On my lunchtime walk today, I strolled down Bourke Street and saw this memorial table dedicated to Sisto, the late owner of Pellegrinis, the cafe which is a Melbourne institution.

He was brutally murdered 18 months ago in the city by some deranged wannabe terrorist.

As a sliding door moment, I was in Pellegrinis with one of my friends chatting with Sisto about half an hour before his life was so unfairly stolen. He was a very nice fellow.

Even though Melbourne is a city of five million, everyone still knows everyone else within a couple of degrees of separation, and it seems everyone knew Sisto.

My best friend lives in Melton, a pragmatic but affordable home ownership choice after his marriage breakdown divested him of his previous home.

He does not live there for the lifestyle choice, with the local greyhound racing stadium near the freeway and the live wrestling hosted at the Shire Hall.

But home ownership is an important and intrinsic necessity for most people of our generation in this country (ie Gen X) and being able to afford a home, even in Melton, is better than renting a studio apartment in North Fitzroy (how are all those closed cafes, restaurants and bars working out for you now, smartarse hipster millennials?!).

The other day, he was sending me a What’s App message about living in such a lovely village laden with bogans (I have every right to joke about it, being a Footscray boy first and postgrad dropout second and having kinfolk who have made the title of Village Idiot in North Sunshine hereditary), and when I replied, the auto-correct on my phone changed Melton into Meltdown.

That might work better. We should petition the Melton Shire Council to change the name.

Much as I believe in free market capitalism, I do not believe in being an avaricious a-hole. The following news story has gone viral, about a supermarket manager, John-Paul Drake, who refused to give a refund to some such avaricious a-hole who decided on a not-so-clever get rich quick scheme where he and some cronies decided to buy 5000 rolls of toilet paper and 150 bottles of sanitiser where he subsequently could not get eBay to list his stash for sale:

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/supermarket-bosss-blunt-reply-to-toilet-paper-hoarder-wanting-refund/news-story/985cc7022ce371a71b7d86c3031e2ce5

At a time like this where government is (hopefully only temporarily) imposing unprecedented controls on civil society and the economy due to the pandemic, it is important to reflect on what makes our society – both free market economics and civil society – function.

It functions on trust, civility, and a general sense of decency. For as long as most people behave in a generally decent way (you don’t even have to be kind or generous, just mostly honest and not exceptionally greedy or a-hole like), our society functions well. If more than a few people were to behave in a way which is not generally decent, then the whole community would collapse into a chaotic mess.

Behaviour like this price-gouging would be entrepreneur who sought to corner the toilet paper market and turn a quick profit, and who then asked for a refund when his scheme fell apart, is not the kind of behaviour which engenders trust and civility in society. Nor is it decent. It is the behaviour of an a-hole.

He has been rewarded by the finger from a supermarket manager, and can now hold onto his giant stash of toilet paper. Happily for him, being a giant a-hole means that he probably will go through that 5000 roll stash fairly quickly, so that is a silver lining for him.

As for John-Paul Drake, he really deserves to be Australian of the Year.

Right now, we have the coronavirus pandemic wreaking the most havoc seen in the First World since 1945. Pandemics are not exactly First World Problems. They are what we expect to find in poor countries, ie the Third World (which reminds me, I heard a rumour that Ebola is making a comeback at the moment).

Which is why it is an opportune time to talk about too much choice, in the context of TV programming available to me today.

A very clever but highly dislikable sociology lecturer I studied under over 30 years ago once opined to his class that one of the problems we have in the modern world is too much choice, and that all this choice was not making us any happier.

I think, although as I have not thought too much about his words in the intervening decades (BTW he later wrote a book about nihilism in Western Culture which seemed to me to be a rip off of Nietzsche’s Will To Power), that he used video libraries as an example of where we are festooned with too much choice (the words of the Pet Shop Boys in one of their break through songs would probably have been unfamiliar to him).

And I suppose his words were true. Priggish and self-righteous though they (and he) were. Video libraries could be an overwhelming overload of choices of crap that you could rent and waste a few hours watching. (I did one weekend, when house sitting near a classier video library in Albert Park, treat myself to quite a few classic Bogart films though, which I was very pleased to finally see.)

It’s hard even for my generation to remember what it was like before and in the early days of colour TV (when video recorders were only used in schools to show us Playschool or David Attenbourough nature documentaries). We kept our crappy old Australian made TV (an Astoria) for ten years, and aside from regularly breaking down, it had very bad reception and only got us channels 7 and 9, choosing between which required a set of pliers as the channel selection dial had busted early on. Channels 2 and 0 (precursor to Ten) had signals too weak to easily pick up.

And there was the vertical hold problem – the TV picture kept jumping up and making it unwatchable (there was a vertical hold switch on the back of the set).

Even after we got our colour TV in 1981 which had channel selection buttons and better ability to pick up signals (and no vertical hold issues), the signal from channel 2 was not always strong enough to get a decent picture when trying to watch countdown.

