The Narrow Corner

 

 

There's nothing like the pitter patter of rain drops on a corruagted iron roof to send me off to sleep, so after my lunch of what Padma calls her "home-made pizza" - slices of salami and shredded cheese on a piece of Lebanese bread lightly toasted - I doubled down on my retirement by retiring to "Bonniedoon" for an afternoon snooze.

Woken up after an hour or so by the rustling of leaves and something else rustling somewhere under the floorboards, I was reluctant to return to the "real" world and grabbed the nearest book within reach which transported me once again to another and even more exotic location.

 

 

W. Somerset Maugham's novel "The Narrow Corner" is set "a good many years ago" in the Dutch East Indies, where a young Australian, cruising the islands after his involvement in a murder in Sydney, has a passionate affair on an island which causes a further tragedy. A quote from "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, "Short therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells", gives it its title.

In addition to drifting away from the here-and-now, the story allowed me to fantasize to the many possible "what might have beens?" had I stayed longer in New Guinea, settled on Thursday Island, retired - as I once thought I might - at Port Dickson in Malaysia, or never left Greece. Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living", which Adam Phillips, the Freudian existentialist, countered with "The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?"

Playing the "what ifs?" is not a gratifying way to live. And it is definitely not the way in which to have a positive attitude toward the life we now have and have lived. It is the exact opposite of a life of gratitude for simply being alive. And yet it is, I am sure, what we all do late in life.

The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne once quipped, "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened." There go about half the things I used to feel bad about. As for the rest, I take consolation from the fact that so many of the extraordinary characters I encounters in my life seem to have finished up just like me: holed up in deepest domesticity and with no more "what next?" ahead of them - well, except for the most obvious one (which some reached already).

The human mind - at least mine - tends to work from the concrete to the abstract, from personal experiences to principles suggested by these experiences. I am sure that if I sat in the lotus position for days on end on some remote mountaintop and tried to come up with a meaning of life, my mind would soon turn toward something concrete, like the rumbling in my stomach. I would probably then declare that life is another slice of "homemade pizza" washed down with a cold beer.

I leave you with a YouTube clip of the radio play, adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Segal, and broadcast in BBC Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre on 1 April 1989, with Garard Green as Dr Saunders and Douglas Blackwell as Captain Nichols, as well as a copy of Maugham's book to read here.

 

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The things that kept me going

 

 

After three years overseas, first in Saudia Arabia and then in Greece, my memories of that mythical place called home — meaning Australia — had grown as blurred as these images on the corkboard above the desk in my office in Piraeus.

While dozens of ships were carrying millions of dollars worth of cargo across the seas, I was left to second-guess and piece together from the names of ships and copies of telexes and entries appearing on bank statements my boss's commodity trading deals in far-away Jeddah.

 

Note my early PC, an APPLE ///, but most computing was still done in my head

 

Accounting depends on paperwork, not guesswork, and my patience was often sorely tested as I had to rely on hearsay and word-of-mouth to offset one Letter of Credit against another and settle charter parties on little more than a brief phone call. I didn't always sleep well at night.

The things that kept me going were those photos and picture postcards pinned to the corkboard above me desk, photos of my first home in cold Canberra, photos of my last home in tropical Far North Queensland at Cape Pallarenda, and postcards of Picnic Bay on Magnetic Island where I owned a block of land and hoped to one day build my permanent home.

 

 

I had already paid a very high personal price in taking on and continuing this job, so that when, through a great deal of 'extracurricular' forensic auditing of trades done before I had even started this job, I was able to recover vast sums of money, only to be 'rewarded' by my boss with a "What took you so long?", the things that kept me going no longer did.

I impulsively resigned from a job that others would have killed for, to return to that mythical place called home where it took me the best part of another ten years to bring back into focus those blurred images, not in cold Canberra and not in tropical Far North Queensland, but in little Nelligen which has now been my home for over thirty years.

Journey's End! (should that be with a question mark?)

 

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Altwerden ist nichts für Feiglinge

 

Wikipedia

 

Wie hatte ich den Schauspieler Joachim Fuchsberger vermisst? Er spielte doch schon in so vielen Filmen ehe ich in 1965 als Neunzehnjähriger das kalte Deutschland verlies.

