Have you ever thought how in a hundred years - sooner for most of us - we will all be buried? Strangers will live in our homes we worked so hard to acquire; our descendants - if we have them - will hardly remember us. I mean, how many of us know our grandfather's father? We may be remembered for a few more years, then a few years later we won't even be memories.
If we had paused to think about it, if we had spent more time on things that filled our lives with laughter, we might have become different people.
Here is an almost bleached-out old photo from those carefree and innocent days when we were moving purposefully towards an unknown destination.
The location is Camp 6 on Loloho Beach on Bougainville Island in New Guinea. I'm on the folding stretcher - we called them laylows then - outside my donga. Behind me is Brian Herde, and on the far right Roy Goldsworthy, both down from Panguna for the weekend. Someone had just cracked a joke and we were waiting for the messhall to open for dinner before cracking a few more jokes over a few beers. Just another photo from those carefree days when we were still coddiwompling through life.
I have coddiwompled all my life but am at an age when the dead people I know outnumber the live ones, and so my destination is no longer vague.
