TL;DR: I drank. A lot.

We begin on Friday morning at Sawtell station. Yes, that's all of it. No bustling phalanx of porters, no guards or ticket collectors, no dining room serving Devonshire teas, no passengers apart from yours truly. This is not a consequence of Covid; this is normal.

In fact I'm astonished to find that I'm actually able to get the train, rather than a replacement bus service, as was the case for my last trip down to Sydney. That was a nightmare. A tin can full of hillbillies, knees hard up against the seat in front of you, a dozen excuse mes, sorrys, and thank yous between your seat and the stinking lavatory. Thank God I don't have to go through that again.

The train arrives dead on time, stopping for nobody but little old me. I'm drunk with the power to halt an entire train single-handed.

There are some cows to look at. Which is nice. You don't get cows from a car window now that it's all motorway between Coffs and Sydney.

I catch up on podcasts. Really enjoyed this one with Bill Mitchell wandering off core Modern Monetary Theory into politics a bit more than usual.

Not that many people in my carriage, so I'm not bumping elbows with anybody. No screaming babies, and the only yammering hillbillies are some distance away and only going as far as Port Macquarie for a music festival. No prizes for guessing what genre of music it is.

The situation appears altogether too good. I'm prepared for the nine hour trip: a packet of pork scratchings and three plastic soft drink bottles. One is cool from the fridge, another cold from a few hours in the freezer, a third frozen overnight in the freezer. Your classic alcoholics' Goldilocks strategy: take each one in series when it's just right.

My patented blend: cardboard box wine, a splosh of fruit juice to disguise the fact that it's box wine, and if I'm feeling fancy perhaps some herbal tea but otherwise just water to get it down to somewhere approaching beer strength. I hear that in Mediterranean countries it's common to drink watered down wine with meals. Obviously not good quality wine, but with the horrible stuff I can afford to drink, there are no rules.

Well, there is one rule: no BYO drink on NSW Transport vehicles. But that rule obviously only applies to amateurs, not responsible professionals. Moreover, as I trust I need not stress with too much stressiness: nine hours! There is too much Australia. We need a good tailor to take it in. It's really quite baggy.

While looking for an unoccupied lavatory, I find that the front two carriages are completely empty. It actually is a wonder that I'm not on a bus.

It's gone noon, and the entertainment value of the cows is diminishing, so I crack open bottle number one. Bracing, but not technically abusive. You would be within your rights to demand your money back, but no court in the land would award you damages.

We stop to let a northbound passenger train go past. There's only a single track running along the East coast of Australia, and few sidings where trains can pass each other. Accordingly, everything is very tightly scheduled. If your train is more than a few minutes late, it's missed it's "window" and is obliged to make way for everything else. So you get later, and later, and later.

As a natural pessimist, I assumed that in the unlikely event that the train turned up at all, that this would be the case (as it had been on previous trips). From which it logically follows that the scheduled eight PM arrival time in Sydney could only be the product of pure unicorns-and-rainbows thinking. So I had the perfect excuse to book a hotel room rather than change trains for a further fifty minute suburban trip down to the family estate in the Shire.

The ostensible purpose of my journey is to partake in a solemn ceremony involving scattering my late father's ashes from the deck of a Sydney Harbour water taxi. I'm not entirely convinced that feeding the fish of Port Jackson is the sort of thing he'd have been enthusiastic about — at least not in this capacity — but my mother seems to think it a good idea.

I really haven't a clue about the propriety of such things, so I'm more than happy to go along with whatever wiser heads than mine consider appropriate, but I would rather not go back to the old house. I stayed a few days there on my last Sydney trip a couple of years ago as a sort of dare to myself, wandering about the unpaved suburban streets where I spent my childhood, thinking that as a forty-[mumble] year old grown-up I was by now surely immune to the enervating effects of that nasty, violent, ignorant, bigoted environment. (Not the house itself, mind; my parents are/were almost entirely harmless. It's the ghosts milling around it that I cannot exorcise.) I ended up in a massive funk which persisted for weeks afterward.

Also I'm now of a certain age, and I appear to have gone through The Change. I get terribly emotional about things. I must say it's quite unexpected and embarrassing. In this condition I couldn't stand spending even a couple of nights in a house where my father would now consistently fail to be where I expect to find him. I'd be a wreck. So I told my mum that, on the grounds that I would be feeling very much like just flopping into bed on arriving at Sydney Central, rather than embarking on a further long commute, a hotel made perfect sense. I'd meet everybody in town the next day, and pop down for a visit the day after. She seemed satisfied with that excuse.

In fact things are going altogether too well. The train remains stubbornly on schedule. As we get into Wauchope, mobile phone signal returns, and I get an SMS. The train for my return journey has been cancelled and replaced with a coach service. Ah, equilibrium has been restored.

Quaint little country towns flash by, as do the podcasts. The Something About the Beatles podcast has a few episodes of first reactions to the Peter Jackson doco based on the footage and audio recorded in January 1969 for the vague project which the following year became the film/album Let it Be. Titled the Musician’s Get Back, I expected the podcast to be a trainspotter's guide to vintage musical/audio equipment and a complete yawn, but it's (mostly) about group dynamics and those four (or five, or six, or seven) guys who love each other, despite and because of everything. I get quite teary (The Change again - and maybe the wine).

The country around the Hunter Valley is gorgeous. You don't see any of it from the motorway. Rolling green hills which put one in mind of James Herriot and the brothers Farnon rolling up their sleeves and startling a cow or three.

There's a limit to how much of a fifty gram bag of pork scratchings one should consume in one hit if one is to avoid nausea (for the record, it's about ten grams), so I go to the dining car for a sausage roll fresh from the drawer it's been stewing in since dawn, and a can of alleged beer.

It's 330ml of mid-strength lager. Australia likes it's beer flavourless, but this is really the apotheosis of the antipodean brewers' art. To all intents and purposes, the can was already empty when it was sealed. I'll refrain from citing the brand so as to avoid a stampede of connoisseurs rushing to not experience it.

