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It's difficult to read Camus when you are married and your day is filled with trivialities. Today was different because today Padma went to join the 'Stitching Bitches' in the village hall where she learns the latest crochet knots, and I was left alone in the house.
I hadn't read Camus' "The Stranger" for what seemed like ages. I don't even know if I still have all his books in my somewhat messy library, and the only online copy was in Bahasa Indonesia. And so I did the next-best thing and relaxed on the verandah and listened to the audiobook.
I could've listened to it in French - click here - but this was my day off from domestic challenges, and the English translation was just fine.
When you get to a certain age, trying to stay awake during the day and trying to fall asleep at night become one and the same. Trying to fall asleep to Albert Camus' complete philosophy may make a difference. It works for me! Tomorrow I might surprise you with Camus' "The Stranger".
I have no idea what Trump's next cunning plan is; I just hope he's not doing another Baldrick. After he had extended the Iran ceasefire overnight, all indications were that the stockmarket was going to nosedive. Yes, all the banks took a beating, but the big miners went up, and then down again, and then up again.
(Did you know that Australians now torch - at a minimum - over $31 billion a year on gambling across pokies, betting, lotteries and casinos, which is roughly the annual profits of ALL the four banks combined?)
The market simply doesn't know what to do — well, except for a certain clique in the US who are making billions with their insider trading. Very soon, though, there will come that Gorbachev-moment — remember December 25, 1991? — when the Iranian regime will finally collapse. I just hope it'll happen long before the whole world economy collapses.
I am holding on to my BHP shares, and just now bought a few more Liontown (LTR), after having sold my previous holding for a tidy profit only yesterday. Lithium is all the rage, and will be for a long time to come, now that electric cars are in higher demand than ever before.
Remember when Blackadder told Baldrick, "You wouldn't know a cunning plan if it danced naked on a harpsichord singing 'Cunning Plans are Here Again'"?
Let us just hope that Trump doesn't solve the problem of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by only cutting off everyone's head.
I know you're so gripped by this clip that you can't wait to watch Part 2
Istill remember being overwhelmed the first time I had to calculate the laytime of one of Mofarrij's six general cargo vessels - be it the "Mofarrij-A", "Mofarrij-B", "Mofarrij-C" "Mofarrij-D", "Mofarrij-F" or "Mofarrij-G" - or of any of the other charter vessels - click here.
The year was 1984. I had just purchased two APPLE ///s, each with floppy drives A: and B:, holding 5.25-inch disks with a capacity of 360 KB each. We thought them sheer magic! 😄
All those NORs, SOFs, WWDs, SHEX, and SHINC, and the small print in Charter Parties were more confusing than the simple dictum that for every debit there must be a credit. It's done with computers now but back then in my Greek salad days (with my apologies to Shakespeare's Cleopatra) in my office overlooking the busy port of Pireaus it was still done the old-fashioned way with paper, pen and hand-written time-sheets. I was often laid up for days with lengthy laytime calculations!
In my office in Piraeus
After a desperately placed classified in the ATHENS NEWS, I was lucky to find Bozenna, a former employee of Polfracht, a Polish shipbroking and chartering company in Gdynia (which is part of what my former fellow-countrymen used to call Danzig, but we won't go there now), and with a vastly over-qualified master’s degree in maritime transport economics.
"Nie ma problemu", said Bozenna and set to work, often craftily interpreting Charter Parties to swing the calculations in our favour. It proved to be a fortuitous encounter, just as it had been for Bozenna in 1979 when her Polish employers had sent her on a holiday replacement to their office in Piraeus. Two days after her arrival, another Pole, a marine insurance broker, invited her to dinner - and the rest is history.
Bozenna and Tadeusz (Ted) at the SAVOY Hotel
I know that history well because by the time I got to Greece in late 1982, Bozenna was already married to Tadeusz, the marine insurance broker, and both became my best friends during my time in Greece.
Ted in full flight
As it turned out, Bozenna was not only smarter than me in calculating laytime but also smarter than me by staying in Greece. Those years were the best years of my life, SHINC (Sundays and holidays included).
The grey area represents the reception of West Germany's ARD's television in East Germany. The areas in black had no reception and were jokingly called the "Valley of the Clueless" (Tal der Ahnungslosen), with ARD said to stand for "Außer Rügen und Dresden"
In the far east of Germany lie two infamous valleys. One is the far northeastern tip of the country, the other is around Dresden. During the Soviet occupation of East Germany, they were known as "Die Täler der Ahnungslosen", or the Valleys of the Clueless.
