"It's too late for that!"

 

 

I had got up early to phone a supplier who had received the wrong order from the carpenter I had contracted to rebuild my verandah. Not being able to get through on the phone, I shaved and showered and was just about to drive into town when he returned my call, and I was lucky to cancel the order just in time. Being all dressed up with nowhere to go, I said to Padma, "Let's drive to Ulladulla for lunch at the bowling club".

Which is what we did but, of course, no visit to Ulladulla is complete without a visit to my favourite bookshops, of which there are three: the Uniting Church op-shop, Vinnies, and the Lions Preloved Bookshop.

 

 

I came away with "Knowing What We Know Now" by Simon Winchester, which had been released only a couple of years earlier but here it was already in a second-hand opshop, and in mint condition at that. Then there was "Seriously Curious - The Facts and Figures that Turn Your World Upside Down", "Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour of Europe", and Paulo Coelho's "The Pilgrimage" along the road to Santiago de Compostella in Spain (which is a walk I have always wanted to do but now never will).

 

Read it online at www.archive.org

 

Then I found "Understanding the Woman in Your Life" by Steve Vinay Gunther (written by a man???), and I asked Padma, "Should I buy this?"

"It's too late for that!" she said, and so I spent the two dollars I had saved on that transaction, on Peter Schweizer's "Secret Empires", which is about America's top politicians' scams to end all scams. It's too late for us to do anything about that, too, but it's still worth reading about it.

 

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That "On Golden Pond" Moment

 

 

I have this "On Golden Pond" moment every morning as I look out the window and see the river shining in the early-morning sunlight. I look at it and am reminded of all the people who have brightened my life and who are no longer here. I look at it and I am taken back to those many magical moments in my life.

And as the early-morning sunlight loses its golden sheen, I am also reminded of how fleeting life is and how much we should hold on to those precious moments before they are no longer here, before we are no longer here! Then it is time to feed the ducks on my own golden pond and give the possum in the possum penthouse his banana and then to brew myself my first lemongrass-and-ginger cup of tea of the day.

 

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I can count the number of my friends on the thumb of one hand

 

Sorry, Chasers, but Peter Roget - despite his 'Frenchie' surname - was a proper Englishman

 

If you suffer from monologophobia – the obsessive fear of using the same word twice – you reach for Roget's Thesaurus, published in 1852 by Dr Peter Roget who longed for order in his chaotic world and so, from the age of eight, began his quest to put everything in its rightful place, one word at a time.

Roget was not just a doctor. He was also a polymath whose work influenced the discovery of laughing gas as an anaesthetic, the creation of the London sewage system, the invention of the slide rule and the development of the cinema industry – as well as being a chess master and an expert on bees, Dante and the kaleidoscope. All of which showed up in the work that he christened a "thesaurus", borrowing the Greek word for "treasure house".

His Thesaurus was constructed as a crystal palace of abstraction, each of whose 1,000 lists pushes a reader, often antonymically, to the next, “certainty” leading to “uncertainty” leading to “reasoning” leading to “sophistry.” I've never made head nor tail of the system and always go straight to the index — added by Roget almost as an afterthought — to use it as a book of synonyms even though Roget thought there "really was no such thing", given the unique meaning of every word.

 

This is a homophone, not to be confused with a homonym and homograph

 

I've always thought that people who claim to have lots of friends probably couldn't spell the word 'acquantance' ... 'aquantence' ... 'acquaintenance' ... well, you know, 'friends'. Looking at their facebook pages, I was amazed at the number of friends some of my acquaintances have and promptly reached for Roget's Thesaurus to see if the words 'friend' and 'acquaintance' are synonymous. According to the good doctor, they are!

So go ahead, Hengky Tambayong - who is, incidentally, a real nice guy and Bali's best hotel manager! - , and enjoy your 2,354 friends! I shall keep counting the number of my friends on the thumb of one hand.

 

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It's not hoarding if it's books

 

"... and this room is filled with magic."

 

I no longer have a TBR pile; I have a TBR mountain range. Although my concept is quite simple: I expect to live long enough to still read them all. If that will turn me into a nonagenarian, so be it!

If you wonder what "TBR" stands for, you must feel the same way I did when recently I stood in front of an automated money-dispenser which had been covered with the sign "This ATM is out of service ATM (at the moment)". Who said bankers have no sense of humour? We used to crack lots of jokes when I was with the ANZ Bank more than sixty years ago. The one that sticks in my mind is "Once you withdraw you lose all your interest". I understood the word 'innuendo' before I understood that one.

But back to my TBR mountain range: hoarders are known to hang on to some seemingly insignificant detritus — an old cup, a yellowed old newspaper (I had a neighbour in Canberra who kept every copy of the CANBERRA TIMES under his house) - which they couldn’t possibly throw away. I am not that kind of hoarder. What I hold on to are books.

 

 

I got my get-out-of-jail-free card when I discovered the Japanese word "tsundoku". Instead of castigating myself over every new book I buy, I tell myself that I'm practicing tsundoku. "That’s not a pile of unread books; that's a tsundoku", I tell my wife, the magic word transforming the pile into something unshackled from negative associations, into what I see when I look at it, a tower of potential reading experiences.

 

 

I leave you with Carl Sagan's now almost famous "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

If that will not turn you into a tsundoku master, I don't know what will.

 

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Bougainville Blue

 

 

In the early 2000s, Brian Darcey wrote a book, "Bougainville Blue", which is about Bougainville and named after its spectacularly beautiful butterfly but also about a ‘blue’ which is Australian slang for a fight. It’s about the beauty of Bougainville and its flora and fauna. And it's about the destruction of Bougainville.

Brian and his family lived in Papua New Guinea for twenty-five years, from 1955 to 1980. He was the original Rabaul agent for CRA Exploration when he operated B.F.DARCEY & COMPANY PTY LTD at Rabaul until 1965, then at Toniva on Bougainville Island. They were cocoa and trochus shell exporters, but also had a store at Toniva selling artifacts, jewellery, clothing etc.

"Bougainville Blue" is a work of fiction but it also tells the reader about the Panguna Mine which was closed by a ragtag militia bent on reclaiming their land. Brian saw the Bougainville Revolutionary Army come into being. He observed the rise and fall of Australian rule in Bougainville. He watched the ‘blue’ take place. Listen to an interview Brian gave in 2008: click here or here.

"Bougainville Blue" is still available by mail order from Diane Andrews, email dianepithie@gmail.com, for $28, including postage.

 

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P.S. Sadly, Brian passed away on 14 May 2018 in Cairns, three months short of his 90th birthday. For more of his writing, click on Seventy years ago in New Guinea and Farewell to New Guinea.