Trial Pictures

This is the rocks at Port Labatt, looking down from the lookout. This is the only permanent colony of sea lions on the Australian mainland, and you can stand watching them for hours; as the young frolic in the icy cold pools, the huge males protect their harems and fat mums laze about in the cold. It's exceptionally beautiful, and the sea lions are fascinating to watch. It was about 15 minutes away from where we were staying.

There weren't other things, other reasons, I felt sweaty in the night and there was the constant fear that the plague had reached here, that we, who were going to live forever, would instead be shortened and the life that we had welcomed, that we had known would always be ours, from the special voices in childhood to the sense of destiny as an adult, to the moments when you came for me and said, I love you, how rare it had been across the decades, from the time when we had sat on bar stools and batted them away, and had been, basically, with all the empathy of youth and the lure of looks, had been everywhere, staring down at the sea lions and thinking, this is special, if cold, with the wind whipping across the lookout and the pair of us wrapped in ungainly blankets as we looked down in the early morning light in astonishment at what was basically a National Geographic movie taking place before our eyes.

We didn't look young anymore, although we could remember how much we had taken it for granted. We didn't have any grand hopes for the future, because the future was now and Col was sick, coughing as the wind whipped off the sea. The area was all national park now, roped off, because some of the locals had once gone around shooting the sea lions, for no reason that anyone could explain, and here, I just wanted to escape everything my life had become; being at work early, being told what to do by people 20 years my junior, people who wouldn't know a story if it sat on their face, of dredging the coal mine to write another story about some subject he couldn't have cared less about; years passing without a pay rise, without a friendly word from the hierarchy who inhabited their fear laden shelves; and with it, the humiliation of age. Your best times are past. The golden age is gone. The daily humiliations are all part of it. Anyone tried to tell me how tough their life was; and I just said, I'm over 50 and I've got two kids to look after and I'm at work by 7.30 in the morning and you spineless whingers have no idea what you're talking about. Yet I paid taxes to support them. And the wind whipped off the sea, and I didn't, really didn't, want to go back to the life I had fled. I didn't want to go back to my own craven mind in a city full of strangers. Nor did I want to face the consequences of a life poorly lived, or more precisely poorly planned; so in the end we stood and stared at the sea lions far below us; and finally said: is it time for tea and toast? Bundled ourselves back into our beat up old car, and headed back to the verandah we could have happily inhabited for the rest of our days.