Ah, the joys of the crisp winter morning walk to the gym: barely a car on the road, the world is quiet and peaceful.
The pre-dawn sky split only by the celestial jewels of the stars, the light of which was emitted hundreds and even thousands of years ago and has travelled countless kilometres through the silent vacuum of space to convey the majesty of the universe to us – and, of course, the pink neon light blazing away and proudly proclaiming that the local cosmetics surgery is ‘injecting now!’.1
Yes, the bakery isn’t open yet, nor is the coffee shop, and the petrol station is still in unstaffed mode – but your lips can be as fat as you need them to be. I don’t know what this says about us as a society, but I suspect it isn’t good, and is probably yet another reason why whatever other intelligent life-forms there are in the universe have elected not to contact us.
This time of year isn’t all about beautiful mornings and lips the size of life preservers, however; it also means that it is the middle of the year and thus time to get our taxes done. These days this is relatively simple, because my wife and I get our tax done by an accountant, and the only stress involved is actually getting in touch with our accountant who, like all accountants, is very busy around this time of the year and less likely to make contact than the aliens.
I do feel for accountants here, because for the rest of the year they sit there, with reams of great advice that will actually save people money, set them up for retirement and that sort of thing, and everybody ignores them unless they are telling a joke calling for a particularly boring participant. Then, tax time comes, and all of a sudden people are chasing accountants with all the intense desperation of Anthony Albanese trying to get an invite to Donald Trump’s treehouse. No wonder they hide at this time of year.
Tax time used to be far more stressful when I did my own taxes, not – and I stress this to any ATO people reading this, and who I point out are looking particularly good today – because I lied on it or anything, but because my maths skills are somewhere between your average counting horse and those Muppets on Sesame Street who need help from The Count to get from zero to seven. So I am worried that I got something wrong once, and that it is sufficiently simple that the ATO will not believe any animal capable of bipedal motion could get it wrong other than deliberately.
My maths wasn’t always bad – it was quite good right up until year nine when maths got harder and, in a perhaps not un-related development, I started playing hockey.
Now, hockey at a high level is a great game of speed, skill and strategy; at the beginners’ level at an all-boys high school it is adolescent males enthusiastically whacking each other about the head with sticks. By eerie coincidence, I was encouraged to play hockey by my year nine maths teacher, who was also an Olympic silver medallist in hockey. I suppose there are two conclusions there: either whacks to the head in hockey destroyed my mathematical abilities, or my teacher figured that my maths skills couldn’t get any worse so I may as well play hockey.
You might be thinking that if my maths skills were that bad I would have been in trouble by now, but the thing is back then you filled tax returns out by hand. This gives me an edge because my handwriting skills give my maths skills a real run for their money. My handwriting looks as if a not especially clever mouse had consumed a few too many of whatever it is that mice consume after a hard day on the treadmill, and then staggered across and ink pad and then straight on to the paper.
The upshot is that even the aliens who refuse to contact us because of our collagen addictions would not be able to understand it. I suspect the ATO simply looked at the scrawl, then at my group certificate, had a bit of a snicker and let it go figuring that nobody would lie over such a tiny amount of money.
I know what you are thinking: what have aliens got to do with collagen, apart from making humans look like them? I refer you to the start of the column on that, but you probably also thinking, ‘why is your handwriting so bad?’
Well, partly because I played cricket and did a little wicket-keeping, which means my fingers look like one of those brain-game type puzzles where you have to untangle pieces of metal wound together. The other reason is law school.
This will surprise youngsters, but in my day we had to go to things called ‘lectures’ and ‘take notes’ for ‘future study’ which admittedly we ‘didn’t do’. What we did do, in our naiveté, is assume everything our lecturers said was pure gold2 and thus attempted to transcribe it verbatim – to the point that if one of them had suddenly commenced a recitation of The Iliad, we’d have duly churned it out.
Just as Einstein showed that mass warps space, and space and time are equivalent, so time warps handwriting, meaning the faster you write the less legible your work, which is why my lecture notes look like something scientists found on the crashed flying saucer at Roswell. Future scientists studying what will then be known as the Collagen Age will no doubt look at my notes carefully, intrigued by the strange hieroglyphics and convinced they hold the key to what killed the Collagen People (my guess is a high-intensity lamp), never realising that they are simply a wildly inaccurate description of mere equities.
In any event, law school ruined my handwriting, and I am sure that there is some sort of class action that can be brought, which I will get right on to once I find my accountant and do my tax return. Anyone know the address of Donald Trump’s treehouse?
© Shane Budden 2025
Footnotes
1 Yes, that is a long sentence, but longer sentences are what the people voted for.
2 It was not.
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