Learning to Die: 24 Hours in Evacuation

The phone buzzes. I wake. Sort of. And read the text. 

NEW SOUTH WALES RURAL FIRE SERVICE EMERGENCY BUSH FIRE WARNING – Bermagui – Leave now to the East towards the beach and shelter in place. 

It’s 5:48am. New Years Eve, 2019. My wife and I get out of bed, slowly, like part of us believes this isn’t happening, like moving quickly will admit that it is. There’s a fire coming. But we don’t know when. Or where. Or what to do. 

We fill a bag with stuff, not entirely at random: a blanket, spare underwear, toothbrushes. We don’t know how long we’ll be gone. I pick up a shirt and put it down again because it has metal buttons. Trying to avoid the possibility of hot buttons now counts as planning, a measure of my need for control where I have none. My wife packs water bottles, woolen sweaters and my acid reflux pills, a measure of her ability to prioritize and care for others. 

* * *

We arrived here two nights ago. Sped past Bega on the Prince’s Highway and, as we do every year, looked for the rolling green hills and the expanse of blue on the horizon. It was traditionally the moment when the beach holiday officially began. 

This time was different. The Bega Valley didn’t look like Tolkien’s Shire anymore. The hills were shrouded in yellow, brittle grass, pale and dry as the fence posts meant to distinguish farmland from scrub. 

We’d heard the numbers, seen the news footage: acres of dust, one of the worst droughts on record, water in some dams down to single digits of their capacity. It was the same story up and down this state. Higher temperatures, lower rainfall, livestock culls. But seeing it was different. Here they were, those abstractions, translated as land and our experience of it. Yesterday’s second home was now a foreign landscape, sepia-toned like photos on old travel brochures. Sunburned.  

* * *

It’s time to wake the children. This makes the fire real, more than the text. We gently rub their feet until they wake. It’s the reverse of Christmas Day. 

My son doesn’t understand why we can’t pack the Lord of the Rings Lego set he got for Christmas. He sobs as we walk through the darkness of the caravan park towards the sports oval, the town’s emergency assembly point.

The oval is already crowded. The lights of emergency vehicles flash against tents, parked cars and groups of people waiting to know more. A pickup truck hauling a jet ski parks near the beach. I can’t decide if it’s an absurd affectation or a brilliant plan of escape.

The sky is black. Not dark. Black. Flashlights bob around in the blackness as people are drawn to the oval from the town’s surrounding buildings. Up in the hills, car headlights creep down forest tracks as people from outer areas make their way to town. Despite the commotion, the air is still. The leaves refuse to move.

Couples and families debrief their options. There are none. The town of Bermagui is a regional evacuation point. Everywhere else is less safe. A visibly drunk man staggers towards the beach and slurs our subtext. “Fuck it,” he says. “I’ll just put water all over me.” 

A breeze of conversation wafts up from the people we pass, huddled on the field. “The house is pretty much gone,” says a woman wearing a nightgown. “The bowls club’s okay, though. It’s weird what’s survived.” 

Another woman turns to her partner. “We should have left while there was still time. I’m worried about her if we have to go into the water.” The woman motions to a baby in the car seat. “She can’t swim.” The man says nothing, just leans against his car and looks up at the sky, dense and featureless as a black hole. 

My wife and children are quiet, taking all of this in too as we walk towards the surf life saving club, the town’s emergency evacuation command and control center. Floodlights illuminate the exterior of the building. The effect is inviting. We are drawn towards the light. 

Inside, volunteers put out white plastic chairs, quickly, to keep up with demand. We sign in and join the newsreel footage. Fire crews, police and emergency rescue workers move purposefully into back rooms with two-way radios pressed to their ears. Civilians stand around, draped in blankets, wearing whatever it was they had on when they got their evacuation order: shorts and thongs for many. Others are in pajamas, nightgowns and boxer shorts. Kids, half asleep, are propped up on pillows or bedded down on towels, snug against the walls of the life saving club. With them are dogs and cats and bunnies and guinea pigs. Modern families meet Noah’s Ark. 

There’s not much to do but wait and entertain one’s own thoughts. People sit around. Some talk. Most don’t. Some laugh, some sob, many more keep looking at their phones. A weathered man is slumped in a corner, asleep, his head almost resting on the bulk of his belly that rises and falls. We all deal with stress in our own ways. Breathe in. Breathe out. 

People stay together in distinct groups. Couples. Families. Backs turned out. No one else is allowed in. Not now. Inner circles. The scene reminds me of an airport lounge full of people awaiting a delayed flight. Changing planes. 

In the club kitchen, three teenage boys wearing surf rescue uniforms spread butter and vegemite on dozens of slices of white bread. “This isn’t how I imagined spending New Year’s Eve,” says one of them. “Yeah,” says his mate. “But at least I feel useful.”

The volunteers are organized and supportive. They hand out sandwiches, cut up oranges, mangoes and distribute bottles of water. They are kind and gentle, a welcome dose of calm in the eye of this storm. 

We don’t know it, but the fire is now tearing through the town of Cobargo, 25 kilometers away. Behind us, somewhere in those hills, father and son Robert Salway, 63, and Patrick Salway, 29, are dying in the blaze.

In the Bermagui Life Saving Club we have no information about the fire. It’s just out there, like a creature, on the move, that can’t be tracked. My son and daughter play video games. I can’t protect them, so I distract them. But it’s not enough. Not for me. I should have done something, somehow, somewhere along the way, before we got to sitting on a blanket, surrounded by flames. We all needed a holiday. But we shouldn’t have come.    

A polite queue forms outside the toilets. I go there a lot. The line for the women’s toilets is long. But the women talk and comfort each other while they wait. The men’s queue is shorter. But the men do not speak. We don’t even look at each other. The difference between the two lines feels profound, like it’s the explanation for and answer to everything. I’ve joined my toilet queue at least three times in the last hour. I tell myself it’s because I drank a lot of water. I search myself and conclude that I’m going to the toilet so often because I’m scared. 

I should be. Outside, on the beach, away from conversation, things feel more severe. Against the matt black sky, floodlights illuminate a band of ash that flutters in the air, lands gently on my head, my shoulders, my eyelids, soft, grey snow that never melts. I’m sweating. The wind blows hot. 

“What time does the sun usually rise?” I ask a woman wearing a surf rescue jacket. 

“5:30am,” she says and looks away. I check my watch. 9:47am. How quickly life unravels. I never expected to grieve the sun. But then, even our sun must learn to die.

Beyond the roof of the life saving club, I see something I will struggle to forget: a smoldering red orb that oozes through the darkness, as if melting the sky. It’s not the sun. The sun is somewhere else, somewhere behind me, cold and invisible, the thing that never rose. This is the fire. And it’s heading straight for us. It’s still kilometers away, but I feel the weight of its heat. Fear bleeds into terror. The sky glows red. 

