As the gums bend and shed their hair, you can do nothing but quiver and take cover.
When it occurs at night, and you are in bed surrounded by tall trees, it feels like a bony finger wag from God that you’ve been bad, very bad, and you are going to be whipped for all the awful things you’ve said and done in your whiney life. Even the things you’ve thought of saying and doing are worth a slap or two from the Mighty Punisher when you’re lying awake at 4am and listening to the forest drag and pound like a roiling black ocean above you.
At times like these, you wish you hadn’t sent those white-shirted messengers away and sneered at that their flimsy booklet because you really are, after all, a tiny pebble in the vast and sinful naked shingles of the world.
But I had other things to think about apart from my own guilt and mortality.
Before dawn broke, The Chief Gardener and I faced a car trip to Melbourne for her regular round of treatment to help subdue the effects of a debilitating neurological disease.
I have told her that instead of a biannual drug infusion, she needs to drink more champagne. However, the benefits of this remedy are in dispute, and I need to do more research.
So, because the benefits of medical drug trials do not extend to those careless sinners of the bush, we are forced to drive twice a year to Melbourne starting in the dark so we can arrive at St Vincent’s Hospital at 9am. Her treatment takes about five hours, and because I am her filthy, possibly COVID-infected partner, I am forced to tramp the streets of Fitzroy like a doorway dweller on the hunt for a coffee and somewhere warm to escape the cruel blasts of nature.
In recent years, as a struggling artist, I have made a habit of replenishing my dwindling art supplies by searching out quality art supply shops. Last year, I found a good one on Smith St, about a 20-minute walk from the hospital.
This year, I bought some paints and a nice 40x60cm stretched linen canvas. All I had to do was walk back to the car at an underground park on Brunswick St. On any other day, this would have been a pleasant walk in the sunshine and a chance to flaunt my creator status among the disruptors and influencers of Gertrude St. However, as soon as I exited the art shop, I realised my return journey was going to be more than disruptive; it could be lethal.
A gust of wind caught my stretched linen canvas and sent me sideways across the pavement straight into the path of a young disruptor who had to interrupt her phone conversation to avoid being barged off the kerb into the line of a delivery van hurtling down Smith St. She threw a glare of astonishment and ridicule at me. I felt like Buster Keaton with no script. Further on, I saw a man talking on his phone on a selfie stick in front of his face. I tried to avoid him, but the wind forced me to stumble in front of his camera like a drunk derelict.
If you see someone about to die in traffic holding a 40x60cm canvas on an Epic Fails Facebook reel — that’s me. On a positive note, I thought if my stretched linen canvas was a ship sail, I could be in Hawaii by now.
Eventually, I made it back to the car park, where I put my art stuff in the boot and sat in the passenger seat, stunned and gasping.
That’s the last time I go art shopping in the mighty wind. However, I’m still a little nervous. I do feel the Great Punisher hasn’t done with me yet.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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