If you can't spell it, don't buy it!

 

RRP (Recommended Retail Price) $10,499

 

Lucky for me, I speak Swedish almost as well as the Swedish chef in the Muppet Show, and I have also already run three 'Huskies' into the ground before this one became the object of my desire. This particular Husqvarna was one of two of the same model cluttering up the showroom at Industrial Replacements, and I was able to buy it for $7,950.00. Not that they sold it to me at a loss, so you can only image how huge the profit margin is on the full RRP.

 

I have attached their invoice just in case you feel like paying for it. 😀

 

Delivery should be sometime tomorrow, by which time I hope to have recovered some of the money on the share market. Not that today was much of a day, as my BHP shares are down by $1.25 apiece. But that's all right, too, as they are a wonderful cash cow. As the saying goes, "A cow for her milk, a stock for her dividend". I had put a SELL-order on my lithium shares LTR at $2.49 before we left home. I missed selling them by one cent. The sharemarket giveth and the sharemarket taketh away.

It's going to be a busy weekend going up and down my seven acres, trying to tame the grass that's been allowed to grow long and thick.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

The poem of my life

 

 

A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past.

Images of the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As a car slows to pick him up, we realise the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he's accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he's chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveller. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold — for it's a commercial we've been watching — the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears.

The advertisement I've just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice:

 

 

It is, of course, "The Road Not Taken" - routinely misidentified as "The Road Less Traveled" - by Robert Frost. In the commercial, this fact is never announced; the audience is expected to recognise the poem unaided. For any mass audience to recognise any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognise a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely.

But this isn't just any poem. It's "The Road Not Taken", and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture — and in world culture as well. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it's almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem.

A poem which almost everyone gets wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about "The Road Not Taken" — not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. It’s worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is often taken for granted: Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. When we play "White Christmas" in December, we correctly assume that it’s a song about memory and longing centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyce’s Ulysses, we correctly assume that it’s a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.

Frost's poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider "The Road Not Taken" to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion ("I took the one less traveled by"), but the literal meaning of the poem's own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem's speaker tells us he "shall be telling," at some point in the future, of how he took the road less travelled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths "equally lay / In leaves" and "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." The road he will later call less travelled is actually the road equally travelled. The two roads are interchangeable.

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming "ages and ages hence" that his decision made "all the difference" only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn't a salute to can-do individualism; it's a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.

With so many forks in my path, with so many opportunities gained and lost, with some fifty job relocations across fifteen countries, "The Road Not Taken" became my favourite poem ever since I discovered it ages and ages ago. During all this time it served me as a means of my self-deception before becoming the source of all my regrets as well as my comfort in old age. It's the poem of my life. Thank you, Robert Frost.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Buyer Beware!

 

 

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 next 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 third 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!

 

 

Four quotes; four vastly different prices:

Quote 1: $18,000.00 (which does NOT include beam and guttering)

Quote 2: $41,747.43 (which does NOT include beam and guttering)

Quote 3: $24,499.20

Quote 4: $17,316.20

No double-guessing whose quote I was going to accept, except that at the very last minute he and I had a disagreement over what was really a trifling matter and I decided not to go ahead with it. Instead, I decided to just buy all the material myself and then look for a carpenter - even a handyman could do it - who would do the work on an hourly basis.

 

 

The hardwood frame plus the new overhead beam cost $981.98.

 

 

480 lin/m of MERBAU decking plus 4 boxes of screws cost $2,965.40.

The guttering has been quoted to me at under $800, giving a total of $3,955,38, say $4,000, for the materials included in Quote 2 and 3.

Quotes 1 and 2 do not include the top beam ($219.60) nor the guttering $800); therefore, their materials can be reduced by $1,000 to $3,000.

Which leaves the following labour costs in the four quotes:

Quote 1: $15,000.00 ($18,000 minus $3,000)

Quote 2: $38,747.43 ($41,747.43 minus $3,000)

Quote 3: $20,499.20 ($24,499.20 minus $4,000)

Quote 4: $13,316.20 (17,316.20 minus $4,000)

Quote 2 suggests an hourly rate at $110; therefore, it allows for 352 hours (8.8 weeks!!!) Assuming the same hourly rate in all the other quotes, Quote 1 allows for 136 hours (3.4 weeks); Quote 3 for 186 hours (4.6 weeks); and even Quote 4 still allows for 121 hours (3 weeks).

