7 July in Melbourne Diaries

At work listening to Sun Kil Moon’s latest good but sometimes depressing album (as well as a great album by New Zealand’s Tiny Ruins). I was in Canberra last week for the second of my three farewell parties – at least I’m being missed. Nothing about the work environment in Canberra has caused me to regret leaving. There is a complete disconnection between senior management and staff, with the staff either leaving, trying to leave, or resigning – the whole thing felt like a wake for what was previously a good team environment. The axe may well fall on my own supervisor next week (who has four kids, three of whom are badly ill).

Also caught up with Andy and his father (so familiar with me that he often treats me like a distant cousin). He seems happier, but that could be the result of wife being away on extended cycling trips, leaving him with his kids in peace. His marriage is no real marriage at all, but he’s more content these days. A mutual friend of ours, though, is going through hell. She has two young kids, one an angry, perpetually fighting mess of a boy with every aggressive and developmental disorder imaginable, and the other a baby girl with Downs Syndrome (and who can expect no protection from her violent older brother). I remember this girl when she was young as a good person all things considered, but also volatile in character, intermittently drug-addicted (and to pot, not the fashionable drugs), aggressively promiscuous and a person who disrupted the lives of those who came within her orbit. She’s not the type to deal with such personal tortures at all well, but middle age calms all of us down. Another person I dated (for, like, ten minutes) now has a kid that’s seriously disabled, which has also affected her life greatly.

As for me, my life may hopefully be emerging from its limbo state of the last two years. I can now settle semi-permanently in Melbourne, buy a house, be essentially normal and so forth. To what extent that includes any woman is up to me, but I have no inclinations at all these days. I’m getting more and more shy as I get older, and while normal looking I am not going to suddenly get more attractive in future years, or considerably wealthier (though I’ll never be poor). There is the whole online dating rigmarole endured by people my age, but I lack the necessary confidence to put my face on a site and deal with speculative hits from peculiar people in varying states of desperation. There are women I meet at work or through friends and colleagues, but most are married or firmly entrenched in their own relationships. I am coming to terms with the likely fact that, occasional flirtations apart, what happens for other people may well never happen to me. That said, I've never seen marriage and kids as the end point for all happiness - the opposite if any of my friends are an example.

When I came back from my ten mile run yesterday I was at first self-congratulatory at making the distance after so many injuries this year; then I realised that I had run the distance slower than I used to do fifteen miles as a young man. Bugger, how did I get so slow?