"We've both seen the best of it!"

 

 

Padma does some great bird impressions. This morning she's watching me like a hawk. I think I had better finish my breakfast quickly and drive across the river to see an old friend with whom I have nothing in common except old age.

He's the sort of bloke who, if you gave him a book, would ask, "What do I want a book for? I've already got a book". What makes us identical is that we both got a bad case of OCD: we're old, cranky, and dangerous.

We both get quite cranky when we look around us and compare it to the world we grew up in. With so much natural stupidity around, who needs artifical intelligence? Having discussed it all and feeling disgusted, we usually end on the happy note that "We've both seen the best of it!"

That framed photo is of him when he was sixty years younger. At that age I was still pushing a slide rule while he was already felling trees to be turned into books. No wonder he doesn't want any more of them.

Just one more spell check before I post this and see my friend. I hate spelling errors. You mix up two letters and your whole post is urined.

 

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Reading changed my life!

 

  Bild Zeitung   dated Thursday, 30 Jan 1964
The advertisement in the bottom right-hand corner changed my life!

 

 

All my life I've been what they call a 'buveur d'encre' in French, or a 'kutu buku' in Indonesian, or a 'Leseratte' in German, or, in the good ol' Queen's - sorry, King's - English, a bookworm!

Reading is a drug of which I am a slave; deprive me of printed matter and I grow nervous, moody and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, I will make do with the label on a can of soup or a tin of paint or the telephone directory; I will even make do with a newspaper several years old.

Some five years ago, I read a newspaper that was fifty-seven years old, all thanks to the nice people - and two very nice people, Frau Katja Hinrichs and Herr Matthias Winkler - at the German   Bild Zeitung  .

I had asked them to find me an advertisement by the Australian embassy which had sought to attract young Germans to come to Australia.

Well, "deutsche Gründlichkeit" was alive and well because just two days later Frau Hinrichs had sent me a copy of the advertisement which fifty-seven years earlier I had cut out, filled with my name and address, and mailed to the "Australische Auskunfts- und Auswanderungs-Büro":

 

"Do you know Australia?
Information about Australia, a young and aspiring nation, and the opportunities awaiting you there, are available from the Australian Information and Immigration Agency
2 Hamburg 1, Mönckebergstrasse 11, Phone 33 49 82.
For more information complete this coupon (in block letters) and mail it to us."

 

All in "Blockbuchstaben" (block letters), of course! A year later I was in Australia; six years later I was an Australian. Reading changed my life!

 

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P.S. Read also "10 Pfennig BILD Zeitung"

 

What a week it has been!

 

a 5-day chart from Monday to Friday

 

Monday had looked promising: BHP's share price rose by $1.49 to $62.43. On Tuesday it had dropped by $1.15 to $61.28. On Wednesday it dropped by another 42 cents. And yesterday it dropped like a stone by as much as $2.86 to close at $58.00. AUTSCH!

Today came the relief rally: up by $2.03 to $60.03. Too little but not too late to give me some hope for next week. What a week it has been!

But despite the pressure hitting mining stocks, the market barometer, copper, continues to hold firm. Copper is still in the green this month. And that goes for other commodities as well: metal prices remain strong, yet the underlying stocks that generate revenue from them tumble to multi-year lows. It's a divergence of epic proportions!

In fact, only a few weeks ago, I read an article which posed the question, "Are the BHP and CBA share price headed for parity?" - click here - and continued, "[with] their bullish outlook on copper, the team at Regal Partners believe that not only is BHP likely to maintain a larger market cap than CBA, but that both stocks could be trading at a similar price within five years."

That last bit, "... within five years", made me pose an even bigger and even more personal question: Will I still be around to see it happen?

Of course, I could've extended the the length of this post without much extra work simply by putting the the word "the" in two times in a row every time. It would've extended the the length of this post quite a bit. Don't believe me? Read it again. And you're telling me I'm getting old!!!

 

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Flucht in die Wüste

 

 

Technische Inkompetenz und Furcht gegen Urheberrechte zu verstossen erlaubten es mir nicht die Originallänge von 51 Minuten aufzuladen. Es handelt sich hierbei um ein bisher nicht veröffentlichtes Filmprojekt aus dem Jahre 1998 der Dokumentarfilmerin Silvia Schippers die inzwischen verstorben ist. Ihre damalige Anschrift war Alemannenstr. 6, D-78259 Mühlhausen-Ehingen, Germany. Ob und wo der Film heute noch erhältlich ist weiss ich nicht.

Der Dokumentarfilm beschreibt die Geschichte zwei junger Männer, Henno Martin und Hermann Korn, frischgebackene Doktoren der Geologie, die im September 1935 an der Küste Südwest-Afrikas ankommen.

Sie haben Nazideutschland verlassen, beginnen geologische Forschungen im Naukluftgebirge und erkunden Wassenvorkommen für die Farmer. Der Zweite Weltkrieg holt sie ein. Aus Furcht vor der drohenden Internierung als 'feindliche Ausländer' fliehen sie in die Wüste, und kämpfen dort mehr als zwei Jahre um das nackte physische Überleben.

Hunger und Durst quälen sie. Ihre wechselnden Unterkünfte, provisorisch, primitiv, bilden den Ausgangspunkt für wechselndes Jagdglück auf der Suche nach Nahrung und Wasser. Sie leben fast wie Menschen der Urzeit, bewundern die karge Schönheit der Wüste, deren extreme Spannung von Tod und Leben sie zu neuen Einsichten über das Werden und Vergehen von Natur und Menschheit führt.

 

 

Das Buch, "Wenn es Krieg gibt, gehen wir in die Wüste", kann man auf der Internet beim www.archive.org kostenlos lesen - siehe here. Um die englische Übersetzung zu lesen, siehe here.

 

 

Glücklicherweise war Dokumentarfilmerin Silvia Schippers nicht die Einzige die das Leben dieser zwei Geologen mit einem Film am Leben erhalten wollte. In 1991 wurde es auch schon einmal verfilmt unter dem Namen des Buches in der englischen Übersetzung. Ich schaue mir den Film an wenn ich mich an meine Zeit in Südwest-Afrika erinnern will.

 

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Lunch at the bowling club

 

 

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape."

I took this quote from Alain de Botton's book "The Art of Travel", which I leaved through as I was having a glass of chardie followed by roast pork with apple sauce and another chardie at the bowling club in Moruya.

I took the book from Vinnies' op-shop, even though I already have it - along with almost every other book ever written by Alain de Botton - because it is a beautiful hardcopy edition to give to another old friend who is as frustrated as I am that his travelling days are long gone.

I also picked up "A Jane Austen Education - How six novels taught me about love, friendship and the things that really matter" by William Deresiewicz and "Shipwrecks - Australia's greatest maritime disasters".

 

 

And I discovered a still shrink-wrapped DVD, "Leviathan", which is said to be a Russian crime thriller, a black social comedy, and a thinly veiled swipe at Putin’s regime, all in one tidy package. Unlike the above full-length YouTube upload, the DVD I bought is supposed to have English subtitles, which is just as well as our family didn't stay long enough in Communist Germany's "Workers' Paradise" for me to learn any Russian.

My German GP, whom I visited shortly afterwards, does speak some Russian, since he also served in East Germany's "Nationale Volksarmee". He always welcomes and farewells me with a firm German handshake after a thorough examination with his usual German "Gründlichkeit".

He told me to come back next Wednesday when he wants to cut out a suspicious-looking sunspot from under my armpit. Luckily, it's under my LEFT armpit or else I wouldn't be much good for the next few weeks in today's Germany which is again drifting dangerously to the Far Right.

 

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