Great cat rescue

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I try to lead a dull and uneventful existence, but real life keeps finding me. Last month I stepped on a manhole cover, as I’d done a thousand times before -- but this time it gave way beneath me. I snatched my foot back just in time to watch the cover pivot on its axis and plunge down the shaft in front of me. I was unhurt but considerably startled.

Last week, I drove my sister back to her house after a morning playing croquet followed by lunch at my place. When we walked up to her front door, we were surprised to find a map of the world rolled up and sitting on the porch. “Isn’t this the map off my library wall?” said Julie. I had a look and replied “It certainly is. Look, you can see the x where as a child I marked the spot the Titanic sank.”

We entered the house cautiously and decided that although she had obviously had intruders, nothing obvious seemed to have been stolen. Things were moved about, drawers opened and a book on dogs sat on the couch where the burglar had apparently been reading it. We discovered later that the visitor had used a spade from the garden to prise open a side window out of view of the public.

That was unsettling but Julie was worried about something else. “Where’s my cat??”

The other animals around the property all seemed safe and well, but the senior cat Kes (aged 15 and known for her nervous disposition) was nowhere to be seen.

We did all the usual things. Walked around the house calling her. Consulted the pet-loving neighbour across the street. Waited to see if she came back for food. Called some more.

It was possible that she’d been scared out of the house by the burglar, but it seemed more likely that she was hiding somewhere inside. We called and listened, hoping for some response.

The only witness was Julie’s dog, chained up at the back door, but unfortunately she couldn’t tell us what had happened.

That was on Thursday afternoon. On Friday we continued searching on and off. No results.

Saturday afternoon, Julie planned to do some work on the front garden while I was at the supermarket. My phone buzzed and I read a text message telling me “I can hear her, but I can’t find her.”

When I reached the house, Julie was going up and down the stairs trying to work out where the distant meowing was coming from. Eventually she settled on the right-hand wall of the attic. We could peep through an opening and see into the space under the roof.

The meowing was louder whenever we called Kes, but we couldn’t see any sign of her even when we shone a light into the cavity. The sounds seemed to come from in front of us, though there was nothing to be seen. It was very Lewis Carroll. I even went across the street and looked back at the house from a distance, just to make sure the cat wasn’t up on the roof.

Not one to leave things hanging, Julie fetched a hammer and began working on enlarging the hole in the attic wall. After a few minutes work, there was a hole large enough for us to put our heads through and peer around. No sign of Kes though.

We took it in turns calling and looking. Our attention soon focussed on an opening in the floor next to the chimney which seemed to have no reason for being there. (We eventually decided it was the top of a blocked-up airshaft.) After a few minutes, I said to Julie “Lean in as far as you can and shine the light downwards. Can you see anything at the bottom of the brick wall?”

She looked and then gave a cry. “Oh Kes! I can see her. Puss, puss, puss!”

Kes looked up and gave a meow. She was alive and responded to our calls. That was good. What was more of an unknown quantity was how to get her out of there.

She was apparently unharmed, but surrounded on all sides by solid brickwork, and eight or ten feet down from us. “I wish we had a trained monkey that could climb down and put her in a sack for us,” I sighed, vague memories of a Poe story in my mind.

While Julie fetched a saw and worked on enlarging the hole in the wall, I went to a local store and bought some makeshift rescue equipment. Ropes, nets and something called a sea anchor which just looked as though it might be handy.

By the time I got back, Julie was sawing through one of the vertical beams in the wall, having first checked that it wasn’t holding anything up. With that out of the way, there was room for her to scramble through into the space beneath the roof.

“Careful where you put your feet,” I cautioned, having visions of her crashing through the ceiling of the kitchen.

There followed a protracted sequence with us putting cat food into various things and lowering them down the shaft to try and tempt Kes into climbing aboard. The sea anchor was the right size for hoisting her up, but she didn’t seem to want to get into it.

We lowered down a net but she sat on it instead of in it.

“She knows we’re trying to help her,” said Julie, peering down the shaft while I looked on warily. “If only we could explain it to her!”

What finally did the job for a hair-raising trick in which Julie attached the rope to the net and then lowered it under the cat before slowly raising it up. It took a couple of minutes, but finally she was able to slowly pull the unresisting cat up the shaft and grab hold of her.

There followed a couple of minutes of hugging and celebration before she let go of the cat. Kes promptly shot out of the room and down the stairs, as though she wanted to get away from her prison as far as possible.

Julie looked at the large rectangular hole we’d made in the attic wall. “I’ll block that up,” she said. “But not tonight.”

I looked at my watch. From locating Kes to the successful rescue had taken four hours.

POSTSCRIPT

Kes appears to be unharmed, though hungry and thirsty. Her ordeal doesn’t seem to have left any lasting problems.

The burglars haven’t been identified.

Plans are underway to cap the top of the airshaft to prevent any more such incidents.

The year 2012

2012 is the year we will see the temperatures rise, and the seas advance ...
Temperatures will rise until July / August when they will start to decline.

Unless of course you live in the Southern Hemisphere, then it's the other way around.

And as for the seas? ... well you'll have to check your local tide tables to know when they will begin to recede.

(Copied from the OTRplus forum)

Who is the Doctor

Enjoying the five-part Doctor Who audio adventure recently broadcast on BBC radio (it has been available on CD for some time, aimed at the audiobook market).  Hornets' Nest is... well, let the author explain it:  "An intricate and macabre series of interlinking tales perhaps best listened to on winter evenings. This creepy epic leads us step by spooky step towards the darkest nights of Christmas as the Doctor tells tales of his most recent escapades to his old friend and colleague Mike Yates and together they prepare to fend back the deadly and bizarre forces of darkness."

