Fuck the future

Fuck the future
Just a game
Dole or uni
It's all the same
Fuck the future
Ain't no fun
The future's buggered
And so's your mum
- Sam McCarthy and Andrew Young (aged 15¾), 1992

Summer had offered up better days than this, that was for sure. At the Gabba it would have been a day to win the toss and bowl. The skies were grey and heavy and the wind was up, ripping whitecaps out of the swell on the bay making the ferry trip to Straddie almost seem it was over open sea. Seriously, even the Interislander across Cook Strait on my mission with the Hayabusa boys had been a smoother ride. As the waves crashed over the bow of the ferry and the Foul Can bunny-hopped across the deck, I wondered if this time the Met bureau were actually serious with this latest cyclone warning. Sorry, ‘subtropical rain depression’, which sounds more like weather than needs a cuddle rather than weather than needs running away from. Cyclone or not (and since we were very much south of the Tropic of Capricorn it seemed to be officially ‘Not’) there was a huge-arse low pressure cell centred somewhere off Fraser Island, heading south in fits and starts, not really sure whether it’d made up its mind whether to fuck shit up or not.

We’d had so many warnings like these through my childhood, with every single one petering out to fuck all of nowt by the time they eventually crossed the coast, if they even made it that far. Despite dire warnings of Cyclone Tracy style destruction, all you’d get would be stiff winds and a shitload of rain, maybe some localised flooding. That was it. And so it’d appear, London to a brick, for what we were obliged to call Former Tropical Cyclone Nigel. Odds on, Nigel wouldn’t be finding any friends on land. We already had the winds – most of south-east Queensland did, judging from reports – but the rain just continued to threaten under leaden grey skies. Given it hadn’t rained since October, as far as I could remember (none of the deluge which had hit Sydney the night I flew out made it up the coast) I reckoned the whole place could do with a decent soak, so bring it. And at least the breeze and cloud cover, mixed with the humidity, took a bit of sting out of what would have been probably yet another sticky mid-thirties day.

Anyway I made it to Straddie safely without losing my ute, or my lunch, and headed home for about the first time since… well in a lot of weeks anyway. Three or four at least. Given the time, and the fact it was full of someone else’s furniture (the rental of which someone would have to pay for at some stage, hmmm), it really didn’t feel like home, more like some executive serviced apartment of the Medina or Meriton variety. Even after I’d slotted a few homely reminders around the place, like my clothes in the wardrobe, or some beers into the fridge. Truth was, it was just an asset now, one which was bleeding red ink all over my financial ledger. Don sounded like he was running out of ideas. I didn’t blame him. The summer season had been and gone, school holidays were over, our moment (such as it had been) had passed.

Don recommended scaling back on the open homes to ‘take the temperature of the market’. Absolute fuckin’ zero, as near as I could tell, but at least no open home this weekend made his life easier, my final invoice hopefully cheaper, and also meant I could leave the place in a bit of a mess if I wanted – at least until the professional house dressers came back to collect their chattels and I was back to the sparse remnants of my decrepit furnishings, currently stored in the shed. I was even thinking about whether if I could hang on here a bit longer, when interest rates bottomed out through the upcoming financial crunch (they were already dropping, and Mick reckoned they’d have a way to go) whether I could maybe refinance then and at least make the mortgage more manageable. Still, it’d be pretty fucking tight between then and now, even with my royalties situation on the improve courtesy Beef Week Queen and the In The Worst Possible Taste Gasket best-of. And that book I wasn’t writing but might have to get around to. Lena would be the one to talk to about that, I figured. Given she was writing one but didn’t want to admit to it.

“Rough day?”

Beth’s frazzled look and thousand-yard stare told its own tale. “I have the most feral classes in both years 8 and 9 this year, there’s an ego war on in the staffroom as to who gets to be head teacher because Gerald refuses to endorse anyone to take over from Wayne Prentice while he’s on stress leave, everyone seems to think it’s my doing that you’re not back this year, and fucking year 12 wouldn’t shut up about my fucking ‘emo’ haircut. Today needs to get better. Fast.”

“I’m making seafood cannelloni,” I told her, “and there’s a six of Heineken in the fridge.”

“It just got better,” she said, kissing me. “Babe, I hate my job, can I have yours?”

