So today's speech seems to have worked ...

 ... at least for one participant.

Hearing Dougie Herd from @EveryAustralian hilariously sum up the #ndsconference Sign up to the campaign now! pic.twitter.com/6CaxLCmOG7
— NDIS MI Way (@NDIS_MI_Way) March 31, 2015

But who is that tired old man up on the Convention Centre screen?

Let the train take the strain

I sing of the joys of integrated, accessible public transport (with apologies to Walt Whitman).

We rose from bed at a ridiculous hour - not yet four o'clock.  There was a plane to catch at 6:20 a.m. to take us to Brisbane where I shall be the closing speaker tomorrow at the Queensland conference of National Disability Services.  (As usual, I'm far from sure what I'm gong to say).  To make that flight I need to start early - with Spike's help of course.  Folk like me always have to add on 'quad-time'. 

You work backwards from the deadline:

• The flight departs at 6:20 a.m.
• I have to check-in at least one hour before departure time because I'm a wheelchair user requiring assistance (in contrast to other passengers who may check-in with only 30 minutes to go).  So that means be at the check-in desk by 5:20 a.m.
• That means be turning the ignition key in the car no later than 4:45 a.m. (Transfer into the driver's seat - drive for 20 or so minutes, maybe half an hour - transfer into my wheelchair - push from the car park to the check-in lounge).
• Start getting out of bed at 4:00 a.m.
• Start 15 minutes before that just to be safe.

We made it to the airport by five, as it turned out (Canberra has very little traffic at half-past four in the morning) so we had a pleasant short stay in the QANTAS Club.  Chai latte and pancakes for breakfast.  Spike took coffee.  There are worse ways to start a working day.

After an effortless flight - effortless on our part, that is - we arrived in Brisbane shortly after seven, local time.  Queensland sees no need for daylight saving so we gained an hour or lost one depending on your preference for sleep at the other end of a day.

Spike, sketching on the Brisbane SkyTrain

We took the AirTrain service from Brisbane airport directly to the street on which the Convention Centre and our hotel are located.  How blissfully normal it was. What a shame Canberra airport has no accessible public transport connection of any sort! 

But how far we've come in my 30 years as a wheelchair user.  The airline's staff has been trained to assist people like me who can neither walk nor transfer independently.  The airport is fully accessible which means my route of travel was the same as that of other passengers.  I can't recall the number of times elsewhere - and in the past - I've been required to take a different route through the behind-the-scenes twists and turns of the hidden interiors of buildings like airports.  We took a lift and ramp up to the train station, paid for our ticket at the wheelchair-friendly counter, boarded the roomy train via the platform ramp and forty minutes later were wandering along the wheelchair accessible paths through the slightly surreal South Bank precinct - with its lawns, playgrounds, urban beach, cafes and empty performance spaces - adjacent to the Brisbane River.

One day most journeys, most transport services, most of the built environment will be this way; integrated and accessible.  Then we'll only have life to deal with - well or not so well - like everyone else.

The cat that keeps on giving

Me?  But I'm so cute.

Butter would not melt in the mouth of our relaxed little cat, Thistle.  But she does like to catch, kill and sometimes eat rodents, lizards and small birds.  Large birds she leaves to their own devices.  Thistle is, when all's said and done, a small cat.

The cat often brings her prey to show us with what I cannot help but think is pride.  The parade of the captive animal often occurs at night, maybe three a.m. when we are asleep.  Spike has to rise from bed, chase the cat around the room or house, liberate the shocked, dead or dying small beast from the jaws of its captor then make the sometimes hard, sometimes easy decision.  Dead prey is easy.  In the bin.  Similarly easy are the decisions about traumatised but uninjured little creatures - released back into the wild that is our back garden.  More difficult is the decision about seriously injured, possibly fatally wounded creatures.  On at least one occasion the coup de gace was delivered with a spade.

Tell that to the rat.

Today's assuredly dead rodent - stiffer than a good gin - was not delivered to us.  Now and then Thistle the cat deposits and / or hides her prey around the house.  Does she store them for later or simply forget?  We'll never know.  Spike stumbled across this decent sized dead rat in our spare bedroom.  It was removed but there has been no indication the killer cat remembers it enough to be aggrieved that it's gone missing.

Who would have thought our cute little fur ball could be such a dedicated predator?  But now I think on that question the answer is obvious.  

Anyone Douglas.  