Eight dollars! Eight flipping dollars! Just for the zero point nine standard drinks, then another five for the sausage roll!

I love the name Fassifern. I think it should be a term of mild rebuke. i.e. "Oh, don't be such a fassifern!" You instantly understand what it means by the way it sounds. Never been there. The place, I mean; I've probably been a fassifern for most of my life.

Appear to have mobile signal for most of the time now, which was definitely not the case on previous trips. I briefly wonder if it's because of all the Gates/Soros 5G microchips in my bloodstream, but my old phone is only 4G. Did they stealthily vaccinate my phone as well? The bastards!

So I exchange a few texts with Ruben, which helps pass the time.

Newcastle appears to be encroaching on Gosford, or vice versa, as there is now rather little open space between them. From here on you're essentially in the outer suburbs of Sydney. I used to work with people who would commute into the city from this distance.

As there's more built environment, I'm getting more alert my my surroundings. Multi-story buildings! Public transport! Pedestrian crossings! Pedestrians! All the sinful delights that are foreign and abhorrant to the denizens of Coffs Harbour.

Indulge me for a moment: Imagine being confronted with a vista of the most glorious natural splendour. Gravity-defying geological formations. Waterfalls, ravines, rivers and streams. Lush, luxuriant plant life of unimaginable variety; herds of gigantic herbivorous mammals, placid and graceful; gorgeously sleek and agile predators; eye-wateringly colourful birds soaring and swooping to pluck impossibly bejeweled insects from mid-air. And just off to one side a single squalid shack in the distance, with a thin wisp of smoke rising from an open fire.

I've tried several times, in conversation with self-avowed misanthropic nature lovers, to persuade them that in that situation they could not stop their eyes being drawn to that shack. They refuse to concede this, but I am certain that we are attuned to seeking signs of the presence of other human beings. It tickles us in a way we cannot resist. We are homo sociali. I say this as the most introverted person I know. (Not that I know that many people, what with being the most introverted person I know.)

As a lifelong socialist and an amateur macroeconomist, I should abhor metastasising high rise and construction cranes on the horizon as indicators of neoliberal welfare-for-the-rich and impending economic collapse, but my eyes widen and pulse quickens at the sight of them.

Then suddenly Sydney. Oh, Eddy Avenue! How I've missed you!

A block and a half away from Central Station is George Street and the art deco Great Southern Hotel. They gave me the perfect room for a web developer who doesn't like to be found.

If I ever own a place to live, I'm having hotel carpeting throughout.

Now, about that plan to collapse straight into bed… Sod that!

I drop my bags and head up George Street, or "SYDNEY'S STREET OF FEAR", as the Daily Telegraph memorably characterised it on a front page thirty years or so ago. Utter poppycock! I used to practically live on George Street when it was a solid strip of pubs, bookshops, junk food outlets, and video game arcades, and I've never felt so safe anywhere before or since.

A lot of pubs are now derelict due to the current crisis, or the previous crisis, or in anticipation of the next crisis. The first promising target from a nostalgia point of view is Cheers. In the late 80s it was a modest subterranean dive for people who wanted to avoid going to work or going home, but now it occupies several levels with huge sports-screens for vaping gamblers.

I buy a beer on the ground level and head downstairs to the den where so many of my brain cells sacrificed their all so that I might… well, "live" is perhaps too strong a word. At the bottom of the stairs there's a table with a couple of smiling callow youths who explain that the venue is closed to the general public for a private function. Spread out before them are a few open binders full of things in plastic pockets which appear alarmingly collectable. The youths are anxious to explain the nature of the function, saying that for a nominal cover charge I would be most welcome to join them.

It's at this point that my friend Ruben would have leapt eagerly into the fray, spending the whole night having a whale of a time, aquiring an exhaustive knowledge of a hitherto unfamiliar subculture and a bundle of lifelong friends. Alas, I am not that kind of person, so I make my excuses and head back upstairs.

I carry on uphill, past where there are no longer book liquidation stores, video game arcades, and junk shops all blaring the same tape loop of this one guy bunging on a cockney barrow boy accent, promising "You'll never pay full price again!"

Still, it's home.

One block east of the town hall is the Criterion. I remember in the 90s flicking through a guide to Sydney pubs which said it was the place to go if one happened to be a connoisseur of bulbous red noses. Is that supposed to be a bad thing? It's since been acquired by a particularly noxious pub chain who turned it into just another sports bar, but at least they haven't (yet) smashed out all the tiles and bricked in the leaded windows. Also, it's gone quite pink. Which is nice.

In more affluent times, I would never dream of staying out in town to drink on a Friday or Saturday night, these being the nights when the amateurs would spoil the atmosphere with their uncouth behaviour. However I've only a few days and want to make the most of it.

It used to be common for big hotels to have a number of bars in the one complex. I used to quite like the Tudor Bar on the first floor of the Hilton Hotel in Sydney. As the name suggests, it was all vacuum moulded fake timber and horse brasses, but easy on the eyes and a surprisingly cheap no-nonsense boozer for those in flight from reality.

Alas, there is no longer a first floor of the Hilton Hotel. It's been blasted away and replaced by a vast, glass-fronted empty space saying in effect "We don't need to make money from this real estate, but it amuses us to prevent others from doing so. So if you enjoy setting fire to hundred dollar notes in front of homeless people, this is the place for you." In that respect, it's like the similarly cavernous and glazed Apple store across the road containing a sparse smattering of lecterns with elegantly designed flat things propped up on them.

The one bar which the Hilton Hotel still appears to maintain is the Marble Bar. As the name suggests, every surface is at least faux-marble. It's like swimming in a Jackson Pollock kaleidescope. This is not a place for drinking in. It's a place for briefly gawping at and promptly fleeing. In my day it was pretty consistently empty. I supposed it was kept on as a gaudy monument to 1970s excess. Perhaps middle managers and their secretaries found it useful as a place to meet unobserved, I don't know.

