‘Richmond’s not in his room!’ – Why I love the IT Crowd

I have spent too many hours of my life splayed out on the loungeroom floor watching reruns of a sitcom that has grabbed and colonised my heart, soul and mind. It’s called The IT Crowd and its controlled ridiculousness is keeping me semi-sane during what is proving to be a rather grim winter. This British comedy is written by the unfairly talented Graham Linehan, cowriter of Black Books.

Moss, Roy and Jen constitute the IT department of the chaotic but phenomenally successful Reynholm industries (that the company’s raison d’etre is never specified is a running joke of the show; one fan has set up a spoof company website). Stuck in the basement of the Reynholm tower, they’re cut off from the other workers in their airy offices who enjoy stunning views of London.

Moss and Roy are hapless nerds while Jen, their ‘relationship manager’, sees herself as their bridge to the normal world but too often is marginalised herself by association.

Then one day Jen spies a red door in the basement, and, as in Bluebeard’s castle, is only more determined to discover what’s behind it when Roy and Moss warn her that all hell will break lose if she does. After the initial terror of encountering Richmond, an unearthly Goth, she settles down for a chat with this sweet-tempered former high-flyer who has been banished to the server room because of his infatuation with the extreme metal band Cradle of Filth.

‘Richmond’s out of his room, he’s not in his room, he’s supposed to be in his room, why isn’t he in his room?’ laments Moss, his love of routine and predictability thwarted, the British pronunciation of ‘room’, less drawn out and therefore more formal sounding than the Australian version, adding weight to his objection.

Moss, despite Graham Linehan’s denials, is clearly meant to be an Aspergers person. Not only does he thrive on routine but he’s technically proficient to the point of genius, socially clumsy, and entirely oblivious to nuance and Machiavellian craftiness; he even walks and holds his head in a way that is awkwardly wooden.

However, given that Moss’s most salient and attractive quality is his childlike need for certainty, it’s highly unlikely that the character represents an accurate portrayal of an Aspergers person. Yet it’s his childlike aspects that contribute most to his appeal, and perhaps they defuse the kind of criticism you might expect such a portrayal to evoke in the Aspergers community – I couldn’t find any criticisms of the character on the web, although that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.

Another reason for the seeming lack of criticism could be that while we often laugh at Moss’s unintentional funniness, we also chortle at his deliberate jokes, delivered in a self-consciously signature style that fans find adorable.

And generally speaking, Moss suffers far less than the other characters; he’s naturally cheerful, wins out against bullies (as in the first episode in the third series) and is canny enough to take advantage of amorous and financial opportunities (returning the attentions of a glamorous female psychiatrist in the first series; unintentionally stealing money from thieves in the third).

Like many women and probably men, I’m in love with Moss. This is partly because the actor who plays him, Richard Ayoade, is a very attractive man, with large brown eyes, a snub nose, finely sculpted cheekbones and a cherubic mouth; because Moss’s social incapacities make him so vulnerable that he arouses maternal instincts; because his character, and the actor who plays him, are both extremely funny (and sometimes their personalities seem to blend together, as if Ayoade and Moss were in league with each other); and because the childlike aspects of his nature promise a temporary, atavistic return to childhood.

Yet I couldn’t find much on the web about Ayoade himself, except for a frustratingly short beginning of an interview that seemed to suggest that he himself might suffer from Aspergers (he mentions a difficulty in maintaining eye contact with the interviewer while speaking) but in fact appears to show him in a very understated role in a satire.

Ayoade seems to lack his own website, despite what is clearly a huge fan base out there. The Channel 4 website for the show has clips and episodes that are frustratingly off-limits to Australians (I can understand the downloadable episodes being off-limits, but why the clips, including an interview with the actress who plays Jen?).

Despite Moss’s vulnerabilities he succeeds in life (if not romantically), partly because Jen and Roy both protect him from himself; he needs them to smooth the social waters, just as his esoteric knowledge is vital to the company but also occasionally useful to Jen and Roy.

Soon after Jen joins the IT department Roy and Moss are about to complain to the CEO, Denholm Reynholm, that Jen has no understanding of IT and they don’t want her as their manager. But as the three sit opposite Denholm while he barks to his inferiors on the phone, his conversation makes clear that he will ruthlessly sack any team who can’t ‘work as a team’ (gloriously sending up company-speak).

Knowing that all three of them will be sacked if the complaint goes ahead, Roy and Jen have to drag Moss away, assuring Denholm they had only come to the office to install voice activation on his computer. Moss can’t understand why he and Roy aren’t going through with the complaint; he just hasn’t been able to transfer the meaning of Reynholm’s phone conversation to his own situation. But later, in the second series, Moss demonstrates the usefulness of his peculiar genius; he’s able to tell by smelling it that the creepy new boss of Reynholm Industries, Douglas Reynholm (Denholm's son), has put Rohypnol in Jen’s tea.

Prisoners of gender

Aspergers is associated with maleness, but Moss isn’t the only one burdened because he’s male; all three main characters are ‘prisoners of gender’. They are extreme in their habitation of gender roles and they all suffer for it.

Roy is a standard nerd who tries hard to succeed romantically (a cause for much of the comedy) but always fails. The harder he tries the more ludicrous he appears; in one episode in the first series, with carefully pomaded hair and an oversized retro jacket, he attempts to proposition a girl while oblivious to the fact that a dollop of shit or chocolate (it’s deliberately never made quite clear which) is sitting in the centre of his forehead.

Jen is female in a way that is ludicrously stereotypical. When suffering from the monthly arrival of ‘Aunt Irma’ the cure lies in a girls’ night in, with Roy and Moss playing at being her faux girlfriends, all three dressed in terry towelling robes and watching predictable old chick flicks like Beaches and Steel Magnolias.

This should be offensive but largely isn’t because Jen’s workmates are equally stuck in their extreme masculinity. In fact, there’s only one moment when I was truly offended by the show’s portrayal of her.

It’s in the episode in which Jen becomes obsessed with a pair of red high-heeled shoes that are three sizes too small for her. While in this state of obsession she becomes incoherent. When asked for an idea about combating stress by the hyperactive Denholm, she responds ‘What? Shoes …’. But, back in the basement, while she’s mumbling about the shoes, when Roy calls her a ‘crazy bitch’ in an affectionate, condescending tone as he walks her into her office, it’s too much for this feminist to stomach. And the stereotype of women being obsessed with shoes is overwrought.

