Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep

 

He was a little boy at the time the "Great War", who then lived through the miseries of the Treaty of Versailles as a teenager; whose promising career as a "Volkswirt" was cut short by the next war, from which he then came back as a physically disabled and emotionally dead man.

This man was my father who was born on the 9th of December 1907 and who died on this day in 1984. I attended the funeral of this man whom I only ever knew as an emotionally dead man who never showed any sign of affection towards me. Once a year I would run home from school, excited to show him my top marks, and was met with his blank stare.

I built myself a new life in Australia, after which I revisited home and was greeted with an indifference as if I'd just been down to the corner store to buy him the one bottle of beer he held on to for the whole day as he sat, always in his dressing gown, by the window and unseeingly watched the world pass him by. He was the stranger that was my father.

I lived and worked in Athens in Greece in 1983 and flew to Germany to sit with him for a week but he no longer recognised me. I flew back a few months later to attend the funeral but I couldn't weep. I was as emotionally dead as he had been, and yet, as his coffin slowly moved towards the curtain, I shuddered with defiant disbelief that this was the end of his long and painful life.

Even if we understand that dying is but a token of our existential luckiness, even if we understand that we are borrowed stardust, bound to be returned to the universe that made it — a universe itself slouching toward nothingness as its stars are slowly burning out their energy to leave a cold austere darkness of pure spacetime - that we are "3,147,740,103,497,276,498,750,208,327 atoms, and consist of 63.7 percent oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars", it is still hard to understand that in our cremation, "water evaporates; carbon and nitrogen combine with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floats skyward and mingles with the air, and most of our calcium and phosphorous bakes into a reddish brown residue which scatters in soil and in wind." ["Mr g" by Alan Lightman]

As Alan Lightman continues to write: "Released from their temporary confinement, the atoms slowly spread out and diffuse through the atmosphere. In sixty days' time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of the atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of the atoms were absorbed by light-utilising organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone.

Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of the atoms. A year later, babies contained some of the atoms... Several years after the death, millions of children contained some of the atoms. And their children would contain some of the atoms as well. Their minds contained part of the mind.

Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this person? It is not likely. Will they feel what that person felt, will their memories have flickering strokes of that person's memories? No, it is not possible. But it will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at the moment as they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity.

And the individual atoms, cycled through the body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality."

Animated by electrical impulses and temporal interactions of matter, our finite minds cannot grasp any of this. Perhaps this poem helps:

 

VATI born 9.12.1907 - died 31.1.1984     Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep. I am in a thousand winds that blow, I am the softly falling snow. I am the gentle showers of rain, I am the fields of ripening grain. I am in the morning hush, I am in the graceful rush Of beautiful birds in circling flight, I am the starshine of the night. I am in the flowers that bloom, I am in a quiet room. I am in the birds that sing, I am in each lovely thing. Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there. I did not die.

 

 

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Are you hearing voices in your head?

 

A group of high-profile Indigenous Australians has banded together with a former deputy prime minister to co-ordinate the No campaign in this year's Voice referendum, running on the slogan "Recognise a Better Way".

It comes as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton accepts an invitation to attend this week's Referendum Working Group meeting for a briefing on the proposal to enshrine an Indigenous Voice in the constitution. Mr Dutton has been demanding more detail from the Albanese government on the Voice before the Liberal Party settles on a formal position.

While Mr Dutton is torn between members of his party who want to back the Voice and those who are vehemently opposed, the grassroots campaigns are starting to take shape.

The Yes group, led by "Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition", will formally launch its campaign with a "week of action" in late February. Get ready for plenty of pointless virtue-signalling!

Calling itself the "No Case Committee", the first formal No group has emerged with members including firebrand Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, former ALP president turned Liberal candidate Warren Mundine, former federal Labor MP Gary Johns and former deputy prime minister John Anderson.

The six-member committee will broadly support symbolic gesture of recognising Indigenous Australians in the constitution while opposing the Voice, arguing it is divisive and will do nothing to improve the lives of First Nations people. "Bureaucracies have been built in the past and they have all failed miserably," Mr Mundine said. "We need to be getting down into Alice Springs and all of the other communities and working there, not working in Canberra."

In July last year, Conservative firebrand Jacinta Nampijinpa Price made a furious, impassioned entrance into the Senate, railing against "false narratives" of racism and calling the push for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament a symbolic gesture that could divide black and white Australia. As she said, "It would be far more dignifying if we were recognised and respected as individuals in our own right, who are not simply defined by our racial heritage, but by the content of our character." Hear, hear, Jacinta! You're my kind of politician!

