The Inspector-General of Misconception (4 page)

The bane of eating outdoors in the Australian summer is that the last part of a drink very quickly changes into
dregs
.

Especially beer. We asked a friend who became a millionaire what it was that becoming a millionaire meant to his life. He replied without hesitation, ‘I will never again drink the last third of any can of beer.'

‘In fact,' he said, ‘I intend to drink only the first few mouthfuls of any can of beer and throw the rest away.' He argued that it is only the first few mouthfuls of a can of beer that tasted right.

Even those of us who may not be worth quite a million secretly do not drink the last of any can of beer. We know that the beer dies. The last third of a glass of chilled wine suffers but wine is not as dependent on temperature to be palatable.

This attachment to chilled wine and beer in Australia
has made us very dependent upon ice. We feel uneasy, somehow
incomplete
, as party-goers and picnickers if we don't have a few of those plastic bags of ice pieces (virtually unknown in Europe) which wishfully we call ‘party' ice and which we dump in baths.

We like to have copious ice about us – the bags which promise a ‘party'.

But ice has an aesthetic dimension.

Ice (especially that which is at around minus twenty, and at the peak of its hardness) has a special
clunk
and
clink
against glass or metal.

Along with the sound of good glass clinked against glass, the sound of the ice in the ice bucket, is a part solution to wine's single deficiency as a sensory experience – wine has no sound. Wine pleasures the nose, the eye and the mouth (and, of course, the nervous system generally) but can give little to the ear. There is some music to a
well-pulled
wine cork – that single steady note as the cork slides from the neck of the bottle, a long chirp – and there is the pop of the champagne cork.

Legend has it that the tradition of clinking glasses was introduced to pleasure the ear, to complete the sensory experiences of wine.

Ice brings music to the experience of a drink.

Remember the lines about the noises of ice from
The Ancient Mariner
?

We once walked in the glacier country of the South Island of New Zealand, and throughout the day and night there were dramatic noises from the ice falling from mountainsides or moving. The ice in the glacier country growled and roared, but it did not howl.

Ice has subtle sounds as well. We were able to chip off a piece of million-year-old ice from a glacier for our campsite cocktail-hour bourbon.

The glacier ice was cold enough (although not minus twenty) and gave the right clink and clunk, and what's more – it
crackled
.

This crackling of the ice is from the release of air trapped in the ice. In this case, million-year-old air.

We fancy that we might have drunk some dinosaur spore and may grow a tail. It would be a price worth paying.

To be savoured, attention must be paid to the ice at its time of arrival. The rattle of the ice in the ice bucket and the beads of condensation on the silvered bucket gives us a satisfaction of its own, together, of course, with the sight of the ice bucket with the neck of the wine bottle bobbing and waving.

Chef Tony Bilson taught us some things about ice. Especially this: that the most effective way to chill a bottle of wine is not in a bucket solid with ice but in a bucket of water with ice in it.

We once thought that the restaurant was saving on ice by mixing it with water and that it would not chill the wine as well as a bucket full of ice.

But water, as Chef Bilson points out, is a perfect conductor of cold and will conduct it from the ice to the bottle (in point of scientific fact, in eight minutes the bottle will cool down by about ten degrees).

Finally, ice has other things to tell us.

In the high mountains, an incautious move or even a sudden loud exclamation can start an avalanche. In our experience, it's the same with social drinking. The ice of the bucket contains the echoes of our primeval past.

Within the clink of that ice in the bucket reverberates the potential avalanche of life. And the taking of drinks.

There is a distinctive bond which is understood to exist between those who take alcoholic drinks together which had to do with sharing a heightened openness, and, maybe, the willingness to take a small, subtle, undefined risk in life.

Admonition:
Always acknowledge the ice when it arrives, and heed within its murmuring, the tremor of the avalanche.

Our appointment as Inspector-General of Misconception came, we suppose, as no surprise.

Naturally, we denied at the time, modestly, that we were being head-hunted but as always in these matters, there was a little dance going on behind the scenes. And a song as well.

