I'm old enough to know that I don't have any answers, but that won't stop me talking
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.
I am not exactly an early adopter of technology. About six years ago, a colleague suggested, after I finally got an iPhone, that I should join Google +. Prior to that, I had not been on social media – Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat remain undiscovered countries for me.
Henceforth, for five and a half years, I was on Google +, where I posted such matters of superficial interest as my love of hamburgers and fine red wine, and more seriously, my first ever journey to Italy, which was followed several weeks later by my football team, the Western Bulldogs, triumphantly marching to a miracle AFL premiership (our first since 1954).
Sadly, Google + closed down four months ago, and all my posts from that period are gone. A lot of my fellow ‘plussers’ (as Google+ enthusiasts call themselves) decided to move too MeWe. As did I.
Then… two weeks ago, I upgraded my iPhone, and somehow most of what little I had added to my MeWe page, including communities joined and contacts, mysteriously disappeared.
That, my friends, is a first world problem.
Anywho, the friend who had put me onto Google+ asked me whether I was on any social media of any sort, so as to view photos from my upcoming second trip to Italy. As MeWe does not seem to be worth it, I thought I might try WordPress, so here I am….
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.
Lost For Words!