Our cute little cat's a predator.  They kill.

And today's word is ...

DUMPLING

As in, I am one.

Clootie Dumpling ... from Texas, apparently

I submitted two poems as entries to the Fish Publishing poetry competition 2015.  The poems are Come Take The King's Shilling and Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre.  I've been working on the former - which started its life as Blackstrap Molasses - for months.  Throughout that period I have pondered the title as much as anything.

So you can imagine how silly I felt when I received the automatically generated e.mail telling me that my poem Come Take The King's Silling had been received by the organisers.  Silling?  It's not even a word!  Of course, one can't edit an entry after it has been paid for and submitted.  

Precision of language?  I can't even type properly.

Fool.

My Old Lady

I rented the movie My Old Lady from iTunes because it has Kevin Kline, Dame Maggie Smith and the immeasurably talented Kristen Scott Thomas. And it's set in Paris.  So what could go wrong?  Well nothing really but it left me thinking, "ho hum".  Spike gave up after half an hour or so; bored I think.

Paris was, of course, sparkling.  As Kevin Kline wandered around Le Marais, sang opera with a total stranger on the banks of La Seine and crossed Pont des Arts I just wanted to jump on the Internet to book a flight. One way.  The three principals gave us solid performances, good performances but I'm not sure the story warranted a movie.  It was written and directed by Israel Horovitz, an American playwright and author.  It shows its stagey origins.  No doubt it would stand up well as a Broadway three-hander but I'm afraid I found it's whimsical melancholia all a bit too tedious.

An artist at work ... Do Not Disturb

Still Life. Pix by Spike Deane

Spike. Pic by the Louse

And even more vanity

Himself.  Pic by Simone de Peak

This photograph accompanied Monday's story in The Canberra Times.  Now here's the thing.

I had never seen this photo before.  I do not remember it being taken (although I do remember having to rush round Myer's store in Adelaide less than two years ago to find a decent tie to buy because we forgot to pack any and I had to give a speech later that morning to 1,300 people at the National Rural Health Conference).   And I have no idea who Simone de Peak is, although with such a distinctive name I have no doubt Google will track her down in a nanosecond.

Rather atmospheric, don't you think?

Or grumpy?

Vanity, vanity. They name is ... Dougie

Busy day at day two of the NDS ACT conference, chairing three sessions (one delivered by my good friend Barbel Winter of Futures UpFront). But darlings, it's all about ME!!

Karen Southgate.  Pic by NDS

Here's me chairing a session on risk management presented by Karen Southgate, employee of NSW Ageing Disability and Home Care Agency and mother of a young man with disability who wants to jump out of an aeroplane.

Daniel Kyriacou. Pic by NDS

And there's me chairing a session on the crucial role of front line staff as marketeers in the new world of service delivery presented supremely well by the excellent Daniel Kyriacou.

Final panel discussion. Pic by NDS

And here's the stuck live-captioning screen recording for posterity my final words of the previous session (led by Barbel) while the important final panel discussion got underway.

I paid for all this vain bad karma later on.  Rolling up the ramp of my car in the convention centre car park I tipped over backwards, banged my skull on the tarmac and rolled out my chair.  Meg Savage, a former colleague from the National Disability Insurance Agency had to collar a passer-by - a conference delegate as it turned out - to help lift me back into my chair.

Nothing damaged but my pride we drove to Manuka where we met Spike and fellow former colleagues at the NDIA, Vanessa Attridge and Nigel Baker at Public Bar where we enjoyed a lovely, laughter-filled evening.  Drink was taken ... as we say in Scotland.

If it's in the paper it must be true ...

You forget, after a while, the gentle but unmistakable boost it gives your ego to be quoted in a media outlet - to be 'in the papers' (so to speak) because some reporter thinks you have something worth including in a story.  Today, after a prolonged period of absence from the press, I'm in the local rag, The Canberra Times.

My speech this morning kicked off the content part of the two-day National Disability Services ACT conference on the National Disability Insurance Scheme.  I'm pleased (and relieved!!) that the speech went over well.  Conference participants - from the conference organiser, through the NDIA Board's Chair (who was up speaking straight after me) and members of the audience to folk on Twitter - told me I did well.  That's always satisfying.

Some of the Twitter feedback read like this ...

At the #NDIS conference in ACT, @dougie_herd is rallying the troops by using Hawking's theories to show transformative nature of the @NDIS
— Evan Wallace (@evwallace2) March 22, 2015

this ...

