A number of ways

Yesterday, I passed two different rubbish removal utes many streets apart, with two different teams of workers removing their rubbish.

As a sign this can be interpreted in a number of ways.

Theory of language

She told me her theory of language: how most languages distinguished the informal you from the formal you - had at least two yous - and how the formal and the plural form were generally the same. She also said that English had lost the informal you (the thou), not the formal one as most people thought, and that this must have happened as a result of a deliberate rejection - a rejection that was occurring right now among the more pretentious of the middle classes in France; how those families in Versailles who wished to seem smart (she had heard) were instructing their children to address them with the formal you only - with vous, rather than tu - and if this rejection had successfully occurred in the English speaking world, where the thou had been banished from everywhere with the exception only of the pubs of Yorkshire, new editions of the King James Bible and collections of old poetry that nobody read - these viral middle classes whose feeling for language was blunt in the extreme - it was only among the supposedly uneducated in Australia that it had slipped in sidewards through a sleight of words, since the plural form youse was being used, she had noticed, not only for the you in the plural but also for formal situations in the singular - a choice of language, she said, which was both intelligent and shrewd. Last week, she was walking along a street which a team of workmen were digging up when she was asked, could youse just cross over to the footpath please? and as far as she could recall she was alone at the time.

The suited man's smile

Just now I described how, as I approached Yaama Dhiyaan and could see the television vans parked on the raised part under the Carriageworks sign, I reasoned that there must be an event going on and, since it was less than two weeks before the election, an Aboriginal political event, or at least a political event that attempted to connect itself with things Aboriginal, and when a suited man smiled at me as he passed me on the path, I decided that this man had smiled because, either as a politician or as a journalist, he had assumed that he would be recognisable even to someone who never watched television – and how, while reflecting on these kinds of thoughts I went to cross the road and, happening to look back in the direction he had gone, I saw that the suited man was talking to someone who would have been behind me on the path at the moment he smiled, and I could see that there was really no way of telling whether the suited man’s smile had had anything to do with me at all.

Backtrack

We have been told that the six-year girl who was supposed to have gone to bed at nine thirty, twenty minutes before the end of a screening of The Golden Compass on Saturday evening, and been found missing twelve hours later has not been seen by anybody apart from her mother and stepfather for nearly a month. The police have said: It’s important for us to try to backtrack if we can to establish her last movements.

What trees could do

We heard how, after one of her students had broken his golf club swinging at a ball under a tree near Dural, the broken piece had ended up piercing both his liver and his inferior vena cava - an accident that might have been fatal if it had not been for the vascular surgeon who had been putting nearby - and how after this freak accident on the green, she had become quite a bit scared of what trees could do.

Failed to do anything

As soon as she got back this afternoon she told us that on the escalator down from the shopping centre she had been standing behind an old man who was carrying a green parachute silk shopping bag that was identical to hers.

Since she was standing directly behind him, she couldn't help noticing the way the tanned skin at the top of his skull was surrounded by soft white hair, and it was then (having noticed the skin and the hair - and the way that the burden in his green silk bag seemed so light, so inconsequential) that she could imagine leaning forwards to address the old man as her friend Kate would have done: remarking on their identical bags and, perhaps, their similar contents, making a joke of it; using the bags as a pretext for making contact with someone.

But even as she imagined doing this - and at the same time becoming convinced that she would never do such a thing - the man turned a little to one side and, from the nose and the glasses (from above), she could see that he was the famous writer that she had often seen in the centre, either buying rice, or at the dry cleaners or reading a paper near the light well - and she couldn't help thinking of all the times when she had been close to speaking to this famous writer in her life - when, for various reasons (the wrong digit in a phone number, an importunate question from somebody else that had prevented her approach at a particular moment), she had taken advantage of her helplessness and actively failed to do anything.

At any cost

All through the interview she kept using this phrase: She wouldn’t go back to Japan, she wanted a class, she wanted to keep studying English at any cost.