I basically blew my university days in the pursuit of one girl.

It's only now, half a dozen years later, that the idea strikes me with some clarity. Despite what people said at the time. Despite the fact that at every moment of those several years it must have been obvious to everyone but me.

It was obvious. They told me. But I couldn't listen to them because I still had hope. Several years of entirely pointless hope, when I should have been having the time of my life. Not that I had a bad time. In some respects, I had a great time. But it could have been better. If I hadn't blown it in the pursuit of one girl.

Of course, hindsight is no substitute for insight, and this is all pitifully retrospective.

I'm playing the album she gave me for my twenty-first. Sitting here on the bare boards of the verandah of this old house, studiously not renovating, listening to The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead. Watching paint fail to apply itself to the verandah rails.

Listening to the album makes me think we had no chance anyway. She gave it to me, I'm sure, simply because she knew I liked it, not because of its abundance of ironies, full as it is of loneliness and stricken unrequited love. She was neither cruel enough, nor ironic enough, for it to have been anything but a gift. It's only now that I realise that she lacked irony absolutely, and we were in fact totally incompatible. That fact had always eluded me, but I can't imagine how.

Since my enthusiasm for renovation has temporarily slipped and it's approaching seven-thirty, I decide to eat. I decide takeaway, then straight back to work. I call Baan Thai at Milton and the guy recognizes my voice and says, Usual order for Hiller?

He tells me fifteen minutes. I stop for petrol on the way...




email jamie: jamie@jet-black.com.au