Monday, September 23

 It's not often you come across a newspaper article about the Hobart Tip but I was lucky enough to find one this morning. I have fond memories of the Hobart Tip and visited it often when we lived in Hobart.  I remember that it was situated in McRobies Gully. One day, when Mum was visiting us, she asked if she could come with me when I was getting rid of some rubbish and for years afterwards she would tell anyone who was interested that it was the highlight of her visit.

The article I found this morning was about a bored Tip employee who was going through some stuff which had been handed in to the Tip Shop.  Among the detritus (is that a word?) he found a cheap exercise book and it turned out to contain notes made by a famous Antarctic explorer, David Johns, on an expedition in 1957.

The best thing I found at the tip was a slightly damaged cheap guitar and I'm not quite sure what happened to it.

THE DAY OF RECKONING                                                                                       NOVEMBER 18, 2022

 There was no doubt in Charles’s mind that he had been poorly treated: by his parents, by his schoolmates and, in fact, by everyone he knew.  Just thinking about all the injustices he had suffered in his relatively short life brought his pent-up rage to the fore. He felt himself drawing in a deep breath through his nose and letting it out slowly.  He had read about the berserkers of Viking times and how, in their ecstasy of rage, they experienced a red mist coming down over their eyes.  Charles was looking forward to reaching that level of anger but it still felt out of his reach.

He had been an only child, sickly and spoiled.  His mother had protected him from interaction with other children, even to the point of walking him to and from school every day.  As she explained to her friends, the other children at the school were rough and her Charles was a sensitive and intelligent individual who might be coarsened by contact with people who were less refined.  When he joined the Cubs, she, again walked him to the Scout Hall each meeting night, waiting patiently until the meeting was finished and she could walk him home,

Of course, he had been teased by the other children and, over the years, he had built up a resentment, blaming first his mother, but also his father who might have intervened to dampen some of his wife’s excesses.  The other children in the town teased Charles unmercifully, the boys especially, but the girls couldn’t resist joining in the fun and invented their own ways of making Charles’ life miserable.

High School brought its own problems.  Charles was unable to make friends among his classmates, even the more studious ones who lacked the overt social skills which were essential in that environment.  He spent most of his time in the School Library but even the librarians were wary of him and left him very much to himself. 

He was sitting in the park one day, plotting murder in his heart, when a voice interrupted his musings.  “Is that you, Charles?”  It was one of the librarians from the High School.   “What are you up to?”

Charles was so pleased to see a friendly face that all his worries spilled out.  He couldn’t bring himself to give details but he did say that he had a big problem that he needed to solve and didn’t know which way to turn.

The librarian said, “Everything you need to know can be found in a book.  Write your problem down in as few words as possible and then go the library and look for the answer.

Charles started to list his problems but there were too many words.  He started to cross bits out until he was left with just one word: Mum.  In a flash of realisation, he just knew that his mother was at the heart of all his problems.  Her over-protective manner had inhibited his ability to make friends and live a normal life. 

It was obvious: he needed to murder his mother.  At the library, when nobody was looking, he typed into Google: How to murder your mother.  This was easier than wading through dozens of books.  After a few seconds, Google responded with links to a TV show called ’50 Ways to Kill Your Mother’,  a book on Amazon called ‘How to Murder Your Mother-in Law’, a  Jack Lemmon movie called ‘How to Murder Your Wife’, suggestions on how to torture your mother, and, I suppose if all else failed, how to kill yourself.

Charles was ecstatic.  He could, at last, see a way forward.

I met Charles recently and asked him how he was getting on.  He still called me Akela even though I hadn’t been a cubmaster for years.  He confided in me that he had been through a rough patch and had even been planning to kill his mother.  However, he had become so engrossed in the planning of it that he had never actually carried it out.  In the meantime, he had met a young woman in the library and they had started going out together.  He told me he was as happy as he had ever been in his life and I was pleased for him.