Imagine a boy, about eleven or twelve years of age, riding the billy cart he and his younger brother had built with their dad's tools, out of wood they found around the house, plus a handful of nails. They had to find wheels, and in the beginning they used old rubber-tired, wire-spoke wheels from baby carriages - prams or strollers - mounted on a quarter inch steel rod axle. But far better than these rickety old wheels were the ball races - wheel bearings from cars - that you you could get for nothing at the local garage. These were hammered on the shaved ends of wooden axles (you belted in a few nails to wedge the bearings on), and the front axle swung as you steered with your feet. This is suburban Sydney, new South Wales, Australia; kids played on the street, cricket was a home-made bat, a tomato crate for a wicket, and a tennis ball. Okay, now picture me coming fast down the slick hot mix bitumen road (there were not many cars around Lane Cove in the early fifties, it was considered safe) doing broad skids as I took the corner fast and fearless. I would check ahead and then bend my head around, to watch myself scooting along the smooth black road surface, the axles a bare inch above the road. In my movie screen vision I took in the blur of the road the simmering sound of the ball bearings the unpainted wood platform with its three-inch-high sides and my legs and feet out front on the steering bar, with its quarter inch bolt - and the ropes through holes in the front axle, hands holding the ropes - I took it all in, I watched it, wanting to SEE what I was doing, to hear it, feel it, know it, not just DO it. ... The experience is not complete (I didn't think about it then, only now) unless you are aware of it, all of it.

Later I would do the same in my red MG sports car with the chrome wire wheels, with its wonderfully noisy engine. The MG TC had those long, flared mudgards, between them the narrow vertical radiator with the MG emblem and the chrome water fill cap and the big, chromed, separate headlamps. Some nights I would put the top down and tie on my golden-varnished double bass, its gorgeous scrolled pegboard projecting over the windscreen. It was summer, the Sydney air muggy and hot as always. But on these days, I would get up some speed down that big hill coming into Epping, and look at my back wheel and the low-slung red racer body. It was good to be alive - to be young, to be heading to rehearsal at the television studio for our weekly one-hour prime-time variety TV show. And to watch your wheel spinning.

Point is, I'm still doing it, watching myself moving fast - tonight it's happening out in the South Pacific, the 49 ft ketch sluicing along at a solid 7 knots through the water in a calm sea, yellow moon watching, on a close reach hour after lovely hour. Want to be immersed in the experience, yet standing back and watching it. Funny, that. Maybe everyone's the same, don't know.

Interesting. And also why I write the blog, here.