Not MY diary!

 

 

At the beginning of the book "The Diary of a Nobody", the narrator Charles Pooter says this – "Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’ – why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth."

I have only ever kept a diary of sorts when I was in some sort of trouble. Writing it all down helped me to deal with it, but I always abandoned it as soon as my troubles were over. Perhaps I should have kept at it, or perhaps it's for the better that I didn't. Anyway, reading the diary of another nobody kind of makes up for my own omission.

What Pooter describes in his diary are just everyday experiences: life at home with his wife, the people they interact with, like the grocer, the milkman, and the carpenter, his colleagues at work, his friends who come visiting, his grown-up son who is a little eccentric; it's all quite relaxing and with a touch of light humour, just like in the real world.

 

Read it online at www.archive.org
(and donate a few dollars towards the good work they do!)

 

It is so relaxing and so unpretentious, it seems to have been written with the deliberate intent of mocking other diaries and memoirs and, although a 100 years old, it’s surprising how contemporary it feel.

 

Episode 2   Episode 3   Episode 4   Episode 5   Episode 6   Episode 7   Episode 8  

 

I have made this relaxing audiobook my regular nightcap. To paraphrase from the book, "I believe I am happy because I am no longer ambitious."

 

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When "global warming" became bet-hedging "climate change"

 

 

The legendary author, poet, journalist and humorist Clive James, who unfortunately died in 2019, aged 80, had cast a weary eye over the state of the climate debate and concluded that climate alarmists are on the ropes.

“The proponents of man-made climate catastrophe asked us for so many leaps of faith that they were bound to run out of credibility in the end.”

Nevertheless, he warns that everyone else should be on their guard: scaremongering is such an addictive power that the unscrupulous will soon launch some other scare:

“For as long as the climate change fad lasted, it always depended on poppycock; and it would surely be unwise to believe that mankind’s capacity to believe in fashionable nonsense can be cured by the disproportionately high cost of a temporary embarrassment. I’m almost sorry that I won’t be here for the ceremonial unveiling of the next threat.”

Clive James’ survey of the state of the climate debate was published in the new book "Climate Change: The Facts 2017", a review of the science and policy of climate change released by Australia’s Institute of Public Affairs. It has been republished as a standalone essay by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Here it is:

 

Click on each image to enlarge
or, for ease of reading, click here

Source The Global Warming Policy Foundation

 

Suggesting you should read the whole 600 pages of Ian Plimer's "Green Murder" - click here - may have been too much of an ask, so here's your easy way out: read Clive James' essay "Mass death dies hard". It tells you all you need to know about this constant bullshit we're being fed by the media day after day. Move over, Chris Bowen and Greta Thunberg!

 

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Doing it by the book

 

 

Today is the first day in two weeks when the afternoon sun is warm enough to continue my reading outside on the sunlit verandah. And, of course, it's never long before I have company; this time it's from a pair of almost tame butcherbirds who follow me wherever I go - well, not as far as the Bay, but you know what I mean, don't you?

 

 

They are called butcherbirds for their peculiar feeding behaviour of impaling prey on thorns, twigs, or in tree forks, similar to how butchers hang meat. This habit allows them to either tear the meat off more easily or store it for later consumption, creating a "larder". When they visit me, they find a larder of finely-chopped devon waiting for them.

And so the afternoon slowly continues, with me watching the butcher birds, or reading, or looking at the river. Like the men in "Moby Dick", most of us like to stare at the sea - or a river, if no sea is nearby. Is it because that's where we all came from? Unlike the whales who started out on land and then went back to the sea. Maybe that is why, when they emerge from the water to breathe on the surface, they stare back at the land to get a glimpse of us. And yet, if they were to reclaim their place on land, they would be crushed to death by their own weight.

 

 

Which reminds me of what Roger Deakin wrote in his beautiful ode to the act of swimming outdoors, "Waterlog - A Swimmer's Journey through Britain":

"When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is - water - and it begins to move with the water around it. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached at birth ourselves. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terri-fying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control." [click here]

I don't know about you, but I have absolutely no memories of what I experienced before I was born (in fact, my earliest memory is of being flown out of Berlin in 1949 during the Allied airlift), but if nothing else, you have now heard about Roger Deakin's "Waterlog", which I highly recommend, and you've googled for the meaning of the word 'amniotic'.

