Robbed in my own house

Something was taken from house the other day, something I will truly miss.  I feel it as a mind numbing loss, and it seems I’m living at the scene of a burglary.

I lost the last month of work from my computer.  And it was a true criminal that stole it, one as real as a bloke who knocks in a window and steals my TV.  It was someone who designed and sent a vicious computer virus.

I’d never seen a virus like it before.  It attacked suddenly and without mercy.  Everything crashed and disappeared, replaced with a black screen.  And in the aftermath of the assault, the only message on my screen was an official looking one telling me I had to run a system restore program.

However, it said I only had a test version of the program.  Just click here, fill in your credit card number, the program will be uploaded and your computer will be fixed….

As I said, a criminal attack.  The computer had to be stripped back to its most basic factory settings to kill off the virus. 

In the hours I have spent reloading programs onto my computer, I have thought about all these consumer goods that I would not miss.  Take the juicer, one of our two coffee machines or two DVD players, just give me back my damn work.

It’s a prickly lesson that in world of expensive household toys, there are things without physical substance that are a lot more precious.  What I lost has no physical substance; it was digital information stored on something that is the size of my fingernail.

It is the products of the mind that are truly irreplaceable.

No.  There is something else that is honestly and truthfully irreplaceable.  These are the things that house fire victims always regret losing - the photos and videos of our families.  These things are the memories of the mind, made real.

I seethed, sulked and wailed over the loss of my work, but felt enormous relief that I had not lost the photos and videos of my first-born child.  Work I can do again.  I cannot record Guy at his first birthday party ever again, nor at his first Christmas.

I still have the digital photos and movies because I did a serious back up a month ago.  All the photos and videos of Guy were on the portable hard drive.

Once again, adversity and loss reveals what is really precious. 

Still, what I had lost was precious.  I laboured long and hard at it, and it was the product of many late nights of deep thinking. 

I lost all of the research I had done for my work, for my blogs.  Yet I can do both again.  I know where to find the research articles, and I can remember what I had written.

It will take me days to do it all again, so what was really stolen from me was time.  I was not robbed of the stuff that will feed the memories in years to come.

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Member of the Board: Skateboarding in my ‘40’s

WHEN I turned forty, I was asked what I wanted for my birthday.  I said a skateboard.

My family laughed at me, and I got a rather fine set of framed prints.  But I was serious about the skateboard.

I knew just what I wanted, too.  A dignified long one, made for cruising, made for a bloke with slower reactions and a reconstructed knee.

A few months ago, I finally got one.  I was driving down the streets in my community and there it was, embedded in a pile of household debris.  Like a lost torpedo, beached and pointing to the sky.

In a flash I pulled over, and gently prised it out.  Apart from a busted wheel, it looked fine.  Perfect, even.  Fate, I decided.

By the end of the day, I had a new set of wheels on it, as well as knee pads and elbow braces from a sports store.

But that night, the skateboard sat motionless on the lounge room floor.  Black and bullet-like, hunched over pristine new wheels, it was the picture of restrained energy, impatient and perplexed at its immobile state.

It could not be helped: this forty-something man does not know how to ride a skateboard.

I downloaded instructions on how to ride a longboard skateboard, and I started looking for long, smooth pathways with a gentle slope.  But I did not, dare not, strap on the knee braces and step on the skateboard deck.

My wife wisely pointed out that it would not be a good look to have a mayoral candidate campaigning with a broken arm from a skateboarding incident.  There were enough questions about my judgement, without suffering an injury that would embarrass a teenager.

I deferred to her judgement.  After all, she has form on this.  She once broke her ankle trying to ride a skateboard.  She said it was her brothers’ fault, as they were egging her on.

Still, if a 22 year old girl could not do it without a bone-cracking injury, my chances are looking slim at 45.

And why do I want to skateboard?

Because I surf, and I know the sensation of standing on a board and flowing, just flowing, over a silvery surface.

Because I remember the 1970s, when skateboards first emerged in their swirling paisley plastic magnificence, the second coolest thing after a Sandman.

I visited my aunt in Sydney in the ‘70’s, and glory be, she lived on the top of a hill.  Down the street streamed the skateboarders on bullet-like boards, flared tight pants and long flowing hair.  Cool.

And they rode with such attitude.  Nonchalance and indifference, walking away with stiff-legged dignity whenever they clipped the gutter and rolled onto the road.

Maybe it is not nostalgia that draws me to do this.  Maybe it is because I am a grown man, and if I want to skateboard, I bloody well can.

So now I have decided to see if I can ride this skateboard.  I have updated my medical insurance and I shall report back in future blogs on injuries, triumphs, and what my wife says (probably “I told you”).

I have identified a benign sloping pathway not too far away.  

The skateboard has emerged from under the bookcase, looking resentful and dusty, but still sporting a barely contained malevolent energy.

It awaits.

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Souvenirs of a dead man

The cap of a dead Japanese soldier is kept in a box in a cupboard at my place.  It was given to me by my grandfather when I was quite small.

It was one of my WWII playthings I got from him, along with a fibreglass insert for an American helmet.

