Happiness was a red plastic chair when my "home" was a 9x9-ft donga tastefully decorated with PLAYBOY centrefolds of girls waxed to the point of martyrdom, when all my wordly possessions easily fitted into a 2ft-wide metal locker, and when my needs for comfort were satisfied by a red plastic chair on a shady porch (okay, a cold beer helped!)
Camp 6 Loloho, Bougainville Island
Click on image to go to the Bougainville Copper Project website
That was in the early 1970s when I lived and worked on Bougainville Island where it all began, the dreaming of a bigger and better future and the searching for wider and farther horizons. More than fifty years later, my needs for comfort are still satisfied by an old bleached-out red plastic chair on my jetty (under the OSASCOMP-rules, is "bleached-out" a colour-adjective or an opinion? Somebody put me out of my misery!)
Colour or opinion (or coloured opinion) aside, I sit on it and dream of the past, with my horizon no farther away than across the river. Right now my dreams are helped along by still reading Paul Theroux's book "The Happy Isles of Oceania" - after all, it's all of 730 pages thick, and I'm drawing it out by reading it slowly and chewing on every word.
It's an old habit of mine to have a dictionary beside me as I settle down to a quiet read. It's how I started to learn English over sixty years ago, and it's how I still learn English today. When I encounter an unfamiliar word, I don't just want to get the sense of its meaning: I want to know its precise meaning; its etymology, and how it is used in a sentence.
Padma never bothers with a dictionary. She knows she has me. Just now she came out of the house where she'd been watching something on television, and called out to me from the verandah, "What is 'halcyon'?"
I spread out my arms towards the river, and replied, "This is halcyon!"
