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The latest addition to my collection of Australian movies is Sunstruck, starring England's tallest dwarf, Harry Secombe, and the Australian actor John Meillon. Harry plays the Welsh schoolteacher and choirmaster Stanley Evans who emigrates to Australia to 'teach in the sun' -- but finds reality falls somewhat short of the blissful image on the recruiting poster.
Anticipating a Bondi Beach lifestyle, Stanley arrives in Kookaburra Springs to find a town with two buildings: an old pub and a ramshackle schoolhouse. Despite the fact that the kids do everything in their power to get rid of him – no schoolmaster means no school! – Stanley stays, and eventually finds a way to win them over.
Our weekly "Kaffeeklatsch" at the Se7en Café. From left to right: Ernie Bracher and his wife Liselotte, Robyn Weber, myself, and Frank Weber. Since we are all in our eighties, Padma didn't want to spoil our fun and volunteered to take the photo.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have remarked that he didn't mind what he ate, as long as it was always the same. Padma must've picked up on this, which is why I don't mind driving into the Bay at least once and often twice a week for lunch at the club or, as we did today, at the recently renovated Bayview Hotel.
The Bayview's renovated dining room. How could I not feel at home here?
On the drive into town I heard on the car radio the hyphenated word 'petrol-rationing' mentioned in a hushed voice for the first time. Thank you, Mr Trump! Now that petrol and sport are involved, Aussies may take the Iran war seriously and start to wonder if Napoleon and Hitler didn't have a better plan for invading Russia than you have had for attacking Iran, although all indications are that you will also suffer their fate.
As I have written many times before, no trip into town is complete without a visit to my favourite op-shop where I picked up "The Secret Lives of Hoarders - True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter" and a beautiful copy of Gavin Maxwell's classic "The Rocks Remain".
My latest self-help book
I almost also picked up "The Perfect Wife" but since it turned out not to be an instruction manual, I passed it up for a beautifully bound HERON BOOKS edition of H.G. Wells' "Kipps - The Story of a Simple Soul".
Not an instruction manual
Satisfied with my op-shopping and having had our lunch at the hotel, we went to the Se7en Café in the shopping mall to discuss in German and, for the benefit of Robyn, the only Australian among us, also in English, our latest medical misadventures over cups of coffee and hot chocolate.
It's been an enjoyable day in town and we are home again, only to find that Trump must've uttered a few more stupidities or the Iranians bombed a few more oil tankers in the Strait of Homuz because the sharemarket is again a sea of red and BHP again dropped by 98 cents.
Watch the movie in a separate window by clicking on Watch on YouTube
When people talk about their fondness for books, I wonder if they’re really talking about their fondness for reading. It’s rather like confusing the plate for the food. I mean, I like a beautifully printed and bound book as much as anybody else but I don’t need a houseful of them, any more than I need a houseful of beautiful dinner plates. About twelve would do fine; that, and a good recipe book."
Just as Somerset Maugham kept "A Writer's Notebook", I jotted down the above quote in my notebook some time ago but forgot to add its source. It may have been Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future" - in fact, I'm pretty sure it was - but don't quote me on it. I was reminded of it as I leaved through a beautifully bound copy of "The Quiet American" at the Vinnies op-shop and wondered if I should buy it. I already own all of Graham Greene's book, but unlike Douglas Adams — and stretching his metaphor almost to breaking-point — I can’t help feeling some food tastes better when eaten off a beautiful plate.
A woman, already with an armful of books, looked at the spine of my book and asked me if I could recommend a book by Graham Greene. "Why don't you try 'The End of the Affair'?" I suggested. "What, just the end? Not the whole thing?" she replied. On second thoughts, I suggested to her a recently formed book club in the Bay where she didn't have to read at all. As their blurb suggests, "The idea is to have fun and make new friends. We choose books that are easy to read, and that have been made into movies so you don't even have to read if you don't want to".
"The End of the Affair" has been made into a movie twice, but while I have read the book from cover to cover, I have yet to watch the movie to the end. Maybe I will now, if only to see if this quote appears in it:
"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity." [page 46]
And, yes, I did buy that beautifully bound copy of "The Quiet American".
Sixty years after I had drunk my first cup of "smooth and satisfying" International Roast at Barton House, and almost after I had made myself the sixty-sixth cup of coffee from this 100g-tin which promises that it "Makes up to 66 cups", I not only keep scratching the bottom of this tin but also my head as I wonder what to make of the ramblings of our "Leader of the Free World".
"We're very far ahead of schedule", he says, and that the war was "very complete, pretty much", with "nothing left in a military sense", while his Defense Department announces, "This is just the beginning". How short our memories are. Someone should remind the Americans that it took 20 years and $3.5 trillion to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
The "free world" is lead by an orange man-child, who is one half extreme emotional damage and the other half rambling idiot with no ideas of what he is saying from one sentence to the next.
Trump never made any sense, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that he hasn't managed to coherently state his war objectives; indeed, we're left to wonder if he could locate Tehran on a map. "We could call it a tremendous sucess right now ... or we could go further. And we're going further", he says, while the Iranian government announces that they have a huge stockpile of supreme leaders left to inflict more damage. In the meantime, there has been a sudden rush on football uniforms as women in the Middle East are trying to seek refuge in Australia.
I'm again scratching the bottom of the tin because this current state of the world needs more than just one cup of "smooth and satisfying" International Roast, which keeps reminding me of what a much better world looked like when I had my first cup of International Roast more than sixty years ago. Things were then still "smooth and satisfying".
In fact, things also seemed "smooth and satisfying" in what was then still Persia when the Shah-in-Shah was the ruler of the country. Not that I knew much of the country other than what I could read in what was then the German equivalent of "The Women's Weekly" about Soraya and, subsequently, about Farah Diba, the second wife he married to maintain the dynasty. I remember my mother reading a Bertelsmann book simply titled, "Soraya". It was kept in a glass cabinet under lock and key for no discernible reason, but here it is again, in a movie remake from 2003.
I learned a bit more about Persia when I went there in January 1976 as accountant for the Williams pipeline company. I had just come out of tropical Burma and Tehran was freezing cold and I didn't last very long, but neither did the Shah who went into exile in 1979 and died in 1980.
I've met a few Mr Simpkins in my time but I never aspired to follow in their footsteps.
Instead, I used the bit of parchment that suggested that I had qualified as an accountant as my passport to travel the world. Some 7,300 days nett and fifteen countries later, I finally settled down.
I did squash a few eclairs but I don't have 2.4 children nor do I keep a budgie although it's probably fair to say that I'm a total social failure.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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