Tony Abbott, family man

It's perfectly all right to parade your daughters around to prove you're a straight, clean-living family man. But on the other hand, everyone knows that giving birth is icky secret women's business. Those wussy football clubs whose players and officials don't think twice about stars missing a grand final if their partners are in labour, or indeed Ricky Ponting missing the second Test in Sri Lanka, are just pansies and need to grow a pair.

Whoops, did someone say 'pair'? Not if Daddy Tony has anything to do with it.

Tony Abbott. The go-to guy for all that is spiteful, punitive, hypocritical and mean of spirit.

SPIT.

Dear Adelaide

Dear Adelaide,

You know nobody loves you more than your Auntie Pav. But I tell you what.

It doesn't matter that you have a local ABC radio station: if some of the people on it are insufferable self-identified big frogs in a little puddle, then that's just not quality radio.

It doesn't matter how many brilliantly gifted local artists and musicians you have: they can't sustain their work, much less develop it, if you keep cutting the arts funding, which undermines infrastructures and destabilises long-term planning.

It doesn't matter how many great festivals and events you hold: if you have no faith at all in the homegrown talent, then that sends a really terrible message to anyone who might be thinking about coming here for them. If we think so little of ourselves, why should anyone else be bothered?

And it doesn't matter how many funky little red, white and chrome cafes and sushi bars and baguette joints you cram into the CBD: as long as you start closing them and everything else up around 3.30 pm*, you'll never be more than a small provincial city. Really you won't.

Lots of love,
Pav xxx

PS: as with ethnic jokes and blonde jokes, the only people who are allowed to diss Adelaide are those who live here. Any comment deemed unacceptable will be removed.

*This is not an exaggeration

Trusting the girls in the back room

On the grounds that it's never too early to start worrying about something, I have been worrying about a keynote speech that I don't have to give until February. I have to worry about it now, because, come the day, all my worrying capacities may well be used up on the problem of how to get to the venue in 47 degree heat without losing consciousness, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In the meantime, what to say to an academic conference when you haven't been an academic (not a fulltime one anyway) for thirteen and half years? How to approach this topic? What to do?

But a few weeks ago as I headed south down the unlovely Tapley's Hill Road, en route to the marginally less unlovely West Lakes Mall across the road from AAMI Stadium, registering on autopilot the elderly road-crossers, the non-signalling lane-changers, the speed-limit-excessers, the potential drag racers and the current price of petrol and bananas while thinking about my shopping list and its eccentricities, the solution came to me. It just appeared as if by magic, dropping into consciousness like a ripe fruit. There it was.

After I got home, I sat down at the computer and checked the Doonesbury strip for the day, where I found a link to a rare interview with its author (is that the word for a cartoonist?), the incomparable Garry Trudeau:

There must be many days when the ideas don’t come. What does he do then? Walk in the park? Dose himself with double-espressos? “That pretty much describes every day. I spend a lot of time not coming up with ideas, but assuming you’re temperamentally suited for deadline work, you do learn to trust the boys in the back room.

“I know how to prepare myself, but I have no idea how the actual imagining works. I often abandon an idea as hopeless, only to find weeks later that my brain has mysteriously solved the problem without any apparent guidance from its owner.”

My idea for the keynote speech had most certainly come from the girls in the back room. One minute I was floundering, and the next minute I had a phrase that constituted a whole argument, plus a potential framework for a structure. I'd call it a thesis sentence, except that strictly speaking it's not a sentence.

But in my own work, I trust those backroom girls more for the bigger projects than I do for the weekly deadline. Sometimes -- often -- they are napping, and writing four short fiction reviews a week, which is in fact a highly exacting task if you have any ambition at all to do it well, is something they couldn't always be bothered to stir for. They are the Marys to the mind's Marthas -- the Marthas being the girls in the bar, if you will, cheerfully serving the drinks, cleaning the tables and keeping an eye on the till. Those girls are the years of experience and training, and their job is to say to me 'This is your life's work. If you can't sit down and write a workwomanlike piece as part of the day's tasks after all this time, then you can't do anything at all.'

Hey STELLA!

