An Uneducated View of Sex, Food and Politics - Derek Haines (beach read book .TXT) 📗

a void I have felt. And this may happen.
Why am I here? Without an education I so much wanted and still want. Merely because my youth existed in a different time and place. My youth existed before our Australian Prime Minister exclaimed that we should be the ‘Clever Country’. Before Gough Whitlam embarked on a rampant three year period that for the first time in Australia’s history, ignored economics and gave us social reform. The like we had never seen, and have not seen since. The era of my youth was an era that held firm to the view that a tertiary education was the privilege and domain of the elite. The norm then was for boys to find an apprenticeship at fifteen, because to stay at school for another two years was a waste seeing as though one would never go to university anyway. For girls of course, they had two choices, hairdressing or a short secretarial career, just to fill in time until they could do something useful like get married. It was a time also of immense change in society, but also a time of immense rigidity in a country still firmly tied to the apron strings of a Mother country twelve thousand miles away.
It was a time when a news reader aspiring to read the news on the ABC needed to jettison his Australian accent, and fake a Surrey or Kent accent to be accepted. It was a time when we still stood to attention for a Queen we never knew, and did not know us, and for a country that was foreign to almost all of us. It was a time our political leaders said “all the way with LBJ” and took our youth into a war that was not ours to fight. It was a time when as a country we were so immature, we were disappointed if a TV or radio journalist, did not ask an arriving celebrity at their airport interview, “What do you think of Australia?’ The celebrity always had to lie. The poor creature had only just stepped off a plane, was suffering from jet lag, and if he or she was lucky the only exposure or knowledge of Australia would have come from the airline cabin crew.
Nevertheless, to satisfy the fragile egos of a country of isolated, parochial, immature and ignored people, the answer was always the same. “Oh, it is a wonderful country. The people are so warm and friendly.” It always seemed to me that the answer was scripted by the Department of Foreign Affairs. On rare occasions when some drugged to the gills rock star defied the code and said something along the lines of, “I dunno, I just got here man!” He would be pilloried through the press for his entire visit, and probably be arrested on trumped up drug charges and deported.
It was a time when our country was still very European, and also very, very white. It is not so long ago. Today we say somewhat jokingly, “Scratch an Aussie, find a racist.” In 1968 you did not need to scratch. Racism was still Government policy!
These are some of the reasons that “I am here”. They are part of the answer to the simple question.
From the moment we take our first breath after surviving what has looked to me to be a traumatic start to life, we are moulded by our surroundings, prevailing attitudes, experiences and guidance and advice from our peers and superiors. One of my first memories of life was trying to hold my pet cat by the tail when it wanted to do something completely different than what I had in mind. Since then, holding a cat by the tail has always invoked an image of extended claws and blood. I see young children doing as I did, and want to rush to them and give them the advice of my years of experience with cats and tails and blood and scratches. But do they heed my advice and warnings? Nope! They will nod and agree, and as soon as I am out of ear shot they will yank as hard as possible on the cat’s tail, and then run to their mothers arms, covered in scratches all over their small and innocent faces. Their little T shirt covered in blood. And of course their mothers tell them, “Oh poor baby, that nasty pussy cat!”
Next day, the cat is taken on a one-way visit to the veterinarian and is put down for reacting so normally to having it’s tail almost yanked off. Some things in life repeat themselves ad nauseam. No matter how wise or knowledgeable we become as a race or species, we start all over every time a new life is formed.
I once reprimanded a young child visitor, who decided it was a great idea to clonk my dog on the head with a rather large rock. Luckily, the dog was a very timid and good-natured dog, (and also somewhat semiconscious from the blow to the head) and had not gone for the young child’s throat and tore her larynx out in revenge or self-preservation. In reprimanding the young girl of only four, I said something very stupid. “How would you feel if I hit you on the head with a rock?” To which the youngster replied in action and not in words. She picked up the rock and hit herself on the head! Presumably she was preparing herself fully to answer my stupid question. However, before she could regain consciousness, her mother started to abuse me and the moment was lost.
Why are we here? To learn must be part of the answer. To learn for ourselves. Not to be given an answer in length in a language we do not understand. Just as the little girl did not seem to understand me, in actual fact she literally did. It was I, the purveyor of wisdom who did not understand that she was looking to answer my stupid question with the full fruit of experience. Just as I ask my accountant, “Why do I have to pay tax on profit that I don’t have?” I always nod understandingly at his answer and dare not expose my ignorance by telling the truth at the end of his answer. The truth? I never understand a word he says. So inevitably, I make the same mistake next year, and pay more tax than I probably should or could have if I understood anything of accountancy or the tax act.
I could fill pages here about the power of chaos and how the tax regimes of the world use the power of chaos to obtain order, but I shall resist, and take my uneducated thoughts to something much more fundamentally important. FOOD!

