Reading a book one has read many years ago is a bit like meeting an old friend one last saw many years ago. "The Happy Isles of Oceania" is such an old friend. Having found a second copy, a 'cheap' paperback, I retired to my peaceful hide-away "Melbourne", my very own 'Oceania' but after someone has pulled the plug.
When marriages fall apart, men will often turn to drink, sex, therapy or their work in order to blunt the pain of separation and their sense of failure and guilt. When Paul Theroux and his wife separated, he decided to paddle around the South Sea islands in a folding kayak. And he wrote a book about it, which is more than I have watched others do who washed up on the shores of some of the islands I lived and worked on.
I went there when I was twenty-four, with my heart still unbroken, but I can attest to the healing powers of the islands, even if it's not in the Paul Theroux way, whose solution "was to keep paddling" - after all, "if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there".
with another 730 pages to go.
It's a wonderful book to read on a tropically hot day, with the quietly flowing Clyde River on one side and a cold beer on the other. Even the resident mob of kangaroos seem to have got caught up in the moment, as they peacefully recline under a shade tree just metres away from "Melbourne", ignoring my occasional glances out of the window.
I am back in the house, refreshed from a lazy afternoon in "Melbourne". The gods seem to want me very much to pay that new Division 296 tax because my BHP shares keep going up. Each time they reach a new top, I expect them to flatten out, and I sell down some more, and yet they keep going up. It's one way of 'losing out' while still making money.
However, today's wild gyrations gave back all of yesterday's gains: it went from yesterday's $51.51 to a high of $52.09 and then, around lunchtime, came the dive all the way down to $50.12, before closing the day (and week) at $50.57, for a weekly gain of 82 cents. Whiplash!
It's all about copper which jumped from US$6.00/lb to an amazing US$6.60/lb yesterday afternoon and today fell back to US$5.93/lb.
