After a long night of pure Trumpenfreude, listening to the election results coming over the radio, I woke up to one of those "transgender" days which can't make up their mind if they're Arthur or Martha: one moment it was bright sunshine and I was looking for my sunnies, and the next moment I needed a jumper.
I retreated to my library which is cool on a hot day and warm on a cold day. With Bali Spa Piano & Gamelan playing softly in an endless loop, I reached for Polly Samson's "A Theatre for Dreamers" to take me back to one of my favourite islands - no, not Bali, but the Greek island of Hydra.
The year is 1960. The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled king and queen of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen.
Into their midst arrives teenage Erica, with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. Settling on the periphery of this circle, she watches, entranced and disquieted, as a paradise unravels.
More than twenty years later, I repeatedly visited this little island paradise by simply jumping aboard one of those diesel-belching Russian-built Flying Dolphins that departed regularly from the marina just downstairs from my apartment at # 2 Boudouri in Piraeus.
The book that made George Johnston famous
One of several collections of short stories and essays by Charmian Clift
Before I had ever read any of George Johnston's books or Charmian Cliff's even more compelling essays or heard Leonard Cohen sing, I stood outside their house and sipped a glass of retsina at the Douskos Taverna.
Those were the days, my friends; I thought they would never end, but end they did in 1985 when I decided to return to Australia after having misdiagnosed myself with an acute case of homesickness. More fool me.
Fast forward another forty years, and here I am in my own paradise, my library, my sanctuary from the big bad Trumpian world outside. And all that Trumpenfreude has paid off, because BHP finished the day up an incredible 6% to $59. It's a long way from its 52-week high of $68.77, but it's a start. Goodbye Trump! Get back under the rock whence you came!
It's been a night and a day of pure Trumpenfreude.
P.S. For all those misguided readers who still want to call a German shepherd an Alsatian and wouldn't stop in Hahndorf if they were offered free beer and pork knuckle, let me explain that "Trumpenfreude" is a clever play - well, at least I think so - on the word "Schadenfreude", which tells you all you need to know about Germans.
