The handwritten dedication on the flyleaf reads, "To my darling Lee, Happy Birthday, Love Sue 8/95", and to ensure that darling Lee would fully appreciate the gift, loving Sue had left the Chatswood ABC Bookshop's sales docket dated 27/08/95 for $75 as a handy bookmark inside the book.
It stayed there for almost exactly twenty-nine years until I picked up the same book yesterday at Vinnies in Moruya for a mere two dollars. Wayne the Bookwhisperer, who prices all of Vinnies' books and thinks nothing of slapping a $10 price on a second-hand copy of "Fifty Shades of Grey", knows his fellow-Moruyans well enough to realise that an encyclopedia of the English language wouldn't exactly fly off the shelf, hence the cheap price for what is still an almost pristine copy which even darling Lee didn't seem to have looked at much in all those twenty-nine years. Look, I don't mean to denigrate those who prefer "Fifty Shades of Grey" to this beautifully produced encyclopedia of the English language - and for those people who do, let me explain that denigrate means "put down" - but for me this was the find of the week.
I love reading about words; I love writing with words; I love listening to words; in fact, words are all we have, you and I, as you sit in front of your computer and I sit and tap at my keyboard, but words failed me as I listened to the news on the car radio on the drive home. According to one piece of news, an estimated 5.5 million, or close on 20% - TWENTY PERCENT!!! - of the entire Australian population has a disability and is on the payroll with the euphemistically called and much abused National Disability Insurance Scheme, or NDIS. Even the word "insurance" is an abuse because, according to the Oxford dictionary, "insurance" is "an arrangement with a company in which you pay them regular amounts of money and they agree to pay the costs, for example, if you die or are sick, or if you lose or damage something such as your health, your life, your possessions, etc." No-one pays any amount of money, regular or otherwise, into the NDIS, other than the other 80% of Australia's long-suffering taxpayers who are currently being hit with some $45 BILLION - a figure which is estimated to DOUBLE by 2031-2032 - so that little old ladies can fritter their time away playing bingo at the Returned and Services League Club while NDIS-provided personal carers dust their venetian blinds and clean their bathrooms and kitchens and mow their front lawns, and revoltingly obese men with tattoos all over them can come to the swimming pool attended by their NDIS-provided personal carers in a futile attempt to lose the excess weight they accumulated through an unhealthy lifestyle. I am not exaggerating - I have met several of both kinds! The NDIS has become the new #MeToo movement: where once they prided themselves on the number of pills they took, they now take pride that their NDIS-package is bigger than yours!
The NDIS was one of those Labor government ideas which, as well-meaning as it might have been, has completely gone out of control, and is now almost impossible to rein back in. A recent case in point was an unsuccessful attempt to stop paying for sex workers attending to the "personal needs" of disabled people which resulted in a major outcry and the repeated mention of "human rights". I am all for looking after the nation's truly disabled but free sex workers? What next? Free P&O cruises? This is unaffordable and corrupting welfare on steroids!
Perhaps by the time the Chinese arrive on our shores to freshen up our sadly depleted gene pool, our nation will be girth by wheelchairs occupied by one half - many of whom would be better off if they tried to keep fit by walking - while the other half serves them caffé lattes and cleans their venetian blinds, if indeed they are not attending to their more "personal needs". And there are people who complain that we waste too much of taxpayers' money on the AUKUS submarine deal!
As for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language which has already entertained me for hours and re-activated brain cells I had almost forgotten I had, if you know someone called Lee whose birthday is in August, please give him my thanks for having left it in such pristine condition by hardly ever using it. I'm making up for all that lost time!
