Today is ANZAC Day. Lest we forget!

 

To read the book go to www.archive.org
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There were several similarities between John Hepworth and my best mate for almost thirty years, Noel Butler: both were born within months of each other, both fought in the AIF in New Guinea, and both died in 1995.

But while John Hepworth wrote about the bitter and bloody campaign along the savage north coast of New Guinea, Noel Butler never so much as mentioned the war, not to me and not to others. In this he was similar to my own father who, despite having been wounded to the point of being an invalid for the rest of his life, never spoke about the war either. Perhaps they all saw too much death around them, and felt guilty that they had survived and so many others had not.

John Hepworth and Noel Butler fought the Japanese in the area from Aitape to Wewak. Noel Butler later also took part in the Bougainville campaign. John Hepworth returned to Australia where, according to the introduction to this book, he kept "open house and cooking and cleaning for all who fetched up on his doorstep needing help, jollying and solacing and drinking along with their sorrows." Noel Butler returned to where he had fought during the war and settled in Wewak, also to keep an open house for all those who fetched up on his doorstep.

I was one of those he jollied and solaced and drank along with in my darker hours and I will be for ever grateful for his friendship. Reading "The Long Green Shore", itself written as an act of remembering mates who died, is my paying tribute to the memory of a good and kind man.

Lest I forget!

 

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The Bum

 

 

I've been a fan of Somerset Maugham ever since I discovered a volume of his short stories in a bookshop in Singapore in 1975. His irony and cool detachment made him an acknowledged master of the short story, all of which are concise and compelling dramas played out by unforgettable characters.

There are so many of them - "The Alien Corn", "Flotsam and Jetsam", "The Vessel of Wrath" - and I thought I had read them all until I came across this audiobook recording of "The Bum". It's supposed to be part of "The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham - Volume II". I must go out to the library to check on it but only after I've finished listening to this excellent recording while looking out across the mist-covered river with my hands clapsed around a hot cup of tea.

 

 

The Bum

God knows how often I had lamented that I had not half the time I needed to do half the things I wanted. I could not remember when last I had had a moment to myself. I had often amused my fancy with the prospect of just one week's complete idleness. Most of us when not busy working are busy playing; we ride, play tennis or golf, swim or gamble; but I saw myself doing nothing at all. I would lounge through the morning, dawdle through the afternoon, and loaf through the evening. My mind would be a slate and each passing hour a sponge that wiped out the scribblings written on it by the world of sense. Time, because it is so fleeting, time, because it is beyond recall, is the most precious of human goods and to squander it is the most delicate form of dissipation in which man can indulge. Cleopatra dissolved in wine a priceless pearl, but she gave it to Antony to drink; when you waste the brief golden hours you take the beaker in which the gem is melted and dash its contents to the ground. The gesture is grand and like all grand gestures absurd. That of course is its excuse. In the week I promised myself I should naturally read, for to the habitual reader reading is a drug of which he is the slave; deprive him of printed matter and he grows nervous, moody, and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, he will make do with the advertisements of a paper five years old; he will make do with a telephone directory. But the professional writer is seldom a disinterested reader. I wished my reading to be but another form of idleness. I made up my mind that if ever the happy day arrived when I could enjoy untroubled leisure I would complete an enterprise that had always tempted me, but which hitherto, like an explorer making reconnaissances into an undiscovered country, I had done little more than enter upon: I would read the entire works of Nick Carter.

But I had always fancied myself choosing my moment with surroundings to my liking, not having it forced upon me; and when I was suddenly faced with nothing to do and had to make the best of it (like a steamship acquaintance whom in the wide waste of the Pacific Ocean you have invited to stay with you in London and who turns up without warning and with all his luggage) I was not a little taken aback.