It's really nice to hear Tom Baker and Richard Franklin reprise their roles from the old television series.  Even after all these years, they slip back into the old characters straightaway.   Maybe I'm blinded by nostalgia, but I thought this was a very entertaining series so far.

Merry Christmas

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A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all from Michael (words) and Julie (pictures)

What did you do today?

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The other day, I was complaining how busy I was to somebody and they said “So what do you do all day now that you’re retired?”

Let’s take yesterday, which happens to be a Thursday. I had been late getting to sleep the night before, but I had to be up on time to wake my sister Julie and feed the poultry in the backyard. We needed to be at the Croquet Club on time for the Thursday morning golf croquet game.

The game went off well, but we spent so much time gossiping and exchanging Christmas greetings that we didn’t have time for a second game before we had to leave for a lunch date.

Julie’s old school friend (and fourth cousin) Madeleine was in town and had a small window for lunch while her mother was at the hairdresser. We met at the Green Store cafe in New Town and caught up over a meal. She needed a few extra Christmas lights, so we suggested dropping in to Chickenfeed in Moonah.

That didn’t help much, since we discovered the Chickenfeed store had been closed for flood-related reasons since the torrential downpour on Monday. Fortunately the very similar Reject Shop is just across the road.

After Madeleine had hurried off with her purchases, Julie remembered she wanted to drop off a Christmas card at the Croatian restaurant down the street. We wandered in there to find them busily cleaning up and putting everything away, ready to leave for their Christmas holiday. “Come in, come in!” they said cheerily and we ended up sitting in the darkened restaurant with a glass of champagne while we discussed their holiday plans.

We left with a large plate of cakes that they’d cleared out of the display at closing time. “That will do us for dinner,” I observed, hefting the weight of the platter.

The next detour was in to the St Vincent de Paul shop, so Julie could go through the $1 bargain rack and look around for any knickknacks suitable for last minute Christmas presents.

From there we drove to the feed store to pick up some wheat, and then on to Julie’s property to feed her animals. After I had walked the dog, I sat down for a few minutes to wait for Julie and felt very tired. The five hours sleep I had last night seemed to have been not quite enough to recharge my batteries.

We drove back to my house and I checked my e-mails and Facebook page while we had a cup of coffee. I stuck with the decaffeinated sort, since I was planning to take a nap for a while.

Two hours later I got up feeling a little better. I woke Julie, who had followed my example, and put the kettle on again. There was nothing on television we wanted to see, so I pottered about gathering up the week’s garbage, burning some audio files onto CD, and throwing together a makeshift supper. By then, it was time to switch on to listen to the Nightlife programme on ABC radio.

We listened to the late-night quiz segment, then went outside to feed the poultry in my backyard. After that we got back in the car and drove to Julie’s place to repeat the performance with her animals.

I walked the dog again, then shared an apple with her. The ginger cat wandered in and curled up on his blanket. I raised an eyebrow and said “What have you been doing today?” but there was no answer.

After Julie finished feeding the horse and checking on the new batch of ducklings, we went back to my house. I made a cup of tea, then set the computer to record this week’s episode of Those Were The Days for me overnight.

I looked at my watch and found it was very late again. What had I been doing all day? Blessed if I know.

Goodbye Insulin, Hello Bytetta

OK, I haven’t been contributing much the last couple of months. This is partly due to the travails of the Australian winter, and partly due to some health problems.

Like a lot of people nowadays, I have type-2 diabetes. For a couple of years I’ve been taking insulin with moderate results. So I was surprised when my doctor told me that he was going to take me off the insulin and put me on something new, something called Byetta.

I was a bit surprised, since I was under the impression that once you went on to insulin you were on it for good. But I was willing to try something different. He gave me a prescription and I left it at the pharmacy to be filled.

While I waited for the Byetta to arrive, I did what you would have done - googled the name to find out what it was and how it worked.

My sister was sitting across from me and looked up when I gurgled. “What’s wrong?” she asked me.

Yes,folks, Byetta is in fact lizard spit! To be fair, it is a synthetic hormone, one that mimics a substance found in the saliva of the Gila Monster.

I had grown up reading Spiderman comics, so I knew what happens to people who inject themselves with lizard essence. I imagined looking at myself in the mirror every morning, waiting for the first scales to appear.

Despite my initial misgivings I started on the new drug and injected myself morning and night for a couple of months. My doctor was pleased with the results -- not only were my blood sugar levels as good or better than on insulin, but I lost nine pounds.

Before you all rush out looking for Byetta in your local drug store, I should say it isn’t available as a diet aid, and it has some unpleasant side-effects. Chief among these is nausea, though this eased off as the weeks went by.

The reason it is associated with weight loss is that at first it kills your appetite stone dead. Because of the effect it has on your digestive system, I always felt as though I’d just eaten. I had no interest in seeking food; if it was put on a plate in front of me at the table I’d eat it. I lost interest in tea and coffee almost completely.

The only things that I actually wanted to consume were water and fruit. I felt as though I was on one of those silly fad diets.

A couple of months have gone by, and things have changed only a little. I’m still eating less (and enjoying it less -- no “comfort eating” for me). I can tolerate a bit of coffee, though I drink almost no tea. In accordance with Murphy’s Laws, it was only a few months ago that I stocked up on my favorite brands of tea, meaning that I probably now have a life-time supply of tea-bags.

I do have a little appetite in the middle of the day, after the morning shot has started to wear off and before I take the evening shot. My between-meals snacking is a thing of the past though.

It will be interesting to see what the long-term results of the change in medication will be. If the weight loss continues, I may be able to get out those trousers that I banished to the back of the wardrobe a few years ago!

We shall see.

 

November is a novel month

November is always a trying time of year, because it’s National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo). People all over the world set themselves to producing 50,000 words of fiction, starting on November 1st and going through to midnight on the last day of the month. It can be done, but it isn’t easy.

