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I always thought that "The Thirty-Nine Steps" was just another Alfred Hotchcock movie until I discovered the slim hundred-page book by John Buchan of the same name. As the book's Introduction tells me, it is one of five novels which have Richard Hannay as hero, the others being "Greenmantle", "Mr Standfast", "The Three Hostages", and "The Island of Sheep".
"The Thirty-Nine Steps" is significant as being the first true espionage adventure, following "The Riddle of the Sands" by Erskine Childers, which was made into a beautiful movie in the U.K., and also in Germany where it was filmed in the Frisian Islands off the North Sea coast.
Listen to a radio dramatisation here
Read the book here
I've just copied the above audiobook onto a USB stick to take to bed with me for some four hours of listening pleasure under my electric blanket on this penultimate winter's night. See you all in the morning.
P.S. Don't pick on me for using the word 'penultimate'. I'd never used it either until I worked for the American construction company Bechtel Corporation on Bougainville Island. Americans love big words - well, except for the Donald perhaps - and after one of them had used this word in one of his memos, it spread like wildfire, with some even adding an extra paragraph to their memos so that they could refer to the 'penultimate paragraph'. The words 'penultimate' and 'Bougainville' will be one and the same for me until I draw my penultimate breath.
Under the noses of British intelligence, London has become the European hub for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamic terror and extremism - so much so that it has been mockingly dubbed Londonistan. In this ground-breaking book Melanie Phillips pieces together the story of how Londonistan developed as a result of the collapse of traditional English identity and accommodation of a particularly virulent form of multiculturalism. Londonistan has become a country within the country and not only threatens Britain but the rest of the Western world.
I know you won't read this book - well, at least not until it's too late to do anything about it - so I've found you two video clips of a speech by the author, Melanie Phillips. It received a total of altogether FIVE!!! thumbs-up on YouTube which says it all about the apathy of the West.
A bookseller wins ten million dollars in the lottery. His estatic friends ask him what he plans to do with the money. With a huge smile on his face, he answers: "I'll keep selling books until the money runs out!"
Despite this joke, I have often fantasised about being surrounded by books all day long by opening a bookshop. I even went as far as doing some research on the subject, only to find out about the low margins, the long hours, the tough competition, and how hard it would be just to cover the rent.
One particular book that helped me in my research was "Tea in the Library", and I even struck up a short acquaintance by email with its author, Annette Freeman, who was then already living in Europe. She had actually turned her fantasy into reality. As she wryly noted, her book is a 'how not to' for anyone thinking of venturing into retail, let alone bookselling although, on the whole, the book is a positive read.
I had found the book several years ago in an op-shop, read it, and put it away somewhere. It was during last week's trip to Ulladulla that I found another copy in another op-shop. It seemed like it had been waiting for me, and so I took it and gave it a new home in "Melbourne", to be read once more should the old fantasy of opening a bookshop reassert itself.
If you have had the same dream of opening your own bookshop, you will reap vicarious pleasure from her forays into choosing colours and designs for her logo and shop fittout; the excitement of deciding what books to outlay her budget on; the images of her Chesterfield lounges and wing chairs in cosy lamp-lit corners surrounded by floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves brimming with beautiful books. Bliss indeed. And if you are lucky, the cost of this book will be all you give up to experience it.
I bought this book - twice! and for a mere $2 each time - primarily for the vicarious experience, but I quickly found that Annette Freeman's prose (her day job is as a trademarks lawyer) is an absolute pleasure to read. The chapters conveniently cover specific aspects of the life of the shop: Yarn-a-Thon, The Duck Run, Sea in the Library (getting curious?), and throughout Annette interweaves a taste of her own modus operand for life. Here is a brave woman who deliberately ventures out of her comfort zone into the angst-ridden territory of the small business owner but does not end up completely disillusioned, bitter and twisted. Instead, you meet a woman who has accumulated great wisdom at great cost and in the process maintained her poise, grace and equanimity.
