A month gone by and still no quorum? This level of disdain evokes troubling memories of events I had thought I had put behind me forever. If you will permit a confessional reminiscence:

Touring through various western New South Wales trouble spots with the now legendary Ska-Rockabilly band Manson Honeydew and the Uncomfortable Silence, we had come to the sleepy hamlet of Bolivia on the New England Highway to perform a lunch-time gig at the local kiwi-fruit-shaving factory. Or perhaps kiwi-shaving, there being a burgeoning market for hairless flightless birds that season, as I'm sure you recall. Sadly, due to an unconscionable mix-up at the booking agency, the assembled audience had been primed to expect a visit by our Governor-General Archbishop Peter Hollingworth as part of his nine states tour performing excerpts from Othello (from memory, this amounted to little more than the Vice-Regal in blackface, screaming "Play around wid me, wouldja, y'skank!" while smothering kittens - but it kept them wanting more). The massed punters chanted "We want Holly" and brandished copies of his autobiography "Pederasts I Have Met and Written Character References For" to be signed by the great if faceless man. When we appeared before them in the factory-floor's spartan entertainment complex, their disappointment was palpable. In fact, a great deal of it was palped in our direction. Throwing one of our roadies into the maw of the enraged crowd to buy ourselves time, we decamped in haste to the tour bus and sped off, bruised and traumatized. I'll never forget our usually sanguine one-fingered flautist, Miriam, muttering shell-shocked into his foot-long goatee "The horror, the horror...", all the way to Armidale, at which point his words became strangely apt.

But that all lies in the past. In these heady post-liberation days, how can such shadows touch us? With freedom and democracy raising their pointy little heads in Baghdad, as the people of that once-great region prepare to choose between radical Islam, the Iraqi Communist Party and other traditional allies of the United States, can we be discomfited by such trivialities as a looming nuclear war on the Korean peninsula and an apocalyptic death-plague sweeping down on us from the alien wastes of Beijing and Toronto? I see no taint of the end-times in these fripperies - rather I found it in the sight, two days ago, of a middle aged yeoman dressed in the furry white costume of some corporate mascot, standing on the street, sans his suit's smiling cartoon head, enjoying a coffin nail. Thus I leave you with the anodyne epigraph to which all our efforts aspire:

	War is over
	(Apparently)
	Vladimir Ulyanov