The otter man

"Ring of Bright Water - The Story of the Film"
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The 'when' and the 'where' of how I first came across the book "Ring of Bright Water" are now lost in time, but I've been a Gavin Maxwell fan ever since. The story simple: it's about an otter he brought back from Iraq and raised in Scotland.

During World War II, Maxwell served as an instructor with the Special Operations Executive. He was invalided out with the rank of Major in 1944, after which he purchased the Isle of Soay off Skye in the Inner Hebrides in Scotland where he tried to establish a basking shark fishery. He failed. His book "Harpoon Venture" tells this story.

In 1956, Maxwell toured the reed marshes of Southern Iraq with explorer Wilfred Thesiger. Maxwell's account of their trip appears in "A Reed Shaken By The Wind", later published under the title "People of the Reeds".

 

 

Maxwell next moved to Sandaig (which he called Camusfeàrna in his books), a small community opposite Isleornsay on a remote part of the Scottish mainland. This is where his "otter books" are set. After "Ring of Bright Water" (1960), he wrote the sequel "The Rocks Remain" (1963). ("The Otters' Tale" is a children's version of "Ring of Bright Water")

In 1966, he travelled to Morocco, tracing the dramatic lives of the last rulers of Morrakesh under the French. His account of the trip was published as Lords of the Atlas : The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua 1893-1956.

In "The House of Elrig" (1965), Maxwell describes his family history and the place where he was born.

In 1968, Maxwell's Sandaig home was destroyed by fire and he moved to the lighthouse keepers' cottages on Eilean Bàn (White Island), an island between the Isle of Skye and the Scottish mainland by Kyleakin. He invited John Lister-Kaye to join him on Eilean Bàn and help him build a zoo on the island and work on a book about British wild mammals.

Lister-Kaye's book "The White Island" is a result of this invitation even though both projects were abandoned when Maxwell died from lung cancer the following year, aged 55. "Raven Seek Thy Brother" was published in the year of his death.

 

 

Reader's Digest's Condensed Books are as difficult to dispose of as bins of radioactive waste, so it comes perhaps at no surprise that there's still a condensed version of "Ring of Bright Water" lurking on page 318 of this 1962 edition. Skip through it at your own peril.

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I won't waste any time reading it!

 

According to "The Shovel", former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has made a one-off donation to his book sales figures, buying 45,000 copies – or $1.75 million worth – of his autobiography "A Bigger Picture."

Mr Turnbull said the $1.75 million investment was his and Lucy’s way of giving back. “I’ve done pretty well in life, so it’s part of my duty to give back. And if that means buying the entire stock of a book that’s been released in the middle of a global pandemic, then so be it”. The investment will yield him $1 million in royalties.

The former PM said the 45,000 books will be housed in a separate wing of his house. He intends to read each copy over the coming months.

"A Bigger Picture" retails for $39.95 in ALDI's toilet paper aisle, or $0.00 if you have a mate in Scott Morrison’s office - click here.

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Bunt sind schon die Wälder

 

Melancholy is a cool morning with thick mist hanging over the river and knowing that winter isn't far away. And winter is the time of year when I once again question my decision to settle this far south.

I ease up on my self-flagellation when I realise that it was as unplanned as everything else in the pretzel-shaped course of my life. Add to this the current 'unreal' hiatus in all our lives, a time that will mark a 'before' and 'after' for perhaps generations to come.

"Do you remember a time when we used to go to a café to read the communal paper, when we judged a man's trustworthiness by the firmness of his handshake?" we might say to one another.

We may have to unlearn lifelong embodied instincts and get used to a dystopian future in which we all wear masks, sip our espressos at a polite distance, and video-chat with family members and friends far away.

 

Bunt sind schon die Wälder Gelb die Stoppelfelder Und der Herbst beginnt. Rote Blätter fallen Graue Nebel wallen – Kühler weht der Wind Wie die volle Traube Aus dem Rebenlaube Purpurfarbig strahlt! Am Geländer reifen Pfirsiche, mit Streifen – Rot und weiß bemalt. Geige tönt und Flöte bei der Abendröte und im Mondenglanz; junge Winzerinnen winken und beginnen frohen Erntetanz.

