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

D.E.L. (don't eat lunch)

I raised the glass of champagne and toasted the horse as he grazed in the garden. I’ve always found Christmas to be a stressful time, but Boxing Day things start to calm down a bit. One of Julie’s neighbours asked us round for a drink, and even invited Julie’s horse.

We opened the champagne, then took down the slip-rail that divided the two properties. After a bit of cajoling, the horse wandered in and started cropping the grass. Then he wandered off again.

All the time we were having drinks and nibbles, the horse came and went. You can probably guess what happened in the end -- when we were ready to leave, I put the slip-rail back in place, and the horse decided he wanted to come back into the garden. He stood there and looked at me reproachfully across the fence.

“You had your chance,” I told him. “You should have taken the opportunity then.” He just grunted accusingly.

#

The end of the year is a bad time if you’re trying to lose weight, especially in Tasmania. You just get over Christmas, when the vast majority are engaged in becoming ever vaster, then you have the Summer Festival.

This started as a time-filler between the start and finish of the Sydney-Hobart yacht race, but in twenty years it’s become a fixture on the Tasmanian scene. The jewel in the crown is the Taste Of Tasmania, a week-long festival of food and drink held on the Hobart waterfront.

Friday my sister and I made our third visit of the week to the old warehouse that houses the enormous range of stalls. We started out with a glass of draught cider to wash down the eight different kinds of cheese we sampled at the Bruny Island cheese stall.

Then we moved on to the smoked lamb with rosemary and pinkeye potatoes with spiced cherries. We made our way down the line of sheds heading for the Turkish stall, but got detoured by the Huon Valley free-range roast pork.

When we finally made it to the Turkish stall, we had some lamb cutlets, then moved on to the Paris Cafe stall for coffee and Mexican beef on a buckwheat crepe with Mesclun salad.

I was starting to fill up by this stage, but managed to sample the pancakes with strawberries and ice cream. While we were buying a take-away platter of the Bruny Island cheeses, we were standing next to the stand selling Panna Cotta (the name literally means “cooked cream” I believe).

Watching the people walking away with plate after plate of that beautifully light eggless Italian custard was too much for me. We ended up sampling that as well before we walked out into the late afternoon sun.

“Do you want anything else to eat?” asked my sister.

“No,” I said firmly, “I do not.”

#

Alan Rider isn’t well, so the last couple of episodes of Theatre Organ Showcase on 96FM were slightly different to usual -- no Irish comedy segment for example. But we still had a lot of enjoyable music, including an agreeable swinging version of “Mack the Knife” and a Klaus Wunderlich medley.


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

http://www.mediafire.com/?3wmeum0wzdy

nothing doing

Don’t sit down till you read this. It seems the standard for office chairs may have to be revised upwards in the near future. The requirements for chairs assume that users will weight no more than 100 kg but nowadays they often have to cater for people weighing 150 kg (I think that's 350 pounds in the old scale).

With ever increasing numbers of people being classed as “obese” it looks like chairs will have to be made stronger if we want to avoid having them collapse underneath us.

###

Today was Monday and to be candid I didn’t accomplish a darned thing today. And I won’t apologise for it.

The last couple of weeks have been so hectic I wonder when I would have found time to go to the office had I still been employed. I’ve eaten so much turkey I feel as though we’ve already had Christmas, since I’ve been to two different Yuletide functions in three days.

Not to mention the time taken up with learning the game of croquet. I even threw my back out one week, enabling me to claim (for the first time in my life) that I was suffering from a “sporting injury” !

###

I did take time out to finish reading Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency. This novel, set in Botswana, has been a world-wide bestseller and the start of a series. Smith has a real feel for the dusty little nation of Botswana, though he doesn’t paint it as a utopia; it may be peaceful compared to its fellow African nations, but there are all the usual problems common to humanity.

There are a couple of plot twists that would be at home in a more traditional crime novel, but it’s the atmosphere and the characters that really draw you in.

I’ll keep an eye out for other books in the series.

###

You have to hand it to those Wurlitzer boys (and girls - don’t forget Beccy Cole) for the variety of music they produce. How many instruments could play not only “Nessun Dorma” but “Let’s Go To The Hop” in the same show?

You can download that week’s show here

And the following week is here

Write a novel in 30 days

The final days of the National Novel Writing Month were in sight and I was trying desperately to keep up my quota.

Even though this was the fourth year I’d taken part in this writing challenge, the first two weeks were especially difficult. It wasn’t until the third week that I began to pick up speed. By the fourth week I had actually drawn a little ahead of the daily quota of 1,700 words and could see the target in the distance.

