I think I’ve fallen a little bit in love with the President of France, Emmanuel Macron. I just read an article about how he and his wife recently met with the King and Queen of England, as well as Prince William and Princess Kate. President Macron kissed both Camilla and Kate on the hand when greeting them, and this prompted Charles to kiss Macron’s wife’s hand in return.
I love that this happened. Macron would know it’s borderline inappropriate in the eyes of the Brits, but he just charges in and does what he wants. Just like he does with his politics. Just like he does with his love life.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu has just nominated Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently, Pakistan had already nominated Trump, but I can just see Netanyahu and Trump sitting in a room together, plaiting each other’s hair and talking about how they want to forcibly remove all the Palestinians from Gaza, make it look like free choice, and classify it as peace.
Speaking of powerful men, and seeing as I’ve been on the topic of the Judge and Sydney in my last few posts, I wanted to share an interesting little fact with you.
After I was let go from the courts and came back to Adelaide, I started writing to Chief Justices all over the world, asking for a copy of the oath used in their courtroom, or the oath they themselves swore when they became a judge. In the process of corresponding with so many judges overseas, I discovered that Bram Stoker, the actual author of Dracula, once worked at the Dublin District Court.
Do you remember how I told people at the courts that this particular Judge reminded me of Count Dracula?
So, I looked into some of Bram Stoker’s other work… and discovered that he also published a short story titled The Judge’s House.
Other key findings — Bram Stoker’s wife had once been engaged to Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde, later turned out to be a homosexual.
I know it sounds far-fetched — but if Stoker’s wife had a pattern of attracting closeted homosexual men, then I think there’s strong evidence within the novel itself to suggest that Dracula may have been inspired by Bram Stoker’s own experience with a male judge.
Dracula is a novel that centres on the concept of the vampire.
The undead.
One of the key features of the mythological vampire is that they cast no reflection in a mirror. I found that fascinating, because they are undead, which doesn’t simply mean they’ve died… it means they haven’t truly LIVED. They do not LIVE.
I genuinely believe that, woven into the novel’s many themes, is the idea that immortal life would be far more of a burden than most people imagine. But what makes me certain — in my own mind — that Bram Stoker had an experience not unlike mine, is the modus operandi of the vampire.
Because of the burden of immortality, their need to sustain it becomes more powerful than their hatred of it. And that need is an eternal thirst for blood.
Which is one of the themes I found in my novel, and also in the Second Testament of the Bible.
I thirst.
I believe the metaphoric value of the characters within Dracula have the potential to have been inspired by a Judge, which, to further expand on that platform, has the potential to demonstrate the power of power, and the power of powerlessness.
And the ability of the five senses, when in a heightened state, to express this in ways likely foreign and frightening to the author — and, coincidentally, as true in Dracula — sometimes in a letter format.
The idea that an Irish Judge could have served as an influence or muse for one of the classics is not unreasonable, as Jane Austen was in a relationship with Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, Thomas Lefroy (1852–1866), prior to him becoming a Supreme Court Justice.
It has been suggested that the character of Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice was based on Chief Justice Lefroy in his formative years.
And to further elaborate on that, whilst Mr Darcy is not identified as a legal professional in Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones’s Diary is based on this story, and the character of Mr Darcy is a human rights barrister — which I now wonder is the author’s silent nod to Chief Justice Thomas Lefroy.
It's currently 5:14am on Wednesday morning, 9 July. I've been up all night, and I'm going to watch a David Attenborough documentary and go to bed at around seven.
I'm feeling really happy at the moment because the volunteer organisation got back to me, and I am right to start volunteering with them again. It was actually the bureaucracy that I complained about that saved me in the end, and they didn’t deem my criminal conviction of using my phone while driving to impact my volunteer role with them.
As I've mentioned previously, I am also going to knit the trauma teddies for the Red Cross. It was such a coincidence. I was talking to my mother about the teddies yesterday. And as I've also mentioned, my mother is a master knitter and she is going to teach me. But just after we finished talking about it, they did that “Ray Of Sunshine” at the end of the news and it was a lady who was knitting trauma teddies. She was doing it for Lions Club, but that was just another coincidence I can put in my bag of tricks.
I actually have another one. Just a few days ago, I wrote here about my trip to Mt Gambier and the Gold Coast in search of bioluminescent mushrooms and glow worms. I talked about this man who wanted to come up to my room and he called me, saying all this inappropriate stuff and he literally just added me on Facebook.
That is a massive coincidence. That was nearly three years ago, and just after I spoke about him, he added me. That is also deeply concerning, because I don’t know how he knows my last name. I didn’t accept his request, because I hate it when people just come out of left field like that. It is such a violation of personal boundaries.
But I had a look through his Facebook page, and he’s a snake catcher as well as a glow worm tour operator. So maybe he wasn’t lying about working at Australia Zoo.
Anyway, I live in a life of coincidence but I’ve stopped going on about it, because it makes me look flawed.