 

"Melancholy is the happiness of being sad." Not me. Victor Hugo.

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I'd be dead without ABC Radio National!

 

When I still lived and worked overseas, I didn't watch television or listen to the radio much, because the various corners of the world I dwelt in for a period of time were either so remote that there was no reception or in a language I could not understand.

Not that I missed it because the 'real' world around me was so exciting that it surpassed anything produced by the BBC or National Geographic.

However, now that I have, as they say, "settled down", I feel more cut off from the world than at any time before but, thanks to modern technology and through my computer, I can listen via the Radiobox and the Radio Garden to just about any radio station around the world.

And yet, for my wake-up call in the morning and for my non-alcoholic but all-the-same intoxicating nightcap just before dropping off to sleep, I simply couldn't do without my trusty old friend, ABC Radio National.

Their interesting and often erudite programming gives me a sense of continuity and a sense of anticipation. I think I'd be dead without it!

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Was I born under a wandering star?

"I've never seen a sight that didn't look better looking back."

 

Now having lived in one place - "stuck" might be a better word - for as long as I used to move from place to place previously, I sometimes reflect on what made me do it, the moving-on and the staying-on, alas, both defy analysis!

W. Somerset Maugham begins his short story "The Lotus Easter" with the words, "Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like train-cars travelling forever on the selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap-iron."

Having nothing to lose and everything to gain was often my only reason for moving on rather than a deliberate refusal to accept my "lot". I'd fire off another job application with as much forethought as ordering an-other beer, and I'd get another job just as quickly, and off I'd go again.

Without having read Henry David Thoreau, I saw around me "men [that] lead lives of quiet desperation". To some I must've been a bad influence, like my next-door-neighbour in Apia in Western Samoa in 1978. An expat from England, married, with a lovely wife and two boys, he worked on some technical job with the Samoan government, and had been there for many years. I almost envied him his 'groundedness' and his seemingly happy acceptance of the ordinary things in life, because I wasn't feeling grounded, and in less than a year I was off again, this time to Malaysia.

 

My neighbours in Samoa

 

Was I a bad influence on him? Maybe, because when I tried to contact him again only a few months later from Penang, I was told he had left. I believe there's something in the human condition that leaves us slightly dissatisfied with whatever situation we are in. I know because I've just received this email from an old friend from my days in New Guinea:

"A restless spirit lurks deep in my soul which drives me to keep active even at 76. Life is for living and you have kicked the can down the road over the years as I have and hopefully we both have a few roads left in us. Time will tell. I am putting the house on the market next week."

Suddenly I feel no longer so alone!

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Call me Ishmael

 

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

Which is how I used to feel all my life, and which is how I feel right now. In times gone by, as regularly as every six to twelve months, I would jump on a plane and cross oceans to a new country and a new job. Alas, circumstances, old age first and foremost, now keep me at "Riverbend", with even "doing a Cato", messy as it was, not an acceptable way out.

As Herman Melville wrote, "If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings."

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All Quiet On The Western Front

or watch the 1930 version

 

In all this hype about ANZAC Day let us not forget the real message in all of this at these uncertain times when both the USA and China are flexing their muscles and real war is only a small mishap away: that war is terrible and must be avoided at all costs!

If you need any convincing at all just how terrible war is, watch the movie or, better still, read Erich Maria Remarque's book (to BORROW it, JOIN UP - it's free! - and then LOG IN)

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My reflections on ANZAC Day

 

As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me (German: So weit die Füße tragen) is a 2001 film about German World War II prisoner-of-war Clemens Forell's escape from a Siberian Gulag in the Soviet Union back to Germany.

It is based on the book of the same name written by Bavarian novelist Josef Martin Bauer. The book is in turn based on the story of Cornelius Rost who used the alias "Clemens Forell" to avoid retribution from the KGB.

Much of the dialogue in the film takes place in languages other than German, such as Russian, Chukchi and Persian. At certain points in the film, no subtitles are provided, deliberately so as to impart upon the audience the sense of helplessness felt by the main character, who knows only some Russian.

