Boxing Day With the Beast

Sunday. Boxing Day. Three years since I set out after the Beast from George Street, and it is still out there, and I am still in here, and every hour a new party of allies joins the hunt.

Today’s party wore paper crowns again. It has become a tradition, though nobody started it on purpose. I wore one too. Barnacle wore his as a sort of tent.

I read what the Sydney hunters write afterwards. That it is creative. That it is hard. That they had to think. That their host was wonderful, by name. I have no quarrel with any of it, except that they write about the Beast as if it were the star. It is not the star. I am the star. The Beast is weather.

Three years, and neither of us will give up. So the year ends as it began, the two of us circling and a party of friends in between, pulling levers.

Merry Christmas to every passenger, past and future, and to the Beast, grudgingly. I have left it a present at the porthole: a sternly worded letter. It is the thought that counts.