yes, we all know memes are lame, but Jeremy has tagged me, so, since we’re in holiday mode…

1. When I was a kid we had a small hobby farm just outside of town, where Dad ran about 30 head of Hereford cattle. We kept horses as well, and sometimes took them on family holidays there, spending the days riding and playing in the bush, staying in a caravan and heating water for the bush shower in a big copper over an open fire. I think I learned the meaning of solitude and the value of space there, and I miss it.

2. I was in the Navy Reserve band for a brief while when I was first at uni, because they paid something like $60 a week for rehearsals. That was a lot of money to a uni student in 1988. I quit when they said I had to sign on/up properly and would really have to start wearing the uniform. I was shithouse at the marching and stuff anyway.

3. I’ve played Jimmy Galway‘s solid gold flute (or one of them), at a masterclass once. It was heavy. and sounded awesome.

4. I had a story published in the Sunday Mail when I was about 9 or 10. It was called ‘The Last Battle’, and despite sharing a title with a C.S.Lewis Narnia book, was not a fantasy. Rather it concerned a fight to the death on the “dusty plains” of the outback between an old male “boss” kangaroo and his younger rival. Unlike Narnia, where good triumphs over evil, in my story the older kangaroo died (by being squashed “until his ribs cracked sickeningly and his eyes popped out”) because he was older and weaker. Cheeful, huh.

5. I am the world expert* on the musicological distinctions between and the ideal structural forms of the power ballad and the rock anthem. And because what may seem like a perverse love for Celine Dion is actually based on a Kantian, disinterested master-knowledge of the affective aesthetics of the genre at which she excels, you can’t diss me for it.

I tag Mel, Josh, Marika, Axel and Jaz next.

*self-appointed