Not because the people there are unusually stupid, but because of the areas' topography which meant that West German television broadcasts couldn’t reach them. They were therefore cut off from the rest of the world, with only the East German state propaganda reaching them.
There are times when I feel I am living in the Valley of the Clueless, that valley being Australia. Here we all are, in an extreme energy crisis — although, if you listened to our clueless Labor government, you'd think that everything will be fine as long as we drive without our roof racks — and yet we maintain a full legislative ban on civilian nuclear power while sitting on nearly 28% of the planet’s known uranium reserves.
While China is building a nuclear empire, Australia is completely absent — zero operating capacity and zero prospective builds. While we are sitting on piddling fuel reserves, we are exporting gas. We also have oil but can't drill for it lest we upset our own homegrown bunch of Greta Thunbergs. And don't get me started on all those shut-down refineries.
While European investors still remember surprise bank holidays, limits on their ATM withdrawals, capital controls, double digit inflation and governments defaulting on their bonds, the stockmarket valuation of our country's biggest bank is greater than the world's biggest miner.
Our blissful ignorance is more ignorance than bliss.
To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself."
Padma has gone shopping which gave me an excuse to go to my little retreat at the bottom of "Riverbend". Just me, surrounded by some of my books and some of my keepsakes, and total silence on the inside and out, which is when the above quote entered my head. Where had I read it before? Of course, it was by Henry Miller, but in which of his books?
The question gnawed at me. Decades of forensic accounting when I had left no stone unturned, and years with management consulting firms who demanded that I would back up everything I wrote with footnotes to its source had left their mark on me, and so I went back to my library near the house to run through my Henry Miller books. No, not "Tropic of Cancer"; no, not "Tropic of Capricorn"; yes, of course, it had to be his book "The Colossus of Maroussi", which he had written after visiting the British writer Lawrence Durrell on Corfu Island in Greece in 1939. No wonder, it had stayed in my memory. And there it was on page 45:
Did I stop at page 45? Of course not! "The Colossus of Maroussi" is a beautiful Greek travelogue. As he wrote, "The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being". In it, Miller travels to Athens, Crete, Corfu, Poros, Hydra and Delphi. As he describes these places, he also portrays Greek writer George Katsimbalis (the "Colossus" of the book's title), and Lawrence Durrell, and Durrell's first wife Nancy, as well as Theodore Stephanides, the Greek-British doctor and polymath who was Lawrence Durrell's brother's friend and mentor.
Even though I hungered for more silence and for more of Henry Miller, what drove me back to the house in late afternoon was Padma's promise to bring back a roast chicken — not that KFC-[expletive deleted] but a real roast chicken from the rotisserie at Woolies, with a bit of coleslaw on the side. (Did you know that 'coleslaw' comes from the Dutch phrase "koolsla," which is "cabbage salad" [kool = cabbage, sla = salad]? When Dutch settlers brought this dish to America in the 17th century, "koolsla" became "coleslaw" or "cole slaw". You didn't know that? I thought so!)
Having filled the hole in my stomach and the hole in your education, I searched YouTube for anything on Henry Miller's famous quote and found this video clip. Of course, the smartphones and algorithms, of which he speaks, did not exist in his time. This is all AI-stuff, but cleverly done.
I almost wrote 'KI' - Künstliche Intelligenz - because that's what Germans call artificial intelligence which surprises me. They've been throwing out perfectly good German words by the DUDEN¹-load, replacing them with English words (sometimes even coupled with German conjugations and declensions²), and yet here they are, for once 'Germanising' what is essentially an English initialism³. It reminds me of the French who insist on calling a computer an 'ordinateur' — but, of course, you already knew that, didn't you?
The DUDEN¹ is a dictionary of the Standard High German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880 (which makes this an eponym).
A declension² is a grammatical process that applies to any inflected word that changes its form to indicate number, case, or gender; verbs are not declined; they are conjugated to show tense, mood, and person.
An initialism³ is not an acronym. Acronyms are pronounced as words (e.g., NATO), whereas initialisms spell out each letter (e.g., FBI).
If you want to know why I tell you all this, listen to ABC Radio National's Sunday Extra's "On pedantry *or being pedantic", as I did last Sunday.
After having spent more than ten thousand afternoons taking a nap and more than ten thousand mornings eating breakfast on the verandah, it's hard to believe that "Riverbend" didn't even have a verandah when I bought the place and immediately had one built.
That was thirty-three years ago, and the verandah is showing such signs of wear and tear that nothing short of a complete rebuild is needed.
