by Alan Cornell

Published as an ebook by October Grey Media Pty Ltd

"The bridge to go and four minutes left on the clock! Will versus instinct! A bloodline bred within an inch of sanity confronting the dangerous unpredictability of stupidity! And all we can do is watch and wait, in an atmosphere as charged as an electric fence, as Blossom, the Border Collie from Koonwarra, fixes her gaze on her woolly headed prey!"

Ches Fanning had broadcast the Olympics.

Ches Fanning had covered world title fights.

Ches Fanning had called 19 grand finals, 2 World Cups, 4 Commonwealth Games, 8 Davis Cup ties, 62 test matches and presented more prime time sports reports than John Daly has had hot dinners.

And here I was covering the Mirboo North Sheep Dog Trials for 3GG Gippsland and the Latrobe Valley.

At least Macavaney and McGuire would never hear my desperate attempts to create gripping theatre of the mind from fifteen interminable minutes of a dog crouched in the grass while three mindless Corriedale sheep wandered lonely as a cloud to a packed audience of seventeen gum-booted farmers and a travelling salesman.

"Ge’back!"

The farmer's gravel voice split the silence, adding blessed atmosphere to the broadcast as Blossom ge’backed, belly scraping the grass, a coiled spring, eyes never missing a movement as her nervous quarry weighed the options at the last obstacle - negotiate a slatted timber hump between two fences leading to a patch of grass identical to the one they were standing on now, or spring in any other direction that occurred to their small brains. Heads rigid, eyes rolling, they weighed the options.

Cross the friggin' bridge ya daggy buggers, I yawned to myself.

With which one possibly psychic animal crossed the bridge and trotted into the pen on the other side, her companions following like, well, sheep.

Gratefully I leaned into the microphone as the farmer swung the gate behind them. "Put your hands together for Joe Hannaford and Blossom ladies and gentlemen, and stand by for some big points from the judges."

The crowd, such as it was, broke into tumultuless applause as I took the chance for a quick trip to the refreshment tent for a teabag and a piece of sponge to sustain myself for four more dogs and another dozen dozy sheep.

With only one person ahead of me and four minutes of commercials for fertilizer, fencing wire, tractor parts and artificial insemination to fill, I was relaxed about time. No matter that the pink-haired punk-shirted teenager behind the trestle dispensed the hot water as sparingly as if it were the blood of Kurt Cobain himself. Never mind her ineffective rummaging through a green plastic ice cream tubful of red-tagged English Breakfast bags - when even from two back I could plainly see the white ice cream tub next to it practically overflowed with the yellow Earl Grey teabags she was looking for. But finally bag and water were joined in tepid union, change negotiated and the teenager turned squarely towards me, thumbs tucked into frayed jeans that already hung dangerously low on exposed hips.

I brushed the wavy brown lock that flopped low over my left eye. It’s sort of a trademark of mine. Gives the impression of one eyebrow permanently raised in a kind of rakish Clark Kent way I rather like. The girl was actually quite pretty underneath the purple eye shadow and black lip-gloss, though twenty years ago the only one at a show like this with a ring through the nose would have been competing for a ribbon.

"Earl Grey or English Breakfast?"

Another time I might have opted for the latter, but judging that the lass had now safely established the whereabouts of the Earl Grey, I chose expediency over flavour and soon enough the urn was dribbling again.

"I know you." I turned to the ruddy, cloth-capped face behind me. "Weren't you...um...somebody?"

"That's me, yeah. Ches Fanning, Channel Ten. Well, I'm freelance now."

"There you go. English Breakfast," interrupted the Iron Maiden.

"Geez, what are you doing way down here in Gippsland?"

What indeed!

"Lovely," I said, and scurried sheepishly back to the safety of the OB van.

There comes a time in every man's life when he must resolve himself. Reconcile his strengths and shortcomings, discern his purpose, comprehend his own personal truth. When the myriad parts that comprise him, no matter how diverse and contradictory, meld into one, stronger self, whole and complete, where personal aspirations and bitter realities embrace and cohabit.

I hadn't reached that point.

If anything I was heading in the wrong direction, in the sort of car often favoured by directionless middle-aged men.

