2 months ago
15
I run into Paul on the beach in the morning about twice a week, and he’s helpful in a way he doesn’t understand. He’s wary of Wilma, who’s leery of Paul, and they orbit me slowly. “You say she doesn’t bite, Anson. But she doesn’t bite who, is what I want to know. And exactly how hard doesn’t she bite?”
As he watches my dog, he sucks a cardboard coffee and opines. He has advice, news, breaking stories, and almost all his thoughts are spectacularly ad hoc. Until his retirement Paul was a cosmetic surgeon who made so many Mar-A-Lago faces for Melbourne’s aspiring Mar-A-Lagans that now, when the local beau monde assembles for canapes, the venue looks like a Mattel seconds store.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
But forget the startled botoxics Paul once conjured from the banal flesh of Brightonians. Now, having laid down his tools, he has taken up a deep care for the world – he has begun forming opinions. They are neither fresh nor accurate, and my guess is, they come to him in the night when we are most prone to fever dreams and codswallop. Paul has become the arse-end of the weathervane, the rooster’s bum, that great bouquet of metal tailfeathers that point the way the wind isn’t blowing. A sort of antipodean zeitgeist plays in his head, a carnival of unlikely fates – and he must tell me of them. He is not alone in that. Many people see me as a megaphone for their idiocy. It’s almost as if I’m short of the stuff and need donations. I’m not. I don’t.
Seeing me as access to a public platform and recognising in me his only chance of saving Australia from becoming the many failed states he so vividly envisages, Paul predicts the coming travails and implores me to write of them. And if the dark futures Paul warns me of seem merely playlets transported from his dreams, then remember we are on the beach, it is early morning, and Paul is only half disentangled from the rich bunkum of sleep.
Wednesday: “Anson, you should write about algal blooms. It won’t be bombs and missiles. That’s old war. China will kill our rivers with algae when they’re ready.”
“Algae you think, Paul? I never thought the Reds would come at us with algae.”
“Bloody oath, algae. Nature’s natural assassin. And a totally deniable crime.”
Sunday: “Anson, there’s a big story for you here ... Russia has a virus that’ll kill our internet dead – make Australia a Stone Age chaos. One push of a button. ASIO knows it. Nothing they can do. They all own boltholes offshore in Italy and New Zealand.”
“Italy, Paul? Would one buy in Italy to escape a Stone Age chaos?”
Wednesday: “Anson, Labour has a program to fade out Christmas in favour of Diwali. I know government insiders. Check the explosion of federal funding to non-Christian festivals. The commos always had a grudge against Christ. Goodbye Santa, Anson.”
“He won’t be missed as far as I’m concerned, Paul. He vomited on our hearth last Christmas.”
Sunday: “It’s so obvious, but no one’s writing about it ... the lefties are using the Islamists as muscle, Anson.”
“Like ... as removalists, Paul?”
You will notice my replies to his cautions are playful, as if I’m humouring a crackpot. But I don’t want him to take offence, so I generally placate him by saying I’ve heard similar whispers to the ones he’s been hearing, and I promise to “look into it”. Of course, I never look into it, nor write about it. It’s true Northcote and Hamas have become unlikely lovers, but this page is hardly the place for me to examine that queer fling. Anyway, my neglect of Wednesday’s apocalypse is nothing to Paul, who by Sunday is begging me to sound the alarm on another.
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The Greek prophetess Cassandra was cursed by Apollo so that whatever she predicted inevitably came true, but no one ever believed her predictions. Paul shares half Cassandra’s terrible dilemma. No one ever believes his predictions either and, predictably, they never come true – this situation gives immense succour to his doubters and offers no inkling to him that his visions might occasionally be awry.
Over the last year, Paul has warned me Australia is going heedlessly to Hell in so many handbaskets that I’ve begun to feel optimistic about 2026. He bucks me up, Paul. He is my anti-Cassandra acquaintance who predicts such a profusion of dire futures I suspect we’ll be okay.
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