We had Our People suggest to journalists that ‘family considerations' made us reluctant to go into public life again – that is, we enjoyed not having a family or anything to do with a family.

Admittedly, in public life to have a family is very desirable so that when the heat is turned up, one can resign from public life for ‘family considerations'. We intend to get one for this reason.

Incidentally, we were surprised to read recently that ‘moving residence' is placed high on the list of stressful activities. We, on the other hand, find that living in a
domestic situation for too long seems very stressful for many people.

There were also rumblings in the media about our wearing of too many hats. No one seemed to care about us wearing too many furs or feather boas.

Our Number Crunchers also worried about the public perception that we keep ourself as distant from the real world as possible and were not ‘listening'.

However, Our People were able to turn this around and presented us as a ‘very private person', one who shunned the spotlight (although there are very good reasons why we keep our life private).

Our Spin Doctors also turned the accusation of ‘not listening' into a positive by describing us as being more inclined to the solitary, studious and meditative life.

Then the media rumoured that we were in the Prime Minister's pocket.

We wish to say this now, and to state it categorically, and to make it perfectly clear, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that we have never been in the Prime Minister's pocket.

However, at the same time, we rush to say that we do not discriminate against people whose preferences are in this direction and at the end of the day we may in fact rather like being in someone's pocket ourselves.

We were once found in someone's pocket in an evil
bar Americaine
in Paris and it was very nice, but that was after Someone Had Slipped Something Into Our Drink.

We admit this now, following the example of Lenny
Bruce who, at the beginning of his US presidential campaign, made it quite clear that he had sex with dogs.

As with Lenny Bruce, we do not wish to have the Paris Being-In-Someone's-Pocket-Incident flung in our face at some later stage. Our newly appointed team at the Office of Misconception will look at the Great Australian Errors of Common Wisdom.

We will also examine Fallacies Propagated by the Intelligentsia and we want to clear out of public discussion and conversation Some Things Which We Suspect We Have Heard Once Too Often and Gravely Doubt.

Let us begin our investigations of Australian misconceptions at the very soul of the nation, Gallipoli.

As recently as this month, Our Office heard a Larrikin explaining to two Japanese businessmen that Australians commemorate Anzac Day because Australians glorify ‘defeat'.

The Japanese businessmen were told that it says something about the Australian Character that we alone as a nation would celebrate a defeat.

Our Office was worried that these Japanese businessmen could have been spies and would report this back to their military.

But we have been hearing this misrepresentation about Gallipoli all our life.

The question facing the Inquiry is why are so many of the Australian intelligentsia tickled by this notion that Anzac Day is about defeat?

The intelligentsia like this notion perhaps as an
example of some sort of admirable Australian counter-patriotism? Or that those who celebrate it are being amusingly tricked by the historical truth?

We suspected that it had to do with a much-vaunted thing called Larrikinism in the Australian character which exists strongly in the minds of intellectuals and nowhere else and whose elegant spokesman is Brian Matthews.

We subpoenaed a Larrikin to give evidence and after hunting high and low we dragged one into the Inquiry chambers.

He was shockingly casual in his approach, in stark comparison to our own judicial demeanour and costuming. Our newly designed robes are gorgeously lined in red satin with an ermine trim.

We ‘swept' into the Investigation Chamber led by a youth dressed as a pixie trumpeting The Call to Attention.

We were tempted to describe the behaviour and dress of the Larrikin as disrespectful but our minders suggest that we give him the benefit of the doubt and called it ‘casual', which is also, we're told, a much-vaunted part of the Australian demeanour.

He said that, for the record, he saw himself more as a Yobbo than a Larrikin.

Let it be so noted.

Having refused to stand or take the oath, he said, in reply to our close questioning, that the Larrikin Spirit refused to acknowledge, and resisted, all authority.

We probed by asking whether in its most destructive form, the Larrikin Spirit refuses to acknowledge the social conventions by which fragile society arranges itself
for the protection of citizens and their rights one to the other?

‘Bloody oath,' said the witness. We took this to be a form of a ‘street avouching' and had it recorded as an affirmative.