This was the seventh year I’ve taken part, and each year it seems to get a little harder. Last year was especially difficult and I felt a lot of dissatisfaction after cranking out a potboiler titled “The Purple Page.”

This year I was hoping to produce something better. I had spent a lot of time during the year musing on the plot and I felt I had a reasonable plot skeleton worked out.

The title was “The Moonlight Visitors” and would concern a man who discovered that his house guests were actually from a parallel world - that explains the

Tasmanian Tiger he saw in the back garden.

Things would have worked out all right if I’d been able to write every day -- about 1700 words a day is recommended. But things distracted me, and I had three or four days when I didn’t write at all. I was short of sleep, averaging about five and a half hours a night. There are some things that you can still do on four hours sleep, but writing fiction is not one of them.

The end result was that I had half the novel written by the time we were two-thirds of the way through the month. My maths isn’t great, but I knew I was in trouble.

I re-organized my schedule for the last ten days of the month to allow me more time to write. Especially the last three or four days. Who was the author who said the secret of writing was applying the backside to the chair and the fingers to the keys?

A pleasant surprise, I managed to finish at 4:15 pm on the last day of the month. Story completed, and almost eight hours to spare. “Wow!” I thought.

Next year I’ll be better prepared.... But then I say that every year.  

Goodbye to good books

In the city this afternoon, we took a walk through a shop that had been there all our lives. Seeing it closing down was like losing an old friend.

OBM (Oldham, Beddome and Meredith) began business in 1922 selling books to the people of Hobart. As a schoolboy, I used to go through there whenever I passed the corner of Collins and Elizabeth Street. The shop was shaped like an L, so you could walk in through the Collins Street entrance (the bookshop) and walk out into Elizabeth Street (where they sold newspapers).

In the centre of the shop was the OBM Circulating Library. They had yards and yards of books that you could borrow for a week for sixpence or ninepence. I think I worked my way through their entire Crime and Science-Fiction sections over the years.

By the end of the twentieth century, the shop had been taken over by the old-established [founded 1884] chain Angus & Robertson. It seemed odd at first when they changed the name of the shop, but it was still referred to in our family as “the OBM arcade.”

Alas, like many bookstores the chain fell in to the hands of conglomerates whose business was business, not selling books. I guess the trend to on-line sale of books didn’t help either. Whatever the cause, the Angus & Robertson chain went under, something that would have seemed inconceivable a few years ago, and the Hobart store was dragged down with the rest.

Walking in from the Collins Street side, it seemed as though there was a sale going on, with prices slashed on everything. But walking on a bit further, the real situation became obvious -- acres of empty shelves, stripped of every volume.

The Elizabeth Street side was almost empty, with a few rows of greetings cards at 75% off and a pathetic little table of stationery items. Gone was the array of magazines from all over the world, the dozens of different calendars, the complex window displays.

A skeleton staff forlornly sold what they could. Asked how long they’d be there, they replied “Wednesday is our last day.”

Who would believe that it could end like this?

Goodbye Oldham.

Farewell Beddome.

So long Meredith.

We shall not see your like again.

They want your brain....

Yesterday I was off to an early start so I could be at the Menzies Research Centre by 9:15. I was taking part in a study called CDOT (Cognition in Diabetic Older Tasmanians) which involved some physical measurements, blood tests and sessions in which I had to remember shapes and numbers.

The mental testing was more taxing than any of the physical things. I went through this three years ago, so I knew what was coming but that didn’t make it any easier.

Trying to remember a group of unrelated words was difficult enough, but I blew one question entirely I suspect -- “Tell me all the words you can think of that start with the letter A.” My mind went completely blank. “All right, there’s... well, there’s... umm...” I did manage to think up a few but I felt a bit foolish.

The one I dreaded was the numbers section. They tell you some numbers and you have to repeat them back. But then they ask you to repeat the numbers backwards ! Yikes!

In comparison, the MRI scan was quite restful. They now give you headphones and play music to you. This is an attempt to disguise the noises that sound like the USS Enterprise is being attacked by Klingons nearby.

on the road until...

The message this month, boys and girls, is “Never leave home without fastening your seat belt.” Let me tell you why.

They say that a lot of car accidents happen within a few blocks of home, and it seems that this is true. One Thursday afternoon last month I drove out of my street and turned left down the main road in my Toyota Corolla. I had travelled only half a block when I heard my sister (sitting in the passenger seat) give a gasp of horror.

I started to turn to see what she was looking at, but at that moment there was an almighty impact. A green Mazda, trying to get across the traffic and turn into the other lane, had driven straight into the left side of my car. 

I don’t remember if I tried to brake or not, I was just conscious that my car was spinning to the left and there was a loud grinding noise.

It’s not like they show you in the movies. Time didn’t draw out into a slow-motion scene or anything like that. It was all over in the space of five or ten seconds. What was most startling was the sudden cessation of motion and sound. My sister and I just sat there not moving for a few seconds, stunned by the unexpectedness of what had just happened.

What had happened was that the green Mazda had collided with my passenger side door and scraped along the left side. My car spun sideways, bouncing off the bull bar of the Tarago van beside me; this impact forced me forwards into the rear right hand corner of the blue car in front of the Tarago. The Mazda must have been trying to turn right because my car spun sideways and ended up facing left in the middle of the road.

There was minor damage to the blue car’s rear but apparently no damage to the Tarago. The Mazda’s front bumper bar was detached and hanging down. My car suffered an impact to the passenger door and that side, and to the back wheel on that side. The bonnet was crumpled up concertina-fashion in front of the windscreen.

