Father's day: Learn to cry

Yeah, I complain a lot. And then something happens that reminds me how much I've learned.

There's this thing called the Aussie Bloke, a most damned creature indeed. Feelings? For the weak. Talking? Un-Australian. Emotions? The stuff of poofters. Tears? Beat them out of the male when he's three years old so they never return.

Heaven knows how much damage was done to how many people, but I suppose the depression statistics would help tell the story.

I won't reiterate the personal journey this time. Those who already know, know. Those who don't can read the back story on this blog. If it were written in the corner of an eye with a needle, as the Thousand Nights and a Night puts it, it would yet provide instruction.

Here on father's day, I'm remembering that my father had emotion beaten out of him by World War II. He was difficult to please: I took up drumming in early high school, and the first opinion he ever expressed about it was in a music shop in Penrith in 1975, when I needed a new kick drum pedal.

So there I was, trying not to buy the really expensive one I really wanted, talking to The Dude at the counter while dad mooched about the shop, apparently uninterested. And when I finally decided that he could at least stand $40 instead of $20 or $100, I waved him over.

“This one?” he asked me. I guess I tried to excuse the expense, but he had other things on his mind. Because he turned to The Dude and asked whether drum kits came with kick drum pedals.

“No, you choose the pedal when you buy the kit” was the answer, more or less.

And dad waved at one of the drum kits on offer and said we'd take that as well. At about $400 – this was in the 1970s, remember – it was the second-largest amount of money spent on me in one hit (the largest was the re-attachment of the last joint of the little finger of my left hand, in 1963, and he'd only finished paying that off in 1970).

That had me stammering. Something about “I don't need new drums, just a new kick pedal.”

“Well, you've put up with that second-hand junk for two years. You practise morning and night. So I know you're serious. You deserve this.”

No, that is not verbatim. Even if I was good at verbatim – I am now, after 25 years at a journalist, but I was in the first half of my teens with a father I didn't know how to talk to, then – too much time has passed. But: he bought the drums, and I worked extra hard, because.

I wouldn't have minded him being just a little more emotional, in the brief time between his departure from the toxic overwork of his 1960s job, and his descent into dementia in the early 80s.

And here I am, bruised and battered and still bloody here, getting all misty-eyed over a picture of a UN security guard playing “you got my finger” with a Syrian baby. This one: pic.twitter.com/JQwkMmOY8J

Misty? You bet. 

You know what? I like this version of me, a whole lot more than the one that tried to learn not to cry. It's having the leg-chain unlocked. The weight lifted. It's bloody liberating, not having to pretend that I'm the tough guy.

And suddenly, decades too late, the curtain is drawn back. There's a whole world out there that you can understand better if you let it hurt. Let it touch. Let it rattle the damned-to-hell Aussie Bloke, leave him dead in a gutter because it's so much better to feel than not.

"Soften the fuck up" is probably the best advice I ever gave myself. I certainly like me more this way. Will I cry when my throat chokes and the eyes leak? Yep.

And if anyone thinks I've turned soft, let them try to convince me. The hard bit still lives inside, and can be called at need.

Dad: here's my Father's Day wish to your long-cold ashes. I wish you'd had the chance to learn this. You'd have been nicer with a tear in your eye. Now and then.

I'm not so strong

 

People tell me they admire my strength because of my posts about Ms T and I, both here and on Twitter.

It's not strength, it's just life. “Here's what happened: deal with it.”

And I'm now going to retreat into what a writer does if he's a coward, and call upon metaphor. "Deal" is the keyword.

I don't have many obsessions. I did, once, but they get shed, one by one, when reality becomes too pressing. But I have protected one thing that reconnects Richard in 2013 with Richard of 1970.

I play cards in a world that's slowly forgetting how. My game is Five Hundred. Since there are so few real-life card-playing people, I play my games online, sometimes against humans, sometimes against computers, never for money.

“If you need a particular distribution of cards to exist, assume it exists. If it doesn't, you weren't going to win anyway.” – This is a paraphrase of a line delivered by a character called Vector Shaheed in the five-book epic Sci-Fi “Gap Series” by Stephen Donaldson.

In Five Hundred, it's advice that works. I can have a week without losing a single game, and on a good day, I can win a game without losing a single hand. I've sometimes wondered about dollars, but no: the game I can reliably win at doesn't have any significant play-for-money community, online or off. Oh well.

But it really does work: I can construct my bids (six hearts, seven hearts, misere, whatever) around the assumption that everyone else has the cards I need them to hold, and I can outplay them if I'm wrong.

Then it goes wrong, and I'll lose for weeks at a time. That's just how probability works. Sometimes, all the distributions run wrong.

Out in life, I can't just ignore it when the cards shuffle badly. But the only way out of the forest (to swap metaphors for a moment) is to keep going. Keep shuffling, keep dealing, keep bidding, and wait for the win.

The wins happen. They really do. At the moment, if I sound down, it's merely because three years of broadsides have left me (probably clinically) depressed. But the objective part of my mind can count off the wins.

Ms T will soon move to three-monthly chemo. That hints at a new balance in the war of attrition between cytotoxins and the immune system that's trying to kill her. And it's a huge win: it means there might be six week stretches in 2014 when she's suffering no side effects of cyclophosphamide.

After eighteen months, she's broken through the pain specialists' waiting lists. If that gets results, 2014 could see us bushwalking together again. I don't hold her hand over rocks or steps because she needs me to; I do it because I like it better that way. To hand her down the Den Fenella (a small walk in Wentworth Falls that was laid out by someone with soul and a taste for drama) would be beyond price. It's our own, personal, her-and-me pilgrimage and it's been three years since we walked it.

Death, right now, seems less imminent and more distant. We both know the cold equations will take her from me, but not now. Since she's shy four major and two minor arteries, this is a big plus.

But none of these things represent strength. To me, strength is exampled by someone like Nelson Mandela: not because he was a saint all his life (read the bio), but because he chose to assume burdens that he could have ignored. Mandela could have done as I do, and devoted himself only to the small struggles of his own life.

I wish I was strong. I wish I could take my struggles and build out of them something that changed the world. But I cannot: I'm too small, and too devoted to the heart that beats next to my own. I can't be away from Ms T to fight larger battles, because keeping her alive and holding her is more important to me than the world outside.

