I am not short of Apple products, is what I’m saying. I quite like them.

Except for these fucking Airpods Pro 3.

Which I bought to replace my beloved but aged Airpods Pro 2.

Themselves replacements for my second pair of Airpods Pro originals.

Until now every pair has done exactly what they promisd to do. Until now.

These fucking things though, these very spendy Airpods Pro 3, I hate them. Why? Because they keep falling out of my ears. Not after prolonged use either. Usually in less than a minute. They just dont fit. I’ve tried all the different sizes for the replaceable tips. Nada. Nothing. They all suck. Or rather they don’t. If they sucked they might stay in. And these don’t. They fall out.

Every. Fucking. Time.

I hate them.

What we didn’t account for was the presence of one large adult son in the house over the course of the day, which drew down the meatloaf stocks so severely that when I came to reheat some dinner, there was nothing to be reheated. So, off to the local supermarket I went to purchase a dirty bird. I brought back the hot chook, pulled it apart, and slapped it on toast. Gourmet stuff.

That actually wasn’t what I wanted to talk about, although I did enjoy complaining about the theft of my meatloaf. What I wanted to talk about was an idea I had while I was putting those dirty bird toasted sandwiches together. I had my AirPods in, and I’ve got some random playlist on Apple Music, which turned out to be guitar-driven rock classics. (Don’t you judge me) An idea occurred while I was making the po’ boy dinner: Maybe the sorrows of the world aren’t the fault of rapacious world-eating billionaires. Maybe everything’s fucked because rock music died.

I remember reading a piece somewhere in the last year or two, and I think I linked to it here, a story about how rock had basically disappeared from the music charts—something like less than 1% of the top 100 hits of any given year were likely to be traditional guitar-driven rock songs. I thought, maybe that’s it. Maybe the world is the way it is at the moment because mediocre white men no longer have the easy path, or at least the dream of an easy path, to rock god status.

If you think about it, 10 or even 15 years ago, even the most mediocre of white men could get a cheap pretend guitar and the latest addition of Guitar Hero, plug themselves into an Xbox or a PlayStation, and imagine themselves thrashing it out in front of 10,000 hot people on stage. They don’t have that option anymore. Maybe that’s what they’re angry about. They are reduced to air guitar riffs over dirty bird toasties.

I’m going to sit with this theory for a bit.

It’s probably a bit unfair to single out Emily Wilson, the translator of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, translations which Christopher Nolan drew on when writing his screenplay. There are plenty of other classic scholars around who have their own issues with his film. Having watched it now, I sort of wonder what they wanted.

Well, actually, I don’t wonder; I know exactly what they wanted: their own personal version. But as anybody who’s seen one of their favorite books adapted for the screen will tell you, there are no perfect adaptations. It’s two different forms of media. To read the Odyssey closely would probably take about 20 to 30 hours, depending on how closely you read it and how fast you normally read. I suppose if Netflix ponied up a couple of hundred million dollars, you could make a 22-episode series that would be a faithful adaptation, but it would be a fucking disaster.

One of Wilson’s objections to the film was based on the lack of thirstiness among its characters. There’s a heap of violent action in both epic poems, but there’s also a heap of sexy time, and we didn’t see much, if any, of that on screen. But so what? There’s a whole bunch of stuff we didn’t see on screen, despite the fact the film ran for three hours.

I thought, given the difficulty of the source material, particularly the structural difficulty of adapting the Odyssey, which arrives in the form of a couple of dozen different books in a discontinuous narrative, Nolan did a great job. If you haven’t seen it already, do yourself a favor and check it out on the big screen. We saw it in a multiplex, and I very much enjoyed the experience, but I may go back and check it out in IMAX while I still can.

After spending most of last week in Hobart, I planned on returning to my desk on Monday, forgetting I’d booked a couple of skin cancer excisions for the morning—three of them, in fact. Part of me, the foolish part, thought I would let my dermatologist do his slicing and dicing, take a couple of painkillers, and get back to it.

Oh, how we laughed!

He sliced, he diced. I took the painkillers, came home, and collapsed into my reading chair where I snoozed away most of the day. I finally got back to work this morning, where it seems I have a bit of catching up to do.

Still, Hobart was very nice. Don’t believe what any of them tell you.

