I should be so Injalak-y: Part the Third

Play

The dilemma of what to do with your spare time in a remote indigenous community is one that plagues most balanda (white people) who decide to doff the trappings of civilisation – coffee, live music, films, theatre, restaurants, shopping, university, and the obligatory drunk-on-Saturday-seedy-on-Sunday pantomime – and go bush. The easiest way to deal with this is simply not to allow yourself any spare time. This worked pretty well for me, and I found a 6 day, 46 hour working week infinitely preferable to the alternative, which involved reading till my eyes fell out of my head, more Sudoku than your average inner-suburban, Age-reading yuppie could do in a month of Sunday mornings and the discovery that 9.3 days worth of music in an iTunes library is not necessarily all that much.

Other people react differently. Those with more of a penchant for exercise than me (i.e. an inclination to raise their heart rate for anything other than boogie or booty) did crazy things like swimming 2 kilometres per day in the local pool and biking round the community in leggings and a shroud of sweat. Those with more of a penchant for the moving image than me splashed out on Foxtel and spent hour upon hour watching reruns of Futurama and American Dad. The Vietnamese family who run the local store invested in a $5000 karaoke machine and spent their nights competing with the curlews, warbling along to ‘My Way’. Honestly, some stereotypes just don’t seem to want to be debunked. Those who’d been in town long enough to genuinely be able to call Gunbalanya home, which was a very small percentage of the white population, engaged in such wholesome activities as pig-shooting, buffalo hunting and haring around on quad bikes scaring the bejesus out of native and introduced animals alike.

All these activities were pursued either solitarily or in the company of other balanda. In my case, I was fortunate enough to join a karaoke session and misguided enough to believe that I would be remotely interested in swimming any approximation of a kilometre in the murky waters of Gunbalanya ‘Community’ Pool (I use the term ‘community’ very loosely, as access to this pool cost $150 a year, somewhat beyond the means of 95% of the community). The only social sphere in which binninj (aboriginal people) and balanda interacted was at the institutional heart and soul of Gunbalanya and raison d’etre for many of its denizens: the Gunbalanya Sports and Social Club.

It’s hard to know where to begin with the Club. Although it’s called the Sports and Social Club, it’s really just a drinking hole, more than that, the only drinking hole in a 60 km radius. It’s managed by a guy named Alex Seibert, whose family pretty much owns Gunbalanya, as they run the Club, the Service Station and the Air Charter Service and thus all the booze, fuel and wet season transport this side of Kakadu National Park. Technically, Mr Seibert merely administers, rather than owns the Club, which has an Aboriginal executive committee, but he seems to be able to take whatever salary he chooses out of its enormous profit, judging from the $400,000 Winnebago that sits in his yard. In a touching, Brady Bunch-esque display of family bonding, the entire Seibert family ran on the same ticket in recent council elections, meaning that if things go their way, they may actually, rather than effectively run the town. I anticipate an episode of ABC’s ‘Dynasties’ on these guys some time soon.

The Club’s opening hours govern the operation of the town. Since the intervention, the Club is only open four nights, as opposed to six lunch time and evening sessions, per week. At Injalak, it was always noticeable when it was a Club night. On nights the Club was open, the centre was packed with artists furiously working on various forms of art, organising advances and working hard around the centre for their CDEP ‘top up’ – a cash payment to augment the meagre payment they received from the government and acknowledge the full time hours they put in. At 4.30pm sharp, the Injalak troop carrier would depart for the first run to the Club, after which either Rebecca or Murphy would have to drive up and back so that no one would have to bring it back again. On days when the Club wasn’t open, the buying desk would be near silent, frequented only by regulars and non-drinkers.

