Some people had their life flash before their eyes, often during a near-death experience. Gazing into a blazing fire on a cold winter's morning is far from a near-death experience but can induce a similar phenomenon, even more so when fortified with a steaming glass of "Glühwein".
By the second glass of "Glühwein" I felt extremely grateful that I was sitting here at "Riverbend" rather than somewhere in (c)old Germany, which would have been the case had I never had the courage to take that first step and leave the "Vaterland" almost exactly sixty years ago.
And, as unlikely as it may seem, I may have continued driving a delivery truck around Canberra, had I not seen that advertisement in the "Canberra Times" which led to my becoming a bank officer with the ANZ Bank, which was a career good enough to aspire to even for an Australian school-leaver, let alone someone whose school education was almost entirely useless by the time he stepped ashore in Melbourne.
I could have seen out my working life, as so many others did, working for the bank and living a good and stable 9-to-5 life until my retirement. I could have accepted my good fortune but I refused what was spread before me and turned by back on it. I refused, so as to better hunger for what had so far been denied me, because to enter the promised land was to despair to ever coming near it. And on I went, holding everything at arm's length, and coming closest to arriving when farthest from it.
I could've started a new life again in Germany when I returned after two years, but both my parents refused to take me back in, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I wouldn't have mustered the courage a second time after being spoilt again with three home-cooked meals a day and clean underwear and an ironed shirt every morning.
And so on I went to South-West Africa which was like Germany but with blue skies. I fitted in well but again I refused to accept my good fortune and kept looking for that promised land, which I found a year later in Papua New Guinea. It was everything I had ever wanted from life but it was also too close to arriving, and so, after several years, I left again.
And on and on I went, one country after another, always holding things at arm's length, until, finally, I am sitting here beside a blazing fire on a winter's morning, holding nothing more at arm's length than a steaming glass of "Glühwein". Somehow I've got this far! Sometimes it seemed like driving a car at night. I could see only as far as the headlights, I couldn't see where I was going and very little of what I passed along the way, but somehow I managed to make the whole trip.
Now the only trip left is to the house for another glass of "Glühwein"!
