Down here in plague city, we are all working out how to look smart in our new masks. I am a migrant to Melbourne and love the place unreservedly (without loss of affection for my homeland, Sydney), although I haven’t changed religions. I’m still an NRL tragic (especially tragic given the season my beloved Canterbury Bulldogs are having) rather than an AFL aesthete.
But as we grapple with this deadly germ, we are all donning masks at last.
In one sense, this represents another importation of an Asian cultural practice.
When I was a kid, no one would have dreamt of photographing food. Now we do it routinely — there is a food pornography industry. The Japanese have been doing it for decades. Ditto masks.
Now we can’t shake hands we have the choice of two long standing Asian alternatives: the Japanese bow; or the Indian hands joined as in prayer to namaste.
My beloved and I have been wearing masks in big shopping centres for a couple of months, though we stopped during that brief break we had from lockdown.
Generally an awkward chap, with a mostly recalcitrant body and often finding any device or artefact unco-operative, I struggled a bit with the mask. I found wearing one tended to fog up my glasses, which indicates that I didn’t have it on properly.
It was really only spousal direction that compelled me to keep at it until I got it more or less manageably right. If, like me, you wear specs, the thing is to anchor the metallic strip at the top of the mask to the bottom of the glasses. Or at least so I find.
I once really fancied wearing a certain type of mask. As a kid, I saw the Israeli war hero, Moshe Dayan, being interviewed on TV by the great Sam Lipski. Dayan had lost an eye, so legend has it, in battle, and he wore a striking eye patch strapped onto his head. It looked impossibly dashing and reminded me of Errol Flynn in one or other of his movies.
As a youngster you sometimes like to affect certain props for appearance. For a very brief period of maximal pretentious silliness, I sported a French beret. That didn’t last long.
I didn’t smoke cigarettes for long but for a time absolutely loved the effect, and the aroma, of a pipe, although I could never get the damn thing to stay alight. And when I did light it there were billowing clouds of smoke.
I think the only person I ever really impressed with it was myself, but I loved it. Alas, I sometimes carried it raffishly in my back hip pocket and ended up sitting on it and breaking it. Talk about ashes to ashes.
My first big facial fashion statement, in my early teens, was specs. I cannot imagine being without them and would have no use for contact lenses, even if I could wear them.
The legendary John Wheeldon, a cabinet minister under Gough Whitlam and later a leader at this august journal, daily demonstrated to us the rhetorical possibilities of specs, which he would take off, fold over and thrust forcefully forward when making a point (he was always making a point). It was mesmerising in its way.
I admire folks who can stick with a distinctive prop — a red bandana, say — or gesture. But if your natural appearance is a bit dishevelled and sloppy, it’s best not to get too invested in the visual. Be consoled. As the Psalm has it: there is joy in the morning newspaper.
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