We asked him if he would categorise the claim that by commemorating Gallipoli we are glorifying defeat, as an example of the much-vaunted Larrikin Spirit?

The Larrikin witness winked at his mates in the gallery, and while rolling a cigarette, said that ‘in his bloody view, the Larrikin Spirit was to never give a stuff'.

Cupping his hands, he lit what he called ‘his fag', and drew on it deeply, coughing in a very tubercular way.

We suggested from the bench, construction of which had finished only that day, with the varnish not yet dry, we suggested that this Larrikin Spirit was the capacity to laugh in the face of the existential pain? Or to put it another way, at its most negative and destructive, was a refusal to cry when crying is appropriate?

Did it rather tend to be against sissies, for instance?

The Larrikin witness's friends waiting in the public gallery guffawed.

They were heard repeating the word ‘sissies' among themselves which seemed, each time, to recharge their humorous reaction to the word. Despite our calls for order they went on repeating it to each other, until there was no laughter left in them, except for an occasional dying snort.

We could see that the Larrikin Spirit did not have much time for sissy talk.

The Larrikin witness then opened a can of Foster's lager thrown to him from the public gallery, the spray from which reached the bench and our ermine trimmed robe. A minder who rushed to wipe away the beer whispered to us that we should let the beer spray matter pass without comment. We refrained from telling the Larrikin that a thrown can of beer will always froth.

Addressing the Larrikin, we suggested that this Larrikin Attitude would also fail to mourn when mourning is appropriate, nor to admit defeat nor to admit error.

‘Always.'

‘For instance, do you believe that someone who had a lifetime of studying and tasting wine might know a superior wine from an inferior wine?'

‘A load of bullshit.'

‘Do you think it is not true that a person could have discernment, or is it that even if discernment were possible it would be a waste of time and not worthy of consideration?'

‘Both.'

We returned to the notion that Australians glorify defeat on Anzac Day which has within it the suggestion that Australians react in the opposite way to all other people on the planet.

‘Bloody oath.'

Very patiently we began by pointing out to the Larrikin that the notion of defeat is historically wrong.

Although the Gallipoli campaign was a failure in the sense that the attacking troops did not take their objective, this was not what was being commemorated.

Australian troops were not defeated as such, in that they did not surrender, nor were they forced off the peninsula.

What was being commemorated, we pointed out, was a grim feat of arms which showed rather extraordinary bravery, resilience and military innovation by the Australian troops.

Furthermore, it may come as a surprise, we said to the Larrikin and his mates in the public gallery, that many nations pretend to relish their so-called ‘defeats'.

We called as a witness, writer Alan Moorehead, who told the Inquiry, ‘Both the English and the Germans adore defeats. Dunkirk will remain in the English mind … the siege of Stalingrad will rally future generations of Germans …'

In the US, the Alamo is a celebrated defeat but really a celebration of what is seen as a splendid performance in battle by a handful of men. So is the Battle of Little Bighorn where Custer was wiped out by the Indians (seen at the time as the ‘enemy').

The Serbs celebrate each year at the Field of Kosovo (or did until recent events made the journey rather risky) the defeat of the Serbs by the Turks (about one million attended the 600th anniversary in 1998).

We also pointed out that the Canadian intelligentsia like to believe that they as a nation also glorify their ‘defeats'.

We put it to you, we said leaning forward and again sticking to the newly varnished bench, ‘This manoeuvre – of glorifying defeat – is a way of “winning”; that is, by
rising above winning and losing. Those who do not care about winning can therefore never be “beaten”.'

Curiously, we added, it could well be that the failure to ‘win' at Gallipoli, after all these years, still hurts in the Australian memory, and the ‘glorifying of defeat' manoeuvre is a way of covering over that hurt. And so with other countries.

We were pleased that the Larrikin witness shuffled uncomfortably at this information but as usual there was, without any pause for thought, a chorus of ‘bullshit' from those in the public gallery.

We had the court cleared.

Ruling:
Gallipoli and Anzac Day does not say anything about defeat or about the distinctiveness of the Australian national character when faced with perceived ‘defeat'.

Sorry.

It does say a lot about military ingenuity and gallantry.