Perhaps it sounds trivial to swerve mid-thought from my emotional well-being to the type of car I drive. Women in particular, God love ’em, often struggle to understand how a man can have such an intense relationship with a machine. But surely they’re the reason for it! What else could have inspired Carl Benz in what is essentially man's attempt to repackage all his desires - sensuous contours, the promise of excitement, speed, escape – into something he can actually understand. With the added bonus of a driver's seat. If women came with a steering wheel and a brake, could be turned on and turned off at will, could be taken out on sunny days and put away again behind a roller door; if women were made of cogs and cables and metal and chrome, the sum of which is logical and predictable and therefore fixable with the help of a manual and a good mechanic, man's life, in the gender sense, would be everything the Lord intended. If God had ripped out Adam's rib and fashioned it into a Porsche 911 the apple would still hang ruddily on the tree and the fall of man would describe no more than a momentary stumble on a protruding root.

So we call our cars models, and passion is the emotion they inspire. We choose them with all the love and deliberation of a marriage partner, to represent -or wittingly misrepresent - who we are. And for me, that was a 1969 Datsun Fairlady!

True, as sports cars go, the Fairlady was gone almost as quickly as it had come, making way for the far more successful 240Z. But in its short life it actually outperformed the MGB, handled better than a TR5 and made the Austin-Healey look like a surprised frog with a moustache. Yet for some reason a bloke has to be confident of his masculinity to drive one and prepared to defend her honour. I reckon I am, on both counts. This forty-something body may be a sniff past its athletic prime, but you can see where it's been. And the gift of the gab is as healthy as ever.

I also have a pretty good head for trivia on any sport from formula one to farnarkling. If you want to know about the African states or the Opposition's position on collective bargaining, there's not a lot of point in asking me. But if you've got a bet riding on how many Lindsay Kline made in the tied test or who came last in the Melbourne Cup of 1991, Chesterman Fanning is definitely your man.

Sadly there's not a lot of call for such a combination. But one party who did call, bless her earnest little 1980s heart, was the ABC sports department. I'd been carving out a pretty respectable reputation in Shield cricket until unsuccessful reconstructive surgery cut my career off at the knees. So the prospect of a job in the media that involved nothing more challenging than watching sport all day every day certainly eased the pain. And, in time, live radio crosses led to TV special comments led to Sports Tonight led to a regular seat at the Channel Ten news desk for their nightly sports report. I did that for ten years. Then came economic rationalism, which managed to clear my brownly-waved head as easily as Steve Hooker vaulting his way to Gold in Beijing. And when the network powers-that-be axed state bulletins like a blow from Jack O'Toole in favour of a national report, I didn't known what had hit me. Unlike my ex-pugilist Sydney counterpart Anthony Bunker who was in there punching before I even knew the fight had started, if you'll forgive a possible excess of sporting metaphors. Even now, several years down the track, I struggle to grasp where it all went wrong.

So there we were, me and the topless old Lady, slipping through the green grandeur of Victoria's south-east, forelock flapping gaily in the breeze. Let's make that jauntily. With no appointments till the races at Hanging Rock next Thursday and no-one waiting at my Richmond rental opposite the MCG, I found myself, without really thinking, heading south from Leongatha, in the opposite direction from home. Which in any case was just a euphemism for an empty apartment, an empty fridge and an empty life. Time heals all wounds. Says who? My knee still ached, my pride still smarted, and the scar on my heart some four years on flared, red and raw, whenever I saw Helen on the program she co-hosted Monday to Friday on daytime TV. Beautiful, intelligent, funny Helen. All of which I'd always known. Perhaps if I'd mentioned it more. Perhaps if I'd been around enough to mention it more. Perhaps if Anthony Bunker hadn't been around enough to mention it more than I did.

For some life is a waiter, standing by with silver tray laden with milk and honey for the taking. Others have to do the waiting themselves, for scraps that never come, only ever getting close for the perverse purpose of having them snatched away at the last moment. Maybe it was a bad day, but somehow I'd forgotten my few happy years as waitee under the crippling disappointment of a sun that these days failed to shine on the long winter of my discontent.

And so, with my own private cloud hovering over the old Lady in an otherwise clear sky, I continued blindly through some of the most striking countryside in Australia. Finally stopping at a bleak cement rendered antiquity of a pub remarkable only for the giant mullet beached improbably on its roof. I clipped down the tonneau, entered the Fish Creek Hotel and asked for a room.