Dear Author

Welcome to our Society! We are thrilled to have you as a member.

The Society for People Who Write Books About Things They Did For a Year is a thriving organisation. Since its inception in 1991, when our esteemed chairman, Peter Mayle, took off to Provence, we have been growing and growing!

You may wish to look through our catalogue. It includes titles such as Eat, Pray, Love (spiritual journey); Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (cookery; and now a major movie!); The Year of Living Biblically (following the Bible’s tenets to the letter), and Just Do It (an inclusion that divided the admissions committee, as the author had sex every day for only 100 days rather than the traditional 365). We will shortly be admitting the previously-rejected Sean Aiken, as his One-Week Job Project (doing 52 different jobs for one week each) is finally due to be transferred from an organic endeavour of youthful idealism into the proper print format recognized by the Society. We also have high hopes for the Around Oz On A Battered Fish bloggers, who drove around the coastline of Australia in an environmentally-friendly car powered by waste vegetable oil (except when they had to use diesel!).

Our selection process is a rigorous one, and we are proud to have rejected My Year Of Just Doing My Job, Raising The Kids, Getting Groceries, And Looking After My Mum Etc.

Forthcoming titles include Underequipped and Ridiculed: A Year Painting Rowboats In A Landlocked Finnish Village; Living Canadian: 365 Days, Eh?; and Twelve Months of Relentlessly Quoting the Goons.

You will be pleased to hear that both of your proposals have been accepted by the Committee! Your initial idea to take a year off to write a book, and then write a book about the year in which you wrote a book, is inspired. And your second, to spend a year reading 365 books people have written about things they did for a year, and then write a book about it, shows admirable commitment to the Society’s cause, alongside a healthy grasp of a very comical metatextual conceit! Dear Author, we are impressed. A position on the Society’s Steering Committee for the Promotion of Doing Things For A Year seems likely to be in your future.

Membership expires on an annual basis.

Sincerely,

The Society for People Who Write Books About Things They Did For A Year

meanwhile back in the AFL...

I am sorry to report that the Adelaide Crows have 'devoured' my new bezzies, the 'undermanned' Fremantle Dockers.

I KNOW. Try to contain your sorrow.

The only real way I have to keep up with all this pain and heartache is through WA Today's online reporting. It seems pretty comprehensive. It uses the words 'obliterate' and 'humiliated', which can't be good. I suspect Shoutah, having run through his entire extensive vocabulary of insults for his beloved team, is at the very least going to be unable to go in to work this week, and at worst has lost his everloving mind, lifting a ceremonial two-by-four of shame and murmuring a soft, sad, '...like a pack of galaaaahhhhs...' before beating himself square about the chin with it.

But look at this:

"Fremantle's final score was the lowest in their (sic) history, comfortably less than the 3.7 (25) compiled against Geelong in round 20 of 2004, and the 117-point deficit equalled a round six drubbing by West Coast as their worst loss.

Their halftime return of 0.1 (1) was the most meagre in a league fixture since Fitzroy went scoreless against Essendon in round one 1995."

I could not love these sentences more, nor be more curious. What in the name of all that is good can it all mean? What other team sport has scoring represented by dual numbers employing both decimal points and brackets? What mystical equation brings us from the one number to its enbracketed relative? It's like a freaking MENSA question: "If 3.7 is to 25 as 0.1 is to 1, then 4.5 is to ... as 2.2 is to ...?"

Just about the only word I understand in the whole of the above is "Essendon", which is only because an acquaintance's dad played for the team in the forties.

I remain undaunted. Through WA Today's report, I've picked up a few more bits of correct terminology - it seems each quarter is actually called a 'term' - and I can begin to fill in position names, replacing the English rugby/ Canadian football tangle of wingers and quarterbacks in my head with correct AFL nomenclature:

"Fremantle entered the game minus a host of big names, none more significant than that of their gargantuan ruckman Aaron Sandilands."

Aha! I shall diligently scribble 'gargantuan ruckman' in my notebook. Right alongside 'youthful hobbledehoy' (to be found in the forward line) and 'inscrutable filibuster' (on the flank).

The Dockers website is also a mine of useful information, quoting the coach:

"...an inability to move the ball forward efficiently and combat Adelaide's structures were the most frustrating aspects."

Really? Not 'moving the ball forward efficiently' was frustrating? Well, I imagine it would be, since that is more or less the entire point of the game.

I LOVE this sport.

it's time to play the music

Sometimes, there is quite simply nothing in the entire world that is better than the Muppets.