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A palindrome worth watching

 

Palindromes, or letter-by-letter reversible writing, weren't even known to me when I travelled through the Panama Canal in 1965 aboard MV FLAVIA on my way to Australia.

And, just as the freshwater flushes through the locks of the Panama Canal in one direction only, I have never been through the Canal again in the opposite direction, as Australia has remained my home for all those fifty-five years, right into retirement which now gives me plenty of time to read about these things.

 

 

Go to Wikipedia for more on the historical and technical details of this gigantic engineering feat, as well as such snippets as the lowest canal toll of 36 cents (paid by the American Richard Halliburton who swam the Panama Canal in 1928) and the origin of the expression "Another Day, Another Dollar" (coined by the Panama Canal construction workers who were paid a dollar a day for their labour).

If you've been reading this far, you don't suffer from aibohphobia. Isn't that worth knowing?

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Faery Lands of the South Seas

 

Hall finished his story in the dark. The last of the diners had gone long since, and, save for ourselves, the broad veranda was empty. "What are your plans?" I asked. "Our year in the South Seas is up. Where are you going now?"

"I have no plans," he said, "except that I doubt if I shall ever go north again. I may be wrong, but I believe I've had enough of civilization to last me the rest of my life. We are happy here. Why should we leave the islands?" I fancy the South Seas have claimed the pair of us.

---

That's how "Faery Lands" ends and that's how both writers end up: staying on; James Norman Nordhoff for twenty years, and Charles Bernard Hall for thirty-four years until his death in 1951. During their time in the South Seas, they wrote the Bounty Trilogy: Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Men Against the Sea (1934) and Pitcairn's Island (1934).

However, first came "Faery Lands of the South Seas", published, as the coversheet suggests, in MCMXXI, which contains a memorable passage of Hall's 1920 encounter with Cridland, a British hermit in search of a lonely islet on which to live out his life. In "Faery Lands", we last see Cridland from Hall's perspective aboard a trading schooner, waving in the distance, his fate and life a mystery with an unknown ending. But there were two more encounters that took place. First, some ten years later, when Hall visits the hermit, he finds a Cridland whose mind is disintegrating amidst the vast loneliness of the Pacific and his desert island. Just over ten years after that visit, the dying Cridland summons Hall to his deathbed to reveal the reason for his desertion to the South Seas. Hall's reaction was to describe Cridland as a discarded life and a "mistake of nature." A veiled reference to Robert Dean Frisbie?

Reading "Faery Lands" takes me back to things that enchanted me early in life and had an impact on me that has lasted a lifetime. Call it wanderlust, if you will, but I was never satisfied with "home". Seeing new places wasn't enough; I had to live in them. And now that I'm in the last years of my life, I'm reading again the books of James Norman Nordhoff and Charles Hall and Noel Barber and Robert Dean Frisbie. It makes me wistful for the past, but I also feel compelled to follow the lesson Hall had learned: never return to a place of which you have happy memories; disappointment and frustration will result if you do.

It's easier to click here and read "Faery Lands of the South Seas".

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The Island of Desire

 

In a past inconceivably remote it must have been the peak of a volcano, jutting from the midst of a sea whose solitude was broken only by flocks of migrating birds, a pod of sperm whales lumbering down from the Austral ice fields, or the intangible things of the mythic world; the spirits of Storm, Fair Weather, Night, Day and Dawn.

Coral polyps attached themselves to the steep walls of the volcano to build their submarine gardens a mile or more to sea, surrounding the island with a reef and shallow lagoon; then erosion, the battering of the Pacific combers, and subsistence, until finally the volcano had disappeared, leaving a blue lagoon shimmering in the sunlight, a barrier reef threaded with islets and sand cays; Danger Island, or PukaPuka - Land of Little Hills.

So it was called by the first Polynesians who came here, centuries ago. It appears now much as it did then: a tiny place compared with the vastness of the sea surrounding it. The low hills, scarcely twenty feet high, are shaded by cordia and hernandia trees, groves of coconut palms, thickets of magnolia bushes; and between the hills lie patches of level land where taro is grown in dikes swamps and where the thatched houses are half obscured by clumps of bananas, gardenia bushes, and gawky-limbed pandanus.

