Cherry picking – not science, but quotes

Screaming loony climate conspiracists (I will not dignify them as “sceptic”) are famous for cherry-picking data, but we forget that they also cherry pick people. Let one phrase out of a hundred sound like a prediction you can prove wrong, and they'll roll it out to prove you were wrong.

The SLCCs – pronounce it “slacks” if you like – have been on and on and on about the idea that Tim Flannery predicted unending drought forever in this interview with the ABC's Maxine McKew, which is the cherry-pick of cherry-picks.

Hence if Sydney gets a thunderstorm in March, you can guarantee that the editorial cannon fodder that are proud to fight on behalf of rich people that despise them will take it as proof that Flannery was wrong.

To save you from tl;dr, I'm going to parse the interview.

1. Are weather patterns changing?

Flannery's answer: changes to wind patterns and the tropics moving south have changed rainfall in south-eastern Australia. He didn't say “every year will be a drought year” in answering the first question. Nothing he said answering McKew's first question is contradicted by events since.

2. Is it more severe in eastern Australia?

Flannery: yes. “Something will need to change” to fill the Warragamba. Something did change, a flip in the Southern Oscillation. Nothing he said to McKew's second question is contradicted by events since.

3. You can't be certain?

Flannery agrees. He says he thinks the science is pointing in the other direction. Nothing he said to McKew's third question is contradicted by events since.

The next question and answer are given verbatim with emphasis.

MAXINE McKEW: So does that mean, really, we're faced with - if that's right - back-to-back droughts and continuing thirsty cities?

TIM FLANNERY: Well, you can't predict the future; that's one of the things that you learn fairly early on, but if I could just say, the general patterns that we're seeing in the global circulation models - and these are very sophisticated computer tools, really, for looking at climate shift - are saying the same sort of thing that we're actually seeing on the ground. So when the models start confirming what you're observing on the ground, then there's some fairly strong basis for believing that we're understanding what's causing these weather shifts and these rainfall declines, and they do seem to be of a permanent nature. I don't think it's just a cycle. I'd love to be wrong, but I think the science is pointing in the other direction.

So – every aspect of that answer was qualified: Flannery didn't make an absolute prediction. He was doing his job, trying to explain the science – including the uncertainty. Nothing he said to McKew's fourth question is contradicted by events since.

5. It will continue, and cities will be thirsty?

Flannery said “that looks to be the case”. Nothing he said to McKew's fifth question is contradicted by events since.

6. What's the worst-case?

Note: this is asking not “what will happen?” but “what's the worst that might happen?”

Flannery: There are quite severe problems if current trends continue. Nothing he said to McKew's sixth question is contradicted by events since.

7. Is drought preparation worthwile?

Flannery: Yes, “even if you think there's only a 10 per cent chance that this rainfall deficit's going to continue for another few years”. Nothing he said to McKew's seventh question is contradicted by events since.

8. What about Western Australia?

Flannery: “Yet to be seen, yet to be determined”. Nothing he said to McKew's eighth question is contradicted by events since.

9. South Australia and Victoria?

Flannery: Adelaide might have water quality problems. Melbourne is vulnerable to water deficits. Nothing he said to McKew's ninth question is contradicted by events since.

At this point, the discussion diverts to power and away from drought.

Hang on. In the nine questions about climate and drought, Tim Flannery said absolutely nothing that has been contradicted by events.

In other words, if your a slacker – a screaming loony climate conspiracist – like say Chris Kenny, the only way you can say one thunderstorm fits: “Don't think this is what Flannery meant when he said "..Sydney will be facing extreme difficulties with water.."”

In fact, if you think one thunderstorm disproves climate science, you're unfit to comment. Really. It's like a movie advertiser citing the word “unbelievable” in the advertisement, when the rest of the phrase was “rubbish”. 

 

A speech is not a story just because it's a speech

Really, it's too much. As in, Officially Too Much. The toad-eating supineness of the Australian tech press has me sick to the gullet.

Ever since the mid-1990s, nearly every tech journalist in the world has coveted both the credibility and the pay packet of the Real Business Journalist. See, you can take any press-ganged loser from the tech press, slide them into a job with (say) the Australian Financial Review, and effectively double their income.

A douche with a tech masthead is one-half a douche in business media. That's the cold equation that makes the tech press wank and dribble to prove their worth in front of suits, all the world over.

And it's really, really easy to make a tech journalist make them think they're AFR-fodder: expose them to suits.

Get a tech journalist in front of a speech by a CEO – or even better, to the extent of “do you need a towel sir?”, an interview with a CEO – and you have a stenographer.

Drop on a lunch with free booze and they'll use the table-napkin in place of the towel.

As far as I can see from what I've read from the speech Telstra's CEO, David Thodey, gave today, he said nothing remarkable. He delivered a boilerplate piece that had been written by one hand, PR-tested by another, market-tested by another, and lawyered by another. Four hands on one wank, which should say something but probably doesn't.

It's like a cornflake, really: telling the nutritional value between the speech and the paper it was written on would get you down to quantum physics.

But journalists present at the speech have things to prove: (1) it's worth my absence from the office; (2) I'm a journalist who can report a speech; and (3) I can extract nourishment out of the cardboard, if need be.

Thodey. Said. Nothing.

Nothing new, nothing of note, nothing of value, nothing that wouldn't worry some investors, nothing that wouldn't make some market smart-alecks think they had an inside run on some kind of information.

Because that, dear media, is his job. Never, ever do anything but reassure the investors.

Really: if David Thodey says “Telstra wants to be more intimate with its customers” – the only aspect worth reporting is that it's a statement of such visceral creepiness that you'd bloody sign on with Vodafone to avoid it.

If he says he's going to “protect shareholder value”, it's both his obligation and a repetition of the same chorus he's sung throughout his whole incumbency.

He said “digital first”? In case you idiots weren't watching, the entire Telstra network went digital while you were anticipating your first date. Like, that was 1990s news kiddies.

“The customer is number one?” – I've never known of a Telstra CEO who didn't manage some variation on that theme. And my history of Telstra goes back to the late 1980s when it was still “Telecom”.

I'm sick utterly to my epiglottis with the idea that “a speech is a story merely because it was given”. What, the CEO didn't fall over on the stairs, declare himself a communist, come out in front of an audience, or grope the nearest biped before he came on stage? He just stood behind a microphone and read a script?

