In Which I Am Very Silly

I deliberately booked the MRI for my knee in the late afternoon on the other side of Paris because I thought it would be fun to turn it into a walking tour and take some photos with my new camera.

There is a logic to this, if you squint. I don't like doing any kind of admin – medical attention is admin – so if I can combine it with an activity then suddenly it becomes an adventure. And I do love an adventure, until you discover at the end of the imaging appointment that you have, in fact, torn the meniscus in your knee.

Terrible word, meniscus. The construction itself sounds like it could come apart at any moment. I can't explain this any other way except to say the word feels like two railway cars with defective coupling and it is a miracle that the two parts are even joined. How appropriate, then, that my knee has come apart. Officially. I mean, we already knew I was injured – and I am deeply sorry to write about it again, for the second time in a row – but now I knew I was injured and the knowledge was undeniable because it came with photos.

According to the doctor who interpreted the results, the injury is only a 'petite fissuration' and it came up as a thin white line, although this was two weeks and one day after it happened so God knows what I was ignoring until then.

'I don't think you will need surgery,' the doctor said, in French. The whole appointment from start to finish was conducted in French. This also made it seem like I had a petite fissuration in my brain as I contorted my facial features in a pathetic attempt to have some understanding shunted out of my mind like it was a tube that only needed to be squeezed.

Surgery! I hadn't even thought that was on the table in the first place and even though it had just been taken off the table I experienced the emotions back to front, in much the same way that I was not in an MRI clinic but an IRM clinic, per the French. What topsy-turvy world was this.

The scan cost 500 Euros. When I attempted in my mind to convert this to Australian dollars I experienced a vision, of sorts, and an ethereal voice spaketh from a beam of light, urging me preserve my innocence and forsake this forbidden knowledge. But I looked it up anyway and it was approximately $890! For this sin, I was cast from the paradise of the imaging centre and forced to till the fields all my days, or in this case go to a bank machine up the street because, inexplicably, exactly half the fee had to be paid in cash while the other half half had to be paid by card.

This all happened after they told me I'd torn my meniscus. As I returned from the ATM with money to pay half the bill I watched a bloke wince as he hobbled up to the counter on crutches and what looked like scaffold from a construction site holding his leg together. I could see by the way the receptionist moved her arm that she was telling him, too, to walk a block in the bitter cold to the ATM to get some money. She might as well have told him to go fuck himself.

The man looked down at his leg, and then back at the receptionist, but he didn't say anything. What could he have said? Feudalism might have been abolished during the revolution but us paysans are still on the hook for seigneurial dues, repackaged for the modern world. The sun had set by now, just minutes after 5pm, and the wind was gnawing off five whole degrees from the ambient air temperature which made the outside conditions dark and near freezing. I watched the man limp heavily into that frost-bitten night like some injured wolf in an Attenborough; never to be seen again.

I had my own journey ahead of me. A 27 minute walk to the Métro Odéon – because I am now Parisien enough that the idea of having to change from one Metro line to another is a spiritual assault – and then a lot of stairs down and then even more stairs back up and another 15 minute walk home. This was fine on the way to the scan but now I had quantitative evidence of my injury; the natural enemy of my generally avoidant coping strategies is evidence.

Earlier that day the barista at my local café had been playing Fleetwood Mac's Landslide and, unbidden, I began singing in my head as I walked 'and I toooore my men-iscus' to the same tune.

Then I got sad.

Perhaps, after all the fun I've been having, you have earned yourselves a depresso mortini. But I suppose sad is the wrong word. Frustrated might be more appropriate. For you see, running is not just something I have come to actually enjoy, it is something I desperately need. This sensation snuck up on me, over the course of four years from when I bought a fitness watch and consciously started moving everyday. I think I've written about it here before but I only started running because I couldn't fit more walking in to my day. And I only wanted to fit more walking into my day because I wanted to see numbers on my watch go up. Everything else was secondary. At first I ran, like, 250m. And then I cracked a kilometre. Years passed. It hurt to run, but I was stubborn. A year ago, I think, the running stopped hurting per se and became freeing. It was funny, because I never believed the hype. But there you go.

