Many happy returns, Hoasi ...

... and, after 25 years in your chosen paradise of Eden-like beauty, the Kingdom of Tonga, may you never have to return to the cold climate and still more glacial moral atmosphere of your native Austria.

Putting my toe in the water

If it's Tuesday, it must be our aquatic day at the Ulladulla Indoor Swimming Pool. Even though Ulladulla is well over 50 km away, the beautiful pool, when combined with shopping and lunch at the bowling club, makes this a very worthwhile weekly trip.

A few dozen laps in the big pool, followed by another hour in the even warmer therapeutic pool ...

... and then another half-an-hour in the hot spa, and the world looks a whole lot better especially when viewed through a pair of rose-coloured goggles.

Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough. Groucho Marx

At the Top of the Muletrack

 

Langada is a white hill village on the Greek island of Amorgos in the Eastern Aegean. No foreigner had lived in it until Carola Matthews arrived there in 1966 to complete her first book, also on Greece, The Mad Pomegranate Tree.

Having come to know its people and feel at home among them she returned two years later to write about whatever still seemed to make sense after she had walked to the top of the muletrack leading up to her house. She discovered that there is less complication and more humour attached to life than she had thought.

I discovered this delightful book, a 1971 Travel Book Club Edition, in Ulladulla at the bottom of my own muletrack. It reminds me so much of my own eighteen months spent in Piraeus; my apartment overlooking Marina Zea from where I could jump aboard a 'Flying Dolphin' to escape to the islands; my cafenion where I spent many hours sitting in the sun and clicking my kombolói without a worry in the world; and my taverna where I indulged in the delights of Greek cooking.

Marina Zea from the air

I might as well have continued living there. My landlord thought I would when he offered to sell me the apartment at Marina Zea for what was then the equivalent of two months' salary; my Saudi boss thought I would when he kept pushing more and more work onto me. The break came when I discovered that one of his trading partners had 'forgotten' to pay him an almost-a-million-dollar settlement dating back several years before my arrival. I was able to recover the money plus interest but all my boss said was, "What took you so long?"

All mountains are built of molehills; all storms originate in tea-cups; the Trojan War might never have been fought had not Laomedon cheated Apollo and Poseidon over their payment for the building of the walls; and I might still be living in Greece today had it not been for those words "What took you so long?". I knew that my Saudi boss, stuck in Jeddah - as I had been for the previous two years - , envied me my life in Greece because no Arab loves the desert but this time he had gone too far. "I'll be going back to Australia in April", I told him, perhaps unwisely, and so I did.

"I am a part of all that I have met", said Ulysses, to which I want to add "... and all that I have met is part of me" because after Greece, philanthropy means literally 'love of man' to me rather than sending intermittent cheques to orphanages, and a metaphor is as much a Greek removalist van to me as it is a figure of speech. After Greece, everything is Greek to me!

Hérete! (literally: Be happy!)

 

Some days are diamonds, some days are stones

 

 

Think you are having a bad day? Fire authorities in California found a corpse in a burned-out section of forest while assessing the damage done by a forest fire. The deceased male was dressed in a wet suit, complete with scuba tanks on his back, flippers, and face mask.

A post-mortem test revealed that the man died not from burns, but from massive internal injuries. Dental records provided a positive identification. Investigators then set about to determine how a fully clothed diver ended up in the middle of a forest fire.

It was revealed that on the day of the fire, the man went diving off the coast, some 20 miles from the forest. The fire fighters, seeking to control the fire as quickly as possible, had called in a fleet of helicopters with very large dip buckets. Water was dipped from the ocean and emptied at the site of the forest fire. You guessed it. One minute our diver was making like Flipper in the Pacific, the next, he was doing the breast stroke in a fire dip bucket 300 feet in the air.

Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed. But keep reading....

Still think you're having a bad day?

A man was working on his motorcycle on the patio, his wife nearby in the kitchen. While racing the engine, the motorcycle accidentally slipped into gear. The man, still holding onto the handlebars, was dragged along as it burst through the glass patio doors.

His wife, hearing the crash, ran in the room to find her husband cut and bleeding, the motorcycle, and the shattered patio door. She called for an ambulance and, because the house sat on a fairly large hill, went down the several flights of stairs to meet the paramedics and escort them to her husband.

While the attendants were loading her husband, the wife managed to right the motorcycle and push it outside. She also quickly blotted up the spilled petrol with some paper towels and tossed them into the toilet.

After being treated and released, the man returned home, looked at the shattered patio door and the damage done to his motorcycle. He went into the bathroom and consoled himself with a cigarette while attending to his business. About to stand, he flipped the butt between his legs.

The wife, who was in the kitchen, heard a loud explosion and her husband screaming. Finding him lying on the bathroom floor with his trousers blown away and burns on his buttocks, legs and groin, she once again phoned for an ambulance. The same paramedic crew was dispatched.

As the paramedics carried the man down the stairs to the ambulance they asked the wife how he had come to burn himself. She told them. They started laughing so hard, one slipped, the stretcher dumping the husband out. He fell down the remaining stairs, breaking his arm.

Still having a bad day? Just remember, it could be worse..

The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were being released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later, in full view, a killer whale ate them both.

Still think you are having a bad day?

A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen shaking frantically, almost in a dancing frenzy, with some kind of wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current, she whacked him with a handy plank of wood, breaking his arm in two places. Up to that moment, he had been happily listening to his Walkman.

Still think you're having a bad day?

Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn , Germany . Suddenly, all two thousand pigs broke loose and escaped through a broken fence, stampeding madly. The two hapless protesters were trampled to death.

What?! Still having a bad day??

Iraqi terrorist Khay Rahnajet didn't pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with 'return to sender' stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb… he opened it and was blown to bits.

There now, feeling better?

I don't let old age bothet me. There are three signs of old age. Loss of memory ... I forget the other two ...

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