All four tradesmen gave me a completion date of one week to ten days, so why do they want to bill me for three weeks or as many as eight? No wonder that not one of the quotes separated the cost of labour from the cost of the material, as the game would have been up at first glance.

Any carpenter wants to do a week's work for say $6,000 ? Call me now!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

German is a special language

 

Changing the upper case in 'Speisen' to lower case even changes the meaning of the preceding word in 'Warme speisen im Keller'. How subtle can you get? In fact, it is so subtle that it took me a while to dimly remember that 'Warme' was a slang word during my youth for homosexuals, a breed of men then never spoken of and certainly never seen.

 

An Austrian friend whom we befriended during his time in Australia many years ago, wrote to say that he had shaved a few milliseconds off his texting time by not capitalising German words. I hope it won't get you into trouble, Rob!

While capital letters in the English language are primarily used to mark the start of a sentence, the pronoun "I", proper nouns (specific names of people, places, organizations, and sometimes things), and the names of days, months, holidays, nationalities, languages, and formal titles, the capitalising of German words is far more subtle.

I can think of no word in the English language where changing its first letter from lower to upper case would give it a completely different meaning. It can do so in German. It's a very special language indeed.

I end with this observation: Aussie kids are kind, but German kids are Kinder.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

If a book is worth reading, it is worth keeping

 

 

I don't think of the books in my library as a "to be read" pile. Instead, I think of them as my wine cellar. I collect books to be read at the right time, in the right place, and in the right mood.

The narrator in this video clip, Raymond Russell, tells the story of his bibliomania, how his book collection has grown and changed over the years, which does strike a chord with me. I, too, may have gone from bibliophile to bibliomaniac, and am in danger of becoming a hoarder.

 

 

Still, thanks for the video clip. If I'm book-mad, at least I'm not alone!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

"It's too late for that!"

 

 

I had got up early to phone a supplier who had received the wrong order from the carpenter I had contracted to rebuild my verandah. Not being able to get through on the phone, I shaved and showered and was just about to drive into town when he returned my call, and I was lucky to cancel the order just in time. Being all dressed up with nowhere to go, I said to Padma, "Let's drive to Ulladulla for lunch at the bowling club".

 

The finger points to the Ulladulla Bowling Club

 

Which is what we did but, of course, no visit to Ulladulla is complete without a visit to my favourite bookshops, of which there are three: the Uniting Church op-shop, Vinnies, and the Lions Preloved Bookshop.

 

 

I came away with "Knowing What We Know Now" by Simon Winchester, which had been released only a couple of years earlier but here it was already in a second-hand opshop, and in mint condition at that. Then there was "Seriously Curious - The Facts and Figures that Turn Your World Upside Down", "Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour of Europe", and Paulo Coelho's "The Pilgrimage" along the road to Santiago de Compostella in Spain (which is a walk I have always wanted to do but now never will).

 

Read it online at www.archive.org

 

Then I found "Understanding the Woman in Your Life" by Steve Vinay Gunther (written by a man???), and I asked Padma, "Should I buy this?"

"It's too late for that!" she said, and so I spent the two dollars I had saved on that transaction, on Peter Schweizer's "Secret Empires", which is about America's top politicians' scams to end all scams. It's too late for us to do anything about that, too, but it's still worth reading about it.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

That "On Golden Pond" Moment

 

 

I have this "On Golden Pond" moment every morning as I look out the window and see the river shining in the early-morning sunlight. I look at it and am reminded of all the people who have brightened my life and who are no longer here. I look at it and I am taken back to those many magical moments in my life.

And as the early-morning sunlight loses its golden sheen, I am also reminded of how fleeting life is and how much we should hold on to those precious moments before they are no longer here, before we are no longer here! Then it is time to feed the ducks on my own golden pond and give the possum in the possum penthouse his banana and then to brew myself my first lemongrass-and-ginger cup of tea of the day.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

I can count the number of my friends on the thumb of one hand

 

Sorry, Chasers, but Peter Roget - despite his 'Frenchie' surname - was a proper Englishman

 

If you suffer from monologophobia – the obsessive fear of using the same word twice – you reach for Roget's Thesaurus, published in 1852 by Dr Peter Roget who longed for order in his chaotic world and so, from the age of eight, began his quest to put everything in its rightful place, one word at a time.

