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A Question of Honour
Somewhere off Sydney’s Northern Beaches, 2006
Easing backwards off the side of the boat, I begin steadily propelling myself down into the depths. The sea takes me into herself and I am free at last to roam this mysterious element that has always felt like home. Despite all the scuba equipment my breathing always feels more relaxed underwater. Suze—that’s my wife—says I must be part amphibian: she also insists I’m getting too old for all this, and my doctor agrees. But when I’m down here I feel no different than I did fifty years ago when I did my first dives with the Navy.
Suze stays up there in the boat, watching out for me, she says. Today more than ever, as this is the deepest dive I’ve ever attempted—sixty metres, twenty over the legal limit. Suze freaked out when I told her what I was planning, threatened to ring the authorities and have me stopped. The sea is not her element, she doesn’t even like going out in the boat, is a poor swimmer and would sooner die…
What offended him was not a lack of quality, but of purpose. He simply couldn’t tolerate—perhaps due to his profession, which was accounting—things that remained forever and intentionally ambiguous. He’d been trained to view unsolved problems as errors. To John, a balance sheet was poetry, and a bookkeeping ledger, a metaphor for human life.
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