🔴 Condition - Good 🔴

1974, and Leo Sayer sang, 'I was just a boy'. Quite so.It started out so well - A young life under clay-coloured skies in lovely, leafy Melbourne in the late 60s and early 70s.This is foremost an account of the first twenty or so years of this rich and jam-packed childhood, lived, distilled, aged in the charred-oak barrels of my head, then blended with life experience into extra-creamy goodness and poured lovingly onto these pages. Juxtaposed though, by a preceding, grumpy old man's observations of today's rather sadder reality, considering where it all went wrong and what we've lost, from those quieter, less complex times.It's the story of a happy, promising beginning, suddenly disrupted by family breakdown, sabotaged by the damage that was done and later diffused into poor choices, disappointment, loss and dashed hopes.I reflect on and delight in the earlier, wonderful years, when all was rosy, and before stormy weather appeared on the horizon. A time when it was still possible to experience a quiet city street with shops closed on a Saturday afternoon, and cracker night was the high point of the year. We then delve into murkier times, through upheaval, and witness how the results played out for the poor, dazed kid, who was just trying to make sense of it all.For those who knew those times, it is a nostalgic journey through the canyons of the mind, and for those too young to have lived it, a window to a time not so long very ago, when life was different.