Vielleicht lag es daran daß ich Wichtigeres im Kopf hatte als ins Kino zu gehen, denn der Ernst des Lebens hatte für mich schon angefangen als andere in meinem Alter noch Cowboy und Indianer spielten.

Aufgeschoben ist aber nicht aufgehoben, denn ich entdeckte ihn über zehn Jahre nach seinem Tod als ich begann mich mit diesem Thema zu beschäftigen und nach Büchern der Elke Heidenreich suchte. Und hier war Joachim Fuchsbergers Buch "Altwerden ist nichts für Feiglinge".

 

Read it online at archive.org

 

Und ich konnte mir sogar die Portokosten von Deutschland sparen denn es gab eine Kopie davon auf archive.org. Das hebe ich mir auf bis zum nächsten verregneten Tag den ich in "Bonniedoon" verbringen werde.

 

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P.S. Jetzt hörte ich gerade vom Hubert in Cooktown dass der Joachim Fuchsberger auch eine zweite Staatsbürgerschaft in Australien hatte und Sandy Bay in Tasmania sein zweites Zuhause war ehe gesundheitliche Probleme ihn nach Deutschland zurücktrieben. Er war ein "Honorary Ambassador for Tourism" und filmte die "Terra Australis" Serie hier:

 

Für mehr, drücke hier.

 

Radio Okerwelle

 

Listen to Radio Okerwelle here

 

It's going to be a long night tomorrow night: a newfound friend in my old hometown of Braunschweig in Germany volunteers at the local community radio "Radio Okerwelle" and goes 'on air' at 11 o'clock on Sunday morning which is 9 o'clock late at night here.

He offered to send special greetings to Nelligen — "Falls Du zuhören solltest, schreibe kurz. Dann kommt ein Gruß nach Nelligen ..." — and while the choice of music in his "Früstückswelle" programme isn't what I grew up with, I agreed to stay up if he plays my listener's choice of ...

 

 

Not that "Radio Okerwelle" is only about music I can no longer relate to. Their facebook page also mentions cultural events, such as the release of the film "Amrum", of which all-knowing YouTube already has a trailer.

 

 

I live too far away from the (c)old country to "Mach dir ein paar schöne Stunden, geh ins Kino", but I'm going to keep an eye on ebay.de to find the DVD as soon as it becomes available. Thank you, Radio Okerwelle!

 

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A totally rained-out Saturday morning

 

 

It didn't just rain last night, it bucketted down! All night! The small fishpond by the house is overflowing; the big pond at the bottom of the property has doubled in size; the scientifically calibrated raingauge, the small dinghy in the river, is full to the gunwales.

To keep out the noise, I listened to the audio recording of Alexander McCall Smith's book "My Italian Bulldozer" which I had picked up months ago at an op-shop. Not that I was particularly interested in that particular story but years ago I had found his books set in Botswana and seen the movie "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency", and the scenery had brought back many memories of my time in neighbouring Namibia.

 

 

We woke up to grey skies and a water wonderland this morning, but the 6-knot speed sign on the other side of the river, which all the boaties and especially the pesky jetski drivers seem to ignore, is still well above the water even though we have a high tide right now. Not that there has ever been any flood threat in all the thirty-two years I have lived here by the river, but the possibility is always there if the rain continues.

 

 

Listening to this morning's news, the situation is Greenland is heating up, with the Danish government dispatching her best Lego soldiers to defend the world's largest island. There is still hope that the situation may be resolved peacefully, with Denmark offering to hand over the island to Trump if he can point to it on a map. "We are reasonable about it," a government spokesman said, "We will allow him three attempts."

In local news, following the cancellation of Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah's appearance at the Adelaide Writers' Festival and most other writers withdrawing as well, the organisers renamed it the Adelaide Writer's Festival to correctly reflect the numbers still left.

That's about all the news that's fit to print. And, yes, the 6-knot speed sign is still well above the water level. Back to "My Italian Bulldozer".

 

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