I had come to Vera Cruz from Mexico City to catch one of the Ward Company's white cool ships to Yucatan; and found to my dismay that, a dock strike having been declared over-night, my ship would not put in. I was stuck in Vera Cruz. I took a room in the Hotel Diligencias overlooking the plaza, and spent the morning looking at the sights of the town. I wandered down side streets and peeped into quaint courts. I sauntered through the parish church; it is picturesque with its gargoyles and flying buttresses, and the salt wind and the blazing sun have patined its harsh and massive walls with the mellowness of age; its cupola is covered with white and blue tiles. Then I found that I had seen all that was to be seen and I sat down in the coolness of the arcade that surrounded the square and ordered a drink. The sun beat down on the plaza with a merciless splendour. The coco-palms drooped dusty and bedraggled. Great black buzzards perched on them for a moment uneasily, swooped to the ground to gather some bit of offal, and then with lumbering wings flew up to the church tower. I watched the people crossing the square; negroes, Indians, Creoles, and Spanish, the motley people of the Spanish Main; and they varied in colour from ebony to ivory. As the morning wore on, the tables around me filled up, chiefly with men, who had come to have a drink before luncheon, for the most part in white ducks, but some notwithstanding the heat in the dark clothes of professional respectability. A small band, a guitarist, a blind fiddler, and a harpist, played rag-time and after every other tune the guitarist came round with a plate. I had already bought the local paper and I was adamant to the newsvendors who pertinaciously sought to sell me more copies of the same sheet. I refused, oh, twenty times at least, the solicitations of grimy urchins who wanted to shine my spotless shoes; and having come to the end of my small change I could only shake my head at the beggars who importuned me. They gave one no peace. Littie Indian women, in shapeless rags, each one with a baby tied in the shawl on her back, held out skinny hands and in a whimper recited a dismal screed; blind men were led up to my table by small boys; the maimed, the halt, the deformed exhibited the sores and the monstrosities with which nature or accident had afflicted them; and half naked, underfed children whined endlessly their demand for coppers. But these kept their eyes open for the fat policeman who would suddenly dart out on them with a thong and give them a sharp cut on the back or over the head. Then they would scamper, only to return again when, exhausted by the exercise of so much energy, he relapsed into lethargy.

But suddenly my attention was attracted by a beggar who, unlike the rest of them and indeed the people sitting round me, swarthy and black-haired, had hair and beard of a red so vivid that it was startling. His beard was ragged and his long mop of hair looked as though it had not been brushed for months. He wore only a pair of trousers and a cotton singlet, but they were tatters, grimy and foul, that barely held together. I have never seen anyone so thin; his legs, his naked arms were but skin and bone, and through the rents of his singlet you saw every rib of his wasted body; you could count the bones of his dust-covered feet. Of that starveling band he was easily the most abject. He was not old, he could not well have been more than forty, and I could not but ask myself what had brought him to this pass. It was absurd to think that he would not have worked if work he had been able to get. He was the only one of the beggars who did not speak. The rest of them poured forth their litany of woe and if it did not bring the alms they asked continued until an impatient word from you chased them away. He said nothing. I suppose he felt that his look of destitution was all the appeal he needed. He did not even hold out his hand, he merely looked at you, but with such wretchedness in his eyes, such despair in his attitude, it was dreadful; he stood on and on, silent and immobile, gazing steadfastly, and then, if you took no notice of him, he moved slowly to the next table. If he was given nothing he showed neither disappointment nor anger. If someone offered him a coin he stepped forward a little, stretched out his clawlike hand, took it without a word of thanks, and impassively went his way. I had nothing to give him and when he came to me, so that he should not wait in vain, I shook my head.

'Dispense Usted por Dios,' I said, using the polite Castillian formula with which the Spaniards refuse a beggar.

But he paid no attention to what I said. He stood in front of me, for as long as he stood at the other tables, looking at me with tragic eyes. I have never seen such a wreck of humanity. There was something terrifying in his appearance. He did not look quite sane. At length he passed on.