We had the web for a long time before we had smartphones, and there was some pretty kooky stuff going on even back then. But the world wasn’t broken in the same way it got later, and we weren’t as broken as we are now. I think the reason might be very simple: you can stand up and walk away from a computer. In fact you have to occasionlly, if only to take a toilet break. But you can’t really walk away from your phone unless you deliberately leave it behind.

It’s always there, isn’t it? On the bedside table while you sleep, in your pocket when you leave the house. It’s part of us now. And of course, once the tech companies realised this, they began to exploit it.

Do you remember the early days of mobile Facebook? It was a fucking joke. I recall posting somewhere, probably on Twitter, about how terrible it was and oh how we larfed. For what felt like an eternity in tech time—maybe six or twelve months—people were sorta questioning if this was the end of Facebook. Everyone was going mobile, and their mobile offering was hot garbage. Well, the Zuck showed us, didn’t he?

You often hear people lament, “It’s the phones.” What they really mean, of course, is the algorithmic exploitation of human frailty, organically located in the dopamine cycle. But the phones are the perfect delivery device for it. They made it so much easier to hook us than a desktop computer ever could.

I assumed Mr Kundera’s labradors were very well behaved and his cats did not stomp all over his face at 3 AM demanding that the biscuit bowl be refilled.

I’ve got so much thinky content in this piece that I decided I needed a solid, narrative opening, so I drove up to Ipswich to find me one voter each for Labor, Liberal and One Nation, hoping that their personal histories would provide the spine of the essay.

We’ll see.

As an aside, I accidently published this post at ASB, where two people quickly ‘liked’ it. I didn’t think anybody was at the Boob thru the week. Now I feel bad, like I should put more stuff there.

Dickson is right. The blanket makes it worse. But I think the death twitches and the presenter trying to make the best of it is my fave part.

I had the house to myself last night and decided I’d watch this recent Austin Butler film because I’ve become quite the Austin Butler fan. I vaguely recall reading a review of this movie when it came out, but I’d completely forgotten about the film, so it obviously didn’t set the world on fire. Still, there was something about it that made me think it might be worth a couple of hours of my time.

It was. To very briefly summarise the plot, Butler plays a former baseball player whe had the world at his feet, and then he fucked it all up. I won’t give away any spoilers about how, because it’s kind of an important thread in the film. He ends up tending bar in NY, where he seems to be the life of the party every night, but you can see his trajectory is going all the way down.

The film is set in New York in the late 1990s as the changes to policing and city government under Rudy Giuliani are beginning to transform the broken urban environment of the previous 20 years. There are occasional mentions of gentrification, but Butler’s dive bar is in a rough part of the inner city.

I really enjoyed the feeling that this was a story from the “Before Times.” Nobody had a mobile phone, there was no social media, everything was analog and gritty, and there was a huge amount of friction to doing everything. Because the city is rapidly gentrifying, the crims are all looking for ways to get a piece of the action even as the city moves away from them and the action changes.

I don’t want to say too much more about the plot because it is enjoyably complicated, much like the early Tarantino pieces.

The cast is fantastic. Besides Butler, you get my third favourite Doctor Who, Matt Smith, as a full-on, late-stage punk who tips Butler’s well-meaning bartender into the criminal underworld by insisting the bartender mind his cat while Smith flies back to London to visit his dying father. Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber appear as Hasidic Jewish gangsters and threaten to steal the whole film. The whole cast is awesome. Even the cat.

The whole thing is awesome, really. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, it was one of the more enjoyable cinema experiences I’ve had recently, partly because it felt a bit like time travel, but also because I recognised the form of this story. It’s a movie I’ve watched 20 or 30 times before. The best way to shorthand it is to say it’s the John Wick hero’s journey: a guy just trying to live a normal life runs afoul of criminal elements, and violent hilarity ensues. This is the John Wick Universe, which is also the Jason Statham Universe, and before that, the Arnold Schwarzenegger Universe, and even, God help us, the Steven Seagal Universe.

The protagonist in these stories is always blessed with some near-magical arcane skillset that allows him to dismantle the criminal enterprise of which he has run afoul. Caught Stealing, however, is much more realistic. Butler’s character has no arcane skills beyond his ability to swing a baseball bat, and don’t for a second imagine that’s gonna make him a minor Marvel superhero carving a path through the underworld with his improvised wooden club. It’s not.