I know the final stage of our evacuation plan. Everyone does. And we dread it as much as the fire. The order to march into the sea. I scan Horseshoe Bay, where I taught my kids to boogie board and how to dive under a crashing wave, where they crawled, then walked, then ran on the squeaky, yellow sand while the ocean breeze ruffled the edges of our beach umbrella. The water is now dark and marbled with foam. I plan how far out we’ll go. How we’ll lock arms to stay together, huddled under the woolen blanket my wife brought because wool won’t burn as easy as other fabrics. But I imagine us out there, in the dark water, where the waves are breaking, with a thousand other people thrashing around in the rip and I can’t foresee what happens next. I don’t want to.

I go back inside the life saving club. It’s packed. There’s an announcement asking people to give up their chairs to those who need them: parents with babies, old people on walking frames. How will they fare in sea? And will I ignore them when the time comes? 

There are stricken people here now, pale and hollow eyed, whose coming precedes the fire. They are jittery and streaked with ash. One man’s knees are bleeding as if he’s scrabbled and fallen in his haste to get away. A volunteer ushers a woman to a chair. She holds a little girl, no older than five. They too have seen the molten orb. But closer. And the look in their eyes tells me they see it still.  

Two boys pass us. They’re wearing life jackets and have a mobile phone number neatly written on their arm in thick, black ink. People are better prepared than me. 

I dig in our bag and find a ballpoint pen. 

My son has been playing Minecraft on the iPad for hours. He’s barely distracted as I stretch out his arm and start writing my wife’s phone number on his skin. 

“Just in case someone needs to call mum,” I say. 

“Okay,” he says and goes back to building some more perfect world. 

I take my time, forming the numbers on his arm, making sure they’re legible, that my zeros don’t look like sixes, that my twos can’t be mistaken for threes. When I finish, I reach for my daughter’s arm. 

She pulls it away. “I know mum’s number.”

“I know, but–”

“No, I don’t want it.” She crosses her arms and turns away. “I know mum’s number.” 

I leave her arm blank. It’s what she needs. I need it too. Defiant hope. 

I go back outside where I don’t have to pretend I’m brave. Out there, the wind now blows cold. It is changing direction. 

A man in surf rescue uniform gets up on a chair. He taps his microphone. A silent crowd gathers around him. The immediate danger has lifted, he tells us. All roads out of town remain closed, but we may, if we wish, return to our homes. He warns us to remain vigilant for ember attacks and to be ready to leave if the situation deteriorates. He instructs us to come back tomorrow at 10am for a briefing. The fire is leaving, heading somewhere else, towards someone else. For now. The crowd disperses.

Charred gum leaves tumble from the orange sky and collect on the beach where the waves roll in, black with soot. We are the lucky ones.  

Can I learn to accept how much depends upon the direction of the wind? 

– Yannick

This piece won first prize for New Millenium’s Creative Nonfiction Award

Covid, a Love Letter

It’s a collision of worlds. The micro and the macro.

It’s logging on to the WHO situation tracker at four in the morning to note the body count, to watch the blobs of infection grow on the ‘interactive’ world map. Curiosity and concern? Or painfotainment?

Back home, it’s the playgrounds wrapped in neon orange, plastic barricades. It could’ve been barbed wire. Maybe it should have been.

It’s being out for a stroll in my neighbourhood and watching people veer from the sidewalk onto the deserted street to avoid walking near me. No longer anonymous, I am now the bringer of fear, a different kind of host.

It’s news from America, proof that heartlessness can have an epicentre too. A heartland.

It’s knowing that somewhere, somehow, people are scheming to profit from this misery.

It’s the helicopter that buzzes my house. I know it’s not the traffic report. What’s it doing up there?

It’s public money that appears in my bank account, a plea to keep spending… perhaps in the gift shop of a cruise ship whose windows have sunk below the water line.

It’s the fine days where the arrogant birds sing from inside the sunlit branches of their trees. Their song is the same. It’s me who is different.

It’s work culture, abetting the shift to our avatars.

It’s the envy and the pity of watching a dog, serene and oblivious, sleeping in a wedge of sunshine.

It’s the photos sent by family and friends who, gripped by nostalgia, dive into their hard drives to share memories of happier times.

It’s knowing I'll one day look back and remember much of this fondly, back when we were all together, morning, noon and night, when I cut the kids' hair and helped them with their homework and built them a cubby house in the yard that became our world. Back when we always knew where the children were, and that they were safe as long as they were near.

– Yannick

Lit Therapy in the Classroom?

Some of my students have been assaulted. Others have been homeless, jobless or broke, some suffer from depression, anxiety or grief. Some fight addiction, cancer or for custody. Many are in pain and they want to write about it.

Opening wounds in the classroom is messy and risky. Boundaries and intentions can feel blurred in a class where memories and feelings also present teachable moments. But if teachers and students work together, opportunities to share difficult personal stories can be a constructive, rewarding educational experience.

Writing about trauma

The health benefits of writing about trauma are well documented. Some counselling theories — such as narrative therapy — incorporate writing into their therapeutic techniques.

Research suggests writing about trauma can be beneficial because it helps people re-evaluate their experiences by looking at them from different perspectives.

Studies suggest writing about traumatic events can help ease the emotional pressure of negative experiences. But writing about trauma is not a cure-all and it may be less effective if people are also struggling with ongoing mental health challenges, such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Internationally acclaimed researcher and clinician Bessel van der Kolk asserts in his book, The Body Keeps the Score, that trauma is more than a stored memory to be expunged. Rather, van der Kolk suggests our whole mind, brain and sense of self can change in response to trauma.

Pain is complicated. And teachers in a classroom are not counsellors in a clinic.

If properly managed, though, sharing stories about personal suffering can be a relevant and valuable educational experience using techniques which, in a counselling setting, could be referred to as ‘lit therapy’.

An empathetic space

Dr Jill Parris is a psychologist who works with refugees and uses lit therapy as an extension of trauma counselling. Parris and I also worked together on the project Home Truths: An Anthology of Refugee and Migrant Writing, which paired refugee authors with a writing mentor to develop personal stories about challenging migrant journeys to Australia.

Parris says writing about trauma is helpful in most cases, as long as teachers and their students monitor stress levels and offer an empathetic space where storytellers are given the time and tools to manage the complex feelings that may surface.

“It is important that people feel absolutely free to avoid focusing on traumatic events and this should be made clear from the start,” says Parris.

Teachers should therefore be wary of implying traumatic personal stories are inherently worthy subjects, that divulgence alone is more likely to receive a higher grade or publication. It isn’t. In fact, sharing a story may be detrimental. It may be unfair to the author’s future self, the other people involved in their experience, or to the piece’s intention for its readers.

Helping individual students identify their own readiness to share personal experiences is an important first step. Parris recommends asking students how they know they are ready to share their story. What has changed to make them ready? Answering these questions helps people sit outside themselves.

As teachers, we also need to be mindful that sharing painful memories presents a risk for those hearing them.

Vicarious trauma

Vicarious trauma is a real threat. To help mitigate the risk of emotional contagion, teachers should check in with students at the beginning and end of class to monitor feelings, reminding people they are in the present, that the trauma they recounted or heard was survived.