After a few seconds, my sister and I emerged from the car and looked about blankly. Strangely neither of us seemed to think about whether we were injured (I had a scratch on my right elbow, but incredibly that seemed to be the only physical sign of the crash). I suspect we were both in shock, because we were also oblivious to the fact that we were standing in the middle of a main road at rush hour, with cars trying to get past the accident scene. We just stood there, staring at the damage, joined by the drivers of the other vehicles.

The police turned up -- well, one of them did -- and a tow-truck to take my car away. It was obvious that it wasn’t going anywhere under its own power, since the left rear wheel looked as though it would fall off if you tried to move the car.

I felt sorry for the driver of the Mazda. He was a young African guy, and he looked as glum and unhappy as you would be in his place. I went over and spoke to him a couple of times, but the body language of the others standing around obviously spelled out who they thought was responsible.

The driver of the Tarago van was amazed that I had stopped against his bull-bar but without actually crashing into his vehicle. He had watched me spin into his path and was sure that we were going to collide. In fact it was only later that we absorbed the unbelievable truth that nobody had been injured at all in any of the automobiles involved. That was our miracle for the week, maybe for the year.

As they towed our car away, my sister and I were still wandering about vaguely wondering what to do next. Fortunately a friend named Leon had been driving past and had spotted us standing next to our wrecked car. He turned around at the first opportunity and came back to offer us a lift home.

Leon helped us gather up the stuff we’d removed from the car and drove us to our destination (Julie’s house to feed her animals), returning to take us back to my house. He stressed that we needed to take it easy and suggested we might want to get checked out by a doctor the next day.

It all seemed unbelievable as we sat in our familiar armchairs that evening. Had it all really happened just hours earlier? Was my garage really empty? Perhaps this was all some sort of dream and I’d wake up to find it hadn’t really happened.

The next day was taken up with the usual business. I contacted the insurance company. We notified friends that we wouldn’t be able to join them for dinner, since our movements were now restricted to places within walking distance.

It all worked out all right in the end. The insurance company wrote off the Corolla and I used the money to buy a Hyundai Lantra. Neither my sister nor I seemed to suffer any aches or pains from the impact. If there were any legal problems resulting from the accident they obviously didn’t involve me.

Only gradually did I try and process what happened. The possibility that one or both of us might have been killed was almost impossible to take in. It’s a cliche, but I didn’t seem to be able to comprehend my own mortality.

A few days later, the man at the supermarket check-out asked us if that had been our car he’d seen. When we said it was, he asked if we’d suffered any after-effects from the accident. “Surprisingly, no” I had to say. And it was true. I had expected to have some trouble sleeping that night, but I had dozed off after a few minutes. No dreams or troubled sleep.

Maybe I was made of sterner stuff than I had realised.

Or perhaps the ability of the human mind to avoid unpleasant subjects is even more powerful than I had imagined.

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The King’s Speech won a load of Oscars last night. I saw it a couple of months ago and thought it was a fine film.

What struck me about it was that it was basically a movie about the power of radio. In an earlier generation, the speech impediment suffered by the new King would have been a difficulty for addressing visitors to the palace. Probably people attending a royal garden party would have been embarrassed by his problem, but the awkwardness would have been confined to a small number of people.

But speaking to the entire British Empire over the air made it even more important to find a way of dealing with his stutter. As war loomed, the ability of the King to speak to his nation became virtually part of the arsenal of freedom. This sounds like a job for Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue [Geoffrey Rush].    Great stuff. 

Duck! There goes Christmas!

Christmas is like a roller-coaster I feel sometimes. You start off quietly - Christmas is three or four weeks away. Then you start to pick up speed, but it’s still two weeks or more to go.

Then you go over the crest and suddenly you’re picking up more and more speed. A week? That’s no time at all! Each day just flies past and suddenly you’re bursting into the Yuletide festival, covered in tinsel, turkey and wrapping paper. You look about, thinking “What just happened?”

By the time we get to Boxing Day, you feel completely shattered. The suburbs are quiet and almost deserted while everyone is away. It’s like the silence after some awful catastrophe in an old disaster movie.

It doesn’t help that I’m still carrying a respiratory infection from the winter that I can’t get rid of. I was scheduled to read the lesson in church the week before Christmas, but my voice was so hoarse and croaking that I had to postpone it for a week. Not to mention the way my right ear keeps blocking up until I can only hear out of my left ear.

The answer for the latter problem seems to be steam inhalation. What a wonderfully old-fashioned cure! I thought my doctor was too young to have even heard of it, but he recommended I give it a try.

So if you’re looking for me, I’ll be out in the kitchen inhaling steam and looking at the pile of Christmas cards I never got motivated enough to post out.

Broken Things

The other day I got up feeling very muddle-headed after sleeping for an hour in the afternoon of a very hot day. I blundered around in the kitchen, trying to make coffee, and ended up knocking my mug off the counter.

It was one of those big black mugs with your name lettered in gold on the side. I picked it up and at first it looked all right, but when I touched it, it broke in half.

My grandfather bought those mugs. He got three of them, one for me, my sister and my mother. Michael, Julie and Mary, they said in gleaming gold lettering. Now the gold was worn and almost illegible. He’s gone now and so is my mother.

My sister is three years younger than me, but her health is not 100%. I spent a lot of time looking out for her, and I wonder how she’ll go if I’m no longer around one day.

Coming up to Christmas, you tend to think a lot about the past. 

And the future.

There’s my half-sister and her family. The youngest member of the family would be her grandson Nathan.

It’s funny to think that whatever we have will eventually belong to him. He doesn’t really know our generation. The people we knew and loved are just names to him, sometimes not even that. I guess it’s hard for him to understand a world and a century that he hardly remembers.

I sit there at family dinners sometimes and watch him. He’s big and tall and has a loud voice; he’s interested in cars and parties and his friends. Typical of his age, I guess. 