Roget was not just a doctor. He was also a polymath whose work influenced the discovery of laughing gas as an anaesthetic, the creation of the London sewage system, the invention of the slide rule and the development of the cinema industry – as well as being a chess master and an expert on bees, Dante and the kaleidoscope. All of which showed up in the work that he christened a "thesaurus", borrowing the Greek word for "treasure house".

His Thesaurus was constructed as a crystal palace of abstraction, each of whose 1,000 lists pushes a reader, often antonymically, to the next, “certainty” leading to “uncertainty” leading to “reasoning” leading to “sophistry.” I've never made head nor tail of the system and always go straight to the index — added by Roget almost as an afterthought — to use it as a book of synonyms even though Roget thought there "really was no such thing", given the unique meaning of every word.

 

This is a homophone, not to be confused with a homonym and homograph

 

I've always thought that people who claim to have lots of friends probably couldn't spell the word 'acquantance' ... 'aquantence' ... 'acquaintenance' ... well, you know, 'friends'. Looking at their facebook pages, I was amazed at the number of friends some of my acquaintances have and promptly reached for Roget's Thesaurus to see if the words 'friend' and 'acquaintance' are synonymous. According to the good doctor, they are!

So go ahead, Hengky Tambayong - who is, incidentally, a real nice guy and Bali's best hotel manager! - , and enjoy your 2,354 friends! I shall keep counting the number of my friends on the thumb of one hand.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

It's not hoarding if it's books

 

"... and this room is filled with magic."

 

I no longer have a TBR pile; I have a TBR mountain range. Although my concept is quite simple: I expect to live long enough to still read them all. If that will turn me into a nonagenarian, so be it!

If you wonder what "TBR" stands for, you must feel the same way I did when recently I stood in front of an automated money-dispenser which had been covered with the sign "This ATM is out of service ATM (at the moment)". Who said bankers have no sense of humour? We used to crack lots of jokes when I was with the ANZ Bank more than sixty years ago. The one that sticks in my mind is "Once you withdraw you lose all your interest". I understood the word 'innuendo' before I understood that one.

But back to my TBR mountain range: hoarders are known to hang on to some seemingly insignificant detritus — an old cup, a yellowed old newspaper (I had a neighbour in Canberra who kept every copy of the CANBERRA TIMES under his house) - which they couldn’t possibly throw away. I am not that kind of hoarder. What I hold on to are books.

 

 

I got my get-out-of-jail-free card when I discovered the Japanese word "tsundoku". Instead of castigating myself over every new book I buy, I tell myself that I'm practicing tsundoku. "That’s not a pile of unread books; that's a tsundoku", I tell my wife, the magic word transforming the pile into something unshackled from negative associations, into what I see when I look at it, a tower of potential reading experiences.

 

 

I leave you with Carl Sagan's now almost famous "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

If that will not turn you into a tsundoku master, I don't know what will.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Bougainville Blue

 

 

In the early 2000s, Brian Darcey wrote a book, "Bougainville Blue", which is about Bougainville and named after its spectacularly beautiful butterfly but also about a ‘blue’ which is Australian slang for a fight. It’s about the beauty of Bougainville and its flora and fauna. And it's about the destruction of Bougainville.

Brian and his family lived in Papua New Guinea for twenty-five years, from 1955 to 1980. He was the original Rabaul agent for CRA Exploration when he operated B.F.DARCEY & COMPANY PTY LTD at Rabaul until 1965, then at Toniva on Bougainville Island. They were cocoa and trochus shell exporters, but also had a store at Toniva selling artifacts, jewellery, clothing etc.

"Bougainville Blue" is a work of fiction but it also tells the reader about the Panguna Mine which was closed by a ragtag militia bent on reclaiming their land. Brian saw the Bougainville Revolutionary Army come into being. He observed the rise and fall of Australian rule in Bougainville. He watched the ‘blue’ take place. Listen to an interview Brian gave in 2008: click here or here.

