If you find the text too small to read on this website, press the CTRL button and,
without taking your finger off, press the + button, which will enlarge the text.
Keep doing it until you have a comfortable reading size.
(Use the - button to reduce the size)
In old age, Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" has become a bit of a regretful dirge for me, and it takes very little to make me go and recite "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference."
After countless detours in my life, there are no more forks ahead of me, except this one which I found on the way to the front gate. Padma must have dropped it on her way to the recycle bin, which is where she goes every so often with a box full of what she deems to be surplus stuff.
On closer inspection, I recognised is as the small fork I had kept when I flew Egypt Air. At the time I thought it small recompense for the ordeal of sitting aboard an ageing Boing 707 which, judging by the broken food tray and hanging arm rest, should never have got off the ground in the first place, let alone with so many homeward-bound Egyptians nursing television sets and sewing machines on their laps as "cabin baggage".
I took the airline less travelled by and, luckily, survived it.
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".
Below is a sample of the 24-hour audiobook which ends on page 4 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 seemed to have got caught up in the moment, as they peacefully reclined under a shade tree just metres 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.
Unfortunately, I didn't sell down during today's wild gyrations when BHP gave back all the gains it had made yesterday: it went from yesterday's $51.51 close to this morning's high of $52.09 and then, at around lunchtime, came the sudden dive back 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.
Poor Mr. Trump. His Trump Coin has lost 98% of its value. And even his wife’s hagiographic documentary, "Melania", is said to be disappointing. Market researcher 'Boxoffice' has projected it will gross between $1 and $2 million in opening weekend ticket sales. Both figures are well below the $40 million Amazon paid for the title.
He went to all the trouble of taking out Maduro in Venezuela, warning Vice President ‘Delcy’ in front of the whole world. ‘Delcy’ gave him the middle finger by saying she’s had ‘enough’ of orders from Washington.
And he went all the way to Switzerland to deliver a rambling, almost incomprehensible discourse, bringing his cannon onto the stage — he was going to invade Greenland! — but then he turned around and took his cannon home with him without firing a shot. Ditto Tehran. Even if they never admire him, at least they will learn to fear him. Right?
And 'USA Today' reports that "President Donald Trump said he hopes the father of Renee Nicole Good, the woman who was shot and killed by an immigration officer in Minneapolis, is still a 'Trump fan' after his daughter’s death." Yeah, right!
P.S. According to reliable sources - click here - Trump has threatened the Ayatollah that it will release this feature-length biopic of the First Lady in Iran, if Tehran continues to ignore American demands.
There are more 'professional' recordings - see here - but this one does it for me
I really need those empty hours of those early morning when I brew myself my first cup of tea before the house wakes up and breaks up my melancholic thoughts, which at my age are mostly about the people I have known and who have already gone before me.
It's a sad reverie but the sadness is tinged with gratitude. Gratitude for having known those people; gratitude for having had such friends. I never knew when their last hour would come, so I never had a chance to say goodbye, leaving many words unsaid and many things undone.
The hand is cold that once held mine
I can't believe you've really left this world behind
I can wait and I can hope I'll get over this in time
It takes time to learn when someone's gone for good
They're not comin' back like you wish they would
In the empty hours when you miss them so
Then it's time to learn to let them go
Your last hours we never knew
We never had a chance to say goodbye to you
Words unsaid and things undone
We'd just begun and now we'll never see them through
It takes time to learn when someone's gone for good
They're not comin' back like you wish they would
In the empty hours when you miss them so
It takes time to learn to let them go
It takes time to learn that you're gone for good
You're not comin' back like I wish you would
In the empty hours when I miss you so
Then it's time to learn to let you go
The hand is cold that once held mine
It's taken time to learn that they're gone. Now it's time to let them go.
They say that time and tide wait for no man, and so I made an appointment with my solicitor in the Bay to update my will, sign an Enduring Power of Attorney, appoint an executor, and even lodge an Advanced Health Directive, i.e. "Switch it off!"
I also talked with Padma about a eulogy and scribbled something on a piece of paper. Something about the many forks in the road, the many roads I had taken, and the many more I had not and now no longer will — in phonetics, so she won't have any doubt about the pronunciation.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
If you are looking for a particular blog, search here!
Come and read my other blogs (click on triangle for details)