Last night in Melbourne's Federation Square, the new Stella Prize for the best book of the year by an Australian woman was launched as part of the Melbourne Writers' Festival. I did something uncharacteristically frivolous and flew over for the party.

The only people in this photo I actually recognise are journalist George Megalogenis, the tall dark dude over to the left, and Scribe publisher Aviva Tuffield, who is the smiling woman with darkish shoulder-length hair tucked behind one ear, at far right.

Chris Gordon, the events manager at Readings bookshop and a fellow member of the Stella Prize steering committee (as is Aviva, above), spoke persuasively of the need for sponsors and donations, and then introduced Australian feminist legend Anne Summers, author of Damned Whores and God's Police, which if memory serves was the first, or certainly one of the first, books in Australia to look at Australian history and culture through the lens of a feminist reading.

Anne officially launched the prize, reading the notes for her speech straight off her iPad, the first (though no doubt not the last) time I'd ever seen anybody do that. One of the most arresting things she said was that things were actually better for women in 1994 and we had apparently gone backwards.

But mostly the party was about the prize: what we've done so far, what we have still to do. The large crowd included most of the steering committee, mostly Melbourne writers and publishers: Chris, Aviva, Monica Dux, Jo Case, Rebecca Starford, and Sophie Cunningham who started it all.

Sophie Cunningham (R) with Pip McGuinness from NewSouth Books, the brains behind their Capital Cities series and therefore publisher of Sophie's book Melbourne and, next month, my book Adelaide.

The other Melbourne committee members include Jenny Niven, the MWF programmer, who I don't think was there (if I were the MWF programmer I'd be home in a coma by now) and Louise Swinn, who wasn't well. Susan Johnson from Brisbane also wasn't well enough to come, though she'd planned to. Kirsten Tranter and I flew down from Sydney and Adelaide respectively. See the Stella website at the above link for more detail on all these people.

L to R: Monica Dux, Rebecca Starford, Jo Case

Others spotted in the crowd included Melbourne publishing legend Hilary McPhee; longtime literary editor of The Age Jason Steger; publishers Philippa McGuinness from NewSouth Books and Michael Heyward from Text; Adam Bandt MP, the Federal Member for Melbourne; and Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings bookshop, who has been a quietly effective supporter of the Stella Prize from the beginning.

Sophie Cunningham, Adam Bandt. The person he is talking to is probably Kirsten Tranter -- I think I recognise the outfit.

It was Kirsten who wondered on Facebook the night before the party which members of the steering committee would be out in Flinders Street drunkenly shouting 'Hey STELLA!' before the night was over. The closest I got to that myself was a quiet bottle of Stella Artois back in my hotel room later that night as I read the grisly new Val McDermid. My days for this sort of thing are a very long way behind me.

Of course they bloody do

Michelle Grattan's piece in the Age today is not only disingenuous but even perhaps a tad hypocritical, reporting today from well up in the high moral ground that the Federal Labor MPs all have cheat sheets, media questions, for the answering of.

Because as if the very best efforts of Craig Thomson were not enough to bring the party crashing down around his ears and usher in the era of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who if he falls over will be replaced by Prime Minister Julie Bishop, some unidentified (a) total doofus or (b) rat in the ranks (tick one) has left his or her notes lying around on a chair where, of course, the meeja just happened by and picked them up.

Whether it was done by accident or design, you can only imagine what Julia Gillard is thinking this morning. When you've been forced by circumstance to make a fateful lose-lose decision about leading your party, fought an election, exercised your stunning negotiating skills to form government, kept it all together for over a year despite some truly frightful attempts to oust you, and made a few appalling mistakes all by yourself, who needs a rabid, grubby Opposition, a hostile media, a big smear of misogyny right across the national board (Opposition, media, electorate, one's own party, you name it) when you've got one f*ckwit who can't keep either his credit card or the other thing in his pants, and now another who is too absent-minded, or treacherous*, to avoid leaving this kind of thing lying around?

But here's the thing. Of course they've got a bloody cheat sheet. No sensible person who has anything at all to do with media questions would be without one. Because most, not all but most, journalists in our country in its current incarnation seem to think that journalism is about nagging, needling, asking hostile, mindless gotcha questions (50 extra points if you make someone cry or lose his/her temper) and then putting as sensational a spin as possible on whatever the answer was in order to sell more papers. Even Michelle Grattan, who used to be the gold standard.