That's a speech. It's not a story. Save me.

Dear supermarket shoppers …

Dear supermarket shoppers,

The reason my wife moves slowly is that she's sick. We're really sorry for the frustration it causes you, that you may have to either break your stride or change direction for a second.

The reason she suffers brief confusion is that her illness carried with it a little bit of brain damage. So she may, on occasion, take longer to choose a product at a shelf than it would take you. Again, we're sorry.

The reason I'm protective of her, and put my hand between your trolley or basket and her back, is that it takes very little to break her bones.

Your impatience does not give you license to shove her with your trolley, as has happened. Nor to poke her with your basket. Nor, because you're a six-footer with an attitude problem, to use your height and weight against her.

Lumbar 3 and 4 have already been fractured by a shopping trolley; I'm not jumping at shadows here.

What confuses me most of all is how much hostility is offered. Ms T didn't jump your queue or speak rudely to you. All that Ms T does is move slowly, and sometimes, take a moment longer to choose an item from the shelf.

If we get a passive-aggressive “excuse me” as you reach past her face, that's tolerable (albeit rude). But it goes far beyond that: there are many, many people who are enraged by the sight of someone moving slowly near them, and want to push them, prod them, punish them for frailty.

Back in December, I put my hand between an oncoming trolley and Ms T's back. I didn't speak, nor did I actually look at the person pushing the trolley: I simply saw it about to collide, and prevented the collision. For this, I received a torrent of abuse.

Why? What drives a successful and healthy thirty- or forty-something, most usually a man, to regard someone moving slowly somewhere within his field of vision as an affront?

That, I can't answer. But when I see people falling for the idea that the disability pension (which we don't receive) somehow encourages scroungers, and then I see them in the supermarket, I weep for the creeping nastiness that is poisoning Australia's society.

The vasculitis primer

In most of the articles I've seen and heard today, Harold Ramis dies of a rare disease, auto-immune vasculitis (correct) – and journalists have shown little curiousity to explain it.

I'm not a doctor, but since my wife, Ms T to you, suffers from auto-immune vasculitis, I thought I'd set down a brief explainer; I haven't seen many media outlets bothering.

We never saw it coming. Recently, she pointed out that in the January before the disease took hold, she managed 13 bushwalks in 30 days – all of them in the 5-15 km range, all rated “medium” or “hard”. Within 12 weeks of that glorious time, she was 32 kg, unable to eat or walk any distance, and (as it turned out) toxemic. Her once-d-cups were replaced by ribs.

What turned out to be auto-immune vasculitis had closed her celiac artery; this caused liver failure, which was manifest in stomach ulcers of horrifying severity.

The rest of the toll of the vasculitis, before it was discovered, was: a 95 per cent occlusion of her right carotid artery (with a thankful growth of “collaterals” that have actually kept her alive); the anterior communicating artery (in the head) doesn't show up on scans; one renal artery; one brachial artery in one arm, and a radial artery in the other.

The proximate cause is that the immune system rejects the blood vessels and attacks them. The resulting inflammation closes the vessels; and once closed, they don't come back. A vein taken from her leg keeps Ms T alive by feeding her liver; the others are gone.

The ultimate cause - what sends the immune system on a kill-its-host mission? - is unknown. Here's an observation: since 2000 the National Health and Medical Research Council has spent $86 million on quack medicines, and sod-all on auto-immune vasculitis.

And those who have read our travails over the years also know that in a serious case, the immune system has to be brutally suppressed. If corticosteroids don't work, the “gold standard” therapy is cyclophosphamide.

Now, chemotherapy has been the subject of a huge amount of research over the years, with two aims in mind: make it more directed to the disease it's treating, and reduce the toxicity of the side-effects.

Which has improved both the effectiveness of treatment and the quality of life for cancer sufferers.

Cyclophosphamide isn't one of the new, kinder drugs. It's a nasty, nasty piece of work. Developed in 1954, it's only a couple of generations away from mustard gas.

That's because this is a rare disease. If USA Today got things straight, Harold Ramis' presentation was that the vasculitis attacked the blood vessels feeding nerves, which Ms T believes would be even worse than her own suffering.

Prognosis? We hope that the cyclo dose doesn't kill, because without it, the vasculitis will.

Nuance dies when Internet anonymity is debated

If you knew of the Internet before commercial ISPs existed, you were almost certainly connected through a university. The typical (say) pre-1989 Internet user would be a member of a university (therefore known to the systems administrator), connected through a serial terminal to something like a DEC VAX that acted as the university's node.

(I remember the great excitement with which a university systems administrator showed off something to me, in early 1990: he showed a document directory on a computer in America! That demo was all that he was willing to show, since the teeny-tiny 56 Kbps connection to America (I think) was supposed to be doing serious stuff.)

In that kind of environment, and given the fair chance that any Internet user was known to a fair circle of other users … anonymity was at best an ambiguous concept. At that stage, it meant at best “someone too distant from me to know or care who I am”.

As a long-time member of one of Australia's oldest Internet mailing lists, Link at the ANU, I can attest to a lively debate in the 1990s, along these lines: “Is the emerging trend towards anonymity a good or a bad thing?”

It appears that Link's archives don't reach that far back, but one of its members, academic Dr Roger Clarke, considered anonymity to be an active debate in 1996, when he set down this paper: http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/AnonPsPol.html

Anonymity was not something built into the Internet from the start. It was a set of social behaviours that emerged later. And it's always been a topic that aroused opposing opinions for and against.

Right now, anonymity is back on the table, mostly courtesy of abusive campaigns that seek to silence the voices of science, political dissent – and quite often, women. Hence when Julia Baird writes an article like this, she cops insults for pretty much one paragraph:

"Surely much of this could be solved if Twitter insisted people use their real names, as Facebook tries to do. Why allow the violent and cowardly to hide?"

(I disagree with this, by the way, but it's not all she had to say. Nor will I reprise the abuse she copped).

Internet anonymity is a work in progress, people. 

It took years for people to think the Internet was a place where anonymity was possible (the famous “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog” cartoon, in 1993, documented the start of the debate, not its end). In more than 20 years, a consensus hasn't yet been reached.

It's disingenuous to pretend that there ever has been a consensus surrounding Internet anonymity.