Which makes me not strong, but selfish, and I don't mind it if you tell me so. 

Where I can devote my strength, I will. But most of my thew and sinew, my mud and muscle, my heart and soul, I have promised to the small and simple, because in 1991 I stood in front of a wedding and made my promise.

I will carry my love to the grave. Deal me the bad hand, I'll play it to my best and hope I can squeeze a win from the rest of the world.

A vignette of friendship

This is only because I treasure friends, and always feel bad about not staying in touch.

So: one friend reminded me of another I hadn't heard from for a while, and Google revealed a phone number.

Back when we were in close contact – working in the same place, and she'd had Ms T's roasts at our home and raved about them, and drunk too much wine with us from time to time – I knew that she (name withheld, etc) liked to sing. As I do.

I don't have a bad voice, and I can hold a tune, but I know from trying to sing in public that I have no personality behind a microphone. But singing with friends I love dearly, and it nearly never happens.

You can imagine that finding a workmate who liked to sing, and – treasure of treasures! – could hold a melody while I improvised harmonies … Well, it's a treasure. Even if it bugs the hell out of workmates on a Friday afternoon:

“If you two do 'Afternoon Delight' again I'm going to kill you!” That sort of thing. (I can't actually remember what songs bugged our workmates - after a decade, I'm just guessing).

But we fell out of touch, because I've been paying attention to matters closer to home, and she's been forging a new career.

And I called, because I remembered and found the number. And I remembered our party trick, and I dialled and let the phone answer and she gave her name, and I didn't give mine. Instead, I started singing:

“Stars shining bright above you

Night breezes seem to whisper 'I love you'

Birds singing in a sycamore tree,

Dream a little dream of me.”

She might have tried to keep up for a line before she collapsed in laughter and we returned to a normal phone call.

We talked for half an hour, apologising that we couldn't talk long, and I'm still smiling.

Truly, such things are the stuff of life and love and friendship.

Euthanasia: you can't make castles out of shit

Here's a humorous start to a serious post. The conversation was between Ms T and one of her numerous specialists.

Specialist: “And what does Mr X (her vascular surgeon) say?”

Ms T: “He says it's perfect. And I still want to punch him.”

Specialist: “Oh, that's all right. He's a surgeon. Everyone wants to punch them.”

I strongly suspect that the head of Western Australia's AMA, Dr Richard Choong, must be a surgeon, because after his contribution to the euthanasia debate, I want to punch him. Honestly, here are two quotes straight out of the SBS news story.

“Transition from life to death” – yes, he really said that. No, it's called “dying” and we all have to do it. But some of us get to do it slowly, painfully, in depressing ways, replacing dignity with relatives to clean up the shit in elbow-length gloves. Others might just go quickly from a gunshot or something. Transition is what you make of it, I guess, whether it's miserable for years or a momentary “shit, what was that?”

“Quality of life is how the individual approaches their life, and what contribution they make from their life and what they receive from it” – yes, he really said that as well. And this is the true ignorance, the inexperience of youth that I want to unpick.

Now, I've said on this blog before that my wife is dying. We don't know when, and at the moment, things are not too bad.

But this post is about pain and stupid, stupid, smug people who haven't had it bad. So, with my wife's permission, I'll outline a little detail.

1. Painkillers

Ms T can't take Paracetamol, because her immune system's damaged her liver. She can't take aspirin, because of damage to her stomach. And she can't take anti-inflammatory painkillers, because they set off the immune system condition (heaven knows why). This leaves her one, just one, effective painkiller shy of the hospice: artificial opioids. How much does she know about chronic, disabling pain?

2. Chemotherapy

Try it, Dr Hoong. Try getting the carer's kit: the long gloves in case someone vomits or shits themselves, because you're not supposed to touch what comes out. Try the weight loss, the skin lesions, the constant fear that the suppressed immune system will give rise to a tumour that isn't spotted before it becomes the next killer. Try the constant anaemia that leaves you sapped of energy.

3. Steroids

Heaven knows why footballers and runners think they're a good thing. They ruin your skin, make you bruise like nothing, suppress the immune system (because we need just a little more vulnerability), and generally fuck up your life.

4. Sex

Just don't start. If it happens, it's likely to be traumatic. If it's not too bad, you light fireworks. If it's actually like the life you remembered when you married, you're in danger of running naked down the street yelling “Up yours, world, we got a fuck and it didn't hurt!”

5. Work

Well, you can strike off the suits and polished shirts and expensive ties and the other trappings of being a prominent doctor. In fact, my honoured smugness, try striking off work at all. Because you can't deal with the public if you're likely to throw up. And your looks are ruined, your skin blotchy, your mind is addled, and you can't think what would happen if your carer broke a leg, let alone died.

And Ms T isn't dying this year, it seems, nor next, and maybe, life willing, not for a decade.

But even our faint shadows of death give us hints. To have less life than this, and more death; to have less joy and more pain; to have certainty on one hand and no reward in the other? Sure: I'd consider euthanasia.

Ms T and I, we'll get by for now. We can still imagine that she will one day be well enough that we can walk some of our favourite bushwalks together. We can still hear the echoes of what we were when we met, loved, and somehow ended up married.

But if the love of my life begged it of me, and explained why? I would cry and beg and argue; I would, as I do, wish life better and different. I would tear the temple down, tear the world down, rather than consent. And if a kind death were the last service love could offer, I would give it while my heart broke.

My father's last words still haunt me. “I know what I'm like, don't think I don't. I can't control this. Don't come again.”

I disobeyed him, visited again when he was already lost in confusion and shit.

It took another year for him to die.

I can't laugh at mental illness

Oh shit, I have to sympathise with someone I ought to despise.

Take a look at this Tweet-stream and refine your hate. Make it good and hot; sharpen it on stone, burnish it on a leather-strop; spice it with all the laughter you can summon.

Yeah, deplorable, isn't it?

There isn't one moment when I am not feeling bullets hitting me where it really hurts.

Let me be clear: nothing in his actions is remotely near me. I haven't taught gender studies, haven't sexted or slept with students while pretending faithfulness to my beloved Ms T. (I don't do affairs well, actually. Or possibly I do. The best I had ended in marriage, it was nearly 30 years ago, and having hit a jackpot, I quit the casino).