It’s one of life’s little jokes that you only really feel connected to previous generations when your own has begun to fade away and drop out of circulation.

But for now I suppose I’ll take my tablets, watch my diet and see how far into the 21st century I can make it.

Farewell Don Tuck - SF's greatest chronicler passes

The past is another country; they do things differently there.

That quote went through my mind when I recently heard of the passing of an old friend, trail-blazing bibliographer Don Tuck.

TUCK Don Henry

Passed away peacefully

at Ringwood Private

Hospital, Melbourne.

Formerly of Ulverstone and Hobart, Tasmania.

Beloved husband of the late Audrey Jean, father of Marcus,

father-in-law of Rowena and devoted Grandpa of Jessica, Lucie and Hugh.

Resting in Peace.

Like a few young men of the pre-war generation, he developed an interest in science-fiction, a minor genre often dismissed as “that crazy Buck Rogers stuff.” SF was a small niche market and it would have been possible for a dedicated fan to read all the science-fiction published in English every year. Unlike most of his fellow afficianados, he began collecting information with a view to compiling a book that would include all the available facts about the genre.

This would have been a challenging project had he been in New York or London, but he had been born in Launceston, Tasmania, as far from the wellsprings of the literature as one could get!

In those days, there was no internet, no e-mail. To query someone overseas about a fact, you wrote the question down in an air-mail letter. If you were lucky, you might get a reply in three or four weeks.

The situation was not helped by the fact that the Australian government had banned the importing of American magazines in 1940 as a war-time economy (in fact the ban lasted until 1959). This meant that the magazines that were the staple of serious science-fiction, such as John W. Campbell’s Astounding, could only be obtained by barter or depending on the goodwill of fellow fans abroad. Many of Don’s magazines from the 1940s bore the rubber stamp of the Bermuda Post Office, through which they passed on their long sea voyage to Australia.

Never deterred, Don plodded on through the decade, collecting and storing data while also moving to Hobart, holding down a job at the local zinc company and starting a family.

The story in his family was that when he married Audrey, her father volunteered to help him move house. After watching box after box of science fiction and fantasy publications loaded into the truck, he turned to his daughter and blurted out “Audrey, you’ve married a nut!” Audrey’s response is not recorded.

Don published a series of four articles about prominent SF authors in the newsletter of the Melbourne SF Club, Etherline, in 1954. Those outside his circle of friends may not have appreciated these were just the tip of the iceberg, for Don was nearing the completion of his first book on the subject.

 A Handbook of Science Fiction and Fantasy was published in 1954. Don had typed up all 154 single-spaced pages on his manual typewriter onto stencils and ran them off on a duplicator machine. No photocopiers in those days! Self-publishing was the only option since no mainstream publisher would have considered such a book for a moment.

(To put things in context, the first “real” book about science-fiction was New Maps of Hell by Kingsley Amis in 1960. The first book about science-fiction films, incidentally, wouldn’t come along until 1970 when John Baxter wrote Science Fiction in the Cinema.)

The Handbook caused a sensation in the science fiction community and there was wide approval for the scope and detail of the work. Far from resting on his laurels, Don continued collecting information and in 1959 published and revised and enlarged edition. This now ran to two volumes, a total of 400 pages!

No wonder he received a special award from the 1962 World SF Convention. The 1950s was a time of great growth in the field, and Don’s works covered it in great detail.

Still residing in Hobart, Don kept in touch by mail with fellow collectors around the world, a common practice at the time. His only face-to-face contacts were occasional evenings at his home in Lindisfarne when half a dozen SF connoisseurs would gather to discuss the latest developments in the field and admire Don’s collection. Following an hour or two of gossip, Audrey would serve refreshments and the meeting would break up. I was privileged to be invited along when Don discovered I lived just across the river from him, and he was always a courteous and charming host despite my youthful enthusiasm.

I was aware that he was still collating facts and reviews, but nobody was expecting the final flowering of his efforts. Don had been in touch with the American specialist publisher Advent, and in 1974 they began the publication of his greatest achievement, the three-volume set The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968: A Bibliographic Survey of the Fields of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction through 1968. These were three big books, and every page was packed with text (no illustrations) and detailed entries about books, authors and publishers.

Reviews were enthusiastic and 99% positive. Don was perplexed by a review by Barry Malzberg who reproached him for leaving out such famous authors as L. Sprague de Camp. It turned out that Malzberg, slightly confused about the niceties of alphabetical order, had looked under C rather than D!

The final volume rolled off the presses in 1983, and Don could be forgiven for finally drawing a line under his bibliographic career. After fifty years he deserved some time off.

The collection of old magazines and books was sold off to a university library on the mainland, and filled an entire moving van. Previous to that, Don had invited me to drop in and have a look around his garage. It was lined from floor to ceiling with paperbacks from all around the world. “Anything you want, just pick it out,” he said. I filled the back of my car with rare items at bargain-basement prices. (I wonder what they would have fetched if e-Bay had been around in those days?)

The success of his magnum opus led to his being invited to be Guest of Honour at the 1975 World SF Convention being held in Melbourne. Don was unable to make it to the convention in person, but several authors and fans were so determined to meet him that they added a trip to Tasmania to their Australian visit. We had a large dinner at a city hotel for the visitors.

After that, I lost touch with Don. He retired from the Zinc works, and he and his wife moved to Victoria, closer to his children and grandchildren. The increasingly frenetic and profitable genre that was modern science-fiction held less appeal for him (though he and Audrey did enjoy the first Star Wars film).

There were many other reference works about science-fiction in the years to come, but nearly all of them were quick to acknowledge their debt to Don’s comprehensive surveys of the field.

