That was on Thursday of last week, less than 24 hours from when those words were meant to be with the editor.
Saved, filed and ready to send was a piece that told about my early days as a reporter, how I became a Bruce Springsteen fan and how, along with my wife, I missed the chance to ride The Great Ocean Road on our Harley Davidson in the company of the American rocker.
As significant as that was — well, at least to me — it vanished from the hierarchy of importance after sitting through a webinar on Wednesday afternoon and was reminded again of my responsibilities on Thursday by the Member for Warringah, Zali Steggall.
Beyond that, I also sat through a midweek event organised by Environment Victoria at which it was explained why some messages fail and others succeed.
Facts, it seems, carry little weight and so have almost no impact on changing people's minds, which leaves me sitting here for hours pondering over what to say next.
My unrelenting interest is in the climate crisis; a dilemma that arises from cold, flint-hard facts which are the very thing that most people never absorb or act upon.
They need emotional stories; stories that reach deeper into their lives, touch their hearts and so drive them to change their behaviour.
So, what happened on Wednesday that was both factual and sufficiently emotional to cause me to scrap an already written column and substitute this?
Sitting through a webinar organised by the Melbourne bookshop Readings and The Conversation, a universities organisation that each day publishes articles from academics on every imaginable contemporary topic, I heard some alarming facts that quickly became emotional.
The webinar was for the launch of selected writings from The Conversation in a book entitled The Conversation: 2020 The Year that Changed Us.
One of the speakers and contributors to the new book was climate scientist and author Dr Joëlle Gergis, who made it quite clear that regardless of what we do, and even if we achieve the goals set in Paris in 2015, we will still see temperature increases this century of 3.5 degrees Celsius and maybe even four degrees.
That’s the flint-hard fact, and the emotional stuff is that I have a son and a daughter who will have to see out their lives learning to live with those conditions.
On top of that I have two grandsons, only one is yet a teenager, who may find life impossible at 3.5 degrees more.
Zali Steggall, someone with whom I have a rather tenuous relationship as I interviewed her for my podcast when she was only a contender and not the Member for Warringah, has taken a stance on the climate.
Next month she will present a bill to Federal Parliament calling for the recognition of climate change and subsequent adaption and mitigation.
That’s a flint-hard fact; but let’s free our emotions, for just a moment at least, and think about your kids and grandkids and how they will live, thrive and survive in a world endowed with conditions never before experienced by humans.
19°C