Return to childhood

Yet the whole show is overwrought, regularly venturing into surreal territory, making it difficult to be offended by the stereotyping. It’s basically a child’s world where the everyday and the magical are seamless parts of a whole, and where reality is often viewed as a series of extremes.

It’s a world of play, the unknown and the novel, girded by the iron certainties that children cling to because they are still so ignorant of its machinations, but also bounded by the terror that lurks when Roy and Moss enter social situations they aren’t equipped to deal with, and when Jen enters emotional situations in relationships that always seem to end badly.

This is why Moss is so vital to the show and why he is in some ways its central character; he’s a child who hasn’t grown up. His literal view of the world, his inability to understand nuance and sarcasm, in some ways reflect the child’s brain. Watching the show is an invitation to re-enter childhood.

And this is why Richmond is also an attractive character. Gentle and softly spoken, if a trifle melancholy, he adds to the fantastical nature of the show. Yet there is something very traditionally British about him; the way he speaks to Jen at his first appearance, not to mention his 19th-century costuming, has something of the period hero, as if Mr Rochester had blended with Bertha Mason to create not the madwoman in the attic but the sane gentleman in the basement; even his name has a 19th-century flavour.

As a social phobe I can’t help identifying with Richmond, stuck in the IT server room, not even the basement proper but a room off it, a secret room with a forbidding red door. Once out of his room, Richmond is ‘allowed’ to flutter freely around the basement in the first and second series but he never makes it back upstairs, although in the first series Jen tries valiantly to persuade Denholm to have him back.

A continuing obsession

I regret that this little world that Graham Linehan has created lives only in his head and those of his fans. I can’t bear that these characters do not actually exist, especially Moss and Richmond, although on some level I believe that they do. I'm hungry for information about the actors who portray them because that is a way of refusing to believe they aren’t real; the last thing I want is to see them in other shows playing different characters.

And for good or ill, I’ve watched each episode of the first and second series so many times on DVD that I now have the funniest sections on standby in my head; I’m liable to start smiling to myself for no reason as I ‘play’ one back, which has both advantages and disadvantages. (The third series has aired on the ABC and Australian fans now await the fourth, which is currently being aired in Britain on Channel 4.)

I don't have the DVD of the third series, but recently I realised I could watch repeats of whole episodes on Youtube. Yet watching the show on my PC doesn’t do it for me at all; it’s not just the poor quality of the footage but the fact that I don’t associate sitting at my desk with leisure. I love the whole DVD experience of sinking against cushions and losing myself in three indulgent hours of comedy paradise.

However, having now seen the first and second series in full, I think the content of the third series, which I originally watched on telly, isn’t quite as good, and it’s not just the Youtube factor that’s making me feel that way. The show’s becoming more like Seinfeld by the minute; Seinfeld is not surprisingly one of Linehan’s inspirations, and worth imitating, but the particular magic of character-based dialogue needs to be preserved.

Just one tiny example: when Jen and Richmond have their first conversation, Richmond says of Roy and Moss ‘I don’t know their names’. In the context this line is simply brilliant, illustrating how cut off Richmond is from the world and yet how self-chosen is his exile; Roy and Moss are no more than functionaries who form part of the background of the catastrophe he finds himself in. Why this is so funny is difficult to pin down, but it has a lot to do with the rarefied worldview of this underrated and now sadly lost character – somewhere between the second and third series he ‘got scurvy’ and was never seen again.

Tweet

Farewell to the park?

It’s been hard to write a blog entry lately because things have been in such a state of flux. A cold flattened me over Christmas, striking me down as a I struggled to finish editing a stubborn report (I always seem to get colds when I have big editing jobs to finish).

The cold was a convenient excuse for not worrying about not having enough social events to go to over Christmas. But it also presented an existential dilemma: I surveyed the coming year, and the perceived failures of the previous one, through a prism of exhaustion, which in turn made me feel helpless. Even present wrapping was tiring.

The cold took two weeks to work its way through my nasal passages, leaving me worrying about the state of my immune system. Thank God for the internet and Google – I’ve decided that the reason I get two colds a year is not because of lowered immunity but simply my plethora of nieces and nephews and our frequent family birthday celebrations (an excuse for seeing less of my family in 2010?).

A particular situation that’s been in my face for the last couple of weeks is still very much unresolved. For the moment I’m no longer walking Jordan, a mainly cocker spaniel who belongs to my elder sister, Andrea, and her husband Richard. I’ve been doing this three times a week for the past two years and it’s come to a temporary halt, with the final outcome still unknown.

Richard and I were bound to clash sooner or later. We’re both equally bloody minded. I in my pursuit of animal (Jordan’s) welfare, and he in his determination to look after Jordan in his own way.

Never would I let Richard and Andrea forget that I thought they weren’t treating Jordan properly. Apart from the occasional walk down the street to the shops, or taking the kids to school (normally a drive) they’d virtually stopped taking him for walks, relying entirely on my thrice-weekly trips to the park.

He badly needed a clip and a bath, and had knots of hair on his bum that needed shaving. I’d even offered at one point to come around and bath him – I didn’t get to do that, but my home clipping job was certainly not the best. (Although you’d never know it, Richard is extremely wealthy and could easily afford professional grooming for Jordan, even if only, say, twice a year.)

The thing that I wouldn’t let up on – that I continued to nag them about – was that they wouldn’t bring Jordan to family gatherings at mum and dad’s. If I am perfectly honest about this, my normally kind dad is inexplicably hostile to dogs. A former secondary teacher, he seems to view them as juvenile delinquents so evil they’re beyond saving.

In contrast, my mum, despite her disabling osteoporosis and concern for the domestic environment, is okay with having Jordan around. And my sister Therese and her husband Tony sometimes bring their ridgeback-cross Sarah (also a neglected dog, but in a different way to Jordan) to family gatherings. But Andrea and Richard can’t be bothered taking him in the car with them, even at those times he’d have a playmate in Sarah to keep him out of mischief.

So every time I’d turn up at mum and dad’s to find Richard and Andrea in the kitchen and Sarah in the backyard slobbering contentedly, knowing that Jordan was stuck behind his wooden fence half a kilometre away, I’d call them on it. ‘Where’s Jordan?’ I’d ask. Each time, they dug their heels in even further. Recently, Richard had been fixing me with a rather malevolent stare he’s perfected and saying in a crisp tone: ‘I’ll look after Jordan. He’s ours. He’s not your problem’.

