April 13

Yesterday, struggling with the looming apparition of my own ordinariness, I recounted the Seduction of Abebe Birera to my workmates- an English slapper, a misogynist Irishman, a wide-eyed dancer from the western suburbs and a depressed homosexual of indeterminate years. This is a story in which an Australian woman in her late twenties deflowers a tennage Ethiopian virgin in the hill town of Gondar, assisted by a litre of honey wine and a low grade episode of mania, for no other reason than that she feels like it (he doesn't object either.) The Ethiopian virgin is also of undisclosed age but dances like a young Michael Jackson and produces charming grammatical aberrances like 'shoeses' and 'stuffs' which is enough to override the horrible possibility that he may not be eighteen- as he claims - but something rather closer to sixteen. He is five foot tall (the pervert cougar is about six), and the romances blossoms in the Gondar cinema where the prospective lovers court over a bunch of chat, five cigarettes and an action movie starring an Aryan hero and a man- eating monster. The usher tells Abebe sternly that his mother will be informed.

For the next ten days this romance proceeds in fits and starts, with Sean Paul singing about sexy ladies all over town in the background and the first tiff occurring within days over the presence of an extremely drunk junvenile, asleep with his shoes on in the disgruntled sex tourist's bed. Disgruntled sex tourist takes the cue of the cinema usher and threatens to send drunk juvenile home to mother should this ever occur again. Luckily for all the affair is too brief for this to become a real issue and within a week the sex tourist is on her way out of town in a rattling bus that will- before the trip is over- see the birth of one long-lasting romance between the sex tourist and a Polish architect and the death of one donkey.