Reading this book will give you a whole new appreciation for your local bookshop and, if nothing else, will want you shake the hands of their owners in gratitude for what they endure for your reading pleasure.
I suppose it is a bit ironic for someone in ancient Greece to update you on Australian cinema. But then again, we've had a few thousand years of headstart while your folks were still hanging out in the trees, followed by a sudden influx of convicts. Consider this a little cultural exchange from the cradle of civilization!"
Thus wrote my old friend and fellow-worker in Greece, Bozenna, after she had watched the Australian film "The Travellers", which hasn't even been released in Australia yet. It tells the story of Stephen Seary (Luke Bracey), a successful set designer who returns from Europe to Western Australia to visit his dying mother one last time. What begins as a short journey turns into a stark confrontation with his stoic, resentful father Fred (Bryan Brown) in a small, traditional town.
As I told Bozenna, any movie with Bryan Brown in it is worth watching. I mean, who could forget him from his appearances in "The Odd Angry Shot", "Breaker Morant", "Stir", "The Shiralee" - especially "The Shiralee" - and dozens more. I must try and watch them all - and certainly Bozenna's latest recommendation, "The Travellers" - even though some of them are now almost fifty years old and quite hard to get hold of.
"Stir" is one of those old ones, dating back to 1980, of which I could only find this incomplete copy on YouTube. It's still worth watching though.
My social 'colander' is full of holes these days, but somehow a whole lot got pushed through today: an early-morning float in the 34° warm-water pool followed by an eye test for my driver's licence followed by a quick dash to the RTA to renew it.
At my age I hate to over-capitalise and would've been happy to renew it for six months, but they offered me five years for $234, which I took on the condition that, if I don't use it up, my heirs will inherit the refund.
With the whole day still ahead of us, we drove the fifty kilometres to Ulladulla for lunch at the local bowling club followed by some grocery shopping, which I sat out on the 'Waiting Husbands' Bench' outside a second-hand shop. I'd gone back there because during a previous visit it had displayed an old OLYMPIA typewriter which was almost the same model I had bought in New Guinea and then schlepped around the world for twenty years. It was still for sale at $200 but without a ribbon, and where would I be able to buy a new typewriter ribbon these days?
And so I went to my other favourite op-shop where I picked up several interesting books, such as "It's All Greek to Me!" and "The Summer of my Greek Taverna", to remind me of one of my more memorable and laid-back work assignments (I refuse to call them a career; they were more like a succession of occupations that seemed interesting at the time).
P.S. A frequent reader of this blog in my old hometown replied to this post with this clever little message typed on his very own OLYMPIA typewriter which still had an inked ribbon and includes the German character 'ß' and even the umlaut 'ü'. It's enough to make me homesick for a 'Vaterland' that had ceased to exist for me a very long time ago.
"Hello Peter, sunny greetings from your old hometown Braunschweig!"
And this is the German reader's very own OLYMPIA typewriter full of 'Ü' and 'Ö' and Ä's which, if you look at them, they look right back at you, but the no longer much used 'ß' is tucked away below the question mark. I still remember the rule: a double-s is used after a short vowel ('Wasser') but an 'ß' - which is just another form of a double-s - is used after a long vowel ('Straße'). Strange, how some rules stick with you all your life! Such as "'Gar nicht' wird gar nicht zusammengeschrieben!"
By the way, did you know that if a standard western typewriter keyboard were expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph, it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide? That would make it slightly less portable than my trusty old OLYMPIA typewriter.
At the end of his book "For Who the Bell Tolls", David Marsh recommends some further reading. The books he recommends include Bill Bryson's "Mother Tongue", which I have read more than once, but his top recommendation goes to "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.
As he writes, "If you only read one book about language, apart from For Who The Bell Tolls, make it this one. Starting from Darwin's assertion that language is 'an instinctive tendency to acquire an art', Pinker, a cognitive scientist, develops the theme that 'people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs'."