A fantastic presentation by @dougie_herd at the NDS #ACTconference #NDIS
— Source Kids (@SourceKids) March 22, 2015

and this ...

Wow @dougie_herd that was an amazing speech on the #NDIS at the #ACTconference. Follow the live blog here http://t.co/6LQNkdcggs
— NDIS campaign (@EveryAustralian) March 23, 2015

Later in the day I was interviewed by Clare Colley of The Canberra Times.  Her article in the online version (I doubt it made the print version) with my couple of positive quotes can be read here.

Not a bad day's work, all things considered.

And just in case the newspaper culls old links, here's the text of the story.

People with a disability would be at risk of poor quality support and struggle to find a place with providers if service prices remain too low, a disability peak body warns.
Pricing has been just one of the problems identified in the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in the ACT, National Disability Services chief executive Ken Baker said.
About 650 NDIS participants, carers, and providers are meeting in Canberra for the NDS's two-day conference this week – the largest of its kind in the ACT.
When the NDIS roll-out began in the ACT last July, the territory's pricing was the highest in the country, but Dr Baker said the NDS felt service pricing especially for one-to-one support was inadequate across the country and negotiations were continuing with the National Disability Insurance Agency.

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"The price underpins service quality and choice, if the price is too low there won't be enough providers to offer services or the quality of service they will offer will be inadequate," he said.
"In general across Australia the new prices [under the NDIS] are less than providers have been receiving."
Transitioning from the ACT government funded system had also proved problematic with some providers forced to carry the financial burden when there was a gap before NDIS funds began, Dr Baker said.
The planning and assessment for NDIS participants was another area that needed improvement, with Dr Baker advocating for the role to be handed over to the non-government sector rather than the NDIA.
"I think it's reasonable the agency [NDIA] would want to check people's eligibility and allocate them an individual budget, but much of that discussion about what's the best way to support this person to achieve their goals is best taken place outside the agency with their family and service providers," he said.
Rather than the desperate lack of cash that strangled the sector previously, disability advocate Dougie Herd from Every Australian Counts said the new challenge was taking feedback from NDIS participants to ensure the scheme met their justifiably high standards and eased their anxieties.
"It's better for us to work to solve these problems of new support, growth and development rather than the old system in which the problem was really about when will we ever get enough money to meet people's needs," he said.
"All jurisdictions have been rationed by available dollars over the last 10 years or so."
Mr Herd said before the roll-out there were about 2500 people with a disability accessing the ACT system; the extra money made available under the NDIS would allow the number to double by the end of 2019.
While Dr Baker was confident all the issues will be ironed out as the ACT trial site transition continues, he said many questions surrounding the NDIS rollout could not be answered while the design of the scheme was still evolving making it difficult for organisations and individuals to plan.
"At present it feels like a construction site, it has all the promise and excitement… but all the frustration, disruption and problems of building something new while the plan is still evolving," he said.
Dr Baker said unlike other trial sites the NDIS roll-out in the ACT offered an opportunity to examine how people with a disability who missed out a full NDIS package could still access support.
While the number of providers in the ACT was sufficient for now, Dr Baker said as the scheme expands there will be room for more with interstate organisations already expressing interest.
Mr Herd said he expected new forms of service support to cope with the increasing demand.

I thought I left 'all-nighters' when I left university!!!!!

So ... big speech in the morning, making the opening address to 650 conference delegates at the National Convention Centre, Canberra.  I finally started to get an idea of what I might say and how I might say it early this afternoon.  It's a sign of how (uncharacteristically) nervous I am about tomorrow's presentation that I decided to write a text.  I usually don't.  I started writing around seven-thirty this evening.  I'm maybe half way through and it seems to be holding its themes and structure together, so that's a hopeful sign.  

Here is one thing for sure.  No sleep for me tonight.

Reading The Observer's 100 Best Novels

Two books arrived today - Neil Gaiman's new collection of short stories, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions & Disturbances and an edition of The Pilgrim's Progress, parts I & II with the original illustrations.  I'm very pleased to receive the latter.  Neil Gaiman's book is for Spike.  I may read it sometime.  Or not.

I've decided to read all the novels on Robert McCrum's list of the 100 best novels ever written in Engish.  Such lists are, of course, arbitrary; a fact readily acknowled by Robert McC in his introduction to the series here.  That's neither here nor there, IMHO.  We all compile lists - favourite this, most disliked that, the tedious 'bucket list' and many more besides.  We pick and choose.  