So we had 2 channels in practice, and 4, later 5, in theory. And we tended to be glued to the TV set.

These days, we have data streaming. I have book marked all the major networks except for channel Ten, which is pretty crap most of the time these days, on my iMac. I stopped owning a functional TV set 3 or 4 years ago, and I don’t really miss it. But with either catch up or live streaming online of these free view channels, I have virtually unlimited choice (and unlimited data to use to watch them).

On top of those, right now, I also have Apple TV+, which kept me occupied at Christmas time, and am trialling Amazon Prime, which I have been binge watching since Easter Saturday.

And last year, when one of my close friends was living in my spare room after breaking up with his wife, I had free Netflix for a while!

So you see, an abundance of choice as to what to watch. Too much choice perhaps, and you have to wonder whether it it worth your while investing that much time of what you have assigned on this planet to lie around watching silly shows on TV instead of doing something else, even during a Pandemic.

I have not had a chance today to do any binge TV watching – it took longer than I expected to tidy up my garden a little and plant some lavender, and then place some begonia cuttings in pots for propagation. I think I am happier for having done those than for picking which is the next show on Amazon Prime I might spend a few hours staring at.

Back in January I bought a Venus Fly Trap as a gift for a friend (I make such heartfelt gestures from time to time), and decided that I wanted to find it some food.

So I went looking around my front verandah and garden for some insects or other bugs I could feed to it (I admit, I would like to see a Venus Fly Trap leaf close around it’s prey) and to my chagrin, I could find nothing.

Which got me to thinking that maybe those environmentalists were right, that the Insect Apocalypse is upon us and all those bugs we usually regard as a nuisance when we take their role in the balance of nature for granted have been disappearing at an unhealthy rate.

Since then, I have seen plenty of bugs in my garden, to my relief, and even mosquitoes buzzing around my home at night (thankfully my blood group is not as attractive to getting stung by mozzies).

But I did reflect on this, and how maybe it is time to make my garden more bee friendly. I am not going to go so far as to get a full beehive (I know someone who has though) – I don’t like honey very much. But I asked my mother to grow some lavender cuttings for me from one of the bushes she has in her garden.

Hence this morning, I have just planted four lavender plants in my front garden along the fence line, to form the start of a lavender hedge for my home. That is just the start. I will plant more cuttings and grow those , until my front fence line is fully covered by lavender plants.

It is a little thing, but I don’t like roses, and I want to do my bit for the survival of bees, even if I don’ get to feed them to a Venus Fly Trap.

I’ve never been an Age reader. My father always used to bring the Herald (an evening newspaper) home each night after work, and from the age of nine onward, I got into the habit of buying what was then called the Sun News-Pictorial (a morning newspaper) on the way to school. In 1990, they were merged into the supposedly 24 hour (ie morning and afternoon edition) Herald-Sun, which I believe no longer has an afternoon edition. (Not, aside from Business Editor Terry McCrann and the Garfield comic strip – and a relatively recently resurrected ‘In Black and White’ column – does this newspaper have much in common with the old evening Herald newspaper either, which tended to have deeper journalism than the Sun.)

So I have been reading what is now the Herald-Sun and its predecessor papers for over forty years.

One thing that has never changed is the Easter Saturday headline for the Herald-Sun. Every year, it’s Good Friday appeal for the Royal Childrens’ Hospital sets a new record of money raised.

That is a good thing – even though everyone is shut up at home and people are not rattling tins for the appeal, more money is still being raised by the people of Melbourne for our children’ hospital. Especially this year, when people are closed up at home and things look a lot darker than usual.

But I do lament the predictability and shallowness of the journalism at the Herald-Sun. I doubt that any news publication that I semi-regularly read can be as predictable as it is, except for Money Magazine.

I went for a walk last night around sunset, to get some exercise. Being cooped up in the house all day got a bit dull, particularly as I did not trigger my Amazon Prime trial til this morning (binge watched The Boys most of today).

I walked til the McDonalds in Military Road, which had the drive thru extremely busy, with cars banked up right til the entrance from the street, the busiest I have ever noticed.

I think this was because it being Good Friday, there was nothing else open, and no other reminders of normality in this time of pandemic. So people, seeking a respite from cabin fever, got into their cars and drove to the nearest McDonalds to get some semblance of normality, in the form of comfort food.

For me, normal is eating at least once at the local Thai restaurant each week, with a bottle of decent red wine to accompany the food. That is not possible right now, and I do miss it. I grazed today on a succession of toasted cheese, tomato and onion sandwiches, and on some yoghurt. But I can see how for many people, McDonalds is a tie to the sanity and mundane stability of normal life. Especially as not only has the local fish and chip shop closed for the duration, but also the kebab caravan permanently parked at the service station.