Personally, I am with the No group, and I am becoming increasingly concerned by attempts to shame people who dare to ask questions. Is this just a fraudulent, empty gesture by mostly-white, so-called aboriginal academics seeking power, money and status? May this lead to special "Voices" for other racial groups? For specific religious groups? For the growing number of 'other' genders? Where and when will it all end?

I am usually fairly apolitical: I keep my head low and my nose clean and I pay my taxes. I have been doing so for the past fifty-eight years [1] as I think we live in a pretty good country where everyone gets a fair deal.

We're not perfect; as Winston Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried."

Listen to the YouTube clip. I think the presenter Kel Richards nailed it!

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[1] I arrived in Australia in August 1965

 

The storm that wiped out Darwin on Christmas Day 1974

Noel and I playing chess on Christmas Day 1974 on the beach at Vovo Point
(that was before we had heard about skin cancer; I've paid the price for it since)

 

When Noel Butler flew across from Wewak to spend Christmas with me in Lae in 1974, I had already sold my little gunter-rigged Heron sailing dinghy; so all we could do was to sit on the beach by the yacht club at Vovo Point for our usual game of chess.

I had been busy packing my few belongings into a small messkit which Noel stencilled "P. GOERMAN, RANGOON, BURMA", as I was due to fly out to my next assignment as chief accountant with TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles who had begun drilling for oil in the Arakan Sea.

We had no radio, and even if we had, there would've been little more than static, and so we were both blissfully unaware that Cyclone Tracy had just wiped out Darwin. It was Australia's worst natural disaster - a night of fear and horror with 300-kilometres-per-hour winds of unprecedented savagery and destruction which totally destroyed nearly all of Darwin's buildings and killed more than fifty people.

 

 

Nearly fifty years later, I just came across this book in my favourite op-shop in the Bay. Gary McKay was then a captain in the Australian Army and, in early January 1975, was sent to Darwin to assist in the clean-up.

Of course, I picked up the book, together with "Flinders : The Man Who Mapped the Australia" by Rob Mundle; "The Harbour : A city's heart, a country's soul", an 800-page tome about - what else? - Sydney Harbour by Scott Bevan; "Dreamers and Schemers : A political history of Australia" by Frank Bongiorno (who is not, it seems, related to Paul Bongiorno); and Alexis Bergantz's "French Connection" about how the French have been integral to the Australian story since European colonisation which began when the men of the First Fleet saw the two ships of the La Pérouse expedition enter Botany Bay four days later.

It's been raining all day and it's set to continue for at least another day; perfect reading-weather! I've started on "Tracy" to take me back nearly fifty years to that day on the beach at Lae. Better late than never!

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My lumberjack days are over!

 

My treefelling days are definitely over, so when a tall tree was dangerously overhanging my powerline, I emailed ESSENTIAL ENERGY again and again for almost a year.

I couldn't get much of a response from them until I finally threatened to have one of those Leopard tanks destined for the Ukraine positioned outside their offices in Port Macquarie that things began to happen.

On the first day they came with a huge cherrypicker to lop off the top.

Very early the next morning they rolled up with this cute KUBOTA to take down the remaining stump and clean up the mess they had made.

I took a photo of their phone number if I ever need them again:

 

This is NOT a paid advertisement

 

Then my trusty old mate Troy came with his chainsaw and log splitter to turn the lot into firewood. I just hope I live long enough to use it all up.

Image the sign: DECEASED ESTATE SELLS LIFETIME SUPPLY OF FIREWOOD.

 

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Celebrating my very own Australia Day

 

Having left behind my Lederhosen and button accordion and swapped my socks-and-sandals for a pair of thongs, I arrived in Australia on the 6th of August 1965.

 

 

Was it a good deal? Well, it wasn't as funny as all that and it wasn't as wonderful as in this Youtube clip but after almost sixty years I have no regrets.

Not that anyone ever emigrates because of the success they've enjoyed at home. No one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off." The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is because they've cocked everything up in their own.

Being just nineteen years old, my opportunities for cocking things up had been rather limited by the time I left; in fact, my only - and certainly biggest - cock-up until then had been that I allowed myself to be born to parents who were so dirt-poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of fourteen.

If I had become what I was intended to be, I would probably have been desperate, because I would have had regrets. You know, like you work in an office and you say, "One day I will go to see the world." Instead, I went to see the world and I said, "Maybe one day I will be obliged to work in an office."

Some people see and some people don't see; much the same way they hear music or they hear noise, they only use their vision so as not to bump into trees or fall into a ditch. My vision was more than that and it led me to emigrate to Australia.

