The Little World

You don’t need to fill out an application form – just sitting there with cement on your fingers and tears streaming down your face is enough.

You’re one of us. Now peel that ruined canopy off your jumper and tell us why you decided to do this to yourself.

You had a chance to escape. You saw what this sort of thing could lead to when you were a little kid. You burst into tears then and no-body thought worse of you. It is different now. When you are overcome with emotion they take your beer away and tie you to the chair.

The things that went wrong then go wrong now, The chief difference is you are paying for them and at 10 X the price. And expectations are far higher – what you got away with in 1959 would get you scorned now. Your only advantage is the ability to lie.

As a kid, your lies were pretty transparent. Everyone knew when were trying to get out of trouble – and no-one ever believed that the dog ate your homework. Unless you wrote your mathematics assignment on liverwurst, your chance of getting out of it were pretty slim.

Now you can bullshit and baffle with the best of them – having done so while in work for the last 40 years. Retirement has honed your skills as you wheedle money out of Centrelink and your wife in equal measure. You can get a new model kit in the door and onto a stash shelf without getting tomahawked. You can go to the hobby shop under the pretext of spending time in a striptease club. You’re a pro.

Time to join the hobby club and come out of the closet – or the stash room, as it happens. We understand you…if not ourselves. We will never tell on you. And we have a spare bottle of acetone in case you superglue your fingers to a Spitfire…