As long as we live, they too will live; for they are now a part of us as we remember them.

 

 

A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them ..."

"The ultimate touchstone is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone."

Which is how David Whyte described the word 'Friendship' in his book "Consolations". And what a fitting description it is of my best friend, Noel Butler, who bore witness to my life's many trials and tribulations for almost thirty years, until his untimely death in August 1995.

Basically your friends are not your friends for any particular reason. They are your friends for no particular reason. The job you do, the family you have, the way you vote, the major achievements and blunders of your life, your religious convictions or lack of them, are all somehow set off to one side when the two of you get together.

If you are old friends, you know all those things about each other and a lot more besides, but they are beside the point. Even if you talk about them, they are beside the point. Stripped, humanly speaking, to the bare essentials, you are yourselves the point. The usual distinctions of older-younger, richer-poorer, smarter-dumber, male-female even, cease to matter. You meet with a clean slate every time, and you meet on equal terms. Anything may come of it or nothing may. That doesn't matter either. Only the meeting matters.

Noel Butler was such a friend. We first met aboard the liner PATRIS in 1967 when he was going on a European holiday and I was returning to Germany. The PATRIS had been scheduled to call at Port Moresby in New Guinea but, following the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel, the Suez Canal closed and the ship was re-routed around the Cape of Good Hope.

However, the many New Guinea expats who had already booked, Noel amongst them, still joined the ship in Sydney. As did Graeme Bell's All Stars Band. And so for the next four weeks I would sit in the ship's Midnight Club and listen to the many yarns of high adventure told by those larger-than-life New Guinea expats while Graeme Bell's All Stars played their ragtime music.

During the day, Noel and I would sit on deck for hours, hunched over a chessboard. Our mutual love of chess and my interest in New Guinea started a friendship which lasted until his death thirty years later!

We kept up a regular correspondence during all those years which Noel spent mostly in Wewak in the Sepik District, before PNG's Independence in 1975 and old age forced him to return to his homestate Queensland.

I had come up to PNG in late 1969 and worked there for several years. During this time I visited Noel on his small country estate outside Wewak and Noel came to spent Christmas 1973 and Christmas 1974 with me. Or at least he tried because by the time he arrived on Bougainville in 1973, I was in Arawa Hospital being prepared for an urgent appendectomy; and when he came to see me in Lae in 1974 I was already packed up and ready to fly out to my next assignment in Burma. Then it was my turn to spend Christmas 1975 at Wewak but I could only stay for a few days as I was already booked to fly out to Tehran in Iran.

Our paths crossed more frequently after I had temporarily come back to Australia in 1979. I visited him several times and observed with some concern his struggle to make himself at home again in Australia, first at Caboolture, then at Mt Perry, and finally at Childers. He never quite succeeded since, as he put it, after a lifetime spent in PNG, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea", a sentiment we shared.

 

 

Some friends are more or less replaceable with other friends. Noel was not. I last heard from him sometime in April 1995. He'd sent me a funny "Childers by Night" postcard which was all black except for those words. On the back he had written, "Hope your outlook on the future is not as black as this; mine is but that's inevitable." I was then far too young and far too busy and far too full of myself to think that this was more than just a funny card. Four months later, Noel was dead.

Again, to quote David Whyte: "... an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way ..."

My friendship with Noel has continued for more than thirty years "in a silent internal conversational way". Today is his birthday, which we never celebrated because we never knew each other's birthday. We never allowed our friendship to become too sentimental. We had both been loners for most of our lives and didn't want to be reminded of our non-existent home and family. It's something else we shared.

 

 

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Something to think about over breakfast as you tuck into your avocado on toast!

 

According to the blurb, "Siimon (with two i's) Reynolds is one of Australia's young business success stories. Aged 35, he has already co-owned and built four advertising agencies." At 35 years of age, what could he possibly teach me that I haven't forgotten already?

 

All my life I've been eager to embrace the new day. There had never been any question that I would've wanted to 'sleep in' and miss out on a day's work, but for reasons I would not even want to go into here, I have felt like not wanting to get out of bed these last few mornings.

It's a slippery slope, and to stop me from sliding any further, I decided to take another trip to Ulladulla for lunch at the bowlo and a visit to my favourite op-shop for some more books. "I" decided but in the end it became a "we", and so "we" set off just after breakfast, because if it had been just "I", there would've been no or only burnt dinner tonight.

