Cinema

Gadfly 237 By Robert Macklin. In our Tuross bolt hole we have a magic mirror. I guess many readers have one, that special looking glass where the light is perfectly positioned so your reflection is far more flattering than in any other. Hypnotic isn’t it. Ours is in ‘my’ bathroom - the old original one with the shower and the washing machine. But when I glanced at it last night after showering, the bloke in the reflection had his face lathered in shave cream! I was hurrying to watch 7.30 and here I was lathering for a shave, just as I had that morning and every other of my adult life. A ‘senior’s moment’, you say? Oh, if only…. The truth is, it’s been happening for all the years I’ve been writing those twenty-nine books (so far). It’s an occupational disease. It comes on gradually. For the first 20,000 words you’re happily raising a literary trot until you’re cantering down a well-defined track. You have friends over for lunch, catch a play at the Rep…but then, without willing it, you fall into a routine. It’s fairly sloppy to begin. After a boiled egg and the ABC news feed, the mornings are for writing. Around midday there’s a stroll and in summer maybe a swim. Afternoons are editing time, maybe organizing research for the next day’s writing, but then a break to watch that last Quarter again when your team beat Collingwood. Feeling pretty good, you tell the Beloved you’ll make dinner, and afterwards you negotiate over her Antiques Roadshow or an SBS World Movie, or maybe both. After all, working and sleeping hours are really yours to decide; it’s one of the rare benefits of the game. But then the book starts to take control. You rise earlier; shower, shave; and breakfast is now toast and coffee – and you start timing your preparation. You begin writing at 8.30 exactly with the ideas that arrived when you woke. The fingers are flying over the keys and at 11 sharp, it’s tools down – exercise time – so off on the walk up a certain hill. A break for lunch but at 1.30 precisely you’re back at the computer and after a quick edit you’re plunging into the story as your hero grapples with his next mighty challenge till you hear, ‘Your turn tonight, dear!’ (Oh no.) You invent a wise old saw: ‘A meal should take no longer to prepare than to eat’ and for the next twenty minutes you’re juggling frypan, microwave and stove-top in a blur of flying limbs. Then comes the evening viewing, but your mind now has a mind of its own and it’s back with your hero struggling through the jungles of head-hunter infested Dutch New Guinea in 1943 until bed and a harmless Melatonin to ‘ravel up that sleave of care’. Briefly… By now it’s 80,000 words and you’re at full gallop. Beloved’s lady friends tiptoe past the writing room and share their mutual hilarity three closed doors away. The days lose their identity, their passing goes unnoticed, sleeping becomes an optional extra, the routine is rigid as ironbark…until one day you look up at the magic mirror to a clown face covered in shaving lather. ‘Damn it,’ you say, ‘This is crazy. I’ll walk away. I’ll be real person again.’ But then, as the lather disappears behind the blade, that handsome devil whispers, ‘Wait. Writing is not what you do, it’s what you are.’ ‘Nonsense,’ you cry. ‘There’s too many books in the world already.’ ‘Maybe so…but isn’t yours just the best work you’ve ever done.’ ‘Well…’ ‘You need a little break. Um, I know…Why not just write about it…just a sip, a little Gadfly perhaps?’ robert@robertmacklin.com

The chill on the headland ignored Bazza’s a empts at ghtening his collar and he cradled the warmth of his coffee in the predawn blackness. He distracted the cold by repea ng key lines he could remember from Paul Simon’s song Sounds of Silence………It lulled his solitude.

Hello darkness, my old friend I've come to talk with you again A wry smile accompanied the memory of Sounds of Silence being appreciated at full blast in his youth. Bazza had decided to brave the predawn for the winter sols ce, by himself, on the south coast headland. Welcoming the winter sols ce was a ritual Bazza had fallen into as a young man. Back then, it was all about defea ng winter and hastening the onset of summer. In his youth, summer was worshipped, and to be extended, at every possible opportunity. He was carefree, and in many mes stupid. The ul mate surrender of day to night was resented but ironically celebrated at its peak by whatever ritual or celebra on was in vogue. A nude swim in Tasmania one year or an all night party in Bondi another. Always friends, lots of friends. A need to be surrounded by people. He sipped his coffee; it’s warmth reassuring. In the intervening decades such frivolity was abandoned in the pursuit of the busyness of life. Always busy…… very, very busy. The longest night rejoiced only for a longer sleep. Summer, autumn, winter and spring became cards in the rapid-fire game of winning in life and had gobbled up the years. A blur of busyness and a shredding of friendships. He rotated his cup for the remaining warmth. Bazza squinted across the ocean at that proverbial darkness before dawn. The sea and sky merged in an inky caliginosity and an archipelago of black clouds duped his eyes. He measured his loneliness and fallibility against a vast ocean, with its rhythmic heartbeat of gently crashing waves. The loneliness he detested as a young man was now somewhat soothing. The coffee cup was cold and he shi ed feet and thoughts. He strained his eyes into the inky blackness and slightly shook at the thought he was the furthest he could be from the sun, an umbilical cord stretched to the maximum. He contemplated frailty and vulnerability within this sound of silence and this deepest darkness. He thought of the community behind him and the communi es beyond. How presumptuous to think all our human going ons could be played out…. under the belief the magnanimous sun would always rise. Hello darkness, my old friend I've come to talk with you again Have a beer with Baz at john.longhurst59@gmail.com