A visit to the Gunbalanya Sports and Social Club is unlike any drinking experience to be had in the city. Almost entirely outdoors, the place is always packed. Attracted by the floodlights, cane toads lollop in hordes across the lushest grass in town and people are ranged across picnic tables, the air abuzz as Kunwnjku, English and Video Hits compete with the whine of voracious mosquitoes. On approaching the bar, you squish yourself into a throng of people that four people are furiously trying to serve all at once. There are no rounds, as you are only allowed to purchase one can at a time, two if the person you are buying for is standing right next to you. Choice is not difficult – cans of VB, Carlton, Crown or XXXX, all mid-strength and all yours for the bargain price of $5. I can say, after careful research and the adjusting of my palette to distinguish the subtle distinctions between each incarnation of watery beverage, that VB is the most drinkable of the lot. Unsurprisingly, mid- and full-strength XXXX taste pretty much as bad as each other.

At 7 o’clock, an ear-splitting siren that you are never quite ready for generally causes you to throw your unappetising beverage all over yourself. This alarm tells all children and ‘banned’ patrons that it is time to leave. There is an intricate system when it comes to barring those who commit misdemeanours, and punishments are meted out according the severity of these transgressions. Punching Alex Seibert in the face, for example, carries a ban of three years, which some would believe is worth it for the comic effect. More minor offences are punished with bans from a week upwards, or the lightest penalty of leaving at 7pm, an hour and a half before the Club shuts its gates. Most bizarrely, at times when the Police Station finds its cells too full, the police will dole out Club bans as punishments for minor offences to save themselves the paperwork.

Going to the Club can be a great experience, as it provides a sphere in which to relate to binninj one on one and learn things that would not be possible in a professional capacity. People are more likely to open up after a few cans of anything, mid-strength or otherwise, and it is at the Club that a lot of balanda, including me, get their Kunwinjku skin names that will, for better or worse, define your relationship with people in the community in many ways. There is the standard humbugging to buy people cans of beer, and you find yourself saying ‘no’ for a decent portion of the night, but at the Club I learnt about people’s families and histories, met Traditional Owners and those not involved in the arts centre but intrinsic to the community, as well as learning a great recipe for damper.

The Club’s position in the community is problematic and everybody has an opinion on its merits, or lack thereof. It’s hard to assess having only been in Gunbalanya four months. From my experience, it seems that the Club was managed in a manner that benefited its management more than the indigenous population it was supposed to serve. The changes the Intervention brought – limited opening hours and the serving of mid-strength beer – have been beneficial in many ways. When I arrived in town, there was a young men’s initiation ceremony, a Kunapipi, in progress that traditionally occurs every year, but that until then had not taken place for a decade. The spare time that people were given with the Club’s closure for three nights had resulted in the revival of one of the most important ceremonies in Kunwinjku culture. On the flip side, the practice of grog-running – driving to Jabiru, getting as drunk as possible and taking the treacherous road back, croc-infested tidal river crossing and all – increased, which in my short time resulted in a death, some serious injuries and, gruesomely, a car driving into a wild horse and splitting it clean in half. It’s hard to weigh it all up, and the question of the Club’s position is intrinsically tied to that of alcoholism, so obviously rampant in the community, but it is unequivocally there, showing no signs of leaving, and the place that most people choose to spend their time.

I should be so Injalak-y: Part the Second

Work

I work at Injalak Arts and Craft Centre. It’s named after the hill that sits behind the arts centre. Injalak is pronounced Inyaluk (thanks again, sadistic linguists), which, you will see, makes the title of these rantings hilariously puntastic. Injalak is a community arts organisation that buys paintings on bark and paper, as well as fibre art (otherwise known as baskets) from local artists, and markets and sells it to the wider public. More importantly, it is the only source of cash income in the entire community. Most of the Aboriginal people in Gunbalanya are on CDEP, an indigenous work for the dole programme, which pays $350 per fortnight. Pity the liberals don’t like Aboriginal people; otherwise they could trumpet their hardships along with those crazy single aged pensioners. So for most, Injalak serves to supplement their meagre income.

