Miss Verena was a natural genius, and he hoped very much she [Miss Chancellor] wasn't going to take the nature out of her. She could study up as she went along; she had got the great thing that you couldn't learn, a kind of divine afflatus, as the ancients used to say, and she had better just begin on that.

SI joint

Surely there is someone in ABC Television management who has read Bruce Dawe's evocative poem Life Cycle: When children are born in Victoria/they are wrapped in the club-colours, laid in beribboned cots/having already begun a lifetime's barracking/Carn, they cry, carn … feebly at first.

“What a simp I am. I can't believe I left it at home.” She leans her forehead against her locker, straightens, and then turns to me. “Can you believe what a simp I am?"