Soaps, and Other TV: An Aussie Comes Clean

I have a confession to make. In fact I have two. This post is all about coming clean. As Saint Thomas Aquinas probably said, “coming clean is like buying a pair of new sandals: you wish you had done it long ago, as trekking to the well is a sure recipe for dirty feet.”

Confession number one. I have never seen a single episode of “McLeod’s Daughters”. OK, so any cred I might have had, even vicarious, Saint Thomas Aquinas cred, is now evaporated.
Or so you might immediately think.
But hasty conclusions are like custard tarts: it’s not the filling that makes them, or the pastry casing, it crucially depends on the ambience of the first bite. All by way of saying, that when it comes to “McLeod’s Daughters”, I have mega-cred.

I am a good friend of Jack McLeod’s girlfriend!

Now, as I’m sure you must understand, I must talk in vague generalities, to some great degree, as they don’t want the media pack descending on their doormat, but I can reveal that Jack likes fishing, though he tends not to catch very much, even when he gets up at 4:30 in the morning and drags his girlfriend “Janice” (discretion is essential) with him on the boat.

“Janice” and Jack have a puppy, who turned one year old a couple of weeks ago, and they held a puppy birthday party. The puppy, who I’ll name “Nestor”, (I must keep his breed a secret, in case he might be recognised on walks in public), is already a veteran chewer of anything and everything, and hole digger. “Janice”’s sister’s designer shoes are no longer, post “Nestor”, what they once were. No need for any doggie DNA to be taken, there is only one suspect.

My lips, for the sake of my friendship with “Janice” must remain sealed, and not divulge any more goss. But may Our Good Lord strike me down and microwave my boxer shorts until they burn to a cinder, what you have just read is the truth.

But enough quotation marks around names. Back to True Confessions. There is one TV show that, if I miss it for a single weekday, I curl up in the foetal position, and, inconsolable, won’t even visualise a chocolate bar to cheer me up.

I’m referring to ABC News Breakfast (and that’s Australian Broadcasting Corporation), which has as one of its news presenters the woman who, had Shakespeare not been much chop, he would have penned sonnets with lines like “O sweet sadness of my soul, my heart longs” and “O, as I yearn, thou art as unattainable as the morning dew” and so on and so on to serenade her with.

Virginia Trioli

Yes, Virginia Trioli is the perfect woman. She’s smart, she’s witty, she has a smile to die for, and, importantly, she never nags, or presents other than an immaculate persona.

What more could a man ask for? Her phone number perhaps? But we poets are wise. Let dearest Virginia stay two-dimensional for me. Let her be perpetually unattainable, for it is in the act of attaining that one is lost.

Actually, I snuck that last, wise-sounding bit, in from Saint Thomas Aquinas. He was wise. He would have made a good TV Australian football pundit...