Diary

Wednesday, 8th July 2009

I think the difference between me and, say, a koala is that I will eat almost anything.

Of course, I am not the first home gardener, and I will not be the last. What matters, rather, is the remarkably rewarding experience even a small-scale backyard effort at farming food provides. We saved money, and there is a whole movement on to promote this sort of, some say conservative, others progressive, ‘greenhorn’ experience (search YouTube for ‘greenhorns trailer’). I can now say, too, that while we do not always fill up on our homegrown produce, the food tastes great, and we are generally satisfied.

Being unsatisfied, however, seems to be part of everything else. Visiting a retired friend in his new digs in Sydney, a man who just months ago was one of the most powerful in the nation, I wasted time looking him up on the nameplate next door. Surely, I thought, he would be holed up in this wood-panelled, gothic building. No. It turned out he was in the modernist place adjoining, above a pathology clinic where obese ladies waited, and across from an obesity clinic. We had tea, which he brewed, and occasionally he paused to answer the telephone. He could only afford a secretary three days a week, he said at last. I wish I had told him about backyard farming.