Early morning at "Riverbend" and we were woken by the weekly garbage truck coming down the lane with its headlights blazing which is always a sign that we're still in winter and the nights are still long. By the way, do you know that garbage collectors don't get any formal training? They just pick things up as they go along.
We made a quick dash into town for our early-morning swim and Padma's shopping while I visited Vinnies to rehome some more books and DVDs, including a beautifully bound 25th anniversary edition of Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist" and the Oliver Stone movie "JFK". I was eighteen years old and still in Germany when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963 and the world changed forever.
It's still a bit chilly outside which does nothing to improve my mood even though the ducks on the 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 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 gunship action 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 sit back and read Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist".
