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‘How many times?’ the voice on the other side shouted. ‘How many fucken times? Will youse ever listen?’ The brick wall between the two change-rooms might have been cardboard.
On this side – the visiting team’s side – the boys sucked on their orange quarters, all ears. Dom Russo, the team manager, screwed up hi ...
The Observatory: Selected poems by Dimitris Tsaloumas, translated by Philip Grundy
Looking back over what I guess is my literary life (so hard to distinguish from the other that it’s a bit like leaving a forest and, in a clearing, trying to pick out the path among the trees!). I suppose I could lay claim to being one of the least disappointed or frustrated writers around the place. In part, this may be a tribute to my limited expectations which were nothing if not a reflection of a 1930s childhood when, if it was working-class and semi-itinerant, the philosophy one imbibed was not to ask too much. My brother who with my mother was the essential fountain from which I drew that sustenance which comes in the guise of folk wisdom, was fond of saying: ‘They (meaning whoever the authority-figure was) never put the roof on my lavatory!’ The sacred places were sacralised by a sense of independence which, now I come to think of it, depended upon what seems to me a very traditional Australian view not to expect too much whose lugubrious extreme is summed up in the national beatitude: Blessed is the pessimist, for he shall not be disappointed …
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