I’ve clashed with Richard a lot in recent years. It took me many years to realise he wasn’t the brother-in-law from heaven I’d originally thought he was. He’s a charming man with a sly, subtle sense of humour and excellent social skills, and the extended family think he’s great. But he can also be a bully – he’s been dominating Andrea for years – and I heard a story recently about him that shocked me.

On the day of the recent byelection in our electorate, Andrea was working and hadn’t voted in advance, so risked getting a $20 fine. Apparently Richard and Andrea asked one of my younger sisters, Therese, to fraudulently vote on Andrea’s behalf. Therese refused, and Richard tried to make her feel guilty. ‘We’d do the same for you if you asked’, he said. Therese was furious at him for trying to manipulate her into breaking the law, but she didn’t give in.

On Christmas Day, the predictable happened and Jordan wasn’t brought to the celebrations. I made my usual protests and Richard got predictably annoyed. But the next day when I rang to arrange the usual Monday walk, he answered the phone, and said in the same annoyed tone that he’d look after Jordan while he was on holidays.

At that point I think I realised what I was up against, and I stopped fighting. My arrangement with Jordan’s family has been based on the false assumption that I and they share enough common beliefs to maintain the regular contact that is inevitable when you walk someone else’s dog. But we don’t, and my differences with my family don't start with Richard -- they’re as old as the hills, and the basis of the majority of my problems. How did I think I could skate over them so easily?

I considered at that point that perhaps it was time to give up walking Jordan. Truth to tell, I needed some kind of break. In the last two years, seeing the reality of Jordan’s life up close and feeling helpless to improve it had led to periodic depressions characterised by a deep sense of sadness.

And my whole park venture seemed to be coming to a close anyway. Jordan was a skinny, shivery, smell-crazy puppy when I decided to start walking him regularly. This arrangement would be partly for Jordan’s benefit and partly for mine, to help me deal with my social anxiety.

It seemed to be working okay, despite the occasional social disaster. But increasingly there were periods when I’d be convinced that a quiet park meant people were staying away because of me. I know this is distorted thinking – a friend of mine, who has a lot of knowledge about anxious and depressed thought patterns, shouted down the idea and called it totally whacky. But I think my paranoia was based on a deeper truth – that I didn’t really fit in with the wealthy milieu of many of those who frequented the park, despite the fact that they were ‘dog people’, and mostly friendly.

Also, a couple of people who were my anchors and as addicted to the park as I was had had their elderly, statesman-like dogs die in the last year, and although I still saw them sometimes, their visits to the park were much less frequent.

At the moment, the future of my relationship with Jordan is still an open question. Perhaps I’ll be able to come to some arrangement with Andrea and Richard, and perhaps I won’t – time will tell. If I don’t, then it will probably be better if I don’t see Jordan at all, because I won’t want to be reminded of my abandonment of him.

Tweet

Buying less, caring more: towards a sustainable, non-growth economy

Woke up early this morning with a blog entry clamouring to leave my brain and get onto the page.

There are two different knotty issues that I’ve been thinking about a bit lately and wanted to place side by side because I think they could illuminate each other. I’m not trying to solve these problems so much as simply start to look at them in tandem. Before I do that I want to warn that I’m just as much a part of the problems as anyone. In fact, it’s my own inconsistencies that lead me to contemplate these issues – the gap between my ideals and how I live my life!

So here goes.

Buddhists tell us that all living creatures want to be happy and enjoy the world. Yet our fast-paced capitalist society treats the earth, as well as human and non-human animals, as resources that need to be productive or at least managed. The effect of this is that we all overlook just how much care and nurturing the earth and its creatures need. In a sense, the whole set-up in many Western cultures requires us to do this if we are to function ‘properly’.

I suppose I’m talking a bit about sustainability here, but with a living creature component.

In his popular blog Rocky and Gawenda, former editor of The Age newspaper Michael Gawenda writes about the effects that his tiny, mischievous dog has had on his life. Since Gawenda’s retirement from full-time journalism Rocky has become his close companion: every morning they rise at dawn and go for a long walk along St Kilda beach.

But Gawenda still has many work obligations, and in an article in The Age a few months ago he wrote of his reluctance to acknowledge the depths of despair that his regular abandonment of Rocky produced in his beloved mutt. He feared that one extended absence had led to an estrangement so great that Rocky would never fully recover the depth of trust and affection he had once displayed towards his master.

In the article, Gawenda reluctantly grappled with just how delicate the emotional make-up of a non-human creature such as Rocky might be, and how much such a creature might require in care and attention.

When we start to be willing to look at a situation like that, the needs of the world can seem too overwhelming. In fact, it is nothing more than an invitation to put living beings before gain – an invitation that the world constantly tries to draw us away from.

Michael Leunig is a Melbourne cartoonist, illustrator and artist turned writer. In his regular pieces for the Age, Leunig contemplates life from the slow lane. Living in the bush, he is alive to its nuances, and documents with great honesty the rhythms of his own emotional life as he relates to an increasingly dysfunctional wider world.

Leunig is far from perfect either: his failure to see the sufferings of women denied agency and power in the world, as well as his inexplicable hostility towards Australia’s embattled intellectuals, not to mention thought itself, are baffling.

In 1995 he produced one of his most controversial cartoons, ‘Thoughts of a baby lying in a child care centre’. A tiny newborn lies in a crib at a child care centre. The child is in despair because it believes that its mother has abandoned it, and it then turns that despair in on itself, deciding that it must be unworthy. Feminists were furious.

No doubt one reason for this cartoon being controversial is that Leunig was pointing out an unpleasant truth: our society does not really want to think about the complexity of the needs of a single child, and instead puts the work ethic and the dollar first.

But what I think made feminists angry was the assumption that only one half of society was responsible for this grave failure to care: women. For one short moment, Leunig was able to contemplate the giant need and great loneliness of a single child; but it was too painful for him. Rather than remain in uncertainty, and invite the ‘negative capability’ that Keats suggests and that he himself claims to be comfortable with, he simply reached for a convenient scapegoat. If he could blame women for the problem, he no longer had to deal with its full implications.

Jeff Kennett was the conservative premier of Victoria from 1992 until 1999. Gung-ho, aggressive and revengeful after many years in opposition, and having inherited a huge debt from the outgoing Labor government, he seemed to take great joy in shutting down hundreds of government schools, carrying out mass sackings of public servants, and privatising the electricity industry (which caused massive job loss).