I wanted to try and be a little early, because I knew from past experience that different word-processors count totals slightly differently. There’s nothing worse than sending in your completed manuscript only to find that you are a few hundred words short of the 50,000.

So when I clocked up the magic total at 5 pm on 28th November I was happy but wary. And sure enough, when I entered it into the word count validator on the NaNoWriMo website, I was about 250 words short.

A determined effort over the next half hour managed to put me over the hump, and I collapsed in a heap.

I’ll never put myself through that ordeal again.... well, not until next year anyway.

To see my NaNoWriMo novels, go to this site



Some problems with the recording of today’s Theatre Organ Showcase, but the sound clears up after the first few minutes. Listen for yourself and see what you think. You can download it from here

just lazing around

People kept saying to me “So, what will you do with all that extra time once you retire?” Let me think...

Last Thursday for example, I looked at the calendar and said to my sister Julie “Look at the date. We have to be at Parliament House in 45 minutes!” We rushed in to town to take the tour arranged by Adult Education followed by morning tea with the Speaker of the House.

Then we went to Julie’s house to feed her animals and swung by my sister Pauline’s place to pick up a mobile phone we’d left there the night before. After that we drove in to the church office; I may not work there any longer but Julie still had things to do in the church library.

From there we went on to dinner with friends at Claremont. We played cards with them for a while after watching the thunder over the hills.

And before I went to bed, I had to write 1,700 words for this year’s National Novel Writing Month.

All that extra time? Don’t think it will be a problem.

---

This year’s NaNoWriMo story was a difficult one to get started. It’s the fourth year I’ve done it, but I’ve never had so much trouble getting off the ground. I don’t even have a title for it.

I suspect that this year my creativity fuel-tank was so low that it kept running out before I could refill it each week. In fact the first week I kept thinking to myself “I’m getting bored with this story” - that’s never happened before.

But once I passed the halfway mark I started to pick up speed a bit. What’s still difficult is when you’re typing it late at night and you think “How much more have I got to go?” 500 words.. 400 words.. 300 words.. It can be arduous getting those last few sentences out.

---


Listened to the Theatre Organ Showcase on 96FM. Ah, the mighty Wurlitzer! Another great show. Where else will you hear the theme music from ‘Paul Temple’ and ‘Things to Come’ one after the other? You can download it at the link below:

http://www.mediafire.com/?1mmoiq4njmi

Farewell faithful desk

So now we come to the final day. Yes, Thursday will be my last day at the church office, where I’ve worked part-time for the last two decades.

It will seem strange at first not to be there every Tuesday and Thursday. I fall into routines easily, and a habit of twenty years standing will not be easily broken.

This was the second of the only two jobs I’ve had in my life. It wasn’t difficult work, for the most part, but sometimes it was a bit overwhelming. I was there two days a week every week since 1988 -- no holidays or sick leave on that sort of job.

I hope that I was useful. Several people were nice enough to say kind things about my work. A couple even said “I never thought of you not being in the office!”

My response was “Sometime in the future, someone will say ‘This wouldn’t have happened when Michael was in the office.’ But whether they mean that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen!”

Time to clean out my desk, gather up the personal possessions that have colonised the area around my workspace, and try and leave things the way I would have liked to find them when I started there.

Still to come is the official farewell on Sunday, with the special morning tea, the gift presentation and the inevitable speeches. I will have to steel myself for that ordeal. One of the Elders invited me to lunch and presented me with a framed photograph of myself at my desk.

To quote from my father’s favourite song:

And now, the end is near;
And so I face the final curtain.
My friend, I’ll say it clear,
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain.

Regrets, I’ve had a few;
But then again, too few to mention.
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption.

Where's the money gone?

The chronic global financial crisis has wiped trillions of dollars off world stock markets since it first erupted last year - but where has all the money gone? Nowhere, according to analysts quoted on the NineMSN website:

From New York to Tokyo, via London, Frankfurt and Paris, investors were gripped by another roller-coaster ride of turbulent trade last week.

Across the globe, equity markets have now slumped by 30-50 per cent since the same stage of 2007, as confidence has been ravaged by the collapse of the US subprime housing sector and the subsequent credit crunch.

Economists say markets have suffered massive "paper" losses that do not relate to the disappearance of cash - but instead to a dramatic drop in value.

"When we say that trillions of dollars have been lost, this is a miswording," said economics professor John Sloman at the University of Bristol.

"What we should say is: trillions of dollars of value have been wiped off from the stock market's value, which is totally different," he told AFP.

"It's not money, it is value, which is basically the price (that) people are ready to pay at one time."