And he quotes from the book: "To a scientist, the fundamental fact of language is its sheer improbability. Most objects in the universe - lakes, rocks, trees, worms, cows, cars - cannot talk --- I can arrange a combination of words that explain how octupuses make love or how to remove cherry stains; rearrange the words in even the most minor way, and the result is a sentence with a different meaning or, most likely of all, word salad. How are we to account for this miracle?"
My friends at www.archive.org offered several copies of the book for online reading but had to remove them for copyright reasons. Luckily, YouTube offers the above audiobook. It may not cover the whole 500-page-long book but should whet your appetite to order it on ebay. While you make your decision, you may want to listen to the man himself:
He's written so many fascinating books - click here - that I may well be tempted to press the BUY button more than once. However, right now we're off to the 34°C warm-water pool to chill out those ageing bones.
Actually, it's a twenty-page-short essay by Mark Forsyth about bookshops and the delights of not getting what you wanted, which is why I didn't immediately click the BUY button when I saw the hardcopy advertised on ebay for $7.
Instead, I bought it for $1.49 as an online Kindle file which I read online on the read.amazon.com.au/kindle-library, and then tucked it away on my harddisk for later re-reading. There's so much in those twenty pages. Take, for example, the short chapter "The Ghost in the Bookshop":
What a beautiful description of a perfect bookshop. Perhaps I should've paid the full seven dollars for the hardcopy. After all, I can afford it, as BHP has just now hit an all-time high of $68.77. Mind you, during the twenty minutes it took me to read this essay they eased back to $68, but that's still a 50% increase from the $45.27 at the start of this year.
At my age, Happy Hour is an afternoon nap. While I was asleep, BHP had given up all of today's gains and closed 27 cents down at $67.40. Still, there's always tomorrow. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
What do you know about alliteration, polyptoton, antithesis, merism, the Blazon, aposiopesis, hyperbaton, anadiplosis, hypotaxis and parataxis, polysyndeton, asyndeton, aiacope, hendiadys, epistrophe, amd the tricolon? Yep, me neither - and that's only on the first one hundred pages of the 230-page thick book "The Elements Of Eloquence".
As in his previous books, "The Etymologicon" (which dealt with the connections between words) and "The Horologicon" (which covered obsolete words), Mark Forsyth employs his ingenious trademark of ending one section with a word that starts the next, which I think is a form of anadiplosis - see chapter 9 on page 60. It means you are likely to start off reading a couple of chapters, and end up reading the whole book in one go.
Some of the rhetorical devices he discusses are well known, such as alliteration (Pride and Prejudice, Power to the People), but most will be unfamiliar terms. Forsyth's examples bring them immediately to life: for example polyptoton, where you repeat a word in a different sense (Please Please Me, "but me no buts").
It's packed with obscure but fascinating facts. On page 24 we learn that "to be bonny and buxom, in bed and at board, till death us do part" was part of the medieval marriage service; on page 25, that the first world war song "Bless 'em all, bless 'em all, the long and the short and the tall" originally went "Fuck 'em all".
Like Doug Piranha in the old Monty Python sketch – "he knew all the tricks: dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire" (see 10:54 in the above video clip) – Mark Forsyth wears his considerable knowledge lightly. And writes it down so beautifully.
I read about this book while reading "For Who The Bell Tolls". That's the thing with books: you read a book and then, like one of those Russian matryoshka dolls, another book pops up inside it. Of course, I could've read the online copy - as you can by clicking here - but I'm a booklover and need to open its cover and turn its pages, and so I lashed out $33.33 on a beautiful hardcover copy. Hours of reading pleasure await me!
Und schon seit dreiunddreißig Jahren! Wie schnell die Zeit vergangen ist!
Für zwanzig Jahre in aller Welt war "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld!" mein Motto gewesen. Jetzt ist es nur noch "Hier sitze ich, ich kann nicht anders!"
