My mother sometimes gets quite incensed when I refer to myself as a simple peasant (‘un semplice contadino’). As she likes to point out, whilst I am the son and grandson of peasants, I am not one, and have never suffered from the deprivations and hardships which they have.

Indeed, through the expectations and encouragement of my parents, and, to some limited extent, my own exertions in terms of my education and office job, I enjoy the lifestyle and material affluence of the lower middle class, with all its suburban, bourgeois banalities (I doubt any real peasant would talk like this).

As a colleague pointed out fairly recently to me, the value of land in Greater Melbourne, to say nothing of the cost of water, means that growing one’s own fruit and vegetables in a suburban backyard is probably far more expensive than simply buying them from the supermarket.

[There might be a point there – if my house block was valued by the square metre, it would be about $1400 per square metre, and I would want to get quite a handsome yield of home grown produce ($70 worth per square metre per annum) to cover the opportunity cost of NOT subdividing and selling up to some developer hellbent on converting my block into townhouses. But I digress.]

16 years ago, when I took up residence in the 1960s brick veneer dump I now call home, I planted a lot of trees. Some, surprise surprise, were natives. But mostly, I went for fruit trees. Apricots, peaches, and many citrus. There are a rather unsuccessful lemon, a more prolific lime, and four orange trees in my back yard – along with some more recently planted fruit trees in the front (where I finally tore out the ivy that had been slowly strangling some shrubs).

The orange trees are a Mediterranean Sweet, a Washington Navel, a Valencia, and a Blood Orange. For the first time last year, some of the fruit from the Blood Orange (four out of roughly forty) blushed enough that the insides were red. Apparently this type of reddish juice is even more healthy for you than the usual orange juice.

What is interesting is that whilst so few of my fruits from that tree actually turn red, quite a few from the Navel have been doing so, at least partly, but sufficiently as to provide me with blood orange juice when I squeeze those.

Fascinating. I suppose that the bees are to thank for this – they must be fertilising the Navel in part with pollen from the nearby Blood Orange tree.

Here is a snap I took a few months ago of a possum in a tree in my front garden. Until recently they were pretty rare around Avondale Heights, but now they have in the past year suddenly become widespread, and for the first time I have been seeing them regularly on trees in my my front and back yards.

This is a mixed blessing, as they like to feed on my fruit trees and veggie patch.

Half a lifetime or so ago, I was enrolled in a Master of Arts by thesis course, which I eventually abandoned – hence my proud boast of being a post grad dropout. Nietzsche, Hegel and the End of History all seemed so intriguing to me back then.

But this Sunday cartoon strip from Calvin and Hobbes says much better than I could, if I had bothered to persevere with my MA, what the End of History and all our materially affluent suburban first world lives are all about.

October 1 2016 was an awesome day. My brother and I went to see the Western Bulldogs play in the AFL Grand Final. Afterwards, we went to the Victoria Hotel in Footscray to celebrate the awesome victory. This picture is from the Channel 7 news footage the following night, where we were briefly shown. A news crew toured the pubs of Footscray filming the locals celebrating the home town team’s victory.

I am still getting the hang of this blog. Here is a selfie I took in Pisa in 2016, when I visited it on my first and so far only trip to Italy. When I took a wrong turn and took a while longer to get to the Leaning Tower, I had a ‘wow’ moment when I reached an old Roman Wall, turned my head and saw the tower in the distance.

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The prompts from the blog platform suggest that I introduce myself.

In short, I am several things.

Firstly, I am a Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray. I have been describing myself as that for at least the past 15 years or so.

This description might not be totally accurate.

I am probably not as narrow minded as I boast I am.

Whilst I am of Italian ancestry and reasonably fluent in Italian, I probably think more the iconoclastic way that Australians do, having been born and lived in Australia my whole life.

Nor am I particularly observant religiously, although like most people, 1600 years of Christianity being the dominant religion (‘thank you’ Emperor Theodosius) in Western Civilisation does tend to hard wire us in a particular way. (I do like to amuse myself by claiming that the dinosaurs missed the ark and that the world is just over 6000 years old.).

Peasant? Well, my parents are from peasant stock, as probably most Italian migrants in the 1950s were, and I like growing my own tomatoes in the backyard. But I am a lower middle class office worker really, with the luxury of participating in a post industrial economy. I also have a university education, and not in agriculture.

Whilst I am very personally Conservative, both culturally and socially, I am more Liberal than Conservative, and believe in individual rights and liberties and freedom of choice and conscience etc to the point where I can get quite worked up when I hear of proposals to intervene in the lives of people or to curtail our freedoms.

I also don’t live in Footscray, although I was born there (and proud of it), and lived and went to school there during my childhood and adolescence, and the Western Bulldogs (formerly known as the Footscray Football Club) is my AFL team. I do not live too far from Footscray though. I am in Avondale Heights, which is like a north western outpost of Footscray, and previously lived in Maribyrnong. But just like people from Fremantle claim that they are from Fremantle rather than from Perth, real Footscray people claim that they are from Footscray rather than from Melbourne. I suppose, historically, that it has something to do with the fact that there is quite a distance between the eastern boundary of Footscray at the Maribyrnong River, and the centre of Melbourne, and most of that two mile distance was occupied firstly by a swamp and then by a wasteland involving docks, chemical depots (where were you during the Coode Island fire in 1991?) and quarantine grounds….

Secondly, I am a postgrad dropout. That does contradict a lot of what my first description suggests I am, but we all are complex and many layered people. The MA thesis I was planning to write was about Nietzsche, Hegel and the End of History or some such, which is the sort of topic which would have been pretty passe in 1994 when I was interested in doing it. However, life gets in the way – working full time and getting a promotion at work which resulted in me focusing my energies and attention on my job meant that I did not have much left in the tank for a 30,000 word thesis. And whilst I still enjoy reading Nietzsche for his manic and frenetic style, Hegel is really boring.

As for more? I much prefer the writings of Anthony Trollope over Charles Dickens. I still enjoy re-reading my favourite Nevil Shute novels, and I occasionally re-read my copy of JRR Tolkien. I did ditch Game of Thrones about 100 pages into the first book, and don’t regret it at all. I remain very curious as to whether some of the unpublished novels of JD Salinger from his period of seclusion (I have the general impression he wrote some) will see the light of day during my lifetime, although I loathed Catcher in the Rye whilst finding his short stories fascinating.