by Bert Meinders

Created on: August 31, 2011

I once heard life defined as "a common sexually transmitted disease, often painful, curable only by death". My perception of life during my pre-Christian years was about the same. I was intelligent, shy and witty. I never had even a token pimple. Those good bits were overshadowed by problems. While I had taken to driving cars and riding motorcycles as readily as a parliamentarian to perquisites, I apparently terrified money, which always took care to hide from me. Romance crossed the street to avoid me and I simply could not grasp the Binomial Theorem. My relationship with my parents was distinctly disharmonious a lot of the time and I seemed unable to change the parts of my attitude and behaviour which annoyed them. Wherever I looked, my contemporaries looked happier than me, less troubled and less frustrated.

Some of these problems were solved by the passing of time. Teenage problems are usually cured by reaching maturity. I went to university, bought a morale-boosting car - a Triumph Herald when most student cars dated from the late 1930s to the early 1950s - I lived away from home and grew a beard, and cut my drinking back to Moderate Weekend Social. I even managed a girlfriend or two during those years. Problems solved then?

Not really. I had a learning problem which came to light in my second year of university. In the first year I had studied English, Maori and French, easy because I'd always loved literature and, being brought up in an immigrant family I had an aptitude for languages, and I cruised effortlessly through that year. Second year Law subjects were a different matter. Having had such an easy academic path in nonmathematical disciplines, I had no real intellectual discipline and my grades reflected this. It didn't help that I was deeply unhappy. My car died and was replaced by a reliable and economical Holden with a body made mainly of brown lace, held together by habit. My reduced drinking owed more to lack of money than to personal temperance and I felt keenly the loneliness and anonymity of a city much larger than I was used to. Naturally I hadn't got into a simple and comfortable relationship with my girlfriends during my university years. The first was doomed from the start by her stricty religious parents, who found her a job at the other end of the country, and the other two liaisons were tormented and destructive because I disliked myself too much to give happiness any chance to develop. At the end of the second year, I went

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