And so on.

But @hugoshwyzer's meltdown still resonates. Because I can understand it from some distant echoes. The pen-traces on a purely personal seismograph. 

Perhaps it's because someone I consider a close friend was seriously manic at times, and I hung around when the office would empty out rather than be there.

Or perhaps it's because I understand this: when all of the clouds close in, you don't see anything except yourself.

This is difficult, and I ask you to bear with me while I construct a straw man that only looks like me.

Imagine that you're enclosed in a tiny, dark space, in which the only window on the world is your own eyes, and in which nobody exists unless they're you or exist to prove that you're still alive inside your tiny dark space.

Really, if you get inside that space, it's easy to believe that nothing could exist unless it's there to keep you feeling warm inside the protective coating. Because if you ever get cold, you fear you will die.

It's easy for me to think that Schwyzer found himself living in such a space, because I've been there. Why do I love Ms T with every breath? Because she was there when it was like that, and never thought to do what was sensible all those years ago, and get as far away from me as she could.

I have nothing in common with Hugo, except this.

If the walls close in, from every side, it's damn easy to find yourself looking out at the world through a letter-slot window that's your only contact with the outside.

And if you find yourself there …

You will do anything, any damn thing and I don't care what how or why to preserve that last view of the world that will keep you alive, eating, and as far as everyone else is concerned, functional.

I can easily imagine how hypocrisy inside the letter-box-slot can be rationalised, because it's all you've got. No matter what happens on the outside: every discrepancy between life and art can be faked, made up, reconciled, explained somehow.

Until the reckoning comes. And then you fall apart.

I've been inexpressibly lucky. I've always had a friend to protect me when I fell apart. Not all of them knew they were protecting me when it happened: some merely listened to me for hours on end. That's not protecting, it's just listening. But they kept me nailed to a chair, drunk or sober, until a crisis passed.

And I'm blessed, because somehow by accident or my own malicious angel, nothing evil happened to me in the worst times of my life. Someone was always there, and their names live close to my heart.

Which is why I can't join in the general game of making fun of Hugo Schwyzer. I'm living on the side of pain, these days. I try to live on the side of forgiveness, because it's so easy to need it.

Here's what I like about reading Kurt Vonnegut: “I never wrote a villain”. It's easy to cast Hugo Schwyzer as a villain, and the world of laughter will do so. And I can't laugh at mental illness. I've grown soft; so be it.

Let me laugh instead at the folly of the sane, fight the battles of the strong, and rage at the plots of malice. Then I need not feel guilty at despising the weak.

Not wanted in the chemo suite

I fear this post, because I am afraid that I'll offend people in ways I don't intend.

Occasionally, I tweet things about Ms T's chemotherapy, which means I have to explain that she doesn't have cancer. Chemotherapy happens to others, as well.

There's quite a bit of it about, actually, in that small, off-in-one-corner, not-quite-catered-for kind of way. You'd know, for example, that if you ever need a heart transplant, there will be drugs to make sure your body doesn't decide to attack the new heart. That comes under the heading “chemotherapy”, even if you spend the rest of your life taking pills instead of having the stuff dripped into a vein.

Once you look around, you'll find an awful lot of immune disorders that also need chemotherapy. Rather than re-hash Ms T's condition – you'll find it in my previous posts on the subject – I'll head in a different direction.

If someone reads this, and that person is an IT journalist in Australia, they may remember a woman called Helen Dancer, who died around a decade ago. I never got to know her well enough to ask what treatments were used on her severe rheumatoid arthritis, but I was at least friend enough that she'd happily lean on my arm to get to her seat at a press lunch. 

Treatment probably included methatrexate, in which case she would share an experience with Ms T. Helen didn't die of chemo, merely of being too devastated by her disease for her heart to keep pumping. I was overseas when I heard the news, with friends who also knew her.

I'd like to say something solemn about "an hour of quiet recollection" except: if you had known Helen, the recollections pretty quickly became hilarious, and you'd be laughing through the tears. She did devastating illness with a very sharp and ruthless sense of humour. To remember her is to laugh through tears.

And I see others like Helen these days when taking Ms T to the Sydney Cancer Centre, because if you need your chemo by infusion that's where you go. They hobble, like Helen did; they have the misshapen joints, and eventually, some of them will meet the doom of an untimely death.

Here's the part I fear. I am not trying to offend, denigrate or downplay the importance of cancer treatment.

But understand this: the number of support groups for Ms T is zero.

And what about research funds? Ms T isn't on the research list (except for one or two students that have her in their PhD folios).

Auto-immune diseases get about one-third the NHMRC research funding that cancers get – and only seven disorders are listed in the funds. Cancers are also much bigger on the charitable funding league table than auto-immune disorders. (An aside, nothing to do with me or Ms T: zero for research into psoriasis? How come?)

And yes, auto-immune disorders can kill, and their treatments can kill.

And finally, there's this. Quoting from its Website.

“The Chris O'Brien Lifehouse at RPA will transform cancer treatment for Australians in an environment thriving on discovery, research and uncompromising care.”

I'm all for an environment that improves on Gloucester House. It's uncompromising brick, really. It's too brightly lit to be thought of as “stygian”, but somehow it manages. Whereas Lifehouse is a brand new steel-and-glass wonder and even has its own charity shop.

Ms T and all the other auto-immune patients won't be there. Lifehouse is for “everyone living with cancer”. And only those.

Somewhere in the Byzantine world of charitable administration, there's a soulless automaton, a gimlet-eyed executive, an oxygen thief, the kind of person whose boast – look on the website – is that the place gets off the ground by moving the bloody executives into the building.

Or, more likely, more than one such person.

So: a committee of gimlet-eyed executives, soulless automations, oxygen thieves – let's just call them professional administrators – have made a decision. 

The non-cancer patients don't make the journey over the road to Lifehouse at RPA. That the "environment promising uncompromising care" draws the line at chemo without cancer.

The care will continue. Either Ms T and her fellows will be farmed out to other hospitals – think on that, ye who manage the health budget, not to mention that some of the people we know don't have someone (me) handy to do the driving for them – or RPA will have to prep a few day clinics to handle chemo patients. Or Gloucester House will land back on RPA's budget anyway so it can deal with the people unwelcome in a steel-and-glass tower.