I couldn't tell a good carpenter from a bad one if he hit me in the face with a claw hammer, and so I asked a friend if he had a friend who could do the job. He did, casually inspected it, and then quoted me $18,000.
I have little experience with tradesmen - of which most were bad - but I remembered the advice to always get three quotes. The first one was for $41,747.43 - I loved that 43 cents! - but didn't include an overhead beam which needed replacing, for which he quoted me $110 an hour. As I told him, "Not in my wildest dreams ..." He wasn't surprised at all.
The second one quoted me a not-quite-so-outrageous $24,499,20. It ticked all the boxes - as they say - and I thought I was on a winner!
But then came "Old School Quality Building" who had been the first one to show up for an inspection of the job but had been delayed giving me his quote, for which he apologised. $17,316.20. Old school indeed!
I immediately sent back an email, "Thank you for the time you took to look at the job and in preparing your quote. I really appreciated the thoroughness with which you did your inspection. I have never undertaken such a big job before, so please give me time over the weekend to think about it. I am keen to get started, so I'll get back to you early next week. I am also keen to establish a lasting relationship with a reliable carpenter as this old house is beginning to need more and more work done on it, which I hope you could help me with."
Think about it? Of course, I needn't think about! Three quotes and third time lucky! And so in my next email I said, "How soon can you start?"
Last night, after yet another of my more frequently occurring "Pinkelpause" - look it up! - when I had trouble falling off to sleep again, the movie "The Beach" - not to be confused with "On the Beach" - with Leonardo DiCaprio entered my mind.
It is, of course, based on the book of the same name by Alex Garland, and one of the few instances where I watched the movie before I ever read the book (with the book usually a far more satisfying experience).
"The Beach", both the movie and the book, are thought to be a remake of that other book and movie about a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves. That books, as every kid who had to read it at school knows, is called ... there I was, at four o'clock in the morning, and not being able to recall one of the classics of English literature.
I've always prided myself on a good memory and almost instant recall, and yet, despite willing my brain to come up with the title, it simply wouldn't obey me. It was only when the first light came filtering through the curtains and I heard an early fisherman passing on the river, that I gave up the fight, switched on my smartphone, tapped on the GOOGLE icon, and typed in "Golding" - yes, I had remembered the author's name but not the name of the book! - and there it was: "Lord of the Flies".
Of course! How could I have forgotten! From now on I shall always associate "Lord of the Flies" with sleepless nights which is perhaps as the author had intended it to be. Watch the movie for an instant recall.
I've just heard on the radio, and then followed it up by reading, about a life jacket worn by a passenger on RMS Titanic as she escaped the sinking steamship on a lifeboat sold at auction on Saturday for $906,000. (Don't even ask me if that's in Australian or American dollars; it's totally crazy in whichever currency.)
I immediately rushed out to the jetty house to check the storage box.
Phew, they're still there! Four old life jackets which could be worth a million dollars in years to come. I had better include them in my will.
What a brilliant movie! Now read the book at www.archive.org
Politically, Singapore is as primitive as Burundi, with repressive laws, paid informers, a dictatorial government, and jails full of political prisoners." Which is how Paul Theroux ranted about Singapore in his 1973 book "The Great Railway Bazaar", by which time it had been his home for three years, from 1968 to 1971, teaching English at the National University of Singapore.
It was also the setting for his first Asian novel, "Saint Jack", published later that same year. It was good he was elsewhere when it appeared, because Singapore's government didn't like the novel or its author any more than he liked the government, and banned the book.
It sold moderately elsewhere, until Peter Bogdanovich turned it into one of his best movies, shot on a low budget and on location. A phony script for a film called "Jack of Hearts" was submitted to obtain the official approval and this is what the Singaporeans on the cast and crew were told they were shooting as the cameras recorded the true grit of the waterfront, street markets, and notorious Bugis Street. The film, of course, was banned in Singapore when it was released in 1979.
"Saint Jack" tells the story of an affable American pimp who helped American GI's find companionship while on R&R in Singapore during the Vietnam War. Theroux has never said he knew any such individual, but his years of residence in Singapore give the novel a ring of truth.
Watching it decades after I had visited Singapore repeatedly while stationed in Rangoon in what was then Burma, it has more than a ring of truth about it: it is exactly how I remember Singapore from my days there in 1975 and again when my Saudi boss sent me back several times in the early 80s to supervise his transshipments through Sembawang.
Since then the world has changed, and so has Singapore, but a kindly soul, Toh Hun Ping of Singapore Film Locations Archive (whose website has disappeared since I first wrote about it), went to the extraordinary trouble of splicing together yesteryear's street scenes in "Saint Jack" with today's equivalents. Thanks for the memories, Hun Ping!