Vielleicht liegt es am Altwerden oder daran daß ich jetzt viel zu viel Kram am Hals habe um alles je wieder einzupacken und wegzuziehen.
Übrigens kannst Du "Riverbend" ganz kurz am Punkt 2:15 sehen, mußst aber aufpassen denn es ist nur so am unteren Rand des Bildes zu sehen.
Vielleicht setze ich eine 'drone' auf meinen Weihnachtswunschzettel und mach dann meine eigenen Aufnahmen. Bis dann!
I was puzzled by this headline in this internet article by livewiremarkets.com. How could BHP, the world's biggest miner, double the market capitalisation of CBA, Australia's biggest bank?
Then I realised that it was just an ambiguous, if not to say ambitious headline. Charlie Aitken had left out the word "be" which would have changed the headline to "BHP could be double CBA's market cap".
Crunching the numbers, this implies a $100 BHP share price. Here's how:
BHP's current share price is around $65, with some 5,081 million shares issued, giving it a market capitalisation of around $331 billion (never mind a few hundred million in rounding errors).
CBA's current share price is around 158, with some 1,673 million shares issued, giving it a market capitalisation of around $264 billion (same rounding errors).
If BHP were to achieve a market capitalisation twice that of CBA, that would divide $528 billion into 5,081 million shares, making its shares worth $104 each (again, ignoring the rounding errors).
WOW! And yet, walletinvestor.com has already pencilled in a 1-year "bull case" forecast of $95.39, albeit with a likelihood of only 25%.
How is this trend reflected in the immediate price? Well, after a huge jump in price to $65.75 on Thursday, it dropped to $65.16 on Friday, but overnight closing prices in London and New York suggest that BHP will resume trading in Sydney on Monday morning at well above $67.
Following Warren Buffett's advice to "only buy a stock if you'd be happy to own it if the market was closed for the next five years", I have been a rusted-on BHP investor for at least two long decades, and BHP's price movements have had a huge impact on the value of my portfolio. Yet it's just tiny dots on a flickering computer screen and a game that gets me out of bed in the morning and keeps my mind active. Come on, $104 !
To put it in perspective, BHP started the year at $45.76.
20.8.2026 day's range $64.68-$65.75, closed at $65.75 ↑
21.8.2026 day's range $64.85-$65.79, closed at $65.16 ↓
24.8.2026 day's range $67.03-$67.72, closed at $67.12 ↑
25.8.2026 day's range $67.34-$68.22, closed at $67.67 ↑
26.8.2026 day's range $67.29-$68.77, closed at $67.40 ↓
27.8.2026 day's range $66.40-$67.51, closed at $66.40 ↓
28.8.2026 day's range $66.33-$67.30, closed at $67.30 ↑
31.8.2026 day's range $65.27-$66.74, closed at $66.23 ↓
After yesterday's excursion to Eden, I was looking forward to a quiet day at "Riverbend" planting a few more trees (which I should've done thirty years ago), but Padma wanted to buy some lip balm which is only available at a certain pharmacy in Moruya. Twenty-five clicks there and twenty-five clicks back for a tiny tube of lip balm worth costing dollars!
If I hadn't agreed to go, my life wouldn't have been worth living, and so I thought I make the best of it and visit my favourite op-shop and have lunch at the bowling club as well. I think it must've been my sense of frustration that made me take a photo of the club's "WOMENS" amd "MENS" toilet signs even though I'd seen them many times before. If they had wanted to make them plural they would've been wrong; if they had wanted to make them possessives, they would've been even 'wronger'.
I noticed the lady at the cash register had been watching me. To keep her happy, I ordered a piece of cake for dessert. The cash register displayed, "DESERT $9.50". Oh no! I'd lived long enough in Namibia and Saudi Arabia not to want another piece of desert, let alone have it for dessert, but it turned out to be delicious and was artfully decorated.
"Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument."