As workplaces go, it’s absolutely nuts. There are only three of us that work full time. To put it very basically, Murphy is the manager, Rebecca buys all the art and I sell it. This does not begin to explain what all of us do, but every time I’m asked what I do, I draw a blank. I think it’s because I have no way of anticipating what any day will involve. To serve as an example, take my first week.

I arrived at my first full day at work bright and shiny and prepared for everything it could throw at me… except hearing as I walked in the door that one of the artists had died at the age of 37 and that I needed to get every piece of his artwork out of the gallery before anyone saw it and the smoking ceremony began. This might not have been so hard in a normal gallery, where less is more and art is hung sparsely. Injalak hardly fits this description. Unlike most art centres, which attract very few visitors and do most of their business remotely, Gunbalanya sits 40 minutes drive from Kakadu National Park and right in front of one of the most breathtaking rock art sites in the world. As the most accessible place in Arnhem Land, people are dying to get to Gunbalanya to experience Aborginal Cultcha first hand, and tourists visit en masse every day. As a result, the gallery that I look after is absolutely chock full of art. The best work is displayed in a small fine art section attached to the main gallery, but everywhere else shelves groan under stacks of paper, barks hang off every surface, carvings are stacked against every bit of wall not already taken up by bark and the floor is covered with baskets. This is not to mention the prints, spears, spear throwers, didjeridus and books. To his credit and my exasperation, this artist (whose name is still not said) was very diverse and thus produced ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING except baskets. It was a tough task, especially as at this stage I had no eye for the distinctions between artists and thus had to check the accreditation of almost every piece. Picture me manically peering at the back of every piece of paper in a huge pile, throwing baskets over my shoulder the whole time. In the middle of all this, there was suddenly, a didjeridu playing, a whole heap of smoke and everybody was standing completely still. I was able to compose myself and do the same and next thing I knew, someone was going over my whole body with a leafy branch. I then realised he was doing this to everything and everyone in the centre. That is a lot of branching, let me tell you. This was, of course, the point at which the tourists turned up and had to be unceremoniously booted out before they got their zoom lenses smashed over their heads. It was tragic and confusing and for days after I was still finding things that the artist had done and running them out of the gallery as fast as my freakishly elongated legs would take me.

I arrived at my second full day at work quiet and wary and pretty sure that my university education and globe-trotting had left me entirely unprepared for what was waiting for me. All went as normally as I hoped for the first hour or so, I attacked some enormous cobwebs with a broom and got covered in crap, but at least I wasn’t breaking any taboos. I tried to help out in the shop and learn as may stories as I can. I packed up artwork, I organised freight. So far, so good. Then my manager turns round and says “how do you fancy going for a plane ride over Arnhem Land to deliver some stuff to an outstation?” I nodded my head up and down until I thought it might fall off when he hesitated “just to let you know…” What, I thought, I’m going to have to fly the plane myself? It’s a one way trip and I have to hitch home? I have to hunt and kill an emu/buffalo/wild pig and bring it back? “… You won’t get a lunch break.” No worries, Mr Manager.

He informed me that I had to do a shopping run for someone at the outstation, which is called Gumarringbang, so off I go to acquaint myself with the community store. Coming back with my booty, I am greeted by two men in blue uniform who I assume are the police, but turn out to be the pilots. I still haven’t worked out exactly what is going on, but I don’t ask questions at this point and we load the food into the back of a van and speed off to the airport where I am greeted with the tin can I will be hurtling through the air in. No Boeings out here. Thankfully, the flight was smooth and Arnhem Land from the air is breathtaking. Towering escarpments climb backwards across the landscape, never flattening off enough to constitute anything other than outcrops and waterfalls and cliffs and fissures. The floodplains are impossibly green and dotted with cows and brumbies, the rivers are dry, brown ribbons snaking through the trees. We pass an abandoned mine and a number of other outstations, all the while following the path of a cyclone whose devastation is still apparent.