My late friend Helen Dancer would, if needing to hobble into a chemo suite on her sticks for methatrexate infusions, be turned away from Lifehouse. As will Ms T – we already know, because her specialists are trying to make the alternative arrangements now.

My little rant here is not directed at cancer patients. You don't get to fifty years of age without walking behind coffins, knowing people fighting the cancer fight – or, in our case, finding yourself on nodding terms with regulars in the chemo suite. Ms T and I fret about some of those: why is X no longer showing up on First Tuesday of the Month? Is he in remission, over at radiotherapy, or dead?

It's directed at the kind of administrator who could take $150 million of government money plus another $110 million of charity dollars, and make a decision that turns the rest of the Gloucester House chemo load away at the doors.

The small pittance that I can spare to charity will not go to Lifehouse.

A nearly fictional vignette

This is not true, but neither is it fiction. Call it a fictionalised account. The emotions are true, but I've rewritten the event and conversation to make them coherent. Because real conversations are so often not coherent.

The scene: two people, with a joint history spanning nearly forty years, are sitting, talking and weeping over how life drove us apart and crafted new lives for us both, and how the new lives held hard secrets for us.

Yet those lives turned out to be filled with all of the stuff of life: love and homes and mortgages, jobs and worries and children, in sickness and in health and still more love. They were both lucky.

Life repairs many rifts if it's given the chance. Continents can move, if you wait. And two people wanted to see where their continents now lay, and sat at a picnic table in the bush, and talked.

Well: honestly, one talked, the other listened, because the divergence of their lives wasn't merely that they grew apart. They also had different fortunes. One prospers in another country and she is nostalgic for home. The other, doing most of the talking, is suffering in the home that he loves to distraction.

Because she's not “suffering”, she's listening. Because he is, he's talking. They've reached back beyond a disaster of passion, to the friendship that preceded and post-dated a brief marriage, and if they're not comfortable (because tears aren't comfortable), they both know why they're here.

And the wind blew.

Surrounded by old-man-banksia, tea-tree, bluegum, angophora, mountain devil, grevillea, and bent ghost gums, the wind blew above them.

“Stop talking for a minute,” she said, and since he was pouring his heart out, he was momentarily hurt.

Then he saw her face.

He knew her face well: in high school, he'd seen it gaze at him, talked to that face, befriended it, fallen in love with it. Married it and divorced it. During a separation of decades, he'd only been able to imagine the face when they talked on the telephone; in twenty-five years, they'd been face-to-face just twice before today. He knew at least enough to recognise an expression and wait for her to speak.

And, surrounded by old-man-banksia, tea-tree, bluegum, angophora, mountain devil, grevillea, and bent ghost gums, the wind blew above them.

Nobody, having loved a face and its expressions, sees anything of age. Are there wrinkles and blemishes? Of course: who cares? Merely an expression on the face, a shout across the years rather than an echo, erases decades and wrinkles.

She has stopped talking and stopped listening to him, because surrounded by old-man-banksia, tea-tree, bluegum, angophora, mountain devil, grevillea, and bent ghost gums, the wind blew above them. She has relaxed her shoulders, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes with a sad smile that reminds him how they fell in love.

And the wind eases, and without moving or opening her eyes, she speaks.

“I haven't heard that sound in thirty years. The wind in the Australian bush. It's different: you can sit in an English forest in a storm, but it doesn't sound the same.”

“Thirty years. We were married, then.”

“I know. Why do you think I'm crying?”

“Me too.”

Mythbusting: The Daily Telegraph was not handed out at Fox Studios for the Coalition's broadband launch

Here's the conspiracy theory: the evil Murdoch plan for the NBN is proven because at Fox Sports, in April, instead of a press pack, journalists were handed copies of the Daily Telegraph.

For example, from Twitter:

“Coalition Fraudband launch at Fox Studios and reporters handed details in a @dailytelegraph but no Murdoch conspiracy says @TurnbullMalcolm”

It didn't happen, and the reason I can say this is simple: I was there. I'm an eyewitness. I wasn't actually invited, in fact I regard it as one of the best press conference gatecrashes of my life, but I was there, since before Messers Turbull and Abbott arrived until after they left.

I still have the notebook I was carrying – the one I'm whacking with my pen when I'm asking Malcolm Turnbull questions in the press conference in this video, and don't I wish I was better dressed that day!

So this is a combination of my memory, and my side-notes about the sequence of events.

Yes, there were press secretaries there. What were they doing? Mostly, lining up vision with the TV producers: scribblers like me got to be bystanders. I got to watch events with nobody in my face.

So there was the exit-the-car shot, someone asking for a second go at opening the door, and Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott walking through the foyer.

No Daily Telegraph handouts.

Then the cameras rolled while someone from Sky did the show-and-tell for Tony Abbott. I could almost sympathise with a politician in this situation: it was entirely so the TV news could show Mr Abbott nodding at bits of technology, no sound.

No Daily Telegraph handouts.

And after that stuff – still without Daily Telegraph handouts – was over, we took our places in the studio used for the announcement and waited, because the two VIPs needed to be given clear air entering the studio for the cameras. No Daily Telegraph handouts.

After that, there was a brief demonstration of a 3D hologram for Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull (that would need a lot of bandwidth, which is odd as supporting material for a “25 Mbps is good enough” press conference).

And there was the press conference, and a handout at the end – without a Daily Telegraph. I still have the press pack on my desk, because I refer back to it when looking at Liberal Party policy announcements. I have it in its entirety.

The Daily Telegraph isn't there.

Was a Daily Telegraph story given to journalists? Yes: down in Canberra as a pre-launch puff to people who were not present at Sky Sports in Artarmon, Sydney.

Guess who else was not present at Sky Sports in Artarmon, Sydney? The bloggers and conspiracists who are convinced that the Daily Telegraph was handed to people like myself in lieu of a press pack.

How has this idea taken flight? Here's how:

1. The Coalition gave the Daily Telegraph an early exclusive on the story. It drives journalists nuts if they're not the ones getting the exclusive, but it's also completely unexceptional.