Robert Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University in the United States, drew a comparison with the drop in the price of a house.

"Suppose one day you ask a real estate agent to estimate the value of your house if it were to be sold," Shiller told AFP.

"The next day you ask a second real estate agent to estimate the value of your house, and the second agent gives you an estimated value that is 10 per cent lower.

"Have you lost any money? Certainly not, the currency notes in your pocket have not changed, nor have any of your bank accounts.

"But you would be poorer, in a very real sense. It is just the same with the stock market. Nobody loses any 'money' in the strict definition of that term, but they have lost value."

(Of course it would help stop the panic if the media stopped making it sound as though we were all losing millions of dollars in cash every day.....)

Stalk the ball

“This is a game for all ages which provides mental and physical stimulation. It combines strategy and precision and is a bit like snooker on grass or a combination of chess and golf. It is an ideal opportunity which allows for social interaction.” My sister read from the Adult Education brochure, adding “And it’s just around the corner. We should sign up for it.”

She read on. “This course will show you the basics required to play the game of croquet. Six 90-minute sessions.”

So this month we’ve been spending our Saturday afternoons out in the sun hitting coloured balls with wooden mallets.

They started us off simply, more or less playing the simplified game known as Aussie croquet. After a while in the first lesson, I started getting the knack of hitting the ball. Then they introduced us to the more subtle aspects of the game.

“Roquet, croquet, continuation,” I muttered to myself. “Stalk the ball. Mind the angle. Check your V. Ball in the hand. Make sure they touch....” I was starting to get a little dizzy. Playing for one or two hours a week means you don’t get a handle on the finer points of the game easily.

The third lesson they showed us the Standard Grip and the Follow Through, with special emphasis on using the shoulder muscles. Yikes!

After that lesson, they gave us a cup of tea in the clubhouse. I could see my coach at the other end of the table, talking to the Club Secretary. I could hear my name being mentioned but I couldn’t make out anything else. “Mumble-mumble-mumble Michael. Mutter Michael mutter.”

I wasn’t really that concerned. Playing croquet for a couple of hours in the sun can be surprisingly tiring. For the moment all that really interested me was getting off my feet and having a hot drink.

my day in court

Not many people are happy to get a letter telling them they have to be at the Supreme Court at a particular time and date.

However since I had signed up for a special tour of the building with the Adult Education Department, I wasn’t intimidated.

They let the group in - there were about ten of us - then locked the doors. If anybody was passing in Salamanca Place, they must have wondered why we were going into the courthouse after hours.

We were greeted by a pleasant young woman. It took me a moment to realise that she was actually a Justice of the Supreme Court. She led us into Court #8, where she is sitting this month, and gave us a full description of what happened where.

I was surprised to hear that all proceedings are now digitally recorded; the last time I was in court the only electronics visible was a big square reel-to-reel tape recorder. For routine appearances that only take a few minutes the prisoners will often be there only on the audio-video link from prison.

There’s even a special court intranet that links courthouses around the country. Who knew?

The judge then led us down into the tunnel that links Court #8 with its mirror image Court #7 in the building across the way. Surprisingly, the tunnel zig-zagged and curved to an alarming extent. It seems that instead of going in a straight line it follows the edge of the property line around the court complex. It is not a place you’d want to find yourself during a power cut.

The courthouse was only built during the 1970s but is looking a bit tired and in need of updating. The oldest and least modern part of the whole place are the holding cells below the building. They are the classic jail-house cells -- thick metal bars, furniture fixed in place and big padlocks that would have been at home in the convict era.

Much of the court’s work is done on computer these days, but they still have a large library. We asked the judge if she ever needed to consult the old law books and she said she had been down there just recently to look up a 19th century case.

Our final stop was the judge’s own chambers. There were some personal touches (like the framed drawing of Rumpole of the Bailey) and her robes and wig ready for the next trial. The current Chief Justice is doing his best to simplify the robes, and possibly do away with wigs altogether. It would take away a lot of the atmosphere of the court, I thought. After all, every trade has its uniform.

90 minutes later we were back out in Salamanca Place, with the seagulls wheeling overhead in the floodlights that illuminate the historic buildings. It was hard not to feel a passing twinge of relief. It was a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t like to stay there....

enter the Five

We call them the Famous Five.


Nothing to do with Enid Blyton.


These are five chickens that suddenly decided to take up residence each night on the old refrigerator outside the kitchen window. I don't know why they chose this spot. You might have thought they'd be bothered by the noise of me rattling round in the kitchen preparing the evening meal.


