By Sandshoe aka Shoe

Treu bleu, the undertaker could not be sure he was dead. Not the undertaker. The stiff I meant.

What kinda story opens like that. The inquiry is the rhetorical mind. I’ve no mind for a treatise on why or how. Even who is a measure too far.

Still, it is the first Sunday of the year. Jumpin’ emus. I’ll grab my hat and head to the Bar.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2023 TO THE PIGS ARMS!

It is the genuine Shoe here.

Youse’llall would guess I’ve been scraping the barrel to find an audience, diverted, following in Foodge’s footsteps. Foodge made it all the way. I might yet.

Barflies who do not know who Foodge is will have to ask around for now.

I’m still remembering that Hung One Over in his persona as Mark or Hung if he pleased and I in mine as Christina or Shoe if I pleased most solemnly vowed between us. We would conjure a summary of what has gone on here. We would write it or one of us would and the other one cheer. Good one, ay. It would be epic however small. It’d be good.

In the New Year when I’m back studying just like Foodge did to go to the Bar, I’m gunner give it a go to print out the episodes in a form I can read lying down on the job. I’ve been way out of commission for a year. I had to take a year off Law School because I sustained two spinal fractures. They knocked me right off my feet. The point is relevant that one day I woke up (literally) and wondered where the pain had gone. I do still need rest because sitting for hours on end as I recently have begun (again) is hard work regardless no pain to speak of.

Now here is a miracle. I have been in pain for years. Long before fracturing my spine and finding myself in an extraordinary pickle living because of the housing crisis in lodgings (where I couldn’t move a muscle without suffering agony). A couple of friends were able to occasionally help me.

Now, a single woman of 72 years of age at this present after nearly 12 months of the transformative experience of discovering what dinkum pain is like, I can stand in the shower with water cascading over me and wash my hair, but not focus at every second fearful of not keeping my footing.

I discovered ambition after a few days pain-free.

Not rediscovered it. Discovered it burning. In a flood of yearning to solve the many (socially problematic) issues I learned the aged suffer (learned as I suffered through being nearly entirely immobilised in digs in agony, eventually dependant on My Aged Care), one glaring thought emerged, “You’re a WASTE.”

I kick start the New Year with an Intensive course to knock off one of the remaining subjects and I’ve scheduled another nine subjects (plus another Intensive) for 2023. I did do two full-time years of the study of Law in the two preceding years prior to 2022 despite I failed two subjects. I sat them for the second time from the get-go in that time frame. Not too shabby.

I lived for two years at a University College on campus. For the previous 12 months I have missed my student class friends who are my peers especially very badly, madly, and somewhere in time and space, living alone in a parallel universe, I have re-found and re-imagined myself. I’m an improved, better version by far.