But since retiring from politics, Kennett has changed. A former chairman of beyondblue, an organisation that publicises depression and assists sufferers, he now regrets his failure to consider the social effects of electricity privatisation. This infamous right wing warrior made the following admission in The Age of 12 December:

It’s very easy to change the natural order of life but it comes with a huge social and economic cost. If I was in office ever again and implementing change as I did in the past … I would make sure that I had a lot of education in place … I would try better to understand the impact of change.

Although many people see the categories of right and left as outdated and meaningless, I don’t agree. It’s been said that what distinguishes them is the left’s willingness to actually consider the effects of political and economic decisions on the ground, for individuals, communities and particular groups, to look at the micro as well as the macro. Through his involvement with beyondblue, Kennett has learned to do this and is a wiser human being as a result.

So – what’s the other issue I wanted to look at? I know this post is getting long, so I’ll try and keep what is an infinitely complex topic outrageously short.

The journal New Scientist had a great collection of articles in its 18 October 2008 issue on why the continued growth model of economic development simply wasn’t possible any more. It’s not a matter of ideology – the earth can’t sustain continued growth any longer because its resources are finite, and they’re fast running out. Rapidly rising population is a large part of the problem.

In his contribution, Tim Jackson looks at the sustainability–growth issue in terms of the need to reduce carbon emissions. He warns that if we factor economic growth (which itself seems to require increasing population) into the equation, ‘the idea that technological ingenuity can save us from climate disaster looks a whole lot more challenging’.

Jackson goes on to calculate how low in carbon emissions our economies would have to be by 2050 if we a) want to stabilise greenhouse levels in the atmosphere at ‘a reasonably safe 450 parts per million’ and b) factor in projected population increases, continued economic growth and the need to eradicate extreme poverty. He demonstrates that to achieve such a stabilisation, ‘the carbon content of economic output must be reduced to just 2 per cent of the best currently achieved anywhere in the European Union’. It would, in other words, necessitate more or less ‘complete decarbonisation of every last dollar’ – a well-nigh impossible task.

But if economic growth is the problem, adopting a different model would represent a change of gargantuan proportions. How is it to be done without causing widespread suffering? In fact, reducing growth in a chaotic fashion already has increased poverty and death – In March 2009 it was estimated that the recent global financial crisis would lead to the deaths of an additional 200,000 to 400 000 children.

Any discussion on changing our economic system to one that doesn’t rely on growth must look at how we can reduce consumption without increasing unemployment and causing widespread hardship.

What would a sustainable society and economy look like? Because goods would be built for the long term, maintenance and repair would become major industries.

There would be major government investment in services that have been sorely neglected for years such as public transport and social housing, as well as huge investment in renewable energy. But let’s not forget that, worthwhile as these investments are, they will still rely on the world’s natural resources to be farmed and dug from the ground (eg iron ore).

The need to care more, which I’ve identified in the previous section of this blog entry, is perhaps one of the solutions. Caring could be a significant form of employment in a sustainable economy. More teachers in classrooms. More childcare workers in creches. More psychologists and psychiatrists and counsellors in psyche units, community health centres, mental health outreach teams and jails. More nursing staff in aged care centres. More doctors in the western suburbs, new suburbs and rural areas.

But a lower consuming society would also leave more time for its citizens to care for each other, which wouldn’t cost anything, but would save a lot of money.

In the long run, this would lead to a reduction in crime and incarceration. Community bonds would strengthen.

Caring for the earth, through environmental employment projects and community vegetable gardens, could also increase.

I’m not an economist and can’t even begin to discuss here what the nuts and bolts of a non-growth economy would be, how it would actually sustain itself, pay its workers and feed its population. My point is that we need to start discussing what such an economy would look like and how we could move towards it. And perhaps the fact that the world demands so much care and attention – so much more than we can currently give it – is one reminder that something needs to change.

Tweet

On the loneliness of dogs

It’s almost two years since I started walking my sister’s cocker spaniel, Jordan, three days a week. Predictably for someone with social anxiety, we stick to a rigid routine – 11.30 to about 12.15 Monday, Wednesday and Friday (going at other times, and encountering an unpredictable mix of people, would be traumatic, although very occasionally I do a Saturday instead).

I’ve mentioned before in this blog some of the ways Jordan has changed and helped me, not least by simply being a companion to take to the park. And he’s a great distraction when I’m chatting to someone – if an awkward social moment arises, he’s liable to do a pooh, sending me scrabbling for my trusty plastic bag.

But being Jordan’s friend is not without its own problems. Least of all the sadness I feel at his closed-in, often miserable little life.

I’ve complained in this blog previously about how little his family care about his emotional welfare, all too happily piling into the car without him and zooming off to some child- and in many cases dog-friendly destination. He’s left pining for hours on the front porch or, if the weather’s good, barking desperately at innocent strangers as they walk past. The family is too lazy to train him so when they have guests they simply tie up the poor little bugger.

It would be easy to query why my sister and her family, obviously not dog people, have a dog at all, and why they keep it, having discovered the effort involved. Wouldn’t it be better to relinquish it humanely, for example by placing the dog with a rehoming program, or trying to find a new owner among friends or family? But I think the answer isn’t that difficult.

For a start, that so many non-dog people do indeed have dogs illustrates just what joiners we humans are. Non-dog people who get dogs do so because other people, often their friends, have dogs. And because they are non-dog people in the first place, once they have the dog and have begun to neglect it, they don’t really care much about the effects of their neglect on the dog.

It’s therefore logical for them to keep it languishing, just as one holds onto an expensive designer dress one has bought on sale and never wears. (Of course I know that many people do abandon their dogs in cruel ways and this represents another level of callousness altogether.)

I’m being a bit unfair. There’s often, as in the case of Jordan’s owners, a great deal of affection for the dog. My nieces love Jordan, and he gets cuddles and inside-time at night, as well as some inside-time during the day when my sister’s not working, at home for a while and not too busy.

But it’s a selfish affection. Apart from the narrow obligations of providing food, a place to sleep and basic veterinary care, neither my sister nor my brother-in-law feels, or fosters in the children, a sense of responsibility towards Jordan. My nieces are never made to feed or play with him, for example. An opportunity to teach the children about reciprocal love is wasted: the dog gives love, and the family benefits from that love, but they’re not particularly interested in how their own lives and love could benefit the dog. This kind of love for a pet is ultimately narcissistic.