For the duration, I work in the office in Wednesday and Thursday each week. Seeing two separate sets of wine deliveries on my doorstep this evening was a rare treat!

And just in time for Easter!

I have been fascinated by Ancient History since my childhood. As a result, I spent four years as an adult trying to learn Latin at the Centre for Adult Education (even as a fluent Italian speaker, Latin is extremely hard to learn!). I have three feet worth of shelf space dedicated to books on Ancient Carthage, the Punic Wars, and the greatest Carthaginian general, Hannibal (he who took all the elephants over the Alps to invade Italy), against the day I might write a novel about Hannibal (a cherished future project on my to do list since I was 16). And almost the first thing I did when I bought my iMac in December 2018 was to write my own Greek Tragedy Ghosts, emulating the themes espoused in Euripedes, Aesychelus, and Sophocles (and Sartre too – that he wrote Flies in the 1940s showed me that you don’t have to be in Ancient Athens to write like an Ancient Athenian).

Where it all comes from, really, is watching epic theatre on Channel 9 on Sunday afternoons in the mid to late 1970s. Right after World Championship Wrestling from Festival Hall, hosted by Ted Whitten, there would be some sword and sandal movie set in Ancient Rome (mostly) or Greece. Some were myth based, and some were rooted in history (assuming you can call Livy’s writings history). There were heaps of them, made in Italy in the 1960s and dubbed into English.

Given that I am very likely to be spending much time in the coming winter months at home alone streaming movies and TV shows on my iMac, I decided to do a search through the Apple TV app to see what movies of the sword and sandal (aka pepla) genre I might find. I typed in Roger Moore (he did a few before he was Bond), and no luck. Likewise for the main pepla leading man, Steven Reeves. Zero for an actual film (my favourite actually) Amazons of Rome.

This does not look promising. There are more recent examples of this genre I might watch, like Xena Warrior Princess, or Gladiator, or the remake of Clash of the Titans. But these, whilst quite enjoyable, are not a part of my childhood which I would like to take the opportunity to recapture. Over Easter, I think I will sign up to Amazon Prime and see what I can find there (if I can tear myself away from binge watching Hunters and The Boys of course).

Old fashioned sword and sandal might be rather corny, but it was always good fun and entertaining, and the links to the past, whether it is myth or history, are always going to make at least some kid curious about the past and the origins of our civilisation.

Without at least some people having an ongoing interest in the Classics and in our past, where will we go in the future?

As far as the First World goes, this Pandemic is the first major challenge it has faced since the end of the Second World War 75 years ago.

It would have been different, if the Cold War had turned Hot, and Thermonuclear, as I feared in my teenage years, before the Berlin Wall suddenly collapsed in late 1989.

But you look at what we faced in the generation before the Cold War started. The First World War in 1914, the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1919-20, the Great Depression from 1929 until the Second World War broke out in 1939. And if you were in Europe, the period between the wars saw the rise of Fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain (which had an awful civil war to boot), plus the tyrannic excesses of Soviet Russia.

The outbreak of peace in 1945, and the economic prosperity which swept Western Europe, North America, and the rest of the Anglosphere (ie us here in Australia) caused us to live privileged and prosperous lives, with the Cold War as the only shadow of fear.

So, when I reflect on the coronavirus pandemic, I need to think about what my parents (born in Italy in the 1930s) and grandparents have lived through, and remember that it is important to be cautious, but not fearful.

My grandfathers had it far worse. They both fought in the First World War in the Italian army (one was a machine gunner and the other a corporal and POW), and then lived through the fighting around their villages (with their families) in the Second World War, as well as living out their lives in the Cold War. They participated in extreme violence, and then in their middle and old age lived through the threat of extreme and even ultimate (ie nuclear violence). And they lived through the Spanish Flu and the Great Depression, and Fascist Italy.

What we face now is nothing compared to all that.

It is important to self-isolate, and to be cautious, and to avoid behaving recklessly such as to become a victim of the pandemic, or to spread the disease. This is civic duty that everyone needs to take seriously at this time. But it is also important to not be fearful. There are worse things than a pandemic with a disease which has a 5% fatality rate (when you add in the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions) to fear.

At the moment, we have voluntarily and without dissent surrendered many of the liberties that we take for granted normally for the duration of the pandemic – things such as routine economic activity, the right to social contact, the right to peaceful protest. These matters effectively add up to a suspension of the economy and civil society. Such suspensions cannot endure for long without resulting in a significant decline in the long term freedoms of the people.

We need our small businesses, our political parties, our sporting clubs (especially the small ones who play on the local oval and do not appear on TV), our cultural groups and associations. These things, the micro-economy and civil society, are what keep us fed and free. These need to be immediately restored as soon as the pandemic is over.

Otherwise, we will just remain prisoners in our homes, like the denizens (I do not consider them to be citizens) of the Peoples Republic of China.