My Year in Review: Going for Broke

Some Japanese mothers told their children to behave because they were sitting next to Santa. I obliged.

When I look back on my journal from the beginning of this year, I notice a big gap over the Christmas period. We had COVID and spent some three weeks in bed. Numerous opportunities for functions disappeared at the swish of a cotton bud. I was looking forward to so many things but they were not to be. So for 2023, I decided I would do things differently. I decided I would go for broke.

It was not until the 3rd January 2023 that I tested negative for COVID. At that time, I thought I would be on top of my finances, on top of my writing, on top of everything. Instead, I was exhausted. I've been told repeatedly that I don't belong, at the same time that my new rooster, Mr Peepers, was strutting his stuff in the chook run. I was too sick and tired to be boss.

I made the conscious decision not to renew with my professional association. I refused to pay a cent toward the new woke culture and an organisation that spoke of toxic masculinity while celebrating an anti-male world. I re-established my priorities with other professional bodies that were more attuned to my values and I am pleased to state that I am better for doing so in the past year.

January saw the watering system for the raised garden beds at Keswick being installed - a long term project that went off the rails during a divorce - but then it was mostly done. I've been trying to get back to ticking things off my to do list. I read somewhere that it should be called a "get to do" list to put a positive spin on it but I realised how much nonsense this was and decided it was a "do it and stop whingeing" list so it is once again known as my "to do" list. I found the old hard copy list from 2018 and pasted it into my journal. I was surprised by how much had already been ticked off. As they say, if you write it down, it gets done.

I have noticed over the last twenty years how deadlines at work have become shorter and shorter to the point where you can never have annual leave as a full month off. In looking back on last year, next year is bound to be the same. We have lost something by increasing the number of administrative staff who do nothing other than create deadlines for frontline staff. But I think in terms of arms corps versus service corps and it has never been any different unless some random leader comes along who wants results rather than personal sycophants. But that's how it goes.

I first wrote for The Spectator Australia after an altercation with a colleague where I supported nuclear energy. Doing so often brings up my class self-consciousness. It's funny that today I was talking with my father about the research I have been doing recently and he mentioned how "high-end" my work was - he previously didn't understand. But one of my three younger sisters is now on her way to becoming an academic after decades as a successful leader in international education, and she has somehow managed to explain to Dad what I never could (for whatever reason, probably my own issues).

It is surreal to read my thoughts about my Spectator articles. A war on Christmas, replacing the Reserve Bank with a computer, decolonising ends up where? And there's the idea. I started re-reading Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night on the flight home from Japan the other day. It reminded me of the importance of all  

The good news is that we survived. But what a year!