I see that narcissism in myself sometimes. I’m gratified by how much Jordan loves and needs me, by his refusal to judge me for coming by just three times a week, taking him to the park for a frolic and then effectively abandoning him to his loneliness. Truth is, I’ve had to learn to be callous to keep going on in my limited role. And often when my bucket of concern threatens to overflow to every chained-up, filthy mutt, every overweight, underloved pooch, every dog I see staring out with a mixture of gloom and wretched hope from behind a suburban front gate, I must empty it out for my own sanity.

But I’m not trying to make out I’m a saintlier person than my sister; perhaps I’m just more self-aware. Although I’m a dog person, I know myself too well to take on a pet full time.

I also know that, paradoxically, it is easy for me to spend time with a dog, whereas it’s more of an effort for non-dog people like my sister. Truth is, I could sometimes spend hours patting, comforting and playing Fetch with dogs. It’s so easy to make a connection with them: to see in their pining, eager eyes the simple language of need and love. And it’s not hard to make a dog happy, to answer that need, even if momentarily – all you have to do is scratch it under the chin, stroke its neck and tell it what a sweet and good boy or girl it is. Humans are so much more complex (although perhaps I am made momentarily happy by giving love to a dog).

Recently I wrote a letter to my sister detailing my concerns about Jordan. I was trying to make her understand that incorporating Jordan into her life (including giving the children some responsibility for him) was better than seeing him as a separate duty that she would get to when other priorities had been dealt with, and would actually help her and the family as a whole. All it would take to include Jordan in the family to a greater extent, I urged, was a little bit of planning.

It went down like a firecracker during a monsoon. In fact, there was no response to the letter at all until I broached the subject. This was when I went to pick up Jordan for his walk on the last day of the school holidays. He’d been playing with my nieces outside, but now they were off somewhere fun, and he’d be home alone as soon as the walk was over. We all stood in the backyard, Jordan already on the leash. My sister did not want to talk about the letter, except to say ‘please don’t do things like that’.

‘He’s clinically depressed!’ I yelled as she walked towards the car.

‘Aren’t we all’, she replied.

Dogs are a wonderful resource that our local communities could benefit from in ways that also assisted the dogs themselves. We don’t need more dogs, in fact we probably need fewer, but we should make better use of existing dogs. This is not simply being dog-centric: I think we’d become a more caring society as a whole. Just as retired people can do countless good in the community, lonely dogs could be utilised for many purposes.

So how could we improve the situations for dogs, and make things easier for their busy owners? Below are some suggestions for drastically reducing the amount of bored, unhappy, unhealthy dogs in our community (some a bit outlandish, I admit).

Some suggestions for a dog-friendly world
It should be much harder to own a dog than it is at present. In a screening process as is used in adoption, you should have to prove your suitability, that of your home, and that you are able to spend a certain percentage of time with the dog. If not able to spend enough time at home, prospective owners should have to guarantee the regular use of dog-minding or pet-walking services and prove they had the money to spend on such dog services.

To compensate for the difficulty of dog ownership, dogs could be seen as community assets, and moves made to share them among the community. A non-profit service could be established to link people who like dogs (including older people) but don’t want or can’t afford their own with people who can’t walk their dogs due to age, illness, disability or busyness. These would not simply be casual walkers but would have the opportunity to establish a relationship with the dog, eg playing with and walking it several times a week. For example, disadvantaged families without a parent at home during the day, such as single parents, could form a relationship with a dog that they took out on weekends.

Puppy farms should be banned and pet shops not allowed to sell animals.

All dog breeders should need to have a licence and their premises be subject to regular inspections.

A free service for new owners, rather like the maternal and child health nurse but ideally made up of volunteers, could be established. These trained volunteers would pay a once-off visit to the home to help the family adjust to the puppy or dog by offering expert advice and guidance. They would check that sleeping arrangements and diet were suitable for the size and breed of the dog, and offer advice and help with issues such as house training.

Governments could fund the use of dogs (and other pets) as therapy in prisons and aged care homes, with these institutions having their own in-house pets where possible.

I know some of these suggestions are a bit 'out there', but it's time to think outside the off-leash area of the park! The dog walking and day care industries would flourish if there were tougher rules about leaving dogs alone for hours, the dogs themselves would be happier, and so would the humans who love them.

Tweet

Attention!

Attend!
Pay attention!
Are you paying attention?

It seems that attention is what's missing in this society. But how important is it?

Lately a few things I've been hearing and observing have made me think about this scarce commodity, so hard to come by in our rushed, atomised, money-obsessed world.

But what does it mean? And why have I suddenly become fixated on it?

In the last few years, a few books relating to this idea have been published in Australia. A young Australian philosopher, Damon Young, wrote Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, about the prevalence of distraction in the modern world, ruefully admitting his addiction to his Blackberry even while on holiday. And Hugh Mackay wrote Why Don't People Listen?, a well-received book in which he urged readers to start really listening to others.

Both of these books' topics are related to attention. Distraction is attention's obvious opposite. Listening is impossible to do properly if you're not attending to someone. But attention has wider scope than listening. It's a focus on someone or something, sometimes an intense focus. Why does it matter?

I regularly take my sister's little cocker spaniel, Jordan, to the park for a romp. When we get back to his place, I usually play Fetch with him for a little while. Occasionally we play Fetch at the park but he's usually too distracted by his all-consuming sense of smell to keep focused on the game. With such succulent, wafting scents everywhere, it's almost impossible to get him to follow the track of the ball (Fetch!) let alone bring it to me (Come!) and drop it at my feet (Give!)

What I have noticed, though, is that he performs much better when I focus on him. When I look at him and am very aware of what I intend him to do, what I want him to do, he seems to sense it. If I'm half-hearted and distracted, so is he.

Attention seems to be to be related to love and bonding. I have a strong bond with Jordan, and when I 'activate' it through my attention, this no doubt helps him to keep focused on me as we play this game.

Children, as we all know, absolutely crave their parents' attention, and will act out mercilessly if they don't get it.

I'm hopelessly intolerant of my friends having their mobile phones on and answering them when I'm socialising with them one-on-one, because for those minutes they're on the phone they've let go of that attentiveness that I'm hungry for.

