Australian Notebook

 Margaret River, Western Australia

I’m here for a food festival, and to help along my autobiography. The Blonde had cashed in turn-left, en-suite tickets, and said we were going to take the twins. I pulled faces and sucked my teeth, and whined that it was an awful long way, and it would mostly be work. But as usual, she was quite right. Travelling with the kids has made everything brilliant, intensely observed fun. But I have spent a lot of time standing under eucalyptus trees in the dusk, being lectured about marsupials by men in shorts. The marsupials are interesting, though oddly unempathetic or winning, and they remind me of someone or something else. A decidedly irascible collective of single-minded obsessives, with issues and dietary requirements. And then we hear the noise a koala makes. It’s an unexpectedly guttural, grating, grunting, constipated groan of entitled complaint. And it comes to me in a flash — they are the Liberal Democrat party! Every Liberal you ever come across is halfway up a gum tree with a bulging pouch full of nascently brilliant, though ungestated, ways to do old things. Koalas sleep for 20 hours a day. Not because they can, but because they have to. They are unimaginative to the point where they have only got round to eating eucalyptus leaves, which contain infinitesimal amounts of carbohydrate, and don’t generate enough energy to stay awake for more than a couple of hours, which then have to be spent eating. It’s the stupidest condition in all of creation. Our young guide finds a grunting koala who’s fallen out of his tree, and he asks in an encouragingly play-school voice, if anyone can think of a name for him. ‘Vince,’ I shout. ‘Vince?’ he replies. Yes. He’s definitely, uncannily a Vince. The world’s resistance to antibiotics due to profligate prescription is becoming acute, so the Sunday papers tell me.