Tonight it is packed with coked-up Hooray Henrys and Henriettas.

If ever there's a portent of an economic bubble about to burst, this is it. In my Sawtell finery, which to the untrained eye is indistinguishable from Sydney hobo rags, I feel distinctly unwelcome. As tradition demands, I gawp and flee.

A stroll past more shuttered venues once dear to my heart, and I find myself near the harbour, in the financial district. Knowing there's little joy to be had here I turn around and head back south up Pitt Street. There's a new pub on the corner of Hunter Street that looks enticingly empty. The girl behind the bar asks whether I want a pint or a schooner. I opt for the latter, and she pours me a half pint, which - not to be pedantic - is a hefty gulp or two shy of a schooner and charges me nearly ten dollars for it. A steady stream of beautiful people coming through the door and heading directly upstairs indicates that I'm just in the foyer of a far grander venue, not meant for the likes of me.

There's always street art. This piece is about as old as me. I used to roam this manor professionally back when mail boys used to carry high-denomination cheques from one place to another. Do digital mail boys meet to skive off in electronic pubs?

You must be this emaciated to shop here. Blimey. I'll stick to KMart.

Now, this is more like it. The Hotel Downing in Castlereagh Street. My ex-girlfriend used to work across the road, and I would occasionally wait for her in the other half of this pub which is now reserved for button-slappers. Thankfully, you can't see any of that from this bar, and the mandatory sport screens cover only two of the four walls, so you can keep your back to them and pretend they're not there. Also most of the customers appear to be staff, so there's a lovely family atmosphere. This pub I like.

And about time, too. There's a time and a place for dancing, and it's at the kitchen sink while doing the washing up. Anything else is an abomination. I can't remember which pub this sign was in…

But apparently I thought a distressed selfie in the mirror of the gents' lavatory would be sufficient to jog my memory later. Clearly it was time to revert to Plan A and flop into bed.

Continued in part two.

My neighbours, here at the Aloha Home for Deadbeat Divorcees, are a colourful lot. As a rule I've ried to keep out of their way for the last two years. I'm not actually rude, you understand. I smile and nod. I just don't talk, beyond the occasional "good morning", etc. That polite aloofness is how F-bomb Freddy came to suspect me as an obvious snitch.

As I generally don't talk to them, I rarely learn my nighbours' names. When I have to think about them, I use the names I've given them myself for internal reference. As tenancy here is overwhelmingly a matter of unfortunate circumstance rather than choice, a lot of people have come and gone: Boom Box Barry, Zen Ken, Breaking Bad, the Care Bear Kids, Surfing Steptoe, Thumper and Boyband, and so on.

The most memorable, by sheer dint of his desperate need to make an impression, was F-Bomb Freddy.

Freddy was one of those farking people who farking says farking farking all the farking time. His body language strongly suggested that he'd spent some time in prison; that or, less likely, an elite boys' school. Ever-mindful of social rank, he spent half his day swaggering and strutting about like a cockerel, and the other half slinking, glancing nervously over his shoulder as though fearing that he was about to be caught out for whatever past imprudent act was currently preying on his mind.

He occupied what had been the manager's lodgings back in the days when the Aloha was a motel, and had absorbed some of the proprietorial manner appropriate to the tenant of the largest unit in the facility. He always seemed to have a flatmate, but the cohabitation rarely lasted more than a few months before disintegrating into a fistfight in the carpark, followed by a shower of personal effects from the balcony. Yet somehow another flatmate arrived to take the last one's place before you knew it. Each had a shaved head, little in the way of teeth, and a baroque efflorescence of tattoos.

His only constant friend was Mayor McWheeze, who occupied the unit directly below mine. When Freddy wasn't patrolling/slinking about the perimeter in shorts and thongs, or skimming leaves from the common swimming pool to (in his mind, at least) earn his keep, he was holding forth to McWheeze.

Mayor McWheeze was a stupendously unhealthy man; one of those who prefer to approach the art of not dying at the highest degree of difficulty possible. He was almost perfectly spherical in shape, with a voice which started low down - somewhere about his navel - before rumbling up a congested windpipe, doubling back in frustration at a slack, toothless mouth plugged by an omnipresent smouldering cigarette butt, and at last gently seeping out of his nose like politely-suppressed flatulence.

In order to keep a firm footing on the wobbling tightrope which was all that separated near-death from actual death, McWheeze rarely left the table he'd set up at his front window. From behind flyscreen, he had a magisterial view of the only entrance to the complex, and took a keen interest in comings and goings, cheerfully saluting all in a manner which made one feel disconcertingly like Patrick McGoohan in the Prisoner.

In his own mind, Mayor McWheeze was the bright shining star at the centre of a seaside Bloomsbury set. In reality, his days were overwhemingly occupied in dispensing homilies to soothe the wounds from whatever slings and arrows F-bomb Freddy presently felt most outrageous. From upstairs I was mercifully spared the details, receiving only the gist via the to and fro of bitterly spat obscenities and mollifying emphysemic rumbles.

At the start of my tenancy, I wasn't much bothered by Freddy's alarmingly powerful stereo system. As a rule, Australians don't like to know more than a few dozen songs, any of which you can hear any time of the day in any suburban shopping mall. Conspicuous consumption often manifests as hi-fi equipment, so having one's bones rattled of an evening by the bass notes of the same songs over and over again must be accepted as merely the price of entry to suburbia.

However the verve with which Freddy enjoyed the Great Australian Songbook was somewhat disquieting. It had never occured to me that it was possible to whoop and yee-haw in exuberant joy along to the works of Billy Joel, Dire Straits, and the Eagles. Yet somehow Freddy managed to do so. With, it seemed with each passing week, increasing frequency and intensity.

I like to think of myself as a tolerant sort. I thought it not unreasonable to surmise that perhaps Freddy was nursing a broken heart and, having been spurned by some lady — or indeed gentleman, he was proving to himself that he had much left to live for, including slapping a thigh and hooting like a klaxon whenever Greatest Aussie Pub Rock Favourites Vol. 1 worked its' inevitable way around to Working Class Man.

