So far it's Anthony Albanese and Bill Shorten contesting the Labor leadership. That I know of. Whatever. Guys, whoever gets it, judging from your party's history of knifing serving leaders, he or she will be out of that seat before he or she has worn a comfortable butt-groove into it. I have this idiotic song in my head because of Bill's name, and it's going, 'Mammy's little baby loves shorten, shorten...'. It draws from what was perhaps un-politically correctly referred to as a Negro spiritual that went 'Mammy's little baby loves shortnin', shortnin' bread....' Sang it when I was in primary school.
My young 'un is to be picked up from school camp today. I remember my first ever school camp. It was when I was thirteen, and a busload of us were taken to the Warrambungles (sp?) National Park. Over and over, some kid kept playing 'My Sharona' on the old Sony tape recorder. To this day, even though the song is sexually charged, I tend to think of a bunch of kids on a school bus whenever I hear it. At twilight, the kangaroos hung around hoping for spare scraps of food. The cabins were disused railway carriages, and I ended up in one with a couple of the roughest girls in our school year (one of them put stinging nettles in the sleeping bag of a girl she didn't like while we were there, and slapped another in the mush - real noice, she was, and she's still as rough as a pig's breakfast). In the cabin opposite ours were the male teachers. We were in darkness, whispering and gossiping as girls will do after lights out, when one of the girls in my cabin gasped, 'Hey, wow! Look at this!' We looked out the window, and could see in the teachers' cabin because they still had the light on. The science teacher - who had a body like Channing Tatum - was in the process of peeling off his polo-neck shirt. Had the simultaneous intake of breath from us assembled girls been any more powerful, the windows of the cabin would have imploded. Oblivious to the awakenings being stirred in the loins of a bunch of thirteen-year-olds, the science teacher stood in the window, performing some basic wind-down moves that made his biceps and pectoral muscles ripple like the surface of a river after a stone has been dropped in, and my young loins were rippling in time. From the giggles and whispered catcalls of my cabin-mates, I can safely say they all felt the same. It was real 'Magic Mike' stuff, and like that movie, there was no sense of plot, depth, theme or sense. One of the girls said, 'I bet old Poofy Jones* is having a good look.' The science teacher was sharing with the commerce teacher, and the commerce teacher was widely reputed to be homosexual. I have no idea if he was or not, and actually don't care now, anyway. I remember squeaking, 'Get it off, Mr Smith**!' as I stared through the window, my tongue lolling and eyes bugging like Ping-Pong balls in their sockets. Then Mr Smith** moved from the window and turned out the light in the male teachers' cabin, and there was a collective groan from ours.
This is weird, typing on a new blog today. I feel like the new kid in school. Anyone reading, please leave me a message. Even if you don't agree with what I have to say, I still like to hear from you.
Okay, I shall now get on with work on my next novel. I should be getting the cover art for the upcoming 'Silver Studs and Sabre Teeth' some time over the next few weeks, I would imagine. I liaised with the publishers, Zeus Publications yesterday. I had minor surgery last week, and I have this week off from my part-time job to recover, but owing to the stitches in my back it's been hard to sit at the computer chair.
Thanks for calling by.
* Not his real name.
** Not his real name, either.
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