We’d been driving through Nelligen for years — just passing through on the way to somewhere else. Then one afternoon we stopped. The river was doing that thing it does in the late light, where everything goes gold and still, and we sat there long enough to think: what if this was the destination? That’s how Sunlit on the Clyde began. Not as a business plan, but as a feeling."
Long before the new owners allowed the place to fall into disrepute thanks to some of its 'shadier' social clientele, its previous owner, Mavis Dunbar, had already allowed it to fall into disrepair. She simply had grown old and run out of energy and patience with the never-ending demands of holiday-makers dropping in at all hours. You remember McDonald's catchcry, "You want fries with that?" Well, it is rumoured that Mavis used to ask her guests on arrival, "You want toilet paper, too?" In short, Sunlit Waters Leisure Retreat, as it was known, had seen better days long before Mavis Dunbar passed away in August 2020 - click here.
Sunlit Waters Leisure Retreat, as it was then Some of the old photos can be seen here
With just a bit of a clean-up and a fresh coat of paint on the outside and a very substantial refurbishment of the cabins, the old place, much to the relief of all in the neighbourhood, has slowly arisen from the ashes.
By driving an extra two-hundred metres past that "Holiday Here" bubble, you really could have struck it lucky and found "Riverbend Cottage", but, like good ol' Mavis, we, too, have grown old and run out of energy and patience to cater to the demands of holiday-makers, and "Riverbend Cottage" is no more, but we've kept the old website for old times' sake.
For the past thirty-three years, "Riverbend" has been our"feeling that the South Coast doesn’t have to mean crowds, car parks, or a motel room that could be anywhere. It can mean the sound of the Clyde in the morning, a proper breakfast on your own deck, and the satisfaction of having found somewhere that most people drive straight past."
Our regular visits to the pool not only refresh our bodies but also our minds as we always find plenty to talk about with our fellow-"aquanauts", and a recent visit was no exception.
After exchanging a few words with a Yorkshireman whom I had not met before, he said that I reminded him of someone in the movie "Babe".
All I could remember from that movie was the pig, so I asked, "What, I remind you of Babe the Pig?" "I was thinking of its owner", he replied.
Farmer Arthur Hoggett in the movie "Babe"
When we got home, I immediately looked up "Babe" on YouTube, and there was farmer Arthur Hoggett with his uncanny likeness of my father.
My father's photograph sometime in his early fifties
I read somewhere that as you age there comes a moment when you look into the mirror and suddenly see your father. Call me Arthur Hoggett!
At my house at Komin Kochin Avenue # 7 in Rangoon in 1975
In any memoir it is usual for the first sentence to reveal as much as possible of your subject's nature by illustrating it in a vivid and memorable motto, and with my own first sentence now drawing to a finish I see I have failed to do this!"
I could have claimed these to be my own words, but I've placed them in inverted commas to show that I took them from the first paragraph in Paul Theroux's book "Saint Jack". It is about an expatriate living in Singapore who begins to fear dying, alone and vulnerable, in an alien tropic, which may well be why I left what has been the best job I've ever had when I was stationed in Rangoon in what was then Burma.
There I was, twenty-nine years old, with an accounting degree on which the ink had hardly dried, occupying the position of chef-comptable with the French oil company TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles.
Flying out to an offshore oil rig
I occupied a sumptuous office which I shared with three Burmese accountants and two beautiful secretaries, was chaffeur-driven to and from work in a brandnew PEUGEOT 504, and lived in a gracious British Empire-style mansion in the leafy parts of Rangoon where I was being waited on hand and foot by four domestic staff. To top it all, I earned a salary several times higher than what I could have earned at home.
My three Burmese accountants
Did I stay when the French general manager almost begged me, first in French and then in broken English, to renew my twelve-month contract? I didn't, and to this day I still don't know why I didn't! I loved my job, I loved Burma and its people, but boredom, hubris, call it what you want, maybe even the money piling up in my bank account back home, made me chuck it all in — and I have lived to regret it over and over again.
My secretaries
What I should have known was that after having reached such a peak, everything else thereafter would taste like ashes in my mouth. For several years I kept thrashing about, looking for another job like it, and I wasted a whole six years before I finally hit my stride again in 1982 when I became the group financial controller for a large commodity trader in Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia is not beautiful Burma.
Perhaps the first sentence in my memoir yet to be written should read, "Reaching your peak too soon often means you have nowhere left to go."
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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