If people feel stressed, Parris recommends looking around and forcing ourselves to name what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell as a way of returning to the present. Discussing what people will do outside class to care for themselves is also useful.

As teachers, it is important to help our students organise their thoughts and feelings in relation to the craft of professional writing, which is writing intended for consumption by an anonymous reader. Writing for publication is an inherently commercial objective, which makes the intention of this work distinct from therapy. Writing about trauma in the classroom may well be therapeutic for the writer, but it is not therapy.

A classroom is full of feelings, whether you engage with them directly or not. When students volunteer their feelings and personal experiences it can present a teachable moment about the craft of writing. Students are likely to write what they’re passionate about — the good, the bad and the ugly. Their best writing comes out of what’s meaningful to them. Teachers can help guide their students’ search for authenticity.

Feelings and experiences matter, but writers and readers also want to know what they mean. Revealing how masters of personal storytelling bridge the personal and the universal is useful in demonstrating the broader purpose of sharing stories.

Story craft is part of how author Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is both a personal reflection and a forensic investigation of grief. Part of a writing teacher’s job is exploring how personal stories can contribute to the archive of collective human experience.

This work is emotionally demanding. Scenes of horrible things people have told me occasionally invade my mind, as if another person’s lived experience orbits my own memories. It’s unsettling. It’s also why stories matter. Because hearing them can help us better understand the people who share them. Stories help us glimpse the humanity in the hardship, showing us while pain is universal, compassion is too.

Stories are worth the anguish of reading and writing them.

– Yannick

A version of this piece was originally published in the Conversation in 2020.

Teaching Online Requires Revolutionary Change

When COVID-19 forced me to move my face-to-face teaching online, I hated the idea.

Aversion to online teaching is common. An international Educause study on teacher’s perceptions of online learning found 90% of surveyed academics were apprehensive about teaching online. More alarmingly, almost half the teachers believed online learning has either no effect or a negative effect on student learning.

Teachers’ pervasive dislike of online learning suggests there is work to do in how we adapt to teaching online.

I’ve discovered the most significant shift teachers can make to assist this transition may not be technological or pedagogical, but conceptual. We are no longer classroom teachers, physically commanding the front of a room. We are now more like hosts of a YouTube channel or late night talkback radio DJs with the occasional caller.

If this comparison sounds apt, then it may also be instructive. Perhaps we can learn from how mass culture spreads ideas and teaches new skills. We may want to appropriate the aesthetics of pop culture such as podcasts, audio books and YouTube to enrich the shared experience of being online.

I’ve found myself eager to start my online classes with theme music to set a mood, cue my audience and embrace the transition from teaching to hosting.

Some fresh research, such as The 2020 Handbook on Creating Meaningful Experiences in Online Courses, characterises successful online learning by the quality of the relationship between teachers and students, where meaningful classroom experiences facilitate the successful transfer of knowledge. For me, knowledge, empathy and creativity remain the soul of good teaching. How we reconfigure this trinity online is personal. My driving questions are now: how can I use technology to define and refine my desired class experience? How am I earning the respect of my students/audience?

I have found that my online learning platform equips me to pursue this individual and collective engagement. It allows me to instantly run polls, invite students to post material, build groups and facilitate discussion. It also empowers students to engage as individuals by giving them more options to communicate by. Students who may not speak up in a physical class can now ask or answer that question from the safety of their homes.

The chat function becomes a de-facto twitter feed hosting parallel discussions on multiple topics, which I integrate, folding both asked questions and written comments into the presentation at the speed of thought. My mantra is now please talk in class. I can simultaneously address the class and my students individually. It feels like quasi-telepathic communication. I can do things online I can’t do in person. I feel like an augmented version of my teaching self

Keeping track of all these moving parts is exhausting. I feel like an air traffic controller, shifting pixels on a screen, reminding myself these avatars are real people, with aspirations tied to their reasons for being in my class. I owe them a memorable show.  

I don’t yet love teaching online, but I see that I could.  That already feels like revolutionary change.

– Yannick

Creative Zen

Found my old MP3 player the other day. I was restoring order in my life by emptying one of several ‘junk’ cupboards in my house and there it was, at the bottom of a shoe box, under a Ziplock bag of bulldog clips and a knot of power chords for devices I once cherished: a tape recorder, a Nokia mobile phone and a ‘portable’ video camera the size of a half-loaf of bread. There it was, like buried treasure, my pre-smart-phone, 2004 Creative Zen Micro, purchased the same year I moved from Vancouver to Melbourne.

Apple’s release of the iPod Mini that year bred a swarm of competing micro hard drive music players. I chose the Zen. If Apple’s sleek design for the iPod envisioned a future of clean-lined minimalism, then the Creative Zen was its aesthetic counterpart of chunky, Soviet pragmatism. Stout and blocky, the Creative Zen anticipated a more violent future for itself, a life of bumps and scrapes, of falling off bar tops and spilling out of bags onto busy city sidewalks.

My Zen was ugly and weighed a pocket full of nickels, but I loved that Mp3 player. Its boxy design seemed to accept me for who I was, rather than coax me towards achieving a higher version of myself. I could live with it, didn’t feel the need to live up to it. Zen was a music player. Its creator, Singapore-based Creative Technologies, made no further promises.

I’d had many portable music devices before it: a Walkman, several Disc men, but this was different. 1,500 songs in one place! Wow! I could now leave the house confident I’d have enough musical variety to harmonise with whatever emotional peaks and troughs the day threw up.

I spent weeks pouring my CD collection into my Zen. People I met topped the device up with songs they wanted to share with me. I wasn’t just building a music library, I was keeping a personal record, a catalogue of my tastes and social interactions.

Over the next few years, the music in my Zen became the soundtrack of my young adult life as a new migrant to Australia. Imperceptibly, those songs also grafted themselves onto the mis-en-scene of those memories.

Now here they were, waiting to be re-heard, re-seen. If it still worked, my Creative Zen was a tangible link between myself then and now. It wasn’t just an MP3 player anymore. It was a time machine.  

I plugged it in. My eyes widened as the familiar blue glow behind the 1.8 inch touchless video screen came to life. The artists names scrolled across the display: Tosca; Radiohead; Blind Willie McTell. Their songs continued in the random order they’d been set to when I last put my Zen down.

The old songs took me on a journey through a wizard’s Pensieve, reanimating dormant memories, filling the lacunae of remembered experience.

Hilltop Hoods and I am on Swanston Street, heading to the Melbourne Town Hall where I work as a caterer; Modest Mouse and I look out the tree-lined window of the office I share with three other postgraduate students in the John Medley Building at the University of Melbourne; Blur and I melt back into the liquid androgyny of my early twenties; Gotan Project and I’m out for dinner with a German international student I’d hoped would become my friend; The Shins and I’m drinking beer with a former colleague I promised to keep in touch with but who, like so many others, receded into my personal mist of ambition and domestic responsibility. That’s how time flies.  

I needed the music to be reminded of this time, these people. I miss them. And the idea of them. And I miss all the possibilities of what I then imagined my life could and would become.

