He's my man, and I don't care how much it costs

This is Leonard Cohen in 1970, the year I was in what's now called Year 12: he was thirty-six and I was seventeen.

It was the year I first discovered him: I read Beautiful Losers, bought Songs From a Room and Leonard Cohen with saved-up pocket money, bought the sheet music and learned to play and sing fifteen or twenty of the songs:



(Question: when did she study for her exams? And does this explain the D for Matric Modern History, which still rankles all these decades later and which her entire undergraduate career was one long attempt to redeem?)

(Also, my mother made that round cushion, which was a kind of steely grey-blue velvet.)

Three years earlier my heart had been broken by my first-ever boyfriend, a beautiful Greek boy, who engendered a helpless lifelong passion for swarthiness in all its lovely forms.

Over the decades, Leonard and I drifted apart. And then one day a few years ago, my friend R played me this and I fell in love all over again.

R texted me today to say he's playing here on Australia Day and do I want to come with her. Hah. It's an outdoor concert at a winery down in the paradisal Southern Vales and he's being supported by Paul Kelly. On the other hand it's going to cost hundreds of dollars and it'll probably be 42 degrees. But I do not care.