It would be nice to have a mature consensus emerge – but that requires debate.

A legitimate component of that debate is: how to deal with chronic abusers of anonymity?

A couple of more points and I'm done.

1. While not a survey sample, in my timeline, only men took an abusive attitude to Julia Baird. Well done, gents, now go and knock your heads on the table until the dimwit falls out.

2. In a twenty-paragraph article, Julia mentioned a “real names” policy in one par, near the end. Rising up in a spitting fury over that one detail … well, it suggests to me that you're uncomfortable with dealing with everything else she had to say.

3. What of the target's freedom of speech? In what way does a general freedom to troll outrank someone's right to publish under their own name?

Today, protesters standing up in their own skin are getting shot in Venezuela; for them, anonymity is moot.

The sneers of the savvy don't help

If you didn't notice, Twitter got enthusiastic about a small show of solidarity for SPC Ardmona. In spite of various contradictions, the #SPCSunday hashtag took off.

Punters posted pics - “here's what I bought” or “here's what we made”, others posted recipies.

Beneath, however, there was the sneering undercurrent from those more concerned with “savviness” than enthusiasm. They boiled down to:

1. I don't like the product anyhow, and Italian tomatoes are better.

2. You bought the product from Woolworths or Coles, and they're part of the problem.

3. You do know that SPC Ardmona is part of Coca-Cola Amatil, don't you?*

To the last two, I offer no argument; to the first, I'll just remark that you might want to run “Italy tomato mafia contamination” into your search engine and get back to me later.

The objections boil down to “if you want to change the world, you're doing it wrong”.

Yes: there is a obvious contradiction involved in going to Woolworths or Coles, buying a product from a Coca-Cola subsidiary, posting the results on a US-owned social media platform – all in a gesture of solidarity for farmers and workers in the Goulburn Valley.

I'd even bet that a fair number of people who ran with the #SPCSunday hashtag are actually smart enough to perceive the irony.

But ahh, the savvy: a habit of thought that transcends notions of right-or-left, because it's about the dull, grey, humourless gaze-down-the-nose at the folly of the masses. It's how I imagine a Catalan knight may once have looked at peasants having fun.

It's just another condescension, “shut up and leave the adults to talk.”

I address myself now to the savvy of the left: just how well did your strategy work in, oh, the 2013 Federal election? “Miserable failure” is how I'd describe it.

There is a fairly general agreement that “voter disengagement” is worth worrying about.

But it's not “voter disengagement” that's the problem – not directly. It's people disengagement. Get people interested, excited, and by the way having fun, and I'd guess it's a damn sight easier to bring their votes along with them.

What happens when the savvy see people engaged, interested, excited, and having fun? They put on the po-faced frown of the expert: “you're doing it wrong.”

No, we're not. You are. The savvy is the stealer of the soul of politics, the enemy of engagement, the excluder of the outsider.

During England's catastrophic Ashes series of 2013, the incomparable Kerry O'Keeffe, a fine analyst of the game, looked at the English high-performance coaching and risible dietary requirements, and lumped it under the heading “the one-percenters”.

His argument was that the Australian coach, Darren Lehmann, took a low-performing team and focussed on bowling, batting, and fielding. Only someone at the very top of their game, he said, had the luxury of focussing on extracting an extra one-percent of performance by exotic practises. England coach Andy Flower, he believed, was working on the one-percent of performance when the team was having trouble with the basics.

To the savvy of the left, I say this: your research and focus groups – the one-percenters – are no use to you right now. You need the basics: getting people interested, excited, having fun.

Sneering at an obvious success doesn't mark you down as intelligent, knowledgable or knowing. 

*It's been pointed out to me that CCA is majority locally-owned: how much difference this makes, I will leave to the reader. 

You had one job, Australia, and you fluffed it

I have to say it again?

The short version is that my wife, Ms T to those who know us not and those who know us know her name, is sick. Without a high-profile fund-raising disease to provide support, our entire experience of critical illness is of the public system.

And while I complain about details, the key facts are: she's still alive, and we're not broke.

Over the last four years, she's spent about five months in hospital, had one very major surgery plus about ten minor procedures (including removal of two tumours that were side-effects of her treatments), run into her third year of immune-suppressing chemotherapy, vast amounts of various medications, and right now, pain clinic access to try and eliminate her dependency on synthetic opioids.

A US friend of mine tracked things early on, but he gave up when her putative American healthcare bill passed the million-dollar-mark.

But the happy-clappers of prosperity doctrine really hate things like Medicare. It's a direct challenge to their fundamental doctrine: if you're poor, it's because God doesn't love you, and if you're poor because of disease, it's because you have personally and individually offended God and are being punished.

Which is a religious stance that suits the most atheistic of economic schools – the hard market fundamentalists – just fine, because they detest government spending as a matter of principle.

And it's created a most toxic and potent combination that's infecting Australia from its spiritual home in America, and every damn government institution is under attack. Yes, there's SPC Ardmona and the sickening support for mining billionaires and the ABC and SBS, education funding and disability funding …

But my personal angle is personal, okay? I can and do care about the other things, but I write about what I know.

In America, Ms T and I would be yet another case of medical bankruptcy. Instead, I have both an employer and a small business, one son has a university record that makes me swell with pride and the other is about to enter the workforce. And we didn't have to sell everything, retreat to a trailer park, declare bankruptcy, or seek income support from the government.

And right now, the prognosis for Ms T is better than it's been since 2010, whereas under the American system, I'd have scattered petals on her coffin long ago.

You had one job, electorate of Australia, and you did it wrong. With any number of people warning you that gimlet-eyed ideologues wanted power and would abuse it from Day One, you decided that “an Abbott government couldn't be that bad”.

You were wrong, and with years still to go, protest – huge, ongoing, mass protest – seems to be the only way to defend Australia against the US-inspired mission teams of the Tea Party.

Welcome to Lübeck! Tourism before the terror

It's so long since the trip, when Ms T and I and our sons travelled to the UK for the first time, and one of the great memories has nothing to do with the UK – more than ten years.

Don't get me wrong: the UK trip was a treat beyond our means, which is why our dearest friend on earth helped us get there. But … that is a different story.

In a world that hadn't yet suffered the global terrorism panic pandemic, we called by a minor German city, Lübeck, on our way home. The only reason is that Ms T believes a big part of her family history is associated with that city. “We once owned a castle that got turned into a mental hospital in East Germany” is the short version.

