The Kingdom

 

I remember sitting by the poolside in some five-star hotel in Bahrain in early 1982 and reading this book while I was waiting for my Saudi Arabian entry visa. Several drinks and several laps in the pool and a few hundred pages into the book later I came to the part where it said that it was banned in the Kingdom.

Left behind in the hotel's wastepaper basket in Bahrain in 1982, many years later in Australia I bought another copy of this classic about a country full of mystery and contradictions. Robert Lacey wrote his book in 1981, just months before I arrived there, which makes it a perfect aide-memoire of my own life in the world's largest sand-box.

 

 

The Kingdom not only banned this and many other books but several hundreds, perhaps thousands, of consumer goods such as Ford cars, Xerox machines, Alka Seltzer, and - much to an Aussie friend's dismay who had a lifelong addiction to it and spent many years in Saudi - Coca-Cola, because those companies had investments in Israel (before leaving Jeddah on a business trip, I once suggested to book my return trip via Tel Aviv which would've automatically cancelled my Saudi visa).

 

Arab maps of the Middle East do not show Israel

 

During my years in Jeddah plans were discussed to tow kilometre-long icebergs, covered with insulating blankets, from the South Pole to the Red Sea as a source of fresh water, and yet video-taped imports of the Muppet Show were confiscated on the grounds that its heroine is a pig.

And while corporal punishment is banned in schools, public beheadings are carried out regularly which neatly brings me to the movie "Death of a Princess" which I described here. There's a rumour that Princess Misha'il had a stand-in - or should that be a 'kneel-in'? - and that she's slowly growing old in a windowless room of the royal palace in Riyadh like some latter-day female version of the "Man in the Iron Mask".

Will we ever find out? "Insha Allah." If God wills so.

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The best selfie stick is at the end of your arm

 

Well, it turned into a beautifully sunny day after all. The hills and the river are alive with the sound of outboard motors and I've relocated my laptop and myself onto the sunny verandah. Adieu, Tristesse!

This is the end of the first week when the only thing that's been on the television is dust. Not even the news which, according to Hegel, seems to have replaced religion as a modern society's source of guidance and authority to become its "prime creator of political and social reality".

There's too much news already and we've become addicted – news junkies - to this relentless bombardment with stories designed to make us fearful or angry. We seem to have lost our ability to compare an apparently traumatic event in the present with the experiences of humanity across the whole of its history. With the right perspective in mind, we soon realise that hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.

The economic indices may look grim but we have weathered similar situations many times over the last century. Floods may look dramatic but in the end they will affect only a proportion of the population and recede soon enough. Cancers and heart attacks have multiple causes that we may never understand completely, but eternal life was never on the agenda. And even after the eternal city of Rome fell, some 600 years later everything was back to normal again.

"Riverbend" brings some relief from the news-fuelled impression that the world consists only of wars, riots, economic catastrophes, and rogue missiles fired off by some silly kid with an even sillier haircut.

Living here alongside the mighty Clyde, the views are expansive (and expensive for those buying into it ☺) and the only sounds are those of revving outboard motors as they pass the 8-knot speed limit sign and speed off downriver towards the sea.

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Bonjour, Tristesse!

 

A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism.

I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else." [read more]

These opening lines from Francoise Sagan's "Bonjour tristesse" are an eloquent description of what afflicts me at the onset of yet another autumn and winter. After half a lifetime spent in tropical climes, I find myself ill equipped to handle long, dark nights and frosty mornings.

Not that we're quite there yet but already the morning sun takes longer to reach the house, and when it does it isn't quite warm enough to thaw out the old bones and lift the sagging spirit.

As I slowly shuffle, wellies on my feet and cup of tea in my hand, through the brown and golden leaves fallen from the now almost barren liquid amber trees, "I repeat over and over again softly in the darkness. Something rise in me that I call to by name, with closed eyes. Bonjour, tristesse!"

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Make Australia grate again

 

This grocery-shopping is quite a new experience for me. Isn't it amazing how they hide all the everyday items like milk and bread and cheese right at the back of the store so you have to run the gauntlet of all those 'buy-me' and 'today's special' stickers along miles and miles of shelving?

Anyway, I got away with just the things I wanted to buy and not the ones they wanted me to buy, including cheese for little Rover. He likes his cheese grated and I was absolutely astonished at the difference in price between a block of cheese and a bag of grated cheese of the same weight and brand.