“Well I’m unemployed as of next Monday morning…” I cracked her a beer. “Apart from the ‘honorary’ marketing role Mick’s lined me up for. Pay’s not flash. I think I’m being paid in motorbikes.”

“You can’t eat them,” she pointed out. “Unless you’re that weird French guy from the Guinness Book of Records.” She took a swig. “He’s being pretty brave taking that all on himself given what the economy’s like.”

“More than that,” I said, “he’s expanding.” Raised eyebrows from Beth. “Pushing into scooters and commuter bikes, starting up a new inner-city shop.”

“That’s… beyond brave.”

“Well, where there’s risk there’s opportunity…”

She laughed. “That sounds more like something you’d say to be to talk me into something, erm, adventurous, shall we say? I’m hoping you’re not going to get just as completely screwed.”

“Feeling left out are we?” I remarked. “We should get you on a bike too. Make a thing out of it. Advertorial series in the local glossies. Brisbane News or whatever.” She pulled a face. “C’mon, you’d be perfect. You love speed…”

“Who talked our way out of that ticket down near Mudgeeraba?”

“Who was driving like the ghost of Ayrton Senna and needed to talk her way out of a ticket?” I reminded her. “Plus, you’re a babe and the camera loves you, you’d be awesome. C’mon, I can see you on something cool and funky, something like a Vespa…”

“Ohhh, a Vespa,” she beamed. “The whole La Dolce Vita thing, scarf, handbag, sunglasses…” I’d won her already. “You realise,” she added wryly, “when you said ‘scooter’ I thought you meant, like, ‘mobility scooter’…”

I LOL’d. “Pimped out shopping trolleys for Grannies. And fully sicked up golf carts. That’s phase 3 in the expansion plan. Just haven’t told Mick yet.”

“Well, aging population,” she pointed out. “Baby boomers aren’t getting any younger…”

Hmmm, maybe I was cut out for this marketing bollocks after all. Mick would totally go for the idea of a series on following a young novice rider through licensing and training, and the free lifestyle glossies were as good a place as any to reach the audience we were after – maybe even street press, to go another way and target the Yoof. Dropping 106ci S&S Harley V-twin cruiser motors into golf carts… well he’d probably be in for that too, although I wasn’t sure there was as much of a market-validated value proposition there. Still… it’d be a laugh, yeah?

“Hey, I didn’t tell you. There was one good thing about heading home last night. Finally picked up my mail. Letter from QTAC,” she beamed. “I’m in.”

So this was Beth’s last secret. Her escape plan. At 25, she was officially ‘independent’ for Austudy purposes, and she figured she was just about psychostable enough to deal with the concept of uni study again. Physiotherapy at QUT, I think it was. She’d talked about it on the roadtrip the other day, but subconsciously I wasn’t really listening, on account of being allergic to the future. Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled she was moving onwards and upwards, that she felt strong enough in herself to have another try at it. It was just that this sort of shit seemed to have been happening to me every since I was 17. ‘I love you’ didn’t mean ‘I want to be with you’ or ‘My plans actually include you.’

And fair enough, I didn’t have any plans which she could work around anyway, so I was probably just being a bit too fucking precious about it. Didn’t mean we couldn’t be together – far from it, it wasn’t as though Gardens Point or Kelvin Grove (couldn’t remember which she’d be based at, probably didn’t matter much) were that far away, and I’d always planned (hoped?) to get off the island, get this place sold and live somewhere more central. It was just the idea of it. The reminder that I didn’t have a plan, had never had a plan, and had drifted through the last 15 years being left behind by girls who mattered to me because of that. And there was just that vague sinking feeling, waiting for her to casually mention the other offer she’d got from the University of Fucking Miles Away in some other state (*cough law at Monash cough*) which meant she was off, goneski, it’s been swell but the swelling’s gone down, seeya kthxbye.

Ah well. Fuck the future, as one of McCarthy and my very, very poor teenage songwriting efforts went. Given it was 1992, no surprises it was all Nevermind-era abject angst and grungy distortion - the riff was later turned into Nirvana in Pyjamas. Who needs a plan anyway.

“So… I was thinking… a big old Queenslander in Paddington or somewhere, surrounded by trees… handy for uni, but not too far away from Ashgrove or the Valley…”

“Huh?”

“Well I’m going to need a flatmate to split the rent with, aren’t I?” she said, a little defensively. “I just kind of figured you might want to be it.”