– Yannick

Anti-Ode to the 1990s

I suffer a deep and persistent nostalgia for the 1990s. Specifically, 1994. That was the year before my two friends were killed in a car crash. It’s sad. We were all eighteen. I’m forty-three now. They’re still eighteen. That trauma changed me in ways I couldn’t appreciate then. Some lessons take a lifetime to learn.

I return to that decade, with its peculiar mood of listless anxiety and try to find some comfort, some meaning in it.

The internet makes it easy, so I travel back to the nineties. I re-hear its music, I re-watch its films, I even search random footage on YouTube and my heart jumps when I find thirty seconds of flat, grainy video footage of white kids with dreadlocks moshing to the Beastie Boys at Lollapalooza 1994. I was there too. With dreadlocks.

It’s pathetic. Was and is.

I’m not alone in my sentiment. A generation of former teens and twenty-somethings remember those years as well. They are online with me. They, too, scour the internet and post wistful comments under top-ten lists and YouTube clips: Those were the days. This takes me back to happier times, etcetera.

Were they?

Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys died of cancer in 2012. He was forty-seven. Kurt Cobain was meant to play Lollapalooza in 1994. He didn’t make it. Maybe therein lies the reason for the nostalgia, the pain of longing to return. Time marches, they say. Like an army, it crushes everyone in its path: celebrities, along with your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, colleagues you knew of but weren’t close to, friends, your parents. They all die. Time robs us of vitality. It was a gift, but in youth we mistook it for a birthright. We didn’t realise it yet. We imagined we would always have enough time. Maybe that’s why back then seems like happier times. I’m not convinced they were.

To ‘us’, the white, suburban, middle-class, western youth of that era – the mascots of Generation X – the nineties felt like a letdown, a second-rate Elvis impersonation of the 1960s, a commercial pastiche of its iconoclasm. Ask anyone who attended Woodstock 1994.

Our revolution was technological, not social; we were more likely to experience it at home behind a computer screen than on the streets. The revolution was televised, or at least it was downloaded at 28.8 kilobits per second via a dial-up modem. The sixties, as our parents described them, seemed embellished, self-important. But the delusion of ‘flower power’ also sounded kind of wonderful. We were the generation of global warming and AIDS.

But my friends and I had more in common with the sixties than we realised. That decade’s counterculture was predominantly a middle class-experience. Migrants, people of colour, the poor and working classes were mostly too busy working, or staying out of trouble, or getting drafted to Vietnam to participate in the sixties that way. The comfortable malaise we experienced as North American teenagers in the nineties was also a predominantly white, middle-class privilege, enabled by our parents’ generosity, a largesse they showered on us in part to distinguish themselves from their own parents’ frugality. In the nineties, the combination of freedom and listlessness resulted in a kind of apathetic torpor, which Richard Linklater captured to critical acclaim in his 1990 film, Slacker.

Some of us did ‘fight the system’ or scuffled it, rather. My friends and I marched against human rights abuses, protested the excesses of the World Trade Organization. I mostly dabbled in activism. For me, protest was more social than existential and I got the feeling most of my friends felt that way too, which is why we more commonly submitted to guiltless pleasures like smoking indoors and having only the vaguest sense of what carbon dioxide was. We rationalised our slacking with an edge of melancholy, which somehow redeemed our central deficits of knowledge, inspiration and creativity – at least to our eyes.

Between willful distractions, everything in the nineties felt lazy, in need of a jolt. Popular culture offered few answers and little direction. With a few exceptions – mostly in hip hop – popular music turned away from social issues and focused more on personal angst. Nirvana’s revolutionary Smells Like Teen Spirit (1991), the best song of the nineties according to Rolling Stone, was no anthem for an alternative political idea. Nirvana’s outburst of raw emotion simply harmonised with the existential ennui that pervaded Generation X. The song made no sense but felt intense. Like life.

Television offered no deeper insight than popular music. On TV, the easy, de-fanged political humour of Saturday Night Live and Jay Leno ruled late night, while Seinfeld – the show about nothing – reflected life’s banalities back at prime-time audiences.

There was a prime-time television audience, though. One could belong to that. If you wanted news and entertainment, you turned to TV, because the web, pre-1994, was still an enclave of nerds and people with security clearance.

Offline, you could still believe that your perspective was fresh, your feelings original, because social media had not yet collapsed personal reactions into a singular, hash-tagged cultural response. Communication was decidedly top-down, not bottom up. News and information were aimed at you, not foraged for as is the case today. Tuning out from corporate media was a form of social protest. It was as easily said as done. No-one I knew owned a mobile phone.

That said, my socially conscious friends and I bought into consumerism, played our role in corporate culture, far more than we were likely to admit. Even our activism was a consumer act. We wore the ‘right’ buttons (WTO); the ‘right’ t-shirts (I Am Not A Target Market). Now we tweet. At least that’s free and requires no uniform.

Epistemologically, everything was relative. In academia, postmodernism informed the zeitgeist which meant that nothing was more important than anything else. Everything was subjective. There was no ‘Truth’, which meant there was no morality (not really), which meant there were no just causes, which didn’t matter anyway because there weren’t any causes to fight for. Years later, the singer Beck said that he wrote protest songs in the nineties for a generation who didn’t have anything to protest about.

But, of course, there were things to be upset about. There were causes. I was mostly just too lazy and self-involved to be aware of them or meaningfully respond: sweatshops, inequality, racism, de-industrialisation, environmental degradation, Rwanda, Bosnia – these were all real issues, which I too easily dismissed or miscalculated as the last gasps of empires that hadn’t yet realised this was a New World Order; globalization demanded necessary sacrifices. This was the End of History and my generation had front-row seats.

Google ‘1990s nostalgia’ and most of what you get back are endless lists and clips: 48 Reasons ’90s Kids Had the Best Childhood; 39 Awesome Things Only 90s Kids Will Remember. Nearly all of it is an indiscriminate collection of stuff people owned back then: oversized cell phones, inflatable furniture and hacky sacks, VHS tapes and a cover box of Windows 95. To the oracles at BuzzFeed, nineties nostalgia feeds on a diet of consumer goods.

The editors of those lists miss the point. The popularity of nineties fan sites tell us more about the nature of nostalgia than it does about the decade itself.

There is nothing particularly special about the nineties. In the timeline of world history, that decade will register as a blip of relative peace and prosperity (depending on who you ask). What is remarkable about that period for Gen Xers is that we were young then. We can look back and feel comforted by how quaint things seemed or how harmless the technology looked. After all, the Tamagotchi digital pet was far from an apocalyptic vision of artificial intelligence. The seam between virtual and actual reality was clear. But I suspect it is the votive act of remembering itself that brings most people on their nineties quests.

People’s ability to create and latch on to screen memories is a uniquely human characteristic. My parents feel nostalgic about the sixties and seventies, despite that period’s open misogyny and Cold War tensions. I expect dew-eyed remembrances also grip ninety-year-olds who lived through World War II, not because they particularly miss the life they had or the world that was, but because they miss the time they had ahead of them. I expect nostalgia is part of the human experience of growing old and marking increased distances between memories. Like Proust, we are all in search of lost time and increasingly aware of how little we have left.