He had little contact with science-fiction fans in later years, and aside from a Christmas card or two, I gradually fell out of touch with him. It was a sad moment to learn he had died aged 87. I will always remember him as an agreeable host, a loyal friend and an industrious scholar. R.I.P. Donald H. Tuck.

 

another year

Looking back at 2010, it’s hard to believe we are so far through the year. Even things that seemed like big landmarks, like my 60th birthday, are now rapidly receding into the past.

My sister Julie did most of the organising of this occasion. We took over a small restaurant near my home and invited a couple of dozen of my friends. Most were from either my church or the croquet club, but there was a scattering of people from other circles.

At this sort of gathering, inevitably the person in question is called on to make a speech. To avoid this, I compiled a trivia quiz covering events that had happened in my lifetime, and passed it out to guests as they arrived. This meant that I could combine the speech with giving the answers to the quiz, killing two birds with one stone.

My note on the invitation that birthday gifts were not necessary was largely unheeded. After the party I had to make two trips out to the car to load the presents into the boot.

This winter was wildly different to last year. In 2009, we had the biggest amount of rain we’ve had for fifty years -- the mud stretched almost to the horizon. But this year it was actually below average for rainfall. Not what I was expecting after last year.

Now that spring is here, Julie is about to start work on her new chicken shed. The keeping of chickens in urban areas is going from strength to strength around the world, but here in Hobart there is a whole bundle of red tape involved. For a start you cannot keep a rooster inside the city boundaries unless you have the written permission of all your neighbours. Then there are restrictions on where you can build your hen house, how far it has to be from the edge of the property, and strict controls on how it affects the people next door. (Penalty for each infringement is a $240 fine.)

The fact that the chickens were there before most of the neighbours moved in cuts no ice with the authorities. A string of complaints to the City Council and the RSPCA have been a recurring irritation for her. Some of them have been out and out trouble-making; one complaint alleged her dog was neglected, which was unbelievable for anybody who has met my sister.

My health seems to suffer during the winter each year nowadays. I get a cough that lasts for weeks, and that tends to drive up my BGL (Blood Glucose Level readings), which upsets my endocrinologist. Controlling my diabetes is more difficult when I’m battling a virus that refuses to move out for months on end.

It’s almost November, which is National Novel Writing Month. This will be the sixth year that I’ve taken part in this challenge to write a 50,000 word novelette in a month. It seems unbelievable, but that means I’ve written a quarter of a million words of fiction (http://www.mediafire.com/?0662ubc64xksl). As often happens, I have no idea what to write about this year, but I’m hoping my subconscious is working on a plot that will come to mind by the end of October!

A thing of the past

.
My life is over -- well, not quite, but the end is in sight. Only two weeks to go till my 60th birthday, and I am beginning to feel the years piling up.


For example, on Saturday my sister and I were invited to Michele's house for the 13th birthday of her son Aleks. We knew that he was interested in the history of rock & roll, so I went through the attic and found a 1971 book on Buddy Holly that I thought he might like.

The party was a large affair, but partitioned so that the adults and children didn't have to spend all their time together. The basement was taken up with a sound system blasting out AC-DC while the elderly in-laws ate a sit-down meal upstairs.

Julie and I wandered about, chatting to various people, partaking of the copious refreshments and watching Michele's dog try and bully one of the visiting dogs. It was all pleasant enough.


But when we arrived home after only two or three hours, I felt as though I'd been away for the weekend. I suppose I'm no longer used to noise or large numbers of people. Once I would have taken it in my stride, but that seems to be a thing of the past.
.

---

At least my cough has eased off enough that I can sleep at night again. A couple of weeks of waking every two hours to cough really made me feel seedy.


I hope to be rid of it before the winter weather sets in, although going on the weather forecast for today that isn't far away. Last night it was almost frightening to read a forecast that predicted strong winds, heavy rain and possible flash flooding.

Happily, none of these things seem to have happened.

21st century (with waterfowl)

.
My health is improving a little, though I'm not sure you can say the same for my sister Julie, who (inevitably) seems to have picked up the same virus that I am battling. 

It seems hard to believe that this month I will be celebrating my 60th birthday.  I remember when I was at school I calculated that if I wanted to see the 21st century, I would have to live to be fifty.  That seemed so far off in the future... !  And today the year 2001 is nine years in the past. Sometimes I wonder where that half century has gone. 

We now have four geese in my backyard as well as the population of chickens that invaded colonised the property from Julie's house.  I've always had one goose, but three goslings were rescued from an uncertain future at Julie's place and have grown up strong and resolute in my yard (where the lawn used to be once upon a time).  The only difficulty is that the oldest goose tries to boss the chooks around, and honks at them loudly if they displease her.  Heaven knows what the neighbours make of it. 

Rooster refugees re-located

So we got the roosters moved, without needing to have a poultry mass-execution. (That would really have had the neighbors in a tizzy!)

The ten favorite roosters were sent off up north to stay on a farm near Oatlands. Julie found someone at the croquet club whose family own land up there, and he persuaded them to take the ten. We now refer to them as "the Government in Exile" since there is just a chance that one day they may return to their old home.
The remaining crowd we managed to re-locate to a country property a bit closer to town. A poultry breeder told Julie about this disused farm whose owner is prepared to let people release unwanted chickens onto his place. There's water, shelter... they're even near the beach. It's more like a holiday camp than a detention center for refugees.

All we had to do was catch the roosters one by one and shove them into a feed sack. When we had enough to fill the boot of my car, we'd drive off across the river and release them. It took about three trips but we did it. I like to think of it as "the Shangri-La for roosters" rather than as abandoning them. They certainly look happy enough when we were down there.

The following week we arranged to meet the Environmental Health Officer and take a walk around Julie's property. He seemed a nice enough young man (you couldn't actually see the horns that we had imagined him with) and made few demands.