I don't think I ever buy grated cheese again. From now on I grate my own. I might even start my own movement:

MAKE AUSTRALIA GRATE AGAIN

 

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

The Joy of Reading

 

Having for the last six nights gone to bed with my trusty can-opener without which I would've starved to death, I've finally gone into town to get myself a few Chinese take-aways and TV dinners - or rather ABC Classic FM radio dinners because during Padma's absence this house is a TV-free zone.

"Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man" was St. Francis Xavier's nostrum. Well, there was no television for the first seven years of my life in Germany, and so I never missed it for the rest of my life either. There was no television in South-West Africa or New Guinea or the Solomons, nor in Burma or on Thursday Island or in Samoa, and what little I saw of it in Iran, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia or Greece was in languages I didn't understand.

I cultivated the habit of reading instead, or perhaps it cultivated me because a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies whereas the man who never reads lives only one. Or, as my favourite authour Somerset W. Maugham wrote, "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. "

Instead of buying a TV guide, why not buy this passionate guide to 189 of the world's best books? Here's a short teaser to whet your appetite:

 

 

It starts off with "Reading is my favorite thing to do. When I was ten and supposed to go to sleep at a certain time, I read under the covers with a flashlight until my father told me I would ruin my eyes. I didn’t stop; I was willing to risk my sight to enjoy the pleasures of reading. In fact he was wrong; after seventy years I can still read, even without glasses if there’s enough light." How I can relate to this! ☺

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This is a commercial break

This is Batemans Bay, Canberra's seaside suburb

It's just 8km - or a ten-minute drive - down the highway from Nelligen

Close enough for a bit of shopping and to see the city (de-)lights ...

... and far enough to avoid the crowds when the holiday crush is on.

 

 

Can we stop consuming our future?

 

He makes a lot of sense, the sort of sense totally missing from our political leaders. Sorry, did I say 'leaders'? I meant 'opportunists' who're consuming our future by bestowing on themselves generous lifetime benefits during their short and ineffective reign.

I could listen to Satyajit Das all day. You can, too, by going to YouTube. Not that it will make much difference as we're already well down the path of self-destruction but at our age it can be comforting to know what kind of future we'll miss out on.

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

P.S. Unfortunately, you won't be able to leave a 'Reaction' at the bottom of this blog as there's no box for 'frightening'.

 

Colonel Klink must've had a hand in this!

 

Batemans Bay is growing but this looks, at least from the air, more like a copy of Colonel Klink's Stalag 13. It's an old industrial side opposite a caravan park onto which they somehow managed to squeeze thirty-three two- and three-bedroom units starting at $350,000 a piece.

It seems that "Wharf on Clyde" is the ugly rectangular, straight-up-and-down box shape of things to come. And they call it progress!

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

So, like, when did all this start?

 

The habit of ending statements with a stress that makes them sound a bit like questions is one that winds many people up - including me. So many people now believe that the speech pattern originated in Australia that they've dubbed it the Australian Question Intonation.

English is a notoriously woolly language, full of ways to say one thing and mean another, but why add to the confusion by ending a sentence with an interrogative tone so that it sounds like a question even when it's just a statement? Like that, in fact.

"So what did I do today? Well, I went canoeing on the river? Which was, like, really really fun? And then I had a cold beer on the jetty?"

Did you notice the 'like' I slipped in as well? Some people can't speak a full sentence without it, which is another pet hate of mine. And the list is growing because I've just noticed this latest habit of starting almost every sentence with the word 'so', the kind of 'so' which is so meaningless that you'd be inclined to separate it from the rest of the sentence by a comma - if you still believe in punctuation, that is!

I know it's a living language but it shouldn't be killed off prematurely. I don't think that needs a question mark, do you?

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In praise of the quiet life at "Riverbend"

 

A quiet life sounds like an option that only the defeated would ever be inclined to praise. Our age is overwhelmingly alive to the benefits of active, dynamic, ‘noisy’ ways of living.

If someone offered us a bigger salary for a job elsewhere, we’d move. If someone showed us a route to fame, we’d take it. If someone invited us to a party, we’d go. These seem like pure, unambiguous gains. Lauding a quiet life has some of the eccentricity of praising rain.

