Bonjour, Tristesse!

 

 

A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness. In the past the idea of sadness always appealed to me, now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and at times remorse, but never sadness. Today something envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, which isolates me."

 

Read the English translation here

 

Autumn is not my favourite season. And right on cue, autumn has started in Australia, with a sudden drop in temperature and sunshine which could only be described as hesitant. I've just taken in the wheelie bins after this morning's garbage collection, and am debating with myself whether I should make myself another cup of coffee, read a book, go back to bed, or do all three. Bonjour Tristesse indeed!

 

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More Australian 'kulcha'

 

 

The latest addition to my collection of Australian movies is Sunstruck, starring England's tallest dwarf, Harry Secombe, and the Australian actor John Meillon. Harry plays the Welsh schoolteacher and choirmaster Stanley Evans who emigrates to Australia to 'teach in the sun' -- but finds reality falls somewhat short of the blissful image on the recruiting poster.

 

 

Anticipating a Bondi Beach lifestyle, Stanley arrives in Kookaburra Springs to find a town with two buildings: an old pub and a ramshackle schoolhouse. Despite the fact that the kids do everything in their power to get rid of him – no schoolmaster means no school! – Stanley stays, and eventually finds a way to win them over.

 

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It's been an enjoyable day in town

 

Our weekly "Kaffeeklatsch" at the Se7en Café. From left to right: Ernie Bracher and his wife Liselotte, Robyn Weber, myself, and Frank Weber. Since we are all in our eighties, Padma didn't want to spoil our fun and volunteered to take the photo.

 

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have remarked that he didn't mind what he ate, as long as it was always the same. Padma must've picked up on this, which is why I don't mind driving into the Bay at least once and often twice a week for lunch at the club or, as we did today, at the recently renovated Bayview Hotel.

 

The Bayview's renovated dining room. How could I not feel at home here?

 

On the drive into town I heard on the car radio the hyphenated word 'petrol-rationing' mentioned in a hushed voice for the first time. Thank you, Mr Trump! Now that petrol and sport are involved, Aussies may take the Iran war seriously and start to wonder if Napoleon and Hitler didn't have a better plan for invading Russia than Trump has had for attacking Iran, although all indications are that he will suffer the same fate.

 

Napoleon Bonaparte, similarly talented at war, beat the Austrians, the Spanish, the Prussians, even the Egyptians. And then, enchanted by his own genius and emboldened by his own audacity, he decided to take on Russia. And here it is worth remembering one of the grand masters of military strategy, a man who figured out how to win wars by not fighting battles. In 1812, Barclay de Tolly, a Baltic German, was in command of the Tsar’s largest army. Instead of meeting Bonaparte in battle, he chose to retreat. He scorched the earth in front of the Grande Armee and drew it deeper into Russian territory. By the time Napoleon realised the fix he was in, it was too late. Russia was easy to get into; it would prove disastrously difficult to get out. He lost around 300,000 of his soldiers — to cold, hunger, disease, and Russian armies. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

 

As I have written many times before, no trip into town is complete without a visit to my favourite op-shop where I picked up "The Secret Lives of Hoarders - True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter" and a beautiful copy of Gavin Maxwell's classic "The Rocks Remain".

 

My latest self-help book

 

I almost also picked up "The Perfect Wife" but since it turned out not to be an instruction manual, I passed it up for a beautifully bound HERON BOOKS edition of H.G. Wells' "Kipps - The Story of a Simple Soul".

 

Not an instruction manual

 

Satisfied with my op-shopping and having had our lunch at the hotel, we went to the Se7en Café in the shopping mall to discuss in German and, for the benefit of Robyn, the only Australian among us, also in English, our latest medical misadventures over cups of coffee and hot chocolate.

It's been an enjoyable day in town and we are home again, only to find that Trump must've uttered a few more stupidities or the Iranians bombed a few more oil tankers in the Strait of Homuz because the sharemarket is again a sea of red and BHP dropped by another 98 cents.