Butler’s a great everyman actor, and part of the appeal of this film is watching him just not cope for most of it, the way the rest of us wouldn’t either, until he finally reaches a place where not coping is no longer an option.

It’s streaming for free on Amazon Prime, but if you are not in the habit of giving Bezos your credit card number, you could probably rent it on iTunes or one of the other platforms.

Anyway, I feel a little bit of shame admitting it, but I was having issues with the narration because, deep breath, the version I had on Audible was narrated by a female voice actor, and her lilting tones meant I was struggling to imagine myself into this story full of ridiculously macho Greek warriors. A lot of these characters speak directly to the listener, and hearing their words in her voice, I couldn’t help but think, “Man, this would be so much better with Patrick Stewart narrating it.”

I felt bad saying that, because you’re not supposed to think these things. Technically, the narration was excellent—and having done a tiny bit of audiobook work myself, I know how hard it is to get even close to halfway decent. But I just kept wanting to hear some big, booming, stupidly masculine voices for these big, booming, stupidly masculine characters.

But then, as I was grappling with this, I had a sudden flashback. It took me all the way back to primary school, to my grade six teacher, Mrs Kaisos. I hadn’t thought about her in nearly fifty years, but the memory came back hard. Every Friday afternoon, she used to read a novel to the class. It struck me half a century later that what she was doing was what Homer did—or rather, what the Greek orators did when they learned Homer’s poem and performed it for an audience.

I thought to myself, “You loved those Friday afternoons. You used to look forward to them every week. Why is this any different?”

Well, I guess it’s different because I’m lazy and live in an on-demand world where we always get exactly what we want as soon as the algorithm predicts our wanting it. A part of me still couldn’t help thinking I’d really like to hear Sir Patrick Stewart narrate this book, but after remembering Mrs Kaisos and how much I loved her reading those books to us, I went back to my audiobook. And as I continued my own hero’s journey up to Ipswich, I complained no more.

It’d been coming for years; you could see it happening. They shrank the size of the shop a couple of years ago, cutting it in half. The back half was given over to another barbershop. The front half still had newspapers and magazines, but there were far fewer magazines than before. And of course, newspapers are shrinking in size, becoming thin tabloids—advertising wraps with QR codes you could scan to go to the website for the actual news, which is where they wanted you in the first place, even though the website isn’t a sustainable business model.

I’m upset about the newsagent finally succumbing to reality because I’d just subscribed to The Saturday Paper and was looking forward to having it delivered. Reading the paper on the weekend is a fond memory of The Olden Days. My parents would buy three or four, possibly even five, of them. They’d arrive as thick as telephone books, and wandering sections would cover the house like a newsprint avalanche until late on Sunday when they would all be tidied up.

I’ve been in the habit the last couple of years of buying a physical copy of The Saturday Paper, even when the content of the week didn’t really grab me. I just liked having it draped over my armchair so I could pick it up and read something while I had a cup of tea. Even if I wasn’t interested in most of the stories, there’d be some worth reading.

Occasionally, I’d make myself read something I didn’t think I’d be interested in, only to discover that because of the quality of the writing and the editing, it was a very engaging read. I got my digital subscription because it gave me access to the archive, which has proved invaluable while I’ve been putting this Quarterly Essay together. But I was rather looking forward to just having the paper itself delivered so I could drape it over the arm of my reading chair in the library.

Oh well, I guess I will never want for a haircut.

Oh, wait…

I was pretty much instantly transported back 20+ years, to Sydney, where I was making ten bucks an hour, cash natch, in the loading dock at Rolling Stone. It was a temp job, a month or two of moving boxes of magazines around. There were a couple of us down there, and we had a tinny radio tuned to Triple J.

This came on at least twice a day.

Until this morning it’d never occurred to me to find out who’d played it, even though it was a sort of old fave. I’d never added it to any streaming playlists.

I still haven’t. In fact, I’m sort of pissed I looked up the artists. There was something nice about having it randomly drop on me decades later. A bit like the feeling I used to get when a fave song would come on the radio.

That feeling is one of those odd little historical artefacts that’s gone now, when everything is instantly available.