2. For some reason a press secretary in Canberra thought it would be a good idea to rub the rest of the Gallery's nose in the exclusive, by handing the story to other Gallery journalists.

This event is clearly documented by Crikey, here.

'Last Tuesday, journalists in the Canberra press gallery were eager for details of the opposition’s broadband policy, due to be announced later that morning. So they asked the Coalition’s spinners for information. Instead of a regular press release, however, the journos were handed a colour photocopy of that morning’s Daily Telegraph front page story. The headline: “Pledge to slash internet bills: NBN at half Labor’s price”.' (My emphasis)

This is clear and unambiguous: the Daily Telegraph “drop” was in Canberra, not in Sydney.

3. However, bloggers have put the two events together and decided that the newspaper was handed out at the launch in Fox Studios. For example, courtesy of “No Fibs”:

“The Coalition held its broadband policy launch at, wait for it, Murdoch’s Fox Sports, And the press secretary handed out copies of Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph instead of policy documents.”

It never happened. I was there. I have the press pack. Not The Daily Telegraph.

Why bother setting this down? Because conspiracy theories never made a debate work better.

A different love story

This will sound odd, but I am even lucky in my ex-wife.

I will never, without permission, recount the circumstances of our separation. Suffice to say that we had a few years when we hated each other.

Reconciliation began in about 1989 when I had to call her to tell her of the death of my father. I don't know why I felt this was an obligation, because even I found him difficult. But that's another story.

She ended up on the other side of the world, we formalised our separation with a divorce, and we both remarried. And there was an extremely awkward phone call that ended well.

I don't remember who called first, but one of us felt that imminent birth needed to be announced to the other. And it turned out, in an oddity of life and circumstance, that our first children – their twins, our elder son – were born within a very short space of each other.

Somehow, our children reconciled us. She visited us with family in tow in the mid-1990s for an afternoon while back from England to see family. We visited them in the 2000s when we took our sons to England because I pined for the company of another friend who'd made the trip and wanted to show us the sights.

We stayed in intermittent touch, and in what seems to be a once-a-decade event, we saw each other. My first wife returned to Australia to see her family, and via e-mail and phone calls, I managed to find a slot in her schedule for us to talk.

And we found a life before we'd made the mistake of marrying or the mistake of separating or divorce, or briefly hating each other, or whatever the mistake was. We found the blood-wood of the friendship that led us down the path towards a marriage that ended badly.

I don't know all of her life challenges. She knows more of mine, because I have blogged some of them, and she hasn't hers.

I had a complete and utter meltdown. I held myself together while her daughters were present, before they took their leave so we could talk. After that, I emptied the bag, gave it a shake, told her the things that haunt me at 4am, and cried.

She knew me when I was a teenager with a set on her. We knew each other growing up when our parents didn't know what we saw in each other. We married, divorced, detested, reconciled, re-friended, and learned a new and different kind of love.

We're friends, now. I told her what went wrong with life, and she listened. We cried together, except that this time she was strong and I wasn't, so I beat my head on a picnic table in the bush, and I tried to tell her that the love that is my second wife, and still my great love, will die and I can't stand it.

And she cried with me, and stroked my arm, and hugged me, and listened to the worst of the worst, demanded the details, and reminded me that I am her best friend, which I in no way deserve.

And Ms T and I have sent our thanks to her privately. Whatever her arm-stroking, hugs, listening and cheek-kisses gave me while I beat at a picnic table and raged at life – they helped me, and hence helped us both.

And this brings me to the point of the post.

“Thank you.”

“It's nothing.”

How many times do you, the listeners and huggers, the strength-givers, cheer-givers, love-givers to the deeply depressed, think you're not changing lives?

Do not say that, or think that, because people like me need your ears and arms and love and cheek-kisses, not because you can replace us bearing our burdens, but because you will love us when we're at our worst, our depths, in our blackest nights, when Pratchett's Death is all our conversation.

If you have the strength to listen to the worst of someone else's life and still love them, you've helped them already.

If you can do it – all the way to facing the worst that they face without offering them a fake optimism, that “stay calm and carry on”, but instead try to imagine their burdens and merely sympathise, you've gone beyond the standard cant of support-group psychology.

If you can grasp the worst, well enough to say: “No. I can't imagine it. It's beyond me. But I'll be here whenever you need”, you've put your feet on the same path as we walk.

If you'll admit that you have your own demons, and promise to offer them back in return for your support, people like me will thank you. Because you're trusting us to be here and still strong enough that we can try to return your gentle love and support.

If you can write off old pain, and count old friendship as more important than settling long-dead scores? You're gold.

I have an ex-wife who supports me trying to care for my wife, across half the world. I have no idea what I did to deserve such love. Maybe I can earn what I don't deserve, sometime in the future.

The stars are going out

“Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

That is the closing line of a novelty sci-fi story, Arthur C Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God.

So it goes in life as well: if you have the good fortune to survive, there will be those around who you do not. 

Sometimes, the news comes as a secondhand surprise: someone reports that someone you lost touch with was in a car accident isn't it dreadful? And you try to recall a face to associate with the name, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. You say something suitable and curse yourself for insincerity.

Sometimes, however, it's the fixed stars: those that were always in your night sky. 

Those of us bound to each other because we shared pain in another, younger world; those who we called to say “I'm sorry to call you at this hour, but you wouldn't want me to wait. My mother died this morning”. And we cry together just like when we were teenagers.

A long time ago, we fell out because you thought I was making a mistaken marriage. Things worked out, and we awkwardly repaired our friendship. 

Twenty years on, when I thought my wife of 20 years might die, it was you I called to weep and rage and weep, curled up on the kitchen floor, and you listened. With the whole of the globe between us, it felt like you held my hand, wrapped your arms around my shoulders, kissed my forehead, promised me she wouldn't die tonight. You also reminded me, sharply, that I had responsibilities: I must sleep, I must offer my strength to the boys, I must work, and I had to get off the floor and pick up my burdens, as we all must.

Damn it, if you're dying why didn't you tell me? Don't you know how much I love you?

ADDENDUM

So. I plucked up my courage and asked outright.

"No, I said 'pretty soon I'll be deaf."

You see, when two people on a phone call have damaged hearing, there's lots of scope for missed connections.