Journalist Rupert Isaacson is the father of an autistic boy, Rowan. The child was incontinent, constantly having tantrums and unable to relate to others when Isaacson and his wife, psychology professor Kristin Neff, decided to take him on a trip to Mongolia to be healed by shamans (horses were already playing a large role in his progress, so the trip also involved horses).

After the shamanic healings took place, miraculous changes occurred. Rowan became toilet trained, his tantrums virtually ended and he made his first friend. Isaacson wrote a book about the experience, Horse Boy, and a documentary has been made about the journey.

Isaacson can only speculate on what actually caused the changes. But could part of the shamans' powers have come from the intense focus they had on Rowan, and the inner healing powers they were able to summon up, during the healings, partly through that focus?

And could some of the trip's success have come about because Rowan's parents were so intensely focused on him and what they wanted for him, not in a grasping way but in their willingness to drop everything for him? (This is not to suggest, of course, that attention will cure everything, or that parents with disabled children who can't be helped are not giving enough attention.)

Recently a UK journalist, Simon Singh, along with coauthor Edzard Ernst, wrote the book Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial (I think this is too complex an area to have only one opinion on; homeopathics are nothing but water, yet herbs are clearly medicines that we still need to know much more about.)

Naturally Singh was down on homeopathics, and I don't blame him. But when western scientists and science writers such as Singh have discovered that people benefit from homeopathics anyway, I think they too easily dismiss the reasons. There's the placebo effect of course; that's the mind healing itself, which is highly significant and extremely worth exploring.

But it's also acknowledged that sitting down with a naturopath who listens to your problems, asks you questions about all aspects of your life and gives you the time and attention that so many GPs are just too busy to give may also help the healing process.

But, you might well ask, what about animals and children? How could they possibly benefit from homeopathics and get better as some seem to? Of course, the usual maxim applies that many would have got better anyway regardless of treatment. But perhaps the actual dispensing of the homeopathics, with the ritual involved and the attentiveness necessary, has something to do with it?

Too bad that kind of thing can't be measured, and too bad it can't be bottled and marketed and made it into a brand (I guess capitalism tries to do that, but I'm talking about real attention …).

What if all medical students, in addition to having good marks, had to demonstrate qualities such as empathy and compassion? Perhaps this is an essential aspect of healing, not just an add-on?

Attention is perhaps a kind of love, or perhaps love is not the word I'm looking for. I don't mean individualistic love or romantic love but the life force that flows through us. Perhaps when we give something or someone our attention we allow our minds to provide the beginnings of healing. That's one reason why truth and justice commissions are so important after terrible massacres. Sufferers need to be heard by other humans.

And that's why in naturopathic, but also psychotherapeutic, consulting rooms all over the world, people seek out and are willing to pay large sums of money to those who will listen to their stories, mobile phones and pagers turned off and no computer blinking in the background. That's one aspect of therapy I really miss – the quietness of the consulting room, and the sense that someone was giving me their complete, undivided, fully focused attention, even if only for 45 minutes a week.

Tweet

On (Not) Reading the Classics

I’m writing this entry for purely therapeutic reasons. It’s about an ongoing issue that I feel I have no control over, so putting it out into cyberspace might somehow, magically, transform it for me.

It’s about my reading life, which is constantly being blighted by my television life. I want to read the classics. That’s an abstract wish, but when I try to put it into practice my body and mind rebel.

(I know that this whole categorisation is a subject of scholarly dispute – for the purposes of this article, I’ll rather randomly define ‘the classics’ as any work of fiction popular enough to be in a cheap paperback edition at least 30 years after its original publication.)

Apart from those I read at school and uni, I have plodded through quite a few of them over the years (although perhaps sleep walked is a better term: what happened in The Brothers Karamazov, vols 1 and 2, and War and Peace? I couldn’t even give you the barest plot synopsis, except that the former is about addiction, a priest dies at the beginning and the brothers fight [I think] and the latter is about the Napoleonic wars and the fortunes of an upper class family and some soldiers). All those words, and so little recalled.

So what’s the problem, apart from a poor memory? Soon after I start to read a classic text, it gets too dense and I go off to the library and borrow a contemporary novel.

There are many exceptions, particularly Romantic novels filled with overblown emotion. I read Jane Eyre and Crime and Punishment again a few years ago and was amazed at their emotional power. I can happily chomp through George Eliot.

Some Thomas Hardy, a tiny bit of Stendhal (again with not much plot recall), Balzac and Zola are okay, Dickens I like but any work of his takes a long time to get through. When I find a cheap edition of Vanity Fair I’ll get around to that – I already know something of the story of Becky from the miniseries, which helps.

Part of the problem is the cheap editions I tend to buy. The paper is yellow, the type tiny – not a very attractive proposition, especially at night when I do the bulk of my reading.

So what do I want to read or reread?

Currently I’m taking Kafka’s The Trial in small doses. I’ve borrowed a beautifiul hardback edition from the library. It has a nifty little page finder, text in a nice, good-sized font, and thick white paper. But I can only read small chunks at a time. The images are very strong but I’m experiencing too much of the hero’s bewilderment and sense of disorientation for comfort. And of course it’s a translation: however good, a translation is likely to be a bit dry compared with the original.

I have a cheap edition of Byron’s Don Juan and think it will be a sin if I never read this. It’s like wasting someone else’s genius. I have tried fruitlessly to put myself in the position of the typical female reader of the time: this spicy book would have been considered highly risque, liable to send me into paroxysms of passion that would cause me to madly wield my fan and take pinches of snuff. Perhaps if I could view it as a page turner I could race through it?

But of course it’s not as simple as a question of subject position. If I tried to race through works like that I’d be stumbling over the myriad associations that were then familiar but now make no sense. As far as I’m concerned a kind of translation in the form of notes is required for any work written before the twentieth century. And referring to notes slows down the pace, and therefore the fun.

That’s the difference between me and the academic or intellectual: I’m curious about the lives of people in other times but I need someone who has covered the territory to step forward and guide me, making the strange and unfamiliar emotionally comprehensible. I want to feel the common humanity of the writer and the world they’ve created but it doesn’t come easy.

There are so many references that would have been familiar to the book’s intended readers but now require scholars of archaelogical determination to nut out their meanings. And the tone is often so foreign. I admire the researchers because they can see through the superficial differences to the unchanging human concerns of the writer.

I read Dante’s Inferno a few years ago and it was a mammoth task. Again, very few of the strong, compelling images have stayed with me. The ending has though, and I almost gasped at the beautiful irony: the final circle of hell as a place of stasis so utter that it is frozen rather than burning.