The book beside the plate is Douglas Murray's book "The Strange Death of Europe - Immigration, Identity, Islam". It's happening in Europe; it's happening all over the Western world. Ignore it at your own peril!
Years ago, I found this book in my favourite op-shops for two dollars. It's the amazing story of a pack of killer whales who, for almost a hundred years, hunted around Eden on Twofold Bay, a small town just two hundred clicks south of Batemans Bay, and assisted local fishermen during the winter whaling season.
These killers would actually herd whales into the bay and then attract the land-based whalemen. As the boats put out from the shore, one killer would lead them to where the rest of the pack had surrounded the whale, working much as sheep dogs do for drovers. After the kill the pack claimed the dead whale's tongue and lips as reward, the fishermen removing the rest of the carcass a few days later.
I never quite finished reading this book but was reminded of it today when I visited the Eden Killer Whale Museum where the same book was on sale for $29. I had gone there with a new neighbour who is from that tiny, wealthy landlocked country in Western Europe surrounded entirely by Belgium, France, and Germany - anyone who can correctly name it wins a free twelve-month subscription to this blog - and recently settled in Nelligen just a few houses up from "Riverbend". He had always wanted to visit the museum and suggested I should join him on this trip, and so we set off early this morning to make a whole day of it.
By this time you will want to know more about this, so here we go:
But before we got to Eden, we stopped for lunch at the Robyn's Nest Lakeside Resort, which an old friend had bought some years ago to get rid of all the hard-earned money he had squirelled away in the past.
Listening to my friend's story reminded me of the story of the ageing booklover - not me! - who, having won the lottery, opened his long dreamt-of bookshop. Asked how long he would run the bookshop, he replied, "Until I run out of money". My friend's usual open-handed hospitality only made things worse, because even though he was still in town when we arrived, he had already instructed his staff to start serving us lunch and drinks and not to ask us for any money. (If I had known, I would've ordered a bottle of the most expensive wine on the list which, from memory, was over $5,800 !!! Could someone please email me a copy of that wine list, so I can double-check my memory, as I find it quite hard to believe that anyone would order that stuff. I suspect they only put it on the list to make people who order a wine in the more moderate $300 price range feel like they're getting a bargain.)
As you can't see who's clicking his heels, I let you guess which side I am on. Hint: I have started wearing braces as I no longer have a waist to speak of!
Not having seen him for six or seven years, I asked to have my photo taken with him, but having grown considerably older since then - I far more than he - I decided to publish the above 'headless' version only. (Actually, it was a lousy shot as the photographer had failed to call out "Say cheese!" while I was thinking of what my BHP shares were doing and my friend wondered if I had ordered that $5,800 bottle of wine.)
My friend's new home is truly spectacular, and Padma and I would love to go back and stay for a whole weekend, perhaps even for a whole week, but only if my far too generous friend allows us to pay full price.
At my age, my back goes out more often than I do, but I'm now, tired and hungry, safely home again. It's been a long but wonderful day and, with the weekend coming up, I'll be looking through my library to find Tom Mead's "Killers of Eden" to finally finish reading this amazing story.
Someone named Aiden from an email address inside "a boutique investment research firm that harnesses the power of young, tech-savvy finance and media experts" located in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) has just sent me the following email:
Since Aiden's email address is aritrag@flairtree.com, I went straight to flairtree.com to possibly negotiable this "beneficial bargain that comes with a relatively reduced price" to an even more beneficial bargain.
While I am still waiting for his reply, I thought it best to send you the above video clip as an advance copy of "all those lustful videos" that Aiden may show you if I can't strike an even more "beneficial bargain".
After all, Aiden seems to be such a nice chap - he even suggested that I "ensure all [my] passwords are replaced with new ones on a regular basis" so that I don't "get involved in similar kind of unpleasant events anymore"- that I'm sure he'd be willing to negotiate.
(If you received the same email, we could ask for a bulk discount!)
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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