THERE’S NO EXCUSE FOR BEING OLD

Avid readers. As i rapidly approach my 50th year, still i find myself, even now, thrashing about the countryside in a futile search for wisdom. Still, even now, i plunder exotic and inappropriate places seeking enlightenment. In the nether regions of beautiful women. Atop a pile of nickel rocks in the Victoria Desert. In the cloudy depths at the bottom of a bottle of Cooper’s ale. In the Mongolian yurts of Mount Barker.

But it never used to be like this. When i was young, at that tender age when, in today’s truncated vernacular, i would have been known as a ‘tween’, things were so much simpler. What happened to that naïve and elemental primitive, that clear-eyed boy and his innate oneness with the universe?

When i was a snot-nosed pre-pubescent the days were long, the summers endless. Days spent building wooden carts to race down the hill, afternoons riding pushbikes, skidding down lanes with my cousin, building hideouts, treehouses, cutting a swathe through lupins at the lake with our makeshift wooden machetes, intrepid explorers that we were.

Then one day my mother gave me a pear tree. Like me, it was a mere sapling. I dug a careful, round hole in the garden, pulled away the wet hessian, and planted it. I watered that tree every day for months, nurtured it, fertilised it, until it grew tall and strong. Until one fateful day when it began to bear fruit.

And it was then that it all went pear-shaped.