It’s hard for most of us to contemplate any potential in the idea because the defenders of quiet lives have tended to come from the most implausible sections of the community: slackers, hippies, the work-shy, the fired…; people who seem like they have never had a choice about how to arrange their affairs. A quiet life seems like something imposed upon them by their own ineptitude. It is a pitiable consolation prize. Read more at The School of Life.

At "Riverbend", the quiet life is no pitiable consolation prize. It is the very raison d'être for living here but, please, don't tell anybody. Keep quiet about it!

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ANZAC Day 2017

 

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war."

With this epigraph begins "All Quiet on the Western Front" ("Im Westen nichts Neues"), the most powerful anti-war book ever written. Its author, Erich Maria Remarque, left Germany after the government, on the initiative of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, banned and publicly burned all his books. Read more here.

Both the book and the film are enduring testaments to the sheer idiocy of a war between three cousins - Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of England, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were all cousins with each other: Wilhelm and George were first cousins, George and Nicholas were also first cousins, and Wilhelm and Nicholas were third cousins - that meaninglessly pitted young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another.

Lest we forget, read Margaret MacMillan's essay "The Rhyme of History - Lessons of the Great War" which compares the world today with the one that was shattered in 1914.

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

I've been to Bali too, but not for a while

 

I would've been listening to Radio National's BooksPlus last night when Padma touched down in Bali where she was met at Ngurah Rai International Airport by HARRIS Tuban's smiling staff in their bright orange uniforms which make them stick out in the airport melee like - well, like smiling oranges ☺

 

Close to the main shopping areas and nightlife spots, HARRIS Tuban is just a short walk from Kuta beach and entertainment spots and restaurants and yet is situated in an incredibly quiet location. It offers a free shuttle service to the airport which is only 2 minutes away.

 

After or before a long flight, HARRIS Tuban - it's walking distance from the airport but why walk when their smiling staff in their bright orange uniforms will drive you in their bright orange van? - is the perfect place to start or end a visit to Bali. We've been staying there for years.

 

 

Padma phoned this morning after she'd had her long longed-for spicy Indonesian breakfast and bought herself an Indonesian SIM card. She's getting ready for her flight to Surabaya which is less than an hour and, because Surabaya is one hour behind Bali, will get her there before she's even left Bali. Must be time again that I've been to Bali too!

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

The neighbours are back!

 

Last January's Australia Day fell on a Thursday which meant employees were supposed to work on the following Friday. Boohoo! Next week's ANZAC Day falls on a Tuesday and employees are supposed to show up for work on the preceding Monday which is tomorrow. More boohoo!

Judging by the traffic on the river I suspect that a lot of people are scoring themselves a four-day weekend by "chucking a sickie", one of Australia's proudest pastimes according to statistics which show that on any given weekday, approximately 300,000 Aussies are taking a sickie.

Excuses range from "I couldn't come in because my cat was throwing up" or "My hamster died" to "The dog ate my shoes" and "The lady down the road had just hung her sheets out and I didn't want to drive past and get dust on them".

 

 

The skipper of MV Tenacity needs no such excuse. He sold his Photofast Camera House in the Bay well before digital photography killed it off, and since then regularly anchors his floating gin palace off Riverbend. Maybe my internet connection is faster than anybody else's. ☺

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Mine is on the left

I take the bigger can because I'm bigger than him ☺

 

Little Rover and I will do a lot of male-bonding over the next few weeks while Padma is away in Surabaya. I've already laid out all that's needed: one spoon, one fork, one knife, one cup, plus two plates - one for Rover and one for me - to say nothing of the ever-handy can-opener.

We had to get up well before 4 o'clock to catch the 5.45 a.m. bus from Batemans Bay to Sydney airport. I had bought a new alarm clock to make absolutely sure that I wouldn't oversleep. Its ticktock was louder than the alarm itself so when 4 o'clock came around, I was still awake.

I'm back at "Riverbend" now and already pulled up the drawbridge and lowered the portcullis - just kidding; I only fixed razor-wire to the top of the gate! ☺ - because I want to enjoy my newfound 'alone-ness'.

I also pulled the battery from that noisy alarm clock because for the next few weeks I'll sleep when I want to sleep, get up when I want to get up, eat when I want to eat, drink when I want to drink ... (I spare you the rest of my bodily functions).

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

There was a time when I was so rich, I lived here!

