This week I sat on the verandah and listened to the sky grumble.
And I thought, yep — I know what you mean.
The trees shook their heads and agreed.
The world is a shambolic mess.
There are queues at petrol stations; another senseless far-away war; teachers are walking off the job; there’s misinformation and disinformation; the leader of the free world has the mind of a spoilt child; and what on earth is happening with that forest of unused traffic lights at Shepparton Art Museum?
Will they ever be switched on?
Or are they actually a conceptual art installation with a profound metaphorical message about humanity’s loss of direction?
No wonder the sky is grumbling.
We are sleepwalking through a rolling cluster of dangerous fusterclucks circling the world on mobile phone screens.
People are worried.
I had my hair buzzcut this week in Melbourne by a man with a brain injury who did not let his disability get in the way of conversation — which, of course, is the defining skill of a good hairdresser.
He announced his condition via an AI voice message on his phone — one of the many uncelebrated benefits of the new ubiquitous technology.
We traded personal trivia for a while, then he asked via hand signals and screen messages what I did for a living.
When I said I was a retired journalist his face lit up.
He announced his excitement with the only words he was able to successfully use — an explosion of expletives.
He reached for his phone, jabbed at it and held the screen up for me to read.
“WWIII?” was his question.
But his question asked more than that. I was a journalist, so surely I knew what was going on?
I shrugged my shoulders and smiled the inscrutable smile of one who thinks he knows the unknowns, but who doesn’t know the things he knows and so doesn’t really know anything at all.
My hairdresser looked disappointed.
He wanted a clear answer to all this confusion.
All I could offer was an obtuse reply.
“Thank God for art,” I said.
He looked at me as if I’d slapped him in the face.
I said a song or a poem, or a painting or a film, or a piece of theatre was the only thing that could really explain what was happening right now because they showed what it was like to live in a confused and dangerous world.
Then I told him all about the Shepparton Arts Festival, which was celebrating its 30th anniversary this week with all these things happening around town.
His eyebrows lifted and he flapped his hands around.
On his phone screen he typed “How?”
It was another unanswerable question.
All I could think of was something vaguely human like the need to look for the good in ourselves every year, and the need to keep talking and getting together to share human stories and drink wine.
So I said all that and he nodded and looked out of the window at the passing traffic then went back to buzzing my scalp.
He seemed satisfied with my answer.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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