“Flatmate’s a little generic, isn’t it?”

“Live-in lover, then?”

“God, that’s a term I haven’t heard for years. How old are you?”

“Old enough, baby. For what you have in mind.”

“Oh for what I have in mind…”

“Yes. I’m the sweet innocent one, remember. You corrupted me.”

“Riiiight.”

“It’s true,” she maintained. “It’s all your fault. I used to go to church. I used to care what my parents thought. I used to be able to get through a day at work without daydreaming incessantly about having incredible sex with my man in the abandoned darkroom in the art block. And it’s all your fault.”

“Wait up… abandoned darkroom, you say?”

“I don’t know why they put it in,” she remarked. “Only got built a few years ago, surely they’d have realised film photography was dead…”

“You’ll need to show me this… facility. At some point.”

“We’d need to sneak you onto the grounds somehow, undetected,” she pointed out. “Funny, in my daydream, you were dressed as a photocopier repairman. Not a lot of photocopiers to fix in there.”

“I haff come to change your toner,” I pronounced in my dodgiest Euro porn voice. Which was dodgy. Oh yes. She giggled.

“How long before dinner?”

“Erm, the cannelloni will probably need another twenty minutes…”

“Good,” she said, tugging off her shirt. “Enough time for entrée?”

Beth – as distinct from Bethany, if that distinction makes sense – was given to sensual pleasures, food, drink and sex. Whereas Bethany had strangled her desires and indulged only in very carefully metered, anguished-over aliquots, Beth had become – or maybe always had been – a girl who threw herself into eating and drinking as much she did lovemaking. It wasn’t as though eating and drinking without guilt had made her gain so much as a kilogram. Her logic was that the sex burnt off the calories that the food and wine gave. I liked her logic. We explored it further that night, over cannelloni, the Heinekens and my last bottle of red from downstairs. With the wind howling through the trees en route to Former Tropical Cyclone Nigel to the north-east, it wasn’t as though either of us were going to get much sleep anyway. What better way to distract oneself from the banging against the windows than… erm, banging against the windows?

Something wet and cold was brushing against my nose. It was too early for this shit. I blinked awake. It was Beth’s nose. Upside down.

“You’re upside down.”

“No, you are,” she countered.

“Ah,” I said, “that explains it.” She was fresh out of the shower, hair wet. Looked a picture.

“Hungover?” she asked.

“Not in any way,” I replied. Meaning, “Yes.”

“I’m thinking three beers and half a bottle of red on a school night… not so clever.” Beth smiled. “Then again, not so clever is sort of my trademark…” She smoothed my hair away from my brow. “You know what I’ve heard is the best hangover cure ever…”

“What might that be, babe?” I smirked.

“Vegemite toast,” she replied, taking a bite from a piece she happened to have to hand, and sprinkling me with crumbs. (Everyone loves a comedy prop. Unless it’s Darryl Brohman in the Lowes ads.) “Oh yeah, and orgasms.”

“Any particular order?”

“Well the toast is already hot.”

“So are you.”

“I was getting to that,” she insisted. “And if you have the toast first you get more crumbs in the bed. Or on the couch. Or over the breakfast table…”

So yeah, hungover and late to work on a school morning. She didn’t care. She was chucking it in as of the last week in Feb. Four and a half weeks away. Christ, the timeframe on this was condensed. Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future… But as we’ve already observed, fuck the future. Particularly if it comes with a riff you can recycle later into an actually listenable song rather than something that sounds so much of a lazy Cobain pastiche even the Vines would be embarrassed to run a tape over it.

Speaking of the old shite, once I’d farewelled Beth on her way to work (still with those lunatic go-faster stripes and other modifications on her Beetle) it was time to go have a ferret through the shed up the back and drag those old demos out of storage (which of course were in the last box I looked in, right up the back.) I was fairly pressed for time on account of needing to get to the airport for the midday flight flight to Adelaide via Mudbourne which Joey had booked me on, but I’d had the riff for Sandra Sultry in my head for the last two days (thanks mostly to Jeff and Superfun) and the only thing I knew which would kill the earworm stone dead was listening to the bloody thing at Ludicrous Volume. And besides I’d had this big fuck-off stereo here for a month on rental and never actually cranked it properly. Laptop into AUX, CD into drive. What have we got here then?