I could have removed this post, except: if you love people, they deserve to know it. You don't know where your nemesis lies or when you'll next get the chance to say so.

Why don't women think they're beautiful?

I ask because I know too many women who, when paid a compliment, will dismiss it as if there's something wrong with my eyes.

Just take it for granted that that Ms T is at the top of my list; it's not her reactions that confuse me. It's women I know who are convinced that beauty belongs to someone else.

When life has been at its worst – for example, during the 12 weeks or so Ms T was in hospital in the last few years, when I thought she was dying – there were people, all women (I don't actually know why), who called me to check how I was doing. They kept track of me when I could barely keep track of myself; cared for me in lots of small ways.

Two took my phone calls no matter when it was I went to pieces. One brought meals around on Saturday nights because I'd been cooking all week after coming home from the hospital and “you must be tired by now”. Another called me, took me to coffee, e-mailed me, and talked incessantly to cheer me up.

And they all listened to me.

Their voices were the greatest comfort I had when I couldn't even begin to cope with anything. They put up with my panic attacks, the way I would sink to despair at night, my calls at odd hours, me sitting on the kitchen floor in a huddle. They'd talk me back onto my feet, ready to be at Ms T's bedside at 9am the next morning. They'd coffee me, hug me, cheek-kiss me, tell me I'd cope, and set me tottering on my feet to face battle again, with a little bit of love as nourishment.

Doesn't that count as beauty? It does to me.

If I were to wake up without warning in an intensive care unit, these are women whose faces would make me feel better just by being there when I opened my eyes. Whose presence would calm me down, convince me that it would all be OK. Whose smiles would warm me (take my word for it if you don't know: it's never warm in an ICU).

Doesn't that count as beauty? It does to me.

This touches the deepest parts of my life, my personality, and my gratitude that Ms T and I are still managing to hold ourselves mostly together after three years that defy description. Ask Ms T's opinion of the individuals I have in mind, and she'll say that her best days happen because I had hands at my elbow when things were bad.

These women know their names. I guess they'd probably cringe to read this, but please god they will forgive me for writing this, anyhow.

They leave love in so many of the places they go, and I have been among the lucky: a beneficiary of love, support, and friendship unearned but treasured.

Doesn't that count as beauty?

It does, to me.

Husic and the Koran was not new and not news

Mostly the reason I haven't been blogging lately is simply busyness. There's stuff happening and I don't have as much spare time as I'd like.

But I'm going to to make an exception for the utterly brainless, stupid, bring-them-a-four-by-clue media excitement over Ed Husic's oath of office which, for an obvious and unexceptional reason, was sworn on the Koran instead of the Christian Bible.

That was reported, along with the abuse he suffered, as news by News Limited, here. For example.

And I call trolling. Why?

Because the same thing arose three years ago. Specifically, in September 2010, when Ed Husic was sworn in as an MP, and chose the Koran for his swearing-in. If the News Limited paywall doesn't defeat you, it's here.

In other words: in the twisted logic of the nasty trolls at News, there is a significant difference between being sworn as an MP over the Koran and being sworn into cabinet over the same book.

What utter, shameless, let's-create-a-fake-clicktroll-controversy linkbaiting this is.

Husic's religion was already known, and he'd already chosen his book-of-oath, three whole years ago.

But the desperate link-trolls of News Limited wanted something that would attract the inflexive racists of Facebook and Twitter. So they chose to highlight as a “first” something they'd already pimped as a “first” three years ago, solely on the basis of Husic's elevation to the ministry.

Win? Of course they did. The Harlot of Holt Street never loses.

But what depresses and outrages me is that even the ABC couldn't lift its fingers over the keyboard with sufficient alacrity to Google up the history: that the old news, “Husic is Muslim”, got treated as if that, plus the online acid, were the news. Instead of the obvious real story, which is “News Limited punts religious hatred for the sake of clicks.”

Husic's oath is three-year-old news which, in my cold, dead, editor's eye, is “no news at all”. Every aspect of todays story-so-called was already on the record. Only a link-baiting fool could call it news, and only an idiot with no will of their own could fall for it.

There are two "news" angles here. One is "News Limited whips racist slurs against Muslims", which is a genuine story that the limp, supine, impotent dills of other media don't touch. The other is "First Muslim minister.'

Husic's oath of office is not news, except in the twisted logic of one news organisation, which appropriates to itself the right to "set the agenda".

News is what News is. The ABC should hang its bloody head in shame: Rupert's agenda should not set the news agenda for serious current affairs. The ABC should not feed the trolls.

Being a carer is lonely

So here it actually is: the story from my side, instead of me telling Ms T's story.

It's like this. And fuck it's difficult.

The life of the carer is lonely. Really, really, lonely.

How can this be? I'm with Ms T, and since 1987 we've put a lot of effort into trying to live our lives so we were in the same place as much of our days as we could manage. When she spent 12 weeks in hospital, I spent most of them tucked away in a corner of her room, working while she slept or watched the hospital TV (thank heavens for mobile broadband), returning home to cook dinners for my sons, and to sleep.

(An aside. Our sons were too young to have this happen to them. They were brilliant, strong, supportive, and became independent instead of going off the rails. I love and admire them.)

And there have been whole years when we haven't spent a night apart, and have only spent a handful of waking hours when we weren't in the same place.

How can this get lonely?

Because.

We generally wake about 5:30 am, which is when her overnight painkillers wear off. By 6:20, I'm awake and she's back in bed and who the hell do I talk to? So I start my day's work.

Ms T will emerge before 7:45 am and nearly always fetches me breakfast – unless I get too damn hungry to function. She gets her own breakfast, preps lunch for the son that's still in high school, runs through the rest of her morning routine, and takes her morning medications.

And then returns to bed, because she's not like you and is exhausted by the morning rituals.

Even then, she's not well enough to get through the day without retreating to the bedroom again in the afternoon.

She's the one that's sick, after all: her immune system is as dangerous to her as if she had received someone else's heart and lungs. If it's let off the hook, it is a killer, and the drugs needed to damp it are dangerous, and are exhausting. They don't discriminate: while fulfilling their appointed task of keeping her immune system under control, they also exhaust her, attack her digestion, distract her attention …

… and leave me alone, in the same way that other carers have, as the penalty of their particular devotion, the reward of loneliness.