I don’t work in a factory, of course, and I have my own office, but because it’s mine and mine alone, I find myself, occasionally, with my thoughts running along the same track as Dad’s, wondering what the real office people are doing.

This occurs most often around two in the afternoon when a wave of sleepiness overcomes me, and I have to decide whether to take a nap. I try not to take too many office naps because I’m a responsible grown-up writer of important novels, long-form essays, and charming little blog posts. Every nap I take robs you, my loyal paying reader, of a couple of paragraphs I could be cranking out.

But sometimes, you know, you’ve got to have a nap, particularly if you lifted weights at lunch, or you were up late the previous evening, or somebody decided to let two dogs and a couple of cats sleep in the bedroom, so you didn’t have a perfect night’s rest. For whatever reason, sometimes a nap demands to be had, which is fine because, as I may have mentioned, my office is mine and mine alone. There’s even a very nice napping reading chair in one corner.

On those rare, and I can assure you of this, very rare occasions when I do succumb to the siren song of an afternoon nap, I may wonder to myself, what do people who work in real offices do at naptime? Feel free to answer below. I’ll just be over here in my, er, reading chair.

Prada 2 might be an odd choice for a Sunday morning movie, especially with Project Hail Mary as a freebie on my Amazon watchlist, but obviously, I want to watch that in the dark at night with an adult beverage, so I don’t know why we’re even having this conversation.

I’ve watched the first Prada a couple of times, and I don’t see it as a movie about fashion. It’s a movie about publishing, and specifically magazine publishing. And having worked in mags for so many years, I’m all over that like a big hot meal. Everyone else was locked onto Andy Sachs and her evolving relationship with Miranda Priestly. I was obsessing over the print mechanics: “Wow, look at that, they're still using tear sheets to pick the illos.”

So, Jane was pushing on an open door when she asked if I’d like to watch Prada 2 on a Sunday morning. I knew from The Discourse that it was as much about the sorrows of publishing and media in the digital age as it was about fashion. But in fact, it’s way more of a magazine movie than it is a fashion movie.

I hit play with relish. I hit pause about 10 minutes later because I needed some more scones and a clarification. Jane had said that when the movie came out, most people didn’t like Anne Hathaway’s character, Andy Sachs.

I couldn’t see why.

We’re still early in the film. We’ve got through the inciting incident, which was Sachs and all of her colleagues being sacked from the newspaper where they worked. We’d passed through the debate stage where she’s arguing with herself about whether she should take a job back at Runway under Miranda Priestly. She’d just had the first meeting with Miranda, and it hadn’t gone well. She reverted to her earlier type: nervous, babbling, too eager to please.

That was my only real hit on the writing and Hathaway’s character. At the end of the first film, Andy walks away from glamorous fashion-mag life for the worthy pursuit of Real Journalism™. The sequel opens by establishing she’s spent the years since actually doing that: travelled the world, broken hard stories, and she’s striding through New York in the opening scenes looking like she owns the joint. She’s stylish (thanks to her Runway apprenticeship) and thoroughly accomplished (thanks, presumably, to twenty years of doing the hard work).

And then, what? She falls apart because Miranda was mean to her? Again?

It didn’t make sense to me, even though she would’ve been anxious because she’d just been fired along with all of her colleagues and she needed a job. But she had a soft landing already lined up. Her friend who runs a successful art gallery had offered her a cushy gig writing gallery copy, presumably well over the market rate for journalism. Having freelanced in mags for 20-plus years, I’mma tell you that most of the female journos and editors I met were hard as fucking nails and would not have put up with Miranda’s bullshit for one minute.

If they hadn't leaned across the desk and punched her in the snoot, they'd have laughed in her face and pointed out that the only reason Andy's sitting in that office after twenty years away is because Miranda fucked up badly enough to need dragging out of the hole. But that was it. That was my only nitpick for the whole, hugely enjoyable movie. The ending was believable within the context of the story (but completely unbelievable if you moved it to the real world). I enjoyed mapping the villains of the piece onto our real-world tech bro oligarchs. Got a pleasurable little jolt when I recognised Laurene Powell Jobs, saviour of the Atlantic, in one character. Had a smirk when I saw she’d been ditched by Bezos rather than Jobs.