As we come in to land at Gumarringbang I suddenly remember that I am in a tin can and freak out momentarily but the landing is smooth and soon we are being greeted by a man, Jeremiah, a woman, Louise and a huge gaggle of kids who are into the boxes of food before they even touch the ground. Jeremiah quietly tells us that the Outstation Resource Truck didn’t come this week and it occurs to me that these people are very hungry. The improbably large family (I later discover that only two of the children belong to Jeremiah and Louise and the rest have been left there, making the lack of resources more acute) goes off to their house and Rebecca and I visit a man known as Old Timothy with a care package. Old Timothy was, unfortunately, very unwell and unable to leave his bed. Rebecca went into his room to chat to him for a while and I leaned in to hear what he had to say but I couldn’t get close enough so I look around his room and am surprised to see my old fave the Virgin Mary hanging out on the wall with Jesus. Never doubt the penetrative powers of Christianity. Outside Timothy’s, three overweight old white people sit on camping chairs and play cards. The man tells us defensively that he is Timothy’s old friend of 20 years and makes it clear that we are most unwelcome and the women tell us that there is amazing rock art in the surrounding bush and they are the only white people to have seen it. But, alas, it is time to go back to work, and we go back to the plane. The trip home is just as beautiful, but feels less like a treat and more like an unnecessary chore undertaken due to governmental incompetence. Jeremiah paid $600 for that basic grocery run using royalties from an amazing burial coffin entered into the Telstra Art Awards that I’m sure could have been better spent fixing their generator, which had been broken for months, leaving them with no power.
Other days at work have been less exciting and more trying. One that comes to mind is a day spent physically picking up a young lad who had fried his brain with petrol sniffing when he was younger and as a result has episodes of psychosis that mainly involve him throwing himself onto the nearest available patch of ground, be it in the middle of the road, under a sprinkler or onto someone’s painting, and putting him back inside. All that said, my job mainly comprises working in the gallery, selling art, packing it up and sending it where it needs to go, as well as other basic admin duties and sometimes I actually find myself twiddling my thumbs in boredom. On those days I do not stress, because I am sure that something bizarre will no doubt happen tomorrow.

Aside from Murphy and Rebecca, there are always a huge number of people at Injalak. Some artists choose to work on site, some live there and some people help out round the centre. One of these people is Thomas ‘Bundine’ Nabegeyo, a tour de force, without whom the arts centre slowly begins to fall apart as we realised that nothing has been labelled, is where it should be and we have no mail. He is one of the best dancers in the community and speaks little English, so communicates largely with hand gestures worthy of a fiery Italian. When it comes to me, these gestures usually involve him hitting or poking me shouting “hey!” and pointing me in the direction of the place he requires me to be. He also does the best air guitar I have ever seen.

Kathy works in the shop with me. She is a no nonsense lady who is slowly and patiently teaching me Kunwinjku and is indispensable when it comes to dealing with irritating, patronising tourists. Once, a doddering middle aged woman tottered over to her with a very basic, small painting of an egret. She looked at Kathy very intently for a while, leaned in conspiratorially and said “tell me, are these good spirits or bad spirits?” Kathy fixed her with a withering look, cleared her throat and in a tone as patronising as the woman’s said “That is a BIRD.” Kathy is in her forties, but apparently according to my skin name she is my granddaughter. ¿Qué?

It’s a good job I enjoy my work, as I’m there six days a week. If you’re wondering why I’m as pasty as I was the day I left next time you see me – it’s because I spend most of my time inside, doing whatever it is I do all day.

I Should be so Injalak-y. Part One.