Each week I read the article introducing The Observer team's pick of that week.  This week in a list that's ordered chronologically we've reached book number 78, To Kill A Mockingbird.  I've read 25 of the list announced so far which strikes me as pretty poor form; about one-third.  So I've decided to read or re-read the entire list in the chronological order it has been suggested to us.  Hence the arrival of the Bunyan, which I read a very long time ago - as an early teenager - perhaps in an abridged format.  I have a vague recollection of a children's version which, I speculate, my parents would have thought educational and improving for a child of still tender years (I may have been ten or eleven, so not even a teenager).

I flicked through the pages of the edition I received today (I remain surprised that anyone makes deliveries on a Saturday but I'll stop talking about that rather dim-witted surprise some day soon).  The illustrations are familiar.  They must have been in the children's version I read maybe 45 or more years ago.  And when I read the first paragraph (before setting down the book to return to reading the Guardian online over breakfast) I had an unmistakable and strong sense of having been there before, inside Christian's head, hearing his voice speak to me 300 years after the author set them down on paper.  I guess it's that sort of literary power that makes any writing a candidate for appearing on lists.  We'll see as I read it.

And the Oscar goes to ...

I'm preparing a speech to make at a conference on Monday.  This thread may appear in what I say.  Or not.

If you want to win an Oscar in the leading man or leading woman categories it does you no harm to 'do' disability.  Eight out of 58 women since I was born have played characters with disability.  Twelve out of 58 men playing characters with disability in the same period have won.

Only two of the actors, both women, have had a disability.  That's 10% of characters with disability were played by actors with disability.  Less than 2% of all 116 of those Oscar winning roles have been played by actors with disability.

Oscar winners - Best Actress

• 1957 Joanne Woodward in Three Faces of Eve playing a paranoid schizophrenic
• 1986 Marlee Martin in Children of a Lesser God as a deaf cleaner.  Marlee Martin was deaf.
• 1993 Holly Hunter in The Piano playing a mute Scottish woman.  Holly Hunter is deaf in one ear.
• 1994 Jessica Lange in Blue Sky playing a mentally ill army wife.
• 2002 Nicole Kidman in The Hours playing Virginia Woolf.
• 2004 Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby playing a quadriplegic former boxer.
• Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, playing Margaret Thatcher during her years with dementia.
• 2014 Julianne Moore in Still Alice playing a university professor with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.

Oscar Winners - best actor

• 1968 Cliff Robertson in Charly playing a man with intellectual disability.
• 1969 John Wayne in True Grit, playing the one-eyed US Marshall Rooster Cockburn.
• 1977 John Voight in Coming Home playing a paralysed veteran of the war in Vietnam.
• 1988 Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man playing a man with an autism spectrum disorder.
• 1989 Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot playing Christy Brown an artist with quadriplegic cerebral palsy.
• 1992 Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman playing a blind retired army general.
• 1993 Tom Hanks in Philadelphia playing a man with AIDS.
• 1996 Geoffrey Rush in Shine playing David Helfgott, a concert pianist with a history of mental illness.
• 1997 Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets playing a writer with compulsive-obsessive disorder.
• 2004 Jamie Foxx in Ray playing Ray Charles, blind musician.
• 2014 Matthew McConauchey in Dallas Buyers Club, playing Ron Woodroof who died of AIDS.
• 2015 Eddy Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, playing Professor Steven Hawking who has Motor Neurone Disease.

And today's word is ...

Volatile  

Sometimes it's just how things are.  If you don't look closely enough or deeply enough you'll get your arse kicked.  Today is one such day.  Thank goodness it was not for real.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

Mid-March and only now have I managed to finish reading my first novel of 2015.  Shame on you Douglas Herd.  It's also my first Alan Hollinghurst book. I'm not quite sure how I reached my grand old age without having opened anything by an author universally acclaimed as one of England's finest.  Better late than never (which may be my motto ... or an inadequate apology).