I detest being absent from Ms T even for hours. A night apart is a misery. We travel together even if it would be better for her to stay at home, and she will sleep in the car because the M4 is soporiphic.

But, and I wish my mother was alive so I could tell her I understood, the life of the carer becomes lonely. 

When my father was Alzheimer-mad, her sole relief in daily life was a labrador whose devotion was such that he would walk around Katoomba with dad, until his paws bled, and still be ready to do it again tomorrow, and the day after, until the day he (the dog) died.

Mum waited alone at home, because there was no telling when they would return.

Ms T and I, we'll get by. I have a dear friend, someone who treats me with the frivolity I deserve and crave, who loves me god-knows-why, who will put up with me for occasional coffee-dates, and there's my respite.

But it makes me desperately sad to think of all those carers whose circumstance is worse than mine, whose partners or siblings or parents need so much more care, whose loves are as deep and desperate, and whose respite never arrives.

When that topic next arises in the public debate – which is infrequent – think of it this way.

Those people asking for a tiny amount of free time from their caring aren't asking for much. They want to know that:

• if they have a coffee-date, they don't need to worry that their love will die while they're away.

• they can be sent away from home for work for one or two nights, without fretting more than they would if they were at home.

And a thousand other small reliefs that would make the carer's life less lonely.

We, those who care, do it because we love. This is not some kind of rage against those we love. Ms T loved me when I was young and daggy and didn't believe that a woman with her beauty, intelligence and education could spare a second thought for me.

But I wish, to the point of tears, that I could have the woman I married back with me. Just for a week, before she dies. And I care for her in illness – “in sickness and in health” – against the hope that we'll walk the Den Fenella again, that we'll do a loud punk gig together and dance, that we'll have both the health and the money for our last bottle of Grange together, that we'll fly to Scotland to see a dear friend of the family.

That's the desperate last hope of every carer. And our – me and my fellow carers – know we might not get our hopes, that we might instead have to fulfil, without the reward of joy, the promise we all make:

“I will hold you until you die. I will carry you to the grave.”

We love. That's why we do it.

Dancing on workplace graves isn't journalism. It's revolting.

So. Workplace safety.

First, the headline-chasing. I am a click-whore with the best of them, but I draw the line at advertisers paying to have people click on a death if it's not directly relevant to what I write about. A road accident that happened to involve a kid working for an NBN contractor?

Even with the proud red-top tabloidism of The Register as my masthead-of-employment, I won't give the world the headline “NBN-related death”. Not ever.

In trying to explain my position on Twitter, I called on my father's record, which was “nobody died on my sites”.

He was a civil engineer. Because he was a WW2 veteran (Australian Navy, seconded to the Royal Navy), he was also a good imitation of insane much of the time, until he got Alzheimer's Diseas, and then he no longer imitated it because he was.

From the 1950s to the early 1970s, his specialty was as a construction engineer, managing projects from Mount Isa's first power station to (at his peak) the last half of the construction of Australia Square. Then he spent some time on shopping centres (Bankstown Square, Carlingford Square and Penrith Plaza) before home construction for Petit & Sevitt, and retiring from the construction industry because his friends kept dying young from the pressure.

In that career, his proudest boast was that people didn't die working for him. That is: from power stations to skyscrapers to project homes, nobody died on his sites.

I guess it came from WW2, when people died all the time, always too many, all of them people. His ship, the HMS Quiberon, once entered Sydney Harbour with a gaping hole in its bows from a Japanese kamikaze that almost hit, and he always wondered about the pilot. He even felt bad about chasing an ASDIC (the predecessor to Sonar, Anti-Submarine Detection, Interdiction and Combat) signal around the Pacific Ocean for two days so his ship could depth-bomb a whale.

He didn't like deaths, and was fanatical about protecting workers on his sites.

That wasn't always popular. The then-“union boss” and now revered instigator of green-bans, Jack Mundy, once threatened to pull a strike because Dad sacked labourers for refusing to wear hard-hats on site. What changed Mundy's mind was Dad's site record: “nobody has ever died when I was in charge. Pull a strike. I'd rather that than a dead worker.” Mundy, apparently, changed his mind.

And that record remained in place. On one site, Oxford Square, the most serious injury was to Dad: a swinging joist in a crane struck him on his (hard-hat protected) head. His head was fine, but he was on a ladder, so the impact broke his ankle. He also broke a rib, once, but that was his own work: he decided to sit on the edge of a desk to take a phone call, and missed.

In case all this sounds a bit rose-coloured: we never got on, Dad and I.

When I was little, he wasn't there. When I was a teen, we were fighting – my disappointing performance at any kind of sport probably didn't help. And in my twenties, his brain was growing the holes of Alzheimer's disease, and he was fading.

At best, there were a couple of weeks in my whole life when Dad and I actually liked each other. But I can see his big accomplishment – “nobody died” – for what it is, something to be proud of.

And I have two direct pieces of evidence for his record, that I can put my hands on: marble coffee tables, one in my home, the other in my brother's. They were gifts from a loud Italian contractor, delivered in person to our suburban home in West Pennant Hills when I was a child, “because you take care of my people!”

From my point of view, media dancing on a workplace grave for a political point is absolutely loathsome. I detest every workplace death, and will not exploit it for clicks – and I'm probably the greatest click-whore in the Australian tech press.

A line has to be drawn somewhere.

A Twitter-rant I'd like to preserve

Like Sarah Stokely, I'm sick of the emergence of the “cult of hard”. 

"HTFU" is yet another piece of plastic solidarity, invented only so that the arsehats at the top of corporations can justify their “we own you so do as we say!” Invented to ruin lives, steal weekends, cancel holidays, eliminate sick leave – and adopted out in the community by suckers, racists, toad-eaters, pole-climbers, place-seekers and all that drops from the arse of the corporate world onto the anchor-fluke of the ship of commerce.

“Harden the fuck up” leads to nets under Foxconn dormitory flats to catch the jumpers, to trolls that don't think “ape” is a racist insult to an Aborigine footballer, to miserable lives of desperation no longer quiet, to silent misery after yet-another-buggering by a priest.

