I suppose you’ll call it my mid-life crisis. Plenty of people did. Not my wife, God bless her, nor even my two sons, although I am sure that they would have preferred me to buy something they could borrow at weekends; a low-slung, red sports car for example. But a petrol-head I emphatically am not.

My first car was an aged Morris Traveller, the model with the ash trim around the rear windows and doors, one previous owner; a careful, sedate and most reverend gentleman. In my estimation I have never owned a better designed and more attractive vehicle. I tell you this by way of explaining my character, so that you will better understand the decision that I made. I imagine you people reckon you can tell a lot from the kind of cars we drive.

Both Sandy and I were devastated when the wreckers finally came for Boris, for he was the conveyance of our courtship and of our early married years. Both sets of parents were insistent, however, that the imminent arrival of our first-born necessitated the purchase of something more reliable, something that would not break down should an emergency dash to hospital be required. Given that they were prepared to back their arguments with cold hard cash we had no choice but to acquiesce. So it was farewell to the intoxicating aroma of real leather upholstery when the sun shone brightly, as well as to the mushrooms that sprouted, whenever it rained, from the material on which the rear passenger windows slid. Regretfully we entered the era of Japanese design.

No, not my family, rather it was my work-mates who thought me crazy when I decided to give up my position at Consolidated Joineries and enrol in a degree course at university. When the monstrous howl from the mixed choir of woodworking machines fell silent at morning smoko, allowing the dust to briefly settle, and I announced my imminent departure to the tea room at large there was universal incomprehension, succinctly expressed by Colin as “English Literature, why the fuck?”

“Language,” immediately shouted Rose, our tea lady, the only woman in the room full of thirty or so joiners, apprentices and process workers. Rose considered herself too much of a lady to countenance the use of the F-word in her presence, although she was very free with “bugger” herself. One day, upset at being told off once too often, I asked her if she knew what a bugger was. She looked around at the other people at our table with a wary look on her face and said “well, you know, stupid, like, an idiot.” It was unkind of me I suppose to embarrass her so publicly, but I had been working on the overhead router for two days, the most dangerous machine in my area, moulding imitation panels onto full-length pantry doors, and she was one irritant too many. I just couldn’t resist. “It’s someone who fucks people in the arse.” You can imagine the reaction.

After Colin’s chastisement Bill moderated his comment to “he just wants to get his leg over some of those young student sheilas.” Although spoken tongue in cheek, this was generally perceived as a perfectly acceptable reason for a forty year old man to want to go to university. Tea-room conversation usually revolved around either sex or what had been on television the night before, both if a particularly raunchy foreign film had been late night on SBS. The Sex Before Sleep channel.

Having laughed off a certain amount of well-intentioned ridicule before the whistle blew for the end of smoko, as I walked back to my station I was tapped on the shoulder by old Derek, he of the two missing finger tips. I was about to re-start the spindle moulder and was contemplating the pallet of hardwood cupboard door panels I was still to shape when he shouted “Good on you son. Get out while you can still hold a pen,” holding up his right hand and waggling his stumps before pulling on his paper face-mask, plugging his ears with the company issue foam rubber bungs, and returning to his workbench. Derek only had three more years to retirement. You don’t see too many old joiners with the full complement of fingers. Lucky he’s left-handed.

I confess I was apprehensive myself. Twenty-five years on the tools since the start of my apprenticeship, bench-hand joinery was all I ever knew. Not that there was much hand-work done any more. Big machines. Big expensive machines. So, as with other fields, consolidation was the name of the game. Big fish swallowed little fish, growing fat on the entrails of their competitors.

Quality is still important of course, quality of looks that is, but not of longevity. And certainly not individuality. Machines just don’t do that. Not the sort of machines I’m talking about. The latest one in our factory had cost around a million dollars. It has two saws which work at right angles to each other, enabling it to cut sheets of melamine coated MDF into whatever size has been programmed into its computer. We’re making, say, fifty Morgana kitchens that week. The computer knows how many sides, backs, bottoms of whatever size are required for that many units, estimates the most economical way of cutting up each sheet and tells the operator how many sheets of the varying thicknesses it needs to do the job. All he has to do is provide them and hit the “on” button.

Load in, load out.

Which hardly requires Colin to have done his four year apprenticeship. The firm did send him to Germany for a week so that he could learn how to program its computer, and to give him practice in operating it. On his return mostly what he seemed to have learnt was the difference between lager and pilsner.

Communist? Me? Don’t be stupid. Show me any system not based on exploitation. The rise of the proletariat? I look around but I can’t see it. It’s been a bloody long time since a train driver sat in Parliament.

So what’s this all about? Just trying to show you why I applied to university.

