Illustration: michaelmucci.com
Some weeks are not funny.
Inevitably, it begins with the weather - its sheer inability to acknowledge that spring is nearly over and summer is around the corner. Stubborn clouds dig in their black Doc Martens heels and refuse to move on, a flash mob of clouds to Occupy Sydney Sky.
Stuck in snaking traffic fleeing Parramatta Court, I'm not a Lincoln lawyer but a battered Barina barrister, slowly passing more cars sitting in flagged car yards like shiny whores - buffed up, smiling grilles, with their rock-bottom prices written across their forehead front windows. Pick me, pick me, they seem to scream from their outdoor-brothel viewing parlour.
My heart sinks even further as I pass deserted dealerships with once proud names looking like empty churches. It's the survival of the fittest and fastest everywhere.
On Parramatta Road, just before Annandale, a bloated and drunk Father Christmas staggers all over the footpath, bottles in each hand - presents for himself. A couple of metres further on, someone has tied a blow-up plastic doll with rope to a telegraph pole, facing the road. I could have reached out and touched it if I had my wits about me and not left them in the Sydney West Trial Court in downtown Parramatta. Her arms were tied behind a pole, an unnecessary gag around her mouth. Her legs swayed though tightly bound to the pole, her pink nakedness required no Brazilian.
The product of a student prank or a plastic pervert, the image stayed with me until I arrived at a wake for Lydia Livingstone, whose name lives on by its very nature, but whose holy remains, but for ashes, joined the scrummed-down clouds from the Botany Crematorium earlier in the morning while I lay in court, unable to adjourn.
Lydia loved people and people loved Lydia. There was more love in the room at the Deus Ex Machina warehouse opposite Sydney Uni than in the stadium at a Hillsong convention - and better music. Tim Finn, James Reyne, assortments of the Barnes brood and Jenny Morris all brought tears to our eyes - and theirs - in bittersweet recollections. If there was a Twitter scroll across the dais, it would have been #generosity, the unanimous opinion of the mourners. In true Maori tradition, everyone at the gathering must sing, and everyone did.
I met Lydia when she was an agent with Fran Moore. She went on to produce movies, theatre and marvellous events. Lydia's pre-eminent talent was as an agent for friends - she would put people together from all over the world who would otherwise never meet, and she had the knack of knowing who would get on with whom. Her dinners and parties were triumphs of intuitive taste and skilled matchmaking.
When her bright blue eyes caught you, you were snagged for life. There was no end to her generosity of spirit and her patience if you needed a friendly ear to download.
She built a life on friendships, upon which all of us lucky, lucky ones sailed. Every New Zealander seems to have been born with a golden voice, and thousands of fanatical friends. Everyone barracks for everyone else. They live, sing and laugh, and they die, sing and laugh.
Note to self - make more New Zealand friends lest my own wake be in a coin-operated single-toilet facility in Hyde Park.
Death followed me back to chambers, turning into a solemn depression that stalks me still. Everything is black and thick. My furious ex-wife urgently wants a copy of our divorce decree, an official reminder of life's failure. A trial falls over, a brief relief but a financial shock.
There seems to be more homeless and freaks on the streets. Like the weather, I know that it will pass, but there are no umbrellas in the mind.
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