So we figured out that a cheap flight would land us in Lübeck to be tourists, a cheapish train would take us to Hamburg, and after that we could pick up our flight back to Australia with no penalty.

So we went to Lübeck, and there are things to see there: churches, for example, restored after WW2 in which the “restoration” work is left in plain white and the “original church” is the bits gathered up after the war, so you can see, dark-on-white, the extent of the devastation.

There's the tourist boat trip around the harbour, which I loved. Or the sausage-seller who could talk better to my son (who has no German) than to my wife (who studied the language in high school)!

But that's not my favourite memory of Lübeck.

My favourite memory happens at border control, in an airport better described as a “shed”, with one bored customs guard processing the incoming passengers.

It seems that in those days, at least, if you were flying cheap and your destination was a Hamburg industry conference, you landed in Lübeck and got a free bus to the conference. So the customs officer had his repertoire down pat:

“Travelling to Hamburg? Out the door, right to the bus, good-day.”

We broke his recitation.

“Travelling to Hamburg? Out...”

“No. We're travelling to Lübeck.”

“Lübeck?” … pause … “Why?”

(And I'm not going to try to do a German accent in text.)

Ms T: “Because my family came from here.”

The customs guard switched from bored to a face-splitting grin and arms spread wide. Really: I've rarely seen a transformation like it, especially from someone in uniform behind a desk. He stood up:

“Welcome! Welcome to Lübeck! Willkommen! To our lovely city!”

It took us a few minutes – which wasn't welcomed by those behind us – to get through customs, because we were receiving (good) advice about where to get breakfast, and being reminded that “you can walk everywhere in Lübeck!” (which was true), and a reminder of the churches and squares that were worth seeing (he was right).

And the customs guard gave us the key bit of information that made our walking-tourism perfect, that day: “Go to the railway in a taxi, leave the luggage in a locker, and go walking”.

And we have wonderful and (some) distressing memories of that city: its war damage must have been horrific, for example. But we also remember being welcomed at the gate of the city, with joy and enthusiasm, and I wish a dozen years later I could find that guard so we could all thank him properly for helping us find a strange city in a foreign tongue, and enjoy it.

But the world changed, with America holding the whip: I guess the customs guards who have license to smile are few and far between, today. But Lübeck won't have changed that much behind the gate, and it's a wonderful place.

Lisa Bonchek Adams: say what you will

To write this, I first had to do something really difficult. I'll explain that in a minute, but it's the reason I'm crying.

The debate de jour has been sparked by some of the most insensitive columns I've ever read: this, from the Guardian (which includes the utterly shameful admission that the columnist included direct-message conversations in the column without permission), and this from the New York Times – a stunning husband-and-wife double-act to piss on a dying woman because she's Tweeting her cancer.

To answer the wife, Emma Keller: there is no ethical question. A person has chosen to write and publish, and has a platform from which to do so, and you have no damn say in it. And, Bill Keller: your snide aside about the cost of visiting dogs is beyond reprehensible.

The cross-platform pissing contest is cowardly beyond anything I can express.

And I recall to mind another individual who chose to die in public, Denis Wright. His blog posts – still preserved here, for how long I know not – were an exemplar of dignity, a life documented in public as Lisa Bonchek Adams' is, and the reason I'm crying now, because I re-read the last week of his journey and the following eulogies and damn even writing these words taps a spring of tears. It was really difficult.

If Lisa Bonchek Adams is wrong to fight her fight in public, then so was Denis. I'm too distant from Ms Adams to speak to her stance, but Denis, I at least knew well enough on Twitter to chat with, and I admired him well enough to (I hope) learn from.

And I'm still on the edge of tears.

My wife and I have chosen to put some of her experiences on this blog, and I won't reiterate them tonight. Our path is different: not cancer, but the toxic and dangerous path of a medically-suppressed immune system.

The reason we speak out is because we know there are things aren't known to the world at large: really, the same reason that Ms Adams is Tweeting. And because we see the “pink ribbon” view of illness – the glamour that raises funds – and like her, we resent it, because there's nothing glamorous about illness, and nothing pink about vomit or shit or pain.

Ms T and I are with you, Lisa Bonchek Adams: keep saying it. We understand. We endorse.

Save what you can

“Negative thoughts never lead to positive outcomes”.

Aside from the fact that sales aphorisms always come from Rich White Americans, I call bullshit.

I can easily think of at least one profession in which thinking the worst leads to success, and optimism leads to disaster.

Here's a video of what happens when a civil engineer is an optimist - the Tacoma Narrows Bridge:

And here's an engineering pessimist:

“If I put one rock on another”, the real engineer says, “there will be an earthquake, or a flood. We'd better build it like this, so it never falls down.”

“Negative thoughts never lead to positive outcomes”? Bollocks.

And yet, the same world that can consider a lame aphorism like that which led this post can treat subscription underwear as a good idea:

“I am an adult male, so lame that I can neither wash nor buy underwear, but that's okay because there's a lauded start-up that will let me subscribe to my jocks.”

Truly, I have not seen a more lame idea since the Tech Wreck (look it up).

Its premise is that men can neither clean nor buy their own underwear. And, given the spavined, incapable, can't-do-without-mummy, send-me-skincare culture of the modern male, I guess it'll probably make enough money to get by.

Look: if you're so lame you can't keep track of underwear, you're not a man, because you're not an adult of any kind. The washing machine – over there, lamo – can be deciphered without a codex, the clothes-line is outside, I realise it's an uncomfortable distance from the computer so take the damn iPhone with you, and if it's raining, use the dryer, whose interface says “on” and “off”.

But no, there probably is a demographic of 20-something utter losers who can't keep track of their own underwear, and can't bear to ask mother to keep them supplied at least until they find a girlfriend whose devotion works better than her nose.

And those “men” will probably be working in sales, and believing the same stupid aphorisms that their elder sales-people are sprouting at them.

Sad, really.

Here's another bunch of ten-cent aphorisms that gets published because it's from Harvard. 

1. “Don't give up on your dreams”. Dude, I'm not at Harvard, and I'm over fifty, and my wife's health got stolen by her immune system, which means she'll never work again. I had to grow up, and focus on survival, and walk away from my dreams. You smug turd.

