Mut­ton wrapped up as lamb, make a silk purse from a sow’s ear … there are plenty of idioms about ugli­ness want­ing to be some­thing else. Wish­ing Cin­derella style, any num­ber of unlucky maid­ens are cel­e­brated in fairy­tales for a mid­night trans­for­ma­tions, though some­times they have to kiss a frog. Now as one of the world’s cer­ti­fied uglies, the man-brand, I should have flocked together long ago with some of those unblessed ladies. If truth be told though I’ve never been able to get hot and flus­tered about barn­yard ani­mals, cane toads, or moun­tains of human flesh (of either gen­der). Yup, it’s unrea­son­able and polit­i­cally incor­rect, but there you go. In unex­pected cor­ners of the Ark Earth I strike up mar­vel­lous con­ver­sa­tions, meet hero­ines and vil­lains, revel in the human drama with every imag­in­able mishapen kind of crit­ter, but when it comes to the hot flame of romance, the visu­als can stir and quench one’s heart in ways that defy rea­son. In vain my mother, despair­ing at my fail­ure to be decently mar­ried by a proper age, pleaded that all cats are grey in the dark.

These obser­va­tions come from sit­ting on the con­course at Cen­tral Rail­way Sta­tion, Bris­bane, a bum-park­ing spot I’ve come to know well after miss­ing yet another hourly train by thirty sec­onds for the umteenth time. The late evening exhi­bi­tion at Cen­tral is some­thing to behold. Here is the mat­ing parade, Aus­tralian style. These are not mid­dle-aged mums on for­lorn week­end mag­a­zine diets, or the wad­dling moun­tains of flesh a gen­er­a­tion older. No, it’s twenty-one year old chick­ens head­ing off to their com­pul­sory mosh pits of binge drink­ing and bad music. They come wrapped like sushi rolls in frag­ile wisps of cloth that stop two cen­time­tres below their crotches, with the top lopped off for a gen­er­ous bulge of tit cleav­age. Shoals of them teeter past on stilet­tos. I should be vibrat­ing like a tun­ing fork, but it’s limp sausage time, worse, repul­sion. I’m sure they all love their cats and even make their beds some­times, but these girls are FAT, fat as in an overfed, self-indul­gent ani­mal-pop­u­la­tion-out-of-con­trol herd. The genes that forever bar us from movie star good looks, me or them, come with a throw of the cos­mic dice, but the glut­tony and sloth that grows slobs is all our own mak­ing. Maybe the wist­ful eye of blokes like me is not so new either. With his uncanny knack for catch­ing the soul of the Ark Earth in a res­o­nant phrase or two, Rud­yard Kipling said it all in 1890 in Man­dalay:

I am sick o’ wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’-stones,
An’ the blasted Heng­lish driz­zle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho’ I walks with fifty ‘ouse­maids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they under­stand?
Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and —
Law! wot do they under­stand?
I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Man­dalay …

I live on a quiet street. The traf­fic might be three cars a day. Out­side of my win­dow now though, a huge white truck has just arrived. It must be worth as least $150,000. Three hefty men climb down from the cab. One folds his arm and watches. One picks up a rake from the back of the truck, and one picks up a scoop. I’m a bit mys­ti­fied because this is the kind of street that has nicely trimmed lawns, def­i­nitely a short-back-and-sides street where peo­ple tidily roll out their coun­cil bin once a week and dust their let­ter boxes. The swat team in their flu­o­res­cent jack­ets has seen some­thing though that eluded my care­less gaze. In the gut­ter is a small col­lec­tion of leaves. Heck, there must be twenty leaves. So the man with the rake swats the leaves into the scoop man’s scoop, and the scoop man solemnly tips the leaves into the back of the truck. The super­vi­sor unfolds his arms and they climb back into their mon­ster truck. The machin­ery rum­bles off with an enor­mous roar, enough power to gen­er­ate elec­tric­ity for a small town.