Sunday morning and Johnny Cash just about sums it up "'Cause there's something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone". And even though there's no smell of someone fryin' chicken, I'm taken back to somethin' that I'd lost somewhere, somehow along the way.
That the morning is grey and overcast and the temperature a mere 15 degrees doesn't help to fight off those supercharged memories that crowd in on me. Strangely, they all go back to the years before 1985 and are neatly compartmentalised: 1965 arrival in Australia and working in Melbourne and Canberra; 1967 return to Germany and working in Hamburg and Frankfurt; 1968 Lüderitz in South-West Africa; 1969 Cape Town, then back to Canberra and leaving for Papua New Guinea; 1970 working in Rabaul and on Bougainville; 1972 Sydney; 1973 Honiara in the British Solomon Islands; 1974 back on Bougainville in New Guinea again, then Port Moresby and Lae; 1975 Rangoon in Burma; 1976 Tehran in Iran; 1977 back to New Guinea, then Thursday Island; 1978 Apia in Western Samoa; 1979 Penang in Malaysia; 1980 up and down the east coast of Australia: Mt Isa, Mackay, Brisbane; 1981 Townsville; 1982 Port Moresby again, then off to Saudi Arabia; 1984 Athens in Greece.
Then, in 1985, I'm back to Australia and everything becomes one big fudge and the big questions in life are reduced to "What's for dinner and what's on TV?" Is that the kind of memories people have who've stayed in one place all their lives?
To quote W. Somerset Maugham, 'What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.'