I now look back on my privileged and prolonged adolescence and wonder if my own children will eventually remember the 2020s with the same tenderness I regard the 1990s. My guess is they will. Despite everything.

For all living generations, I expect time feels more precious now.

That, too, is a gift.

This piece was published in Overland

Scanning Darkly

For the first time in months, I decided not to use the self checkout machine at the supermarket today. The clerk looked lonely.  

I loaded my groceries onto the conveyor belt and stood there as he scanned and bagged them. I felt strange, just watching him; felt bad for him, as if I was asking too much. A once weekly ritual now seemed like a luxury, an imposed request, like asking someone to help me lift something heavy.

The clerk scanned my corn chips, my Toblerone, played indifferent witness to my guilty pleasures. I suddenly felt vulnerable.  

He asked me how my day had been, what I’d been up to and what I might do later. I didn’t remember these teller/customer conversations typically going further than the perfunctory, ‘how you going?’ so I wondered if his gregariousness was personal or commercial. Had he been instructed to be chatty, to differentiate his human services from the computer scanner three aisles over?

“Oh, not much,” I said. “Bit of cooking, you know.” I gestured to the rest of the groceries he was bagging. He nodded.

I imagined I would soon exchange these same banalities with the scanner.

– Yannick

Doom Porn

I’m on a train and tapping out a draft of this on my phone. I’m in a ‘quiet’ carriage, surrounded by loud talkers replaying last-night’s footy grand final, toddlers wandering up and down the aisle, and a teenager endlessly testing out new ring tones on his mobile phone. My battery is about to die. I may follow it.

I was reading stories about climate change. Doom porn, mostly, and doomsday prepper advice. Hope comes in many forms.

My wife’s taken the kids away for a week of the school holidays. I had to work, so I stayed behind. I note that, without my wife’s moderating influence, it doesn’t take me long to return to my solo state of heightened anxiety and tendency towards excess. I’ve been alone three hours. By the end of the week, the family may return to find me hiding behind the couch in full camouflage, holding a can of beans and a crossbow.

I looked up rural real-estate for sale in north-western Canada and came upon some acreage near a town called Kitimat, which looks like the kind of place mentioned in a story about the opioid crisis.

I text my sister who says she was watching a program about how fish in waters that have too much CO2 can change their behaviour, their instincts are thrown off, so to speak. She says it sounds like autism in fish. We’re clearly in synch.

I read Catherine Ingram’s Facing Extinction. She says our children may well be the last generation of humanity and these climate action movements, while touching, are too late, and that most of us live perennially locked in the denial stage of grief for a species that is already terminal. The author says the number of things that will kill the children before 2100 (heat, starvation, thirst, murder, suicide) are so likely that it’s improbable to expect otherwise.

Another article, by Michael Mobbs, likens living in a city now as analogous to Jews living in Germany as Hitler took over. Staying or going could make the difference between life and death. Worryingly, Mobbs, a sustainability expert, is going. I’m on my way back to Melbourne. Kitimat beckons.

When I lived in Vancouver, my friends used to laugh at me for having three days’ worth of food and water stored in earthquake provisions. Now it’s recommended practice. What is recommended practice for this?

Pretty much any doomsday prepper will advise you to get the hell out of a city, long before it’s necessary. Not ‘head for the hills,’ exactly, but be part of an existing community in a sparsely populated area where you are growing and storing food.

I return to Ingram’s article, which instructs us to live for now, in a present, mindful, connected way, unmoved by visions of wealth or personal success, or ego or legacy, to live the way people who are dying often report they wish they’d always lived.

I’m going to stop writing now and look out the window.

 – Yannick

Company Man

A very senior university executive sat next to me at a meeting, looked around as if to make sure there hadn’t been some mistake in the seating arrangements, and said to me, “what area do you work in?”

“I teach writing,” I said.

“Oh, so you’re in the arts and humanities,” he said, eyeing off an empty chair next to someone more promising. “You guys do all the soft stuff.” He turned back and looked me straight in the face. “I’m from maths, engineering and science. We do all the hard stuff.”

I took a breath. “Yes,” I said. “You design the pill that lets people live five years longer. We help them spend that time with joy, interest and meaning.”

But I didn’t say that. That’s what I wanted to say. The words had even arranged themselves in that order in my mind when the senior executive finished speaking. I felt like Voltaire. But I didn’t have the courage to spit those words out.

What I actually said was, “Yes, but think what an imposing trivia team we’d make.”

Pathetic. Grovelling.

The words of a company man.

– Yannick

French War Memorial's Message to Australians

“Beware,” said my friend. “If you go to Oradour it will change you.”

On June 10, 1944, German soldiers of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division entered the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, murdered everyone and destroyed the town. The Nazis massacred 642 men, women and children there. Just seven people escaped.

When General De Gaulle visited Oradour-sur-Glane in 1945 he said, “a site such as this remains communal to everyone, something we can all recognize as our common misfortune, our common will and common hope.” The French government designated the site a permanent national memorial in 1946. The town’s ruins have since been left untouched and open to the public.

I knew Oradour would be confronting, but I had to go. As a French citizen and as an historian, it was rite of passage. As a human being it was my duty to absorb the lessons of our past, to perform a votive act of solidarity.

I arrived at the site early. It was mid-winter and there was no one else around. Fog shrouded the broken buildings which stretched deep into the mist. Beads of condensation gathered on the telephone lines, suspended and glistening like dew in a spider’s web.

An old man shuffled past. He was the only person I saw all morning. He appeared to me as if he were a ghost carrying a pink umbrella, a haunting emblem of what might have been. No one had a chance to grow old here.

The death toll in this village was small when compared to, say, Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen, though I see no moral value in comparing such things. The familiarity of this setting is part of what makes it confronting. My mind does not first need to grapple with the impossible horror of a death camp. Here, the context of mass murder is uncomfortably familiar. Oradour is a town. It is a ruin, but it is still a town, in many ways indistinguishable from the dozens of French villages I passed through on my way here. The signs on the shopfronts are still legible: bureau de poste, café, coiffeur.

The killing was sudden, people destroyed in the act of living, leaving their cars on the road, their pots on the stove and their bicycles leaning against walls. All that was theirs now crumbles in flakes of rust that collect on the frozen ground.

Signs point out where the murders were committed. They happened in barns and houses, in a bakery, in a church. These plaques beseech visitors to remember what happened here, in the hope that willing ourselves to recall atrocities like this one will help us to prevent them from ever happening again.

I feel a distressing impulse to detach myself from this experience and a simultaneous urge to share it.

I remind myself the perpetrators of this slaughter perceived it not as a crime, but as the logical extension of a hateful worldview, weaponised into a lethal political and military agenda. Dissociative violence. It happens too often.

