Do they want to book a property inspection?

 

 

The Labor government's proposed tax changes have thrown the housing market into a state of limbo and there have been even fewer inquiries to my FOR SALE advertisement than before.

Those who do respond mustn't have read much beyond the "MAKE AN OFFER!" headline because as soon as I refer them to the postscript paragraph "When we wrote, 'MAKE AN OFFER!', we meant a reasonable offer, always bearing in mind that the property's land value alone is already close to three million dollars", I hear no more from them.

Owners who are desperate to sell still find a buyer, but they are being picked off by bargain hunters who pay well below the asking price. A friend's lifetime work - click here - recently sold for $2,625,000, well below its initial selling price of $3,500,000, and a far-away neighbour was able to downsize from his waterfront house - click here - but only after having reduced his price from its original $1,300,000 to $880,000.

 

 

Having borrowed the land value comparison from me didn't help much either, but the rest of the prose is enticing enough to make me want to borrow some of it for my advertisement, but only after I have dealt with the people who just anchored their hired houseboat off "Riverbend".

 

 

They keep looking and shouting and waving at "Riverbend". Do they want to book a property inspection? Should I put out the WELCOME mat?

 

 

I've just checked the Clyde River Houseboats' website and see that their off-season 3-day houseboat hire costs them $3,190. Not quite enough for a deposit on "Riverbend" but it means they have a bit of spare cash. Do they have enough to add three noughts to make it $3,190,000 ?

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

He just about sums it up!

 

For more of Jonathan Pie, click here

 

Waking up to the headline "Iran closes Strait of Hormuz again, but US says traffic still flowing" makes me groan, "Here we go again!" Is there no end to this Trump folly?

Yes, I am lost for word, but a neighbour, right on cue, sent me this YouTube clip of a chap who obviously isn't. He just about sums it up!

 

 

They should've listened to his mother!!!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Another magic morning

 

 

Another magic morning is coming up at "Riverbend". Just ten minutes earlier, the river had been hidden under a blanket of early-morning mist but, like Cat Stevens lyricised oh so many years ago, "morning has broken" and "mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning".

Mine is also the porridge, full of raisins and honey, which together with a cup of hot lemon-and-ginger tea should keep me going until lunchtime on the verandah rolls around. It's only a few more days to the end of the tax year. Where have the last six months gone? Did you ever hear yourself say when you were twenty, "Gosh. It only seems like yesterday that I was ten"? Me neither! But these days it only seems like yesterday when I was in my seventies, in my sixties, even in my fifties, not to mention forties! I think it was sometime in my late forties when time strapped a jet pack to its back, lit the afterburners, and if you blinked you missed a whole month.

 

 

A bunch of youngsters to whom life is still eternity, last night parked their hired houseboat across from "Riverbend". I was expecting a lot of noise but whatever they were drinking did the job because they were out like a light by ten o'clock. And they still are as I type this with one hand on the keyboard and the other holding a spoonful of porridge.

I hope it'll stay quiet because I think I spend the rest of the day just lying on my back, chewing on a bit of grass, and thinking of nothing but what my final words might be. "Another magic morning" should do it.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Reality always intervened

 

 

I have never had the luxury of a mid-life crisis; reality always intervened. It seems to affect men in different ways: a former neighbour of mine in Canberra bought himself a red sports car and a toupée while a certain Austrian wrote "Mein Kampf" and invaded Poland.

Another Austrian left Vienna in 1995 at the age of 39 and moved to the Kingdom of Tonga. I met him there on the tiny island of Lifuka in 2006, and I stayed in contact with him until he had moved to the even tinier island of Uiha and gone completely "native". Since then it's been silence!

 

The photo shows his 'fale Tonga' native abode on remote Uiha Island. It has one solar panel to run one single lightbulb, his CD-player and a blender for the occasional banana-shake, but no fridge and no phone. "What else do I need?", he muses.

 

As he wrote in his last email to me (loosely translated by me):

"My 6 x 3.8m 'fale Tonga' is not waterproof but water-resistant and made entirely with local material using traditional methods: the floor is beach sand, the framework coconut palmtree trunks, walls and roof coconut palmtree fronds. The only concession to modernity is the use of 100 iron nails. The 'furniture' consists of a bed, a cupboard and two small tables, all made from old wooden boxes, and a small gas stove. Under the bed is a wooden box which contains my 'power station': a 12V-battery and a 500W inverter which feeds my 10W-12V Halogen light. Outside, on the northside, is the all-important solar panel. Next to it is a small space to wash and dry my laundry and a few steps along my small workshop which contains tools and fishing gear. To the left is the toilet and outdoor shower. On the westside of the house, next to the entrance door, is my 'kitchen' as I normally cook outside (the gas stove is for rainy days or when it is too windy or to bake bread with)."

 

 

However, even he had to admit that "natürlich sehe ich auch Nachteile in einem 'natürlichen Haus' zu wohnen aber auch damit kann man leben." (of course, there are disadvantages to living in a 'strawhut' but I can put up with them).

Is it really such a disadvantage that he no longer has to fumble for light switches or reach out for a tap, that cold drinks are no longer available, that he can no longer watch the news on television, and is no longer surrounded by all sorts of modern-day gadgets?

 

 

Perhaps, like Robinson Crusoe, he now considers what he has gained: "It was now that I began sensibly to feel how much more happy the life I now led was, with all its miserable circumstances, than the wicked, cursed abominable one that I led all the past part of my days ...

There, but for good wine, Camembert, Pavarotti, private health insurance, stacks of books, and a few million other things, go I.

 

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My Winter of Discontent

 

 

Forget about Shakespeare; forget about Steinbeck; I have my very own winter of discontent. And I have it every year around this time when I look out the window and ask myself, "What am I doing here?"

I still remember my late friend Noel Butler who, after a lifetime spent in New Guinea, struggled 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, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea".

Where is my spiritual home after half a lifetime in more than a dozen different countries? "Über den Himmel Wolken ziehen, über die Felder geht der Wind, ... Irgendwo über den Bergen muss meine ferne Heimat sein." Hermann Hesse

 

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