Or about taking some perfectly ordinary fact, like, say, that MPs have had media training and have paid attention to the advice they were given, and blowing it up with the rhetorical equivalent of a few acronyms and punctuation marks, as here, where the invisible OMGs and exclamation marks are thick on the ground. Get real, Michelle. If the media were doing a good job of reporting neutrally and truthfully on the facts, just the facts, about the way the country's actually being run, people wouldn't nead cheat sheets to help with the Augean-stables task of resisting being tormented and misrepresented by the ladies and gentlemen of the press. As it is, WTF do you expect?

*I'm going with 'treacherous'. You don't 'inadvertently' leave your notes 'on an Opposition seat in Parliament'.

The Don's legacy: more complex than you thought

The lovely Greta Bradman, granddaughter of Sir Donald.

Dr Max Nicholls, 1927-2011: a good start in life

When people say 'So-And-So had a good start in life,' they usually mean that she or he was born equipped with silver spoon. I can't claim that, though I do remember being very struck by the words of the great South Australian activist, novelist and parliamentary reformer Catherine Helen Spence, on the first page of her autobiography: 'I count myself well-born, for my father and my mother loved each other.'

My sisters and I had that: they loved us too, and we had a country childhood, and there was enough money (though farming is a tough and jumpy-making gig, whatever townies may think).

And as I now know, as of today, I had the good fortune to be delivered by a very distinguished man.

My earliest memory is of gorgeous red and purple rhomboids and lozenges of light, reflected in the polished boards of the hallway, from the stained glass in the front door of the building I was born in. The Curramulka Hospital had been built on land donated by my great-grandmother (I do so love the enlightenment implicit in that sentence); she laid the foundation stone with the silver trowel presented to her by the contractor for the purpose, and then they all went across the road to the Institute for ice cream and a fund-raising fox-trot competition. Oh, it was all go in Curramulka in 1927.

In February of that year, my dad and a man called Edward Maxwell Nicholls were born within eight days of each other, country boys in different country towns. After an eventful education, Max Nicholls arrived in Curramulka with his young wife in 1951, and stayed long enough to escort me into the world two years later at the age of 26 (him not me) before moving on to Mannum later the same year.

Both of my parents always spoke highly and warmly of him. But I knew nothing about his life as a pioneering geneticist in the wake of that early stint as a country GP until today, when my older sister handed me a clipping she'd saved for me: a content-rich obituary by his daughter Christine Nicholls, herself a distinguished scholar with an international reputation. I particularly like these bits.

... he topped the state in mathematics in his Leaving Honours year. Although he wanted to study pure mathematics, his father urged him to follow a vocational pathway so Max accepted a full scholarship at the University of Adelaide where, in 1944, he enrolled in medicine, boarding as a secular student at Wesley Theological College with his brother, Les. At Wesley, Nicholls's relationship with the authorities was uneasy and his stay was punctuated by constant arguments with resident theologues. He also organised a dance - at a time when dancing was frowned upon by hardline Methodists - and came close to being expelled from the college.

*

After graduating in 1949, he was a resident medical officer at the Royal Adelaide Hospital before joining the Royal Darwin Hospital. As a flying doctor in the service's early days, Nicholls visited remote Aboriginal communities and leprosariums and delivered babies. As a 23-year-old, he briefly found himself in charge of the entire Northern Territory Medical Service when his senior medical officer announced, at a day's notice, that he would be taking annual leave interstate.

*

In 1953, the family moved to Mannum on the Murray River ... He attended many serious boating and drowning accidents and regularly visited the large Aboriginal settlement near Swan Reach, where he co-operated with the indigenous midwife to deliver babies.

He did postgraduate study in genetics in Mannum -- picture the scene: postgrad studies by correspondence in a South Australian country town while managing a large general practice and a growing family -- and not long afterwards was offered a university job, where his research made a significant contribution to what we know about genetics. Read the whole thing here.