The cap is quite small, and I often wondered how a man could have possibly worn it.  Or was he a child like me?

There are words inked inside the cap.  I still wonder if it is the name of the soldier.

My grandfather drove jeeps for the Americans in New Guinea in WWII, and came back from the war with a range of souvenirs, besides the cap.

He told a story that he had a brace of Colt 45 pistols.  On the way into Newstead wharf, an officer told the returning soldiers to get rid of their contraband.  Dutifully my grandfather threw his pistols over the side of the ship.  To his dismay, he was never searched, and always bemoaned the loss of his pistols.

I think of those pistols at the bottom of the Brisbane River whenever I cross the Breakfast Creek bridge and look at the agitated brown river water.

For whatever reason, he kept the cap.  I have little doubt it came off a dead soldier.

When going through my father’s things in 2010, I found a bundle of small photos my grandfather took in New Guinea.  There are photos of a wrecked Japanese ship on a beach.

The writing on the back says “Kioto Maru/Japanese ship-grounded/1943”.  I now know the Kyoto Maru was already grounded when the Allies took Lae, but I always wondered if the cap came from a soldier who perished on that ship.

I have started to think I should see if it is a name inside the cap, and establish whether he perished in the Lae area.

I now fantasize that I find out who it belonged to, and I send it back to a tearful and grateful family.

But the reality is that there are souvenirs throughout Australia that won’t be going back to Japan.  A cap is not the worst souvenir Australian soldiers brought back.  In Australian museums, I have heard there are collections of Japanese bones.  

When fathers and grandfathers have died, and children have looked in those boxes buried deep in cupboards, they must have found these shocking souvenirs. 

Unsure what to do, they have donated them to museums, where they in turn are put in boxes at the back of cupboards.

War is brutal and gruesome, but the war in the Pacific was probably the conflict that most brutalised our soldiers.  Things happened in the jungle that were not passed down into our popular culture.

I was always fascinated by what my grandfather did, and I still am.  When I was a wide-eyed kid, I asked him if he killed anyone.  He gently said no, he had to keep both hands on the wheel of the jeep.

I believe him, and the paper of his war record backs him up.  His war was a mundane one of driving supplies.

But I still have the cap of a dead soldier in my cupboard.  I don’t know where it will be in the future, or if I will pass it onto my own son or grandson.

If I do keep it in the family, I will tell the truth of it.  Of nameless bones, of the needless Australian deaths at Tarakan and Balikpapan, and a rusting ship on a beach.

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Shields, steel and saddles: The modern sport of jousting explained.

 On 7 and 8 July, at the Abbey Medieval Festival, Caboolture will host an international tournament for one of most interesting of modern sports – jousting.

You may think jousting was a historic chivalric pursuit, but it thrives today as a modern contact sport.  

Picture this: hundreds of kilos of humans, horses and armour charging at each other, intent on landing the point of their 3 metre lance on the body of their opponent.

There will be wood flying, dents in armour, and if the crowd gets what they want, someone will be knocked off their horse.

No wonder it is popular.  In fact, so popular there is now an International Jousting League, with rankings, and there are annual prestigious jousting events that attract the best from around the world.

Sounds modern?  It’s the way the sport was organised in the 13^th century.  In medieval times, the best knights would travel from tournament to tournament, and were the “sports celebrities” of their day. 

Like all the best sports, the rules of jousting are simple and straightforward, but they allow a great deal of subtlety and gamesmanship from the competitors.

The object of jousting is for a knight to land their lance tip on their opponent - that scores points.   A hit is called an “ataint” and an ataint scores if it is a hit on the shield, body or helmet.  But you get even more points if you shatter your lance upon your opponent.  Yes, wince as you picture that.

The lances are designed to shatter on impact, and the tips are replaced after each ataint.  The breaking point is a set distance from the tip, and a lance must break at that point if it the ataint is to count.

And what does the  jousting “stadium” look like?  Like all sports, there are tiers of seatings all around, so the spectators can see every hit, hear every grunt, and all of the action.  Some things are eternal – it was the same for the gladiatorial games in Rome.

Like most equestrian sports, spectators are more worried about the horses than the humans. Fear not, the horses are safe.  Safer than the jousters. 

There have always been great protections built into jousting to protect the horses.  Harming or targeting  the horses is dreadfully taboo.  If a horse is hit, the offending knight loses the tournament and traditionally had to surrender his own horse.

In fact, we think the horses rather enjoy the action and attention.  Like the jousting knights, they don’t hold back.  And that is how all elite modern sports should be .

As a modern sport, jousting  may even be better than many of the ball-chasing events you see on pay TV.  

It is a brief, intense one-on-one  contest where you can’t miss the action.  All the drama is distilled down to a single moment, the moment of impact.   There is noise, there is shiny armour, there are the “oohs” and “aahs” from the crowd.

And sometimes, we see a knight knocked off his horse.

So take your kids to see an international sporting event in July. An event  with no drunken spectators, one where you get to see a result, and one where everyone learns something about the past.  Go to the jousting.

(Click here to read about the jousting at the Abbey Medieval Festival)