I still don’t really get the Andy hate. She makes a bad call in the back half of the film, which could have led to disaster, but the Scooby gang all pulled together, and Bezos was foiled. Huzzah! But that was just a judgment call. It wasn’t her making a conscious decision to do the wrong thing. If you judge her call on the information she had to hand at that point in the story, I’d say it was completely justifiable, especially since she then went to the aggrieved party and justified what she’d done. Or tried to, anyway.

Apologies for talking around the plot. I’m trying not to give away spoilers for anyone who hasn’t yet seen the movie. Long story short, I very much enjoyed it. It was one of those unusual movies that ticked all the boxes for both Jane and me, even if the boxes were different shapes for each of us.

Part of the problem was that I wasn’t working on World War 3.4 where I can just bang out a bit of narrative and keep moving. I was working on my Quarterly Essay about the rise of the New Right in Australia. So there was no banging anything out. I had to do the research, then synthesise the research, then write the par, and then go back and check that somewhere in the writing of it I hadn’t lost my anchor to the research I’d started with.

It’s a transitional paragraph, about three thousand words into the essay, which opens with me driving up the highway to Ipswich to call on an old friend and then slam cuts to Switzerland in 1947. The narrative opening is designed to personalise everything that comes later, and I don’t want to go into too much detail lest Chris, my editor, have a stroke over all the spoilers. But, in short, I’m moving from personal narrative to a longer, analytic discourse and this paragraph is the gear change.

It took all fucking day to do, completely knocking my planned workflow out of alignment. When I finally put the pen down—I do the first draft in pen, because it slows me down and makes me think about what I’m actually saying—pretty much the whole workday had gone on eight or nine lines of text.

It made me think about the pressure university students are under. Or the pressure on consultants out in the private economy, come to that. I could see exactly why you’d be tempted to just hand the whole problem to an AI and let it punch the thing out for you.

And this isn’t me wrapping myself in the chainmail of righteousness about artistic creation and large language models. I got no time for that bullshit. When I was doing the initial research for this paragraph, I quite happily threw the first search to a couple of agents on Claude. I told them to scour the internet for primary sources, if any existed, on the relationship between the economist Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Specifically, a stretch during the Second World War when the two of them were up at Cambridge and served together as fire watchers, standing on the roof of King’s College, or maybe the chapel, watching for Luftwaffe bombers dropping incendiaries.

That’s the sort of thing that would’ve taken me a week in the olden days. Dragging myself into the library, hitting the card indexes, grinding through subject searches, pulling biographies off the shelf, checking the index and hoping it led straight to the story. And when it didn’t, which is what usually happens with something this obscure, I go hopping through the book chronologically, trying to confirm some half-referenced story that might not even be true.

That’s the kind of primary source-hunting I am very happy to hand to a machine. It saves me a lot of time. Not a lot of thinking, just the time I used to spend walking the Earth to track these little factoids down.

Now, you’re probably sitting there thinking: wait, didn’t Claude just hallucinate a pile of nonsense and vomit it back at you? And you’d be right to ask, because that’s exactly what happens if you’re not careful about how you build the search. But I told it I wanted primary sources I could read for myself, and I wanted the links. Which usually means PDFs of books and journal articles published decades before the first personal computer ever booted up. And that’s what it did, came back with half a dozen checkable references. When it summarised those references, you better believe it hallucinated a couple of little nuggets of bullshit. Didn’t matter because I had the references. I could go straight to the original source, run a text search, and find what I wanted. That’s where a good chunk of the five and a half hours went.

But still, five and a half hours against a week or more for the same job. That’s a massive productivity gain.

Then I had to write up my notes the same way I’ve written notes for decades — longhand, in a paper notebook, the way I was doing it back on my Arts degree. Which is exactly what put me in mind of a student who hasn’t had four decades on the tools. Someone who gets handed the same assignment and has to do the same research and synthesis cold.

They just haven’t got the reps in. They haven’t built the mental muscles. And it is so easy to throw everything to Claude or ChatGPT instead. If we’re being brutally honest about campus life now, we all know their tutors and lecturers are using AI to do a lot of the marking anyway, or at least the first pass. Please check this first-year essay for obvious errors of fact. Good. Now check it for flaws in the argument. Now proofread it for spelling and grammar.

That’s for sure going on. The student grinding away in the library knows it’s going on. And they’re paying tens of thousands of dollars for this ‘privilege’? Of course they’re gonna throw it to the fucking bot.