Either I’d misremembered it, or this wasn’t the version of the demo I’d stored in my mental recording studio. That version had been all Offspring-esque Genocide-style rapid-chugging guitars and Phil channelling Animal on the kit (whether that was Philthy Animal from Motorhead or Animal from the Muppets, it was your call.) I was almost definite that version existed, but maybe it was an earlier take. This sounded more Grinspoon doing DCX3 or something, big low-down-and-grungy riffs. And I was on vocal, which surprised me – by then McCarthy was pushing his way in front of the mike more often than not. I seemed to be channelling Dick Valentine from Electric Six’s Fire, loud, bombastic and completely over the top. Beers had been definitely harmed in the making of this. It sounded like we were having so much fun, it almost seemed a pity we hadn’t gone any further with it – though we’d already been sued by everyone and their dog (or even their Dingo) for name-dropping them in questionable manner in our last couple of albums, so we’d become a bit litigation-shy by then. Then being around 2002/03, I figured.

Still sounded exactly the fuck like that Superfun song, though. Even with the grungy guitars and the offspring of David Coverdale and David Lee Roth (don’t ask me how that’d work, I gave up science for a reason) on howling duties. I even dialled up YouTube on the slow-as-fark Choadafone USB-stick modem I had (the phone line and interwebs had been disconnected to here some time ago, and if that wind kept up it’d be disconnected to a lot more places around here pretty soon), found Superfun’s official channel and soundchecked Sandra Sultry against the version the kids were into these days. Exactly the same. Clonal. Apart from the guitars, the vocals and the brigade of smiley-faced straight-out-of-Fort-Street-High 19 year olds who were doing the singing and dancing and faffing about being chased by dodgy CGI dinosaurs. At least it wasn’t the Wiggles doing yet more fucking nursery rhyme covers.

If you were thinking what I was thinking, you’d know what I was thinking. Yup. This would make for a fucking hilarious blog entry. For sufficiently low values of fucking hilarious. (I still had content to supply, and hadn’t written anything for a bit, so was on the lookout for ideas. Even my Twuntering and Arsebooking had dropped off. Well, if you will keep playing with it.)

But that’d have to wait until later – maybe Qantas Club or the Virgin Blue lounge or whatever was in my future for today (fuck the future, unless it involves a free feed and a beer) – because there was a seat on a plane at an airport with my name on it, and I needed to motor. After a few years of living here the ferry timetables to the mainland were imprinted on my mind, so I knew how much of an arsehole I needed to drive like in order to make the ferry which would make land in time for me to make the airport to make check-in to make my flight. Today, it wasn’t too bad, I’d have a bit in hand. Enough time to pick a few different items of clothing out of storage to throw into the bag along with the stuff I’d brought from my core wardrobe over at Mick’s. Being able to pick from more than three repeatedly-laundered T-shirts was a bit of a novelty I can assure you. And enough time to not have to do battle with the legal limit and hence the armed officers of the law on the way to the ferry terminal at Dunwich – though, funnily enough, ever since Senior Constable B.S. Toogood had been placed on medical stress leave (or whatever it was called, Beth hadn’t been clear on the details and didn’t sound like she’d been keen to explore them anyway) things were relatively serene. The commanding officer for the island was an ex-bobbie from Manchester who didn’t really go in for stuff like Toogood’s John Wayne approach to road safety enforcement. Or being phoned up by Maddy Cohen-Lewis and getting an absolute earful as a result of same, as per a few months back.

Yup, there was enough time to do whatever the hell I wanted. All the time in the world in fact, as I learned on rolling up to the dock. Because the ferries weren’t fucking running in this weather, were they.

It didn’t look to me as though it was much worse than last night. Still blowing, still choppy as fuck. Still shit you wouldn’t choose to be out in, but this wasn’t a tourist guide boat for fuck’s sake, this was an arterial lifeline. You couldn’t just do that shit to people. To which Rhonda Partridge just pulled her usual dog’s bum face and said well, the Maritime Safety Board had said this and that and they couldn’t go against what the Maritime Safety Board had said, not with what the weather bureau were saying. They’d been saying for the past three days the fucking thing was coming, and it still hadn’t. Still hadn’t even started raining. That was the most frustrating thing. The most heavy, leaden skies you can imagine, your sinuses near-bursting from the air pressure, winds ripping about the place – and still no rain. Like Darwin in the weeks before the monsoons come, the silly season. Just like this. Massive thunderclouds, hot, humid – and it Just. Won’t. Fucking. Rain. No surprises that the rates of violent assault and drunken mayhem go through the roof during the silly season up there (given we’re starting with Territorians it’s never that far below the surface). People just go fucking apeshit.