So for the time being, things are quiet. But Julie is still going through the real estate section every week, searching for a property where you could keep roosters.


This week we visited such a place, a turkey farm up near Molesworth. It was the first time I've seen turkeys up close in numbers, and they actually do make that gobble-gobble-gobble sound and fluff up their feathers when there are strangers about. Very impressive looking.


This persistent cough of mine is now into its fifth week. Taking revolting cough mixture by the bottle. I had been going to visit my GP and see if I needed antibiotics, but he passed away unexpectedly. I am going to see a new doctor tomorrow, so we shall see what happens then.


Old Time Radio Catalog (OTRCAT.com) is dedicated to the preservation of the golden era of radio (old time radio). You can hear thousands of old time radio episodes online and can stream or download full episodes in Mp3 format. Detailed descriptions of the performers and series broadcast in the era (1920's - 1959) are available to read. In the 'daily downloads', there are the broadcasts of the day throughout history (from the last 50-70+ years). More information about old time radio...

Remembrance of fans past

By some weird coincidence, four old friends were in town the same week.  Leigh Edmonds, Valma Brown, Eric Lindsay and Jean Weber.


We met up for dinner at the New Sydney Hotel, along with Robin & Alicia Johnson and Cary & Marjorie Lenehan.   The years just rolled away and it was like we were at a science-fiction convention in the 1970s.   Well, except for the silver hair, prescription medication and the high-tech computer hardware.


Eric and Jean were on holiday before catching a plane for the Melbourne convention.  Leigh and Valma were in town doing research for a book Leigh is writing.  But the conversation ebbed and flowed, jumping from topic to topic and occasionally harking back to an incident in 1968 or 1975.


It was amazing how we all felt so much at ease, as though the last twenty years hadn't happened and we'd just seen each other a few months ago.


A couple of them asked me if I was likely to attend Aussiecon IV.  


No, I told them, I'd ruin my reputation for being a recluse...

A farewell to poultry

My sister Julie always regards Registered Mail as bad news, and this time round she was right.


"You have seven days to remove the roosters from your property," said the official letter. And by the way, here's a $240 fine for having them in the first place.


This marks a turning point in Julie's life. The last few years, suburbia has grown all around her little farm, and now the full might of the Environmental Health department has come down on her.


What will she do with thirty roosters? Kill them? Release them in the country? Give them away? Sell them?


I don't know.


Stay tuned for more news.

All Hooped Out

The second day of the croquet competition I found a bit taxing. It was only just over two hours but as the sun got hotter I started to get tired. The insulin shots only do so much, and after the first hour my concentration began to wane. The close shots were particularly difficult and I kept missing the ball.

After the game, one of the referees came over and gave me a couple of tips on how to hold the mallet correctly. He was being helpful, but by that stage I was thankful just to be standing up, let alone trying to improve the fine points of my game.

I had planned to go home after the game, get something to eat and sit down for a while, but my sister received a phone call on her mobile. Somebody whose chickens she'd been looking after was back from holiday and wanted to collect them. So we drove straight to her place and she caught the required hens.

So it was a late lunch followed by a nap. I felt shattered. I'm either more unfit than I realized, in poorer health or older than my birth certificate states ("born: 1950").

~~

Now that Novel Writing Month is over, maybe I'll be able to get some time to organize my radio collection. All the stuff I've downloaded or recorded over the last month is sitting there on my laptop's hard drive waiting to be sorted, edited and burned to disc. No wonder I keep getting these messages telling me I'm low on disc space and/or virtual memory.

The weekly shows like 'The Big Broadcast' and 'Those Were The Days' are now into their Christmas season. You wouldn't believe how many Christmas-related shows there are in Old Time Radio. Even 'Dragnet' did at least two!

~~

Reading 'United In Crime' by H. Montgomery Hyde [Heinemann 1955]. A collection of short pieces about crime and the law: accounts of the legal cases of Sir Travers Humphreys and Lord Simon followed by a sections entitled Law and Crime; The Enigma of the Multiple Murderer; The Case For and Against Flogging; the Problem of the Young Offender.

The early sections are the sort of legal cases that one might find in the short stories about Rumpole of the Bailey. The chapter on flogging, however, is amazing. I had no idea this was still going on in my lifetime. Who knew that the cat-of-nine-tails was being used into the second half of the twentieth century??

Return of the Blogger

Bears hibernate for the winter.

So do some bloggers.

I felt so run down during the last few months that I haven't been updating this at all. It didn't help at all that we just had the wettest winter for fifty years. I couldn't walk out my back door without changing into boots, the mud was so bad.

Even my hobbies, like collecting old radio shows and reading seemed to lose their appeal. I was so tired that I felt I would be all right if only I could take a nap for an hour after lunch every day.

But the season change, and I recently started on insulin injections and have started feeling a little brighter. Maybe things are on the up from here on.

I had been afraid I wouldn't be strong enough to take part in this year's National Novel Writing Month; the physical exertion of typing 50,000 words might be too much for me. But I started as scheduled on November first, writing a horror novel "The Bohemian Relic" (partly a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft). By last night I had written 32,080 words - that's not the 37,400 I should have written by then, but it's better than I thought I would do.

Onwards and upwards, gang!

Pass the Bicarb

Aaaaagh. I feel as though I’ve swallowed a tennis ball. I found an old bottle of the indigestion cure Dexsal in the medicine cabinet, but the use-by date was 1999. It just lies there if you drop it into a glass of water.

Maybe I shouldn’t have had so much coffee this afternoon, or forced myself to finish that big bowl of plums in custard at dinner. And it definitely didn’t help that we spent the evening in a house where the residents keep the heating at maximum.

Perhaps it was a combination of all the above factors. Possibly aggravated by fatigue brought on by the builders next door starting work at 6:30 this morning.