Out of this desire to make allowances for a little high-decible self-care, and also a keen interest in finding a reason not to provoke someone who appeared considerably less reasonable, and more practiced in pugilism, than myself, I sought inside knowledge from Mayor McWheeze. One evening, as the keening strains of Sweet Child O' Mine etched visible ripples in the asphalt of the Aloha carpark, I stood by his window and asked, as casually as I could whilst shouting over the din, "What's the story with your mate over there?"

The hitherto relentlessly genial McWheeze turned dour, even going so far as to remove the cigarette butt from his mouth and stub it out. Possibly in an ashtray. It was impossible to tell through the flyscreen at dusk. "He likes a drink. Enjoys a bit of music," he pronounced at length, before lighting another cigarette to signal the end of the matter.

Ah. Jolly good. Just an obnoxious arse, then. "Is there anything you could do about it?"

He drew on his fresh cigarette for as long as his severly compromised lung capacity would permit, and gazed into the delicate tracery of burst capiliaries at the back of his drooping eyelids. "You could try writing a letter to the strata body."

"Right." Thanks for being so helpful. I will indeed correspond with a handful of people empowered to say "Stop it at once, or we shall be forced to ask you to stop it once more." I went back upstairs and shut all the windows.

Later that evening, Neil from the Young Ones, residing a few doors up the first floor landing from Freddy, had the temerity to slink over and knock on Freddy's door. He was tossed back like a leaf in a gale of full-throated farks. As Neil, on his heels and suddenly finding himself back at his own door, slipped inside, trembling, Freddy came out onto the balcony to address the gallery of twitching blinds.

"ANY OF YOUSE OTHER LOWLIFE FARKERS WANNA FARKING GO AT ME, YOUSE FARKING MAGGOTS?"

And thus mollified by the comparative silence of nothing but passing vehicular traffic and the lazy trotting of A Horse With No Name, Freddy returned to his lair.

After an hour or so, with no sign of the festival of easy-listening rock abating, Mayor McWheeze, motivated by some glimmer of community spirit, left his customary seat and waddled across the carpark.

He had no hope of ascending the stairs to the first floor landing, so he stood below, calling with increasing volume and urgency "Freddy… Freddy!"

I couldn't hear much of the resulting conversation over the J. Geils Band's 1982 smash Centrefold, but it was clear that Freddy transitioned from curiosity to shock, to outraged betrayal, and finally an explosion of fire and brimstone farks that had McWheeze skipping back to his flat as though peppered by buckshot.

At this final egregious violation of the sovereign Aussie male's right to feel the bassline of Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer reverberating deep in his substantial loins, Freddy seemed fit to rend his garments, had they not been pretty thoroughly rent already. Instead he spun on his heels, and bellowed one final, desperate "FAAAAARK!" to nobody in particular before slamming his door behind him.

The next morning, Freddy was back on McWheeze's doorstep, the two exchanging politely convivial farks like characters in a Jane Austen novel.

There's something deeply disquieting about the aloof cameraderie between Australians who consider themselves mens' men. There's a sense of things understood but unspoken, seeming to hint at dark, soul-eating secrets; of tramatising initiation rites, pacts, threats, and decades-old unspeakable crimes. At least that's how it appears to me.

A few days later, I was sitting out on the landing with my laptop. Kitty, my darling fluffy grey feline familiar, had got it into her head that it was dinner time at two-thirty in the afternoon, so in the face of her implacable entreaties, I had no option but to put myself on the other side of the lounge room window in order to get some reading done.

Zen Ken, a petite, tanned, and alarmingly fit gentleman who eschewed shirts and footwear, and was in the habit of rising early to sit out on the back lawn cross-legged to greet the dawn, stopped by on his way downstairs for a spot of impromptu mindfulness among the stand of banana trees behind the pool. He asked me how I was settling in and what I thought of the place.

"It's fine, apart from…" I glanced in the direction of Freddy's flat, "the odd colourful character."

"Oh, I think he'll be pulling his head in from now on," he smiled, "After that letter to the strata body."

Oh, dear God no. I couldn't imagine anything more calculated to elicit Freddy's ire than a window-faced envelope and the use of the menacingly passive voice ("All residents are reminded that…"). Still, it was nothing to do with me.

"Your cat seems to want your attention," Ken observed, and went on his way, accompanied by the hum of finely-tuned chakras. No sense in wasting the best mind-emptying hours of the day in idle chit-chat.

I love a reasonable degree of uncertainty. I'm miserable out in the suburbs, because in the city you feel that at any moment anything might happen. Nothing ever does, but the potential is electrifying. However that's a different kind of uncertainty to the knowledge that you have an explosion coming, and you just don't know when it will arrive.

One morning, while getting ready for work I heard a knock on the door, shortly followed by the unmistakable "whomp" of a sheaf of paper hitting my doormat, and seconds later the beeping of a reversing delivery van, long gone by the time it took to walk the length of a very, very small flat.

The contents of this A4 window-faced envelope were at least a hundred pages thick and it was addressed to Freddy at unit 21. Mine is unit 20, where the line of rooms runs out, so it wasn't at all unusual for lost postmen (and once, a pair of police officers in armoured vests) to ask for the location of 21, over at the opposite end of the landing, next to unit 12.

I had so far managed to avoid any interaction with Freddy beyond nodding hello, but in the circumstances there was no alternative to being neighbourly. At least it clearly wasn't from the strata body. No consortium of landlords would take the time to devote over a hundred pages to anything.

The door was answered by a young man I'd never seen before. Did Freddy keep him in a cupboard?

"This is for here. Postman left it at my place."

"Oh, right. Thanks."

Crew cut, tattoos, crumbling teeth: Freddy definitely has a type. I never saw him again.