No, I’ve always been a reader, ever since I was a little tacker. Young Adult Historical Fiction I guess they’d call it now. Adventure stories was how I saw it; Romans, Vikings, King Arthur and his Round Table, Pirates, Coral Island, Black Arrow all that. Then later Sherlock Holmes, and Poe, Ruth Rendell and all those other crime writers, and then along came the Russians. Oh God the Russians! One reading of Crime and Punishment and I was gone, swept away in a deluge of Dostoevsky, swamped by Tolstoy, gutted by Gogol, Turgenev, Lermontov, Chekhov. Against the tide of current practice I gave up the television and took up literature.

Sandy understood. She had her own concerns, the three f’s: family, food and fashion. And there was still plenty of the fourth, believe me, our interests might have diverged but our relationship was solid. Besides which, in the clothes that she made on her fancy sewing machine, she remained a real stunner. We didn’t bother with Foxtel in our house, she had a sewing room and I had a shed. A bit different from that of most blokes I grant you but hey, I did my carpentry at work thank you very much. As well as the obligatory bar fridge my shed had a carpet, a comfy chair, and bookcases. Then, when I enrolled, a desk and a laptop. The kids had the living room, with the telly and later on their computer games.

When you’ve got a degree it’s a kind of a passport, isn’t it? You go into some lawyer’s or accountant’s office, and they’ve got all these qualifications hanging up on the wall in neat black frames, all great big red wax seals on them, fancy coats of arms and beautiful signatures. Yes, like yours over there – This is to certify that Harold Green etc., etc. What’s it actually saying? “I’m fucking smart. I can fix your problems.” I sincerely hope you can, otherwise this is all a waste of time isn’t it?

Not that I wanted a passport as such, I wasn’t trying to prove myself to anyone else, but to myself, yes. I wanted my very own stamp of approval. I guess you’d say I was lacking self-confidence. And where are you supposed to get it from when your job requires less and less skill, when you gradually become more and more just a beast of burden, just a so-called unit of labour? Out of a bottle? Illicit sex? Shopping? Watching stupid reality TV shows? Entertainment? You’ve got to be joking.

I joined this sort of book club run by the WEA. Literary appreciation class. Bloody good actually, I really enjoyed it. Probably what gave me the idea. But inevitably you get into conversations about what you do for a living, and there’s always some middle management wanker who goes “you’re so lucky to be actually making things with your hands.”

Yeah, right, he earns five times what I do, works less hours, sits in a nice office with a pretty secretary bringing him coffee, doesn’t have to clock off when he goes to the doctor, the dentist, even the bloody hairdresser if he feels like it, doesn’t have to wear a face mask, ear plugs or safety glasses, doesn’t get covered in shit on a daily basis, doesn’t have to worry about losing the odd finger or two. I mean, O.K. he might get bored occasionally, but he could have swapped any time if he truly believed in the nobility of good honest labour. He didn’t.

Yes, alright, I’m being unfair, I know I am. To each our own alienation. Sorry about the rant, I only packed in the fags again a couple of days ago. Patches? What’s the point of them? It’s the nicotine I’m addicted to, not the breathing in and out.

Do you get any freebies from the drug companies? Travel and accommodation to conferences in exotic locations? No free pens and stationary with Bayer written all over them? No frequent flyer points per hundred diazepam prescriptions given out?

Sorry. Back to me then. So, university. Best years of my life. Wasted on the young. All that bullshit. But seriously, nothing to do all day but read books and think about them. It was like I’d died and gone to Heaven. Paid to read. Unbelievable. O.K., not really free, I’ve got a hell of a HECS debt to pay back. Not like the fuckers who passed that particular piece of legislation. Probably trying to keep people like me out of the system again, didn’t like rubbing shoulders with the hoi polio when they were there, don’t want their daughters sleeping with degenerates. Being a member of the young liberals must have been so uncool in the seventies. People probably laughed. So...

English literature. Man, what a gas. Some of the things that people have written, thought, dreamed up. Loved doing the renaissance. Shakespeare, o.k., we all know he’s brilliant, we’ve been told it over and over so we just kind of accept it as read, but the others are almost as good; Webster, Marlowe, Middleton, Kyd, I’d never read or seen anyone doing their stuff on the stage. Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. “Old excellent he was at a bone-ache.” There’s a line will stay with me forever.

Then there was the older stuff, medieval. Chaucer and so on. Difficult to read at first but the old bat, the tutor, steered us through it and after a while it becomes quite easy, if you put the time in. Funny woman, all holey cardigans and tweed skirts, bit of a moustache on her upper lip, wrinkled hands with liver spots. A blue-stocking maybe, isn’t that the word? Some of the students, the young ones, referred to her as the wicked witch of the west. Because she made them read the stuff when they didn’t really want to.

Oh well, their loss. ‘Cos it’s brilliant stuff. Makes you realise that people haven’t really changed much in six hundred years. I reckon that was my favourite course. I mean I told you I read all about King Arthur as a child, now here I was, forty years old reading the original Malory version. And Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I’d never read his story before. It’s so cool. I even had some original thoughts about that one, about what Gawain’s actual sin was. If you haven’t read it you wouldn’t understand but the gist of it was that he deliberately avoided confession, just when he needed it most. The tutor, the old wicked witch, wanted me to send my ideas off to some journal called Notes and Queries.