Mind you, it took me many years to lose my immigrant mentality, to lose the sense that I'm a guest in somebody else's country, that they may kick me out again if I'm not careful, that I've got to work extra hard to earn my place and that I can't take anything for granted.

But even though I grew up speaking German and thinking in German and dreaming in German, and then had this sudden shift to English, I think it's no longer doing funny things with my brain as I now feel being an Australian as much as I felt being a German all those years ago.

For the full story, click here.

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Have "Kaufmannsgehilfenbrief", will travel!

My German "Kaufmannsgehilfenbrief" (Commercial Assistant's Certificate)

 

The longest word composed in German - at 80 letters - "Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft", meaning, the "Association for Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Danube Steamboat Electrical Services" (as Mark Twain once remarked, "These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions").

At a mere 22 letters, "Kaufmannsgehilfenbrief" doesn't come close to "Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft", but it allowed me to leave Germany and see the world.

For those whose German vocabulary doesn't go beyond "Hofbräuhaus", "Oktoberfest", "Kuchen", "Kindergarten", "Bildungsroman", "Gestapo", "Bratwurst", "Sauerkraut", "Bretzel", "Kaputt", "Dachshund", "Edelweiss", "Angst", "Blitzkrieg", "Schnauzer", "Lebensraum", "Zeitschmerz", "Autobahn", "Weltanschauung", "Schadenfreude", "Gemütlichkeit", "Dummkopf", Kaffeeklatsch", "Schweinehund", "Abseilen", "Realpolitik", "Panzer", "Lederhosen", "Achtung", "Wanderlust", "Poltergeist", "Kohlrabi", "Pumpernickel", "Wirtschaftswunder", "Götterdämmerung", "Goggomobil", "Ersatz", "Wunderkind", "Doppelgänger", "Übermensch", "Zeppelin", "Gesundheit", "Schnapps", "Rucksack", "Volkswagen", "Kitsch", and "Apfelstrudel", let me fill your "Bildungslücke" by explaining that those 22 letters stand for what can be (very) loosely described as a "Commercial Assistant's Certificate". It is given to those who have successfully complete three years of articles to a business during which they are force-fed on subjects such as accounting, commercial law, economics, business ethics, and many other, none of which seem to matter much once they are let loose in the real world.

 

"Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld!"

 

Have "Kaufmannsgehilfenbrief", will travel - and I did! (... and fifty jobs in fifteen countries and sixty years later, it's become just another piece of parchment, slowly yellowing away while I am mellowing away!)

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Listening to Alain de Botton may save you an expensive visit to a marriage counsellor

Tong, for a link to his talk with Chinese subtitles, click here

 

And here's the matching article in the New York Times, headed up "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person": "It's one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.

Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners."

Very fittingly, Alain de Botton ends his talk with this quote from Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who died in 1855, aged 42, having never married: "Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it ... Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy."

So when do you know you're in love? When she pats you on the back and says, "You're in, love!" What a difference a well-placed comma makes!

If you've got this far, you may want to read Alain de Botton's "Essays in Love" and "The Course of Love". Since a visit to a marriage counsellor is not (yet) covered by Medicare, at about $200 an hour, I've just saved you several thousand dollars. No need to pay me; simply buy his books!

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P.S. To read the books on archive.org, simply SIGN UP (it's FREE!), then LOG IN, and BORROW. Making the occasional donation here will ensure that this wonderful non-profit library will continue to stay online.

 

Phew!!! That was a close one!

Watch Colin Wiggins giving an in-depth talk on John Constable's 'The Hay Wain' on YouTube

 

Back from town! Of course, we also visited my favourite op-shop where I spotted this old master from around 1821. I mean, isn't this what all op-shoppers live for? To find some old painting, in this case the famous "Hay Wain" by the English landscape painter John Constable, and all for the price of a Chinese sweet-and-sour pork?

I already had my arms full of books and several DVDs, so I asked Padma to carry it for me to the cash register which was lucky as it gave her a chance to take a really good look at it and to ask me, "Did they really have McDonald's in England in the 1820s?" Phew!!! That was a close one!

Anyway, we came away with the eight-hour miniseries "The Honourable Woman" as well as "The Night Manager" which runs for another 346 minutes. Enough binge-watching to last us for the rest of the week!

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The News - A User's Manual

 

The news is everywhere, we can’t stop checking it constantly on our screens, but what is it doing to our minds?

The news occupies the same dominant position in modern society as religion once did, asserts Alain de Botton – but we don’t begin to understand its impact on us. In this dazzling book, de Botton takes 25 archetypal news stories – from an aircrash to a murder, a celebrity interview to a political scandal – and submits them to intense analysis.