Freddy had just bought himself a new ute (the Australian term for a sedan-sized truck Americans would call a "pickup"). Gleaming white, like something out of the 1970s TV series Battlestar Gallactica. Lord knows how he could afford it; Freddy didn't seem to work.

I grew to love the absence of that vehicle. Freddy's unit being at the entrance to the complex, it was parked at the very front, and could be seen from a hundred metres away. When returning from work of an evening, my heart always sank to see it. I don't know why. In retrospect, it's clear that as he had no need, or particular desire, to go anywhere, it's absence could only mean that he was out purchasing a carton of cans of rum and cola, prior to filling a rotisserie of CD platters with the fruits of the bargain bin, cranking up the volume, and hitting the "shuffle" button.

Returning home one evening about a week after my little chat with Ken, I heard Freddy already in full swing before I saw his ute. I didn't know if Freddy was partial to any drugs other than rum and coke, but at the very least he was definitely one of those people who use alcohol to get wound up rather than to wind down. Quite apart from giving we mild, decent alcoholics a bad name, that class of drinker scares me.

I hurried up to my flat, keen to remain unobserved, though I'd hardly made it through the door before robust exchanges of opinion began echoing across the car park. By the time I'd served Kitty her dinner, the arguments that Freddy was simultaneously conducting with multiple interlocutors, like a chess grand master, had reached record-breaking intensity.

I drew the blinds. My neighbours all had curtains and/or venetian blinds, but my unit was kitted out with roller blinds. These were wonderfully low-maintenance, but had to be raised to at least half-mast if one wanted any fresh air or natural light. Positioned as I was at one end of the top row of units, with three big windows, it was rather like living in a giant illuminated fishbowl. When signing the lease, I reasoned that if somebody had any desire to watch me doing the washing up, or to stand out on the landing, nose pressed to the glass to enjoy the spectacle of an old wreck sweating and snoring though a humid summer night, that was very much their problem. This opinion had been under review for a while now.

The agitation outside was starting to sound as though an element of physical contact had worked its' way into proceedings. Concern for the welfare of my neighbours led me to open the front door and take a look.

Freddy was standing near the top of the stairs leading to his door, and I was relieved to see that it was unlikely he'd just pushed someone down them, as he was vigorously summing up his assessment of the character of Boombox Barry, for the latter's moral edification.

On noticing me framed in the light of my doorway, resplendant in business socks, boxer shorts, and burger-flippers' polo shirt, he swung round and thrust out an accusing finger.

"And YOU! If you've farkin' got something to say to me, whyn'tya come over here and farkin' say it to my face, ya cat-farker!"

The customary colour (a kind of mottled green-grey) drained from my haggard face. Oh, brilliant. He thinks it was me that made that farking — sorry, I mean that blasted — complaint to the strata body.

Freddy leaned over the railing, and dropping his vocal pitch for dramatic effect, announced in a low rasp, "I've got my farking eye on you, ya c**t!"

Unlike most of my neighbours, I lack any of the zest in my emotional repertoire that would enable me to respond with matching vigor, and so somewhat at a loss, I took a step back and closed the door. Freddy moved on to his next target without missing a beat.

Kitty had finished dinner, so now it was cuddle time. The fact that Freddy had chosen to make a point of Kitty's existence (and also, in passing, his unsettling explanation for why he thought anybody might want to keep a pet) unnerved me.

Being six foot two, and typically sporting pretty threadbare attire, I've had the luxury of living my adult life without much regard for my personal safety. I've strolled merrily late at night through some notorious precincts with blithe unconcern about being singled out as a target for assault and/or robbery, and am well aware of my privilege in that regard.

By drawing attention to Kitty, Freddy had struck at the heart of that complacency. After nearly fifty years on the planet, my major moral obligation was to that adorably vexatious ball of fluff. She was also my sole motivation: after a number of very difficult years, I was managing to keep it together for the sake of Kitty. And we were very happy in that condition. We were very nearly one person, except that no one person, at least in my experience, cares for themselves as Kitty and I cared for each other.

And that dim, foul-mouthed, petulant man-child was somehow cunning enough to identify her as my critical vulnerability. In doing so he had upset everything.

Continued in part two.

Probably about [squints a bit, rubs chin] four years ago a friend of my [then-]wife invited us to a nineteen-eighties-themed birthday party. For the previous few years I'd been assembling playlists of music videos, mostly from YouTube, to play during the traditionally festive bit at the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Together with getting out the turntable and dusting off the vinyl, jigsaw puzzles, Trivial Pursuit, Uno, and insane amounts of food and booze, a splendid time was generally had, under the circumstances.

So as we were too skint to shell out for an appropriately lavish gift for a round-numbered birthday, my wife suggested I put together an eighties-themed video playlist on a USB drive. It was tremendous fun finding and downloading the videos (for any young people who may be reading, "downloading" is just like streaming, only deleting the data you've just downloaded isn't mandatory). Where previously I'd just played the videos through my RaspberryPi plugged into the telly, this time after downloading with youtube-dl, I edited (most topping and tailing) the clips when necessary in OpenShot, checked the audio in Audacity to see how much it should be amplified to keep each track at more or less the same level (no, I've not found any satisfactory way of automating this), then applying the amplification and transcoding to H264 MPEG with HandBrake, so that you could stick a USB stick into any telly made in the last ten years and it would play.

It was so much fun that I extended my remit beyound the eighties and started doing the same thing every year. I'm less fussy about the format/codec now, as I don't have a telly (these days nobody does; they're just computers you don't really control, with a huge monitor and a very bad UI), so I just leave it in the format/codec I found it wherever possible.

This year — no relatives, not much food, still plenty of booze — I set about doing the same. Having exhausted the obvious back-catalogue stuff it's a smaller show than in the past, and I'm a month behind schedule. It's mostly little novelties that I've stumbled across in the last twelve months, plus nostalgic things that they brought to mind. You can download the whole thing here, for as long as I have the server space, or follow the YouTube links below until the sources are taken down.

