MR. BORRIE AND THE HOLY GRAIL

“Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time”.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.5

I should have paid more attention to this quote from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations—a book I picked up in a last-ditch effort to cure my nearly three-year case of Borrie Block.

Perhaps I was distracted from finding out that Mr. Borrie and the imperator have much in common. One disgraces commodes; the other, Commodus disgraced.

<pause for effect>

Because the lesson I instead gathered was that I needed to be more like Marcus, and my problems would be solved. This was easily done: journey to the heart of darkness, battle the Germanic Hordes, die, and be succeeded by my idiot son. And then I would have some material for a new post.

So this is how I ended up in South Australia.

As you well know, South Australia is a very queer place: square cup holders, undrinkable water, reversible freeways, domestic fruit fly gestapo. The British didn’t even bother sending convicts there. Instead, they nuked it—nine times.

It is also full of Germanic Hordes. The capital is named for German royalty! They call lunch-meat ‘fritz’! Sixty-nine South Australian locations had to be renamed during the Great War for being way too German! It has the alleged second-biggest schützenfest in the world!

In short, it was just the place I needed.

But wherever I went, these Germans seemed very different to the ones that the Emperor encountered. Everyone was quite friendly! Rather than test my mettle, it seemed die deutschen Südaustralier just wanted to get on in peace with traditional Germanic pursuits, like building submarines.

And then we broke down.

My quest was kaput. I had driven all the way to the far side of the Eyre Peninsula without any self-improvement to show for it. And as it was a Sunday, I couldn’t even console myself over a miniature South Australian beer.

With nothing else to do, I glumly re-opened my copy of Meditations. It fell open on the above quote—and I realised that I had missed the key point of the Emperor’s teachings all along.

To paraphrase: sooner or later, the itchy arse of fate must be scratched.

All of this was inevitable. My bum was beginning to tickle.

Excitedly, I explained to Mrs. Borrie that it wasn’t a lack of basic preventative maintenance that casused our poorly lubricated wheel bearing to fail—it it was simply the natural and inherently logical ordering of the universe.  What’s more, that same logic demanded that I go surfing rather than ring any more mechanics.

As I paddled in from the one-and-a-half foot swell, the hated south-westerly began to blow, and a figure emerged from the spray. He identified himself, unprompted, as the curator of a nearby public toilet known only as “Camelot”, and disappeared into the mist from whence he came.

There is a famous line about this fantastical place: “Camelot, located nowhere in particular, can be anywhere.” I now know this to be nonsense. Camelot is in Sceale Bay, South Australia.

It was a toilet of great legend on the very edge of the world: a land of below-average crop yields, serial killers, and restricted trading hours. It was every bit as good as the name. The universe had pointed the way, and your correspondent, Mr. Borrie, had found his holy grail.