Sometimes they turn and glance at me over their shoulders. Maybe they're wondering when I'm going to go away and stop bothering them.


Or maybe they're checking to make sure I'm not having a chicken dinner.

One of those things

Very unsettled weather all this week. The equinox doesn't help, and being situated between the warming Australian mainland and the sea ice of Antarctica means the wind is almost intolerable.

To add injury to insult, I cut my foot on some wire while walking across the back yard when I fed the poultry yesterday morning.

-----

The music of Cole Porter may no longer fill huge venues, however a small but enthusiastic audience turned out tonight at the Moonah Arts Center to hear Kaye Payne.

Out of his 800 odd songs, she chose for the evening
Night and Day
Too Darn Hot
So Nice to Come Home To
Love For Sale
Let's Do It
I Get A Kick Out Of You
Everytime We Say Goodbye
Don't Fence Me In
What Is This Thing Called Love
I've Got You Under My Skin
True Love
You Do Something To Me
Just One of Those Things

http://www.kayepayne.com/bio.htm

------


Reading The Freckled Shark which originally appeared in ‘Doc Savage’ magazine issue #073 (March 1939) written by Lester Dent under the house pseudonym Kenneth Robeson: ‘In his most exotic adventure, the Man of Bronze encounters the insane money lust of Senor Steel, president-dictator of Blanca Grande (a very unfortunate South American republic); decodes the awful secret of Matacumbe; and sinks -- for what may be the last time -- into the muddy horror of the primitive jungle...’

I re-read it last week and enjoyed it a lot. Doc Savage is one of my two favourite 1930s crime-fighters, along with The Shadow. There are some notable things about it.

-- We often have people bring Doc in to confuse things; this time we
get to see them beforehand and how they make this decision. (Tex and Rhoda are vintage pulp characters. They could have been spun-off into their own series quite easily.)

-- no super-villain or occult methods of murder for once. Just a
ruthless Latin American dictator. There are unintended frissons when
someone defies him, telling him that he can't lock people up on an
island and torture them without people finding out. Hmmmmm.

-- Doc has a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde period here, where he finds that he's actually beginning to enjoy being somebody else, rather than the straight-arrow scientist and do-gooder.

-- some nice bits of description, although I suspect that Dent (like
W.E. Johns) would have said that too much description slows down the
action for the reader.

Friday on my mind

The cat sleeps. He takes up almost the whole of the armchair.

In any other creature it would look awkward, but the cat's natural grace defeats this description.

"An ungainly cat" would be as much of an oxymoron as that old favorite "Military intelligence."

He pesters me for breakfast every morning, then goes in and out of the backyard, returning at regular intervals for more food.

Then when he's decided that he's done enough patrolling, he takes a long nap before lunch.

As he gets older, he takes more naps.

A bit like his owner really.....


----------------------

Listened to the Friday afternoon show on 96FM. Always try and tune in for Alan Rider's programme -- gotta love those giant Wurlitzers who seem to be able to play any genre from classical to rock.

Download this week's show here


photo by Columbine at http://www.sxc.hu

There's a roo in the roses

I thought the noise of the possums and wallabies would quiet down as the winter went on and feed was easier to find. But they still seem to be lurking around in the suburban gardens when I take the dog out for a late-night walk.

Even on a dark night you can tell the difference. If it’s a possum, they wait till you’ve crossed to the other side of the road, then they start making bad-tempered coughing sounds at you. But if you go past somebody’s garden and you hear that characteristic boing-boing sound retreating into the darkness, it’ll be a wallaby.

Sometimes they even come out in the daylight -- the picture was taken just across the road from my sister's front door.

They first started moving into the suburbs last summer when the drought caused a shortage of feed. I knew that wallabies liked flowers -- a friend of a friend has special permission to keep a wallaby in his backyard and it loves a rose as a special treat. But I hadn’t expected them to move into the gardens in my sister’s street.

One of her neighbours showed me the whitewashed front wall of his garden and you could plainly see the marks of the wallabies’ feet where they’d tried to scale the wall. He’s given up trying to grow anything in his backyard because they sneak down the hill at night and eat everything in sight.

And yet my sister, who would love to have a few wallabies going through her paddock, never sees them on her side of the road. Either they don’t like crossing the road or they won’t go through the poultry and horses that populate the property.

What will happen in the Spring? We’ll just have to wait and see.

M R I and me

We want to study your brain. That's what the official looking letter from the Menzies Research Institute said. A study to contrast the brains of diabetics and non-diabetics.

OK, I thought, I'm willing to go along with it. An MRI scan, a blood test and a questionnaire. I could do that.

