Any Ordinary Day

by Leigh Sales

What family could imagine that sending their boy to cricket instead of soccer is a decision about how long he will live?

People seem perversely but irresistibly attracted to catastrophe when it happens to others, while in our daily lives we do everything possible to shield ourselves from these poison darts of fate. We eat leafy green vegetables, apply sunscreen, wear seatbelts, obey speed limits, quit smoking, walk for half an hour a day, install spongy ground under monkey bars and swings, ban peanut butter sandwiches in schools, limit coffee intake, cut down on saturated fats, don bicycle helmets, submit to wanding, patting, screening and X-raying every time we fly, put non-slip mats in the shower, restrict ourselves to only one glass of red wine each day, and permit doctors to regularly scrape, probe and squeeze our private parts. It’s as if we hope that watching others’ misfortune might somehow teach us what new precautions we can add to our list to avoid the same fate.

The thing is, if you asked me where I would rank myself on a scale of journalists, where 1 is a psychopath and 10 is a decent person trying to do the right thing, I’d give myself a 10. I would say you’d be lucky if I were the journalist to knock on your door.

A coronial inquest is not a trial, although it can recommend that people be charged, and unlike a trial, an inquest doesn’t have to prove something ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. The standard is ‘on the balance of probabilities’.

People going to the bathroom and never returning have also appeared often enough in cases before Mary for her to get a niggle when somebody disappears from the dining table for a little too long. And as for police reports on crime scenes, you’ll never leave your house in the same state again once you’ve read a few of those.

Of course, in a primitive society, it would be that you’d be allowed to go and thrust the culprit with a spear. Do we really want that sort of society?’

Racist

‘I think of the way we can make space in our hearts to love people – you have one child and you think, I could never love another child the way I love my firstborn. Then you have another child and you’re like, Oh, I do love them. It’s the same and different, because they’re a different person. Somehow your heart can expand to carry love for many people. Maybe it’s the same with pain. We can carry so much more than we think we can, whether that is love or pain.