2. “Don't be afraid to suffer”. Of course I'm afraid. Humans are. I've carried my wife into ICU, for heaven's sake. If next year has worse, I'm terrified. You smug turd.

3. “Seek the mystery inside the truth, not the truth inside the mystery.” Meaningless drivel: bollocks with Harvard's name attached. A plastic Buddha with made-in-China on its bum.

4. “Let you happen”. What the hell? Really, what can happen to me that isn't me? You're just pulling aphorisms out of the evanescence of fart by now.

5. “The question isn’t if you’re going to die. It’s whether you’re going to live.” Jesus Christ. You're going to die, I'm going to die, my wife's going to die, it happens to all of us. And I'm sick to the back teeth of gimcrack philosophy. I don't wish your death, I just desire your silence, until you've learned life at the teeth of death.

Dude, by now I've spent one-third of my life caring for people who I loved, who were dying. Your theme-park philosophy isn't worth two thirds of a cube-root of nothing. Right now, I am celebrating because my wife can walk three kilometres, and can consider six in the near future.

I've got a simpler philosophy, the last line of The Triffids' album Callenture.

“And between ourselves, and the end at hand /

Save what you can, save what you can.”

The burdens we carry

Sarah*,

I've never quite thought what it's like watching from the outside, when you're close – so close that it's like pressing your nose to the window. And when it's someone close, so that what's happening puts daggers in the heart.

Me, I'm in the middle of my personal maelstrom, as you know. Which makes it easy to forget that people close to the storm, but not in it, have feelings too. I should know: I was shocked to talk to a friend recently, to find her crying when I thought I was just relating facts. Her outside was closer to my inside than I realised.

And you're the one on the outside, which I now realise is harder than I'd thought it was. You cry over photographs, and fret that the people inside the storm won't survive it.

You know what? That's beautiful.

Really: because if you're on the inside, getting touches of love from the outside can hit like a stick full of love and weeping.

But enough of me. Your concern is that one person is dying, and someone closer to you, the wife, is in denial. And that's what I want to talk about.

Denial takes many forms, and one of them, I'm familiar with. By the time Ms T was sent to RPA emergency, I already thought she was dying (which, in the absence of hospital, she was).

To nearly everyone, Sarah, I would have seemed in denial in those horrible three months. Even my mother saw nothing but a stolid optimism from me; I found ways to talk to my sons without actually lying to them. For example, because they were used to some of the ways I spoke, I could have a conversation like this at 7:45am in the morning:

“How's mum?”

“Ahh, you know, guys. Still in hospital, still alive, after you go to school I'll head over to the hospital and find out properly, now eat your breakfast.”

That got me through a lot of mornings, and any third party would take in my tone of voice and words and tell me that I was in denial.

So the first question you have to ask: is your sister in denial, or is she just maintaining a public face, a facade, because if she ever lets it slip, she'll end up like I was then, lying on the kitchen floor, cuddling the telephone after the end of a call, drunk and weeping.

One kind of denial, you see, is to deny your own feelings, terrors, pain, and for God's sake not listening to the voice saying “he will die”. As well as “what about me?” As well as “what about the children?” As well as “what about the mortgage?” And so on.

Yes, there is the other kind of denial: the one that simply pretends things aren't happening.

And it's hard to tell between the two, from the outside.

Don't try. If you assume that your sister, with the sick husband, is in the wrong kind of denial, you'll direct your attention to breaking through her defences, and that won't end well. The only thing you can do is provide support – and the support you provide doesn't change whether or not you have chosen the right kind of denial.

Think about this, Sarah: whether or not your sister is completely sane, her husband's condition doesn't change one way or the other. Whether she recognises the situation, the outcome for her children if he dies will be the same.

Whatever her says in public to you: if or when he dies, the support you have to provide will be the same.

This is the cold equation you have to live with, Sarah: that you have to choose the burdens you can carry, decide you will carry them, and then …?

I'm the bastard who has to say it. You can't set the burden down. It'll be with you until either someone dies, or the crisis passes. Once the cup is poured, you have to drink, no matter what it tastes like, how much it hurts. There won't be anyone else to take it from you, because there never is.

But look at it this way, through the tears. Why would you assume the burdens? For whom? On whose behalf?

You love your sister, so much that you will assume burdens of worry on her behalf.

You love her children, enough to worry that their mother isn't coping with the impending death of her husband, their father.

This, Sarah, is part of growing up. You have learned that love doesn't exist without pain, because one day, love will be lost, and others have to take up love's burdens.

Sarah, your sister's children may well need your love and shoulders, in case your sister really is in denial. Your reality will be needed, and – here, I am again the bastard bearer of bad tidings – someone will have to carry the burden.

And I know that you may not be strong enough to bear the burden. I don't care: you know the burden exists, and it terrifies you (as it terrifies us all), and that is sufficient to warrant my love. I hope, wish, pray that you can carry whatever burden falls to you, and guarantee that I will do my best to share it.

*Not her real name, and not the same “Sarah” as last time.

Two walkers' personal pilgrimage

Really, it's such a small thing.

The walk named the “Den Fenella Lookout” doesn't rate. It's not one of the Blue Mountains' great long walks, like going from Kanangra Walls to Katoomba (which I have walked), or the Six Foot Track (part of which we have walked), or Katoomba to King's Tableland via Mount Solitary (a very small part of which we have walked).

The Den Fenella walk is just a lookout walk from the Wentworth Falls Picnic Area.

It's just 1km down and the same back. With a descent that wouldn't upset anyone except if, as Ms T, they've been too sick to attempt the walk for four years, which makes it special.

And because it was laid out by someone who had a soul.

The Den Fenella Lookout walk starts as a somewhat boring descent through the same Blue Mountains heath as everyone sees, even if they only look at tourist lookouts. It's everywhere, including at Bunjaree Cottages, the joint labour of love of me and Ms T.

It passes down past a small bit of hanging swamp, which is also everywhere … so long as the developers don't kill them. They look like useless bits of ground, but they also supply an awful lot of the drinking water that ends up in Sydney's catchment.

After the swamps, the Den Fenella walk drops into a grotto. It's a nice grotto, but if you want grottos of inexpressible loveliness, go somewhere else. This grotto is just … nice. That's all. Nice.