 

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The End of the Affair

 

Watch the movie in a separate window by clicking on Watch on YouTube

 

When people talk about their fondness for books, I wonder if they’re really talking about their fondness for reading. It’s rather like confusing the plate for the food. I mean, I like a beautifully printed and bound book as much as anybody else but I don’t need a houseful of them, any more than I need a houseful of beautiful dinner plates. About twelve would do fine; that, and a good recipe book."

Just as Somerset Maugham kept "A Writer's Notebook", I jotted down the above quote in my notebook some time ago but forgot to add its source. It may have been Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future" - in fact, I'm pretty sure it was - but don't quote me on it. I was reminded of it as I leaved through a beautifully bound copy of "The Quiet American" at the Vinnies op-shop and wondered if I should buy it. I already own all of Graham Greene's book, but unlike Douglas Adams — and stretching his metaphor almost to breaking-point — I can’t help feeling some food tastes better when eaten off a beautiful plate.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

A woman, already with an armful of books, looked at the spine of my book and asked me if I could recommend a book by Graham Greene. "Why don't you try 'The End of the Affair'?" I suggested. "What, just the end? Not the whole thing?" she replied. On second thoughts, I suggested to her a recently formed book club in the Bay where she didn't have to read at all. As their blurb suggests, "The idea is to have fun and make new friends. We choose books that are easy to read, and that have been made into movies so you don't even have to read if you don't want to".

"The End of the Affair" has been made into a movie twice, but while I have read the book from cover to cover, I have yet to watch the movie to the end. Maybe I will now, if only to see if this quote appears in it:

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity."   [page 46]

And, yes, I did buy that beautifully bound copy of "The Quiet American".

 

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Smooth and satisfying

 

 

Sixty years after I had drunk my first cup of "smooth and satisfying" International Roast at Barton House, and almost after I had made myself the sixty-sixth cup of coffee from this 100g-tin which promises that it "Makes up to 66 cups", I not only keep scratching the bottom of this tin but also my head as I wonder what to make of the ramblings of our "Leader of the Free World".

"We're very far ahead of schedule", he says, and that the war was "very complete, pretty much", with "nothing left in a military sense", while his Defense Department announces, "This is just the beginning". How short our memories are. Someone should remind the Americans that it took 20 years and $3.5 trillion to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.

The "free world" is lead by an orange man-child, who is one half extreme emotional damage and the other half rambling idiot with no ideas of what he is saying from one sentence to the next. Trump never made any sense, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that he hasn't managed to coherently state his war objectives; indeed, we're left to wonder if he could locate Tehran on a map. "We could call it a tremendous sucess right now ... or we could go further. And we're going further", he says, while the Iranian government announces that they have a huge stockpile of supreme leaders left to inflict more damage. In the meantime, there has been a sudden rush on football uniforms as women in the Middle East are trying to seek refuge in Australia.

I'm again scratching the bottom of the tin because this current state of the world needs more than just one cup of "smooth and satisfying" International Roast, which keeps reminding me of what a much better world looked like when I had my first cup of International Roast more than sixty years ago. Things were then still "smooth and satisfying".

In fact, things also seemed "smooth and satisfying" in what was then still Persia when the Shah-in-Shah was the ruler of the country. Not that I knew much of the country other than what I could read in what was then the German equivalent of "The Women's Weekly" about Soraya and, subsequently, about Farah Diba, the second wife he married to maintain the dynasty. I remember my mother reading a Bertelsmann book simply titled, "Soraya". It was kept in a glass cabinet under lock and key for no discernible reason, but here it is again, in a movie remake from 2003.

 

 

I learned a bit more about Persia when I went there in January 1976 as accountant for the Williams pipeline company. I had just come out of tropical Burma and Tehran was freezing cold and I didn't last very long, but neither did the Shah who went into exile in 1979 and died in 1980.

 

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