Somehow I managed to avoid going fucking apeshit at Rhonda Partridge, instead getting her phone number so I could call to see if the ferries were back on. I thought of setting up an autodialler to call every ten minutes and ask, just for shits and/or giggles, but lacked both a local Dick Smith Electronics and sufficient levels of being-arsed-ness.

So I flicked everyone in Team Gasket a group text, while I could vouch for the signal here in Dunwich (t’was a bit ropey on the main road between here and home). Marty’s reply reached me by the time I got back to Point Lookout: “Just get here when you can.” The best part about that was that it contained no passive-aggressive whiny bitch in any way shape or form. I flicked one to Beth to see if she was OK – no reason she wouldn’t be, it was just a bit of breeze – but didn’t get a reply, not surprising since she was at work and all.

And it Still. Wouldn’t. Fucking. Rain.

Fuck’s sake, there’d even been a small bushfire in the forest off to the side of the main island road at one point, by the looks of it – it was down in a gully on the outside of one of the twisty bits through the range, couldn’t quite see how bad it was because the smoke and the drop hid the source, and since I could hear the fire brigade’s sirens in the distance I didn’t stop to rubber-neck – but Jesus, if that didn’t mark this as the pissiest rain depression in history, nothing did. It was just a bit of breeze. This’d be a good day in Wellington. Run the fucking ferries you ponces.

But no, I was home. Not getting my flight. Not much else to do. Might as well write this fucking blog. Wasn’t quite feeling the humour as much any more, of course. The angle I was going to take – absolutely tongue-in-cheek of course – was that Gasket had missed out true calling in life, that being to be the next Wiggles, since their change of lead singer had turned out less like AC/DC and more like INXS, i.e. sucking a suckload of suck. And that the success of Superbad, or Superjesus or Superunknown or whatever the hell they were called, with songs that sounded like Gasket stuff slowed down and de-clawed, sung by fresh-faced kids from dance school rather than seedy unshaven thirty-somethings in Motorhead T-shirts, had belatedly shown us the light. Of course ‘songs’ suggested more than one which meant I’d actually have to go to their bloody website and listen to more than one, in order to make some sort of broader connection which would then peter out to spurious nonsense in the pursuit of comedic win. Don’t knock the formula, people. This nonsense was getting me paid this fortnight just as much as standing on a stage with a guitar hanging off my shoulders was, that seemed pretty clear to me.

Which was how I ended up on iTunes– which on a PC is an absolute bucket of shit, for the record – listening to Superfun’s back catalogue in thirty second bites, having quickly extinguished the offerings on their own site and on their YouTube channel. (There were even bootlegged live-show vids taken from wobbly cellphone cameras, like the over-excited parental punters had been watching the Foo Fighters at Hyde Park or something. Seriously.) And how I ended up going back downstairs to the shed and hauling out another box of shite – the unnumbered ‘Box 4’ from Don Richardson’s garage – in order to grab more CDs and chase up a hunch. An unnerving, unpleasant hunch that had been triggered by something I’d read on their website, Superfun.co.nz – the unpleasantness not being that they were New Zealanders by origin, though it did explain the Jeff’s comment in Auckland that he was really just here for the cheap DVDs (he had kids to keep happy after all) – but that Superfun’s albums were all available through FPB Music. As were their DVDs. As were their licenced books, toys, board games, car seats, garden furniture and playground equipment… this wasn’t the Wiggles, yet, but it had plans to be.

Which itself wasn’t the problem. The problem I had was that when you went to the website www.FPB.co.nz, you found… Future Proof Building, a promotional offshoot of a bunch of NZ building supply companies. Spectacularly irrelevant, unless you were looking for insulation or guttering. However, if you went to www.FPBmedia.co.nz… it redirected you to www.FPBmedia.com. Which was the Australasian homepage of Fyfe Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, headquartered in Auckland. The publishers and marketers of everything those fresh-faced Kiwi kids did, made or sold – the producers, underwriters and profitgatherers of the entire Superfun enterprise – was the media arm of Daniel Fyfe’s business empire.

