After my husband spent days last week trying to get his brother to text or call him back, he rang the local Melbourne police station. Said Andrew hadn’t been well, asked for a welfare check. We’ll get back to you, said the cops. Maybe he went on holiday and didn’t tell you.
Nah. Not Andrew, said Chris. He’s a homebody. Likes his own company at his own kitchen table. Likes reading physical magazines and newspapers, doesn’t like driving. When he does nip up to the shops, he’s likely wearing an ancient Arnold Ross jumper or tweed jacket with patches on the elbows.
This was about midday on Saturday. We went about our business. Distraction. I pruned hydrangeas, thought ahead to dinner. Chris walked our dog Sally, phoned his aunt to see when she last heard from Andrew.
He also spoke to the police again. No car available yet. Sit tight.
Righto, but that was getting stressful. Should we drive up from the coast? Probably faster, but we both had a bad feeling. I didn’t want my husband – still wobbly sometimes from losing his other brother John – to face a too-quiet house, a door unanswered.
To face being the last one standing in his whole family.
So we started talking about Andrew. About his high school exchange year in California, his stint as a language teacher in Japan, his decade living in Sydney working for impresario Mike Walsh. Then his bunkering down home in Melbourne, living the life he liked – quiet.
Andrew was entertaining because he never pretended to be interesting. He and I would debate whether Lady Di would have liked Meghan Markle, if Barbra Streisand cloning her dogs was ick or marvellous. Once, on Facebook, he listed his top 10 albums of all time as including Xanadu and the Broadway original cast album of Pippin.
During a phone call last winter, I told Andrew he’d get a kick out of the Dull Men’s Club, founded in the 1980s by retired US tax lawyer Lee Carlson when he decided there weren’t enough clubs or associations for people who want an uneventful life.
Andrew laughed. Course he did. Now on Facebook, here’s a place where 2.1 million followers — self-described “dullsters”, men and women — celebrate the mundane without apology. The antithesis of usual social media behaviour.
People post photos of eggs, playing competitive conkers, being town criers. In just the last few days, contributions include a school German report, old shoes next to new ones, rubber band collections.
Brisbane’s Richard Gourley put up a sign he sees from the train: “Warning, roller doors open and close at infrequent times.”
My favourite ever contributor is the Canadian bloke who posted a snap from his wife’s delivery suite – of the six-wheeled base holding monitors and devices beside the bed.
“I can’t help but notice how smooth the casters on hospital equipment [are],” he wrote on Facebook. “Perhaps floor texture has a lot to do with it. However, the construction of the wheels and the bearing in each caster seems superior to other casters in other environments.”
Andrew would fit right in, we thought. Just as dullsters posted screenshots of Amazon notifications that plectrums were arriving, he collected theatre programs, could quote Judy Garland movies, never missed posting the same photo of a poppy every Anzac Day.
In November, Carlson – who chose his pseudonym Grover Click for its alleged blandness – described dullsters as “the opposite of hipsters. We’re not into the latest thing,” he told The Times in the UK.
For 40 years, he’s had one message: “Enjoy what you’ve got. It’s OK to be ordinary.”
Andrew knew that. While in his pomp he was at the heart of the party — photos of him laughing with streamers on his head, hugging friends at weddings are Exhibit A — he decided in midlife that having an organised sock drawer and legal affairs were more his jam.
Just after 6 on Saturday night Chris and I were waiting on the front porch when the divvy van pulled up. Two cops got out, opened the gate. And we knew. Sleep tight, Andrew, our extraordinary ordinary man.
Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media. Her book, Boogie Wonderland, is published by Affirm Press.