There are three islets on the roughly triangular reef: Ko to the southeast; Frigate Bird to the southwest; and the main islet of Wale to the north. Ko and Frigate Bird are uninhabited eight months of the year, while on the crescent-shaped bay of Wale, facing southward toward the lagoon, are the three villages: Ngake, Roto, and Yato - or Windward, Central, and Leeward.

The trading station is in Central Village. I, Ropati, live in its upstairs rooms, while the two downstairs rooms have been vacant since the station was closed. The building is glaringly white, shaped like a packing case, has an asbestos-cement roof, balconies in front and back, and, leading from the balconies to the living quarters, doorways just high enough so I can crack my head against the lintels. [Continue]

So begins Robert Dean Frisbie's book "The Island of Desire", a seemingly melodramatic title which is a pun on the name of his Polynesian wife, Desire. It is divided into two parts: the first describes his courtship and early family life with his wife, Desire; the second part follows the family's move to remote Suvarrow in the Cook Islands where they survived a severe hurricane that obliterated 90 percent of the atoll.

Robert "Ropati" Frisbie was a nineteenth-century man living in the middle of the twentieth-century. He longed to make life more than mere existence. He wanted to capture meaning in it, and Puka-Puka, the island of Desire, served that goal. For although its readership has always remained small, it has remained consistent. Frisbie will still be read with the same appreciation a hundred years from now, while more contemporaries, much more popular at the time, fade into oblivion.

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The Book of Puka-Puka

Read it online here

 

The Book of Puka-Puka is not about travel; it is about staying in one place. It is about living as a conspicuous stranger and slowly allowing yourself to become absorbed into the strange ways of an ancient, indigenous community.

This book was not composed by a colonial administrator, a missionary or an anthropologist, but by a hedonistic South Sea trader - a young American who fishes, picnics, swims, sleeps and falls in love but fortunately also has an ear for good stories.

Robert Dean Frisbie was born in Ohio in 1896 but his health was crippled after fighting in the First World War and a doctor informed him that another North American winter would be his last. In 1920, he sailed for the Southern Pacific with a library of books, a desire to live and an ambition to write. His first job, aged 24, was managing a plantation in Tahiti from where he began to explore the scattered islands. In 1924 he travelled to isolated and lonely Puka-Puka, where he ran a store for A.B. Macdonald.

Over the next four years he wrote a series of twenty-nine articles for Atlantic Monthly, which were later gathered together to create "The Book of Puka-Puka", a book long out of print and sinfully expensive to buy but, thanks to modern technology, available online by clicking here.

Enjoy!

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How to get more than your 8-cents-a-day worth

Click on image to go to iview.abc.net.au

 

Living in sleepy little Nelligen means that our television reception can be a bit spotty at times. I can easily do with all those ghastly commercial channels but I do like my ABC which is where ABC iview comes in.

Not only will ABC iview give you crispy-clear reception but it will do so anywhere in the world, and it will even replay programmes previously screened. Interested? Here's the drill:

Make sure both your computer and your TV set have a HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) slot which looks like this:

Buy, borrow or steal a HDMI-cable (they come in all sorts of lengths) and connect your computer to your TV set. Then, on your TV set, press the SOURCE button and select HDMI, after which you go to your computer, log onto iview.abc.net.au, and click on ABC TV Live Stream, or choose one of the hundreds of previously screened programmes. (N.B.: the sound volume is regulated not on your TV set, but on your computer!)

And then there is Chromecast which, using your computer or smart-phone as remote control, lets you access Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, the Google Play Store and other services but that's a story for another day.

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A Theatre for Dreamers

 

Not only because of the coronavirus lockdown but also because of my advancing age, the only travelling I do these days is armchair-travelling which often takes me back to those music- and retzina-filled days in Greece - see here.

