Let's abolish middle age (part 2)

We'd just been to Cape Otway, the second-most southern tip of mainland Australia, a scene of incomparable beauty, with prepossessing five-hundred foot cliffs overlooking one of the most treacherous pieces of water in the world, a place where many a mariner had come to grief.

Driving out of there, on the way to the Great Ocean Road, we came upon a couple of Grey Nomads - Roy and Edna. We knew these were their names because, like many of the GNs, they were painted in a very professional manner on the back of their caravan. (Everything about these vans is professional, and it's not hard to gather the belief that the caravan is the sole reason for their journeying - whereas they could only show off their cute little suburban brick-veneer homes to a handful of people, now they could take their masterpieces of domestic hubris with them, and show off to the entire country.) The GNs put other pieces of relevant information on the back of their vans, like the CB radio channel they prefer, just so that other GNs, coming up behind them, could have a chat about the capacity of each other's on-board freezer, or something, while they infuriated every other driver on the road by slowing to about 40 kph.

Sometimes, the vans have slogans on them as well, little emblematic blandishments that attest to the "character" of the van and its occupants. Leigh and I took great delight, on some of the more tedious passages, of coming up with slogans we thought were more appropriate than "Caution: Grey Power Ahead", and "Pat's Porta-Palace"; Leigh's suggestions ran along the lines of "Dun Livin'".

Well, Roy and Edna's van won the prize for delusion; on the back of the rig, between two beautifully-rendered naked young people, was written "THE PASSION PIT".

"Fuck me dead!" exclaimed Leigh as we got close enough to make out this wondrous revelation, "we must've finally come across a pair of kids driving one of these things."

"Not so fast, boyo," I said, "No-one under the age of 50 are called Roy and Edna."

Sure enough, as we finally crept around them (yes, they were doing 40 kph), Roy and Edna turned out to be at least two hundred years old apiece. Old Roy's rheumy eyes were fixed on the road; he had that dumb, glum visage of someone whose only object in life is to get it over with. And no wonder, because, when I looked across at Edna, all I could see was a mouth oscillating at about thirty gigahertz. She was giving poor Roy the biggest serve on Earth; you didn't need to hear what was being said to understand that if Roy had still been on top of those cliffs at Cape Otway, he, Edna, the Landcruiser and the PASSION PIT would have been hurtling towards the cruel sea below.