Having binge-watched last night the complete first season of "Secret City" - it's so secret that I didn't even know it existed until I found a 296-minute 2-disc set at Vinnies yesterday - we missed the weather forecast on ABC Television, but one look out the window onto the completely fogged-in river this morning told us all we need to know: it'll be a very hot day!
But back to "Secret City": this very interesting political thriller based (and filmed) in Canberra is an adaptation of the best-selling books "The Marmalade Files", "The Mandarin Code", and "The Shadow Game" written by journalists Chris Uhlmann and Steve Lewis. According to Wikipedia, it premiered on Foxtel's Showcase on 5 June 2016 and on Netflix internationally on 26 June 2018. A sequel to the series called "Secret City: Under the Eagle" was green-lit ('green-lit'? do I have to learn a completely new language?) in February 2018. It aired on 4 March 2019 in Australia and launched worldwide on Netflix on 6 March 2019.
The show has got it all: the tension between China and the U.S., Machiavellian politics, even a transvestite ("Transvestite Lives Matter", don't they?); everything I never knew while I lived in Canberra for fifteen years. It was so good that I want to see the sequel, so I had better keep visiting Vinnies in case it shows up on their shelves because there's only a very short trailer on YouTube and we don't have Netflix.
In the meantime, I shall keep myself busy with reading "Tell Me No lies - Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs" and "The Best Australian Essays 2014", also picked up at Vinnies for a couple of dollars - I've since discovered there are a whole lot more on archive.org; when will I ever catch up? - and a beautiful hardcover of Pico Iyer's "Sun After Dark" which arrived in the post yesterday together with a letter from the nice people at the Australian Taxation Office telling me that they've sent me $146.19 in interest for having paid my whopping big tax bill a whole month early. I always get unpleasant things out of the way quickly!
In the meantime, the river has reappeared out of the fog to reveal a bright and sunny morning which raises the next question: where's the year gone? It's just four weeks to Christmas after which it's all downhill to yet another new year. Do you often get the feeling that life is like a roll of toilet paper: the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes?
I leave you with this picture of my life!
