Postcard from Speewah

[This was sent to my workmates, who send "postcards" from wherever they are working. As you may be able to tell, this one was "polished" - drafted, re-written, unlike the letters]

It's a knife fight. Sanity in the blue corner; Lunacy resplendent in red. The bell rings; the opponents meet in a flash of silver. It's desperate. In the second round I notice something odd: Lunacy's trunks have taken on a blueish hue; Sanity's have reddened. By the third round both fighters are purple, indistinguishable. At the beginning of the fourth the combatants shake hands and call for tea and scones; in the fifth they dance a waltz.

I laugh maniacally. I laugh, and then I cry....

Cat Stevens - my lone companion and confidante - tells me thrice daily that "out on the edge of darkness, there rides the peace train". I tell Cat that had he commandeered a stallion, jumped the tracks, and flogged the whinnying beast until it's legs gave way - well beyond the edge of darkness - he'd have reached a place neither light nor dark; a place filled with God and, paradoxically, forsaken by Him. A place called Speewah.

Yes the Lord did some of His finest work when He created the Speewah Dome, pushing a large chemically-unstable mafic intrusion into flat-bedded sandstone, ensuring that the resultant ovoid valley would be fenced in by steep golden cliffs. It must be Eden in the wet season as water gushes in through the Dunham and Pentecost gorges and any number of waterfalls, but in the dry season the sunken ellipse becomes a coliseum; a super-heated crucible where Heathens - counseled only by Cat Stevens and fuelled only by sweetened condensed milk - are pitted against Brown Snakes amongst a thick mat of spinifex and spear grass*. And just when a Heathen, seemingly victorious, staggers punctured and bloodied from the thicket, his face torn with horror, Hell's Monsoon - "the other monsoon" - breaks and the creeks and rivers and waterfalls flow not with water but with despair - at first in a trickle but, before long, in a rampaging torrent that fills the cauldron to overflowing. Then, as quickly and unexpectedly as it began, the great surge ceases and all becomes quiet, still.

It is from the bottom of this Great Lake of Despair, from the lowest point on the valley floor, that I write to you now; my body, though literally tanned and upright, is metaphorically pale, limp, and laying prone in anoxic sludge, faintly idling at -273 C - absolute zero. I am embalmed in loathing; pickled in dread. But don't send help - I am comfortably numb. Forget me, please.

.... Round six and purple tuxedos are being worn for what looks like a banquet. Entree breezes by amid dazzling good manners and gaiety, but after a brief uncomfortable silence, anarchy erupts. The original colours are restored. Lunacy springs forth, plunging his desert fork into Sanity's eyeball and - oh the humanity! - splits his temple with a candelabra. It's a bloodbath!

I stop my Toyota to scream at a cow. She bucks with bewilderment and staggers backwards, her bovine sensibilities severely jangled. "Holy Jesus", her limpid eyes imply, "A madman!" I frown momentarily as a small voice - soft, fading - suggests that the cow may be right: I have gone crazy. But my own sane, sane, sane laughter drowns out the whisper and I speed onwards in a cloud of dust. But again I step on the brakes as I see a black dog in the bushes - the same black dog I have seen each of the last two days. He watches me without expression from his beady black eyes, as I begin to wonder: Is it just a black dog, or is it The Black Dog; Churchill's Black Dog; Led Zeppelin's Black Dog? My laughter is gone, replaced by solemnity, and as I chug away down the track, the dog patiently, knowingly trots behind.

* A tall savannah cover that dispenses it's all-penetrating seed pods at scrotum height.