It's always nice to know they're comfortable

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus

What are the odds of reading two new novels in 24 hours that both reference this painting, I wonder. But having done so, I felt compelled to find it online and have another look at it. Breugel died in 1569, when Shakespeare was five. Imagine still haunting human imagination 550 years later.

If you're wondering where Icarus is, click on the picture to embiggen and then have a look in the bottom right-hand corner.

W.H. Auden was a profoundly political poet and his work, more than most, was written for and about his own times. But he didn't go in for knee-jerk rejection of any universalising thinking, either, and in 'Musée des Beaux Arts' he uses this painting to say something about his own times that is probably true of any place and any age.

She got away with blue murder and loved every minute of it: vale Nancy Wake

I'd say RIP, but she doesn't look to me at all like the kind of person who'd have any interest in resting in peace, not even at 98.

Here's a question*: why is it that Australian history devotes thousands of words to that pair of expensive, incompetent show-ponies Burke and Wills, not to mention the criminal and obviously a bit disturbed Ned Kelly, but that there are few books, and I was never taught anything at school or university and I bet nobody else reading this was either, about this heroic ratbag and tearaway of a woman?

*Rhetorical. You know the answer, and I know the answer.

The good, the bad and the ugly

The Good:

NewSouth Books who have just sent me my advance author copies of Adelaide,

which were waiting for me tonight when I got home from my brush with death (see The Ugly).

French brandy.

My dad.

The Stella Prize.

My friend Stephanie, aca and entrepreneuse extraordinaire.

The lovely Garry Disher's Challis and Destry books.

The bathroom scales (never thought I'd say that).


The Bad:

Centrelink.

The South Australian government and its treatment of employees and citizens. On the other hand, Premier-In-Waiting Jay Weatherill belongs under The Good, at least for now. (NB the Neanderthal mindless macho bullshit rhetoric of the Opposition here.)

Otherwise intelligent anti-feminist women setting the cause back 50 years. Not that I have anyone in particular in mind or anything.


The Ugly

Idiot drivers who come barging out of side streets straight into the oncoming heavy traffic, in the dark, in the rain.

Supermarket white bread.

Great big slugs.

The cat litter tray.

Please feel free to add to these lists.

'Harry Potter' sexist. Yes, and I am Jessica Rabbit.

"In the end, 'Potter' may go down as the most sexist story ever told."
— Andrea Peyser

Yes! Never mind Susanna and the Elders, Lolita, the Book of Genesis, Breath, Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Wind in the Willows or anything at all by Philip Roth: look at the Harry Potter books. Observe the many female characters who exist only as sex objects and relative creatures, and have no individual agency or importance in the story. Mrs Weasley! Luna Lovegood! Professor McGonagall! Lily Evans! Bellatrix Lestrange! Powerless ciphers, playthings, fuck bunnies and male-fantasy projections, every one.

How is it possible that such bitter, incoherent, talentless, mean-spirited, humourless, eaten-up-with-naked-envy (of other people's fame, money and niceness) utter crapitude is appearing regularly in the New York Post? Either blackmail is involved, or someone is very, very good in bed. The former seems much the more likely.

Whingeing

Dear Telstra, American Express, etc etc,

You know when you get some young minion to ring me up and try, under the guise of doing me a service, to screw even more of my money out of me than you're already getting? You know those calls?

Don't tell the young minions to call them 'courtesy calls', okay? You obviously don't know what 'courtesy' means, or you wouldn't apply it to the act of invading my privacy via telephone, almost always in the middle of a sentence/paragraph/train of thought that I am trying to finish, in order to try to get your despicable corporate mitts on more of my hard-earned. 'Courtesy' is not the word for that, however you might try to dress it up. You know what it is they say you can't polish.

And while I'm here, the next young minion (or indeed anyone else) who tells me 'Not a problem' – when what s/he actually means is 'Certainly, Madam' or 'Yes' or 'If you say so' or even just 'If you must' – is going to get a smack upside the head.

Especially if those kids are still on my lawn.

Lots of love,

Pav xxx

They've done what?

The national broadcaster has apparently produced an allegedly comic mini-series, to be aired later this year, about the Prime Minister's private life.

Can you imagine anyone ever writing or saying that sentence about any one of the other (ie male) Prime Ministers in Australian history, while they were in office?

