Captured

Day Dreaming Part 1

Leafy Suburb

John Partridge was happy sitting on his throne. Or at least that's what they called the toilet seat in Australia. Through the Crimsafe fly screen on the aluminium sliding window he could hear the calls of bush birds in the eucalyptus forest gully at the back of the large Sydney suburban house.

All was quiet in the house. Deirdre had taken the kids to school; his blue cattle dog was sleeping in the sun on the back porch and there was just him and the bush birds. His wife would soon be down at her favourite Starbucks coffee shop with her mates chatting about mundane things and laughing a lot. If someone new joined the group and asked her what her husband did for a living, she would reply nonchalantly that he, John Partridge, was the BBC's Representative in Australia. If pressed further, she would explain that John did regular news reports and would occasionally be on TV.

She would not say that John had a cushy job. Nor that it hadn't been a stroke of luck when the mandarins of the British government, who had charge of the BBC funding, decided that they needed less bums on seats. So, stacks of full-time journalists in Britain lost their jobs and that included many permanent positions overseas including the BBC's Representative in Australia. In their so-called wisdom, the mandarins decided that, in future, this position would be paid a stipend rather than a salary and thus not appear on their books. One month John was being paid a salary and the next month he was being paid a generous stipend which allowed him to live in a prestigious leafy northern suburb of Sydney not far from one of the famous golden beaches. In addition to the regular reports to the BBC, he sent in a set of compiled information he received daily from news feeds on his computer. At times there might be special reports that required him to travel anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region. The per diem and the expenses he obtained from these sorts of trips was definitely cream on the cake and added up to far more money he had received when he was on a salary from the BBC.

As well as those two main sources of income were news items John called "gems" and "spinoffs". A good example of this was when a baby salt water crocodile was found in an urban park in Brisbane, the capital of Queensland in Australia. The local journalists emphasized that it was 500 km (300 miles) from where crocodiles lived naturally and guessed that it was a pet that had somehow or other escaped. John changed the headlines for the United Kingdom to SALTWATER CROC FOUND IN MAJOR CITY and then made the by-line "Where's his mummy?" followed by a speculation that adult saltwater crocodiles might be living in the sewer systems. He knew this speculation would resonate with Europeans as they had extensive sewer systems under all of their major capital cities. And then he made a deal with the producers of "Dangerous Australia" - a video on snakes, spiders, blue-ringed octopi, sharks and adult crocodiles - to have a link at the bottom of his article and so got a percentage spinoff from any clicks.

To top that off, he compiled a speculative video about whether tourist operators were changing the DNA of salt water crocodiles by altering the natural behaviour of these huge reptiles. This related to the fact that tourism operators in the tropical north of Australia, had trained both wild and captive "salties" to leap their full length out of rivers and ponds to snatch food from a pole. John had experienced this phenomenon personally when touristing in Magnetic Island off Cairns in Northern Queensland. For a start, he and his family had been inside a Tourist Centre where three-meter "salties" were lying motionless behind two-meter bullet-proof glass.

His youngest had asked, "Are they just models Daddy?"

John had pointed out the tiniest of pulses on the giant head to indicate the creature was alive.

When they went outside and stood behind a two-meter wire fence, a handler holding a long pole with an unfrozen chicken attached by a string, was waiting beside a fully-covered pool with a bright green matt of vegetation. As the handler swung the chicken over the pool, a three-legged "saltie" rose vertically from the pool and snatched the chicken.