It was one o'clock and I had lunch. When I awoke from my siesta it was still very hot, but towards evening a breath of air coming in through the windows which I had at last ventured to open tempted me into the plaza. I sat down under my arcade and ordered a long drink. Presently people in greater numbers filtered into the open space from the surrounding streets, the tables in the restaurants round it filled up, and in the kiosk in the middle the band began to play. The crowd grew thicker. On the free benches people sat huddled together like dark grapes clustered on a stalk. There was a lively hum of conversation. The big black buzzards flew screeching overhead, swooping down when they saw something to pick up, or scurrying away from under the feet of the passers-by. As twilight descended they swarmed, it seemed from all parts of the town, towards the church tower; they circled heavily about it and hoarsely crying, squabbling, and jangling, settled themselves uneasily to roost. And again bootblacks begged me to have my shoes cleaned, newsboys pressed dank papers upon me, beggars whined their plaintive demand for alms. I saw once more that strange, red-bearded fellow and watched him stand motionless, with the crushed and piteous air, before one table after another. He did not stop before mine. I supposed he remembered me from the morning and having failed to get anything from me then thought it useless to try again. You do not often see a red-haired Mexican, and because it was only in Russia that I had seen men of so destitute a mien I asked myself if he was by chance a Russian. It accorded well enough with the Russian fecklessness that he should have allowed himself to sink to such a depth of degradation. Yet he had not a Russian face; his emaciated features were clear-cut, and his blue eyes were not set in the head in a Russian manner; I wondered if he could be a sailor, English, Scandinavian, or American, who had deserted his ship and by degrees sunk to this pitiful condition. He disappeared. Since there was nothing else to do, I stayed on till I got hungry, and when I had eaten came back. I sat on till the thinning crowd suggested it was bed-time. I confess that the day had seemed long and I wondered how many similar days I should be forced to spend there.

But I woke after a little while and could not get to sleep again. My room was stifling. I opened the shutters and looked out at the church. There was no moon, but the bright stars faintly lit its outline. The buzzards were closely packed on the cross above the cupola and on the edges of the tower, and now and then they moved a little. The effect was uncanny. And then, I have no notion why, that red scarecrow recurred to my mind and I had suddenly a strange feeling that I had seen him before. It was so vivid that it drove away from me the possibility of sleep. I felt sure that I had come across him, but when and where I could not tell. I tried to picture the surroundings in which he might take his place, but I could see no more than a dim figure against a background of fog. As the dawn approached it grew a little cooler and I was able to sleep.

I spent my second day at Vera Cruz as I had spent the first. But I watched for the coming of the redhaired beggar, and as he stood at the tables near mine I examined him with attention. I felt certain now that I had seen him somewhere. I even felt certain that I had known him and talked to him, but I still could recall none of the circumstances. Once more he passed my table without stopping and when his eyes met mine I looked in them for some gleam of recollection. Nothing. I wondered if I had made a mistake and thought I had seen him in the same way as sometimes, by some queer motion of the brain, in the act of doing something you are convinced that you are repeating an action that you have done at some past time. I could not get out of my head the impression that at some moment he had entered into my life. I racked my brains. I was sure now that he was either English or American. But I was shy of addressing him. I went over in my mind the possible occasions when I might have met him. Not to be able to place him exasperated me as it does when you try to remember a name that is on the tip of your tongue and yet eludes you. The day wore on.

Another day came, another morning, another evening. It was Sunday and the plaza was more crowded that ever. The tables under the arcade were packed. As usual the red-haired beggar came along, a terrifying figure in his silence, his threadbare rags, and his pitiful distress. He was standing in front of a table only two from mine, mutely beseeching, but without a gesture. Then I saw the policeman who at intervals tried to protect the public from the importunities of all these beggars sneak round a column and give him a resounding whack with his thong. His thin body winced, but he made no protest and showed no resentment; he seemed to accept the stinging blow as in the ordinary course of things, and with his slow movements slunk away into the gathering night of the plaza. But the cruel stripe had whipped my memory and suddenly I remembered.

Not his name, that escaped me still, but everything else. He must have recognized me, for I have not changed very much in twenty years, and that was why after that first morning he had never paused in front of my table. Yes, it was twenty years since I had known him. I was spending a winter in Rome and every evening I used to dine in a restaurant in the Via Sistina where you got excellent macaroni and a good bottle of wine. It was frequented by a little band of English and American art students, and one or two writers; and we used to stay late into the night engaged in interminable arguments upon art and literature. He used to come in with a young painter who was a friend of his. He was only a boy then, he could not have been more than twenty-two; and with his blue eyes, straight nose, and red hair he was pleasing to look at. I remembered that he spoke a great deal of Central America, he had had a job with the American Fruit Company, but had thrown it over because he wanted to be a writer. He was not popular among us because he was arrogant and we were none of us old enough to take the arrogance of youth with tolerance. He thought us poor fish and did not hesitate to tell us so. He would not show us his work, because our praise meant nothing to him and he despised our censure. His vanity was enormous. It irritated us; but some of us were uneasily aware that it might perhaps be justified. Was it possible that the intense consciousness of genius that he had, rested on no grounds? He had sacrificed everything to be a writer. He was so certain of himself that he infected some of his friends with his own assurance.

