By Hugh Bingham, who hit 80 last Wednesday
So what actually is ARBMD? – It was a surprise diagnosis for a Fast Ageing Man. My Specialist wasn’t surprised – the walking stick and the staggers gave me away – “You may have age-related balance mechanism disorder,” he said. The dreaded ARBMD.
How could this be so?
> Because at age 20 in Paris I fell hopelessly in love with Yvette,an exquisite girl from the Bois ce Bologna, who was an interpreter at the 1948 first full meeting of the United Nations, where I was a lowly but adventurous Fleet Street messenger. I could only tell her how I felt by drawing pictures because my schoolboy French started with “Je t’aime” and ended with “The pen of my aunt is at the bottom of the garden.” (“La plume de ma tante est au dessous (de) le jardin !!). Amazing how much progress I made with that.
OR
> Because at age 50, I joined a race to the top of Victoria’s Mt Buller (6,300 ft) which I managed to climb - but fell most of the way down.
OR
> Because I went forehead to forehead with my very expensive but gentle Poll Hereford bull to persuade him out of the cattle race when he had become stuck because he was so bullish big.
OR
> Because in 1966, I danced a mazurka with my amazing Armenian interpreter Eugene Poznakoff in knee-deep snow, with an opened bottle of vodka in each hand, under the wing of a giant Turpolof airjet after a nightmarish landing in a Siberian snowstorm at Bratsk.
OR
> Because I almost always landed on my head when my Cross Country Snow Trekking instructor at Falls Creek, Victorian Alps, tried vainly to teach me to jump on skis over gullies and streams.
OR
> Because I told Treasurer Paul Keating to get stuffed when he telephoned to abuse me for detailing the GST impact on indexed beer and petrol excise duties which collapsed his Tax Summit GST initiative. And by “abused” I mean every expletive from A to Z/.
That’s enough reason, don’t you think?
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