 

Read it online at www.archive.org

 

He raises questions like: How come disaster stories are often so uplifting? What makes the love lives of celebrities so interesting? Why do we enjoy politicians being brought down? Why are upheavals in far off lands often so ... boring?

De Botton has written the ultimate manual for our news-addicted age, one sure to bring calm, understanding and a measure of sanity to our daily (perhaps even hourly) interactions with the news machine.

Inspired by writing the book, he created a news outlet The Philosopher’s Mail which grew into The Book of Life.

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Better bangers for my buck

>

Padma's bangers and mash covered in a delicious gravy

 

I'm typing this while I'm on the phone to the Australian Taxation Office. Their recorded voice has been telling me for the past fifty-five minutes that "Your call has been progressed in the queue and will be answered by the next available service representative".

With plenty of time on my hand, let me tell you about our last weekly lunch-away-from-home. We hadn't been to Tuross Head for a very long time, and so we decided to take a break from our usual Thai restaurant routine and drive to the Tuross Country Club & Golf Course for a change.

There seemed to have been a change of cooks because the new lot looked a lot darker. In fact, they turned out to be Indians and, with not even a single mention of Indian curry on the menu, I wondered what they would do to an Australian steak. To be on the safe side, I thought I order the trusty old bangers and mash which is pretty hard to stuff up.

How wrong I was! The mashed potato was something straight out of a packet; the few green peas sprinkled across had barely seen the light of day since leaving the tin; and the sausages - well, my lips are sealed!

Since then, Padma has cooked me a proper bangers and mash covered in a delicious gravy which I have been enjoying while that dulcet voice keeps telling me that "Your call has been progressed in the queue and will be answered by the next available service representative".

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10 Pfennig BILD Zeitung

A good friend in Berlin informs me that the 10 Pfennig BILD Zeitung now costs €1.20

 

 

The German   Bild Zeitung    was like television in print: plenty of pictures (BILD means 'image') and sensationalised commentary. Sold for 10 Pfennig, or the eqivalent of a box of matches, everyone could afford it and, with just four pages, read it all in one sitting - literally!

Because, being just four pages, it could easily be folded - lengthwise to be slipped down one's trouser leg, or twice across to fit into one's back pocket - and taken to the office loo which in those days was the only place where one was allowed to take some time off from work.

Speed reading hadn't been invented yet and so, in an office with over twenty people and just one windowless loo, slow readers could be a bit on the nose, made worse on a Monday morning when the reporting of the weekend's footie results in the "Kicker Fussball-Illustrierte" slowed down some football-mad readers' bowel movements even further.

Such were the conditions in my office when I was an articled clerk in Germany in the early 60s, so is it any wonder I emigrated to Australia? - see here. But it wouldn't have happened without the   Bild Zeitung   which at the time carried advertisements by the Australian Embassy showing a smiley face in the shape of the Australian continent with rays of sunshine around the edges under the header "Come to sunny Australia!" - in German, of course, or I wouldn't have understood it.

 

"Do you know Australia?
Information about Australia, a young and aspiring nation, and the opportunities awaiting you there, are available from the Australian Information and Immigration Agency
2 Hamburg 1, Mönckebergstrasse 11, Phone 33 49 82.
For more information complete this coupon (in block letters) and mail it to us."

 

No, I didn't write to the embassy while sitting there in that windowless loo, but I did so shortly afterwards, which is how I finished up in sunny Australia, the land of wide open spaces - and plenty of loos with windows in them! - and the freedom to read a newspaper even at work.

As for the 10 Pfennig   Bild Zeitung  , it's still around today, albeit a lot dearer. And I am still in Australia, too, a lot older but still grateful for having read that ad in one of my "quieter" moments.

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

P.S. Read also "Reading changed my life!"

 

Wherever we go, we take ourselves with us

 

Few things are as exciting as the idea of travelling somewhere else. But the reality of travel seldom matches our daydreams. The tragi-comic disappointments are well-known: the disorientation, the mid-afternoon despair, the lethargy before ancient ruins. And yet the reasons behind such disappointments are rarely explored.

We are inundated with advice on where to travel to; we hear little of why we should go and how we could be more fulfilled doing so. "The Art of Travel" is a philosophical look at the ubiquitous but peculiar activity of travelling ‘for pleasure’, with thoughts on airports, landscapes, museums, holiday romances, photographs, exotic carpets and the contents of hotel mini-bars. The book mixes personal thought with insights drawn from some of the great figures of the past. Unlike existing guidebooks on travel, it dares to ask what the point of travel might be – and modestly suggests how we could learn to be less silently and guiltily miserable on our journeys.