Saturday afternoon I present at Calvary Hospital. I'm not certain how much I have to do before the scan, but it turns out to be not much.

Since they're only interested in my head, I don't need to get undressed or even remove my belt. So long as I removed my watch, keys and coins it's fine.

They slide me into a long tube and give me ear plugs. Half an hour can be a long time flat on your back listening to a blacksmith in the next room.

They started off with a repeated bang-click-click, then after a few zing-zing sounds it settled into a steady clunk-clunk clunk-clunk.

I had a panic button in case I became claustrophobic. There was a little window so I could see out, but since they'd taken my glasses that was just a blur.

Thirty minutes isn't long usually, but I had no way of telling time so I tried to pace myself. I thought of some normal calming things for a while, then I sort of drifted off with the rhythmic pounding coming from all around me.

The next thing I knew I heard a muffled voice and I began sliding out of the tube. The technician looked down at me and said something but I couldn't understand her. Then I remembered the ear-plugs.

When I got my watch back, it was just half an hour.

If you're in a similar situation, I suggest you do what I did and don't look up the MRI page on Wikipedia until afterwards. I know if I had researched it in advance I would have found it hard not to think about all those atoms bouncing around in my skull !

world of winter

When we pass the shortest day, the days begin to lengthen but the cold begins to strengthen. The truth of that old saying is certainly proved by this winter. Some of the mornings have been breath-takingly cold and chilly.

Doses of gingko biloba keep chilblains at bay, but the skin on my fingers is beginning to crack. My remedy for this is to apply a cream for dry skin before retiring and put on a pair of white cotton gloves.

This seemed a bit strange at first, but you get used to it. In fact it's an advantage, helping to keep your hands warm on these near-zero nights.


There has been snow on the mountain for about a month now. Every year this sparks a debate about the merits of the mountain road. Whenever it snows, lots of people want to drive up Mount Wellington to see it, but they can't get there because.... well, because the mountain road is covered in snow and ice.

It seems to me that this is something to do with the modern attitude that everything should be accessible and user-friendly. What good is it having snow on the mountaintop if you can't get to it? Some have written to the local paper expressing the opinion that we should simply tell people to walk to the summit, the way they would have done a century ago.

That idea would be unacceptable to many, and the debates weigh up the merits of improving the road, putting in a cable-car or building a light rail service.

I don't know. I enjoy seeing the massive bulk of the mountain looming through the clouds, speckled with white streaks. It's a part of life in Hobart and personally I don't think we need to make it into a 24/7 tourist trap.

It's a new car! (Well, newer...)

"Now into its tenth generation, it's the world's biggest selling badge, with 32 million owners to its credit in its 40 year history. And, somewhere in the world, in one of the 140 countries where it's sold, someone buys a Toyota Corolla every 23 seconds."

When I started looking around for a new car, I thought I'd end up with something cheap and boring. I am still a little surprised that I ended up with a flame-red Corolla with mag wheels. Hardly the sort of car most of my friends would expect me to turn up in.

I saw Robin Johnson at the theatre the other night and I mentioned I was getting a new car. "I'm not surprised," he said drily. Cheek!


When you've driven the same car for decades, it becomes almost part of you. You know without thinking how much pressure to apply to the controls or how close you can come to another car. Then you get a new car and suddenly everything is different!

It's actually quite scary. The first few times you go out, you're concentrating fiercely. If you can avoid stalling when you start off from a red light, you're doing well. And going round a corner is enough to make you break out in a cold sweat.

After a while it gets better, but I don't know how long it will take before I can just get in and drive off without consciously thinking about what to do.

Where to now?

It was like an allegory. Those winds that blew in the bad weather felt like a reflection of the currents that seemed to be stirring up the stagnant pond that my life had become.

Remember those bio-rhythm tables we used to consult back in the 1970s? All the different areas of my life seemed to be moving to a crisis point simultaneously. The car had deteriorated till it can only drive on flat roads. My sister's dog died. Problems at the office made me consider my job might have a limited life span.

I was chronically short of sleep and the cat keeps waking me up at dawn to feed him.

My diabetes flared up, just as it had last winter. The house needed repairs but my bank account was sinking fast.

I couldn't even change the light bulbs in my house as they burned out, due to my vertigo that kept me from climbing ladders. I was slowly being consigned to the dark. Symbolism anyone?

Was I approaching some sort of turning point, I wondered. Since my mother died, maybe I'd just been marking time. Maybe I needed some sort of shock to galvanise me into action.

Like they say, "Sometimes bad things happen because God needs to get your attention." Could be.