The place I live is a strange one, and I’m sure at least one of you is interested in where I am and what it’s like. Unfortunately, a place like this is not conducive to blogging or any kind of sequential narrative, not merely for the fact that my internet access is sporadic and hurried. It is a place where a seemingly uneventful day is revealed to be full of the bizarre occurrences, unique people and nebulous cultural challenges that pass for ‘normal’ here. At the end of every day I find myself confused about something, be it permits, kinship networks, royalties, ownership, education, health, language or even the nature of my job itself. My life here largely consists of slowly trying to piece together the various, often conflicting, pieces of information that I am barraged with hourly. There is sadly no Gunbalanya Handbook. If there was, I imagine it would be thick and confusing enough that it would resemble the Complete Works of Dostoyevsky in Russian and as a result of little use to me. There is a book on Kunwinjku Language that I own, but one look at the diagram explaining skin relationships resulted in my head exploding, so it gathers dust and I muddle through using my limited but concentrated experience. All this serves as a preface to say that what follows is going to be more a set of general observations than a diary or story, as each crazy day melds with the next. Half the time I don’t even know what bloody day it is.

The Basics

I live in an indigenous community in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Arnhem Land was set aside as an Aboriginal Reserve in 1931 and has continued as such, despite various efforts by government and large corporations to mine the shit out of it. As a result, you need a permit to enter Arnhem Land, something you do by way of a crocodile-infested tidal river that can only be crossed in a car at certain times of day. Obviously, I have a permit to live and work here for the duration of my contract, after which I have to bugger off.
Gunbalanya officially has about 1000 residents, but this figure is wildly inaccurate, given the rate of movement between the community, various outstations (tiny communities in the most brain-addlingly stunningly picturesque arse end of nowhere that generally consist of 4 houses, an airstrip and an improbable number of dogs) and of course, every long-grass drinker’s paradise, Darwin. The main language spoken is Kunwinjku – pronounced ‘Gunwingu’ – which, for a language that was supposedly transcribed phoenetically by linguists, is absolutey impossible to understand in its bizarre written form. Gunbalanya, for example, is often written Kurnballarnjaja (for fuck’s sake). Nice work, guys.

The town is bound on one side by a large billabong that in the wet season joins up with the flood plains to encircle the town and effectively make it an island only accessible by plane. The billabong is home to an innumerate number of kinga (the pronunciation of which, most hilariously, is ‘ginga’), the Kunwinjku word for nasty-as-fuck, man-eating, enormous saltwater crocodiles; as well as long-necked turtles (great tucker), barramundi and every type of waterfowl you could imagine from egrets to whistling kites, brolgas, sea eagles, curlews and jabirus. I feel a particular affinity with the jabiru, whose legs are so long and awkward that is does nothing at all with the grace and poise of the other birds and is hilariously uncoordinated when it takes off or lands. I share the dry land with a less endearing menagerie of frogs, cockroaches, cane toads, snakes of various species, spiders, green ants, rarely sighted buffaloes and wild pigs and of course, the ubiquitous camp dogs. More on them later.

Also surrounding the town are three rocky outcrops separated from the larger Arnhem Land escarpment – Injalak, Arguluk and Nimbambirr. Injalak hill constitutes the richest and most concentrated rock art site in the world, containing ‘galleries’ in which the paintings are anything from 20,000 to 20 years old. It’s all pretty picturesque. All the houses near the billabong are on stilts, the roads are dusty red and the community is peppered with palms, eucalyptus and the odd termite mound. It is a beautiful place.

Here’s the thing about living in the middle of nowhere…

Not much internet.  Suffice to say it is hot and weird.

Corporate Lucifer

I’m about to commence my Miltonesque descent from the dizzying heights of the 20th floor, a disgraced angel shorn of wings and unceremoniously booted back into the real world.  A lil’ corporate Lucifer. Tomorrow is my last day, and if anyone asks, particularly the man who makes my coffee, whom I am convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, will miss my only-slightly forced beaming at him every day in an attempt to elicit something of a repartee which, I was assured, is part of this whole corporate shindig, I jumped. 

I am on a never-ending noble quest in search of the Real World.  Picture Indiana Jones in a pair of battered ankle boots instead of a hat being pursued by an enormous accumulating debt instead of an enormous rolling boulder and having poison darts shot at him by office workers instead of pesky natives and you get the idea, or maybe you don’t if you’ve actually seen the movie, which as I just made abundantly clear, I haven’t. 