 

 

All my extensive travels before retirement were footed by my numerous employers who sent me from Germany to South Africa, from Australia to Papua New Guinea, from Papua New Guinea all over Australia, and then to the Solomon Islands, to Burma, to Iran, to Samoa, to Malaysia, to Singapore, to Saudi Arabia, to Zurich, to London, to Greece ...

No more free air travel in retirement, no more lounging in VIP lounges, no more "turning left" on big jumbos, no more stays in five-star hotels, no more free mini-bars, no more same-day laundry service with a cute cardboard bow tie in every starched and ironed shirt left at the bottom of the bed in a sealed plastic bag, and so I take consolation in Alain de Botton's audiobook "The Art of Travel", read by the author himself:

 

You may also read it for free on www.archive.org

 

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Early morning at "Riverbend"

 

Early morning at "Riverbend" and I'm considering which of the fifty shades of Earl Grey I'm going to have for my tea this morning. I've fed the ducks by the pond, the parrots on the verandah, the possum in his possum penthouse, and now it's my turn. Porridge with raisins and a spoonful of honey, all washed down with a hot cup of Earl Grey.

We've had some slight rain during the night which does nothing to improve my mood even though the ducks on the ever-increasing pond don't mind. Which is the keyword in this highly destabilised world we live in. Don't mind about the war in Ukraine; the trade wars between America and China; don't mind about turf wars between bikie gangs in Sydney; don't mind about drive-by shootings and knife-stabbings; don't mind about lying politicians and corrupt public officials; and don't mind about people complaining about banks lending them too much money (they used to complain about banks not lending them enough money).

It was so much easier to keep calm when I lived in New Guinea before the internet when there was no television or even a decent radio reception from Australia, and the only news was from a local station called 'Maus Bilong San Kam-ap' in Tok Pisin, New Guinea's lingua franca, where a helicopter is a 'Mixmaster bilong Jesus Christ' which made the latest news about helicopter gunships in Vietnam sound almost hilarious.

Then there was Burma which was under a 6-to-6 curfew and sealed off behind the "Teak Curtain", and where one couldn't even buy Western toothpaste, let alone hear Western news. The only 'television' to watch were those blue-light electric mosquito zappers which were on the wall of every restaurant and which we called "Burmese television".

And then there was the world's largest sandbox, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where everything was totally censored and a Western newspaper was as stiff as cardboard after all its 'offending' articles had been doused in black ink by censors armed with thick felt-tipped pens.

Of course, we could achieve the same now by simply turning off the radio, the television, the internet, but somehow we are all addicted to the news, especially bad news. Maybe I make today a totally news-free day and just concentrate on my Earl Grey tea.

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P.S. Speaking of which, I recommend you Alain de Botton's "The News".

 

The Lucky Country

 

Everyone has read "The Lucky Country"; I mean, I had read it even before I'd become an Australian in 1971 in the wilds of New Guinea - although perhaps I shouldn't be so sure, as I've just found out today that none of the lifeguards at the pool had ever heard of the Australian movie "The Castle".

 

 

Adding to "The Lucky Country", I picked up today Donald Horne's trilogy "The Education of Young Donald" - all 800 pages of it!; a copy of "Sydney - A Biography" by Louis Nowra; Jeremy Paxman's "The English - A Portrait of a People"; "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J Dubner; and Robin Waterfield's "Why Socrates Died - Dispelling the Myths". Enough reading to keep me in "Melbourne" for the whole weekend!

Having watched "Deception" last night - no, not this one - which is the story of a lonely timid accountant who lives only for his work, I thought I find out what I missed out on by watching "The Accountant" tonight:

 

 

And that should be it! I just hope it rains all weekend so I won't have to feel guilty about not cutting the grass which is growing out of control!

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Making peace with your past

 

Those dear ladies at the op-shop always have something interesting in store. This time I picked up a small book by H. Norman Wright, Making Peace with Your Past.

The blurb says, "Are you hampered by baggage from your past? Much of who you are, what you do, and how you feel is determined by your past. The memories of painful experiences and harmful early influences can come back to haunt you, causing negative behaviour patters that interfere with your life and relationships."

The first few pages are promising. Anyway, it cost me a dollar so if the Lord-Jesus-stuff gets a bit too heavy, I can always chuck it in the bin.

 

 

Mind you, if they ever start charging for emotional baggage, I'd never be able to afford another flight ☺

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