I don’t know whether schools or universities even try to teach their way around this. And I’m not sure how much good it would do if they did, because ninety-odd per cent of what I did yesterday rested on a four-decade history of doing the work by hand because there was no other way. I was glad to save myself the week of physical labour digging up sources, but the only reason I could do that with any confidence, and know at the end that I had a paragraph that would do the job, was the forty years of prior learning.

So that’s my concern with all of this. Not that the machines make shit up. Not that the data centres are eating the world. Not that this incredibly powerful technology is almost wholly owned and controlled by the worst people alive, who will absolutely turn it to their worst ends. All of that is true. My particular worry is personal and kinda niche: that ten or fifteen years from now, because the kids were never taught or made to do the work, they simply won’t know how.

And that’s the moment the worst-people-in-the-world thing stops being an abstraction and turns into an existential problem. Assuming, of course, the entire surface of the planet hasn’t been paved over with data centres by then.

¹ While Keynes was alive, the whole feud ran at a fairly civilised simmer—a medium-rare beef, nothing you’d need call an ambulance for—and didn’t stop him getting Hayek digs at Cambridge, where the pair of them did their bit for King’s College by taking turns on the roof watching for German incendiaries during the Blitz, a couple of clever fellows peering up at the night sky together in the entirely reasonable hope that neither the college nor their argument would explode beneath them. It’s only once Keynes died that Hayek really let rip. Forty years of contention aimed at a man already in the ground, all of it traceable back to one unkind book review from 1931 that Hayek apparently never, ever got over.

It caught me at a moment.

I’ve been training hard for a decade now. Completely remade the way I exercise and how I eat. None of it’s easy, and lately I’ve been losing the thread. I was in good shape earlier this year, before we headed off to Korea and Vietnam. Kept it together through Korea. Then we moved onto the Nam, where the French bequeathed a pastry culture I was helpless against, and, well, things came apart.

I got reasons, justifications, a whole lotta excuses. Doesn’t matter. The trend line is down, and I was thinking I better do something about it when I read Dr Luks’ note.

Don’t train for what you were doing twenty or thirty years ago. Train for what you want to do ten or twenty years from now.

For me, the trap is that when the training gets hard, and I go looking for motivation, I reach backwards. I picture myself in my thirties — living at the beach, surfing every morning, in and out of the dojo, probably in the best shape of my life. I’m now coming up on twice that age, looking over my shoulder at that bloke and thinking: how do I get back there?

Long story short, I can’t.

Nobody can. Time only runs one way, and it runs towards dissolution and rot. Grim stuff for what’s meant to be a motivational post, so ignore the dissolution and rot but think about how time carries you forward because there’s no stopping it. If you quit fighting that and accept it, you can maybe slow it a little. You can redirect it, like deflecting a kick or punch in jujitsu. You can decide where you’d like time to carry you before you get to the end.

For a while, I lost sight of that. When I swapped out cardio for weights, I got a bit obsessed with personal bests — the one-rep max, the biggest number you can shift a single time. It’s strong motivation. It gets you into the gym. But as I pushed my deadlift past 150, 155, 160 kg, chasing twice my bodyweight, there was always a voice: keep at it, and you’ll pull 200 kilos. And 200 sounds pretty fucking good. Even now, typing this, I’m thinking yeah, two hundred kilos ripped straight up off the floor? Bad ass. Then the other voice: Why? What the fuck am I ever going to do with that?

It doesn’t help that once you start following this stuff, it colonises your feed. For months, mine was wall-to-wall strength athletes, including young women roughly the size of my pinky ripping their 200 kegs off the floor like a shopping bag full of fairy floss. Motivating, in a way. Not always a good way. Eventually, logic, gravity, and a hernia I’ve been carrying for ten years all agreed, and I let the 200-kilo deadlift go.

Which left a hole. Why am I hauling this weight up? Because it makes me fit and strong? Sure. Fine, true, and also hard and unpleasant and not entirely motivating, when it’d be far nicer to sit in front of Netflix with a family-sized bag of chips. So, again: why?

That’s the question the good doctor asked me. Not what I wanted twenty years ago. What do I want ten years from now?

The standard, socially approved answer is grandchildren — you’d like to get down on the floor and play with them and get back up again. But honestly, I’m not much fussed about that.