My goal was only to increase my fitness. I wasn't trying to lose weight and certainly wasn't going to ruin my happiness with a diet – some things in life are sacred – but since 2021 I have lost 30kg, two-thirds of which has been in the last year. One-third of that has been since I moved to Paris. None of which is important, really, except that the thing that created the conditions for all of this evaporated overnight. And Ricky likes to see a trend graph more than just about anything else on this mortal plane. I had just run my first ever 10km, in 58 minutes and 28 seconds, and ran several sub-5 minute kilometres for the first time. The freedom, the thrilling sensation of moving with precision and some speed was gone. I realise I am not the first person in the world to experience an injury, or condition, that changes the nature of what their body can do, temporarily or permanently. And judging by the number of people I've seen appear on crutches since my injury, I certainly won't be the last. It's like my banged up knee became the tuning frequency for every other hobbler in the quartier, which is obscene in itself. The musculoskeletal equivalent of a homophobic parent who learns acceptance only after their kid comes out as gay. But I digress!

I'm already walking around without a twinge in the knee, and stairs have become almost normal again. I just can't run and haven't been able to for almost four weeks now. Oh, I tried, but it was ill-advised. I had run about 340 of the last 365 days and then nothing. It has been profoundly unsettling. I have become uneasy just looking at a cobblestone. My confidence is shot. And I see the other runners – in running caps, with utility vests and fucking CamelBaks; my God you're in Montmartre in winter find a fountain and grow up – sprinting down the same streets, even in the rain, and I am both terrified for them and insanely jealous.

Toward my lowest ebb, the universe delivered what felt like a reprieve. The first snow of winter was forecast starting from 11pm on a Saturday night, although I have seen the daily predictions change multiple times in just a few hours – yes I do obsessively check what passes for meteorology in Paris – which gives the impression that the weather here is best understood as a quantum wave function that exists in all possible states until final observation collapses these many worlds into the one you do, in fact, have. The snow came just before midnight and it was a lot more than forecast, about 4cm where I am.

I stayed up and had been going outside every half hour or so to check on progress. There I was, on a cobblestone street, at 11.47pm, as I used the Christmas lights as a lens to make out the tiniest first flakes. Then it came down, hard and fast, and caught me so by surprise I had to run inside and put a water resistant coat on over my other layers. People in bars ran outside and said words to the effect of il neige! and the joy was utterly infectious. Even the French care!

It does not snow much in Paris, I am told, and if it does it rarely stays on the ground. In some sense I had internalised this frequent warning, delivered as if by some Tolkien-esque wizard advising the realpolitik of Middle Earth, and went out wandering for several hours into the early morning as it just kept snowing and snowing. By the time I'd realised how much snow was falling I had climbed to the very height of the butte beneath the Sacre Cœur and it was driving sideways, like my first car with the perpetually misaligned steering wheel.

The ground had become dangerous and I was more than a kilometre from home, at some elevation, on cobblestones. I'm not being melodramatic when I say that I was visited all at once by a surge of fear. My hands were frozen, my knee protested and I imagined what my chances of reimbursement might look like if I had to tell the travel insurance company that the initial injury came from following a brass band around the quartier and the second, aggravating, injury was from being stranded while playing in the snow. Every other step I took slid, sharply. It was now almost 1am and I was tired and afraid. I called Balto's name but he was dead because that film came out in the 1990s.

The climb down, toward home, was treacherous and slow. The magic was still in me, as it was for those all around who had come out to see the Parisien flakes, but my magic had become mixed with the terror of real life. Not again! This always happens! I held on to railings and posts, tree branches and occasionally a car as I inched my way back down to my apartment (fun fact, apartment is a word I now instinctively spell with two 'Ps' as in the French and have to scowl at the computer screen when it tells me I am wrong until I remember my previous life and how to spell). Young people were throwing snowballs at each other and running around in shrieks of laughter. One guy ducked behind me and grabbed my shoulders to use me as a shield while his friends took aim. I couldn't think of the correct French so instead I just shouted c'est bon! This neatly sums my approach to many similar exeriences in my life. I'm the dog in the burning house meme.