I was pretty sure, after somersaulting out of school and making a perfect tuck-turn pike (don’t know much about diving, either) into university, that I would find it there, somewhere between the library and the pub.  Unfortunately, between the library and the pub was a liquidated, dysfunctional Student Union, sleazy Young Laberals (my affectionate name for the drones that sign up to either the Labor or the Liberal party at university.  They are one and the same. They go on trips to the Murray River together and play paintball against each other.  Jolly Hockeysticks!), flighty academics and an inept bureaucracy.  I found myself running round naked out of disillusionment and boredom, more than anything else, or maybe just because I like being naked. 

This, I decided, was not the Real World and not somewhere I should spend much of my time.  I would go around pontificating about the obsolescence and meaninglessness of the majority of academia, how these stuffy old bastards’ feet didn’t touch the ground and decided that 0sitting in an office studying Literature for the rest of my life would be a tragedy.  Great.  What now? I decided to defer my quest by deferring my degree and working in an office and a backpacker hostel.  Not exactly the Real World, I’ll grant you, but it bought me thinking time.

I returned to university with nothing but a desire to get it done.  I went on exchange, the antithesis of the Real World, where you run around with no responsibilities except to have fun, Get The Most Out Of It and scrape through the remainder of your academic career.  This was, incidentally, when the giant debt-boulder started rolling.

So having decided that university was a sham to be completed but not valued, I was back in what many would call The Real World.  Two jobs, the main one in a corporate office, and the required dose of social activities (dance class, trivia nights etc), a sizable debt to pay off, a dog to feed and walk, a long-term partner.  It is the life that they’re all talking about when they say “ho ho ho, wait till you have to live in the real world, the 9-5 world, then you’ll see that life isn’t one big party” (they being anyone over the age of 25 who is doing the career thing).  They are right about a few things there.  It is true that when are a 9-5 city drone, you do not have the luxury of making merry as and when you choose and thus your fun time gets compartmentalised into small, manageable and socially acceptable portions:

Lunch with friend in city: Monday 1- 2

Trivia night: Wednesday 7-9

Friday drinks: 5.30-9

Football: Sunday 2-5

Marvelous. 

What they’re wrong about it the whole “real world” part of that equation.  These corporate lemmings have their feet even further above the ground (in this case 20 floors above) both metaphorically and physically.  This is a world where stationary is of the utmost importance, where a missed phone call is a danger so great that they require the phone to be attended non-stop for nine and a half hours everyday and thus think it’s reasonable to ban the receptionist from ever leaving the desk for anything, where which cup you use matters, where sunshine is a reward for sitting in the same place for 5 hours straight and ultimately dispensable in the case of having Too Much On.  Excuse me, but I’m pretty sure Shakespeare and Keats are more important than all of those things.

So I’m high-tailing out of here.  Not back to university, not in search of the Real World any more.  To the remote Northern Territory, where sunshine is a given, and where things are about as ‘unreal’ according to ‘them’ as you can get – no supermarkets, no offices, no transport other than 4WD, no bars, no cinemas and where, I’m hoping, stationary is of little to no importance.  Fingers crossed.

Suspended

My view, otherwise known as one of the few things keeping me sane in this place, looks incredible today. It’s raining, and these slate-grey clouds are sitting quite still, shrugged possessively around the neighbouring skyscrapers, and probably my own, too. The ANZ Bank Tower – an enormous, Gothic thing on the best of days, all brown stone, spikes, angles and black glass – is shooting straight up into the fog like some possessed urban beanstalk, threatening bats and hunchbacks and ancient bells somewhere in its unseen upper reaches. (Its actual inhabitants are, I imagine, more along the lines of a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters)

While the clouds bear down from above, the lesser buildings below defiantely belch out their own obscuring fumes as their steam vents go into overdrive, throwing a lighter, less ominous mist back up at the sky. And it seems to me that I am sitting somewhere in the middle, no doubt an optical illusion, I could be in the midst of the thickest, darkest cloud in the city, but it looks like I’m in between two strata of mist, where the sun is the brightest. I’m in this corridor of dull yellow that stretches above the street and below the tops of the skyscrapers. I wouldn’t know it was raining if it weren’t for the parade of umbrellas I saw when I looked down to check that the ground was still there.