"Bougainville Blue" is still available by mail order from Diane Andrews, email dianepithie@gmail.com, for $28, including postage.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. Sadly, Brian passed away on 14 May 2018 in Cairns, three months short of his 90th birthday. For more of his writing, click on Seventy years ago in New Guinea and Farewell to New Guinea.

 

What's on the telly and what's for dinner?

 

M.C. Escher's 'Klimmen en dalen' (‘Ascending and Descending’)

 

Call me a nerd but work has been my life and the principal source of my life's meaning! I loved my work which was always challenging and inspiring. On the rare occasion when it wasn't, I didn't stay long.

I mean, if you're going to work all your life, it had better be something you like. If not, remember that they write tragedies about people like you.

If most people seem to view their work as some sort of Escher-like drudge, it may be because they are still working at jobs chosen for them by their sixteen-year-old selves. I chose my first job when I was 14. And the next one when I was 17. And again when I was 19. All up, I made well over fifty choices to keep me challenged and inspired.

Mind you, I may not have the last laugh because I have now been in my last "job" — retirement — for over twenty-five years, and my challenges seem to be reduced to what's on the telly and what's for dinner.

 

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Unexpected visitors

 

On the left, our unexpected visitors Ian and Wendy

 

The river was very quiet over the long weekend. I like it that way, which is why I was almost annoyed when Padma called out, "There are some people at the gate!" By the time I had got off the old sofa on the verandah, they were already coming down the driveway towards the house. "They" turned out to be my car mechanic and his wife. Where else but in a small town do you get visits from your car mechanic?

I reflected on this and how lucky we are to live in this bend of the river, with no neighbours and a view to die for and sunshine everywhere - when the sun is shining which is most of the time. Of course, I will have to downsize sometime in the future, after which my only view will be my neighbours' houses and the sunshine limited to just a few hours a day - if it's not totally blocked out by my neighbours' houses and trees.

Apropos of downsizing, I still receive a steady trickle of inquiries in response to my real estate advertisement on www.realestate.com.au which asks interested buyers to send me their "Expression of Interest", as I don't want to scare them away with my asking price around $3.2 million. Most are scared away as soon as the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, but some hang around to try their luck by making a lower offer.

 

This advertisement is almost ten years old, but even though the land value has gone from $1,554,000 to $2,880,000, my asking price has NOT gone up by $1,326,000 to $3,601,000

 

The latest inquirer was quite insistent, telling me that his offer of $2.8million was quite generous since an earlier advertisement - see above - had suggested a price of only $2,275,000. That was many years ago when the land valuation alone had been a far more modest $1,554,000. That valuation has since exploded to a massive $2,880,000, which means that I am only asking for an extra $320,000 for the huge two-storey house and countless other structures and improvements.

 

Pub menu from 1972: Mixed Grill $0.75

 

It's strange how those same people love to see the real estate they already own double in value every ten years, but hate to see it happen to the real estate they want to buy. Anyway, this particular chap seemed too young to appreciate the magic of compound interest nor to have eaten a cheap pub lunch of mixed grill in 1972 which would've cost him 75 cents but now sets him back $40 at the Bomaderry Bowling Club.

 

Bomaderry Bowling Club Bistro menu from 2025: Non-Member Mixed Grill $40
(Incidentally, I have reported the   Pizza's   to the Apostrophe Protection Society)

 

Which brings me ever so conveniently to the object of my current desire which is a small house in Bomaderry at 17 Tarawara Street. It has plenty of storage space for all my books, the garden is small enough to give me plenty of time for reading, and with the bushland across the road, it has just two neighbours on either side. However, its main advantage is the five-minute walk to the railway station. I love train travel, and with my concessional OPAL Card I could be in and out of Sydney for $2.50 return.

 

A sylvan outlook across the street

 

Its asking price is $839,000, which sounds a lot when you find out that it sold for just $290,000 in 2015 which is only eleven years ago, but that is - once again! - the magic of compound interest, in this case on steroids. Maybe I show it to the chap who thinks "Riverbend" is too expensive!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. Of course, should the unexpected happen and PIXIE come up for sale, we'll stay put because PIXIE has even more space for my books. And we wouldn't have to move very far either: from "A" to "LJH"!