Ticking

I once knew a posh boy whose family shared a house in the Home Counties of England with a Burmese named Ticking, a beautiful creature. Ticking sensed my unconditional love of cats and indulged me when I visited. My relationship with the boy was… well, less successful. Our campus was a rarefied environment, suspending disbelief and postponing the inevitable. We stumbled on until I found the strength of mind to end it, well beyond the sell-by date.

We hadn’t been in touch for some time when he called out of the blue to arrange a farewell meet prior to taking a job in the Far East. I wished him best-of-luck but baulked at a get-together. Enough was enough. He turned up anyway one day, unanounced, at my office. I deigned to go downstairs for a minute – it seemed churlish not to – but returned to my desk feeling re-released. No regrets.

Years later, I haven’t a clue if he is still alive; nor do I care. I’m not cold-hearted, but at some point in a long drawn-out affair that took a toll, a self-preservation switch flicked, and that was that.

I bet he’d think this post is about him.

I was never a big Elton John fan, but admired his and Bernie Taupin’s songwriting talents. My favourite track is off Caribou. Ahead of its time, it told of a reserved, outwardly unremarkable young man who walked out one day and shot 14 people dead. No warning; no reason. Ticking is seven-and-a-half minutes long, with a storyline and major-to-minor key changes that elevate it to memorable.

When Bernie Taupin wrote the words, there had been few random mass murders in the US. Now, there have been so many our shock is muted by familiarity, which is horrific in itself. What triggers a random killer? And mightn’t someone, somewhere have been able to spot something odd before the switch flicked?

In the immediate aftermath of a terrorist bomb blast in central London last century, it wasn’t easy to stand idly waiting for a train without pondering if and when your number might be up. The presence of police at my station – beyond London’s outer limits – served momentarily to reassure, but at the same time freaked me out. Within a week or so the police were gone, and life returned to a new normal. Human behaviour is frequently unfathomable, and therefore potentially terrifying, yet we have a huge capacity for recovery.

Long after headline writers have been distracted, the consequences roll on. What does a teen jailed for ‘life’ for murder become years down the track?

Staying with unanswerable questions; will we ever know for certain what happened to flight MH370? I wondered about this recently on the ninth anniversary of it dropping off the radar over the South China Sea. Such a large passenger plane had never disappeared without trace; nor has one since. Only a wing flap has been positively identified as belonging to the plane. The battered, barnacle-covered debris washed up on a Réunion Island beach, but not until 16 months after the plane was lost.

Following a disaster, is survivors’ guilt inevitable; or subsequent changes to the law necessary to soothe society’s troubled mind? How often are you not even aware you’ve dodged a metaphorical bullet? If you hadn’t forgotten to set an alarm, would you have been on the commuter train that crashed into the back of another held at a faulty signal south of Clapham Junction in December 1988.

How can you ensure your safety anywhere? On a remote and largely empty Outback track, could you avoid crossing paths with the driver too long without sleep; or who’d downed a few beers at the last roadhouse? If you broke down, do you think you could distinguish a genuine helper from the unhinged? How many times d’you check if you have a mobile signal as you cross a wide empty landscape? Even if you listened to a forecast before setting out, storm cells are no respecters of schedule.

The change of weather in the four images below took less than 45 minutes. The last 20-odd kilometres of the journey took almost as long to drive as the previous 200, once huge raindrops fell out of the sky and transformed the dirt road surface into what might as well have been ice. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared.

In a country of vast distances, at a time prior to the widespread use of satellite phones, the cautionary sign below was of limited value. I realised no one had been following us for ages: and neither had anyone passed in the opposite direction.

After the rain, when a few of us were holed up in the pub in Tibooburra, we talked about about how we’d got there, all roads having been closed hours ago. No one had travelled our route.

Two days later, instead of visiting Cameron Corner – the junction of three Australian states – we had to head north, urgently but slowly and carefully. We were novices in a nation of overconfident off-roaders, but no one left for the border before we did. The National Parks Office had not re-opened any roads at that point. I was fairly sure that if you drive on a closed road, your insurance is invalid, which didn’t do much to soothe my troubled mind. When filling up with diesel, I mentioned we were headed up Queensland way, just in case… In case what? In case there were reports later of a white Freelander in a ditch by the Silver City Highway?

The best-laid plans can be turned on their heads in a few moments of heavy downpour. But always try to enjoy the ride, even if you’re sliding out of control and struggling to see out of the windscreen. Your thwarted plans weren’t necessarily the best, so make new ones. When I lived in Australia, chance encounters as a result of unforeseen circumstances often led down different roads to alternative must-sees; not to mention more interesting stories.

Wet track…

…muddy Landie

Trapped in Tibooburra

Oh, and people sometimes shoot at road signs in the Outback: because they can, I guess. Just so you know. It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a nutter about.

Despite several more years of adventures in Australia, we never did make it to Cameron Corner, so it remains on the list.