paint) chair and eyeballed us. He looked like a televangelist to be honest, and I half expected that he was about to launch into that story about the butterfly and the fisherman that my parish priest in Penguin used to always go on about. Instead, he let out a deep mournful sigh and said absolutely nothing for five minutes. After five agonizing minutes, he loosened his perfect tie a little, looked out the window, and said something along the lines that he had disrespected his teacher at school, and then woke up one day realising that his teacher was right all along, he didn't know everything, and now here he was in the twilight of his life, rotting away, wondering where the time went. He then directly looked at one of us, all I know it wasn't me, and said that his job was to teach us to value our youth, and respect our futures, and he wouldn't let us piss it away on stupid pranks and fights and drugs. And with that, he pushed his chair back into position and began what actually quite a productive lesson. It was a genuinely moving speech, the subtext imparted that he didn't want us to feel regret like he did, the last battlecry on a worn out man with problems. However, as a moving speech, it was in the category of a eulogy, because for the rest of the year he never cared again, and was soon back to wearing the coat of a thousand stains. Of course, we didn't realise that at the time the potency of his words, but now, maybe more than ever, it's sort of resonating in my head, the eternal sin of regret, best expressed by an angry and confused alcoholic...expressed by the angry face of a girl who's seen better days at work...

And expressed by the fact that I still can't find any lamingtons in the shop...