One of the highlights of those sunny two years in Greece in the mid-80s were my frequent excursions on the then Russian-built noisy and smoky "Flying Dolphin" hydrofoils from Piraeus to the island of Hydra. I visited Hydra without any knowledge of its reputation as an artists' colony, least of all its Australian connection through George Johnston and Charmian Clift. All those insights came many years later - together with the insight that I should never have resigned from my position there and returned to Australia (but that's a story for another time).

 

Hydra

 

Right on cue at this housebound moment, along comes "A Theatre for Dreamers" which burns with the heat and light of Greece. It is a spell-binding novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost; an intoxicating rush of sensory experience; the headiest of armchair escapism.

 

 

If you wish you could disappear to a Greek island right now, buy this lovely book! I just did! (to whet your appetite, click here for a preview)

 

Click here

 

τα λέμε στην Ελλάδα! (if my Greek is slipping, please correct me)

 

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To all my old friends!

 

In "The Mule", Clint Eastwood stars as Earl Stone, a man who is ninety-years-old, broke, alone, and facing foreclosure of his business when he is offered a job that simply requires him to drive. Easy enough, but, unbeknownst to Earl, he's just signed on as a drug courier for a Mexican cartel.

He does well, so well, in fact, that his cargo increases exponentially, and Earl is assigned a handler. But he isn't the only one keeping tabs on Earl. The mysterious new drug mule has also hit the radar of hard-charging D.E.A. Agent Colin Bates (Bradley Cooper). And even as his money problems become a thing of the past, Earl's past mistakes start to weigh heavily on him, and it's uncertain if he'll have time to right those wrongs before law enforcement, or the cartel's enforcers, catch up to him.

Not Eastwood's best performance but the soundtrack's lyrics are rather catching and, given my own and my friends' age, rather appropriate:

 

Don't let the old man in I wanna leave this alone Can't leave it up to him he's knocking on my door And I knew all of my life that someday it would end Get up and go outside don't let the old man in Many moons I have lived My body's weathered and worn Ask yourself how old you'd be If you didn't know the day you were born Try to love on your wife And stay close to your friends Toast each sundown with wine Don't let the old man in Many moons I have lived My body's weathered and worn Ask yourself how old you'd be If you didn't know the day you were born When he rides up on his horse And you feel that cold bitter wind Look out your window and smile Don't let the old man in Look out your window and smile Don't let the old man in

 

 

Unfortunately, the soundtrack of this full-length YouTube download is distorted, so why not lash out and buy yourself the DVD on ebay before you let the old man come in - I just did!

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The World Is My Home

You can read this book here by signing up for a free account and "borrowing" it.

 

Rice Krispies is one of my favourite junk foods, and James A. Michener is one of my favourite junk writers. He was no disciplined observer with the golden pen of a Somerset Maugham or the silvery resonance of a Joseph Conrad.

As one critic observed, "Sometime in the late 60s or early 70s James Michener ceased to be a serious writer, at least in the literary sense and became something else - an industry, his typewriter a factory upon which, with two fingers pecking, he took history and processed it into best-selling novels that could also be used as doorstops."

One such doorstop was "Poland" which I never quite finished but all the others, from "The Fires of Spring" and "Hawaii" and "Caravans" to "The Source" and "Hawaii" to "Legacy", I read with great pleasure, and several others, but especially "Tales of the South Pacific", "Return to Paradise", and "The Drifters", I read and read again, often in different parts of the world, and each time they gave me new pleasures and new insights.

I guess there's only one autobiography a writer can write, and Michener's 600-page "The World Is My Home" brings it all together. It touches on every book he's ever written and the countless people he met during as travels throughout the South Pacific Ocean, including the famous but now almost forgotten Robert Dean Frisbie. Turn to page 69:

I had been told that Hall was a friend of Robert Dean Frisbie, the writer, and I regretted not learning what he might know about him. But Lew Hirshorn was able to fill me that gap: 'Everyone in Tahiti knows the Frisbie story. Young American of great promise, came out here penniless and went native. Could write like an angel, even Hall says that: "Great talent. Knows far more about the islands than I ever will, but self-destructive. Doomed." The Americans in Tahiti often discuss what we can do to help Frisbie. He has four or five children, you know, and even though we feel sorry for the way he has to live, we do admire him for refusing to abandon the kids. Where he goes, they go. But he's a cantankerous son-of-a-bitch. Won't let you help him, so we've pretty much written him off.' 'His wife?' 'Dead.' 'If I am able to help him, then what?' 'He'll go on dragging his kids from one lonely atoll to another, pitiful case. Hall told me once: "Because I've found a steady life I've know the paradise that the South Pacific can be. Frisbie knows the hell.'" 'What's he doing on Pukapuka?' 'Dying.'