Reactionary, authoritarian populism is on the rise across the west, including Australia. Surely every far-right activist, every would-be neo-Nazi should visit this place and take a moment here to stare at the photographs of murdered children and reflect on whether they still endorse their stated political beliefs. Surely they too can here glimpse the common hope and misfortune that De Gaulle spoke of? I have to believe they can. They are human after all. But what if they just don’t care?

Yale psychology professor, Paul Bloom, challenges dehumanization as a single explanation for human cruelty. As he recently wrote in the New Yorker, “There has always been something optimistic about the idea that our worst acts of inhumanity are based on confusion. It suggests that we could make the world better simply by having a clearer grasp of reality… the truth may be harder to accept: that our best and our worst tendencies arise precisely from seeing others as human.” For Bloom the truth of our shared capacity for cruelty is complex. “Moral violence,” he writes, “whether reflected in legal sanctions, the killing of enemy soldiers in war, or punishing someone for an ethical transgression, is motivated by the recognition that its victim is a moral agent, someone fully human.” For Bloom, cruelty is sometimes exerted by depriving people of their hope and dignity, the very essence of humanity itself. Humans, he reasons, also use empathy to compound their cruelty.

It is easier to hope that Bloom is wrong. To imagine evil as the domain of psychopaths and sub-human predators, aberrations.

In this way, one can disregard, say, white supremacists as mere monsters with no sense of decency or history. But doing so offers us a false reassurance. What if the neo-Nazi’s we see gathering in greater numbers in suburban Australian street rallies understand well the implications of their Sieg Heil, for the attention it gets them, for the reliable outrage it draws. The swastika is more than just branding, to get a rise; perhaps they use it for what they know it to be, an instrument of torture. Knowledge is power.  

The accepted intelligence on Australian fringe political movements has been that most white nationalism in this country is a function of social and economic disadvantage. In other words, give a skinhead a job and a girlfriend and he’ll probably stop short of being a neo-Nazi. He may still be a racist, but he’ll likely stop pursuing it as a political cause.

I wonder if that wisdom still holds? It’s getting harder to believe it does. The economically-alienated-young-white-man theory of fascism I tend to subscribe to fails to confront the sincerity with which many of these people hold their beliefs. I fear history is created as much by momentum as trajectory. We owe it to humanity to occasionally resist its pull.  

In his essay, Stranger in the Village, James Baldwin wrote that, “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” As a black American writer of the 1950s, Baldwin understood, better than most, the interdependence of history and memory, which are more entangled than we like to admit. History is shaped by our memories. The rest fades. We are prompted to remember, lest we forget. Confronting knowledge can remind us, outrage us and occasionally embolden us to challenge the national imaginary.

My friend was right. I do feel changed from being in this village. I feel more certain that harmony is not the natural state of things, that peace is fragile and not to be taken for granted. We need to work at it. I need to work at it. Every day, even if it only means being a little more patient, a little more generous and a little less complacent about cultural representations that portray an equivalence between actual fascists and those who oppose them. It is a false comparison which conceals the very real stakes for the most vulnerable people in our society.

Oradour-sur-Glane drives me to visit sites like this in Australia, where the sharp edges of history, the ghosts of inflicted pain may yet help stall the primal allure of hatred.

And we do have sites like this in Australia. Some places, like Manus, are of our country not in it. We cannot visit there. Not yet. Others carry names like Appin and King River and Haunted Creek. There are hundreds of Aboriginal massacre sites across this country, too many of which are lost from common knowledge. Researchers at the University of Newcastle assembled an interactive map of colonial massacres to help keep our own atrocities from disappearing further into oblivion. 

Murders in places like Thouringowa and Wave Hill Station are part of the same tragic story of Oradour-sur-Glane. They too are reminders of our common hope and misfortune, and our talent for cruelty.

I promise myself to visit some of these places. As an Australian, I see it as a rite of passage. As a human being, these sites offer a secular pilgrimage, places to step outside of ourselves and confront our human solidarity. We should visit these sites. We ought to remember their names. We should talk about the things that happened there. It is part of our heritage. If we are lucky, memory can change us.

On ANZAC Day, on Remembrance Day, we can also remind ourselves there are wars we remember, wars we ignore and wars we forget. We owe it to our country to remember them all. Our national integrity depends on it. So too does the future of our history.

– Yannick Thoraval

 This essay was originally published in the Australian Financial Review, April 17 2019 

Fish Don’t Count

We just got a dog. My daughter wanted one with increasing certainty; she has been sharpening her debating skills on the subject for the last three years. I had a dog when I was a kid and it seemed unfair to deny my daughter the formative experience of pet ownership (fish, she argued, don’t count). So, my wife and I said yes.

I wanted a rescue dog, something sturdy and older, an animal that had already been house trained. As a measure of how much authority I have in our household, we got a specially-bred, eight-week-old Puggle named Ginger.

The first thing Ginger did as part of our family was throw up in the car on the way home. Repeatedly. With a mixture of concern and admiration I watched my daughter mop up the yellowing ooze with a hand towel that was too small for the job. My son grew tense as the towel neared its maximum absorbency. “I feel so sorry for her,” he whimpered. I’m not sure if he meant Ginger or my daughter. We drove on.

Once home, Ginger perked up. We invited her to explore the house, at least the area we’d left accessible, having cordoned off most of the rooms with baby gates and, as it turns out, poorly conceived plywood barricades which Ginger brushed aside within minutes of her arrival.

Toilet training was paramount so we showed Ginger the yard. Once she’d bitten the leaves off the basil plant, she dug up the goldfish we’d buried in the garden a few months before. My daughter was unfazed by the desecration of these graves, despite the modest ceremonies we’d held there. I guess fish really don’t count.

– Yannick

A Rare Night Out

I’m at the Nils Frahm concert in Melbourne.

The show’s not yet started. I got here early and now watch the audience file in. Most are thirty or forty something – meticulously dishevelled.

Many seats fill with white guys who sit alone. I fit right in.

People snap photos of the sound rig on stage, a labyrinth of new and vintage gear, of crates and wires – it’s steam punk meets electronica.

Nils trots out – unannounced – and sits in front of a child-sized keyboard. He wiggles his fingers and begins to play. The audience falls silent except for the occasional crush of a plastic cup.

It’s more of a concert than a show. There’s not much to see, no laser display, no strobe lights, no inflatable puppets unfurl from the rafters. People listen from their seats. No one stands, or dances, or calls out. It’s unsociable music without being anti-social. Anti-social music is often social. This music is passive and personal, and I’m grateful to share it with the two thousand other people there with me in the dark.

Nils stands. He pirouettes around his command station of pianos, synthesizers and reverb units, pushing buttons and twisting knobs as if solo launching the Apollo moon landing. He’s working up a sweat.

He now plays a dismantled grand piano. His hands, side by side, dance on the keys like Muppet spiders. I'm near enough to hear the clunk of piano hammers return to neutral.

Nils layers his track. The music builds from a single note, suspended indefinitely, to an ocean of sound. Every note imaginable now pulses at once. My brain lights up. My heart thumps to the base. It seems possible, probable, that outside, every light in the world now blinks in unison.

The music gradually reveals a secret.