I recalled his high spirits, his vitality, his confidence in the future, and his disinterestedness. It was impossible that it was the same man, and yet I was sure of it. I stood up, paid for my drink, and went out into the plaza to find him. My thoughts were in a turmoil. I was aghast. I had thought of him now and then and idly wondered what had become of him. I could never have imagined that he was reduced to this frightful misery. There are hundreds, thousands of youths who enter upon the hard calling of the arts with extravagant hopes; but for the most part they come to terms with their mediocrity and find somewhere in life a niche where they can escape starvation. This was awful. I asked myself what had happened. What hopes deferred had broken his spirit, what disappointments shattered him, and what lost illusions ground him to the dust? I asked myself if nothing could be done. I walked round the plaza. He was not in the arcades. There was no hope of finding him in the crowd that circled round the bandstand. The light was waning and I was afraid I had lost him. Then I passed the church and saw him sitting on the steps. I cannot describe what a lamentable object he looked. Life had taken him, rent him on its racks, torn him limb from limb, and then flung him, a bleeding wreck, on the stone steps of that church. I went up to him.

'Do you remember Rome? ' I said.

He did not move. He did not answer. He took no more notice of me than if I were not standing before him. He did not look at me. His vacant blue eyes rested on the buzzards that were screaming and tearing at some object at the bottom of the steps. I did not know what to do. I took a yellow-backed note out of my pocket and pressed it in his hand. He did not give it a glance. But his hand moved a little, the thin claw-like fingers closed on the note and scrunched it up; he made it into a little ball and then edging it on to his thumb flicked it into the air so that it fell among the jangling buzzards. I turned my head instinctively and saw one of them seize it in his beak and fly off followed by two others screaming behind it. When I looked back the man was gone.

I stayed three more days in Vera Cruz. I never saw him again.

 

 

As Alexandra Moe writes in her essay "We’re All Reading Wrong", "to access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud".

I've just done my bit.

 

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You will never catch Lucy accusing Charlie Brown of being washy-wishy.

 

 

Can you find the error in the following sentence? “The bells chimed dong, dang, ding.” Don’t dally-dilly thinking about it — you probably felt the offending phrase zag-zig through your gut with the intensity of a pong ping ball. Who in their right mind would say, “dong, dang, ding”? Everyone knows it should be, “ding, dang, dong.” Why? Well ... ‘cause. It’s just one of those secret English rules you didn’t know you always knew.

While there’s nothing grammatically wrong with calling your mom for a quick chat-chit or blasting your favourite jam on the hop-hip channel, you will be rightly mocked for uttering any of these flop-flipped phrases. And for that you can thank the rule of “ablaut reduplication” — a hidden formula all native English speakers know implicitly despite having never heard of it before.

 

If there are three words then the order has to go I, A, O. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or O.

 

Interior vowels of a word which are altered in repetition are called "ablaut reduplications". They give us phrases like tick-tock, riffraff, mishmash, sing song, King Kong, ping pong, dilly-dally, and shilly-shally.

And while you may not consciously realise it, almost every example of ablaut reduplication in the English language follows the exact same pattern, namely, “If there are three words then the order has to go I, A, O. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or O." As to why this I-A-O pattern has such a firm hold in our linguistic history, nobody can say.

If you are a native English-speaker, you've known this rule your entire life — and never heard of it before now. Now you have, courtesy of a "wog", who had to learn it the hard way. But then again, life might have been simpler knowing that you know the rule without knowing it.

 

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Knulp

 

Read this wonderful little book at www.archive.org
(better still, buy a copy and keep it in your backpocket)

 

It's said that it's better to give than to receive, but a gift you buy yourself lets you do both, which is what I did when I picked up this slim copy of Hermann Hesse's novella "Knulp" at Vinnies. They must not have known what treasure they were giving away because its sticker price was one lousy dollar.

Someone recently gave me the ultimate compliment by saying, "I wish I had met you sooner, but I'm glad it happened at all." Back then I was not the person I am now, and that person may not have liked me, just as I may not have appreciated Hermann Hesse's "Knulp" as much as I do now.

The pleasure of 'Knulp' isn't in the plot, which is slight, but in the weight of truth and human understanding that thickens the writing. It makes for a remarkable and deeply affecting reading experience, as it asks the big questions: What should we do with our lives? What is a life well lived? How do we resolve the tension between duty and freedom?