Ramona Koval's love letter to reading is drawing to a close, and so is the sun, and it's time to get back to that electric heater in the bedroom.

 

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What a brilliant scam!

 

 

Many years ago, I received an email purporting to be from an old friend in Canberra who, according to that email, had been stranded in London with no passport and no money and was in urgent need of my financial help.

It just so happened that I knew he had never left the country which was confirmed by a quick phone call to Canberra. In other words, I am no stranger to scams, but the one that came in today is a real cutie.

It pretends to be from an old colleague of mine from my Bougainville days, whom I last saw - what? - some twenty years ago, when I was taking the train to Sydney and stopped over for a day in Thirroul to visit him at his home at Austinmer. And here he was again, emailing me:

"Hi, I apologize for the inconvenience, but could you spare a few minutes to respond to emails? I would have called, but I can't speak on the phone because of severe throat pain from laryngitis. Kindly inform me when you receive this."

Quite chaffed to hear from him again after all this time, I replied:

"Long time no see, John! Yes, go ahead; I'm here!"

Within minutes, I received his reply:

 

"Glad to hear from you! Sorry for the inconvenience, I need to get an Apple gift card for my friend's daughter who is diagnosed with Stage 3 metastasized breast cancer, She had lost both parents to the disease (COVID-19, It's her birthday, but I can't do this now, the stores around here are out of stock and all my effort purchasing it online proved abortive I was wondering if you could help me get it from any store around you and I'll reimburse you. kindly let me know if you can handle this so i can tell you the amount and how to get it to me."

 

Ooops! She is his friend's daughter which means his friend is her mother, and yet he goes on to say that "she had lost both parents". Something doesn't add up! I've just spoken with John on the phone. He's eighty-eight years of age and no longer as mobile as he used to be, and neither is his mental agility, but eventually the penny dropped and he realised that scammers must have hacked the address book in his email account.

What stopped me from rushing out to buy that gift card is the cold weather, but I must admit, those scammers are getting quite clever. They are obviously not Australian or they couldn't have spelt 'laryngitis'!

 

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Nelligen Markets

 

 

I should be going for a leisurely 'Bummel' up the lane and across the bridge to meet the locals at the local market, but these last two weeks of solitude have made me enjoy it so much that I don't want to spoil it. It's just me and a cup of tea and the river.

And the occasional movie on TV, on DVD, on iview, or on YouTube, to say nothing of all my books. So many books and so little time. Why did I not discover Joseph Roth earlier? He died early, just forty-four years old, and just three months before the start of World War II, which he had already predicted in February 1933 in a prophetic letter to his friend, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig:

"You will have realized by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes. Apart from the private—our literary and financial existence is destroyed—it all leads to a new war. I won't bet a penny on our lives. They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns."

 

I hate it when they change the bookcover to the movie image it was adapted in.
I mean, the movie was made from the book, not the other way round.

 

In his last few years, he moved from hotel to hotel, drinking heavily and becoming increasingly anxious about money and the future. Despite suffering from chronic alcoholism, he remained prolific until his death in Paris in 1939. The novella "The Legend of the Holy Drinker", his last major work, reads like an autobiography, as it chronicles the attempts made by an alcoholic vagrant to regain his dignity and honour a debt.

 

Click here to watch the 1963 film adaptation of "Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker". Unfortunately - for some - it is in German, as is the audiobook, but here is a trailer in English.

 

And there are so many more: "The Radetzky March", "The Emperor's Tomb", "Job", "Hotel Savoy", "The Silent Prophet", "Flight Without End", "Tarabas", "Confessions of a Murderer", and "The Spider's Web" are just some. It'll be some time before I can go to the Nelligen Markets again.

 

 

A quick search on ebay brought up several film adaptations but at staggering prices ranging from a "low" $40 to as much as $70. I guess there's no hope that they'll ever show up at Vinnies for a mere dollar.

 

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