COVID has destroyed countless lives and many more livelihoods, so it seems a bit trivial to be also cursing it as a wrecker of travel plans. But as a depositor of flies in the ointments of potential travel itineraries it has had few equals. Wed planned to go to South America in 2020 and then on to visit Emma in Canada. That didnt happen. Wed also assembled a crew of thirty odd family and friends to celebrate Issys 60th birthday in Bali, but that too came to nothing. Our homeland has fared better than most in its fight against COVIDs ravages, but that doesnt mean weve escaped totally unscathed. Our home state of Victoria has had many more COVID deaths than any other of Ozs jurisdictions, due almost entirely to the total ineptness of our authorities attempts to manage hotel quarantine. So they locked us down. State borders were closed. Our beloved Premier Dan also imposed a Ring of Steel around metropolitan Melbourne, and woe betide any poor soul who tried to breach it. We yearned for travel as we sat at home. Well we thought we yearned for travel. Several months after the Ring of Steel had been lifted
and the State borders reopened, we woke up one morning and realised that we could have quite happily left the State some time ago, if only wed bothered to get ourselves organised. Enough we said! Time for a road trip.
Issy thinks I overplan things. Shes never quite got her head around my practice of organising holidays via spreadsheet. Wheres the spontaneity in that she moans. I think it might be an engineering thing. In an effort to impress her I decide this time to only in places where I think it might be a bit scarce. I think shes proud of me. I wonder if shell still feel that way when we cant find any and have to spend a night sleeping in the car.
We head north over the Great Dividing Range, and onto the seemingly endless and pancake flat plain of the Murray River. The roads straight and boring, and Issys drifted into dreamland. But its OK, Ive got the radio The announcer is asking people to ring in with examples of grammatical errors that raise their blood pressure. This is right up my alley. I thought it was only
me that was annoyed by such pedantry, but it seems Im far from alone. Why is it that no one understands the difference between alternate and alternative, or between persuade and convince, moans one caller. I dont think Id ever given those particular issues much consideration. I am however reminded of my own pet grammatical hate. My Year 12 chemistry teacher was rumoured to be a member of the Communist Party, much to my conservative parents disgust. I think they thought that he should have been locked up, let alone left to run free lecturing their son on the fineries of inert gases and atomic weights. Im a bit surprised they didnt move me to another school. It seems that my allegedly red maestro also had another talent; he was a grammar nazi. On the first day of class he told us to turn to page 238 of our text books, and on the third line of the fourth paragraph insert after the word boron. Hmm. Slightly pedantic perhaps. But it was his next offering that has stuck in my mind forever. Turn to page 437, he said, and in the fourth line of the fifth paragraph, cross
out the word very before the word unique. Something cant be very unique, he thundered. Unique means theres only one of something; its either unique or it isnt. ...and Ive never let my offspring forget this. They are all now totally over their anal father groaning at the TV every time, and there are lots of them, someone utters that horrendous phrase very unique.
We reach the Murray River town of Echuca and take a leisurely evening stroll through an impressive reconstruction of its original port. Theres no shortage of fancy looking house boats for hire on show. Theyre well named - some of them are indeed We read that the town was established in the mid 1800s around the site of a punt set up by an enterprising to get people across the river.
