SHAUN MICALLEF'S ONLINE WORLD AROUND HIM                                     Back          Home
	Into the Valley of Dearth Author: SHAUN MICALLEF Date: 01/06/2002 Words: 924 Publication: The Age Section: Saturday Extra Page: 2 Rides the writer who writes about writing. Having successfully rifled through my Perelman and Leacock omnibi in search of inspiration, I thought I'd reward myself with a blintz before pounding the keys. With Balzac it was women, with me it's Jewish savouries. Unlike Balzac, however, no matter how minuscule the length of chain between my ankle and the leg of the escritoire, I can always manage to at least stretch over to the bar fridge. I was almost fully back across Glenhuntly Road and halfway through demolishing my treat when fellow columnist Hannie Rayson caught me by the elbow, inadvertently forcing the comestible up my nose. Eventually it would find its way into my oesophagus and then my stomach, but the moment was lost and I hated her for it. I had met Rayson only once before. It was on the set of SeaChange, in which I was essaying the small but pivotal role of Spurned Lover. She had written the episode and objected to my reacting to Laura's rejection of me with a quadruple take worthy of Harry Ritz. Following a failed appeal to the director she sought me out, took me to one side, and beat out the opening to Louis Prima's Sing Sing Sing on my cranium with a shillelagh until I agreed to a re-take. This time she was full of nothing but praise. Hannie had been reading my columns and admired my cavalier use of brackets (or ``parenthesis" as she tartly insisted on calling them). But, she said, I had been writing about the wrong things. Where were the Universal Truths? Why did I not draw from life? Why the Byzantine syntax and inappropriate references? She was right, of course. As soon as I got home I fired up the laptop and deleted the precis of the piece I intended writing post-blintz. Entitled What, No Click? it was to be an amusing romp about the lack of closure one experiences after having one's picture taken by a digital camera. Sure it was hilarious and would have almost certainly been snapped up by Frank Muir for an anthology had he not been dead for three years, but so what? Where was the humanity? Instead, I spent the next three hours watching my children play in the back yard. It had been years since I had so done. Sadly, they did nothing remotely amusing. True, one of them fell out of a tree and concussed itself on an anchor, but it would have taken the genius of a Hemingway to work it up into anything. And he's been dead longer than Muir. But it gave me an idea. I repaired to the attic and cracked open my great-grandfather's old journal. He had always made us laugh when he spoke of fighting at Balaclava. It was probably his high-pitched voice that did it - that and the Welsh accent, plus a speech impediment so tortured that it involved him turning a somersault whenever he came to a word with a ``t" in it. (This happened even when he was reading). Why Lord Raglan had asked him to participate in the Crimean War was always a mystery to us. That he cut quite a figure at the Pell Mell Club in his striped matelote shirt and Gitane cigarette drooping from his lips was beyond question. He'd danced the kazatski with the Prince of Wales and introduced a whelk-stall to the Members Bar. He knew the Enochian alphabet backwards and once attempted to bronco-bust a pinata. But it was his rubicund nose that caught Raglan's eye and they became inseparable after an incident in which they were forced to flee a cathouse sharing the same pair of trousers. 1854. Through the dense haze of powder smoke and over the din of barking sabres the two friends stood facing each other. ``Have the cavalry recapture the redoubts," ordered Lord Raglan. My great-grandfather nodded as only he could (with his knees), leapt on to a skittish colour-sergeant and rode up the hill to Lord Cardigan. The Lord barely listened to great-grandfather's instructions, preoccupied as he was with devising a way to adapt a crew-neck jumper so that it could be removed without dislodging his pith helmet. ``Buttons," he murmured vaguely as my great-grandfather rode away. As any double nonagenarian will tell you, the results of the Charge of the Light Brigade were less than satisfactory. There would be much debate and a little poetry. Lords Raglan and Cardigan would write to The Times about it; my great-grandfather would ring them and leave a message, but it was Bosquet who would sum it up best when he said ``C'est magnifique - mais ce n'est pas la guerre." Unfortunately, dead men do not speak French. As I sat there in the attic, wearing my great-grandfather's dusty 17th Lancer's uniform, scanning his spidery scrawl, and attempting to extract glib parallels with today's many tragic conflicts - I find that I can find none. Not because they are not there, but because I am blind to them. I couldn't even contrive a neat re-incorporation to provide a boffo finish. No Balzac was I. And so I crossed Glenhuntly Road for the second time that day, my gob full of knish; I spied Hannie Rayson at the petrol station. She was buying firewood with Frank Muir's zombie. I snuck up from behind and beaned her with an anchor. Fin