Pubished The Advocate, March 24, 2006


I HAVE a mate Bill, who is 79, and he has a mate Harry, who is 80. Bill is an author and Harry is an ex-teacher. I know Bill personally and have a sense of Harry through Bill’s anecdotes about him. Boyhood friends, Bill migrated to Australia 38 years ago – he describes himself now as a 'Possie', for Pom-Aussie – while Harry remained in England. Though apart for all those years, Bill says their lives have run in parallel. In countless coincidences, starting with their mothers sharing the same birth date, the same kinds of events and mishaps have occurred to them through the years. I will not bother listing all the overlaps but the parallels include the deaths of their wives in the same year and developing similar health ailments. Both have failing eyesight. In other respects they have their differences. Bill is an old socialist and Harry is a Liberal Democrat. Bill talks at 1000km/minute in a language that is long-winded and old-fashioned. When his eyes went on him and he lost his driver’s licence, Bill spoke of 'adopting a bicycle as my primary means of locomotion'. His everyday language is peppered with such roundabouts. Harry deliberately mispronounces certain words. For ‘schedule’ he says ‘schoodle’, so Bill tells me. Harry apparently uses so many of these invented words that he speaks in an idiosyncratic language of his own. Together the old pals recently spent a month walking through France and Italy, following in the steps of Hilaire Belloc, as you do when you are elderly and have poor eyesight. Belloc walked the route in the 1890s musing on the meaning of life and produced a book of the trip, and Bill wanted to do the same. Bill being Bill, before they left, 'every possibility had to be taken into proper account to guard against untoward eventualities,' including the possibility that he and Harry might find they did not get on after spending so long apart. They reached a pact: Should one do or say anything that irritated the other, rather than leave it to fester and spoil the trip, he should make the complaint known. This possibly is also the secret of a long marriage. Or not. After a couple of days on the road, Bill noticed Harry was unusually quiet and asked if anything was wrong? Harry said he was offended by Bill’s casual use of the F-word. Bill, a former merchant navy seaman and journo, agreed not to utter the effing word for the rest of the trip. At the end of a hot and tiring day, they were struggling to reach an Italian village atop a steep cliff. Exhausted and exasperated at not finding their hotel around each new corner and the one after that – in the fading light with not a good eye between them – they began to worry if they were in the wrong village. Onwards and upwards they struggled and after climbing 452 steps – yes, of course Bill counted them – Harry turned to him. 'Bill.' 'Harry?' 'Permission granted.'