"Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink"

 

 

This famous line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1798 poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" pretty much sums up the Arabian Peninsula: while it is gifted with a fabulous hydrocarbon endowment worth trillions of dollars, it has almost no water and relies on nearly 450 desalination plants to stop everyone from going thirsty.

About 100 million people live in the countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – all now under Iranian attack. Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE are, for all practical purposes, completely dependent on the desalination plants, particularly for metropolises such as Dubai. Saudi Arabia, and especially its capital, Riyadh, also relies on them.

 

 

Take the Jubail desalination plant, located on the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. It supplies Riyadh, via a roughly 500-kilometre-long pipeline system, with more than 90 per cent of its drinking water. If this plant, its pipelines, or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged or destroyed, Riyadh would have to evacuate within a week.

Any direct attack on them by Iran would be considered a massive escalation, so perhaps it is a step too far for Tehran. Still, they don’t have many other options to prevail. Its only options are to hunker down, in the hope that a long-lasting conflict becomes economically too painful for its enemies, or go after so-called soft targets like energy sites, airports and water installations. Let’s hope the Islamic Republic, feeling cornered and fighting for its survival, doesn’t take this last step because, while oil is essential, water is irreplaceable.

So far, "Operation Epic Fury" has been a stunning aerial success, but have Trump and America the willpower and the military power to fight a prolonged war against a desperate regime fighting for its very survival? Or will they, after having bombed the place back into the stone-age, pull out again, as they did in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan?

 

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I Nietzsche more than ever!

 

 

Friedrich Nietzsche lived a troubled adolescence, stemming from the intense difficulty he had in spelling his own name. This difficulty has continued to this day in the spelling of his name in bathroom graffiti and on t-shirts proclaiming "What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger" (neither does arthritis but it doesn't make me stronger).

As for pronouncing his name, I much rather talk about Freud - whose name is also easier to spell - but a useful mnemonic is to cast your mind back to your first girlfriend and the time when you whispered into her ear "I Nietzsche more than ever!" just before she stood you up.

Now that we have both the spelling and the pronunciation out of the way, enjoy the movie "When Nietzsche Wept" which is based on Irvin D. Yalom's book of the same name. It blends both fact and fiction and offers you the chance to nod knowingly next time someone mentions Nietzsche to you or drops the word 'limerence' (look it up, Des!)

 

The only online copy I could find is in Chinese 😁 - click here

 

For my money, the passage "It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!" gives me my much-needed excuse because, you see, I did my children a favour by not having them!

 

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"Objecting to your land value"

 

 

If you disagree with the land value on your notice of valuation or land tax assessment, you can lodge an objection. You will need to provide sales evidence from around 1 July in the valuing year to support your objection. If you do not provide supporting evidence, your objection will be disallowed."

 

 

Thus wrote the Valuer-General when he sent me these two Notices of Valuation which total $2,880,000. That value EXcludes the house and all other structures, and is $250,000 higher than the previous valuations three years ago, and is used to calculate the annual council rates.

Yes, I would very much like to object to the Valuer-General's assessment as I already pay council rates of about $500 A MONTH, which is far too much to pay for the privilege of living on my own piece of dirt. But how do I provide the required "sales evidence from around 1 July in the valuing year" when "Riverbend" is so unique that no similar property of this size and in this location has been sold since I bought it in 1993?

I guess I will be stuck with it until I sell it — at no more than land value.

 

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"Durchhalten!"

 

 

Only the Germans would, or could, have a word with a double-h in the middle of it. It was one of the first words I learnt in post-war Germany: "Durchhalten!" Don't give up! Things will get better! And things did get better! Much better! Not through luck but through hard work.

"Durchhalten!" has been my motto all my life, and I am happy I grew up then instead of now. I am no longer a German and I no longer speak German except when necessary, but when I get into a tight spot, I still tell myself, "Durchhalten!". It helped me then, and it helps me now!

 

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45 Hale Street, Townsville

 

The new owners did not change much of its outside appearance apart from giving it a 'cool' blue-and-white paint job.

 

The year was 1985. I had come back from my last posting to Greece. My Saudi boss, reluctant to let me go, had promised to let me continue my work from Australia, and so I bought this property on the edge of Townsville's CBD, which was going to be both office and home to me.

 

 

I bought it for something like $50,000-plus but then left town as the promised work never materialised. I hung onto the place for some years as a rental property but the trouble with maintenance and defaulting tenants was just too much bother and so I sold it in April 1998, a whole thirteen years later, for a mere $90,000 - hardly the sort of rags-to-riches story so often touted by real estate agents.

 

However, the inside has been quite stunningly renovated. The humble verandah has become an extension of the living-space.

The front room, once meant to have been my office, is now a beautifully appointed lounge.

Behind the lounge is another sitting-room. Its feature is the silky-oak room divider, repainted a gleaming white.

The garden has the city skyline as its backdrop, illustrating how close this ideal 'city pad' is to Townsville's mall and CBD.

 

What was it Heraclitus had said about rivers? It is not possible to step in the same river twice? Well, I haven't been back to Townsville since then.

 

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