For the letting of blood

When it came down to it - out of the two alternative careers that others were suggesting in the wake of the collapse of our industry - two careers we could take up after only a very short period of training - one of us admitted to preferring the real estate option, and the other: phlebotomy, the practice of opening a vein for the letting of blood.

Her working life

My parents told me that the woman sitting down the front, not far from the stage, had been a real estate agent for the last seventeen years of her working life, and it was from her that they learnt of a Japanese businessman’s plan to lease the Northern Territory from the Australian government – a plan which, evidently, has never come to fruition, but not for want of trying, or so they had heard.