And there's another walk around a hanging swamp, with a bit of walking under the cliff, and then …

You turn a corner and find yourself overlooking a long valley with Mount Solitary pretty much dead-centre of the vista.

It takes the breath away – even for Ms T, who hates heights, detests lookouts, and can only ever drop herself on a rock, as far as possible from the railing, and gaze over the valley as a coward.

The first time we walked the Den Fenella, we agreed: “This is a walk with soul in it. Somebody who loved someone wanted them to see things the way they saw them.”

And despite its brevity, we perceive the soul: the person who wanted someone to get the big reveal, the “glamour” – to quote a movie – at the end of the walk. To walk around some rocks, and suddenly find themselves in a vista of inexpressible beauty.

And a couple of days ago, Ms T managed the walk, walked down the stairs, caught “The Prestige” – for herself, for the first time in four years.

It's only a couple of kilometres. The descent, and therefore the climb back out, is only a hundred metres. But it's a big thing, for us.

Ten years ago, an accidental combination of circumstances led us to take up bush-walking. We started with light stuff – including the Den Fenella – and Ms T discovered to her vast surprise that walking made her chronic back pain (an old fracture to lumbar 3 and lumbar 4) disappear. We spent the next six years expanding our range.

At our best, we could cover 20 km in a day, and those walks formed the basis of the best years of our marriage. You do so much talking in ten hours in the bush.

Just before Ms T first went into hospital, she couldn't walk the fifty metres to a bus stop without help, and it's been a long road back.

I'd given up on some things. For example, I thought that we'd be doing well if we got to finish a 10 km walk without drama. But on New Year's Eve, she declared her own goal is 20 km before the end of 2014.

Doing our personal pilgrimage to the Den Fenella is an ideal way to start.

Me and Ms T: musing on a marriage

Disclaimer: I am not giving advice here. Really, I'm crap at advice. I'm sharing experience.

“Sarah”*,

I'm writing this as background for you, because when I try to say this stuff conversationally, I digress and self-interrupt and never get through it.

Our conversation got me thinking, while I was driving somewhere, and adding up.

Out of 22-plus years of marriage, there have been probably seven, maximum nine, that Ms T and I both really count as “happy marriage” years. Ms T's memory agrees pretty much with mine, because I asked her.

You missed much of this “from the outside”, much as I didn't notice what you wanted to tell me, until you hit me over the head with it. So much for appearances. Also, I'm kind of aspie, and apt to miss subtle signals.

Post-natal depression drove quite a chasm between Ms T and I in the mid-1990s. Even when we looked besotted to an outsider. Even though we tried to go everywhere together – we were finding it hard. Communication fell in a hole.

Later, the boys were high-maintenance, and until we got a decent diagnosis and counselling for them, we often got into arguments. Communication of a sort, with an apology at the end as a perverse incentive. When you don't know what's going on, a blame game happens easily.

The counselling was notionally for the boys; but a lot of it ended up being counselling for Ms T and I. And it helped.

Ms T's early menopause, about that time, wasn't a picnic either, she reminded me today.

Our first trip to the UK helped a lot. We'd hit wits'-end a little bit before that – boys difficult, the wind-down of my then-workplace, my first attempt at freelancing, my mother driving us a little nuts!

Then we got to see the boys in a context where we didn't have to worry about what the school would say. They got to go places and respond to them without the hassles of school-appropriate behaviour. We got to see them through eyes like yours, instead of a principal worrying, a head teacher disciplining, etc.

That trip also helped get Ms T and I communicating better, because instead of the talk being “what are we going to try next to settle them down?”, it was “wow, they love The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, and instead of fearing them being bored by The Globe, they were entranced, and we talked about that, and so on.

Things went on an upswing for a few years after that: we began bush-walking, came to the UK again, I was making good money, Ms T was still working, there was spare money to start renovating the house (ha!). That good period – call it five years – was absolutely the best of our marriage.

Then Ms T's health began to fail. You know the story from there. Thankfully, Ms T and I managed to wash up on the same shore. Whatever is wrong isn't us. So we cling close.

We got lucky, but it was hardly ever a certainty.

The only thing that is certain is that the times we looked over the abyss of separating, we drew back. I suspect we were mostly too scared to split up.

It never was a special “better” marriage that we had. We nearly didn't have it at all. Neither Ms T nor I really know what the secret sauce was. We know what is working now, but how we got here is a bit of a mystery.

Along the way, we had to farewell some treasures. There are gaps in our relationship where there once were habits, things that were once part of she-and-I. Yeah, I might cry about that from time to time.

So it goes; we're here.

*Not her real name, obviously.

Meteor showers, fathers, and happiness

Someone reminded me.

Maybe only a few people will read this, but if I've written it, I'll remember it better.

The scene is a very suburban verandah of the 1960s. In those days, there were still eaves on red-brick project homes, they were mostly single-storey, and they always included a covered verandah of at least a few square metres.

The night I'm thinking of must have been in the summer school holidays, because as a (roughly) nine-year-old I rarely even got to stay awake late enough to see the TV test pattern! And this night, when the TV ended for the night, the whole family retired not to bed, but to the verandah.

And I was maybe nine years old. As the change-of-life child of the family, that meant my siblings were already 16, 18 and 20: old enough for long adult conversations while I tried to butt in (I guess) and doze while trying to stay awake.

No, the numbers don't work. I must have been eight, because by the time I was nine, the eldest had left home for university.

Was being awake this late exciting? You bet.

And it was summer, which in Sydney means it doesn't cool down early in the night. So I lazed around with the rest, and don't remember any details, but I do remember the meteor shower dad kept us all awake for.

There was a mattress or maybe an inflatable that I was lying on. There was adult talk all around. The night was muggy and dark. Even the suburbs, in those days, still had stars.

And the stars started moving, flashing across the sky. And every time he spotted one, dad would laugh and call and point.

And I remember, because that was one of the very few times I knew him to be happy.

I remember how deliriously happy he was when, in a rented Halvorsen cruiser, we ran into a wild storm trying to get to Pittwater. He was a seaman in World War Two: the waves crossing the mouth of the Hawkesbury were taller than our boat; mum and my siblings and me were cowering (I was put near dad for my own safety).

He was laughing like the Old Man of the Sea, swinging the boat towards every towering wave, turning it after the wave passed, yelling “turn you bastard!”, inching towards Pittwater, alive and mad and loving it.