 

"The most beautiful things, I think, give us something else beside pleasure; they also leave us with a feeling of sadness or fear." "Why?" "I mean that a beautiful girl wouldn't seem so beautiful if we didn't know that she has her season and that when it's over she'll grow old and die. If a beautiful thing were to remain beautiful for all eternity, I'd be glad, but all the same I'd look at it with a colder eye. I'd say to myself: You can look at it any time, it doesn't have to be today. But when I know that something is perishable and can't last for ever, I look at it with a feeling not just of joy but of compassion as well." "I suppose so." "To me there's nothing more beautiful than fireworks in the night. There are blue and green fireballs, they rise up in the darkness, and at the height of their beauty they double back and they're gone. When you watch them, you're happy but at the same time afraid, because in a moment it will all be over. The happiness and the fear go together, and it's much more beautiful than if it lasted longer. Don't you feel the same way?"

Knulp is always on the road, never quite belonging anywhere. He wanders from town to town, touching people's lives only briefly and then quietly disappears again as if in a puff of air. What he leaves behind is nothing more than a memory; a small recollection, like a melody we once heard years ago and somehow forgot. The novel reaches a final powerful climax when God reveals to Knulp that the purpose of his life was to bring a little nostalgia for freedom into the lives of ordinary men:

 

"Let well enough alone," said God. "What's the good of complaining? Don't you see that whatever happened was good and right, that nothing should have been any different? Would you really want to be a gentleman now, or a master craftsman with a wife and children, reading the paper by the fireside? Wouldn't you run away again this minute to sleep in the woods with the foxes and set traps for birds and catch lizards?" Again Knulp started off, unaware that he was staggering with weariness. He felt much happier now and nodded gratefully to everything God said. "Look," said God, "I wanted you the way you are and no different. You were a wanderer in my name and wherever you went you brought the settled folk a little homesickness for freedom. In my name, you did silly things and people scoffed at you; I myself was scoffed at in you and loved in you. You are my child and my brother and a part of me. There is nothing you have enjoyed and suffered that I have not enjoyed and suffered with you."

By the time you have read this, you're on the second-last page of this 113-page-thin triptych divided into "Early Spring", "My Recollections of Knulp", and "The End", and you wished it wasn't the end, because this lengthy metaphor has so much to teach you. It taught me a lot about myself. I was, like Knulp, the eternal drifter, never belonging anywhere, consistently refusing to tie myself down to any job, place or person.

I have often suspected that by bringing 'a little nostalgia for freedom' into the lives of some of the people I met, I may have upset them and not been the kind of person that deserves the aforesaid compliment.

 

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P.S. For my German readers I have this audiobook of "Knulp" in German!

 

The stranger that is you

 

 

It's difficult to read Camus when you are married and your day is filled with trivialities. Today was different because today Padma went to join the 'Stitching Bitches' in the village hall where she learns the latest crochet knots, and I was left alone in the house.

I hadn't read Camus' "The Stranger" for what seemed like ages. I don't even know if I still have all his books in my somewhat messy library, and the only online copy was in Bahasa Indonesia. And so I did the next-best thing and relaxed on the verandah and listened to the audiobook.

 

 

I could've listened to it in French - click here - but this was my day off from domestic challenges, and the English translation was just fine.

 

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Falling asleep to Albert Camus’ philosophy

 

For more of the same, click here

 

When you get to a certain age, trying to stay awake during the day and trying to fall asleep at night become one and the same. Trying to fall asleep to Albert Camus' complete philosophy may make a difference. It works for me! Tomorrow I might surprise you with Camus' "The Stranger".

 

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What is Trump's next cunning plan?

 

 

I have no idea what Trump's next cunning plan is; I just hope he's not doing another Baldrick. After he had extended the Iran ceasefire overnight, all indications were that the stockmarket was going to nosedive. Yes, all the banks took a beating, but the big miners went up, and then down again, and then up again.

(Did you know that Australians now torch - at a minimum - over $31 billion a year on gambling across pokies, betting, lotteries and casinos, which is roughly the annual profits of ALL the four banks combined?)

The market simply doesn't know what to do — well, except for a certain clique in the US who are making billions with their insider trading. Very soon, though, there will come that Gorbachev-moment — remember December 25, 1991? — when the Iranian regime will finally collapse. I just hope it'll happen long before the whole world economy collapses.