Here's the list:

The Pogues: Dirty Old Town (A Snippet Thereof)

Can't start without the Pogues. Found a few old clips while down some rabbit hole or other last year. Would love to know the source of this one, beyond "somebody's VHS collection". Really encapsulates MacGowan's punk attitude to music at a point in the Pogues trajectory where the success they'd had didn't interfere with his preferred lifestyle; no barriers between performer and audience, and a sheepish indifference to his own talent.

The Trashcan Sinatras: Obscurity Knocks

In the late eighties and early nineties, my old school chum Paul used to drive up from his family's semi-rural property to my family's utterly-suburban home once a week. We'd order pizza and consume vast quantities of cola to the point where I swear I could feel the sugar slurry moving through my veins. Until the not-so-wee hours of the morning we'd talk nonsense and watch Rage, where this video was one of several on high rotatation at the time. A gorgeous song and a video that perfectly suits it, but doesn't define it.

Courtney Barnett: Pedestrian at Best

Stumbled across the official video for this single on a forum somewhere and immediately thought "This is great! Simple, relentless, like the Fall!" As it happens, this song is a bit of an outlier, and most of her stuff is more in the standard Oz Alternative vein. Still, I like that as well, so no harm done. This live rendition is a bit nearer Nirvana than the Fall. Which — also — is nice.

I'm fascinated by the way she plays guitar, since the way I play (well, used to play) is to treat the whole enterprise as mainly an aerobic workout, and if all the frantic thrashing about sounds okay, that's a bonus. Seeing her get that big sound out of lightly brushing the strings, and realising "Oh, yeah. Electric amplification…"

The Stranglers - Golden Brown

Some transitions between songs are because one naturally follows from another. Others are because it's a jarringly discordant wake-up. Still others are just your brain telling you "I want to listen to this one next".

This song was on the EMI (Australia) various artists compilation album 1982 with a Bullet, which we had in our house as kids. In the nineties, when I was living in Oscar's Palace, I was messing about on my guitar with chord progressions and suddenly thought "Oh! That sounds like…", and did the same few chords in waltz time. And yes, my entire life is basically nostalgia for times that don't really warrant it.

Putting together the original 80s playlist, I couldn't find a source for the official video, so I used a far less satisfying Top of the Pops mime performance. This will be not the last callback to earlier playlists (which I may also put online if I'm ever less work-shy).

Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over

Spirit-raising remote lockdown renditions of beloved songs: didn't you love these in 2020?

Maybe not entirely, but still it's Crowded House. Well, it's Neil and Nick. Plus fun fact: the "catch a deluge in a paper cup" line was a conscious nod to Lennon's "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup" from Across the Universe. Bet you didn't know that. Read it in the early nineties in an interview with Neil in one of those music papers that used to give you black fingertips.

Steve Martin (with The Philadelphia Orchestra): Office Supplies

Spirit-raising remote lockdown renditions of things you've never heard before…

I think The Jerk is one of the greatest films of all time, and I'm delighted by Steve Martin's quite substantive musical career in recent years.

I bought a banjo about twenty years ago, hoping to emulate Jem Finer from the Pogues. Turns out it's a very loud instrument, with no volume control. Not quite as bad as bagpipes or the saxophone, but not recommended for anybody who likes to reach a certain level of proficiency in complete privacy.

Still have it. Barely played. Make an offer.

The Dick Cavett Show: Little Richard On Discovering The Beatles

Good golly, Miss Molly. RIP, the king and queen of rock and roll.

The Beatles (Live At The Festival Hall in Melbourne): Long Tall Sally

Ringo had just recovered from a serious bout of tonsilitis. Thought you might want to know that.

Using FFmpeg, you can fix the aspect ratio without re-encoding and losing quality. Which is nice.

David Byrne (Live on Saturday Night Live): Once in a Lifetime

This has already been yanked from YouTube. It's a performance from the American Utopia stage show which Spike Lee filmed and you can probably get from various informal distribution channels. How on earth taking this off YouTube might be to the benefit of Byrne, the producers of SNL, the stage production, or anybody even remotely associated with all the above, is a mystery to me. Monopolists got to monop, I suppose.

Happy Mondays: Sunshine and Love

The Mondays' last proper album is an unappreciated gem. The conventional wisdom about it is total bollocks.

They didn't bankrupt Factory, Factory bankrupted itself and was waiting, unreasonably, for the Mondays to come to the rescue.

The Mondays were always a producer's band, and after a cracking couple of albums with first John Cale and then Martin Hannett producing, they had their mainstream hit with Paul Oakenfold, which to me landed like a wet sock. It was so of its time that it was dated by the day of its release, and so polished that you can listen to it over and over and not feel a thing.

Yes Please! was a return to form, with Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth (from Talking Heads) putting the welly back into the mix.

Unfortunately the NME and Melody Maker, having decided how music was going to go in the nineties and finding that the Mondays no longer fit, elected to put the boot in. Because obviously Northside was the horse to bet on.

Divinyls: Hey Little Boy

Did Chrissy Amphlett make sexy scary, or make scary sexy? Anyway, an Australian band that broke into the mainstream without losing brains or edge.

My friend Paul and I saw the Divinyls at the State Theatre in Sydney about thirty years ago. Brilliant.

I love the State theatre, but it was the wrong venue for that band. The seats were totally redundant from five minutes in.

R.E.M.: Nightswimming

Fediverse chum @andyc brought this clip to my attention last year. It's a beautiful thing.

This song is occasionally on the musak playlist at work. I don't care. It won't spoil it. I could listen to it every day, and it would never fail to fascinate me.

The Sundays: Here's Where The Story Ends

There are no words.

Modern English: I Melt With You

Another lockdown video which is also a callback to my eighties mixtape. The song hit that sweet spot of one you'd remember but not too familiar, so that you'd get that Proustian remembrance effect.

Also, the original version makes one think "Christ! What a bunch of wankers!" I can't say that the update entirely rids one of that sensation, but as a general rule, getting old is a blessing.

