2,883 days to go!

 

At age 0, they give you 79.3 years, but when you get to age 81, they give you another 7.9 years. Noticed something? The longer you live, the longer you live! And studies have shown that those who have more birthdays also live longer! I'll drink to that in four days' time.

 

In a few days I'll turn 81. It feels like a transposition error, except when I look in the mirror and see more hair growing out of my nose and ears than on my head. Think of the money I save on haircuts!

Having swapped the life of an actuary for the life of an accountant because I couldn't handle the excitement that went with the former, I am a strong believer in statistics, and they tell me that I have another two thousand eight hundred and eighty-three days to go! Actually, it's 7.9 x 365 days = 2,883.5 days, but being the lifelong pessimist that I am, I rounded it down to 2,833 days. (Of course, I could have a sex change to gain those extra 1.5 years but who wants to be that greedy?)

I mean, although it wasn't always cricket, I have had some pretty good innings. Yes, there was some underarm bowling and ball tampering going on and I got caught out a few times but, although I dropped quite a few, I also had some brilliant catches, and it's catches that win matches.

Still, it's a bit of an untidy number, isn't it? Maybe I cut back on coffee and Coke and marshmellows and retsina to round it out to an even 3000.

 

 

Medieval philosophers kept a human skull on their desk as a memento mori to remind them that they too would one day die. I think that if we have an awareness of our own mortality it can help us to focus on what really matters. When we begin each day knowing that it is a unique opportunity, that this day has never happened before and will never happen again, then we will be more deliberate in how we spend it.

Skulls are a bit hard to come by and even harder to carry around with us. Why not print out a life expectancy table to carry in your wallet?

Memento mori ! Remember you must die!

 

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How I long for those innocent 60s!

 

 

 

I absolutely enjoyed watching "The Efficiency Expert", set in the Australia of the 1960s, the one I fell in love with when I arrived here in 1965. It all came back in a sudden rush: the way people dressed and spoke back then; the way people worked (or not!); and all those walnut-coloured furnishings that surrounded them.

But what really got my attention was the noticeboard on the wall that had diagonally-placed straps across to hold in place whatever was on it.

 

Front of BARTON HOUSE facing Brisbane Avenue in Canberra

 

One such now old-fashioned noticeboard was in the entrance hall of Barton House (I nearly wrote 'foyer' but it wasn't that kind of place). The manager would place all incoming letters on that board, roughly in alphabetical order, with the A's in the top left-hand corner and the Z's at the bottom right, and each evening on coming "home" from work, we would check the noticeboard for mail before heading to our rooms.

 

Since it is too late to sack me now, I might as well admit that I used the bank's stationery for my personal correspondence. I had used this particular aerogramme to impress my first-ever girlfriend I had left behind in Germany. She returned it to me, together with a whole box full of other letters I had written to her, before her untimely death in 2022. You know you're old when your first-ever girlfriend dies before you. "That's just half of them; if you want the rest, tell me and I courier them as well", she had written - in German, of course. I never had a chance to reply.

 

For some of us, including 'yours truly', "mail" was often nothing more than a plain-looking envelope containing a note from the manager that we had (once again!) fallen behind paying our boarding-house fees.

I never forget the day a fat envelope was waiting for me which, like an hour-glass, leaked a slow trickle of sand from a damaged corner. I had just returned to Australia after six months in the Namib Desert in South-West Africa, and my former colleagues had sent me a "souvenir" from "Sandhausen"; "in case you're missing all that sand", they'd written.

That's how it was in those days: there were no postal secrets and yet an unspoken "untouchability" of one's mail, even if it stayed on the board for days and weeks on end, even months if the recipient was on holiday. I knew of boarders who had cash money sent to them through the mail!

It's unthinkable in today's Australia, just as unthinkable as those same boarding-houses which have all disappeared. As for the slowly-leaking envelope, it would today be confiscated by Customs on suspicion of containing a prohibited substance. How I long for those innocent 60s!

 

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I guess I got my just deserts

 

 

Thursday wouldn't be Thursday without a drive to Moruya and lunch at the Moruya Bowling Club. The menu was still the same, but the prices had gone up by one dollar. Has the cost-of-living crisis finally come as far as the Far South Coast?

Anyway, I ignored it when I heard that they also offered mulligatawny soup. I absolutely love mulligatawny soup! It used to be on every supermarket shelf until some twenty years ago, when it mysteriously disappeared. And there it was again, for the first time in two decades, as hot and spicy and delicious as ever. What an absolute treat!

 

 

I went back for another treat, a lime cheesecake with ice cream, but I almost screamed when I looked at the cash register display. I told the girl behind it that I knew all about deserts, as I had lived in the Namib Desert and the Saudi Arabian desert, but I had never eaten one before.

 

 

I wasn't sure if she had got the message, but realising that she had given me the smallest of the slices on display, I guess I got my just deserts.

 

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Ninety years old and still going strong!

 

My friend in Cooktown, Hubert Hofer, who is an old acquaintance from my days on Thursday Island, sent me the link to this video. He gets a mention at 54:42

 

When I want to find friends' birthdays, I go to naa.gov.au, click 'RecordSearch' and 'Passenger arrivals', and type in their names to find their airport arrival cards, provided they'd travelled overseas (they all have) and they are old enough to have done so before 1972 (they all are).

I must've forgotten about Ben Cropp, Australia's famous documentary filmmaker, now living in Port Douglas, because a friend in Cooktown just sent me the link to the above YouTube clip in celebration of his 90th birthday. A quick check with naa.gov.au where I found this airport arrival card from 1969, and, yes, Ben had turned 90 on the 19th of January!

 

 

I have all the DVDs of his underwater exploits, but you may not. Luckily, Ben has very generously shared many of them on YouTube, and you can watch them here. Wish him "Happy Birthday, Ben!" in the Comments.

 

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The trap of needing a purpose

 

 

When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal."

The main protagonist of Hermann Hesse’s novel "Siddhartha", the wise man, shared these thoughts with a friend. They may sound more like a feeble excuse of a weak-willed loser rather than a pearl of wisdom.

However, it may be worth to pause and think about it. Why? Because we need to keep our mind as free and open as we possibly can. Otherwise, how will we be able to notice when something wonderfully precious enters our life and offers us an opportunity to learn from it?

I only came to Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha" in my retirement. I wish I had read it much earlier and learned from it. Still, it's not too late.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

While I am fixated on the written word and prefer to read Hermann Hesse's book, you may prefer to watch the Indo-American movie.

 

Or click here

 

Keep an open mind. You might learn something wonderfully precious.

 

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