The Stranger's Child is a compelling read, superbly constructed around five episodes taking place at key moments of social, cultural and personal transition, loss or recollection in the lives of characters connected directly and indirectly over a span of 90 years.  I had my doubts at the outset, 1913 upper middle class England, thinking, did not Virginia Woolf get there first and better?  But I hadn't grasped the point.  As we move from each carefully constructed, beautifully written scene to the next the novel's scope expands and diversifies and yet the individuality of the human stories at the heart of the novel don't get lost.  As the novel's driving force - Alfred Hitchcock invented the idea of the McGuffin to describe the force that propels the narrative, like the Grail in a Grail quest - Cecil Valance, the handsome, lost war poet, recedes from view Alan Hollinghurst opens up a fascinating and entertaining examination of loss, memory, secrets and lies, artistic endeavour and changing tastes, reputation, social status, mores and change.  And if all that makes the novel sound dry and literary that only tells you I'm not a very good critic.

Much more accomplished reviews of a fine novel are available here in The New York Times and here (as you might expect) in The Guardian.

Two paces forward or ten steps back?

It can do your brain in, this writing business.  I've been staring at - working with - these lines for hours.  They're a bridge in a poem that started out in life as Blackstrap Molasses.  It's something different now. 

Theirs was an alien landscape, force-fed

From that once-mighty river; no longer

The greatest nor, ever again, the nation’s

Life blood. Sucked dry. Like metaphor. 

First there were three lines.  Now there are four.  And the chances are that there aint much poetry in them whatever the number of lines. But you keep at it because the voices don't stop.

There's a Clydesale horse in it.  Makes sense to me.

Freewheelin' Fyshwick

Before ...

The day began with Spike attempting emergency repairs on the broken axle housing on a front wheel of my wheelchair.  Sadly it was beyond redemption.  After maybe twenty years of use should I be surprised?  No, I don't think so either.

The irrepairable broken wheel necessitated a trip to the wheelchair supplies store, aptly named
Mobility Matters.  It's in Fyshwich, perhaps the oddest but in many ways most practical suburb in this already odd national capital of ours.  Set apart from the rest of the city, on the north side of the Monaro Highway, one can buy anything ... or almost anything.  

There's a Bunnings, Pet Store, Harvey Norman, Clark Rubber plus a host of other retailers of choice for an endless range of practical shopping purposes.  Along the many winding, interweaving (not to say confusing) side streets there are innumerable electricians, plumbers, tile & bathroom appliance sellers, re-sellers and much, much more.  There's one antiques seller that I know of; the maker of Australia's finest macrons, reputedly; at least one daggy sex shop (adjacent to JayCar where Spike buys her LED bulbs for glass works - which is the only way I know about the sex store by the way) and what one must take to be a brothel, currently called the Lollipop Lounge (sure makes me want to enter ... not) painted in what may or may not be intended as an ironic pink.  I suspect 'may not' is the favourite in that each way bet. 

Anyway, we parked outside Mobility Matters inside which Spike conducted protracted negotiations while I - bereft of a functioning wheelchair - entertained myself to the best of my ability inside the car listening to local radio.  Negotiations were not straightforward.  

The repair man was 'away' for an unspecified duration but I could leave my wheelchair and borrow one of theirs until the repair was completed.  Not dead keen on that option I nevertheless asked (not only because I'm polite) to see the loanable wheelchair, which was then brought out to me.  

Hmmm, I thought.  But I also understood my wobbly wheel would not last long.  

'How long before I'd get mine back?' I asked.

'I wouldn't like to be too definite about that until he's seen it" came the reply.  "Maybe tomorrow.  Maybe the day after"

"Oh well," I said, "if it's just a day or so I can wait until he's back then come over to have the repair done."

"Wait" replied the sales woman, trying to be helpful. "I'll go see."  Then just before heading back inside with the still untested, possibly on loan wheelchair, she paused to add, "I love your accent."

What could one say in response except "thank you.  I love yours too"?  She was a New Zealander.

Spike, who had been patiently spectating, leaned into the car.  "It's amazing what an accent can do for you," she said.  "I asked all those questions - and more - and got none of what you were told."

As she pulled herself back out the car Spike paused.  "She thinks you're my father you know." It's neither the first time nor, I suspect, will it be the last time we're allocated those roles in the minor dramas that interrupt the business of getting on with life together.

Spike followed the woman and the empty wheelchairs - mine and theirs - back into the shop.  I waited, searching local radio stations for anything to pass the time.  I now know more about the finals of local sheep dog trials than is necessary, strictly speaking, for a man in my position.  But it was interesting enough in its own way.

... and after.

