It is natural and commonplace to experience at least one period of existential despair in the weeks before the summer holidays. I call this phenomenon PPCM, or Peak Pre-Christmas Malaise, and by no coincidence it manifests just when the year's scheme of work has rendered international travel impracticable. The countdown is equivalent to house arrest.
The condition tends to present as especially chronic in leap years, which callously subject us to both the Olympics and a US presidential election. But this comprehensively absurd year we've just lived through, 2016, has broken comedy forever. It has retired the very concept of implausibility. If The Apprentice is the next American President, was Independence Day actually a documentary from the future?
See there's a lot to be depressed about. It turns out those of us who believe in skilled immigration and free trade are comfortably outnumbered by people liberal economics and open borders have alienated. The working poor of Wisconsin are coming for the coastal elites with pitchforks (a similar mob from Birmingham gave us Brexit) yet the rustbelt's saviour, the Donald, prepares to slash the elite's business taxes to the level of Hong Kong and Singapore. Cut the rate and grow the base! Malcolm Turnbull tried selling that idea but our middle class (their social welfare entitlements so generous our Commonwealth is drowning in debt) won't have it.
Corporate Australia got together for dinner on Thursday night in Sydney. The aliens are coming in their spaceships but that room wouldn't know it. Enemies of post-Enlightenment policy settings – from Pauline and Bernardi to Xenophon to the modern Labor Party itself – are building their Ludicrous Society and the grown-ups shrug their shoulders. When is someone in this country going to get out there and powerfully argue, door to door, with Hemingway's clarity, for (and in defence of) Keating liberalism?
Us journalists are apparently to blame, too. We need to spend more time rubbing shoulders with real people, "out there", in towns bereft of artisanal delicatessens or single block wine sellers, let alone hatted restaurants. It's deflating being part of the problem, on a daily carousel, spuming forth illogic. Is it time to jump off?
There are other significant grounds for maximum despondency. Not only temporarily grounded, but my home is under siege by tradespeople; the entire façade of my building is scaffolded. The windows are boarded up, the sewer stacks being torn out, the fire exits jackhammered. Peace and privacy have given way to invasion, both sensory and physical. A piece of free advice: old buildings are not as charming as they seem.
Thus writing these adventures is getting ever more exacting; also because I'm something like 20 per cent more brain-damaged than I was a year ago. Hangovers last all day now; there is no afternoon lucidity. If enervation was malignant, I'd be terminal.
But worst of the exacerbations, at the very moment it should be therapy, Australian cricket mocks and vexes. The sport is awash with cash but can't field a competitive – let alone a winning – team on anything less accommodating than a batting paradise. Its boss James Sutherland has been ensconced at Jolimont Street since Nine axed the Midday Show and Mark Taylor scored a triple-century in Peshawar. And now comes the revelation that a direct report of Sutherland's was until very recently having his female personal assistant cook him a hot breakfast in the office each morning. Scrambled eggs, baked beans and even bacon on special occasions! She even set the table for him and he'd tuck in while his co-workers looked through the glass in sheer disbelief.
You could not make it up. And it took Sutherland until 2016 to stop the sport's governing body from operating like it's 1950? These dinosaurs are in charge of women's cricket; businesswomen Jacquie Hey and Michelle Tredenick sit on their Board. And it's not like they've built something huge and valuable from nothing like a Solomon Lew or Rupert Murdoch – they are merely superintendents of a game Australians have loved for 140 years. So from where the spectacular sense of entitlement?
What is it about power – even microscopic quantums of it – that makes people behave so offensively? At Telstra, Sol Trujillo installed a button on his desk that called the elevator to the executive floor while Daily Telegraph editor Col Allan would relieve himself in the sink. Man waits for no time. But treating your co-workers like house servants or ferrying your dogs around in a chauffeured Government car or taking the company jet to the Bahamas or, in the Donald's case, grabbing them by the pussy? It's a slippery slope!
Yep it's a ghastly era we inhabit. And it's really getting me down.