When I returned home I shook off my overcoat and walked up to my apartment and removed my hat.

The rest of the snow was there and I shivered a little.

Addenda

Cloud Atlas

There are times in life when I am never more sure that my Mum is actually my mother, and not just the Earthside foster parent she claims to be on behalf of my alien family. We have a little family group chat with my sister, her and me in it which I took the liberty of naming Too Blessed to be Stressed many years ago when we were not sufficiently blessed and rather too much stressed.

This chat is like any other family group chat in that it stops and starts, sometimes there are segues between ideas and thoughts and sometimes there are just cold opens. But I venture, certainly in ours, that no cold open has ever been better than the one Mum sent the other day when I woke up to this from her. No hello, no context, no nothing. Just:

It's the lack of punctuation for me, combined with the almost perfunctory way her otherwise overwhelming curiosity is marshalled. For some reason it reminds me perfectly of the long-running banner gag on Arrested Development where the family, hoping to earn Michael Bluth's distraction with a banner that says Family Love Michael beg him to read it. His brother Gob yells: 'Take a look at banner, Michael!'

Take a look at cloud, Ricky!

Queue and On (and On and On)

Almost three months ago I received the interim decision about my residency in France, a sort of halfway arrangement that allows me to travel around the EU but still not leave the zone lest I reset the entire process. That notice came with the advice that my actual resident permit, with all the privileges that entails, was being 'manufactured' and I would shortly be given a date and a time and a place at which I had to pick it up in person.

Such is the way of the French, nothing happened. There was silence. I thought nothing of it for a month, as surely it would not take them very long. And then I forgot about it for the second month. And by the third I became worried that they had simply forgotten about me or, worse, changed their mind. I was asked to fly home for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards but simply couldn't leave the EU without applying for a separate pass that would allow me get an exception. One of the organisers asked if it was worth getting the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade involved to argue my case, which I found very amusing because I wasn't sure that I had a case to argue. And did the Australians and French need another diplomatic incident so soon after AUKUS?

Much later, I relented and emailed the prefecture to ask, ever so politely, if they had forgotten about me. Not for the first time would I have been left alone while trying to navigate a complex new bureaucracy. When we moved off the cattle station in Outback Queensland and started going to a real school with actual other students in the one location I had to catch one school bus into town to the high school and, unbeknownst to me, change on to a second bus to take me to my primary school. I was sitting quietly and alone on the bus after everyone else got off and hadn't said a word as the driver turned around and headed back to the depot. When he noticed me in his mirror the poor man almost had a heart attack.

Three days after I emailed the French authorities, with no response from the prefecture, a separate message came through for me: my residence permit was ready to collect. Wonderful news, except they seem to tell everyone, all at once, to come to the prefecture for sport. I think they do administrative theatre the way they speak their own language; just fucken run it all together and let people figure it out. Our queue eventually stretched along the entire length of the very large neo-Florentine Prefecture de Police building on the little island in the Seine, Île de la Cité and then around the corner.

Just over the square is the final prison that held Marie Antoinette before her trial and execution which means, I think, she spent less time in this place than I was about to.

Once inside, the queue continued through security screening and down a hallway into an outside hallway and then into a larger room where the queue began all over again. Halfway through what became a three hour queue – people have looked at me with contempt and jealousy when I tell them how 'easy' I had it – an official looked at my papers and asked me where my printed attestation favourable was. This is the document that had been electronically supplied three months earlier, the existence of which was the very reason for my appointment at their request here on this day. Perhaps they told me to print it out in the list of documents they demanded I print – I deciphered the rest fine – but if they did they called it something completely different. And why did I need it printed out anyway? They have it! I was too deep into the queue to turn away now, so I spent the final 90 minutes stressed and unnerved about what awaited me. As it happens: a frown. And then she asked me to write the number from the document, which I had on email, on a piece of paper.

Just like that, I became an official resident of France for the next four years.

