Forty years ago, I walked this walk every morning, all the way up Blues Point Road, but instead of turning right to the train station, I turned left all the way up to Crows Nest to my new job as "Internal Consultant" with Wormald International.
It was the year 1985, my very own annus horribilis: I had returned from my last assignment overseas and, in anticipation of continuing the work for my former Saudi boss from home, settled in tropical Townsville. The work never came - well, not until two years later when his brothers Ali and Abdulhameed offered me my own office in the Banque Des Echanges Internationaux's building on Avenue Kléber in Paris but by that time I had grown tired of the fickleness of Arabs and declined the offer.
With few other job prospects in Townsville, I hastily relocated to Sydney where I eventually took up this impressive-sounding job which required me to be 'on the road' - or rather 'in the air' as Wormald's operations were spread all over the world - for nine months of the year. After the first rush of adrenalin had passed, I remembered that I had just given up a far more highly-paid overseas job with far greater perks in order to live a 'normal' domesticated life. I promptly resigned and moved to Canberra, where I had taken my first tentative steps as a young migrant twenty years earlier, but not before I had bought this "hole-in-the-wall".
Since then, at the end of each month when I receive the rent statement from the agent, I am reminded of those terrible - what? - six or seven months during which everything I did seemed to have gone wrong, including the purchase of this apartment. There had been two on sale, one at the rear overlooking Lavender Bay and offering a glimpse of Sydney Harbour Bridge, and this one facing the street. I chose the one facing the street because I felt lonely and wanted to watch the people walk by on the footpath and the cars driving up the road, the same cars whose noise drove me mad and stole my sleep after I had moved in.
I have just noticed that Unit 1 in this eight-unit complex has come up for sale again - click here. It last sold twenty years ago for $290,000 and is now "price-guided" at $725,000. Being at the bottom of the building, even though it faces the rear, all it faces is a weathered old fence. Two floors up, it would be worth another $250,000. As would've been mine!
