Kiddo had an excursion into the city yesterday. Two classes – hers and another known as 7B – took a train into the city to visit the Immigration Museum and watch an Imax movie. The Imax bit didn’t happen as one of the students climbed onto a hand rail, sat on it and fell backwards, hurting her head. She was apparently quite dazed and the teachers must have panicked to an extent where they cancelled the rest of the program for the day and packed everyone off, back to the school way before. Anyway that isn’t the story for this entry.

On the way back from the city, kiddo took out her a few things from her backpack, including her school diary. The other stuff made their way back into her backpack, but not her diary. The diary, which contains loads of important information, including details of the appointments with her teachers for tonight’s parent-teacher meetings, was left on the train. We had our usual pow-wows about responsibilities, taking care, blah blah blah and all has been forgotten. We had braced ourselves for her to get a new school diary.

A few hours ago, I took a call from an elderly lady. She said she was from Poland, and had settled in Melbourne a number of years ago. She apologised for her accent but said she called because she had found kiddo’s diary, in the train! She had seen another kid take it but insisted that kid gave it to her, as she thought (she is probably right) that the kid would have binned it.

So tonight, we have to take a drive to a suburb known as East Malvern, to retrieve kiddo’s diary. It’s a lucky break for her, to be able to retrieve it.

There are still fair dinkum folks in Melbourne. People who have absolutely nothing to gain from actions like Mrs F’s but did them anyway simply because they are the right things to do. Doing the right thing. If more did the right thing, this world would be a much better place to live in.

Sure there would always be the moral or philosophical argument as to what constitutes the “right thing”. Hang it, I think. I believe in most instances, there is a gut feel to it all, as to what is the right thing to do in any given situation. Most don’t do it in spite of such conviction, because they weighed up the cost and decided it wasn’t worth it. I mean, what if I turned out to be a granny rapist and unimaginably harmed her, when I dropped into her house tonight? Many would have thought of such caution and binned kiddo’s diary, because in many people’s books, doing this “right thing” would not have been worth it.

This is probably not an entry I would have liked to make, but the whole idea for an exercise like blogging is for posterity. Well, it is for me, anyway. One day, who knows – a little version of me 50 years later would discover this blog and said, “Look, gramps had this experience, too!”

I’m talking about libido. Sure, I’ve just sneaked past 40 but surely I’m still as youthful and, dare I say it, as virile as ever before? Or am I not? I shudder to think that I have aged in this way, as well.

Perhaps I can blame it on the fact that we (Theresa and I) have both had to shoulder the bulk of the housework and are therefore often tired out at the end of the day. At least one, if not both of us usually collapse into a heap on the lounge set at night as the family sit around watching a supposedly exciting television program, and snore away, dead to the world. We are talking perhaps 9 or 9.30pm and that is hardly the time to just drift off to Noddy land. But we do.

Perhaps I can blame it on the cold weather but this is hardly Arctic winter.

Whatever the cause, I hang my head in shame, admitting I have plummeted in this department, down to perhaps the Malaysian national average of what – 52 times a year? Even in Victoria, that average is a shameful statistic, one to be elevated, if you know what I mean.

So what do I do? Maybe we can do something about the fact that next week, kiddo goes away for a school camp. We’d have the whole house to ourselves then, and perhaps, a little less housework to worry about. I am not exactly rubbing my hands in glee but that is certainly an idea to work on…watch this space!