No, neither can I.

Sometimes Annabel Crabb just nails it straight through the heart

As here:

Margaret Thatcher earned her 'Ditch The Bitch' placards in 1971, when as education minister she abolished free school milk for the over-sevens in British school. That's pretty hardcore. When you consider that Julia Gillard gets caned for handing out free libraries, you get an idea of the general trend described by the entitlement culture over the intervening four decades.

Fact v. opinion: surely not even Tony Abbott can be that dumb

From The Age online this morning:

An IT consultant challenged Mr Abbott over bagging climate scientists and economists, asking: 'Who would you listen to out of the experts?'

'The public,' Mr Abbott said. 'In a democracy in the end the people are sovereign.'

Either he really does think science is a democracy – in which case, well, you know – or he is *gasp* LYING.

This story reminded me of something I heard on ABC radio yesterday: a baby journalist interviewing another baby journalist -- for this is what passes in these benighted days as news -- about the Prime Minister's Press Club speech. 'Ms Gillard said she thought journalists were getting facts confused with opinions,' said the young woman. 'Do you agree with that, Peter?'

Another dollop of the cream of British acting stirred into the Potterathon

So, hands up who recognised the lovely and talented Ciarán Hinds, aka Captain Wentworth in the most excellent movie version of Persuasion in the mid-1990s,

as Albus Dumbledore's brother Aberforth

in the eighth and final Harry Potter movie. (And what an excellent movie it is.)

I keep telling people 1953 was a good year.

Destroying our way of life

The [carbon] tax, after all, was not on people, but on 500 high-polluting companies. The compensation was to guard against costs those companies might pass on to their customers.

So, no big deal, I said to myself when the details were announced. Surely this’ll all blow over. And then, found myself more than a little surprised when a Herald-Sun commenter (one step above YouTube on the food-chain, I’ll admit) said “Somebody needs to assassinate Julia Gillard NOW before she totally destroys our way of life.”

Gee, and there was I thinking one of the cornerstones of our way of life was the luxury of living in a country where heads of state don't get assassinated.

Quotation is from the brilliant rant here at Heathen Scripture.

No salted caramel macarons for me, then

Well. Today I went to Hutt Street on a follow-up visit to the nice surgeon who removed my gall bladder and, while he was in there, (gulp) biopsied (is that a verb?) my liver.

The good news is that there is no new bad news about the liver, and that everything that was eating at my innards has now been surgically removed and is healing up nicely. The bad news is assorted: (a) that gallstones can in fact form in the bile duct, so there's no guarantee that I won't grow more, and (b) the confirmation that the condition of my liver is not at all what it should be (NB this has nothing to do with drinking, so there) and if ignored and neglected could easily lead to something called non-alcoholic cirrhosis, which is exactly like alcoholic cirrhosis except that you didn't have any fun. And cirrhosis -- well, you know.

Now Hutt Street, as Adelaideans know, is an excellent place to have coffee and cake. I had coffee. No cake, no biscuits, no gorgeous French patisserie and absolutely, positively no salted caramel macarons. Not today, not next week, and only very occasionally as a special treat ever again. Sugar, fat and alcohol, formerly three of my main food groups, are off the menu for the foreseeable.

The bright side is that if I take this seriously, as who would not, then my days as a traditionally built lady might be numbered. Goddess knows I'm already ten kilos less traditionally built than I was when this all hit the fan two months ago. It could be the start of a whole new look.

On being ill

The opening sentence of Virginia Woolf's classic essay on this subject says it all, really:

Consider how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his "Rinse the mouth - rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us - when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

If you think she is being a tad melodramatic, consider that she had lost her mother at thirteen, had then lost a brother in youth to typhoid fever, would lose her friend and rival Katherine Mansfield to tuberculosis when Mansfield was only 34, and was herself embroiled in a lifelong struggle with physical as well as mental illness.

She was also writing in 1925, three years before Alexander Fleming looked at the mouldy culture and didn't realise what he was seeing, and therefore well before antibiotics -- an assortment of which, over the last month or so, I have either ingested or taken intravenously in amounts sufficient to save several horses. This might be contributing to my current lightheaded state but has saved me from the sort of imagery Woolf uses, which is a tad apocalyptic even allowing for her beautiful ironic hyperbole and her well-founded awareness of the mortal dangers, in her own time, of being ill.

