It's eight o'clock in the morning and I've just done my Auggie Wren-thing. It's been raining overnight so, while all is well, all is wet as well and walking is out. The noise of the softly-falling rain kept me company overnight as did, as usual, the soft voices of ABC Radio National. It's an old habit and old habits die hard.
In years gone by in remote parts of the world where there was no radio reception or the voices were in abrasive and totally incomprehensible Arabic or later in softer but difficult-to-follow Greek, I listened to my twenty-four cassette tapes of "Taim Bilong Masta", over and over again. The cassettes have long worn out - and I'm closely behind them - but the recordings are now on mp3-sound files and as good and as clear as ever.
Yesterday I binge-watched "Dead Ahead - The Exxon Valdez Disaster", "The Crooked E", "The Watergate Affair", and - for a bit of cheering-up after all that nasty stuff - "The Tourist" with Angelina Jolie.
It's wet and grey outside and there may be more binge-watching or binge-reading ahead after I've taken out the last two days' recycling.
We've survived the Stone Age; we've survived the Bronze Age; we've survived the Iron Age; will we survive the Plastic Age? In transforming ourselves into the masters of the entire planet, we have become the terror of the ecosystem. We have wreaked havoc on our fellow animals and the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement. We have produced little we can be proud of.
It's now nine o'clock and suddenly not all is quite so well anymore.
