Diary – 17 December 2005

If I die I hope it won’t be in Melbourne. The chief obituarist of a Melbourne morning paper takes a dim view of me, and since the London Daily Telegraph pioneered the custom of pissing on the recently deceased, the Melbourne obituarist is pretty likely to do the same to me. A couple of years ago he wrote an autobiography in which he impugned my patriotism in a rather nasty way. It’s quite a fat autobiography, as are usually the memoirs of uninteresting people — the women who talk longest on the telephone are invariably women who have nothing to talk about. Anyway, I suppose this little prick’s obituary is already on file awaiting the distant date of my demise, and all those people in my home town who thought I was nice will learn what an ingrate I was, turning my back on the Australian cultural renaissance and seeking cheap fame and fortune in distant and unimportant countries.