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Authors: Charlie Pickering
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poodle breeder and crunched his way back up the gravel driveway. He slammed the door of his car and sped off down the road.
Foolishly, my father thought he had won the war. Surely nothing could top this elaborate poodle-based double-cross? There was the minor collateral damage of one poodle breeder who was slightly miffed not to make a sale, but other than that this was a precision strike which would shock and awe Richard into understanding that Ronald Pickering was a significant foe who was not to be trifled with. Dad declared âMission Accomplishedâ and in what can only be described as a premature celebration of Bushian magnitude, packed up the family for a week away down the coast at Flinders.
On his second four-hour drive of the day, Richard began planning the next phase of the campaign.
2 The Mr T Principle: In 1996 my friend Colin and I decided to create an urban myth. To qualify it simply had to be a story of our own unique creation that was told back to us by someone whom we hadnât told it to. The story we fabricated was that Emmanuel Lewis, the diminutive star of the eighties television smash Webster , had died performing a head-spin at a wrap party after they filmed the last episode. We felt the story was believable as it was set in the mid-eighties when breakdancing had taken the nationâs playgrounds by storm and parents were beside themselves about the potential dangers of head-based rotation. However, in practice we found that people were slow to accept the story as fact. After some deliberation we added to the story that at the time of the incident, Mr T had called the ambulance. By combining two eccentric eighties stars with seemingly inexplicable careers, the tale was instantly better received and was eventually told back to me four years later by a member of the Perth street press. For the purposes of clarity, I should add that Emmanuel Lewis is very much alive and well. In 1997 he graduated from Clark Atlanta University and since then has made numerous on-screen appearances, most notably a cameo in 2007âs Kicking It Old Skool , a movie about a breakdancer who comes out of a twenty-year coma after suffering a head injury while breakdancing. I am not making this up. And if you donât believe me, just ask Mr T.
6
Flinders
N estled on the coast an hour out of Melbourne, the holiday house at Flinders represents probably my parentsâ biggest regret. That is really something. These are people who, in the eighties, invested in the artificial insemination of designer goatsâa scheme that went so badly that eventually the cost of one of these goats actually dipped below the cost of a .303 bullet to put the goat out of its misery. As a result, there are some very expensive feral goats currently calling the Dandenong Ranges home.
Bought in the early seventies and known to us only as Flinders, the house had a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom that looked dated the moment it was built and an open plan living/dining/kitchen/craft/rumpus room. The TV didnât always work but it looked good sitting on top of a sideboard that housed puzzles, board games, totem-tennis bats, Uno cards and the numerous other things that the law requires you to keep at all holiday houses without exception. Flinders was proudly un-fancy and smelled like the beach twenty-four hours a day. It was the perfect example of a seaside shack, back when such things still existed. Today if you drive through Flinders there are very few shacks. They have been replaced with âsummer housesâ which look remarkably like mansions and give you the feeling that you will never truly understand what it is like to be rich.
The reason Flinders is a regret is that my parents wished they had never sold it at the end of the 80s. Well, that and seagrass matting.
Some time in my early infancy, the floor of the holiday house was dilapidated, but to polish the floorboards would have been costly and there was a chance they
Foolishly, my father thought he had won the war. Surely nothing could top this elaborate poodle-based double-cross? There was the minor collateral damage of one poodle breeder who was slightly miffed not to make a sale, but other than that this was a precision strike which would shock and awe Richard into understanding that Ronald Pickering was a significant foe who was not to be trifled with. Dad declared âMission Accomplishedâ and in what can only be described as a premature celebration of Bushian magnitude, packed up the family for a week away down the coast at Flinders.
On his second four-hour drive of the day, Richard began planning the next phase of the campaign.
2 The Mr T Principle: In 1996 my friend Colin and I decided to create an urban myth. To qualify it simply had to be a story of our own unique creation that was told back to us by someone whom we hadnât told it to. The story we fabricated was that Emmanuel Lewis, the diminutive star of the eighties television smash Webster , had died performing a head-spin at a wrap party after they filmed the last episode. We felt the story was believable as it was set in the mid-eighties when breakdancing had taken the nationâs playgrounds by storm and parents were beside themselves about the potential dangers of head-based rotation. However, in practice we found that people were slow to accept the story as fact. After some deliberation we added to the story that at the time of the incident, Mr T had called the ambulance. By combining two eccentric eighties stars with seemingly inexplicable careers, the tale was instantly better received and was eventually told back to me four years later by a member of the Perth street press. For the purposes of clarity, I should add that Emmanuel Lewis is very much alive and well. In 1997 he graduated from Clark Atlanta University and since then has made numerous on-screen appearances, most notably a cameo in 2007âs Kicking It Old Skool , a movie about a breakdancer who comes out of a twenty-year coma after suffering a head injury while breakdancing. I am not making this up. And if you donât believe me, just ask Mr T.
6
Flinders
N estled on the coast an hour out of Melbourne, the holiday house at Flinders represents probably my parentsâ biggest regret. That is really something. These are people who, in the eighties, invested in the artificial insemination of designer goatsâa scheme that went so badly that eventually the cost of one of these goats actually dipped below the cost of a .303 bullet to put the goat out of its misery. As a result, there are some very expensive feral goats currently calling the Dandenong Ranges home.
Bought in the early seventies and known to us only as Flinders, the house had a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom that looked dated the moment it was built and an open plan living/dining/kitchen/craft/rumpus room. The TV didnât always work but it looked good sitting on top of a sideboard that housed puzzles, board games, totem-tennis bats, Uno cards and the numerous other things that the law requires you to keep at all holiday houses without exception. Flinders was proudly un-fancy and smelled like the beach twenty-four hours a day. It was the perfect example of a seaside shack, back when such things still existed. Today if you drive through Flinders there are very few shacks. They have been replaced with âsummer housesâ which look remarkably like mansions and give you the feeling that you will never truly understand what it is like to be rich.
The reason Flinders is a regret is that my parents wished they had never sold it at the end of the 80s. Well, that and seagrass matting.
Some time in my early infancy, the floor of the holiday house was dilapidated, but to polish the floorboards would have been costly and there was a chance they
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