The Occasional Masthead

The unrelenting, constant, overwhelming, repeated negativity.

Is it a Brisbane thing, an Australian thing, a human thing, or just the habit of those I know?

I’m on a very short count down to the evening where I go through customs and onto a plane, and fly away into a new life. I know that I am jumping without a parachute, and that I’m trusting to my habit of arsing things through at the last moment, relying on informed laziness. So yes, your words of caution are justified.

But please, could you not be encouraging, rather than relentlessly discouraging? Or at the very least not line up like a Greek chorus to tell me that your cousin said the work situation is grim, that your mum said that she heard that public transport is expensive, that your brother reckons the bottom is going to fall out of the housing market here?

This whole exercise is hard enough as it is, and has been relentlessly grinding for the entire year, without people lined up beside the road chanting “you are doomed, you are doomed, you are doomed”