Books

That may be the real beginning hidden inside the memory. I did not yet possess the voice with which I would later advise, challenge, write and occasionally irritate people who preferred their assumptions undisturbed. I had a musical part and a teacher’s permission, which was enough for that moment. The authority came from outside, but the act of using it began to teach me that a voice could survive being heard.

Age has made me less embarrassed by the human Jeff’s claim. Wanting to be heard is not the same as wanting everybody else silenced, and wanting ownership of one’s contribution is not vanity merely because the contribution arrived wearing a joke. Flavius deserved the line because he understood what it meant within the case he had solved. Brutus could deny him the words, but he could not make the road belong to anybody else.

I have spent much of my life translating complexity into language other people could use. In business, the task was often to hear the technical answer and then find the human words capable of carrying it across the table without diminishing the person receiving it. The internal radio may have been performing a similar translation upon me. It took material I had not yet organised and delivered it in a form already shaped by rhythm, repetition and feeling.

Writing may be the place where the two impulses can coexist more honestly. It is useful in the sense that it may reach somebody, explain something or give meaning to an ordinary life that might otherwise pass without being properly noticed. It is also something I do because the words require a place to go, whether or not another person is waiting with a visible need. Writing does not remove the burden, but it allows me to examine why I picked it up and whether I have mistaken its weight for proof of my worth.

The radio in my head will probably continue to ask, “What about me?” It may ask resentfully on some mornings, reasonably on others and with the Black Dog adjusting the volume when silence would have been kinder. I cannot promise that I will always answer wisely. I can only try to hear the question before turning it into another task, another achievement or another service performed in the hope that somebody else will understand what I have not said.

I also hear the importance of companions. Lidenbrock may possess the driving certainty, Axel may carry much of the fear and Hans may provide the practical steadiness, but none of them completes the journey alone. My younger imagination concentrated on the creatures, storms and impossible landscape because spectacle naturally attracts the eye. My older mind notices the quieter fact that somebody must hold the rope, build the raft, share the burden and keep enough calm for the next decision to remain possible.

The silly songs assist because they arrive beneath that standard. They do not demand courage, insight or transformation; they ask for almost nothing beyond recognition. A few notes can confirm that the station remains connected to its library, that memory is still moving and that some inner part of me has not surrendered its capacity for association. The broadcast may be ridiculous, but it is still a broadcast.

I also hope my children will see, not a man attempting to replace their childhood through the next generation, but a father still capable of learning. Grandfatherhood should not become an improved performance staged in front of adult children as evidence that I finally understood the part. It should include them rather than bypass them.

Writing has become the place where some of those unsaid words can exist without requiring a reply from people who are no longer capable of giving one. It does not recreate the conversation, and it does not place my parents in the chair opposite so that I can manufacture the apology memory failed to provide. It allows the child’s evidence to enter the record after years in which only the adult version was admissible. That is not reconciliation, but neither is it silence.

Yet unfinished does not necessarily mean failed. A life may remain incomplete because life itself is not designed to provide the tidy conclusion we demand from a story. There will always be conversations not held, places not visited, friendships not deepened and ideas not given enough time to become books. The existence of what remains does not erase what has been done. It simply prevents gratitude from becoming complacency.

The concept of becoming local still amuses me. I can contribute, serve, know the roads, recognise faces and accumulate stories, yet some longer-established resident may still introduce me as the accountant fellow who moved up from Sydney. That does not need to be an insult. It may simply be the community’s way of acknowledging that belonging develops through repetition rather than announcement.

I cannot promise that understanding this will make me fluent. Habits formed in childhood and rewarded across decades do not disappear because they have finally been described accurately. I can, however, stop pretending that silence is strength, that usefulness is a complete vocabulary or that private rage is harmless because the public never sees it. Robyn deserved the song on our wedding day, but she also deserved all the unremarkable sentences that should have followed it.