But I got stalled by Thoreau’s Walden. Before starting this book I mistakenly thought it would be a cinch because of the subject matter, so akin to contemporary concerns – a protest against excessive materialism. But it soon began to irritate me. One reason was that there were a few lines that I simply could not make sense of – perhaps theythe language just too idiomatic.

The second reason was that, although I don’t consider myself that materialistic, the anti-materialism of the writer was just too strong for me: I wanted to argue with him about some of the advantages of modern life. That he was intent on proving how few mod cons one needs to live a good life was admirable, but his fundamentalist approach was too much. Still, I do want to finish the book.

I have very subtle ways of sabotaging my reading life. My electricity company gave me a free subscription to Marie Claire a while ago so the magazine magically arrives in the letterbox when the going gets difficult. And even buying the local broadsheet once a week – the Saturday issue is pretty crammed – means that I’ve always got old newspapers to catch up on.

There’s some good tele on at the moment and my willingness to sacrifice favourite shows is at an all-time low – I watch an average of two hours a night, sometimes less, sometimes more. And finally, here are my classic reasons for not reading the classics, given with the twelve-step adage in mind that we’re only as sick as our secrets:

The gas heater steals the oxygen from the room and makes me tired.

My brain’s not what it used to be.

I’ll just forget it all anyway so what’s the point?

I’ve read enough of the classics. From now on I’ll just focus on contemporary writing.

I never learned Greek or Latin. There’s no point reading the translations of works in these languages when the original would be so much better.

I’m lonely and tele keeps me company.

There! I’ve waved the magic blog wand, and hope all these excuses dissolve into nothingness.

Better go now. I have to see what awaits poor Joseph K in The Trial.

Tweet

Depraved, deprived, deloused

Life is such a mixture of the routine and mundane, and the quietly revelatory. It's a force that shows me the aspects of its own nature that I need to understand. Every now and then an incident happens which seems to reveal to me something about myself or the world that I needed to know. But the information is not always welcome.

Yesterday, as I do every Wednesday, I took my sister’s golden cocker spaniel Jordan to the nearby Ainslie Park. We ambled along in the mild morning sunshine, Jordan stubbornly halting to read his pee-mails (and leave one or two) on the way.

We soon reached the park oval and after we’d been on it for a while another regular, Sarah, came up with her blue heeler cross, Rufus. He’s a sweet-tempered five-year-old with an obsession for the ball. He occasionally gets annoyed by Jordan’s persistent invitations to play, but this day they bounded around together like old drinking buddies as I watched in delight.

Sarah was polite but distant and, as is my socially phobic wont, I wondered if it was something I’d said or done last time. If I made a remark she responded but in the past she’d been much more open. The conversation just never got off the ground, although at no stage was she rude. I remembered that I’d seen her being cool and distant with someone else and wondered if she was like that with most people. Perhaps she was just preoccupied?

Suddenly Rufus raced across the oval, towards the water tap for dogs near the tennis courts. Jordan bounded after him and I went over to supervise while Sarah stayed on the oval. By this stage the two dogs were sniffing around the wide bushy garden beds that flank the sides of the park. Sarah started calling Rufus. I didn’t even think to grab him; he’s an older, usually obedient dog. Instead I grabbed Jordan’s collar so he wouldn’t lead Rufus further astray.

Sarah kept calling. Suddenly Rufus disappeared behind the tennis courts. There’s a long narrow path overhung with squashed-in trees that runs between the tennis courts and the side fence, and leads to the other end of the park. Sarah followed Rufus down the path and didn’t come back. I assumed they’d both gone home, and took Jordan back to the oval for another short play.

He sat himself down under the shade of a huge oak. I threw the old tennis ball and yelled ‘Fetch!’ He stood and stared for a second and then inexplicably turned and ran back towards the narrow pathway. In seconds he’d disappeared.

It didn’t make sense to me. It should have. He was running after Rufus, following his scent. And Rufus was on his way home, to a flat in the same nearby, busy street that my sister, Jordan’s owner, lives on.

If I’d worked this out much earlier things might have been less, well, hairy.

Instead, I slowly made my way down the narrow path, calling his name, sure he would have been waylaid by a juicy, overwhelming smell. But the air was thin and bleak with absence. By the time I got to the end of the park near the fenced-in play area the undulating lawns were bare of him. I ran around the front part of the park, up the white stony path, yelling his name. Despite the few kids playing on the plastic swings and slides the place felt chilly, empty, deserted.

Then I realised that the impossible had happened – he'd left the park.

Suddenly I was running along the path to the entrance. And then I saw him, trotting along the gravel walkway, across from Ainslie Road, that leads away from the park. He was walking steadily towards Wattle Road. He’d already crossed the quiet Ainslie Rd, still in search of Rufus. He is clueless when it comes to roads and cars. If he got as far as Wattle Road he'd be cactus.

I ran faster, screaming his name, not giving a shit how it looked, crossing Ainslie Rd at a clip. ‘Is it a dog or a kid?’ I heard a workman on a nearby house speculating. I got onto the walkway and screamed at him to come.

And he stopped. Miraculously, he stopped. He stood there, staring at me with that daffy smile on his face, mouth hanging open, his skinny, cute, overly long legs jutting out at not-quite-right angles from his little torso. He had that expression he adopts when he realises he’s gone too far: ‘Oh. How sweet. I guess I’ll humour you – you do sound a bit concerned.’

‘Come here!’ I yelled imperiously. ‘Come!’ And he trotted towards me although I was scowling and bearing down on him. He cowered when I went to put his leash on and I felt so sad for him: I wouldn’t have dreamed of smacking him. But I was furious. He’d scared the hell out of me. I wanted him to know that I was angry, to understand it. ‘Bad dog’, I scolded as I pulled him along. ‘Very bad to run away. I’m very angry’.

When we got to my sister’s place and inside the gate I took his leash off and he looked around and began to run in front of me, ready for me to throw the ball. But there would be no post-walk play today (and of course we’d left the ball at the park). ‘I don’t want to play with you. Bad dog. I’m very angry.’

I eventually stroked his hair and tried to explain to him what he’d done as if he was a kid and could understand, and then closed the front gate behind me. As I drove away he was staring at me through the slats of the fence.

