One last postcard to all my friends

 

As I lay there in the pitchdark bedroom with my shingles sending all those painful signals to my brain - I couldn't even toss and turn which made things worse, although I did try levitating but failed - remembering that it is always darkest before the dawn didn't calm me much either, and so I got up to take another paracetamol and write this last postcard to all my friend.

In parenthesis (or should that be 'parentheses'?): I won't tell you a lie if I say that 'lie' is my least favourite irregular verb (I wanted to write 'irregular English verb' but wasn't sure if it shouldn't be 'English irregular verb'; damn all that prescriptive OSASCOMP stuff); I mean, even 'go' has the straightforward past tense of 'went' but 'lie'? lied? laid? layed???

I took my paracetamol, wrote one last postcard to all my friends (which didn't take very long as there weren't many - friends, that is), and now I can't go back to sleep and might as well make a cup of tea and a start on Yuval Noah Harari's latest tome, the 500-plus-page book "Nexus - A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI".

 

Read a preview here

 

If you don't want to invest the thirty-five dollars in the book nor the roughly same amount of hours in reading it, here's the video clip:

 

 

As for that last postcard to all my friends, if you don't get yours in the next few days, it means you're not one of them! (them, not 'them')

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The improvements continue ...

 

 

Just because or maybe because "Riverbend" is now listed for sale, the improvements haven't stopped, such as this very convenient beer holder, and the water and sewerage connections, one of which, the water, will be completed this Friday - with photos to come - while the sewerage is yet to follow at a safe distance.

Now that I have added a sales price to my property advertisement - see here - inquiries have dropped off, certainly from people who thought they could swap their HR Holden for this once-in-a-lifetime property.

 

 

I may contact Ernie Dingo for ideas on how to spruik up the advert to attract more inquiries. In the meantime, the improvements continue ...

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Four opinions on four topics

 

What Trump’s Win Says About American Society

 

The End of China’s Rise & the Future of Global Order

 

Understanding the Mind of a Hamas Jihadist

 

We Are on the Verge of Destroying Ourselves

 

 

I - My Life - Until Now

 

Once upon a time, there was a book lady in Berlin from whom I ordered a few German books and then some more and then we became friends. Do you remember Helene Hanff's "84 Charing Cross Road"? Not the same but similar.

That was many, many years ago and I haven't ordered any books for a very long time, and not just because the book lady closed her shop and stopped selling books. Instead, she now wrote her own. Her last magnum opus is her autobiography "I - My Life - Until Now".

She sent me a copy and I devoured it in one sitting; after all, I got a mention in it as well: "When the shop sales began to drop off, I started to sell books on the Internet which went well and world-wide. I even received an order from Australia for a copy of Fritz Delfgen's [sic - it was Heinz Helfgen's] 'Ich radle um die Welt'. Through this buyer I also met his brother who lives in Kiel and we are in touch to this day."

Her last words are: "My years are numbered [she turned 85 last month] and I look back over my childhood and over 41 years of marriage. In what little time remains I I shall continue to disappoint my fellow human beings."

 

 

Ah, but you didn't disappoint me at all, Renate, as your book makes for exciting reading. Thank you for sending me a copy; also for your previous master piece, "Geschichten aus Püttelkow und Anderswo".

 

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To say nothing of my shingles

Keep on reading here

 

In my old age, there are days when I am like the three invalids in "Three Men in a Boat" who feel afflicted with every known malady in the pharmacology - well, except perhaps for housemaid's knee.

Late last Sunday, things took a turn for the worse when my body began to itch and I discovered large red wheals down the right side (I removed the photos so as not to throw you off your lunch). We rushed to the emergency department of the Batemans Bay Hospital where I was triaged and then told to wait and wait and wait ... three hours later, after being told that they couldn't tell me when a doctor would attend to me, we left and arrived home again just before the witching hour.

We made an early start next morning to be the first in line at their outpatients department where a very efficient Dr Leerdam took one look and said, "Yep, shingles", and prescribed a 7-day shingles treatment pack of Zelitrex. The first and last time I had had shingles was six months after I had taken on a huge new job in New Guinea in 1972 - click here - which had left me totally stressed out and overworked.

The friendly lady at the pharmacy explained that if I had had chicken pox at a child, I was also likely to have recurring shingles. Had I had chicken pox as a child? I knew that just after I had started my first day at school I had had some sort of infectious disease, and while I was in isolation with dozens of other kids in the local hospital, I caught some more infectious diseases, all with German names, which meant I missed a whole six months of my first year at school. I would have had to redo my first year had it not been for my father who, from his miserable wartime pension, stumped up the money to pay a retired lady-teacher to teach me everything I had missed out on to get me into Year 2.

(My memory of that time involves a cute teddy bear which my parents bought me to while away the weeks in isolation. To avoid spreading any infectious diseases it might harbour, it was incinerated upon my leaving the hospital which became the first tragedy in my hitherto short life.)

 

 

I'm halfway through my forty-two tablets of Zelitrex and still feel a bit like the cover of this book - too fragile for any future repair - but Padma is handling me with great care and I ought to be around long enough to collect my OBE (Over Bloody Eighty) next year. In the meantime - and to forget the constant itching - I shall watch "Three Men in a Boat" again.

 

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. Some kindly disposed people, on reading these pointless bits and pieces, keep insisting that I ought to write my autobiography. I am getting my head around it and may call it "My Ought To Biography".