Moodge

I first met Moodge in high school. He went to Wanganui High and was good mates with Lulla who went to Shepp High with me. I'm not sure why Moodge didn't go to the same high school as us. Wanganui was the hippy, newer high school and Shepp High was the historic and perhaps prestigious one.

Lulla and Moodge had grown up together in commission homes. Moodge used to joke that the best thing about growing up in commission homes was that you could walk into any of your mates' houses and know exactly where to find stuff. 

Moodge was tall and skinny and had, I'm sure, a dark monobrow as a teen. He was also a smart-arse so he got as good as he gave out from me. And he talked filth a lot of the time so he got that back from me too, initially because I knew he didn't expect it as I didn't look like the kind of girl who would do that.

Poor Genevieve was regularly accosted by Moodge.

Moodge had no desire for Uni and ended up working for Telstra, squirrelled enough away to buy a rental property in Ballarat at 19 and then started learning programming and database management system management. From there his career took off and pretty soon he was in hot demand as a terabyte migration expert and was travelling all over Asia to do that kind of work and train teams to manage it after he left. 

Moodge had a thing for the ladies but I'm not sure many Aussie girls had a thing for him so he ended frequenting "the four floors of whores" as he called it, regularly. I'm not sure if that is where he met his first Filipino wife or not. She sure as hell wasn't pregnant with his child by the time he brought her and the baby over to Australia to show us but the second child was definitely his.

When I got married he pulled my mother aside and pointed to my baby sister, at the time only 15, and said, "You'll let me know when that one is of marrying age won't you".

Another memory is the time he called to speak to me at my parents home, back when there was only one phone in the hallway, and my middle sister Becca answered. Suffering from quite bad depression at the time, he asked how she was ad she answered gruffly and he said, "Oh, did you have a rough night?", to which she replied even more listlessly, "No," and quick as a whip he responded, "well you must have had a rough life then". Arsehole.