It was bangers and mash at the bowlo, washed down with a chardie, followed by blueberry cheese cake. If that wasn't enough to make me happy, the above book on offer at my favourite op-shop promised to get me over the line in just eight minutes. To me, happiness is no laughing matter, but, having spent more than eighty YEARS trying to be happy, I didn't think another eight MINUTES would be much help, and so I passed it up for "Lessons in Letting Go". Not that I believe I am a hoarder of bookx, because when it comes to books, it's not hoarding, is it?

 

 

However, the real treasures I discovered were a copy of Bob Carr's book "My Reading Life - Adventures in the World of Books" and "Origin Uncertain". While I found Bob Carr's book in the BIOGRAPHIES section, Anatoly Liberman's "Origin Uncertain" had been well and truly hidden away under "L" amongst all the other usual dross in the FICTION section.

 

 

It's the sort of book I can read all day. As it says on the dust jacket:

"Lost origins of words revealed. We like to recount that goodbye started out as "god be with you," that whiskey comes from the Gaelic for "water of life," or that avocado originated as the Aztec word for "testicle." But there are many words with origins unknown, disputed, or so buried in old journals that they may as well be lost to the general public. In Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology, eminent etymologist Anatoly Liberman draws on his professional expertise and etymological database to tell the stories of less understood words such as nerd, fake, ain't, hitchhike, trash, curmudgeon, and quiz, as well as puzzling idioms like kick the bucket and pay through the nose. By casting a net so broadly, the book addresses language history, language usage (including grammar), history (both ancient and modern), religion, superstitions, and material culture. Writing in the spirit of adventure through the annals of word origins, Liberman also shows how historical linguists construct etymologies, how to evaluate competing explanations, and how to pursue further research."

Something to think about over breakfast as you tuck into your avocado on toast!

 

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The Rage and the Pride

 

 

Last night, past midnight, my wife found me furtively hunched over my laptop. "What are you looking at?" she asked accusingly, as I quickly turned on the screen saver. "Nothing", I said. "It's not nothing. I saw you looking at a picture."

I was found out. Game over. I clicked the mouse and the picture filled the screen. There she was, in all her glory. Another real beauty, smooth and shiny. "Oh, God", my wife sighed in disgust, then grew silent. I just sat there, my head hung in shame, waiting for her to say something else. Finally, she spoke: "Why can't you look at porn like a normal guy?"

On the screen was a photo of the hardcover "Printed in Italy" edition of Oriana Fallaci's book "The Rage and the Pride", for sale at $28 plus $11.47 postage, on which I had just pushed the   Buy It Now   button.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

In this book, with her well-known courage, Oriana Fallaci faces the themes unchained by the Islamic terrorism: the contrast and, in her opinion, incompatibility between the Islamic world and the Western world; the global reality of the Jihad and the lack of response, the lenience of the West. With her brutal sincerity she hurls pitiless accusations, vehement invectives, and denounces the uncomfortable truths that all of us know but never dare to express. With her rigorous logic, lucidity of mind, she defends our culture and blames what she calls "our blindness, our deafness, our masochism, the conformism and the arrogance of the Politically Correct". With the poetry of a prophet like a modern Cassandra she says it in the form of a letter addressed to all of us. Published just after 9/11, this book is even more pertinent now than it was twenty-five years ago.

 

For some unkown reason, this embedded video plays in Italian.
Click here for the English narrative

 

What is happening in Europe right now reminds me of the fable about the boiling frog. Do you remember it? It claims that if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump out immediately, but if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it up, the frog will not notice the danger and will boil to death. Let me tell you, a live frog will jump out to save itself. Real frogs do not sit still and boil to death; only Europeans do that.

 

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The Camp of the Saints

 

 

In 1973 a strange novel appeared in France that swiftly became a bestseller. The authour of "Le Camp des Saints" (The Camp of the Saints), Jean Raspail, was already known as a travel writer and novelist. Well-travelled, cultured and curious, his vision for this most notorious work came to him one morning in his home on the shores of the Mediterranean.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

In his own words, that morning in 1972 he saw a vision of 'A million poor wretches, armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multitudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West. I literally saw them, saw the major problem they presented; a problem absolutely insolvable by our present moral standards. To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.'

The novel that Jean Raspail spent the next eighteen months writing was set at some point in the coming decades and depicted a France - and Europe - in the process of being swamped by mass migration from the third world. The general catalyst for the migration is the growing disparity between the numbers of poverty-stricken people in the third world and the diminishing percentage of the world's population living in the comparative paradise of Europe.

