"In those days, the old man said, Sydney and especially the Northern Beaches were just floating in an ocean of pure heroin with little blotting paper squares of LSD on the wave peaks...but there was no peer pressure to indulge...and I was of a literary bent anyway, rather than a musical one, so my intention was to spend my life writing very depressing melancholic poetry and neither heroin or LSD were helpful to that 'genre'...I just bought a lot of books and read them...fortunately, just up the road in the Hunter Valley the good Shiraz with amazing head-killing histaminic tannins in it was coming out at $6 a bottle, 10 years old. Mind you, if the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen up to that time in my life, Sally Martin, had asked me to indulge in the narcotics with her, I probably would have...but she never asked and I've never been one to impose. Sigh. My brother Bob, who I had fights with when 6, grew to be the most generous of all of us Fitzpatricks and bought me a bottle of South AUSTRALIA'S FINEST Penfolds 1953 Grange Hermitage...21 years old... for my 21st birthday, and we drank it together, respectfully. I remember the taste of that still...it was perfect raisins in the free-based bliss of the sun designed by a Loving God. I could never afford an addiction to that magnificent substance, so I had to basically live my life only addicted to cigarettes and a few occasional Cuban cigars, a good red now and then, and my favourite really depressing books mostly written by very depressed Germans...books....regrets, yep, a few."

"In those days, the old man said, Sydney and especially the Northern Beaches were just floating in an ocean of pure heroin with little blotting paper squares of LSD on the wave peaks...but there was no peer pressure to indulge...and I was of a literary bent anyway, rather than a musical one, so my intention was to spend my life writing very depressing melancholic poetry and neither heroin or LSD were helpful to that 'genre'...I just bought a lot of books and read them...fortunately, just up the road in the Hunter Valley the good Shiraz with amazing head-killing histaminic tannins in it was coming out at $6 a bottle, 10 years old. Mind you, if the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen up to that time in my life, Sally Martin, had asked me to indulge in the narcotics with her, I probably would have...but she never asked and I've never been one to impose. Sigh.
My brother Bob, who I had fights with when 6, grew to be the most generous of all of us Fitzpatricks and bought me a bottle of South AUSTRALIA'S FINEST Penfolds 1953 Grange Hermitage...21 years old... for my 21st birthday, and we drank it together, respectfully. I remember the taste of that still...it was perfect raisins in the free-based bliss of the sun designed by a Loving God. I could never afford an addiction to that magnificent substance, so I had to basically live my life only addicted to cigarettes and a few occasional Cuban cigars, a good red now and then, and my favourite really depressing books mostly written by very depressed Germans...books....regrets, yep, a few."