A few pages later Michener leaves Tahiti and is on his way to Pukapuka:

If Bora Bora from the air presented concentric circles with a majestic dead volcano in the centre, Pukapuka showed only a circular lagoon completely empty but subtended by one of the most miserable reefs in the Pacific. At places only a few yards wide and a few feet above sea level, the land of the island turned endlessly until it completed the circle, providing here and there widened-out areas where clusters of mean huts clung perilously to what solid land there was. It was a place of utter loneliness, the end of the world, and all who saw it for the first time in those years had the same thought: Come a major hurricane, such as the one in the movie, this place is a goner. There was no airport building. Since we were in a hurry, we dropped the ramp quickly and ran down the metal stairs. There, standing with no shade to protect him, stood Frisbie, whose writings about the Pacific were some of the finest on the subject. He seemed old and frail. A man with an immense lantern jaw, as much of it as could be seen under his greasy pandanus hat, he wore torn clothes that had not been mended in years and a pair of soiled sneakers ... Was this the end of the writer, to be dying alone and ill penniless on a remote atoll? It was fearful to see, this wreck of a man once great with promise, the ultimate beachcomber. And then my attention was diverted from the mournful figure of Frisbie to one of the most touching tableaux I would ever see. To the airplane to bid their father farewell had come four of the Frisbie children, all clean and bright-faced and smiling. The oldest daughter, Johnnie, about fourteen, had risen early, so we learned, and had scrubbed her brother and two sisters, dressing them in their best so that they would look proper when they went to say good-bye for what might be the last time. ... In a few minutes we were going to load Frisbie onto our plane and whisk him away to a hospital in Samoa while his four children, only one even in her teens, stood bravely on the edge of the runway to watch him depart. How many children does one know, their mother dead, who are abandoned in such a predicament? How many children could survive on such a bleak atoll? Deeply moved, I collected a handful of bills from our crew, and after we had taken aboard their father on a kind of stretcher, I ran down the steps and gave the oldest girl the money. Embracing her, I whispered: 'We'll save your father and we'll come back to rescue you,' and we were off, but as long as Pukapuka remained in sight I stared down to see those children standing on the coral strand. ... During the flight from Pukapuka to the U.S. naval hospital in American Samoa I tended Frisbie, holding his head occasionally in my lap, and in moments when he felt strong enough to talk he told me of how he had reached the South Seas and of how he had wandered among the little islands, always preferring them to the big ones, and of how he had met his island wife. I think he said that he had lived on both the Pukapukas, but that his preference had been for the one on which I had found him. He had for a brief spell been an agent for the famous Burns Philp line of island stores, a task at which he said he was not very good, and he chuckled when he recalled his inept storekeeping. It was clear to me that his vital energies were failing and I hoped we could get him to the hospital while he was still conscious.

All that happened in 1943. Frisbie made a somewhat spotty recovery, but he continued to travel, write and publish until his death at age 52, on November 18 (or 19), 1948, in Avatiu in the Cook Islands, from a tetanus infection. He was survived by his five children, who were subsequently raised by friends and relatives in New Zealand and Hawaii.

As for James Michener, suffering from terminal kidney disease, he ended the daily dialysis treatment that had kept him alive for four years. He said he had accomplished what he wanted and did not want further physical complications. On October 16, 1997, he died of kidney failure, at age 90. A life well lived and ended with great dignity!

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P.S. With "The World Is My Home" already taken as a title for my own autobiography, I won't even bother to write one, but merely comfort myself with the thought that throughout my working life I had been the author and owner of "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld".