Notes from Down Under

I haven't been posting much, but here are some notes I made last year.

Easter 2019 -  I am making a flying visit to Ballarat for a family reunion on Easter Saturday and staying overnight.  Sunday I will catch up with Leigh Edmonds, then return to Melbourne late Sunday.  I will be staying at the Victoria Hotel in the CBD and will be available for lunch or coffee etc before catching the 7.50pm plane back to Hobart.  

Wednesday I was still tired from my travels, though most nights this week I've been in bed by 10:15pm which is not usual for me.  To my surprise this didn't seem to harm my game at the Croquet Club -- in fact a couple of people told me how well I was playing on Tuesday.  Go figure.
A very windy night.  When I got up this morning I saw the lid had blown off the 44 gallon drum at the back door.  Never saw that happen before.  Went out to get some food for the poultry.  Let me tell you, the man who coined the term chickenfeed meaning a negligible amount of money never had much to do with caring for hens.
In the evening we competed in the weekly pub quiz and managed to finish in second place.  We only lost by a single point, so I reckon we would have won if we had done better in the puzzle question ("What year did NATO celebrate its 40th birthday?").

Thursday was quiet.  Anzac Day is a public holiday.  I played croquet in the morning and we shared a cake I provided  --  the club has a tradition that you have to bring a cake when it's your birthday that week.  Went home and took a nap.  After dinner I watched some stuff from the Sid & Marty Krofft boxed set I bought last week.  I was unaware that the State Cinema was having a special screening of one of my favourite films THE DAMBUSTERS due to it being Anzac Day!  Oh well, maybe another year. 

Friday got off to a sad start.   I gave Keith Curtis and his cat a lift to the Vet, but only two of us were coming back if you know what I mean.  :(   After it was all over, Keith and I talked for a while over coffee before I drove him home.
Lunch time, Adrian drove me down to eat with Mick, Helena and Zyta to celebrate my birthday.  Chicken and champagne, and since I wasn't driving I felt free to have an extra glass or two.  Zyta had come across one of the conical moulds used for making cream horns and served up a plate of them for dessert.  This was the first time I'd seen those in a long, long time.  Quite nice but you wouldn't want to be eating them every week.

AVENGERS ENDGAME  I enjoyed this a lot more than INFINITY WARS.  The movie hits the ground running and never stops, and though you'd need a PhD in Marvel to identify every character, it works.  The movie looks amazing and it has heart.  I'd put it in my Top Five list of Marvel movies.

10:50 PM 9/05/2019
Last night I felt a little unsettled, and today I felt sad and melancholy for the first half of the day.  A game of croquet took my mind off it for a while, but afterwards I drove past my sister's old house  --  it looked so lonely sitting there behind a chain-link fence studded with warning notices.  The whole property seemed like a wasteland, enlivened only by the donkey from next door grazing in the paddock. (Good old Rosie, I thought.)
Drove in to Moonah and felt a little better after a bowl of hot soup at the Magnolia coffee shop.  I kept thinking about the photo album Julie had put together for my 60th birthday, which I had been looking through recently.  Even after a couple of years, grief can sneak up on you at unexpected moments.

13/06/2019
Thursday night, out to the Playhouse to see the Tasmanian premiere season of the musical LADIES IN BLACK.  Who knew that Tim Finn could write the music and lyrics for a good old fashioned big musical?  This is based on the Maderleine St John novel, but not the movie which was made at the same time the musical was about to come out. (Imagine the legal minefield for the lawyers dividing up the rights!)   The cast includes such stalwarts of the Hobart stage as John X and Chelle Burt, but the star is Cecilia Hutchinson who shines as the bookish suburban girl who finds a way out of the conformist 1950s when she takes a summer job at Sydney's leading department store.  This is that rare play that I would recommend unreservedly to everyone I meet.

11:46 PM 14/06/2019
Friday night and I may not get to sleep easily tonight, because I was drinking a lot of coffee at the Alliance Francais quiz tonight.  The Amnesiacs were defending the trophy we won at their last quiz (which was back in 2016).  The questions were in French, so they had to be translated into English for us, then our answers had to be translated back into French.  Fortunately I was able to answer several of the science & technology questions without waiting for the translation.
We came in second, partly I suspect because of the round where they showed us pictures of statues in France.  We not only had to say who the statues commemorated, but where they were located.   A big ask for a team in which only one had actually been to France.  (I did mis-identify the status of Jacques Brel as Charles Tranet, but nobody's perfect.)

12:03 PM 2/07/2019
For most of my life, buying art has meant picking up odds and ends at local shops or church fetes -- I don't think I ever bought anything priced at more than $25.  But I am now proud to announce that I am the owner of  a "real" painting, the sort that they sell in art galleries.
Liz Barsham's latest exhibition at the Nolan gallery finally convinced me to take the leap.  I am happy to say that her picture "Seeking shiny things" is now mine (and wouldn't it make a great subtitle for my autobiography?).

Over oceans deep
Homeward fly the travellers.
Devils watch the sky.
--- haiku for Julie 2016

cat chaos

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I had feared the worst when I brought Julie’s cat Silk over to live at my house. What if he ran away? What if he fought with the neighborhood cats? What about my two cats?

Well, he didn’t run away and as far as I know he hasn’t been in any fights. In fact my problems have been more to do with my two cats than with him. The two Cornish Rex cats have been indoor cats all their lives, not uncommon for that breed. I used to let the black cat out on the lawn for five minutes a day so she could get some grass, but the white cat was content to snooze on my bed most of the day.

But with me letting Silk in and out, they got the idea that going outside was something worth trying. It’s now got to the point where I have to count the cats before I close the back door, in case I shut somebody outside. This morning it was fine and sunny and for most of the afternoon all three cats were tearing around in and out of the house. The big orange cat Silk walks around silently, but the black cat gives little meowing sounds as she goes past, and the white cat lets out a wail if he goes outside and realizes he can’t see me.

I finally drew a chair up to the desk outside the back door and ate my lunch there, trying to soothe the cats as they ran back and forth around me. At one stage the white cat climbed onto my shoulder (a favorite trick of his) and when I stood up he leapt onto the top of the old wardrobe.

They did go to sleep for the evening, which was no surprise -- I think they were completely tired out.

A sibling recalled

For those who didn't see the latest parish magazine, this is the text of my eulogy for my sister: 

Some of you may remember Gerald Durrell’s famous book MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS. I sometimes thought that if I wrote a book about Julie it would have been titled MY SISTER AND OTHER ANIMALS. Certainly most of you are aware of her love of animals. She started small with white mice and canaries, then cats and dogs before progressing to chickens, ducks, geese, goats and horses.

But that was just one of the many sides of Julie. From the moment I saw her in her cradle at the end of 1953, my life would never be the same. For example I saw every movie Elvis Presley made in the 1960s until she was old enough to go to the cinema alone.

There was Julie the student. She was a picture in her Collegiate school uniform, complete with hat and gloves -- heaven help any girl seen in public without them. After her years at collegiate, she attended the same school as Errol Flynn, though in a different decade. She took up archery, she sang in a gospel group, she won prizes for dressage riding. Later on she was to take up croquet. Probably not a lot of you know she did two years of law at uni, before leaving to work at the new Wrest Point casino, where she progressed from croupier to inspector. 

Julie the world traveller was another one of her hats, and she saw a lot of the world. Whether it was riding horses around the pyramids, dining at the Waldorf Astoria or going around Picadilly Circus on the rear seat of a motorcycle, she seemed to have done it all. One of her favorite destinations was Hawaii and I lost count of how many times she passed through Honolulu. In her wake she left a scattering of new friends and acquaintances, people of all types who fell under her spell.

But it wasn’t all glamor and jet-setting, though she was seen at times feeding her animals wearing a mink coat and diamond ear rings. There was the practical Julie -- when something went wrong in our house, I started wondering how we could manage without it, while Julie was unscrewing the back looking for the defective part. I once saw her build a hen house in my backyard out of some scrap timber, a roll of wire and a sheet of corrugated iron.

She had a habit of gathering up bits and pieces that might come in handy one day. Wood, metal, wire... one day she told some workmen who were clearing out a shop that they could drop off the shelving and such bric-a-brac at her house rather than take it to the tip. They accepted the suggestion immediately. 

Her back paddock remained an oasis of green grass as Lenah Valley was slowly enveloped by the urban sprawl. . The local children often called in to give the horses treats -- the horses knew this and would wait at the gate with anticipation after school let out. One neighbor told me that her visiting grandchildren would come into the kitchen every morning asking for carrots for Julie’s horses.

(In years gone by, some of the local children volunteered to watch over the animals while Julie was at work, sort of the Merry Men to her Robin Hood. One girl dashed across the footbridge during a storm and led the goats to safety before the creek flooded!)

Even the possums, considered a pest by most people, made friends with Julie. One mother possum came down with her baby in tow most nights to get a snack while Julie was outside feeding the animals.

Julie the artist was another part of her life. In the 1960s, she did a lot of painting and sketching, and a couple of her pictures hung in the dining room of her father’s hotel. She was over the moon when one of her pictures sold at an art show.  

Later on she took up photography with enthusiasm -- before Photoshop came along, she would force her animals to pose wearing antlers for her Christmas card photos. With the advent of digital photography she accumulated countless pictures of nature, animals and gatherings of her friends. At one point she was virtually the unofficial photographer here, capturing the events St John’s every week.

Julie was a regular here at St John’s from the 1970s, and she brought me into the fold ten years later. Her baptism by Alan Stubs was one of the high points of her life. I was there when she came up out of the water and I’ll never forget that smile. While she was working at Wrest Point, she stipulated that she wanted Sunday off every week. This probably surprised management, since they often disciplined their workers by not putting them on the weekend roster. But Julie was willing to sacrifice the extra money so she could worship with her church family.

And maybe that’s how we’ll remember Julie -- meandering through the wonders of this world and the next, admiring its beauty and the people and the creatures in it. She is always happy to see them, and I like to think they are happy to see her. 

I know we always were.

Winter days at the farm

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As we bore through the heart of mid-winter, lots of things have to be done.

My sister married last year, an American from North Carolina.  Everyone asks me where they are going to live, but I have no answer.  At the moment, Julie and Gene are dividing their time between US and Australia, trying to fit in various commitments to the satisfaction of both sides. 

So I'm a bit busy, keeping an eye on her farm (farmlet if you want to be precise) -- I have help feeding the livestock most days, but it takes a bit of time buying feed, making sure the house is secure, and keeping the cats company for an hour or two.

Days when I am feeding, I go over twice a day and go in the front door.  Change into boots and go out the back door.   Start with going into the hen house and feeding the chickens;  check for any eggs.   Then go down to the creek and feed the ducks and geese, a noisy business.

After that I go across the creek and feed the horses - the big one Shadow and the miniature breed Trouble - before I hike up the hill in the back paddock with a carrot for Rosie, the donkey who lives next door.  This isn't too bad if it hasn't just rained, it can be pleasant with the sun on your back and a slight breeze blowing down Lenah Valley.  But I always take the hiking stick that Julie brought back from NC for me.

Then, carefully cross the creek and back to the house.   By the time I feel ready for a cup of tea or coffee, to be consumed while I keep the cats company for a while.  Silk likes to go outside afterwards;  Kes prefers to remain indoors, but she is almost 22 years old so that's quite reasonable.

And in the evening, repeat.  With the main difference that I lock the chickens up instead of letting them out into the run.  And I will probably watch the news on Julie's television set, since I don't own a working TV myself at home.

So the time ticks away, and one day I look at the calendar and notice to my surprise that they will be returning in less than two weeks.

And just when I'd got into a routine...

Robert W. Chambers revisited

Felt a bit better today, less tired and not as dizzy.  No appointments today for a change, so spent the afternoon quietly at home listening to music and re-reading Robert W. Chambers' short story "The Repairer of Reputations."

I had not read Chambers since my teenage years, and I had forgotten nearly all of it.  [Spoilers ahead!]  It is narrated by a troubled man in what was then the near future, and some parts of the story don't seem to add up.  But the first time you read the story you shrug that off, figuring that you'll eventually work out what is going on.

When I was younger, I was slightly baffled by the story and did not appreciate Chambers' artfulness in showing us everything through the eyes of an unreliable narrator.  In fact, you realize after a few pages, we are hearing a tale told to us by a madman  -- nobody and nothing he describes are likely to be true. 

The story was first published in the 1895 collection THE KING IN YELLOW and has achieved a new life through being referenced in recent movies and television shows.   I suspect, though, that readers who come to the book through that route will be as nonplussed by the story as I was in the 1960s. 
  

 

The Books of 1972

Recently on Facebook, there was some discussion about the number of books I seemed to have read down the years.    I explained that a lot of my reading had been done in my early years when I had a book on the go almost continuously.  From memory I used to read about six paperbacks a week.

To examine the original data, I blew the dust off one of my old notebooks (and I mean that literally) and opened it to see what I read in the month of November 1972, which is -- um -- almost 45 years ago.

1. THE KANDY-KOLORED TANGERINE-FLAKE STREAMLINE BABY by Tom Wolfe
2. PROFESSOR JAMESON SPACE ADVENTURES: TWIN WORLDS by Neil R Jones
3. THE BLIND WORM by Brian Stableford
4. SEED OF THE DREAMERS by Emil Petaja
5. PERRY RHODAN: PLANET OF THE DYING SUN
6. DON'T FALL OFF THE MOUNTAIN by Shirley MacLaine
7. LOST HORIZON by James Hilton
8. THE CYBERNETIC BRAINS by Raymond F. Jones
9. NEW WORLDS QUARTERLY No.2
10. THE DAYS OF GLORY by Brian Stableford
11. THE INHERITORS by A. Bertram Chandler
12. THE GATEWAY TO NEVER by A. Bertram Chandler
13. KING KOBOLD by Christopher Stasheff
14. THE HIGH HEX by Laurence M. Janifer & S.J. Treibich
15. NEBULA AWARD STORIES No.2
16. NEBULA AWARD STORIES No.3
17. DRAGONFLIGHT by Anne McCaffrey
18. THE AVENGERS: THE AFRIT AFFAIR
19. THE AVENGERS: THE MAGNETIC MAN
20. THE BLACK STAR PASSES by John W. Campbell   
21. DR. FUTURITY by Philip K. Dick
22. THE CRACK IN SPACE by Philip K. Dick
23. HELL'S GATE by Dean R. Koontz
24. THE NEW TOMORROWS edited by Norman Spinrad
25. INFINITY TWO edited by Robert Hoskins
26. THE REBEL WORLDS by Poul Anderson
27. THE WEATHERMONGER by Peter Dickinson
28. THE HOLLOW by Agatha Christie
29. THE STAR VIRUS by Barrington J. Bayley
30. PERRY RHODAN:  THE IMMORTAL UNKNOWN
31. PERRY RHODAN: VENUS IN DANGER
32. PERRY RHODAN: SECRET BARRIER X
33. THE WARLORD OF THE AIR by Michael Moorcock
34. THE ENEMY STARS by Poul Anderson
35. GOD BLESS YOU, MR ROSEWATER by Kurt Vonnegut
36. ALICE'S WORLD by Sam J. Lundwall
37. NO TIME FOR HEROES by Sam J. Lundwall
38. EMPIRE OF TWO WORLDS by Barrington J. Bayley
39. VULCAN'S HAMMER by Philip K. Dick
40. DR. OX AND OTHER STORIES by Jules Verne
41. THE BLONDE AND THE BOODLE by Jack Trevor Story
42. A BOOK OF MILLIGANIMALS by Spike Milligan
43. MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH by Robert Silverberg
44. INVADER FROM EARTH by Robert Silverberg
45. SKYJACK! by Clark Whelton
46. DOC SAVAGE:  THE MUNITIONS MASTER
47. FLIGHT INTO DANGER by Arthur Hailey.

So, forty seven books in thirty days.  Most not long books,  some quite short in fact.  But you can see how it adds up if you keep reading at that rate for several years.  I may not know many modern writers, but I can claim to have a pretty good acquaintance with the authors of the first three quarters of the twentieth century !

Shop till you drop

OK, I spent $300 on new comics in one afternoon yesterday. 

Jeez.

I hadn't been to either of the two shops where I buy my comics for a few weeks, but I didn't realize it had been that long.

The first shop, where I get my British and Australian stuff, I walked out with seven issues of THE BEANO, ten issues of COMMANDO and four issues of THE PHANTOM.

The second shop is the one where I get my American stuff. I came out of there with two issues of COMICS REVUE, one POPEYE, one DONALD DUCK, two WALT DISNEY COMICS, three MICKEY MOUSE and five issues of UNCLE SCROOGE. At least I get a 5% discount there as a regular customer, but bloody hell.   A lot of those comics are $4 in America,  but here we are paying $7 or $8  --  call it US$5.50


I didn't think it was that long, but you can't argue with seven weeks of THE BEANO sitting there waiting for you.

Tasmania -- Bushfire 1967

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the worst fires in the history of Tasmania. I was 16, working in my father’s hotel in the middle of the city. We knew it was a scorchingly hot day and the wind was blowing up, but we could never have believed the inferno that was about to descend on the country and suburbs. 

As the day went on, conditions worsened. The sky darkened, and a chokingly hot wind swept across the city. I stepped out the front door, and the street outside was filled with ash blowing through the city. All but one of the radio stations was off the air because the landlines to the transmitters had been victims of the fires, but we were getting news of the suburbs and the streets that the fires had been through.

My father went down to a hardware store and bought an extra long length of hose in case he needed to damp down the roof if embers started to land on it -- that’s if the water had been available. My mother was freaking out a bit because she didn’t know where my sister was; she got in the car and drove around looking for her, passing the Botanical Gardens where men with hessian bags were trying to beat out fires.

Eventually my sister turned up safe and sound. All my family came through that day safely. But after five hours, there were 62 people dead, 900 injured and over seven thousand homeless. No one who was there on that Tuesday in 1967 will ever forget it.
(Picture shows Lenah Valley in 1967 fire)
 

Barsham excursions and adventures in art

Liz Barsham is an old friend of the family.  We knew her before she became one of Australia's leading surrealist artists -- although she isn't happy with the surrealist tag and prefers to describe her work as "expressionist"  (she calls it Tasmanian Gothic).  Her new exhibition opened in North Hobart this month -- "Excursions and Adventures - new paintings by Elizabeth Barsham".  (Picture shows Liz on the left with Lara van Raay in front of one of her paintings.)

The works on show covered all sorts of emotions and styles.  "Eyes of the Forest" is a straightforward depiction of --  well, a forest of eyes.  "The Flower" caught many people's attention with its splash of colour illuminating a drab and dusty world.  "Battleship" is just that, and "The Mechanics" mixes apocalyptic wreckage with a rather endearing pair of mechanics who seem unphased by the cataclysym, jauntily wielding their spanners as they prepare for work.  

"The Great Silence", with its shambling beast approaching the viewer, would be perfectly at home illustrating a collection of stories by HP Lovecraft.  "The laughing girl" is at odds with its cheery title and caused some unease whenever I looked at it.

"Song of the Mill", 58 cm x 41 cm acrylic on paper, was her contribution to Metamorphosis, an international exhibition at the annual Ripattoni Art Festival in Italy.  Notable for surrounding its organ-playing protagonist with an array of Tasmanian ferns, which Cary Lenahan was happy to enumerate for me.

"Child's Guide to Wilderness" has something of a Lewis Carroll feel, with an immaculate little girl wandering through a strange world - which is obviously Tasmania, given the subtle inclusion of a Tasmanian Tiger and Mount Wellington in the background.  "McCrae's Hill" even more so, with a completely realistic Tasmanian countryside in the background of a typically Barshamesque shambles.
Sometimes the fantastic is so close to the real.  "Seabird" depicts a skeletal shape dominating the landscape,  recalling to my mind the chicken skeleton by my back door, so perfectly does it capture the long-dead avian look.

If I had to choose a picture I would want to live with on my wall, I would find it difficult to choose between the endearingly elliptical bestiary of "Strange Flightless Birds Wandered The Hills" and the small but perfectly rendered piece "Little Sisters of Perpetual Motion" which would have perfectly suited one of those abstract covers that Penguin paperbacks used to have back in the 1960s.

http://www.tasmanian-gothic.com/artwork.html

in the wet

Went across and fed the animals at my sister's place before dusk, then served up some spinach and ricotta cannelloni and ate while I listened to a podcast of the radio serial THE ARCHERS. I haven't heard an episode for a year or more but it's surprising how easily you can pick up a soap opera.

Everything was fine on the drive home, even though it was raining lightly. But when I got out of the car, the velcro holding my wallet closed gave way and I ended up squatting down gathering up all the credit cards and similar that were spread across the driveway. 

Fortunately nearly all these are now plastic rather than paper, and a bit of damp seemed to do them no harm. But I felt quite chilled by the time I got inside out of the rain...

One for the books

When I was in Vinnies thrift shop this week with Keith Curtis, I paused to look at an old book. 
Our conversation went as follows:
"Look at this one.."
"Yes, I saw that."
"By Ilf and Petrov..."
"..the Russian humorists."
"They wrote ..."
"THE TWELVE CHAIRS, yes."
 
About this stage, I began to feel I was taking part in that famous exchange between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty:
“Everything I have to say has already crossed your mind."
"Then possibly my answer has crossed yours.”

I had it here ... somewhere ...

So once again I had no idea what I'd done with the plastic box I keep all my diabetes stuff in.  I remembered I moved it when I went across to Julie's place  -- but did I bring it back?  

I looked in my house, I looked in the car.   I didn't find it, but that was no guarantee it wasn't there.

So the next morning, after staying in bed late, I finally got over to Julie's place to give the 21-year-old cat her tablet.   Couldn't see anything but I wandered around for a bit ...  and there it was next to the kettle.   I must have put it down when I stopped to make myself a coffee last time I was there.

I took a long overdue injection of Byetta, made myself a sandwich and took my diabetes and blood-pressure tablets.  Felt a bit better after a while, sat and read for a bit.  (THE INHERITORS by Jill Dobson)

Think I feel well enough to go home and start on some housework, throwing out the moldy bread and rotten fruit that has become such a part of my everyday life in recent times.   Julie's house may not be perfect, but it is closer to meeting minimum standards for being habitable than mine is.

BGL

I ran out of diabetes testing strips last night and even though I haven't bought any more, I'm not worried.

An old friend died a few months ago, and recently his wife bundled up all his diabetes paraphernalia and gave it to me. He was a very practical person and I'm sure he would have preferred his stuff was passed on to me instead of being returned to the pharmacy for safe disposal.

And every time I do a blood test for the rest of the year, I'll think of him.

Sometimes I sits and thinks

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Sometimes on a wet afternoon you leave the TV and the radio switched off and think.

You think about the past and the future. The people you knew. The people you never met but you felt you knew them.

The things you wish you'd done and the things you wish you hadn't. The things that you know now that you'll never do.

I guess that's life, in all its richness and heartache. But every day we get a new 24 hours, to do with as we wish...
.

Had lunch in Cygnet at the Commercial Hotel, "the bottom pub". Glad to see that not only do they still have the photograph of James Harvey in the Dining Room, they're building a new function space to be called The Harvey Room. He was my great-grandfather and proprietor of the hotel until 1903.

I don't get down there that often (it's a 140km round trip) but I like to check in on the place whenever I'm down the Huon.

Poem for Mondays

Somehow
at this time of life
the day seems to go out of focus
so easily.

Too much coffee
or maybe too little.

You feel as though
in some way
you haven't quite connected
with reality.

It's all -- somewhere a little removed.
You run on tramlines of routine,
vaguely baffled by your own steadfastness.

The things you used to love
no longer give you the same pleasure.
The things which were a chore
are so familiar
they no longer
even bore you.

Voices on the radio
talk of interesting things
and play new pieces of music
but it seems to come
from a space station
in orbit
around some other planet.

The calendars and diaries
tell of an old year ending
and a new year beginning,
but there are none
of the markers you were used to.

Where are the cards
from those uncles and aunts,
so punctual every year?
All gone, every one of them.
And you realize that now
you are the older generation.

Many happy returns, sis.

.
So we finally arrived at the dread day -- my sister's 60th birthday. 

The venue surprised most of the guests:  the loft over the Real Tennis Club opposite St David's Park.

Julie had been planning the event for months, but what we actually needed was twice as much time and twice as many helpers.   The 4 pm start was a bit of a debacle, but with a bit of good will things settled down into an enjoyable evening of music, food and chat.   Our minister said that Julie had the most diverse range of friends he'd ever seen and I suppose that was true.   There were old school friends, neighbors, members of the croquet club, ex-casino staff, even a couple of the science-fiction fan crowd. 

We borrowed a keyboard for Madeleine, and Nikki brought along her violin, so I didn't need to worry about playing any music for the guests.   We had the real thing, live and spontaneous.

As for the food -- well, we had a lot and people brought lots, so at the end of the evening we actually took home as much food as we brought.   Not the same food though!

Amongst the items at the party, we had a toast to the birthday girl from the Bishop of Grafton (who'd been at school with Julie), a display of photographs of Julie's life (which also included a hunt-the-chicken game - sort of like "Where's Wally?" with feathers) and a trivia quiz.   The final segment had three winners, who all scored eleven out of a possible twelve.    Just as well we had prepared several prizes. 

I had carried in a lot of drinks, but most of them were still left at the end of the day.   We used the beer and cider and some of the soft drinks, but there was a lot of wine that wasn't needed;   we used most of the personalized champagne that Julie ordered over the Internet though.   A lot of the people from church who had only been there in the afternoon stuck to tea and coffee.

So about 10:30 pm everyone had wandered off and a couple of our faithful friends threw themselves into cleaning up the place.   By the time we'd run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet and packed everything up, we were out of there by 11:20.  Thanks to Leon for helping us out by providing a third motor vehicle to drive all the stuff home.   He even took the helium balloons, which were a bit of a handful all in themselves.

So now we can start thinking about Christmas.   It was so hectic that we couldn't even get our heads around the Christmas season until the party was over.

We should just about finish the birthday leftovers by the time we have to start piling the turkey onto our plates....

Time marches on...

.

So the seasons change. The fierce Australian summer has given way to autumn, and now the chill of winter can be felt in the air.

Not a bad thing, some people would say. This year we had record temperatures in my home town -- 42 degrees celsius, which is 105 degrees in the old Fahrenheit scale. That is way too hot for most people.  

I found it difficult to tolerate, since I have been tired nearly all year. My sister Julie and her livestock took up a lot of time out of every day, and her "night owl" lifestyle doesn't really mesh with mine very well.

Last year, for example, I had to abandon my annual contribution to National Novel Writing Month halfway through the 50,000 word project. This is the first time in six years that has happened. There are things that you can do on four hour’s sleep, but writing fiction is not one of them.

Apparently housework is another. The place is spiralling out of control and I intend to try and get a handle on things next week, starting with installing a Trashpak container so I can shovel the garbage out of the house and see it hauled away every month.

One of my friends recently commented “You seem to be busier since you retired than you were before.” She’s not wrong. There seems to be something on every day.

Even last Sunday wasn’t exactly a day of rest. Up in the morning to go in to church as usual, then after Julie and I grabbed a quick lunch it was out to the Anglican church at St John’s Park who were celebrating their 175th anniversary. Thomas Heywood is the first Australian musician in history to ever make a professional living as a concert organist and his usual enthusiasm was undiminished as he played the church’s newly upgraded organ. After an enjoyable hour of light classics, we called in to the church hall for a Devonshire Tea followed by a tour of the lovely Georgian-style church.

It was dark by the time we left St John’s Park. We went back to my place and I served up a light meal while we listened to WAMU’s “Stained Glass Bluegrass” show on the Internet. This actually airs on Sunday morning in the US but the time difference means that we can listen to it live on Sunday night!

After that, it was time to go to Julie’s place again to feed the animals again. Including travelling time, this takes about two and a half hours out of every evening, so a not inconsiderable chunk of each day. I try to make some use of the time we spend driving back and forth every day -- at the moment we’re listening to downloads of the BBC radio serial “The Archers” whenever we’re in the car.

In fact a lot of my entertainment comes from radio, live or streamed over the Internet. The analog television transmitters were switched off last month, and although I do own a digital television set, I just don’t seem to have had time to clear a space and set it up! Maybe next month.

I cover the waterfront

Felt curiously disengaged wandering around Salamanca Place after my 12:15 appointment with my GP. I stopped for coffee and a sandwich at Drifter’s, but felt somehow unconnected from my surroundings.

This was my home town, I’ve lived here all my life, but today it could have been a visit to some other city for all the emotional impact it had on me.

Maybe my age is catching up with me. For many years, I always said that I didn’t feel any older on the inside. Like Jack Benny, I reached the age of 39 and stopped. But this year I’m starting to feel as though I have actually been through the 62 years that the calendar tells me I’ve lived.

The diabetes medication probably doesn’t help. Nor would my daily schedule. When you have trouble eating, drinking and sleeping it tends to throttle back the pleasures of everyday life.

But there’s always the radio. This week on A Prairie Home Companion, it's a live broadcast performance from The Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota. With special guests, French-pop girl group Chic Gamine, blues songstress Hilary Thavis, and vocalist Holly Jones. Plus, the Royal Academy of Radio Actors; Tim Russell, Sue Scott, and sound effects man Steve Kramer, Dean Magraw sits in with The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band, and of course (yay!) the latest News from Lake Wobegon. http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/

Lassie Go Home

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Haven't posted much lately, but I guess this is because each day seems so busy.  Take yesterday for example. 

I was up early because it was the day that our local fruit-and-vegetable man drops by with a van loaded with fresh fruit and veggies.   After he left, I felt so tired I thought about going back to bed... but I didn't because I knew we would never get through the day if I did.  

After feeding the poultry, my sister and I drove down to South Hobart.  Julie had spotted some luscious looking boots in the Jesse Shop op-shop when we were at a wedding at All Saints Church, but thrift shops don't take plastic cards.    We raced down and bought the boots, then had a quick fossick around the shop.  

The Jesse Shop is one of those great old stores, full of nooks and crannies filled with all sorts of bric-a-brac, memorabilia and just plain stuff.   We must go back again when we have time to take a leisurely look around.  

Then back to the croquet club for the Fun Day BBQ.  Ian and Henry had done a great job on laying out some games that we could play on the croquet lawns.   It all looked a bit odd at first but turned out to be a lot of fun.  Following that we fired up the barbecue and threw on some snags and burgers.  

To my surprise June appeared with a handful of  toy Olympic Medals and handed them out to all the competitors.   We even lined up and had our photograph taken (no we didn't have a podium, since we were all winners!).

Where does the title come in?  We had taken to the barbecue a brown dog -- not our dog, just a stray we had picked up the night before when I was driving over to Julie's place.   She thought it was too late to let it roam the streets;  it might have been run over. 

So we went back to the intersection where I thought we'd found the dog.    I walked up to the house on one corner, rang the doorbell and asked "Do you know a family that has a small white and brown dog?"

"Yes!" they cried.  "We do!"

Well, I thought to myself, that was easy enough ! 



 

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.