Once, he bought me a gift I didn't expect, a whole new drum kit when I thought I was getting him to buy me a new pedal. My reaction made him happy, I think.

He wasn't happy that often. To my 50^th year, my mother's explanation didn't go far beyond her standard explanation, that “the war changed him”.

I guess he may have been happy in the affair that, sometime when I was a kid, caused misery everywhere else. Or perhaps it may have only been a small relief of his own misery and madness. Mum once said she forgave him partly because of the war: because she had loved someone who took ship and never came home, but she understood.

He was over-the-moon when a vet said our Labrador, Denny, could be saved after he'd been hit by a car. It cost $1,800 – a considerable price in 1974 – but Denny repaid him by caring for dad when Alzheimer's degraded his brain. The dog would take him out each day, and always return him home.

…

There was one more time. The year was 1977, I think. I don't remember the reason for the trip, but it took us through the lower New England, and dad wanted to seek out a friend from the 1950s, when he was surveying roads around Barrington Tops.

His memory was perfect, then. He found Tom Meehan's place through unmarked dirt roads without trouble. It was a classic post-and-corrugated-iron shack, abandoned, but because it had no locks, we walked through it before we continued the search.

A road crew stopped us, and dad asked if they knew Tom, and they did, and pointed us to the right road. We drove for a while on the dirt, and an old man leaned against a rail-type fence.

Dad stopped the car, got out and yelled.

“I'd know your beret anywhere on earth! Damn you, Tom! I thought you were dead!”

“No, just had to move closer to town. How are you, Stan? This one of your sons?”

He was happy that evening, as well.

…

There's a photo of me, eleven or twelve years old, perched on a fallen tree, on the path that leads to The Ruined Castle in the Blue Mountains.

You weren't happy that day; perhaps you were worried about work, or quite possibly you resented being detailed to drag me out on a proper bushwalk.

But I was happy, and I've taken Ms T and the boys on the same walk, twice, and we love it. And I don't say so, but I think of you when I'm on that path.

Because I was happy, that day. So much so that I keep you in my mind whenever I tread that path.

…

And here I am, transported to the late 1960s by a friend's casual remark and wondering why.

I can't wish my father alive again. He wasn't particularly lovable. As mum said, the war changed him. What sanity the navy left him with, he saved to make sure he could provide for his family. It didn't leave much sanity for the home front. He was volatile, fey, dangerous.

I'm volatile and fey, but I've worked hard, and I'm a lot less dangerous.

My sons will at least remember happiness, because they've seen plenty. I may nag and carp and demand they do better, but I also laugh and love. Maybe without realising it, I've set myself the task of healing the wounds of my father's war, so my sons can somehow manage to be more sane than was given to he or I.

And I want them to know that a happy father isn't so unusual.

Twelve wishes of Christmas for 2013

There are too many people, and I don't have the money for so many gifts. So here, in my small way, in my little corner of the Internet, is my Christmas list of people I'd like to wish well to for 2013.

1. RPA Hospital

Keeps my wife alive. Sometimes, that's been hard. And the names are too many to list, but Dr Roger Garsia of Immunology has worked well on a difficult case; his interns are without peer (in particular, Dr Myanh Nguyen deserves great success); and Ms T's chemo is down from fortnightly to quarterly.

A special out-of-2013 mention to Dr Gok Paven, now at St George, who led the team that first worked out what was going on, and is still a pillar of our world.

I must mention the nurses in Gloucester House, now the poor cousin to the famous suit-run joint over the road, who still get to handle the miserable cytotoxins that keep Ms T alive.

2. The Register

I've never had so much fun in my job as I have had working for The Register, and along the way I get to work with good people. Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor, is one, but there are plenty of others. I hope you know who you are.

3. Dr Colin Lim

Our GP. He gets the day-to-day stuff, the boring “just here for ten prescription refills” stuff. He still feels bad that four years ago, he didn't spot what was wrong with Ms T – even though it later took six specialists to get to an inconclusive choice of possibilities. That was the worst coin-toss of my life, and I can't blame a suburban GP for not cottoning onto what was going on!

4. Guests at Bunjaree Cottages

It's not just that they pay bills. Or that they're helping my main mission with Bunjaree Cottages, which is to keep 14 hectares of bush – including my beloved Lyrebirds and Antechinus, and a big hunk of hanging swamp – out of the hands of concrete-lovers.

This year has been a signal year of “nice people” and “people who get it”. People who treasure the bush and the environment and the values. Once, in a desperate circumstance, I had to teach a guest over the phone how to find and then start the backup electricity generator: he was insanely pleased with himself at the idea of going back to his family with a new set of “real bloke” credentials to show off, so he didn't complain – he even wrote nice stuff in the guest book!

Making people like that happy, giving them a relaxed holiday … to quote “black hat guy” from XKCD comics, “that's how I roll.”

A special mention for @Ponder_Stybbons and another local to the Mountains whose name can remain private, for all their help in 2013 in keeping Bunjaree Cottages clean, and making things nice for the guests. I've rarely met people with such unfailing good humour.

5. My old friend from school

I don't resent your calls for help in depression. I treasure them. On your good days, you remind me why my depression damn well won't win. On your bad, I somehow help, and talk it all through with Ms T afterwards, and life is built out of small victories.

6. Stilgherrian

Stil would, anyhow, resent a December 25 7am phone call saying something like “Merry Christmas”. So I promise it won't happen, and anyhow you don't just haul gas bottles in emergencies, you also tolerate and even encourage conversation from my sons. Which isn't something everybody can manage. So thanks.

7. Shara Evans

A long time ago, Shara took me in out of the rain with a job that lasted years. I already owe you for that, friend. This year we haven't been in touch so much, but when we have, I've always enjoyed it. And you are loyal in a way that few people can manage. Thanks.

7. Twitter friends and blog-commenters

Damn, I've been lucky. When people re-Tweet this blog, or comment on it, I'm in terror. But what I get is a world of friendship and wonder.

Look, in person, I'm a bit difficult, a lot awkward … to quote the kids' movie “Mouse Hunt”, I'm a “cat that's … difficult to love.” But I've found so many friends, fellow-travellers, fellow-sufferers out there in the odd and sometimes hostile world of Twitter.

There is love in the world.