 

According to the sales blurb, "in a boutique block of only four apartments, just minutes to Blues Point Road's popular mix of cafes and restaurants and within walking distance to the North Sydney CBD, this irreplaceable penthouse is arguably one of the finest apartments on the lower north shore".

It was last sold - not all four, mind you, but just the one! - in October 2013 for the trifling sum of $7,050,000. To live there today would be well out of my financial reach but it wasn't back in 1972 when I lived in this exact same spot at 6 Henry Lawson Avenue, Mcmahons Point.

 

 

Back in 1972 it was a slightly down-at-heel gracious old mansion with sweeping views across the harbour from its rambling garden outside and a sweeping staircase leading up to a dozen or more rooms on the first floor inside. One of those rooms, within view and earshot of Luna Park across Lavender Bay, was mine because then it was one of many boarding-houses one could find all over Sydney and all over Australia.

There is nowadays so much talk about homelessness but no mention of why this is so: the demise of boarding-houses! They fulfilled then - and would do so again today - the housing needs of those still too young or already too old to be able to afford or even need anything more.

 

Walking past what is now # 6 Henry Lawson Avenue and was then the entrance to the boarding-house. A perfect start to another day at work in the city.

 

And they did so at an affordable price with the added benefit of social interaction with a whole group of different people I would never have met otherwise. Boarding-house life made me what I am today, right down to my predilection for chicken Maryland on a Sunday night! ☺

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I'll never eat pork again!

 

I picked the wrong day to be in town as it was "Pension Day" and every single mother and every unemployable filled the local shopping mall. I thought of taking up Michel's misspelled offer of "every beveridge only $5" but couldn't find a vacant table among their not-so-everidge-looking spikey-and-purple-haired, tattooed, and lip- and ear- and eyebrow-studded clientele.

 

 

Just as well because at the other end of the mall the feeding of the baby farm animals had begun. Little Babe was the star performer and made me swear off ever eating pork again!

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

P.S. This blog elicited a response from a former ANZ Bank colleague of oh-so-long-ago. It shows her serving pigs rather than people some time before she joined the banking service. She is the one with the curly hair, not the curly tail! Just as I remembered you, Colleen, and the white collar is almost like the one you wore with your bank uniform. ☺

Colleen is half-hidden behind Porky and Bess ☺

 

A true retreat!

 

In Russian literature there is this character Ilya Ilyich Oblomov whose one distinguishing characteristic is his slothful attitude towards life which he raises to an art form by conducting his little daily business from his bed. In fact, in the first 50 pages of the novel he manages only to move from his bed to a chair.

He must've lived in a place like "Riverbend" because there are many days when I move no farther from my bed than the verandah over-looking the river or the "clubhouse" by the pond. Why, even the dog seems to have gone into a Zen-like state! ☺

The original sales blurb called "Riverbend"

A TRUE RETREAT!

I'm finally catching on to what they meant by it because it is truly a retreat from the world.

 

 

And today is no exception: the peaceful river, the warming sun, and a glass of slightly chilled wine make it another perfect day.

You have to live somewhere; it might as well be Paradise!

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

The vulgar boatmen

 

This being the long Easter weekend, there are quite a few on the river. And with the house only metres from the river and me sitting on the verandah in the sun and lost in a state of quiet reverie, they're sometimes hard to ignore.

Just now a foul-mouthed foursome in a tinny with tinnies in their hands drifted past. Seeing the  FOR SALE -sign by the jetty, they yelled out, "Hey, mate, emma chisit?" I didn't have the heart to tell them that their Centrelink benefits wouldn't even cover the repayments.

Not wanting any further interruptions, I nailed an additional sign to the front gate and went, Graham Greene's "Travels with My Aunt" and glass of wine in hand, to the more secluded 'clubhouse' by the pond.

 

A friend just emailed me, "Very intimidating signs on the entrance gate and very likely to promote serious vandalism from those so inclined. Is this a photoshop spoof or the real thing? If it’s real and necessary I would suggest that you move; immediately or sooner."
Gotcha, Chris! ☺

 

Now don't get the wrong impression: I don't drink wine all the time. Only when I'm happy or stressed, or relaxing alone or with friends, or when I'm busy or lazy - or being annoyed by vulgar boatmen.

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

P.S. If you're not into reading, watch the novel's movie adaptation which departs hugely from the original story but has Maggie Smith's stellar performance to make up for it.