We're drinking wine from the Bellarine Peninsula, and he soon establishes an Essendon connection with the winemaker. The degrees of separation to a life in football are minuscule no matter where the conversation goes, which in this case is anywhere and everywhere in a dart-at-a-wall journey through a restless mind.

He reckons we could be in any of the world's great cities, perched alongside its grandest waterway, and he's up for an architectural meander. "I often sit at Southbank looking back at Flinders St Station and St Paul's and think, 'Please never touch them.'"

As a young plumber he worked on a St Paul's renovation, nestling the old church forever close to his heart. He likes Federation Square's place in Melbourne's cultural evolution but is still waiting for a truly exceptional modern building to rise up alongside the Yarra. "One to make you go, 'Wow!'"

Buildings lead to art and a proposal he put to a politician to bring the husk of a Kenworth truck, melted by the Black Saturday fires, from up beyond Healesville into the city. In his vision, natives and visitors alike would see what the flick of a match can do in a harsh land. "Agricultural disaster art," Sheedy calls it. The idea went straight over the pollie's head.

He's 67, and in his 49th year as a player, coach, now ambassador and career pusher of boundaries and blazer of trails. Since returning to Essendon this year, two things have dominated the whir of thoughts in his head - creating an annual game to honour farmers, and youth leadership. Everything comes back to people: "People are the game."

His return to the club he led to four premierships comes after what he calls "a bit of a muck-up" by the Bombers, "but everybody has muck-ups - governments, police, army, hospitals, religions".

What matters is how you move on. "You try and get it right, add a bit of flavour here and there."

A group of blokes in town for a West Coast Eagles game stop to say g'day, and he's back in Western Australia on a recent three-week ideas tour, talking to farmers from Broome to Geraldton. Back in the day, Sheedy the coach tied down a windsock, triumphantly waved his jacket and made a throat-slicing gesture at a player - all against the Eagles. He reckons WA is his busiest state. "You get out of your coaches' hat, it's about Australia, what we can do for each other."

He's been working towards National Farmers' Day for five years, a celebration to sit alongside Anzac Day and Dreamtime at the 'G as "icon" games on the AFL calendar. He can picture administrators of global sports seeing 90,000 people at contests between two suburbs and wondering, "How do they do that?" Who plays is up for negotiation between three states; he makes no apology the Bombers must be in it.

The previous night was a late one, talking footy and life at Aberfeldie footy club ("as much as you can run around Australia, you've gotta look after your locals"). He was up early for a business meeting, and hankers only for a light lunch. His John Dory scallops and wild mushrooms arrive covered in a foam that might have been scraped from the Lakes Entrance foreshore. "Lovely. There won't be anything left on the plate."

His working life has been devoted to bringing out the best in young people. Have they changed? "Of course, they're in a hurry. They've got the world coming at them faster than we did."

Screens can be a wonderful tool, and a dangerous one. The subliminal influence of Hollywood through to all manner of computer games is a worry; he advocates countering technology with nature. "The best thing I did was go to the garden, it gives you space, and time."

He and his wife Geraldine spent six years in Sydney, but their Park Orchards haven has held up pretty well. Sheedy's billabong brings particular joy for someone who grew up one of seven in a South Yarra terrace in the 1950s.

On some mission or other in Wagga Wagga, he drove past a school that had a veritable working farm on its grounds - sheep, fish breeding in ponds, a vegie garden, water harvested from the roof. He stopped, marched into the office and asked to meet the teacher who'd made it happen. "Teach them about survival, an understanding of water, growth, soil. We can do that," he says.

He's got four kids of his own and so far one grandchild. "We need more - need to get to 30 million as quick as we can, then 35 million." He's excited for their future, notwithstanding myriad concerns. The scourge of ice, the "death drug", makes him mourn "the beautiful brain you're going to have that won't be what it could be". Sheedy reckons stopping it at the source could be tougher than quelling ISIS; he's open to discussing extreme measures.

"Talk to the group older than me, 70-to-85s, my mentors, they'd go back to the old times. They'd go back to squads, they'd just go and hunt them down. Meet fire with fire. There'll be people who'll be dead, but that's the costs of it." Yes, he admits, that's outrageous talk. "But debate it in parliament, because it might need something unbelievable to eradicate ice."

The parade of lunchtime joggers catches his eye, takes him to the Botanic Gardens ("the best in Australia"). Every divergent thought prompts a question, like why do people walk around it when they could stroll the paths inside? "The robots walk around it, the thinkers walk through it. I say to my son, 'Let's walk through it.'"

Gut-busting summer runs with Richmond were of a robotic bent, yet around the Tan track or on laps of the MCG his mind ticked in time with his pounding feet, sometimes to a spin on Kipling. "'If when I get there next ...' You start programming your mind for next season, convince yourself you could do anything."

The John Dory and my juicy Milawa chicken sweetened with kohlrabi and broccolini are disappearing and we're onto Clint Eastwood, who Sheedy remembers as a cowboy mumbling around a Rawhide campfire in the 1960s. "And he's still talking to me 55 years later."

He hangs on to stories that resonate, and cut one out a few months back that makes him smile when people moan that they'll be working into their seventies. "Here's Clint Eastwood at 85 telling 60-year-olds, 'You're nearly at your peak.' I think that's a pretty good article for me at this stage of my life."

Youth leadership is his next project; the education department should be warned - you're on his radar. He remembers being in his late teens at Richmond and hanging on every word from Ron Clarke, Herb Elliott, Lionel Rose, big names of the time who visited the club to impart wisdom. He's convinced kids need to be inspired, not preached to; seeing boxer Danny Green on the back of a taxi saying, "Stop, think - one punch can kill" emboldened him.

"We need to expand kids' thinking - don't give up, it is tough, suck it up, keep working through the negatives and you might just get a little bit of a lift, discover the self-esteem that gets you through."

The table has been cleared before we realise our fathers both died of Motor Neurone Disease; Sheedy's when he was just 18. At the time they thought it was Multiple Sclerosis; only years later did his sister discover it was actually MND. At the end of the 1981 season, Sheedy made Neale Daniher captain of Essendon before he'd turned 21. He did his knee and never led the Bombers in a single game. Now, he is publicly campaigning for a cure for MND, the "beast" he knows will kill him.

"We've still got him," Sheedy says, recalling Daniher coaching Melbourne to a grand final and the finals six times, his formative role in the AFL Coaches' Association, the inspiration he is providing now. "If you've got great people, if you've got wonderful people, think about them for the next thing."

A young Iraqi and his Asian companion stop for a photo, then Sheedy's phone rings and he's off again, telling the caller he's on the banks of the greatest river in Victoria, waiting for the debris from the recent rains to wash by. "Normally gets caught up around Jeff's Shed. I'll tell them to move the Polly Woodside ..."

The bill, please

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