Stumbling on melons

News recently in:

Police have arrested disgraced ex-detective Roger Rogerson at his home in Sydney’s south-west, over the alleged murder of Sydney student Jamie Gao.

Shortly before 11am, about 10 officers arrived at the premises and went inside.

A short time later, he was escorted from the Padstow Heights home in handcuffs.

Rogerson’s solicitor is quoted as saying that “arrangements had been made” for Rogerson to hand himself in at noon at Surry Hills Police Centre. That migrht mean no more than that he had told the police that was what Rogerson would do, but it’s not as if Rogerson’s house hadn’t already been searched so there can have been little to lose in waiting for this to happen before deploying such substantial police resources.

Rogerson is far from being my favourite person, but what was the point of all this? Is it really necessary to handcuff every arrested person? I think we are seeing an Americanisation of law enforcement practices: life imitates art – if you can call those reality police programs that. It would be a shame if the (amongst other things, highly prejudicial) “Perp walk” were to become the norm in Australia.

ABC TV has been broadcasting last year’s Opera Australia recordings, though with remarkably little publicity. Last week I saw most of Don Pasquale, which I missed last year owing to a trip to China.

Today I caught A Masked Ball.

The video version included some footage which could never have been seen by the audience (since it was from micro cameras carried by cast members or mounted on bits of the set).

Some of the more topical bits of the production (the “Occupy” “Joker” face) already seemed a bit dated, but over all I thought the production, and especially the performances, stood up really well, which is not always the case with recordings of things which one has enjoyed live (1, 2, 3 & 4).

My father grew up on a half-million-acre sheep station at Pindar, near Mullewa, inland from Geraldton and about 500 km north-ish from Perth. He says he hardly ever wore shoes until he went off to boarding school at about the age of eight which is probably why the people he most admired were a travelling group of Hawaiian fire-walkers. He spent summers in Perth. For the rest of the year he saw few children his own age apart from his younger brother. Maybe because they were in this way forced on each other, I don’t think they got on very well at all in their childhood.

My father sent off to join a club sponsored by the producers of Ovaltine and yearned for the day when he could hail a clubmate (recognizable by the badge) and give the required greeting, which he assures me was “Ovaltiney Ovaltiney!”

In relatively less isolated circumstances in Sydney in the 1960s I joined the Puffin Club. At least I did know one member, even if she had just returned from a year in England where there was some chance to participate in club activities.

Nowadays I sometimes get close to that frisson of recognition when on public transport I spot a fellow-reader of the London Review of Books. Subscription to this is remarkably good value, probably because its Editor, Mary Kay Willmers, has financed it for most of its 30-odd-year existence by a loan from her family trust which now amounts to about £27 million (that figure’s from memory).

The days of the magazine’s famously quirky personal ads are now over – killed I guess by the internet but possibly also by the increasing difficulty of surpassing previous efforts. At one point, the magazine’s display ads were conspicuously (or so it seemed to me) peppered with ads dealing with psychoanalysis of one sort of another. Maybe this was in the wake of a memorable article from 2001 Saving Masud Khan. A number of other “house” authors have given accounts of their own psychiatric/psychoanalytic travails.

There is something a bit out of the ordinary, even in this vein, in the latest issue.

It is given the internet equivalent of a front-cover title The Belgrano and me and is a “Diary” entry (there is one in each issue) by one Stephen Sharp.

The source of the title can be seen from the opening sentences of the first paragraph:

My problems began in 1984 when I wrote letters to Francis Pym and Sarah Kennedy about the Falklands War and Sir Robin Day’s part in it. Sarah was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking about me when she spoke of a young man who had just lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show. I took this to mean the PM had given the order to sink the Belgrano. But Mr Pym was speaking in a different context. Paul Daniels, who was also a guest, said: ‘Something strange is going to happen.’ From that day on all the radio and TV channels seemed to be talking about me.

That’s just the beginning of a long saga of unusual beliefs and various confinements in mental institutions and medication regimes and their consequences. It’s obviously a well-rehearsed tale, but there’s a twist in the end which I don’t want to steal from Mr Sharp, described in the sidebar as

a former post office clerk. He attends groups run by the mental health charity Rethink. He has left his diary to the LRB in his will.

I recommend it.