I’m a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm…

I didn’t have clue how to start, so I took some of the best opening lines in music history and used those instead. Thanks, Iggy.

It’s a bit misleading, though. Streetwalking Cheetah? Hardly. More like Panda-in-Captivity, except not as cute. Most of my ’streetwalking’ is done between this desk and the coffeeshop, which I don’t really think counts. The rest of the time I sit in my cage (read: 20th floor reception area), doing the corporate equivalent of lazing round, chewing bamboo and refusing to have sex with other Pandas (read: folding things, looking at the internet and refusing to photocopy).

I’m going to pretend I didn’t just descend into the use of office humour or tenuous metaphors; otherwise I’ll have to throw this whole adventure in before I’ve even begun.

And I probably should begin. As good a place to start as any, I suppose, is the reason for doing this thing at all. There are a few. First of all, I spend my weekdays sitting at a desk doing very, very little other than reading what other people put on the internet and refusing to have sex with other pandas. I think I’ve pretty much seen the internet now. Not all of it, but enough that I’m bored with it. So – Reason the First: Boredom.

Aside from that, and this is getting embarrassing – though if you know who I am by now you are either the man who makes my coffee every day and called me ‘Cappuccino Girl’ once, much to my horror, or my boss, and you are standing behind me and I am fucked – is the anxiety that when I go, I will have left nothing behind. This is more than a little pathetic, given that I am 21 and have no immediate plans for the hereafter, but nonetheless, I do have a great respect for all those lovely hardback volumes of various people’s Letters. There’s a gorgeous collection in my house of the compiled letter of Yeats that sits right next to a volume of WH Auden’s poetry, which for some bizarre reason led me to assume that they were lovers when I was younger. Just because Auden was gay doesn’t mean that he was fucking the author of whichever book happened to be on the shelf next to his at the time, otherwise he would’ve been far too busy to write any of my favourite poems and, assumedly, the inventor of the Time Machine, and we all know that was Dr Who, but thus was the working of my early-adolescent mind. Unfortunately, no-one writes letters any more unless they are in their 80s and still able to use their fingers. I can see how it would go if people still did:

“Dear Rachel,
I am writing to thank you for having a beer with me at the Builder’s Arms on Saturday May 17th. It was a pleasure and a privilege to discuss with you the pros and cons of casual sex, the episode of last night’s reality TV show and the chances of our prospective football teams winning the next day. While we disagreed on many things, I nonetheless relished the opportunity to engage your sharp mind debate…” etc etc etc.

So with no chance of writing any letters, never mind leaving any behind, it will be all things internet-based that will survive us now. At this point, I have a LiveJournal I wrote when I was sixteen, which would result in a legacy of poor punctuation and lead people to think that I was unable to discuss something amusing without writing ‘aaaahahhahahahaha’ before it and ‘lmao’ after, and possibly some emails to lecturers begging for extensions, which are if anything an even worse reflection of character.

Bringing us to Reason the Second: The Desire to Leave behind a Body of Writing for Posthumous Publication on the Assumption that I Will One Day Be Eminent Enough to Warrant a Published Legacy.

Lastly, my head is a noisy, incoherent and sometimes unpleasant place. It’s often hard for me to hear myself think over din. Reason the Third: In the Interest of Certain Thoughts Keeping Their Voice Down.

So there we have it. I wish I was a panda, Iggy Pop is far more rock n roll than me and, as far as I’m concerned, WH Auden invented the Time Machine so he could engage in sexual relations with dead authors. As good a place to start as any.