No, I didn’t. She said I would have to do some research first, get in touch with a Catholic priest who would have a clearer conception of sin in those days. It was quite obvious to me and I couldn’t really be bothered. Besides which there was Kat.

Who was Kat? Well here we come to the crux of the problem. I fell in love with Kat. She was some kind of post-punk, or maybe a Goth, whatever, all black hair, thick mascara and Doc Martin boots, and a real tough, take no prisoners attitude. But really sweet underneath it all, it was all a kind of self-protection I think, because she was small and also quite shy. Me too, the first few days I spent at uni I never even took my coat off.

Anyway by this time we were in third year and well over that initial shyness and I suddenly realised that not only was she beautiful but that I was in love with her. She was not as blown away by all this medieval stuff as I was but she was interested, she did actually read the books and entered into the discussions in our tute groups. There were plenty who didn’t. I guess it started from there, the verbal jousting we used to do in discussion groups. Carrying on afterwards over coffee or beers in the uni bar. I really liked her and she kind of made it obvious that she was interested in me too. Don’t think she’d ever met a real ‘worker’ before.

I was probably part of her rebellion, same as the way she looked. I bet her doctor father hated the tat she’d had done on her neck, and the piercing through her eyebrow. Truth be told so did I, although I never told her that. She really was beautiful, can’t understand why they want to disfigure themselves like that. Thank God she didn’t have one through her tongue, that’s got to be the worst.

And that’s kind of the point. She was only a year or two older than Robert, my eldest son. So no, I kissed her a couple of times, or rather she kissed me, but I never went to bed with her. Why not? It’s not that I didn’t want to. Jesus, kissing her was delicious. The skin of her face and hands so…velvet, so…her lips…exquisite. Made me feel like I was twenty again. That rush. That feeling like you’re the king of the world, like your heart expands till it wants to burst through your chest wall and carry you up and away like some giant red balloon hovering over the streets of Paris. Do you know that old film? Well it felt kind of like that. Just floating.

But you can’t can you? Not when you’re forty-three, been married for twenty-odd years to someone you still love and have two sons still at home. O.k., I could have fucked her, she made it clear she wanted to, more than clear actually, but that’s not who I am, and not how I was feeling. I loved her, so I couldn’t.

Up to that point I’d always thought that you could only love one person at a time, but it’s not true. Love isn’t exclusive is it? I love my sons, I still loved Sandy but a normal, quiet kind of love. With Kat it was gut-wrenching. Tearing. Painful. Like I could die. Like I was an adolescent again. Yeah, that’s it, it was like I was a teenager again, with all that angst, and fear, and longing, like some kind of demonic possession.

So, what to do? I decided to wait it out. I remembered when I was a kid I fell in love with this girl from the tennis club. I was fourteen probably, she was a couple of years older, and not in the least interested in a pimply kid. I’d got it really bad though, followed her home once to find out where she lived, and then hung around her street for a couple of weeks, just on the off-chance of seeing her. But nothing happened and after a few weeks the pain I was feeling went away. Like flowers, if you don’t water them they wither. At least that’s what I thought.

So I started to avoid her. God it was hard. When that course finished I found out which she was enrolling in next, and chose different ones. Stopped going to the uni bar. Took sandwiches and a flask of tea instead of frequenting the café. Threw myself even more into my work, only going into uni when I really had too, spent my time working in my shed. Crying, sometimes, quietly, in my shed.

Sandy noticed of course, how could she not? But was too sensible to question me much. I gave up smoking for the first time then, to give myself an excuse for my erratic behaviour. The family bought it, Andy even gave up in sympathy to help me out, which was a bloody good thing because he stayed off them even when I eventually relapsed.

Kat graduated at the end of that year, whereas they offered me another year to do honours. What do you call it, “displacement activity”?

I don’t know, I guess she was kind of pissed off with me for avoiding her because on her last day she sought me out, tracked me down in the quiet study area in the library. She kissed me one last time, and pressed something into my hand “to remember me by” and, laughing, skipped away. Stunned, I looked down at my hand and saw that she had presented me with a pair of the daintiest white lace knickers that I had ever seen. Something that a bride might wear on her wedding day. And they were warm.

Trouble is I just can’t forget her. Even now three years later. It wasn’t like before, the pain never went away. I see her, now and again, walking through town, minus the eyebrow ring, pushing a baby in a stroller. Married a doctor of course. Looks at me with a sort of wistful look in her eyes, says a word or two about the glories of medieval romance. And I laugh and wish her well, and don’t tell her that I’m now on the dole, although she must realise that I didn’t go back to being a bench-hand joiner. Otherwise I wouldn’t have all this time to wander around the streets, or to consult with a psychiatrist.