Because we are moving I’m going through piles of old notebooks and papers that have been sitting in boxes for the past six years. They’re piles of ‘I should do something with this’s and ‘I don’t know what to do withs’.

Part of why I haven’t thrown them out is that they remind me of things I’ve thought in the past and while much of it them contain shopping lists there are also gems of ideas and random observations and many, many little memories.

In one notebook I found this afternoon there is a list of themes or ‘truths’ that I felt at the time could or should pepper the novel I was trying to write back in 2006, a crime novel about a Melbourne solicitor/barrister.

They were:

Goals, Messages, Truths

• women in business are never on the same level as men because capitalism is so dependent on the personal relationships of decision makers, usually men, who use women as currency both to bolster their own status and image (marriage, assistants and mistresses)and as soothing and because women are also used between men to ingratiate, form intimacies and bonds. (* sexual abuses among professional sportsmen were quite prominent at that time.)
• sex in youth is one of the few opportunities for power in a woman’s life, intoxicating and dangerous and too tempting to not use.
• justice is elusive and in corporate crime there is too little too late. Punishment is rarely commensurate with the pain.
• good and bad aren’t black and white.
• finding and following what you believe in is noble.
• the values of society at present are hypocritical, corrupt and insidiously destructive
• the people who preach economic rationalism are naive, irrational or deliberately misleading
• lawyers are like racehorses, bigger fish bet on them
• courts are one of the few remaining bastions of ‘rules’ left in our society
• good doesn’t come to those who work hard just because they work hard
• values require complicity 
• the world is moving away from democracy
• the real gangsters wear suits, the real cowboys ride bull markets, and the new frontier is the domination and corruption of national sovereignty
• implosion is near and empire will crumble, feudalism will return or it will be theocracy
• it is possible to understand all people with compassion 
• some people are evil, will remain evil 
• fundamentalism is evil, selfishness and greed are evil, violence and terror are abhorrent no matter who does it in what name
• Hope may be Chinese.