Dignity – once lost it can never be regained. It used to be that retirement was a gentle process in which you quietly accepted the rewards of a lifetime’s work. Sometimes, however, retirement sees the shackles of civility finally loosed and the inner feral that has for decades lain dormant given permission to go absolutely berserk. A gentle walk into the sunset is not for all. Some prefer to leave whilst kicking the windows in and setting fire to the curtains. I don’t for a moment suggest that everyone treats retirement as an invitation to vandalism. But when a former politician decides to abandon the restraints of public life and exact revenge on everything from former co-workers to airline food, the results are bound to be less than dignified.
Dignity – once lost it can never be regained. It used to be that retirement was a gentle process in which you quietly accepted the rewards of a lifetime’s work. Sometimes, however, retirement sees the shackles of civility finally loosed and the inner feral that has for decades lain dormant given permission to go absolutely berserk. A gentle walk into the sunset is not for all. Some prefer to leave whilst kicking the windows in and setting fire to the curtains. I don’t for a moment suggest that everyone treats retirement as an invitation to vandalism. But when a former politician decides to abandon the restraints of public life and exact revenge on everything from former co-workers to airline food, the results are bound to be less than dignified.
Personally, I don’t keep a diary. Even if I did, I’d be unlikely to publish it so all the world could marvel at every thought that rolled through my mind like tumbleweeds across a desert. Truth is, I’m forever contemplating the base, the useless and the downright stupid. My whole life is a never-ending struggle to keep my idle thoughts and decrepit logic trapped between my ears, rather than allow it to escape over my lips. In a million years, it’d never occur to me to write these thoughts down, much less publish them. Mystique, I feel, is a highly underrated quality.
I’ve never met our former Foreign Minister, Bob Carr. Despite this, I feel I know far too much about him. For example, I was blissfully unaware that amongst our chief diplomat’s ambitions were to have a concave abdomen and obliques sculpted from granite. Having said that, I can see how carrying a permanent six-pack under your shirt may be crucial to strong international relations. It’s a well-known fact that all major meetings with Vladimir Putin are conducted shirtless. It would be a shame if we gave the Russians a tactical advantage simply because our representative had a tragic case of custard-guts. Indeed, were Mr. Carr still this nation’s Foreign Minister, he would need only to crack a walnut with his washboard stomach in order to convince the Russian Prime Minister to withdraw from the Crimea. That’s how foreign affairs work.
Declaring to the world at large that you look good without a shirt on is one thing. Have a good old-fashioned whinge about a lack of steel cut organic oats or a shortage of quality jim jams can make you seem a little petty. That he should take the trouble to write a letter of complaint to an airline because there were no subtitles on the in-flight entertainment screening of Wagner’s ‘Siegfried’ is not much mildly disappointing as it is gob-smackingly strange and the kind of behviour that you normally associate with having far too much time on your hands. I’m not sure what’s more alarming – that our Foreign Minister should complain about the absence of subtitles for ‘Siegfried’ or that he should need subtitles to begin with. Anyone with even the most basic appreciation of international relations knows that Siegfried is the Vice President in charge of Public Relations and Terror at KAOS.
But diaries need not be monuments to hubris. Sue Townsend kept a diary for years; just not her own. It belonged, instead, to Adrian Mole. Like our former Foreign Minister, Adrian saw himself as something of an intellectual. Indeed, the young Mole believed his intellectual heft prevented him from fitting in better with the world at large. Like Bob, Adrian regarded his Prime Minister as an enemy. To be fair, though, Adrian Mole was thirteen and not a Cabinet Minister.
Sue Townsend’s diaries may not have been her own, but they revealed a lot about what it was to be a teenage boy growing up in the 1980s. They were funny; full of details that would have embarrassed Adrian if, in fact, he was real. But the value of a good diary lies not in the individual humiliations but the things we have in common. For the most part, what we share are our aspiration to get things right, our glorious ability to get things wrong regardless and our ceaseless optimism that things will get better. As much as Adrian’s problems were his own, it was impossible not to relate to him on some level. That was Sue Townsend’s genius. It’s been decades since I read her work, but I loved those books as a teenager. She passed away last week. If she’d read Bob Carr’s diary, she might well have wished that she’d written it first. She would, at least, have got a laugh out of it.
So what now for Bob Carr? Given the ashes of several bridges now lie behind him; a sequel to his diary seems unlikely. But there are other options. TV host David Letterman is retiring and will be replaced by the genius Stephen Colbert. This means that the job of hosting ‘The Colbert Report’ is wide open for a certain pajama-loving, oat-quaffing former Foreign Minister. It’s a job suited to the world’s leading exponent of the Romanian dead lift because, much like Australian Senate, no election is required. In his tailored suit or, should he prefer, silk-cut pajamas, Bob Carr can share his thoughts as they come to him. It will be hard work, but nothing someone with the energy of sixteen gladiators can’t handle. And as he goes about his new profession as talk show host, it will be with dignity. Always dignity.