Suddenly, the fact they sounded eerily like us didn’t seem quite so amusing. Particularly after another hour or three of increasingly grumpy soundchecking and counter-comparing old demos of ours with songs of theirs. Now, to be fair, they’d released a lot of music in a year or two. And there’s only so many notes in the musical scale, which had been the topic I’d been planning to riff on (see what I did there?) in my blog – how complaints of plagiarism are more and more difficult to argue as we asymptote towards the point at which every possible combination of notes has been written, recorded and posted on someone’s MySpace page. However, the blog I was writing – it was changing before my eyes, almost – was pulling stronger for the counterargument. It was starting to argue that a considerable proportion – a third at least by my quick-and-dirty vox pop – of Superfun’s back catalogue had been lifted from old demos by the late Sam McCarthy of Flange Gasket. I knew the copies of those demos I’d ended up with wouldn’t have been the only ones he’d made, as he was absolutely OCD about data backup and storage – particularly after he had a Mac laptop HD fail in late ’01 which ate a few months of garage recordings from our old joint in North Maroubra – but equally I knew that the only people who would have had access to those would have been whoever had been with him near the end, or who’d inherited all his stuff afterwards: his family (more likely Anne et al than his folks I’d have thought given who would have been prepared to go through his stuff) and the girl he was banging (or pretending to for image purposes) at the time. And his old landlord, though Don Richardson clearly had no idea what’d been in those boxes from the time he’d inherited them to the time he’d freighted them on to me.

So basically I’d started out writing a light-hearted blog about how every riff today probably sounds like a riff that’s been written before, so stop worrying and enjoy it FFS, to one which was stating pretty baldly that Daniel Fyfe and company were profiting from the unreleased recordings of a dead man. And coming pretty fucking close to inferring he might have been offed for the purposes thereof. Which I had absolutely no evidence for, just that the whole situation surrounding the end of McCarthy stank, and I hated it, and I almost wanted there to be something dodgy we could nail them for. Particularly that venal little bitch Chastity. Whatever the validity of her story, she was getting paid off. And this was how. If she’d been the one who’d found the demos, it was probably why as well.

None of the above was ever likely to get past the legal department at dB, or anywhere else, so instead I emailed the half-chewed rant to Lena, to see what she thought. She called about 45 minutes later with questions. The first of which was ‘why the fuck aren’t you in Adelaide, it’s boring as hell here.’

“You’re really selling the joint,” I replied, and outlined the reasons I was still marooned on Straddie: no ferry service. Aaaand… that’s it.

“So what the fuck were you thinking going over there?” she wanted to know. “With, you know, a cyclone and everything off the coast…”

“Rain depression,” I corrected her. “Which hasn’t even fucking rained yet. It’s just hung around and depressed people. Me for fucking instance.”

“Yeah, you sound cheerful. Aren’t you getting any? What about you and that newsreader…”

“What newsreader? How’d you hear about that?” The latter part of which kinda undermining the first part of which, but never mind.

“Sore point, I can see. I’ll leave that one… look, this is unpublishable. As you’ve said. You can’t back up any of this with fact. And as much as I’d love there to be some heinous fucking conspiracy…”

“I can back up the fucking plagiarism angle any day of the week,” I insisted.

“Come on, Ang. You’ve said yourself. In the opening paras of this, for fuck’s sake. Riffs get recycled, intentionally or otherwise.”

“This is more than riffs, Lena. It’s entire structures. Progressions, riffs, the metre of the lyrics…”

“Prove it,” she said. “You get me the songs and I’ll do an unbiased appraisal.”

“You. Unbiased.” I laughed. “You’ve got more bias than a fucking lawn bowl.”

“Get me the songs…”

“I’ll bring the demos over with me.”

“You’re not getting here for a week and a half, the way you’re going. Can’t you email them?”

“They’re eleventy million fucking megs, Lena. And I’m on Choadafone mobile web. That’d take a week and a half. Look, I’ll compress the fuck out of them, just use excerpts with the key bits. I’ll tell you the bits of the Superfun tracks I reckon are direct lifts, or where you can see the derivation. You do your unbiased appraisal. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But if I’m right...”

“Erm... you’re right?”

“Exactly.”