Some time later Spike returned with the New Zealand born sales woman and my wheelchair sporting two new front wheels, fitted I know not by whom and nor does Spike because the job was done without consulting us.  But I'm not complaining because the woman, who smiled in a friendly, helpful way, told us we'd been charged only for the parts (new to me but clearly used lightly by some unknown other before me) and not for the labour involved.  Maybe the 'away' repair man had unexpectedly returned from 'away', wherever 'away' might have been; lunch, the lavatory, a pub?  It matters not.

We drove off through the puzzling maze of Fyshwick streets in search of a camera repair shop that turned out to be located six doors down from the Lollipop Lounge.  

"Sorry," Spike was told.  "We don't do Nikon. They won't let us open them up." 

Lest there be any doubt here, it was the receptionist inside the camera repair shop, not anyone in the brothel, who gave this information to Spike.  Tell you the truth, I suspect the staff inside the Lollipop Lounge, if asked, could open up almost anything.

Late-season sun

It feels slightly strange today to be sitting here in our suburban garden in south Canberra. I have retreated to some shade to escape the fierce intensity of the late season sun of this Indian summer. But although it's uncharacteristically hot we seem to be languishing in a spell that's neither one season nor another. I shelter from the heat. Somewhere in the vicinity of our drowsing cat a cricket chirps forlornly, it seems, for there is no response from any other lonely cricket. Perhaps ours is the last cricket to sing this year. Elsewhere the signs are telling us that summer is over, the fall awaits.

The garden's earth is hard and unforgiving. It has been weeks since the last heavy rains soaked the ground to feed the plants, many of which look tired and in need of a good long drink. Some, it's clear, have already shut down for the year. We will not see their brightly coloured flowers, vibrant green leaves or new growth for months now. The lower branches of the majestic pin oak at the end of the garden also display the early signs of season's change. Here and there brown leaves disrupt the coat of green. Every now and then, when the breeze picks up, a leaf or two tumbles to the ground.

We are in between the seasons (we have them in Canberra, unlike most of the rest of Australia). But whatever name we might given to this liminal space it's neither summer nor autumn, neither one time nor the other.

Do I pick up on (read too much into) this not-season, these days of this as well as that, neither one nor the other because it fits my own sense of displacement? Sundays always heighten my feelings of being from somewhere else, not fully belonging either to this new home of mine (after more than fourteen years it still feels new) nor, self-evidently, to the home I left behind; the place and its people.

Why Sundays particularly? 

It's easy enough to see. First act here is to check the football scores back there because for reasons I cannot begin to explain it matters to me how well or (as is more likely) how badly the team I have followed since I was ten or eleven performed. Yesterday, against the odds, we won. Next, one of the great rituals of a Scottish - British - Sunday; a long, luxurious read of the Sunday papers accompanied by tea, toast, a breakfast one can browse through just like the stories. I am infinitely more interested in the news, the sport, the cultural life and - especially - the politics of my homeland than the petty circus here with its unappealing set of clowns and comic singers. I wonder how my friends back there spent their Saturday nights and what stories they will tell to one another over Sunday lunch in a favourite pub. But if or when they meet I will be absent as I've been for many years now. Emigrated but far from integrated. Neither here nor there but somewhere in between. Not one thing or another.  A bit like this unseasonable weather.

Sarah Braunstein's All You Have to Do

Pic: Grant Cornett / Hand Lettering: Mousecake

I read Sarah Braunstein's compelling short story in The New Yorker here.  As I read I listened to the accompanying sound file with the writer reading her story.  (Does that count as me reading - which I was - if the audio file was running too?)

It's a good read.  Short stories are meant to include a twist at the end and Sarah B delivers one - for this modern age of ours - but credible nevertheless.  The story is set in an unnamed town in 1972 when the central character Sid Baumwell is, we're told, sixteen.  I was fifteen that year so the story touches on a familiar period of awkward adolescence.  Sarah B captures that time, those emotions, the uncertainty and the smothering small town feel of Sid's situation very well.  It wasn't hard to suspend disbelief and go with the flow,  I laughed more than once - at the continuous repetition of "Sid said", the magnitude of a life time's supply of aluminium foil, the awfulness we wrongly find as teenagers in family life - and the slight twist at the end made me pause to think about how a comfortable and safe growing up (such as I enjoyed) sometimes, perhaps always, hangs on fragile, invisible threads which, if we're lucky in our growing up (as I was too) we seldom notice.

Well worth reading.

Sarah Braunstein's web site is here.

Filming in Sydney