I am holding on to my BHP shares, and just now bought a few more Liontown (LTR), after having sold my previous holding for a tidy profit only yesterday. Lithium is all the rage, and will be for a long time to come, now that electric cars are in higher demand than ever before.

Remember when Blackadder told Baldrick, "You wouldn't know a cunning plan if it danced naked on a harpsichord singing 'Cunning Plans are Here Again'"? Let us just hope that Trump doesn't solve the problem of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by only cutting off everyone's head.

 

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Laid up with Laytime Calculations

 

I know you're so gripped by this clip that you can't wait to watch Part 2

 

Istill remember being overwhelmed the first time I had to calculate the laytime of one of Mofarrij's six general cargo vessels - be it the "Mofarrij-A", "Mofarrij-B", "Mofarrij-C" "Mofarrij-D", "Mofarrij-F" or "Mofarrij-G" - or of any of the other charter vessels - click here.

 

The year was 1984. I had just purchased two APPLE ///s, each with floppy drives A: and B:, holding 5.25-inch disks with a capacity of 360 KB each. We thought them sheer magic! 😄

 

All those NORs, SOFs, WWDs, SHEX, and SHINC, and the small print in Charter Parties were more confusing than the simple dictum that for every debit there must be a credit. It's done with computers now but back then in my Greek salad days (with my apologies to Shakespeare's Cleopatra) in my office overlooking the busy port of Pireaus it was still done the old-fashioned way with paper, pen and hand-written time-sheets. I was often laid up for days with lengthy laytime calculations!

 

In my office in Piraeus

 

After a desperately placed classified in the ATHENS NEWS, I was lucky to find Bozenna, a former employee of Polfracht, a Polish shipbroking and chartering company in Gdynia (which is part of what my former fellow-countrymen used to call Danzig, but we won't go there now), and with a vastly over-qualified master’s degree in maritime transport economics.

"Nie ma problemu", said Bozenna and set to work, often craftily interpreting Charter Parties to swing the calculations in our favour. It proved to be a fortuitous encounter, just as it had been for Bozenna in 1979 when her Polish employers had sent her on a holiday replacement to their office in Piraeus. Two days after her arrival, another Pole, a marine insurance broker, invited her to dinner - and the rest is history.

 

Bozenna and Tadeusz (Ted) at the SAVOY Hotel

 

I know that history well because by the time I got to Greece in late 1982, Bozenna was already married to Tadeusz, the marine insurance broker, and both became my best friends during my time in Greece.

 

Ted in full flight

 

As it turned out, Bozenna was not only smarter than me in calculating laytime but also smarter than me by staying in Greece. Those years were the best years of my life, SHINC (Sundays and holidays included).

 

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Das Tal der Ahnungslosen

 

The grey area represents the reception of West Germany's ARD's television in East Germany. The areas in black had no reception and were jokingly called the "Valley of the Clueless" (Tal der Ahnungslosen), with ARD said to stand for "Außer Rügen und Dresden"

 

In the far east of Germany lie two infamous valleys. One is the far northeastern tip of the country, the other is around Dresden. During the Soviet occupation of East Germany, they were known as "Die Täler der Ahnungslosen", or the Valleys of the Clueless.

Not because the people there are unusually stupid, but because of the areas' topography which meant that West German television broadcasts couldn’t reach them. They were therefore cut off from the rest of the world, with only the East German state propaganda reaching them.

There are times when I feel I am living in the Valley of the Clueless, that valley being Australia. Here we all are, in an extreme energy crisis — although, if you listened to our clueless Labor government, you'd think that everything will be fine as long as we drive without our roof racks — and yet we maintain a full legislative ban on civilian nuclear power while sitting on nearly 28% of the planet’s known uranium reserves.

While China is building a nuclear empire, Australia is completely absent — zero operating capacity and zero prospective builds. While we are sitting on piddling fuel reserves, we are exporting gas. We also have oil but can't drill for it lest we upset our own homegrown bunch of Greta Thunbergs. And don't get me started on all those shut-down refineries.

While European investors still remember surprise bank holidays, limits on their ATM withdrawals, capital controls, double digit inflation and governments defaulting on their bonds, the stockmarket valuation of our country's biggest bank is greater than the world's biggest miner.