Dicey Reilly: The Dubliners

Now, to be honest, I don't know why I included this. I was probably drunk. It's off the first Dubliners album I ever bought, which was kind of a reunion album (with an accompanying TV special I've still not seen), made in the banner year of 1988.

Siouxsie and The Banshees: Killing Jar, Burn Up

1988 was my last year in school. Beginning with pocket money record purchases, and accelerating when I got my first job the following year I mined that year for everything it had. And what riches it had! The children of punk came of age in that year. The Pogues and Billy Bragg released albums of staggering brilliance and beauty, and the Banshees gave us Peepshow.

I'm a sucker for a cello. Love this video for the eighties music show presenter awkwardness and the VHS artifacts.

Also, as far as I'm concerned, Siouxie still looks and dresses like this. I will not accept any evidence to the contrary.

Electric Light Orchestra: Can't Get It Out Of My Head

Okay. The cello thing can be taken too far.

I was really thrilled when George Harrison had his late eighties renaissance, and the Wilbury thing, with ELO's Jeff Lynne. So as a gormless schoolkid, I started shoplifting ELO records and cassettes (shoplifting pro tip: the cassettes are easier). I tried to like them, but my god, they were awful.

For decades afterward, I tried telling myself that actually, the first — budget-constrained — album was pretty good, what with the overdubbed raw scraping of bows on strings. A few Christmases ago I put that record on the turntable, and no, it's just bloody awful.

So this video is just self-flagellation, and a reminder of what punk fixed, however temporarily. Enjoy.

Madness presents - Two Mad Men and a String Quartet: Night Boat to Cairo

More lockdown. The only song I included in the mix was the first, as it later becomes apparent that Suggs is just phoning it in. Jesus. You had one job to do! Be a nutty boy. That's not an unreasonable request for a sixty year old man, surely? Look at Siouxie: she's still stunning!

The Smiths: Accept Yourself

Oh, Morrissey. Look at yourself. You poisoned it all.

Sleater-Kinney - You're No Rock N Roll Fun

Another one I got from some bonkers forum site. I knew guitarist Carrie Brownstein from Portlandia, one of those Lorne Michaels catchphrase-driven sketch comedy shows that are never quite as funny as you want them to be. I'd heard that she was in some band called Sleater-Kinney, but I never felt sufficiently motivated to investigate.

This song is good, inoffensive guitar pop. What's not to love?

I'm working my way through the back catalogue, The first couple of albums are a bit raw, but the ones after that are in the grey area between offensive and inoffensive, otherwise known as my comfort zone.

Son House: Death Letter Blues

I never heard of Son House, can't remember how I got to this video, by my god this is the real stuff.

Hat Fitz and Itchy: Miss Mabel

Back in about 2002 my wife and I were in Annandale on a very important mission to get a pot of some specific colour of paint, and after securing said item and dinner at McDonalds, we wandered across Parramatta Road to the Empire Hotel for a beer. This was the inner west's premier blues venue, and as we sat down, a young blond-haired, blue-eyed boy started setting up on stage and I, in a terribly racist way, thought "Hello, get ready for some Eric Clapton."

Turned out he was actually quite good, and we stayed to the end of his set. By then we were a bit tipsy, and game for the next act on the bill: Hat Fitz and Itchy.

Good golly, Miss Molly. Never knew that it was possible to make that much sound out of a single guitar. Literally pinned back to the wall by the force of it. Never mind the malevolent glare Fitzy gave the audience as he sent them into paroxysms of pleasure. He was playing the audience as much as playing the guitar.

He announced that he accepted tips in the form of Jameson, and by the time they were done, the front of the stage was covered in little glasses. He's settled down now, and his current musical/life partner told me on a recent visit to Coffs that he doesn't drink at all any more. Which is nice.

I'm a couple of albums behind at the moment, but he's the kind of artist where it doesn't feel right to buy a CD anywhere but out of his suitcase at a live gig.

Neil Finn - Don't Dream It's Over

Yes, I know. All I want from life now is a cure for baldness and a string section that will follow me about on a cart.

Trashcan Sinatras: Best Days on Earth

Not the most prolific band on earth, but thirty years on still the most adept at tugging on heartstrings. I've a personal vignette I can't help but associate with this song, but it's a matter for another occasion.

The Pogues: Greenland Whale Fisheries

Okay, the whole concert video is mesmerising. I just included the whale one because it's such an oddity of a song, and so weird that Shane included it on the Pogues' first album. He has a logic that defies logic.

Shane here is just magic. He's a very capable guitar player, and possibly rivals Lydon as the best punk vocalist. That original simple lineup, the selection of traditional songs, and of course the glorious original compositions are pure genius. He engineered it all, but a few years later it crushed him.

Obscurity is underrated.

That 1 Guy - Whale Race

Not long after we moved to Sawtell, my brother-in-law and his girlfriend came down from Queensland and lived with us for a while before heading off again to Goondiwindi (sounds exotic, but don't go there unless you have a thing for red dirt). They'd seen That 1 Guy in Queensland, and insisted we all had to go see him at the Planto in Coffs.

(There's a doctoral dissertation to be had on the syntactical rules around Australian colloquial abbreviations. The Plantation Hotel is the Planto, while the Toormina Hotel is the Toormi and the Sawtell Hotel is the Sawty. The Park Beach Hotel/Motel is the Hoey Moey. Nobody feels the need to ask why.)

I was so impressed that when I bought a CD from him after the gig I positively gushed. In those days he and the magic pipe mostly stuck to a pithy three minute pop format, and I said he reminded me of the raw, percussive thing that Tom Waits does (I don't think I was any more eloquent than that, sadly). He seemed genuinely flattered and said he knew some people who had worked with Waits, and would really love to do so. I was chuffed to learn a few years ago that he eventually did.

He's become a bit more symphonic in recent years. It should offend my punk sensibilities, but this holds one's attention for nearly ten minutes. Plus it's about whales.

