It's been seventeen years since I travelled to Thursday Island trying to retrieve that irretrievable time when I was young and all my life still lay ahead of me in endless abundance. Now, seventeen years later, I am again looking back, trying to retrieve that irretrievable time when I was still trying to retrieve time.
"Why did you go back to Thursday Island?" people asked me then. "Because it's there," I replied. "But so are your comfortable slippers and the TV remote", they said. Q.E.D., I thought.
I may have been struck down with what psychoanalysts refer to as G.T.D.S.B.S. syndrome (* Going to do something a bit silly syndrome - source: Freud, Dreams and the Unconscious, published 1896), or it may simply have been a wish to revisit one of the many odd and fascinating places I used to live and work in - and they don't come any odder than T.I.!
There are two words I don't want to find myself uttering as an old man, and they are "If only ...". If only. We all have our own "if onlys". If only we had studied harder; if only we had stuck with that job ..."
My trip to T.I. was to eliminate one "if only" and to confirm in my own mind that I couldn't have stayed much longer on the island even if my then boss, Cec Burgess, had been less of a crotchety old bastard.
Socrates said that the unexamined life isn't worth living. What he actually said looked something like this:
(to which Plato is said to have replied, "Keep it in the jar with the lid on or it will all dry up!")
This then is the journal of my journey to Thursday Island and another examination of my unexamined past: click here. Tempus fugit indeed!