9. You know who you are

You'd never forgive me for naming you in public, so I won't. At a great distance and in touch only by Skype and e-mail, you've become a rock of this household, a treasure beyond price. You've listened to me on the darkest mornings when merely facing the day looked beyond me. 

You're loved by both me and Ms T, because somehow I managed to finish this year saner and better able to cope than when I started it.

10. My first wife

One of the great treasures of my life has been to find that we still can love each other, in spite of history, and in 1976 you were one of my first genuinely close friends, and I'll hold you forever in my heart.

11. My sons

Don't tell them. They think I'm an insufferable nag. I am. I'm also a critic and a scold.

On the things they do well, I'm insanely proud of them. And their job-seeking frustrations I remember from my youth. But they've already defeated some dragons that the world threw at them, and I get the upside of their intelligence, their devotion to Ms T, and their sunny natures. I don't know how I managed to be even a moderately good parent, but luck sometimes delivers the parcels that skill left behind.

12. Ms T

You are my Christmas present. I want no other. "Stuff" has lost its allure.

Last year, doctors would have called up a bookie for odds against you making it. And we still hold each other each and every night, and at 2am when the world is cold, you're still warm. And when the day comes, you will fret and grouch your way through your unchangeable Christmas feast, and when it lands on the table, you'll relax and grin and drink champagne. And I'll pray that next year, we'll still be there to carve the roasts and laugh and drink, caress and kiss, because we both know there is a last Christmas in our future.

My love, let this Christmas not be our last. That's the only gift I desire.

The Thirteenth Trump

There is a last, a thirteenth wish. A silent prayer for the memory of an old woman Ms T and I knew only briefly as a customer. Who tapped my cheek and called me “that young man”, and loved her every visit to our little corner of heaven. If I'd known, I'd have stood quietly near the rear of your funeral and slipped away unnoticed. 

You reminded me of my mother, who died before you at a similar age, and I loved every minute of the handful of hours I spent with you. Go well, dear Pat, and where you are, may you be young and flirtatious and beautiful again.

Depression #2

There's RUOK day, there's the famous mental health charities with famous founders, there are the Order of Australia awards, and there's the public adulation. 

Then there's the suicidal friend. Right now, with medication, we can talk without me having to worry that I'm picking the wrong words and making things worse and triggering the knife or the pills.

Today, I was a bit gratified at a turn the conversation took.

“Richard, shut up.”

“But ...”

“No, shut up. Shut up. Shut up means don't talk. Count to five without talking.”

So I counted to five. Slightly too slowly, because I missed the opening …

“See, you didn't know what you were saying next, and it made you stutter. I've known you since we were fifteen, and it's always given me the shits. Just slow down sometimes and you won't stutter.”

Which is right: I get like that, lost in the sentence, all the nouns fleeing my mental grasp like the mozzie you're trying to whack in the dark, and I'd fear it was Alzheimer's except that I really have always been like this.

So I was grinning at my end of the conversation, that my friend has recovered enough conversation and confidence to tell me to shut up.

So the next thing I said was, “It was bloody marvellous to hear you tell me to shut up. Now, when's the appointment with the counsellor?”

The conversation got difficult again. Four weeks after a GP agreeing that help was needed, and the same GP promising to do his best to get things moving, and writing an emergency prescription for strong anti-depressants to get through the wait, the only thing now known is which facility can fit my friend in, and the name of the counsellor.

The date? Well, you know, it's a difficult time of year, and Christmas is coming, and there's probably a counsellor on leave because they have to take leave as well, and really we don't know.

And that's good enough?

In the country of “RUOK” and “get help”, help is at the other end of an indeterminable wait list? - No, that's not good enough.

Someone else I know well was referred to a BMRI doctor – Brain and Mind Research Institute to its friends, but I'm not one of them and never will be – by their psychiatrist, but got fobbed off by the receptionist with “we will review the referral and call you back”.

The bloody receptionist acted as the road-block.

That was in January. The call-back never came. Calls were made to follow things up: it never got past the receptionist. The individual in question eventually abandoned medications, thankfully without incident, and is doing just fine, again thankfully.

The third aspect of this post comes from the ABC: “Australia second in world in anti-depressant prescriptions”.

No kidding.

A GP, looking at someone threatening suicide in the consulting room, has to act, must act, and with no prospect of immediate help, the GP prescribes pills for a crisis, and that is becoming the public crisis instead of the lamentable lack of mental health services... sorry, I'm ranting.

Help is not on its way. Help is somewhere out there, queued up, under-resourced, dealing with last month's urgent cases, dealing with last night's hospital admissions, and so on.

It's all very well for high-profile case histories to be paraded for their success, to teach people the “get help” message, and to incidentally solicit donations via radio-appearances from Famous Australians Doing Good in the World.

It's quite another for people who desperately need help to have to resort to call-a-friend to stop them using the knife or pills, and keep them talking for an hour or so until they find the strength to cook a meal for their family (which in the case close to me includes one disabled child) and take themselves to bed.

The friend I have in mind brought up her children, including the one with a disability, and stayed employed until, over the age of fifty, the last factory in the region closed a while back. I guess the unemployment plus the disability of the child, plus the prospect of a lonely future …

Shit, it would be too much for me. Ms T's illness hasn't broken me, although it's come close. And I have already told you that I suffer from depression.

But here's the thing.

Ms T was desperately ill, when her condition took her to hospital. She was admitted immediately, and kept until there until there was a diagnosis and she was fit to be sent home and there was a treatment regime in place.

The friend I'm thinking of was so close to death that hospital was needed for the self-harm, let alone the mental state. Discharge was next day, and the treatment regime is still on hold.

That sucks. A mental illness can be life-threatening, and no amount of moralising changes that. In the case I'm talking about, a suicide would leave a disabled young adult without a connection to the world, not to mention the ripple effects.

I'm not – absolutely and utterly not – anyone's Best Last Hope in a mental health crisis. My sole qualification is, as I mentioned, that I am intimately familiar with depression.

While I'm happy – wrong word, find a better one yourself – to offer myself to help a friend cope, it doesn't come without cost on my part. But I have a support network of people who treasure me even when I'm an utter shit (Ms T, I'm looking at you, and you love and treasure the others that also help), and I have to pass on their strength because that's what you do.

But hearing famous people telling we at the bottom of the pile that we need to get help that isn't available in a crisis?

It shits me to tears.