Our blissful ignorance is more ignorance than bliss.

 

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To be silent the whole day long ...

 

 

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself."

Padma has gone shopping which gave me an excuse to go to my little retreat at the bottom of "Riverbend". Just me, surrounded by some of my books and some of my keepsakes, and total silence on the inside and out, which is when the above quote entered my head. Where had I read it before? Of course, it was by Henry Miller, but in which of his books?

The question gnawed at me. Decades of forensic accounting when I had left no stone unturned, and years with management consulting firms who demanded that I would back up everything I wrote with footnotes to its source had left their mark on me, and so I went back to my library near the house to run through my Henry Miller books. No, not "Tropic of Cancer"; no, not "Tropic of Capricorn"; yes, of course, it had to be his book "The Colossus of Maroussi", which he had written after visiting the British writer Lawrence Durrell on Corfu Island in Greece in 1939. No wonder, it had stayed in my memory. And there it was on page 45:

 

 

Did I stop at page 45? Of course not! "The Colossus of Maroussi" is a beautiful Greek travelogue. As he wrote, "The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being". In it, Miller travels to Athens, Crete, Corfu, Poros, Hydra and Delphi. As he describes these places, he also portrays Greek writer George Katsimbalis (the "Colossus" of the book's title), and Lawrence Durrell, and Durrell's first wife Nancy, as well as Theodore Stephanides, the Greek-British doctor and polymath who was Lawrence Durrell's brother's friend and mentor.

 

Read it online at www.archive.org

 

Even though I hungered for more silence and for more of Henry Miller, what drove me back to the house in late afternoon was Padma's promise to bring back a roast chicken — not that KFC-[expletive deleted] but a real roast chicken from the rotisserie at Woolies, with a bit of coleslaw on the side. (Did you know that 'coleslaw' comes from the Dutch phrase "koolsla," which is "cabbage salad" [kool = cabbage, sla = salad]? When Dutch settlers brought this dish to America in the 17th century, "koolsla" became "coleslaw" or "cole slaw". You didn't know that? I thought so!)

 

 

Having filled the hole in my stomach and the hole in your education, I searched YouTube for anything on Henry Miller's famous quote and found this video clip. Of course, the smartphones and algorithms, of which he speaks, did not exist in his time. This is all AI-stuff, but cleverly done.

 

 

I almost wrote 'KI' - Künstliche Intelligenz - because that's what Germans call artificial intelligence which surprises me. They've been throwing out perfectly good German words by the DUDEN¹-load, replacing them with English words (sometimes even coupled with German conjugations and declensions²), and yet here they are, for once 'Germanising' what is essentially an English initialism³. It reminds me of the French who insist on calling a computer an 'ordinateur' — but, of course, you already knew that, didn't you?

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The DUDEN¹ is a dictionary of the Standard High German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880 (which makes this an eponym).

A declension² is a grammatical process that applies to any inflected word that changes its form to indicate number, case, or gender; verbs are not declined; they are conjugated to show tense, mood, and person.

An initialism³ is not an acronym. Acronyms are pronounced as words (e.g., NATO), whereas initialisms spell out each letter (e.g., FBI).

If you want to know why I tell you all this, listen to ABC Radio National's Sunday Extra's "On pedantry *or being pedantic", as I did last Sunday.

 

Old school indeed!

 

 

After having spent more than ten thousand afternoons taking a nap and more than ten thousand mornings eating breakfast on the verandah, it's hard to believe that "Riverbend" didn't even have a verandah when I bought the place and immediately had one built.

That was thirty-three years ago, and the verandah is showing such signs of wear and tear that nothing short of a complete rebuild is needed.

I couldn't tell a good carpenter from a bad one if he hit me in the face with a claw hammer, and so I asked a friend if he had a friend who could do the job. He did, casually inspected it, and then quoted me $18,000.

 

 

I have little experience with tradesmen - of which most were bad - but I remembered the advice to always get three quotes. The first one was for $41,747.43 - I loved that 43 cents! - but didn't include an overhead beam which needed replacing, for which he quoted me $110 an hour. As I told him, "Not in my wildest dreams ..." He wasn't surprised at all.

 

 

The second one quoted me a not-quite-so-outrageous $24,499,20. It ticked all the boxes - as they say - and I thought I was on a winner!