With modern communications media, word of this disparity is no longer possible to hide and the third world turns to Europe. One million people set sail in a fleet of boats, but all the time untold millions are watching and waiting to get on boats themselves. Everything depends on the reaction of Europe to this first million. For strategic political reasons Raspail chose to make the migration come not from North Africa but from Calcutta, and head from there towards the French Riviera.

The novel's memorable opening presents an elderly, cultured professor sitting in his house on the south coast of France, listening to Mozart as the armada is landing. He thinks he is alone, as the ensuing anarchy has already caused the local population to flee. However, a young hippy-ish man invades his study. He is glorying in the 'new' country that is going to emerge, a country that will be 'born all over'. And the young man instructs the professor that he is 'through. Dried up. You keep thinking and talking, but there's no more time for that. It's over. So beat it!' For his part the professor accepts that the young man may be right: 'My world won't live past morning, more than likely, and I fully intend to enjoy its final moments.' And so he shoots the young man.

In the wake of the threat to the French Republic every arm of the state - like its European neighbours - buckles. When it is clear that the armada is on the way and that France will be overwhelmed not by force but by people simply landing peaceably on their beaches, everybody fails in their own particular way. The politicians dither, incapable of working out what their attitude should be and flipping wildly between attempts to accept the armada and their ideas of how to scupper it. When some of the military are ordered to torpedo the boats, they refuse to obey orders. Meantime the leaders of the church, weighed down by the guilt of their own wordly wealth, urge that the doors of France be opened. And all the time celebrities and media stars polish and preen their reputations in front of the media by depicting this moment only as a wonderful opportunity. Perhaps aware that any other ending would make his novel even more unacceptable, in the end Raspail allows the armada to land. France does not repel them.

It is not hard to see why Raspail's novel was swiftly and almost unanimously dismissed by the critics as a racist tract. But its uncomfortable precision, not least its depiction of the failure of European society once the migration begins, saves it from being only that. And the prophetic outcome predicted in the book more than fifty years ago has been a vast underestimation of what actually happened!

 

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A hearty "Ahoy!" to all you landlubbers

 

 

Ahoy there me hearties" and a very "Good Morning" from the ocean waves - well, would you believe river ripples? - where I slept aboard the LADY ANNE! (YES!!!, I bought the Savage Nautilus!) With the hatchcover open, listening to the fish jumping and gazing up at the stars, I quickly fell asleep. I slept like a sailor and dreamt of tropical islands and coral seas as the River Clyde flowed quietly on.

I was awakened by the insistent ringing of the cordless phone which reminded me that it was 6 o'clock on Easter Sunday and I was still moored only 20 metres offshore from "Riverbend" where a cooked breakfast and a hot shower were waiting for me. There was time enough though to still make myself a cup of tea on the boat's little metho stove (if I ever run out of tea, I can always drink the metho!) and to make everything ship-shape again. As the Water Rat said to the Mole, "There is nothing -- absolute NOTHING -- half so much worth doing as simply messing-about in boats or with boats, in or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do." (Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows")

I had written this almost twenty years ago, on 8 April 2007 - click here - and it all came back to me in a sudden rush when I received this email:

 

 

He must've been phoning me when I was out on the jetty having my hair cut in the sun. I could hear the phone ring but to go inside to answer it would've meant divorcing my hairdresser, and however tempting that may seem, I thought I had better let her finish cutting my hair first.

By the time I had all my hair cut on top and in my ears and nostrils, it was time for some mulligatawny soup, after which I wrote this email:

"You must've been the chap who called me while I was out on the jetty having my hair cut. I've forgotten where and when I had put that ad - I think it was GUMTREE - but long story short: it sold many, many years ago for a trifle $3,000, and last I heard it was sailed around Magnetic Island off Townsville by a doctor who later phoned me to learn more about the sail configuration. She was a lovely boat; built like a tank in the days when fibreglass was still cheap, and I spent many happy days on her up and down the Clyde River. I sold her reluctantly when I realised that I was too old and my sailing days were over. I hope you find some other boat that will suit you. Best regards and fair wind."

(As you can see, I didn't have the heart to tell him to stop "wandering".)

 

With my Van-Gogh's-ear for music, it could be argued that the Germans should have been required to lay down their accordions along with their arms at the end of the war.

 

It all stirred up long-forgotten memories and made me realise, just in case I had forgotten, how many happy years I have lived here by the river. "By it and with it and on it and in it." (The Wind in the Willows)

 

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