I had mixed feelings. As usual I wanted to save him from the long lonely hours he’d be sitting out till my sister got home. I also wanted him to understand that he’d done something naughty, and suffer a little bit. But his loneliness is an unfair punishment for being alive that he must bear every day anyway. Why should I make him suffer more? And if his most loving aunty is cold to him, where is love to be found?

It would be clear to a tree stump that Jordan badly needs training, and that he’s undersocialised in both the human world and the dog world. I’ve written in this blog before of my concerns for his ‘welfare’ – he’s in a family who aren’t really ‘dog people’ and, as far as I’m concerned, emotionally neglect him. (In the words of one of the delinquents in West Side Story, he’s ‘depraved on account he’s deprived’.)

I don’t think he gets to the park much apart from our walks, certainly not when there’s a lot of dogs around who could knock him into shape and teach him what's what in the dog world. He ran after Rufus because he was starved of doggy energy. And if Jordan was a wild dog he’d be exercising his independence by now -- who could blame him for wanting a bit of freedom, a walk on the wild side?

But a domesticated dog is part of the human world and must, to some extent, put such notions aside. Jordan urgently needs training to know his role in this world, so different from the doggy world, not least for his own safety. Dogs give up the use of some of their instincts to be companions to us and Jordan is no exception. But if we don’t give them a ton of love in return they won’t want to make this sacrifice and won’t know how to even if they’re willing.

And this is where the idea of revelation comes in. No matter how much I plead with my sister, he’s not going to get the training he needs, and I can’t afford to pay for it. We do have a short training session the three times a week I walk him, but he’s not the brains trust and he really needs daily training.

I like to think of myself as Jordan’s mentor, and to believe I’m helping him. And I do help him somewhat just by being there. But I can’t transform his life as I’d like to; he’s going to stay emotionally immature for a long while. We’re both powerless in some areas of our lives, Jordan and I. All I can do is make the most of our time together.

I also need to stop kidding myself that he has any idea of what a park is, or what an oval is. All he knows is that we go to a joyful place of smelly, hairy friends; and that when they leave, it’s lonely.

Photo courtesy of Bigfoto (http://www.bigfoto.com/)

Tweet

Dog days

Three days a week -- Monday, Wednesday and Friday -- rain or shine, wind or hail, I drive the 8 minutes to my sisters' house, pick up her 99 per cent cocker spaniel (1 per cent cute) dog Jordan and walk him to the nearby park, a small park with a fenced play area for children and a large oval where dogs can frolic freely.

I've been carrying out this ritual for about 16 months. It is my self-administered social anxiety therapy. The whole thing, including a short training session when we get back (Jordan is hopeless at training once he gets to the park: too many smells) takes about an hour. Jordan and I hang around the oval, trying not to look needy. When our mutual neediness becomes too evident, I project mine onto him: 'He's cooped up all day -- it's great to get him out' (I am equally cooped up - I work from home and, like Jordan, sometimes don't have enough work to do).

But it's true, it's not 'all about me'. Especially at the beginning, I ached for Jordan, stuck in a family who had no idea what to do with him -- 'What's the point of him?' I often felt like asking them. The poor thing, still only a couple of months old and semi-housetrained, was shoved outside to sleep in a kennel pretty much for good after he poohed on the floor.

My two nieces soon tired of playing with him. 'He doesn't bring the ball back', one of them complained. That's true -- you have to train them to do that!

In those first weeks he spent outside, still a tiny baby, when I visited I would unlatch the gate and call and call. No response. Perhaps my sister had taken him somewhere? And then I would find him in the backyard, curled up on an old canvas deck chair he'd adopted, his chin on his paws, lost in a haze of loneliness and abandonment -- 'clinically depressed' would not have been inaccurate. This would send me into my own fog of sadness and I'd spend the rest of the day worrying about him.

Jordan does spend some time inside at night now (I am assured) but even when my sister's at home during the day he mainly sits in the front yard, waiting for someone to walk past and when they do, barking in a fake-angry way and chasing frantically back and forth behind the fence.

Anyhow, Jordan and I need each other, and my sister and I have learned to manage our mutual incomprehension (I am a dog person; she's not. She has a dog; I don't) on the fairly rare times she's home when I pick up my charge.

But it's not all beer and skittles once we get to the park. Sometimes I have to drag myself there even as I drag Jordan, who would happily spend the hour 'reading his pee-mails', as one astute writer called it, on the garden-flanked gravel walkway that leads to the park. Sometimes when we get to the park entrance I'm tempted to do a sharp right-turn away from it and just keep marching.

But the fact is, Jordan and the other dogs are my cover, my id running free and getting away with it, the best distraction in the world. I don't have to look at the people I'm speaking to for extended periods; I look at their dogs. Conversation is simple: what breed of dog is that? Yes, I can see the kelpie/poodle/labrador strain. What's its name? How old? It's got a lovely coat/smile/personality. And Jordan seems to sense when things are getting a bit strained and often does a runner at strategic moments, dashing to the other end of the park so I have to apologise and try to catch him before he gets onto the road.

It's still not easy and I think now that it never will be. There's always a twinge of panic when I see someone advancing from the other end of the park, their beastie bounding ahead or obediently trotting beside them. Do I know them? Do I know the dog? (Depending on the mood I'm in it's sometimes easier if I don't know them, if I can start from scratch.) Not everyone wants to talk of course; some do walking laps around the oval with their dogs following and scratching in the bushes, and some just walk through the park and keep going.

Sometimes there are lonely days when it's only the two of us on the pale yellow dead grass of the oval, bar a maintenance truck or two. Then Jordan will ignore me in the dizzying world of smells that envelop him until the minute he suddenly comes to, and looks at me as if to say: 'well -- are you going to throw the ball or aren't you?'

And sometimes there are bad days when I walk away cursing myself for something I've said, usually to someone I won't see again for weeks, that seems stupid or inappropriate.

And sometimes there are okay days when we meet a friend and have a chat, and say hello to someone else and their familiar pooch.

And sometimes there are magic days when the trees bow in a gentle wind and dapple the sunlight and a group of us gossip in a circle and the dogs run down the side of the tennis courts like naughty boys, stretch their elegant limbs as they charge around the oval or clutch each other and roll around and around on the grass.

On these days especially I leave with a sense of uplift, but even on boring or bad days I rarely regret going. Many times I leave with a spring in my step and the feeling that I have achieved something, made some small personal progress and given my cheeky little friend a small patch of joy in his dull life.

Photo courtesy of Bigfoto (www.bigfoto.com)

Tweet