Ideally, the removal of the gall bladder involves a routine laparoscopic surgical procedure, followed by a night or two in hospital and a few days' convalescence. By this reckoning, I should have been completely recovered from my June 24 surgery by the last day of the financial year.

But several different post-op complications, including further surgery that then developed its own complication, have meant I'm still not good for much and keep having to lie down, and how those two extra 8mm gallstones got (a) into, much less (b) halfway along, a bile duct that doesn't look anywhere near big enough to contain them is anybody's guess.

I have now been surgically relieved of everything that could possibly have been causing the attacks I'd been having intermittently since February (and 'attack' is the word; it was like being ambushed by a wild animal, and gave me a new insight into whichever classical Greek came up with the story of Prometheus being chained to a rock and having his liver eaten every day by an eagle, only to grow back at night and have the eagle come back at sunrise for seconds: he had gallstones), so if I keep having them then clearly it was something else all along. But I digress.

For me the interest of this not intrinsically very interesting exercise ('The main purpose of the gall bladder,' as some wag remarked, 'is to keep general surgeons on a steady income') (my own surgeon is a saint, BTW) lies mainly in the experience of helplessness. The abjection of being in hospital is a complex thing, and applies both in the Kristevan sense and in the ordinary sense. The hospital experience is full of the drama of the untidy body: of blood, sweat, vomit, bile, all the other stuff normally contained and hidden. But in hospital, the normally compliant body does not, will not and cannot maintain its normal boundaries or habits, so any chart or graph of its constantly-monitored functions looks like a web spun by a spider on acid.

You emerge to full consciousness from your second anaesthetic in five days to the sound of some poor sod barfing his heart up two beds down in the day surgery area, and you wonder how long it'll be before you're next. (Nearly four hours, as it turned out.) You are still dotted with deep, strangely placed little bruises sustained during the first surgery, and wonder exactly what caused them, while you were out of the world. Your cotton theatre gown, under which you are instructed to wear nothing, ties up, most precariously, at the back. Your temperature is up, your oxygen saturation levels are down, and the nurses frown and tut as though you had somehow done these things on purpose, just to be naughty.

You are desperate for water but Nurse Ratched won't let you have more than tiny sips. She takes your water jug away and puts it out of reach, upon which you are consumed with the desire to maim and kill, if only you were strong enough to sit up. One thing I've learned over the last week or two is that the institutional infantilisation of a woman in her late 50s and in full possession of her faculties can create sufficient force to split the atom. It may be the answer to a clean energy supply.

The staff, not just from member to member but from moment to moment, go in for a kind of psychotic toggling between 'You vill do as ve say or you vill be shot' and earnest, frowning requests that you grade your pain level on a scale of one to ten, or that you decide for yourself, in your addled post-operative state, what medication you'd like to take.

They take blood tests and plug you into potassium drips and keep waking you up or otherwise disturbing you every five minutes to take your temperature, blood pressure and oxygen levels, and yet basic standards of hygiene and care seem remarkably hit-or-miss. In the shared bathroom in a four-bed ward, you step carefully over a pan of someone else's urine on the floor of the loo and wonder whether this is world's best practice.

Your sister, who is an old-school RN and a Leo, wangles you a private room through sheer persistence. They lose your pain medication and keep insisting that you know where it is. The fourth nurse to whom you suggest that it might be in the locked cupboard next to your old bed in the four-bed ward actually goes and has a look there, unlike the first three, and comes back with it in its plastic bag.

The infection subsides, you stop being sick, the pain begins to recede, and finally, after much paperwork, you are allowed to leave.

For the next few days you sleep under a clean white doona in your sister's pristine spare room, where a little table holds a framed photo of your mother as a small child. You are wearing your own soft dark-blue nightie. Your sister sees to your dressings and your diet with a mixture of supreme competence and sibling clowning. You eat dry toast and play cards and watch Masterchef and play with the cat. You come back to yourself, and gradually remember your name.