What I do have, more of them every year, is older relatives who need real help to get through an average day. Help with the things I don’t ever think about yet. Getting up out of a chair. Having a bath instead of a shower, or getting in and out of the shower without it becoming a mortal risk.

Yesterday, I was carrying the cleaner bot down to the pool. Our place backs onto the edge of a remnant subtropical rainforest, the pool sits on a steep slope, and the trees drop enough leaf matter into it that I’ve learned — to my sorrow and considerable expense — to stay on top of the job. My gym is under the house, the pool is out the back, so between heavy sets I walk down and scoop leaves for a couple of minutes. It’s a nice little recovery hack. And less for the robot to do on the weekend. But I still have to lug the thing down there.

And halfway down the slope, it occurred to me: this is nothing to me now. But if I’m still in this house in fifteen or twenty years from now, an ordinary bloke of seventy-five or eighty, I don’t think I could do it. And I don’t want to be paying somebody else to.

So there’s my answer. I think that’s what I’m training for. Not the beach body, not the number on the bar. I’m training so that in fifteen or twenty years I can still live in my own house and do the things that need doing without help. Put like that, it sounds modest. And it is modest until you get to a certain age and watch how hard even that becomes.

It’ll change how I train. I don’t know how yet; that’s a conversation for my PT, Darren. But the question underneath it has finally got a proper answer. Not the biggest weight I can shift. Not a set of beach muscles I’ll never use.

Just lugging the pool bot up and down the hill, fifteen years from now.

So, I grabbed that ep and listened to it while I was driving around later in the week. It was really good. The podcast is a two-hander, with Sandbrook talking to his producer from The Rest Is History, Tabitha Syrett, who seems very smart. She took over production duties for The Rest is History back in 2023, which I suspect roughly lines up with the show becoming much more professional and successful. (It was good before. It’s one of the best pods in the world now.

The Blook Club is a deep dive into a single title each episode, and they seem to do an enormous amount of research.

I was surprised and a little delighted halfway through the GoT pod to hear myself quoted. They didn’t cite me as the source of Martin’s quote describing fantasy writers as gardeners or architects, but I am the source of that quote. I interviewed him just as the first series of the TV adaptation was about to air, and I tried to interview him purely as a novelist. We talked a lot about craft. I was probably the 14th or 15th interview he did that day, and he started off pretty tired, but he perked right up when we got into the subject of how to write rather than what the books were about.

Anyway, that’s just by way of illustrating that these guys don’t just read the book, take a few notes, and talk for an hour or so. You normally get a generous biography of the author and quite a bit of scene setting and context for the period the book was written in. The GoT discussion was in-depth and complex enough that I ended up going to the transcript and copying huge chunks of it to add to my research file for the fantasy series I’m thinking of writing sometime in the future.

I’m currently listening to their episode about Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and enjoying it hugely. If you’re looking for something to help you escape from this wretched timeline, I can thoroughly recommend this podcast. You don’t even have to follow along sequentially. You can just cherry-pick the books you want in the order you’d prefer.

Here’s a little peek at my current list.

But the reflex never died. A plate lands in front of me, and out comes the phone, quick as a tic, just in case future-me wants visual notes for a write-up. Which is, I’ll grant you, a bit weird.

It got weird enough, about six months back, after a meal at the Wolf in Brisbane, that I sat down the next day and actually wrote the fucking review. Properly. Didn’t publish it though, cos I’m not that guy anymore. And the Wolf? It’s currently closed for renovation.

But I’m publishing it today instead to ask you lot a question. Should I carve out one day a month, pick a favourite meal and write it up? Cos these photos are getting embarrassing.

I like secret places, especially in cities. I like finding obscure little bars down unpromising backstreets, or ten-dollar barbers above hardware stores. (A true thing that happened to me once in Brisbane.) There’s nothing secret about The Wolf. Motherfucker’s right out there in the middle of Post Office Square, announcing its wares to the CBD with one of the best cafes in the city.

But as good as the cafe is (spoiler: it’s really fucking good), the restaurant tucked away behind it is better.