In my father, enough “hard” to serve in WW2 meant a man who was never completely sane until his death from Alzheimer's Disease in 1989.

To hell with hard. And here's my Twitter-stream because I'm proud I found the words. With thanks to @stokely who started it.

@stokely The world doesn't need more hard. It needs more soft. I'm as hard as a lemonade sandwich. "Strong" != "Hard".

All that follows is me as @r_chirgwin. I have suspension points where thoughts spanned more than one Tweet.

In general, "HTFU" and variations on the theme are just evangelising passive conformity. Takes a lot more "hard" to speak than not.

Someone says "this is rotten", and a whole heap of vested interests say "harden up"...

…(And a chorus of eunuchs chimes in aligned with their meal tickets). Who's strong? The vested interest, or the ordinary person saying "no"?

I'd rather admire the "soft person" who trembled at the knees and spoke up, than the conformist saying "harden up" or any of its variants.

"Strong" is a virtue. "Hard" is not. Ask my wife: I'm soft. But you won't get a hammer through my skin...

…and in the face of hell and death and illness and all the rest, we're 26 years together and still hold each other every night.

The "harden up" crew in the world look a lot less potent if you imagine them in tunics with pom-poms...

…the cheerleaders of a toxic culture introduced to the world by people like Al Dunlap. It's not something to aspire to. It's to despise.

If you love your loves and love your happiness, love your ability to be moved to tears or appreciate beauty, NEVER "harden the fuck up".

People who say "yes" in fear of the horror of being disdained by the boss aren't "hard". They're followers hoping the arrows don't hit them.

And the jewels you win by being "hard as concrete" won't be more than glass when live turns to shit and desperation.

The only things worth holding are love and laughter, and those things you do because they strike at your heart. The rest is chaff.

…........

I ended the Twitter-rant because dinner was served. It was a home-made chicken pie, cooked by Ms T, with leek and mushroom in a cream sauce. Served with chat potatoes in butter and parsley. OK, she ran with frozen peas as well!

She is seriously ill and on chemotherapy for an immune system disorder, and her chronic pain is good enough for synthetic opiods. And she and I live on the knife-edge of expertise: what's enough chemo to keep her immune system down, but not so much that it causes cancer (she had two tumours removed last year)?

“Cooking for you guys [me and our sons] is the last thing I'll let go,” she said tonight.

I'll take your HTFU and raise it “love through the pain”. Even with a pair of twos in my hand, I'll win.

Yet more MSM NBN politicking

It's been a while since I had a chance to unpick egregious NBN commentary – not that the stories have gotten any better, but because I've been extremely busy!

But this piece at Fairfax is too much for me to let pass:

Don't look now, the white elephants are multiplying

Let's just pick off some hit points.

“The government's plan to roll out high-speed fibre-optic telephone cable to the home is now estimated by most experts to cost $90 billion to $110 billion, compared with the government's latest guesstimate of $45 billion.”

Fibre-optic telephone cable? That should set the tone.

And “most experts” don't estimate $90 to $110 billion – that, dear friends, is the Coalition's number. I don't know why the columnist, Kenneth Davidson, decided not to source the number correctly.

The government's $45 billion is the whole network, not just the fibre network – it includes the satellite services and fixed wireless services to the last 7% of the population. NBN Co's calculation for the fibre is currently in the order of $37 billion.

“There are about 11 million fixed lines in Australia. Fibre has a life of about 25 years. In order to fund the capital cost and depreciation of the network, every fixed-line user would have to pay $9400 a year to the NBN, based on a return of 10 per cent a year.”

“Fibre has a life of 25 years”? Oh dear. Mr Davidson has mistaken the depreciation life of the fibre for its operational life. The depreciation life – which gets revised upwards from time to time – is a mere financial fiction. The operational life of the cable could easily reach 60 years; as I've reported before, Corning has tested fibres which, after twenty years of exposure to mud, flood, heat and snow, showed no observable deterioration.

“By 2020, the US will probably have developed low earth orbiting satellites capable of picking up and sending wireless signals at a fraction of the cost of the Gillard government's scheme.”

Wow: let's party like it's 1998, when I was being instructed by boosters to get excited about Iridium, the planned constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites that would usher in a new world of communications, etcetera.

Iridium got launched – but not until after a bankruptcy, for a host of different reasons, and a subsequent restructure that meant some of the planned constellation was abandoned. As it happens, the late 1990s saw this happen more than once, with Teledesic, Orbcomm, ICO Global and Globalstar all suffering a similar fate.

Some of the constellations are there – but you might notice that we're not all using satellite communications in preference to our land-based services.

I would add that I'd just as soon have my services delivered by an Australian company, and pretend futilely that at least some of my communications aren't subject to the Patriot Act.

When so many errors are fashioned into a stick to beat the government, it's hard to believe that the opinion was nothing more than politicking. The problem is, few readers are in a position to pick up the errors.

Mr Davidson Responds 

Update: I'm told Mr Davidson has responded to criticisms, and his response is posted here at Dropbox.

Note that I can't vouch for the veracity of the response. If it's a hoax, I have no way of knowing.

So here's the nub of Mr Davidson's case:

The major difference is between my statement that the capital cost of ftth will be in the order of $90 billion (the Turnbull estimate) rather than the $46 billion (the official NBN estimate) 

The difference is explained by the fact that my NBN critics claim that the ‘least average cost’ of the underground tail connection from the NBN pit to the customer is $4,000 dollars. The highest average cost is $12,000. Based on 11 million connections the total cost of the tail connections ranges from $44 billion to $132 Billion dollars

I don't exactly know where Mr Davidson sources his data but I suspect it's a mangling of data presented on page 207 of the NBN Implementation study. Yes, the peak price does reach between $11,000 and $12,000 per premises.

The $11,000-$12,000 cost per premises is not the cost across the whole rollout – that's the bit of the graph that's been misunderstood here. The graph says that for the easy premises, in metro, near the exchange and so on, the connection cost is low, whereas for someone in a low density area, at the edge of the network, in a country town, the cost is high.

It's quite clearly described in the Implementation Study as a “marginal cost curve”. The $12,000 cost of connecting Joe Bloggs in Dubbo does not result in a $12,000 cost of connecting Jenny Basketweaver in Balmain.