"You have a new friend suggestion: Tex Battle"

 

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Another wintry morning at "Riverbend" despite this being the first day of spring, and as I'm huddled here, shivering in the cold in front of my computer, facebook comes up with this notification: "You have a new friend suggestion: Tex Battle".

I usually flick right through these notifications, but Sweers Island Resort caught my eyes. Where's Sweers Island? Oh, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where right now it's nice and warm and where back in the late 1970s I almost took a job on Mornington Island after having already served my "apprenticeship" in remote-island-living on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait several years before. And this is where Tex Battle lives and works!

A quick scroll down his facebook page suggested many other similarities:

 

 

And so I clicked on the "Add Friend" button on his facebook page.

 

 

Something may come of it or nothing may come of it, but at least I can now answer the question should anyone ask me where Sweers Island is.

 

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Daw Khin San Myint

 

My PEUGEOT 504 in the foreground; the Karaweik Palace in the background
I named our first home at Cape Pallarenda in Australia after it: KARAWEIK

 

Would you rather have loved the more, and suffered the more; or loved the less, and suffered the less? That is, I think, the only real question in life. Of course, it isn't a real question because we didn't have the choice then.

If we had had the choice, then there would have been a question. But we didn't have the choice, so there isn't a question. Who can control how much they love? If you could control it, then it wouldn't be love. I don't know what you would call it instead, but it wouldn't be love.

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling in old age.

But here's the problem: if this is your only story, then it's the one you have most often told and retold, even if - as in my case - mainly to yourself. The question then is: do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away? I don't know. All I know is that I have learned to become careful over the years. I am as careful now as I was careless then.

 

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