Whatever it is, the secret disintegrates the moment I'm aware of grasping it, buckles under the weight of my self-awareness. The secret's fractured pieces now dissipate to reveal themselves to someone worthier, someone whose more liquid consciousness can absorb and reassemble whatever Truth the joined pieces disclose. 

I glimpsed only the secret's fragments. Even they were beautiful.

Frahm’s music is the soundtrack of a film made just for me. And I know every person in Hamer Hall feels it’s their movie too. 

People don’t speak much as they leave the theatre. What is there really to say. People disperse into the night, no longer an audience.

I must go out more often.

– Yannick

Cutting

I sometimes spend up to a minute contemplating which angle to half-cut the sandwich I just made.

Now that is luxury.

– Yannick

Are Tennis Fans Better Citizens?

I don’t attend sporting matches. I can't abide the shouting. I’m deeply unsettled by it – the yelling, the cheering, the waving of banners, the manic-depressive cycle of win and loss, the joy and anger of it all. I like sport. It’s the spectacle in the stands I avoid.

Part of what I dislike is the colour-coded solidarity of sports fans, their team jerseys and flags. ‘It’s all theatre,’ they may say, ‘it’s not really us against them.’ Even so, there’s something atavistic about roleplaying a thin, dualistic identity that makes me nervous. Like battle re-enactors, sports fans leave me feeling… strange. A full sports stadium feels like a Stanford Prison Experiment waiting to happen. I don’t hear a crowd jeer. I hear it howl. It’s a muted battle cry that echoes off every suburban cricket pitch and footy oval on the weekend, our arenas of socially acceptable blood-lust-letting.

‘Get over yourself,’ I hear the crowd roar. ‘We’re just letting off steam.’ Could be. Maybe I’m oversensitive, reading too much into it – perhaps I just don’t like crowds. 

But there’s one sport I can and do attend. Tennis. Admittedly, I love the game, the combination of physical and mental endurance that players need to win.

But I also enjoy the crowd. I like that something is required of them too. In tennis, the spectators – even if there are twenty thousand of them – must be quiet between points. It’s part of the game. Tennis demands a level of civility from its audience that is absent from most other sports, save perhaps golf or billiards, hardly stadium fare. Most stadium sports encourage the crowd to offload their accumulated tensions in carnivalesque displays of rapture and insolence. Tennis asks its audience to show restraint, to display measures of focus and self-control (attributes that also make great tennis players).

There's a pleasing symmetry about that, as if tennis encourages sportsmanship on and off the ‘field’ of play. After all, tennis players can hear what people in the stands call out to them.

This dynamic between player and spectator in tennis underlines, generally, the importance of maintaining social decorum. As a civilisation, we are not just watching. We are collectively and individually involved.

My father – at my urging – once took me to a (Canadian) football game. I was eleven. We got seats in the family section, a small area of the stadium put aside for families to enjoy the game at a safe distance from the sport’s more ardent fans. Two drunk guys sat behind us. It didn’t take long for them to settle in to their game faces. Minutes in, they threw peanuts onto the field, yelled obscenities at the referee and relished, in detail, what they’d do to the cheerleaders if they ever got them into a dark room. If this was the family section, I could only imagine what Dantean circle of hell awaited spectators who sat outside of it.

But we were stuck, assigned to seats 14 and 15 ww (or whatever it was) having paid for the privilege of sitting within earshot of those two idiots. That experience can easily be read as a metaphor for broader society, you don’t choose your neighbours etcetera.

There’s something to be explored there. Our experience of ‘the public’ is better when we all remember that our behaviour affects others and that society is not a winner take all proposition. Maybe it’s worth us doing more to champion, reward and admire displays of restraint, of empathy, of social responsibility. Boring, I know, but spreading the glue of civil society appears increasingly urgent and necessary.

Are we better or worse off when we allow ourselves to treat public space as private space? Are tennis fans good citizens?

– Yannick

Running with Minions

People run for different reasons. Some do it for fun, some for fitness, some run on doctor’s orders, to trim down or stay sane. A few people run for money, to earn it through prizes or raise it for charity. They run to win. Me, I’m a plodder. I run to keep my weight down and manage depression. 

Nowhere is this spectrum of runners more visible than at a big charity run. I recently did the 15 km Run for the Kids in Melbourne. An event like that draws out so much from people: what they are, how they respond to the world around them – the long(ish) run is a well understood metaphor for life.

On the day of the event, I self-select into the starting wave behind the strongest, fastest runners but ahead of the people who plan to walk with strollers or are recovering from surgery. We’re packed in tight at the starting gate. I literally rub elbows with the person next to me. These are people just like me, serious enough about the event to run the whole distance, but self-aware enough to accept the race is with ourselves. I know this because no one speaks. We are people for whom a fifteen kilometre run is part meditation and part mediation; we run for a bunch of reasons. 

The gun goes off, releasing the elite runners onto the course. I watch them jockey for position on the big screen TV. I wish them luck. 

Our group shuffles to the starting line and we await our signal.

We begin. Now we too are a wave. I’m in it, somewhere. I pass people. I get passed.  

I run next to the mascot for a while, until my dignity demands I run faster and pass whoever is waddling along in that Minion costume.

I run on, shedding thoughts as I go.

I pass a guy as he turns to his friend and says, “I've never run more than five kilometres before.” He had ten to go. Oh, to be seventeen again, and to know the possibilities.

At nine kilometres, I come up behind an annoyingly chipper girl sidestepping her way up the hill. She's singing, "I'm dancing on two poles."

I debate whether to use the next portaloo. The need passes and I run on.

I glimpse an emaciated old man. His shirt’s off and he’s puffing through his rib cage. His body is littered with tattoos, the home-made kind, more cut in than drawn onto his skin. His knotted grey beard glistens with spit. I think he must be a junkie who’s joined the race from the underpass where he'd been sleeping. That's a little judgemental, I think of myself. I should be more charitable. He stops running as I get up beside him. "FUCK" he yells at no one and spits over the side of the overpass, a great gob of phlegm, that tumbles onto the street below. "I'm never running a race sober again." He walks, picking and scratching at his arms, his hair, as if he were covered in biting ants. "Fuck this. I need shit inside me!"

I keep going and don’t see him again. Everybody runs their own race. 

At eleven kilometres, I begin composing this piece in my head. I try to hold on to ideas, to sentences, to dialogue I overhear. I almost stop so I can write this out on my phone at the side of the road. But I can’t accept the ironic circuitry of stopping the thing that keeps me going, which allows me to write, which keeps me going. I’m in an Escher drawing.

I finish the race. I write this down. And I go on. Because I can. Because I have to. The road is littered with us minions.

Private School: Where Hogwarts Meets the Guggenheim

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I dropped my kids off for a school holiday activity on the campus of an elite Melbourne private school.

I didn't go to private school myself, and my kids don’t go to private school, but I'm not one of those battlers with a grudge whose hard-knocks-public-school experience left them bruised and determined to pull the silver spoon from everyone's mouth. I'm from Canada where most people, rich or poor, probably went to a public school. So I didn't know what to expect when I walked onto the campus of, I’ll call it ‘Shady Acres,’ to retain its anonymity. Ancient trees did line the driveway.