A Very Basic Christmas

I decided to take myself to the Christmas Capital of the World [disputed] in Strasbourg, in the Alsace region of France (formerly German, formerly French, formerly German etc) for a couple of days because it's my first northern hemisphere winter and, well, why not.

It was much too beautiful to describe in mere words (and also I have taken forever to write this newsletter update and there has been much to much going on, so I am just turning it over to the travel blog it has become for a hot minute) so here are some of the photos I most enjoyed from my ambling.

I will say, however, that the magic of Christmas was marginally spoiled when I received word that the Commonwealth Ombudsman was about to hand down its second investigation report into the federal government's management of a crisis-riddled employment services regime for people on welfare, stemming from a story I first revealed in The Saturday Paper in November last year. Of course, I remain interested and so I spent the better part of my only full day in Strasbourg reading the report and its catalogue of grim administrative scrooge-y-ness, sans final chapter revelation, surrounded by the complete charm of Christmas.

One could achieve a similar psychiatric dissonance in other ways, I suppose, but not quite as efficiently. Perhaps a visit to the Wonka factory interrupted by the release of a workplace health and safety investigation into the deaths of children at same?

In the event I was determined to enjoy myself by nightfall and walked around town sipping from my new favourite drink in the world, vin chaud blanc (hot white wine), before I developed a sudden craving for spätzle and schnitzel that I haven't had since German studies in high school. Fed, watered and sleepy I returned to my apartment above the city and was half reading more of the Ombudsman's report and staring blankly at the wall when I heard the sound of distant singing. I paid it no heed until it grew louder, quite clearly on the move. When I reached my window overlooking the Ill River that surrounds the old centre of Strasbourg, I could make out a kind of liturgical chanting and my heart quickened. Why does this keep happening to me?

I smelled my armpits. Maybe it was a pheromone or something. I thought I had that gland out.

After singing and marching into the spot right below my window I watched them do mass and then continue walking and hallelujah-ing down the Ill. The sound faded and I relaxed. And then they turned around and came back. It felt like the unsettling scene in Love Actually when Rick from The Walking Dead turns up at Keira Knightly's door and tells her he will love her until he dies even though she is newly married to his best friend.

They even had a boom box.

The train trip back to Paris on Tuesday was wonderful, apart from at the start where I had to tell a German he was occupying my seat. In the Alsace! Come on man, read the room. My friend, the writer and journalist Meg Clement, told me that this line was the fastest in all of Europe because the EU Parliament holds sessions in Strasbourg (which is also home to a bunch of other important institutions including the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights) and all the officials who live in Paris wanted to get the hell out and return to the big smoke as fast as possible. Obviously it's also a pretty handy location re: access to the rest of Europe but this story is way more fun. Also, it seems more or less accurate: when the line was finally due to open after decades of pondering and then delays, the then head of the SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, where 'chemins de fer' literally means iron paths) Anne-Marie Idrac said she had never seen the Strasbourg train station before. The boss of the largest rail network in France!

'I've been to Strasbourg before — by plane. I didn't realize this railway station was so beautiful,' she said in 2007.

Anyway, now you can get between Paris and Strasbourg, a distance of almost 500km, in just an hour and 45 minutes. Sublime place to get some work done.

My interview with the Ombudsman and write-up about the report will be out this Saturday.

An Award Round-Up

Sorry to be that guy but precisely one person asked (hi Denyse!) so here is a list of all the awards Mean Streak has now won or been shortlisted for. It's been a wonderful end to the year even as I continue to try to escape it.

• Won the 2025 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-Fiction
• Won the 2025 Nib Peoples' Choice Prize in the Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award
• Won the 2025 Walkley Book of the Year
• Shortlisted for the Australian Political Book of the Year
• Shortlisted for an Australian Book Industry Award in the social impact category

The Walkley was the last to round out the list. As far as I know, the season is now over so you won't hear any more about it (until the ABC / Lingo Pictures TV show based on it enters production in March, anyway).

Mum received the Walkley statue in the mail the other week and clearly hasn't had time to make a Christmas outfit for it yet. I'll leave you with that.