 

 

But then came "Old School Quality Building" who had been the first one to show up for an inspection of the job but had been delayed giving me his quote, for which he apologised. $17,316.20. Old school indeed!

 

 

I immediately sent back an email, "Thank you for the time you took to look at the job and in preparing your quote. I really appreciated the thoroughness with which you did your inspection. I have never undertaken such a big job before, so please give me time over the weekend to think about it. I am keen to get started, so I'll get back to you early next week. I am also keen to establish a lasting relationship with a reliable carpenter as this old house is beginning to need more and more work done on it, which I hope you could help me with."

Think about it? Of course, I needn't think about! Three quotes and third time lucky! And so in my next email I said, "How soon can you start?"

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Instant recall

 

 

Last night, after yet another of my more frequently occurring "Pinkelpause" - look it up! - when I had trouble falling off to sleep again, the movie "The Beach" - not to be confused with "On the Beach" - with Leonardo DiCaprio entered my mind.

It is, of course, based on the book of the same name by Alex Garland, and one of the few instances where I watched the movie before I ever read the book (with the book usually a far more satisfying experience).

"The Beach", both the movie and the book, are thought to be a remake of that other book and movie about a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves. That books, as every kid who had to read it at school knows, is called ... there I was, at four o'clock in the morning, and not being able to recall one of the classics of English literature.

I've always prided myself on a good memory and almost instant recall, and yet, despite willing my brain to come up with the title, it simply wouldn't obey me. It was only when the first light came filtering through the curtains and I heard an early fisherman passing on the river, that I gave up the fight, switched on my smartphone, tapped on the GOOGLE icon, and typed in "Golding" - yes, I had remembered the author's name but not the name of the book! - and there it was: "Lord of the Flies".

Of course! How could I have forgotten! From now on I shall always associate "Lord of the Flies" with sleepless nights which is perhaps as the author had intended it to be. Watch the movie for an instant recall.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Phew, they're still there!

 

 

I've just heard on the radio, and then followed it up by reading, about a life jacket worn by a passenger on RMS Titanic as she escaped the sinking steamship on a lifeboat sold at auction on Saturday for $906,000. (Don't even ask me if that's in Australian or American dollars; it's totally crazy in whichever currency.)

 

 

I immediately rushed out to the jetty house to check the storage box. Phew, they're still there! Four old life jackets which could be worth a million dollars in years to come. I had better include them in my will.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Saint Jack

 

What a brilliant movie! Now read the book at www.archive.org

 

Politically, Singapore is as primitive as Burundi, with repressive laws, paid informers, a dictatorial government, and jails full of political prisoners." Which is how Paul Theroux ranted about Singapore in his 1973 book "The Great Railway Bazaar", by which time it had been his home for three years, from 1968 to 1971, teaching English at the National University of Singapore.

It was also the setting for his first Asian novel, "Saint Jack", published later that same year. It was good he was elsewhere when it appeared, because Singapore's government didn't like the novel or its author any more than he liked the government, and banned the book.

 

 

It sold moderately elsewhere, until Peter Bogdanovich turned it into one of his best movies, shot on a low budget and on location. A phony script for a film called "Jack of Hearts" was submitted to obtain the official approval and this is what the Singaporeans on the cast and crew were told they were shooting as the cameras recorded the true grit of the waterfront, street markets, and notorious Bugis Street. The film, of course, was banned in Singapore when it was released in 1979.

"Saint Jack" tells the story of an affable American pimp who helped American GI's find companionship while on R&R in Singapore during the Vietnam War. Theroux has never said he knew any such individual, but his years of residence in Singapore give the novel a ring of truth.

Watching it decades after I had visited Singapore repeatedly while stationed in Rangoon in what was then Burma, it has more than a ring of truth about it: it is exactly how I remember Singapore from my days there in 1975 and again when my Saudi boss sent me back several times in the early 80s to supervise his transshipments through Sembawang.

 

 

Since then the world has changed, and so has Singapore, but a kindly soul, Toh Hun Ping of Singapore Film Locations Archive (whose website has disappeared since I first wrote about it), went to the extraordinary trouble of splicing together yesteryear's street scenes in "Saint Jack" with today's equivalents. Thanks for the memories, Hun Ping!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. I've just spent the last twenty minutes taking the second 's' out of 'transshipment' and then putting it back in again. I now let you decide!