The school was a palace. It had rose gardens and manicured hedges, and little cobblestone pathways that led you past a century's worth of capital improvements: Victorian brick and sandstone gave way to steel and glass, and zinc cladding. It was Hogwarts meets the Guggenheim.

Now this was a high school and it had facilities to rival the best universities in the world. This place didn’t stop at offering computer labs with up-to-date software. This high school had a purpose-built concert hall, a three-story music school, a fully rigged arts performance center and an Olympic size swimming pool. It had libraries (plural), ‘flexible teaching spaces’ hooked up to the national broadband network and a chapel with acres of stained glass. It had synthetic and real grass sporting ovals, both regulation size. To top it off, the campus offered a majestic view of the distant hills, to be contemplated from a hilltop vantage point just above the smoggy haze of the city below, a city the students of this school would one day conquer.

I was conflicted. On the one hand, I thought it obscene that government money gets poured into the coffers of private schools like this one, while many public schools remain under funded and underequipped.

On the other hand, I thought it altogether right that a place of learning should draw so much energy and support. Valuing education offered me no conflict of interest. Students should be nourished and given opportunities to thrive.

On the other hand, I glimpsed the idea behind this place as something more than just providing educational opportunities. This school played its part in supporting an elitist sub-culture. To go here was an investment. To have gone here was an insurance policy, a name, a network to fall back on.

Did this place breed the culture of privilege and entitlement that I occasionally saw in students when they eventually made their way to my university classroom? Was a place like this responsible for some of my students’ expectations that everything would be handed to them, that there was always a right answer to every question and that success in life was assured, no matter what their talent, skill or dedication?

It struck me that a school like this, for all its amenities and history of excellence, had a weak point, an omission. It didn't represent the real world. A world where, in every workplace and every business, from corporations to government departments and not-for-profit organizations, workplace culture has shifted towards doing more with less. A culture of responsiveness where necessity breeds innovation, a culture of competition where deprivation drives a hunger to succeed.

Can those lessons be taught in a place like this where students are given everything that others think they ‘need’ to succeed? Can that culture be experienced in a place where a state of the art facility is built to cater to junior’s every passing whim or hobby-level interest?

Can these students adjust to the real world? Or will their edenic experience of life at an elite private school forever condemn them to feel underwhelmed by what comes next?

I don’t know. You tell me.

– Yannick

Keeper of the Ancient Bowl

My parents have a Cypriot clay bowl that dates from 2000 BC. As family treasures go, it's no big deal. It’s not rare. It's not important or beautiful. It's a slightly misshapen, un-decorated terracotta drinking bowl that was probably used by a family of moderate wealth in antiquity to drink water from.

It's not particularly valuable either. You can purchase older, prettier Greek pottery online for a few hundred dollars. I've seen hundreds of similar bowls in museums all over the world.

But I love that bowl. When I was a kid I used to trace my fingers along the cup’s crooked lip, its rounded bowl dimpled by the fingerprints of whoever made it, the surface pitted and smoothed over by centuries of use, and centuries more of being buried under some pile of rubble outside modern day Nicosia. When the Turks fought the Greeks in the years before my family lived in Cyprus, that bowl had already seen enough of the world. It had survived countless battles and skirmishes as the great empires of history transferred power, the Assyrians, the Byzantine, the Franks, the Ottomans, the British. Maybe the pottery survived because it was so plain, so forgettable. It didn’t have a crack on it.

I love that bowl, partly because of its history, but mostly because it was ours. Mine. Here was I, a suburban kid, moving an ancient artefact around in my hands in the sunken living room of my parents’ house in middle class suburbia. I was in Canada in the 1990s, and keenly aware that the bowl I was holding had not been broken in 4000 years.

Some will say the bowl belongs in a museum where many more people can ponder it, enjoy it for what it is, an historical artefact. I treasure that bowl precisely because it wasn't behind museum glass, because I am its custodian, because I can touch it, and break it, so it is my personal responsibility to keep it safe.

There were transgressions. When I was about ten, I once filled the bowl with milk and cereal – just once – for the thrill of eating out of it, of sharing that experience with antiquity. Kellogg's Corn Flakes and a clay bowl, corporate America and the Hellenic world meeting in my breakfast nook.

I did it because it was risky, because it was forbidden; I did it for the thrill of making the bowl useful again.

I wouldn’t do it again. But I’m glad I did.

– Yannick

Middle Aged Toys

My son got a toy shop voucher for Christmas – a great gift for him, a diplomatic mission for me. He was always going to want something bigger and better than the voucher could afford. There’s something condemning about our culture when a child can leave a toy shop unhappy.

As it turned out, though, he was fine. It was me that wandered into a weird experience, the toys sparking another in a series of middle-aged crises.

My son and I separated shortly after we first walked into the toy shop. I wanted to show him the model planes and boats I used to build when I was a kid. He had no interest in those and ran off to find the latest NinjagoTM and Nexo Knights TM box sets, Lego subcultures I didn't fully understand. What came first, anyway, the toy or the TV show? Or were they released together, a marketing blitzkrieg on 8-10-year-old boys?

I stayed behind to look at toys that don’t get their own commercials. Model rocket kits that you build and paint yourself, and fly with combustible powder engine cartridges that look like little sticks of dynamite. I loved those rockets. Every launch was a neighborhood event, complete with countdown. Sometimes they fizzled on the launch pad. Sometimes they blasted off to what seemed like the edge of earth’s atmosphere, at least to my nine-year old imagination. I lost more than one of those rockets to suburban rooftops when their parachutes failed to open. Preparing for the descent was not on my radar.   

This toy shop was well stocked. I picked up boxes of model airplanes, a Spitfire, a Messerschmitt, complete with decals and rotating propellers, even tiny pilots in accurate uniform. I loved all the detail and remembered how my cheap, glossy paints never gave my own model planes the professional finish I was after. I guess I’d left a few toy stores disappointed too. 

I heard a song through the toy shop’s weak, tinny speakers and worked hard to ignore the tune. It was Kajagoogoo’s ‘Too Shy,’ a song that reminded me of an improbably, intimidatingly beautiful girl who once broke my heart. I didn't want that grown up memory polluting my pure enjoyment of these toys.

I wanted to stay with the boxes of model railway cars and the scenery, the hollowed out plastic mountain tunnel sprayed with synthetic moss, the boxes of little cloud sheep, the half dozen miniature sunbathers waiting to be released from their hermetically sealed plastic dome.

It was in that toy shop that I finally understood the phenomenon of middle-aged dedication to model railways. It was all built on nostalgia, a yearning to manifest a platonic ideal of the world in miniature that had never, could never exist in a world populated by real people, who don’t emerge from a plastic case, designed, knees bent, with no other purpose than to sit on a park bench, or endlessly punch tickets on a railway platform. Models are about making time stand still.

I don’t know what we bought for my son in the toy shop that day. It doesn’t really matter. Not yet.