The Undertones, True Confessions

You have to. You just do. Two minutes, in and out. Thrashing guitars, no whales, no violins, just pure mischieveous joy on BBC2.

Comment

For the last few years I have been working at a local supermarket. Because there are three of them within walking distance, and provided I don't specify which one it is, I believe I can talk about what it's like without violating any confidentiality agreements I may have made during the "yeah, whatever" signing-on-dotted-lines stage of the hiring process.

I was happy enough to do the job for a year or two, but then 2020 happened, so let's make that three or four.

As one of those people who push a trolley round the shop picking online orders, I'm basically paid to get in peoples' way. The maddening thing about it is that when I am in somebody's way, it's they who apologise. Stop saying sorry, people! You haven't done anything wrong!

There's the occasional exception to this rule, memorable for it's rarity. Recently an old fellow grunted "Can you move?", not even prefaced with "excuse me". (Witty response that came to me five minutes too late: "Can I move? You should see me on the dance floor, grandad!")

However by and large, the job is utterly uninteresting, if physically taxing, which comes as a relief to this middle-aged burnout case. If one has to choose, it's far better to punish your body than your psyche.

A while ago my GP asked how work was going, and I replied that over time, the range of things I've been asked to do has expanded. "Oh good," he said, "Intellectual stimulation. You need that."

He's a queer fish, my GP. He makes so much money from treating sneezes and sniffles, and the various diseases of suburban despair, that he's on holiday most of the time for tax reasons, drifting around the world in a little bubble of affluence. I don't think he's quite grasped how much intellectual stimulation is involved in any aspect of running a supermarket — or indeed in most jobs. Which is to say, none whatsoever.

There are points of interest to the experience, mainly derived from observing what various people bring to it. I've seen a lot of people come and go in a few years, which is not unusual down here near minimum wage.

On my trolley is a little computer which, when it's not malfuctioning, leads me about the supermarket by the nose like a pack animal, telling me what to get and where to get it. When you are new to the job, in the process of being broken in, it is emphasised that if you can't find something quickly you should "out of stock it" and move on. Of course the little computer is surveilling you and extracting performance metrics at all times, so speed is of the essence.

Eventually, you realise that the system's little database of stock is chronically incomplete and inaccurate, so you develop workarounds. You also work out that the people who stock the shelves are likewise evaluated by crude metrics, and that it's not in their interest to take care in their work if they will be punished for it, so (for example) a tin of tomatoes is a tin of tomatoes. Whether it's whole, diced, or crushed tomatoes is not a distinction they'll be rewarded for honouring; just get it all on the shelves as quickly as possible.

Once you've amassed a catalogue of all the managerially-imposed perverse incentives relevant to your task, you can start to reverse engineer from these a mental map of the ways that things will inevitably go wrong, and graduate from following a precisely wrong model of how the place works to a fuzzily right model.

The practical upshot of this is that, for example, you don't "out of stock" so often, yet you still get round the shop relatively quickly. Can't find something where your computer says it will be, though there's supposed to be plenty of in stock? Is the amount claimed to be in stock plausible, or likely an artifact of the periodic farcical charade known as "stocktake" (where every item gets counted, but as the item that is supposed to be in that position rather than the item it actually is)? Is it on special this week (in which case it is likely to be on prominent display somewhere else not know to the system, as it's not worth being too fussy about updating the location database week-by-week; that degree of accuracy is not easily measured, and is therefore not incentivised)? Have a look a couple of inches or feet away where there's another product with quite similar packaging. Peer right to the back of the shelf. Insert your arm, James-Herriot-style, up to the shoulder and have a good rummage. When your fingertips make contact with something, grab it, and give it a good yank, bloodying knuckles in the process. Aha! Beep it, bag it, move on…

Now none of that is intrinsically interesting. What is interesting is how long it takes for people to surmount the blind faith in the flawless way that things are supposed to work. Now after a few years, I believe I've identified a statistically significant age-related difference in the attitude that one brings to a new job, which generalises beyond this particular example. It can be summarised like so:

• Teens/twenties: How does it work?
• Thirties: How should it work?
• Forties and older: In what ways is it f**ed up?

You'll be slower and less effective for longer the younger you are, and more likely to be leaned on (which in a deregulated workplace includes being given fewer and fewer hours) till you quit. There are exceptions of course. Personally, I was wandering about in a comically innocent daze until I was in my forties. But in general I've found that the strength of this childlike belief in a world which is pretty well ordered, by grownups who know what they're doing, is proportional to one's degree of, and temporal proximity to, formal education.

So it's not strictly age related. If you're on the sort of career track where you're enjoying "lifelong learning", then clearly reality is not for you. You've taken the blue pill. You're paid to push an arbitrary sort of accountability down the hierarchy by measuring the easily quantifiable, and your only worry is the smaller degree of whimsical discipline imposed from above by those even deeper in cloud cuckoo land.

There's an interesting body of academic work on this, which I'll write about when I get round to reading it. It basically all boils down to Goodhart's Law.

The general cause of the problem is a neoliberal shift from academic education, concerned primarily with how the world actually is, to vocational education which, whether the practitioners know it or not, is about how this or that group of people believe the world should be. In extreme cases, such as mainstream economics, there's no recognition of a possible distinction between the two, since we live in a Panglossian best of all possible worlds, and one can not only derive ought from is, but also go in the other direction. Fault therefore lies not in our systems, but in ourselves. Therefore, it makes sense to measure our virtues using the simple numerical targets of our broken systems: in a word, meritocracy.

My whole working life I've heard conversations among exasperated colleages that run something like "Why do they still not get it? What can we do with them?", often in rooms I've just entered which suddenly fall silent when I'm noticed. To be functional in a fantasy world is to be able to practice the doublethink necessary to insist that the system is fundamentally sound, while intuitively implementing baroque workarounds for the fact that it is fundamentally broken. This phenomenon is fractal, and scales up to the global level, which might give one pause as we "return to normal" in 2021.

I've no conclusion to this…