What is halcyon?

 

 

Happiness was a red plastic chair when my "home" was a 9x9-ft donga tastefully decorated with PLAYBOY centrefolds of girls waxed to the point of martyrdom, when all my wordly possessions easily fitted into a 2ft-wide metal locker, and when my needs for comfort were satisfied by a red plastic chair on a shady porch (okay, a cold beer helped!)

 

Camp 6 Loloho, Bougainville Island
Click on image to go to the Bougainville Copper Project website

 

That was in the early 1970s when I lived and worked on Bougainville Island where it all began, the dreaming of a bigger and better future and the searching for wider and farther horizons. More than fifty years later, my needs for comfort are still satisfied by an old bleached-out red plastic chair on my jetty (under the OSASCOMP-rules, is "bleached-out" a colour-adjective or an opinion? Somebody put me out of my misery!)

Colour or opinion (or coloured opinion) aside, I sit on it and dream of the past, with my horizon no farther away than across the river. Right now my dreams are helped along by still reading Paul Theroux's book "The Happy Isles of Oceania" - after all, it's all of 730 pages thick, and I'm drawing it out by reading it slowly and chewing on every word.

It's an old habit of mine to have a dictionary beside me as I settle down for a quiet read. It's how I started to learn English over sixty years ago, and it's how I still learn English today. When I encounter an unfamiliar word, I don't just want to get the sense of its meaning: I want to know its precise meaning; its etymology, and how it is used in a sentence.

Padma never bothers with a dictionary. She knows she has me. Just now she came out of the house where she'd been watching something on television, and called out to me from the verandah, "What is 'halcyon'?"

I spread out my arms towards the river, and replied, "This is halcyon!"

 

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Three Men in a Boat

 

 

Jerome K. Jerome's hilarious story of what is probably the worst holiday in literature has an air of delightful nostalgia and is still laugh-aloud funny more than a hundred years after it what first published with this preface:

 

 

And yet, it is full of wisdom as well, "... not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha'pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with - oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! - the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal's iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man - all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness - no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to work ..."

There is so much insight packed into this little book - useful information indeed, to say nothing of the dog! - that you almost regret having come to their final toast, "Here's to Three Men well out of a Boat!"

But that's a whole 184 pages later, so sit back and enjoy! - or lean back, close your eyes, and listen to the audiobook read by Hugh Laurie:

 

 

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Reading by the light of the kerosene lamp

 

 

I've just awoken from a peaceful night in "Melbourne", reading Paul Theroux's "The Happy Isles of Oceania", gazing at the slowly burning flame of the kerosene lamp, occasionally listening to the sounds of nature outside the door, and finally answering the call of nature before tucking myself under the doona for the night.

As I was reading by the slowly burning flame of the kerosene lamp, it gave me the strange feeling that this was the way people had read for almost all of the time that people have been reading: in darkness, slowly, and with full concentration. They didn't end each paragraph thinking it would be a good time to check their emails. Their phones didn't ring. The ambient hum of fridge and television was gone.

 

 

There was no distraction whatsoever except for the occasional pause to angle the book to catch the shifting shine of the light from the flame. The words themselves seemed less fixed and self-evident, as if I could read the same sentence countless different ways just by tipping the book forwards and back. It all had a curious and lovely intensity.

Reading by the light of the kerosene lamp is an experience of strange reverence. It is how I would like to read all my book all my nights.

 

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The fork in the road

 

 

In old age, Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" has become a bit of a regretful dirge for me, and it takes very little to make me go and recite "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference."

 

 

After countless detours in my life, there are no more forks ahead of me, except this one which I found on the way to the front gate. Padma must have dropped it on her way to the recycle bin, which is where she goes every so often with a box full of what she deems to be surplus stuff.

 

 

On closer inspection, I recognised is as the small fork I had kept when I flew Egypt Air. At the time I thought it small recompense for the ordeal of sitting aboard an ageing Boing 707 which, judging by the broken food tray and broken arm rest, should never have got off the ground in the first place, let alone with so many homeward-bound Egyptians nursing television sets and sewing machines on their laps as "cabin baggage".

I took the airline less travelled by and, luckily, survived it.

 

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The Happy Isles of Oceania

 

 

Reading a book one has read many years ago is a bit like meeting an old friend one last saw many years ago. "The Happy Isles of Oceania" is such an old friend. Having found a second copy, a 'cheap' paperback, I retired to my peaceful hide-away "Melbourne", my very own 'Oceania' but after someone has pulled the plug.

When marriages fall apart, men will often turn to drink, sex, therapy or their work in order to blunt the pain of separation and their sense of failure and guilt. When Paul Theroux and his wife separated, he decided to paddle around the South Sea islands in a folding kayak. And he wrote a book about it, which is more than I have watched others do who washed up on the shores of some of the islands I lived and worked on.

 

 

I went there when I was twenty-four, with my heart still unbroken, but I can attest to the healing powers of the islands, even if it's not in the Paul Theroux way, whose solution "was to keep paddling" - after all, "if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there".

 

Below is a sample of the 24-hour audiobook which ends on page 4
with another 730 pages to go.

 

It's a wonderful book to read on a tropically hot day, with the quietly flowing Clyde River on one side and a cold beer on the other. Even the resident mob of kangaroos seemed to have got caught up in the moment, as they peacefully reclined under a shade tree just metres from "Melbourne", ignoring my occasional glances out of the window.

 

Read it online here

 

I am back in the house, refreshed from a lazy afternoon in "Melbourne". The gods seem to want me very much to pay that new Division 296 tax because my BHP shares keep going up. Each time they reach a new top, I expect them to flatten out, and I sell down some more, and yet they keep going up. It's one way of 'losing out' while still making money.

Unfortunately, I didn't sell down during today's wild gyrations when BHP gave back all the gains it had made yesterday: it went from yesterday's $51.51 close to this morning's high of $52.09 and then, at around lunchtime, came the sudden dive back to $50.12, before closing the day (and week) at $50.57, for a weekly gain of 82 cents. Whiplash!

It's all about copper which jumped from US$6.00/lb to an amazing US$6.60/lb yesterday afternoon and today fell back to US$5.93/lb.

 

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