MEM BE RS’ CO NTRI BUT I ON
Lockdown by Life Member Louis A Coutts
I love my Oxford dictionary. I know that today it is passé. All you have to do, so they tell me, is key the word into Google and up comes the word and its various meanings. I haven’t tried that yet because, as I said, I love my Oxford dictionary. There is something about it that suggests learning and the romance of scholarship. Let me hasten to add that I am not a scholar, but I think of scholarship as in the old days when Don’s wore their academic robes and worked hard to enrich their minds and those of their students. I remember a dear friend who was senior lecturer in classics at Adelaide University. I would visit Ron in his room of ill-shapen book shelves full of thousands of books. I would sit in an old leather 24
lounge chair with the springs penetrating the aged leather. He would put on the kettle and make tea in a China teapot. He always had shortbread English biscuits. He was a real romantic. On one occasion when his sabbatical came up, he went down to the P & O office to book his passage to England only to discover that it didn’t take passengers anymore and referred him to Qantas. There was something romantic about scholarship. There are times when I would have loved to be a scholar but now my scholarship is restricted to my Oxford dictionary. I have come across a new word “lockdown”. Now I would have to admit that my Oxford dictionary is a bit out of date. It is a bit like Ron’s aged leather