It feels like a secret place because you have to sort of sneak in down a narrow hallway and push aside a heavy curtain, and once you’re inside, there is no outside. There are no windows looking out onto the Square, no view of the commuters hurrying up to Central Station at the end of the day when we sat down to Dirty Wolf martinis and the creamiest fucking oysters I’ve had in about fifteen, maybe twenty years.

I dunno where the oysters came from, and knowing wouldn’t do you any good because these guys are committed to the freshness bit and your oysters are gonna be coming from somewhere else, wherever best they can source them that day.

I was struck, in the few minutes it took to shuck them and serve them up on a generous mound of ice, by how quickly The Wolf cut you off from the wider world and wrapped you entirely in the comfortable exile of its dining room. In place of windows, there’s art and a warm architectural glow. The dining room is a kind of urban burrow carved out of soft light and expensive textures, all brassy gleam and leather hush. You step through that curtain and into a room that feels like it’s been assembled by someone who used to design first-class train carriages for a glamorous empire that never existed.

The bar is the first seduction: a long slab of glossy stone fronted by deep red stools with the sort of upholstery that makes you sit a little straighter, as though your posture should match the provenance of the whisky behind the counter. Soft benches upholstered in a shade of café-au-lait and burnt sienna, run the length of the room to a glossy, retro-framed portal into the open kitchen. Chefs move inside like a team of jewel thieves working under pressure.

Your host—I don’t know him yet, because I’ve only been once, but I do know we’re going to be friends—is one of those garrulous mofos with the gift of making you feel as though you are the most interesting person they’ve ever met, someone deserving of the care and attention poured into the Dirty Wolf, signature of the house, a super chilled martini with a drop of rosemary oil and a small sprig of the same plant set ever so carefully alight, then quickly blown out to release the aromatics.

Is it as good as the martini with a twist from Rothwell’s, a few minutes around the corner? It’s… different. Rothwells’ martini arrives on a silver tray in a frosted coupe, with a whole extra jug of Even More Martini nestling in its own ice bucket like a bonus level you didn’t know you’d unlocked. It’s a drink that practically winks at you and says, “We’re in this together, champ.”

It may be the best martini in the city, perhaps the world. But the Dirty Wolf is coming for it, brushed with rosemary oil, cool and herbaceous, the sort of drink that feels like distilled zen cool, poured over ice.

It went perfectly with the oysters, which arrived shimmering on ice and topped with a sweet-chilli vinaigrette so light it barely touched them, just nudged the brine in the right direction.

I was hungry and didn’t want to scoff down my fat little beauties just to lessen the pang, so we also had a small, fresh-baked baguette with truffle butter. The truffle content was generous, but the butter was a little hard, and writing that, I feel ashamed that I could even think such a thing at a moment when the larger machinery of the world seems to be screeching and stripping its final gears. But maybe that’s why it matters. Long after the towers fall and I’m hunting my enemies through the rubble of our civilisation, I’ll remember that stubborn quenelle of truffle butter as one of the tiny, absurd luxuries that reminded me we had it pretty good.

Better than pretty good was the duck breast. Duck is one of those dishes that can expose a kitchen’s limits in a single slice. Duck, when done badly, tastes like warmed-over despair. Here, though, the meat is properly rare, not raw, not trembling as the axeman cometh, and smoked honey glides through the dish like a soft chord, meeting the earthy parsnip cream, the tiny sweet peas, the charred lettuce with a kind of pastoral warmth. It tastes like something from a countryside that maybe never existed, but should have; a small and hopeful reminder of gentleness in an age that’s running low on it. The fibre helps, too, of course. Gotta move that protein along somehow.

I had made a noble, grown-up decision to forgo dessert, being in need of some extra belt notches by now, only to discover there was a cheese cart gliding toward the table like a Trojan horse filled to the brim with delicious dairy fat. What was I supposed to do, insult my new best friend? I took two: a middle-aged Comté and a Brie so obscenely creamy it should have come with a defibrillator standing by, warming up its little electric paddles.

I regret nothing.

And I expect no further regrets when I inevitably return. I emerged from The Wolf slightly dazzled, very full, and sporting the smug glow of someone who has briefly escaped the tyranny of sensible eating. This is a restaurant with the confidence to be more than good; it wants to seduce, to cosset, to make the rest of the city look like a cold bus shelter by comparison. The Wolf is a reminder that our civilisation, however frayed at the edges, can still produce nice things.

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