The CB and I have spent a large part of our co-existence living on acreages on the outskirts of Brisbane. It was an idyllic existence apart from the weekends of slave-like labour maintaining the grounds, the pool, the pumps (no town water where we were) and a plethora of other activities which someone else looks after in our current location – a townhouse complex close to the city.

Living out there occasionally threw some rather interesting experiences our way, many involving wildlife. With no David Attenboroughs in attendance to alleviate these situations (or at least film them and let nature take its course) while hectoring me about my skepticism regarding imminent catastrophic, man-made climate change, I had to manage whatever the situation myself. Please read on.

It was one of those days when the knight in shining armour was required to ride to the rescue of his damsel in distress. Having just returned from the weekly pilgrimage to the Bunnings hardware warehouse (care is needed here – if you spell this word with a “wh”, spellcheck will change it to “whorehouse’), I parked my trusty steed (“Mazda the Sixth”) in its stable and proceeded to repair to man cave 3 – the shed (man caves 1 and 2 being the music room and the media room respectively).

Before I even had time to breech the battlements and swim the moat, I was confronted by said damsel, both ashen faced and trembling of limb (enough of the medieval metaphors). “Come with me” was all she said. I obediently did as I was told (after decades of indoctrination, a man knows his place).

She led me to what used to be our daughter’s bedroom, now a repository of faded memories and other junk, and pointed with a torch, for a torch she was carrying in the middle of the day (I know to not ask why), at an upturned plastic box. “There’s a snake”. “No, it’s a plastic box”. I would not normally have gotten away with such smart arsery but these were unusual times. “Under the box. You know I don’t do reptiles”. Spiders, snarling dogs, burglars – no problem. Snakes – call the SAS. But who needs the SAS when someone perfectly capable of handling a deadly, poisonous serpent of anaconda-like dimensions is around (okay, he wasn’t so I had to handle it).

Now the CB isn’t a complete gibbering mess when it comes to our silently slithering home invaders. She did have the wherewithal to lob that plastic box on it. But that’s where her participation ended and mine began.

I carefully moved the box, exposing the animal’s tail. I grabbed it with both hands, shouldered the box out of the way and threw myself onto its torso, releasing its tail and grabbing for it’s throat. Steve Irwin would have been proud. (Child Bride here – it was about a foot long, barely thicker than a shoelace and with a mouth that would struggle to bite a match stick let alone a finger or a leg. Please continue). Okay, sorry for the over-dramatization. I picked it up by its tail and removed it to the bush. End of story.

Apologies to the reader once again for the paucity of posts recently. As I may have mentioned previously, every now and then I have to play the journalist. Journalist in the sense that this (once) noble profession is lumped with fire-fighting and prostitution because they all involve long periods of slothfulness interspersed with furious bouts of intense activity. I have just finished a bout of intense activity culminating in, well, read on…..

I’ve just spent a somewhat stressful time in the witness box, playing my small part in what has been a long and complex trial that doesn’t appear to have an end in sight. Suffice to say it concerns a coal mine that never happened and one of the owners is somewhat miffed that it didn’t. My role was as an expert witness as I am perceived by some to have a degree of expertise in a particular aspect of the subject at hand. I’ve been working in the industry for decades so expertise is an inevitable consequence of longevity.

Anyway, the day and a bit I spent in Court 21 of the Supreme Court of Queensland was the most stressful of my life I think. Maybe flying into Bandar Abbas in southern Iran for the first time just after the Iran/Iraq war and seeing “Death to America” plastered across the front of the terminal was marginally more stressful. Or perhaps the three times I’ve been convinced the aircraft I was in was going to crash causing the heart to pound like John Bonham was using it as his bass drum. But this was up there and lasted far longer.

I’ve negotiated with some of the most intractable, stupid and downright nasty people in the commercial world in my time. Some would qualify as smiling assassins and others would not have been out of place in the Kray gang. Animosity (both real and bogus) notwithstanding, we did both require and (most of the time) eventually achieve a mutually satisfactory outcome followed by handshakes all round and hundreds of beers later that night, except in Iran when I had to wait until I got to our embassy or caught the next international flight out.

But sparring with a sneering barrister who wants to not only destroy your opinions but also destroy your reputation and that of the sources you cite tends to focus the mind to the total exclusion of everything else. It’s not a pleasant experience because no matter how confident you are in what you are proposing nothing escapes a skilled and belligerent advocate’s forensic search for minor inconsistencies and use of semantic nonsense. At least in a negotiation you can come back hard (in the nicest possible way, you understand) at your protagonist whereas in cross-examination overt displays of frustration and anger are very much a losing hand.

Afterwards, over a glass of red, when my mind was acclimatizing with the real world again, I was reminded of the famous interview of Jordan Peterson by Cathy Newman on Britain’s Channel 4. If you haven’t seen it I thoroughly recommend you have a squizz (it’s on YouTube). She spends a lot of the interview prefacing her questions with  “So what you’re saying is….” and he invariably responds with “No that’s not what I’m saying” or words to that effect. Every statement (I naively thought I was going to be asked questions) that was put to me in court finished with “you’d have to agree with that wouldn’t you” of “that’s correct isn’t it” and many times my answer was simply “no”. If I was mortally threatening his line of interrogation when given a chance to expand and expound on my “no” he would occasionally seek intimidating reinforcements and disdainfully state  “are you telling his honour that blah blah blah?”.

Most of the time I struggled to tell anyone anything because of the wad of cotton wool in my mouth. It’s funny because I do actually know what I’m talking about but there are so many points of attack, real and imagined, that can be gleaned from two lengthy reports which are in response to two other reports, all of which cite numerous learned sources. and especially when I’m disagreeing with the opposition’s experts. In these circumstances the metabolism does funny things, one of which is make you talk like a frog.

Yesterday morning one of my golf mates rang from the course and enquired as to my whereabouts as it was a few minutes past our normal tee-off time. Apart from not realizing we were supposed to be playing, I had to say “Sorry, I have to be in court”, a phrase I had always hoped I would never have to utter. At least in this case I was being paid to be in court rather than facing the reverse situation for which I would have to pay my debt to society. Despite the privations I was able to repeat back to him a phrase he once said to me regarding a less than salubrious task but one which was nonetheless a nice little earner – it’s another cruise.