I hope to improve for tomorrow, but at the moment I have to say I feel at a low ebb.

**

Stopped in at the New Town Croquet Club on Sunday afternoon to watch the final round of the state championships and presentation of prizes. One of the officials encouraged me to have a hit on the now-vacant greens.

“This time next year you’ll probably be on the team,” he said, gazing fondly at us as we raised our mallets.

The scary part is I don’t think he was joking.

**
Here’s a couple of episodes of Theatre Organ Showcase from local radio. Have you ever heard the theme music from Star Trek played on a pipe organ? Neither had I. And the Beatles medley is pleasant.



http://www.mediafire.com/?lhz2y1yzz2k

http://www.mediafire.com/?rijhcwoovmz

It's goodbye Julie

My sister Julie and I have always been close, but it looks like I may have to get along without her. The reason is this e-mail she received today:

Attention:

I felt very sorry and bad for you, that your life is going to end like this if you don't comply, i was paid to eliminate you and I have to do it within 10 days.Someone you called your friend wants you dead by all means, and the person have spent a lot of money on this, the person also came to us and told us that he wants you dead and he provided us your names, photograph and other necessary information we needed about you. If you are in doubt with this I will send you to death.

Meanwhile, I have sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation, but I ordered them to stop for a while and not to strike immediately because I just felt something good and sympathetic about you. I decided to contact you first and know why somebody will want you dead by all means. Right now my men are monitoring you, their eyes are on you, and even the place you think is safer for you to hide might not be. Now do you want to LIVE OR DIE? It is up to you. Get back to me now if you are ready to enter deal with me, I mean life trade, who knows, and I might just spear your life, $9,000 usd is all you need to spend. You will first of all pay $3,000 usd then I will send the tape of the person that want you dead to you and when the tape gets to you, you will pay the remaining $6,000 usd. If you are not ready for my help, then I will have no choice but to carry on the assignment after all I have already being paid before now.

Warning: do not think of contacting the police or even tell anyone because I will extend it to any member of your family since you are aware that somebody want you dead, and the person knows all members of your family as well. For your own good I will advise you not to go out once is 9pm until I make out time to see you and give you the tape of my discussion with the person who want you dead then you can use it to take any legal action.

Good luck as I await your urgent respond. Do response to me on this email servicesforsuspension@yahoo.cn


Thanks,
Mr. Jacks Hitler (Everyones Nigtmare)

Goodbye Julie, we'll miss you!

Times of Change

2008 was a year of change. Most people would think of the Obama election, the international financial downturn or even the Beijing Olympics. But I found it a time of flux on the personal level.


For a start, I left my job at the Church Office after twenty years there. I’ve only had two jobs in my life, each lasting 20 years -- what a boring CV that would make.

I got myself a new car (well, newer) after the old one virtually fell to pieces -- it wouldn’t go up hills anymore, rather like me. With all the automobiles in the world, I ended up with a Toyota Corolla, notoriously the world’s most reliable and dullest vehicle.

My financial problems were somewhat alleviated when I began receiving a regular payment for being partly disabled. This came about when the Employment people offered me a particular job and I expressed doubts that I could handle it. “Do you have any health problems?” they asked. I replied “No, apart from being a near-sighted hard-of-hearing diabetic with a bad back.”

I’m now on an interesting variety of prescription drugs, pills and tablets. I’ve also been trying to remember to take St John’s Wort twice a day -- it’s useful for mild anxiety and nervous tension, but you can’t take it if you already have a prescription for anti-depressants.

Probably I would feel better if I could get more rest. I’m tired all the time and have been for the last year or so. Recently I’ve started limiting the amount of coffee I consume; I suspect I’ve been drinking more and more of it because my body is seeking some form of stimulant to make me feel more lively.

On the home front, my sister Julie was saddened by the death of her favourite dog, Saj the mastiff. This gentle giant had survived an operation for cancer the year before, and in fact the bills for it ended up outliving him. (I think they should all be paid off by next month.)

One of the big problems on the domestic side is the large number of poultry in my backyard. It started out when Julie brought over some chickens from her place, some because they were in poor health and some because they were specimens she wanted to breed from. You can probably guess what happened -- a few moments of inattention and we had a poultry population explosion on our hands.

Let me tell you -- that business about roosters only crowing at sunrise is something that they thought up for the cartoons. These ones crow morning, noon and night.

On the plus side, I have been able to start reading again a bit. The last decade I
have been reading less and less, until it was a struggle to even get through the morning paper. But this year I have been able to read a few light novels without too much exertion. Part of the problem I guess is my graduated-lens glasses which stop me from reading in bed; I have partially overcome that by reading e-books on the little Asus EEE mini-computer that was a retirement gift from the office.

As for the future -- well, we shall see.

****
I continue to spend a lot of my spare time on my current hobby, collecting Old Time Radio programmes. This is one case where synchronicity timed it perfectly, with the invention of the MP3 sound file and the wide spread of the Internet. These two things have made it possible for me to hear old shows that I never imagined I would ever enounter.

***

There was a lot of fuss recently about whether Vegemite contained too much salt to be consumed without a health warning. I tend to agree with one website that said “Vegemite is a condiment. Condiments tend to be bad if you look at them in isolation - but hey - we do not (well most of us) eat vegemite by itself.” He went on to advise us to check the fat content of salad dressing and check the sugar content of the chocolate you sprinkle on your latte before worrying about the Vegemite on your toast at breakfast.

http://fordforums.com.au/showthread.php?t=11245877&page=3

***

Alan Rider is back on air again after a few weeks away sick. I always enjoy his
show Theatre Organ Showcase

http://www.mediafire.com/?whynumjtm2f

http://www.mediafire.com/?5l4tiqwzjjj