Chapter 2. What is Food?

“It’s petrol for your engine.” I was told as a youngster. “Eat your crusts to have curly hair!” “Eat your food or you will get sick.” There are many expressions we remember from childhood relating to food. All of them seem to indicate that there are dire consequences ahead if we don’t eat our beans, peas, carrots or Brussels sprouts. Meal times were always a chore as I remember childhood. As parents we all want our children to be fit, strong and healthy. We do anything we can to promote health and well being in our offspring. The one point many of us seem to miss, overlook or just forget, is that food is a sensual pleasure.
If a small child likes the look of something. Swoop! Into the mouth it goes. Thumbs, bread crusts, rusty nails, shoes or mouth wateringly tempting dried white dog shit! It is the first test a baby or young child applies to discoveries to ascertain the acceptability of an object or substance. This sensual approach to discovery is fought by the wisdom of the parents. “Get that out of your mouth. Dirty! Yuk!” screams an emotional, paranoid and grossly inexperienced parent. The reaction invoked in the child is that it must be bad. “This oral testing technique doesn’t seem to be too popular around here!” thinks Junior. And Junior is correct! It is very unpopular. So with the natural ability to learn, Junior, still believing his technique is fine and dandy, (also considering he doesn’t have too many other methods developed yet) modifies his behaviour, and conducts his oral testing out of screaming range. But the dinner table is very much within screaming range.
As if to prove the freshly developed theory Junior has reasoned, Mum and Dad try and coax food into Junior’s mouth. “Ahh! Junior reasons. I am not falling for that. One mouthful and you will start screaming at me.” So Junior squeezes his lips together with the force of a bull terrier and nothing passes his lips. Now Mum and Dad start a different type of screaming. “If you don’t eat Junior, you are going to get sick and die!”
Lost in the logic of all this, Junior looks up innocently at the two paranoid and very confused adults in front of him, and wonders, “Why am I here?”
In contrast, I watched an experienced mother of eight, and a now grandmother of a multitude, simply notice casually, a young grandchild making its oral presence felt towards what was probably going to turn out to be a very unpleasant tasting or possibly mildly poisonous pot plant. Without disturbing the conversation, or the ambience of the family gathering, the grandmother nonchalantly took a piece of cake from the table, and handed it to the child. She delivered it with only a smile. Now this looked a much more interesting assignment for the child who grabbed the icing smothered cake with glee. Within moments the mother of the child was starting on the very predictable. “Oh God, the baby is going to make a mess with that cake. I only washed her dress this morning!” The grandmother replied, “Oh it is a pretty dress Dear. Where did you get it? I am sure it will survive a few more washes!”
As all of us who have been parents know, there is very little preparation for becoming a parent. For many of us, if not most, it comes upon us rather suddenly. Even for those of us that may have planned well ahead. The day that first baby arrives home; life becomes one very steep learning curve. As usual, typical of our species, we just have to find out for ourselves. How vividly I remember the mother of my children reproaching her mother for unsolicited advice. Don’t we all know everything? And what we do not know, we would prefer to find out for ourselves.
If you are searching for a point to my rambling so far, I am happy to enlighten you. I would also say that you are very impatient, as I believe this is only page fifteen! I bow to your want of an explanation however. My point so far is this. As often as we ask questions, and just as often as we are displeased with the answers, in the end what we really want is to find out for ourselves.
3 Please feel free at this stage, to put down the book, look inquiringly at your spouse or relative or whoever may be sitting next to you watching television, and ask this question. “Is there anything you do not know that you would like to know?” If the answer is any more high brow than, “Yeah, this weeks winning lotto numbers.”, you are sitting next to an intellectual, otherwise, I shall rest on my point.
So why am I bothering to write this book? My answer is the same as any other author or thinker. To ferret out truth. Albeit, my version of it, and for my own understanding. My only hope is that it