Over the Top with a Fortunate Hobby

The other day I read A Man's Got To Have a Hobby by William McInnes* which was about growing up in the 1960s and 70s in Redcliffe (which is technically a separate town but I was raised to think of it as a beachside suburb of Brisbane). It was charming, in a sun-kissed self-deprecating rosy-hued way. Every anecdote was a doozy. I laughed out loud many times and found myself explaining why to my Beloved. Unusually (for me anyway), this was remarkably easy to do - I just read out a paragraph. Generally it takes me ten minutes to say what I thought was funny in a book. He also told you enough about his family for you to feel real sadness when age and infirmity caught up with some of its members.

So, it's up there in that blokey jokey life writing genre like Over the Top with Jim and A Fortunate Life. Disappointingly though, it wasn't that well organised. He'd used the continous past a lot ("we used to do this") and you'd get a sense of repeated events but suddenly realise he was talking about one actual occasion. This was confusing.

Also, he'd loosely structured the main part of it around a night to celebrate the history of Redcliffe where a series of speeches sparked heaps of memories of different things and separate anecdotes. Every time he came back to the present he had another drink because he didn't like what someone was saying about changing the town he'd loved. He was meant to be the final speaker as the guest of honour. I was expecting a huge climax of him drunkenly abusing everyone but it didn't happen. Sigh.

Anyway, apart from that, it was sweet.

* Who the book blurb writer thinks is "one of Australia's best loved actors". I thought he was fantastic in Look Both Ways but I really didn't like him in Sea Change. (This doesn't mean he's a bad actor - I just didn't love him But then I was probably too young to embrace the Sigrid Thornton's whole wish fulfilment thing in that show. I mean, when it was on. Probably not now that I live in the big city.)