Smiles all around for the big game in town is the leadership that fits flush for the Premier of New South Wales. One bobby takes a dive and swims in squished grapes, another comes from the brink to sink the mindshare and take back one for the team. Labor versus Liberals till the end of recollection.
Barry O'Farrell, Premier 43 and the once and Ku-ring-gai leader of the NSW Liberal Party, took a stepping down on 16 April as a $3000 bottle is quite a load to bear. Especially if you don't remember suckling on it's grapey teat as the gifter slips their hand in your back pocket.
O'Farrell on the magical bottle that appeared like a Warwick Moss on a splatter of tessera to disappear as soon as it came,
"I have accepted that I have had a massive memory fail. I still cannot explain either the arrival of the gift that I have no recollection of or it's absence, which I still can't fathom."
Never mind the memory for a hopeful second as we stand back in the misuse of the contractual "it's" in this case. The headshakes like babies.
Barely a working week passes for the Liberal leader to drown on his sommelier's ram ventilation before the memory train comes out of the darkness of dementia and delivers unto the station Premier 35, Neville Wran from the Australian Labor Party.
On 21 April the one they called that premier from Bass Hill bowed out and showed up what it's really like to lose your faculties.
The former premier was suffering from dementia and died shortly before 6:00pm (AEST) on Sunday with his family by his side.
Mr Wran, who led New South Wales from May 1976 to July 1986, had been under special care for the past two years.
"This is of course a very sad time for us all, but in fact a blessed release for Neville," his wife Jill Hickson said in a statement.
"Dementia is a cruel fate and I have been grieving the loss that comes with it for some years."
State premiers set themselves out to be difference makers, and the battle of grey matter for the past week is no exception. Between 43 and 35, we get eight. At a gap inside a five day news cycle, we are left with three. The same number of party changes between the Wran and O'Farrell grips. If the time was right for a Labor figurehead to drop off, it would be during a Liberal hold.
Clearly, the more you look at numbers and plug them into calculators and read up about NSW state parliament history, someone will lose out mentally.
If you're going to pretend to not know where you got a bottle of wine, make sure someone else who held your position previously doesn't go off and die with a legitimate and more severe case related to a deteriorating mind. You'll look like you're just drunk and need to go home.
Written on Sunday, 27 April 2014