I spent the weekend in my slippers

 

Reading, of course. For me, reading is a serious illness, a pathological obsession, but I don't want to be cured.

I finished the two non-fiction books I had written about earlier - see here. I prefer non-fiction books to fiction, not only because, as they say, truth is stranger than fiction, but also because it is more exciting.

The next excitement already awaits me with a book which just arrived in the mail: The Box. While the more devious-minded among you may wonder what it is all about, I shall write a blog on it and put you out of your misery tomorrow.

 

My seven instalments of fame

 

 

My birthplace in Germany, Stendal, is in the depth of winter which might explain why its Bürger are willing to read my life story which has been serialised, from December through to June, in their Stendal Magazin.

 

 

Get yourself a copy of "Learn German in 7 Days", then come back here next week to read the seven instalments:

 

 

 

 

 

How did you go?

 

I was going to start smoking and put on weight but three days into the new year and halfway through the first weekend I must confess I have dismally failed.

So it's back to my other vice, reading, which is a great excuse to be antisocial. I mean, you start reading and people just leave you alone and you can be as selfish as you like.

My new selections for the new year are ...

Long before the invention of printing, let alone the availability of a daily newspaper, people desired to be informed. In the pre-industrial era news was gathered and shared through conversation and gossip, civic ceremony, celebration, sermons, and proclamations. The age of print brought pamphlets, edicts, ballads, journals, and the first news-sheets, expanding the news community from local to worldwide. This groundbreaking book tracks the history of news in ten countries over the course of four centuries. It evaluates the unexpected variety of ways in which information was transmitted in the premodern world as well as the impact of expanding news media on contemporary events and the lives of an ever-more-informed public. Andrew Pettegree investigates who controlled the news and who reported it; the use of news as a tool of political protest and religious reform; issues of privacy and titillation; the persistent need for news to be current and journalists trustworthy; and people's changed sense of themselves as they experienced newly opened windows on the world. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pettegree concludes, transmission of news had become so efficient and widespread that European citizens--now aware of wars, revolutions, crime, disasters, scandals, and other events--were poised to emerge as actors in the great events unfolding around them. - description ex www.bookdepository.com

... and

In this provocative, startling book, Robert D. Kaplan, the bestselling author of "Monsoon" and "Balkan Ghosts, " offers a revelatory new prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In "The Revenge of Geography, "Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world's hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe's pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan's porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India's main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century's looming cataclysms. Praise for "The Revenge of Geography" "[An] ambitious and challenging new book . . . ["The Revenge of Geography"]""displays a formidable grasp of contemporary world politics and serves as a powerful reminder that it has been the planet's geophysical configurations, as much as the flow of competing religions and ideologies, that have shaped human conflicts, past and present."--Malise Ruthven, "The New York Review of Books" " " "Robert D. Kaplan, the world-traveling reporter and intellectual whose fourteen books constitute a bedrock of penetrating exposition and analysis on the post-Cold War world . . . strips away much of the cant that suffuses public discourse these days on global developments and gets to a fundamental reality: that geography remains today, as it has been throughout history, one of the most powerful drivers of world events."--"The National Interest" " " "Kaplan plunges into a planetary review that is often thrilling in its sheer scale . . . encyclopedic."--"The New Yorker" "["The Revenge of Geography"] serves the facts straight up. . . . Kaplan's realism and willingness to face hard facts make "The Revenge of Geography" a valuable antidote to the feel-good manifestoes that often masquerade as strategic thought."--The Daily Beast "From the Hardcover edition." - description ex www.bookdepository.com

I'm still waiting for Breaking Bad and Philosophy to arrive but these two will last me through the first weekend.

If you're interested in these books, search for them on God's Own Official Guide to Locating Everything (aka Google).

Happy New Year and happy reading!

 

I used to live and work there

 

www.bwana.de

 

For a whole six months, from late September 1968 until late March 1969, I lived and worked in this tiny town at the end of the world, squeezed in between two deserts, one watery, the other sand. It was a dead-end job in a dead-end town.

 

 

South-West Africa was then ruled by South Africa, and South Africa imposed 'apartheid'. Let me explain this innocent word 'apartheid':

The mostly Dutch people who settled South Africa from the seventeenth century onwards wanted to have the place to themselves which meant kicking out the people who were already there. Kicking them out didn't quite work, so a political system was devised that gave the white people all the goodies, and confined the black people to all the marginal land.

Soweto hadn't happened yet but already there had been Sharpeville, although South Africa was doing a great job of pretending to the rest of the world (and to itself) that the country was some sort of split-level paradise, but the rage and anger was bubbling away under the surface.

Despite benefitting from it, I felt uncomfortable with the apartheid system, and so, despite several other job offers (including one with the VOLKSKAAS in Cape Town), South-West Africa (now Namibia) became merely a staging post to earn enough money to get back to Australia.

In the short six months I worked there, I never had the time to see much of the country or even visit the nearby ghost town of Kollmannkuppe.

 

www.bwana.de

 

However, for another young German, whom I befriended there, it became "home" - see here. "There, but for the grace of God, go I!"

 

 

I've never seen a site that didn't look better looking back

 

And I've never seen a year that didn't look better looking back, so here's to the new year in the hope that it will bring that elusive buyer to "Riverbend".

Strangely, on the last day of the old year the phone rang and a voice - not a 'moneyed' voice - said,

"I'm calling about youse place."

    "Yes, what can I tell you?"

"'ow big's the land?"

    "Over seven acres."

"Right, hmm, yeah, looks big. 'owmuchisit?"

    "Around two million."

"...(silence)...."

    "Hello ... Hello ..."

"...(silence)..."

I think he just hung up.

Friends and guests who come to "Riverbend" ask me, "Why do you want to leave this beautiful place?" and assure me, "You live in Paradise!", but even Paradise can be tiring and what they don't know is that, while in all my years of roaming I managed once or twice to stay in a place for 21 months, I never stayed anywhere as long as I have at "Riverbend": 21 years! Never!

I remember this song from the late 60s by the band Herman's Hermits: "Rise and shine, sleepy Joe, There are places to go" and "Nowґs the time, donґt you know, To get into a new kind of dream".

My new kind of dream has been for some time to go overseas again and the year when I turn septuagenarian may well be the time to do it. There's still so much more to see and do apart from renovating kitchens and repairing ride-on mowers and taking out the garbage and watching welfare cheats waving in a funny way with only their middle finger stuck up in the air.

When the end comes, I don't want to be in my slippers. I want to still have my boots on; not gum boots either, but hiking boots, well worn and dirty! Rise and shine, sleepy Joe, there are places to go!

So here's to the new year in a new place - in fact, some 18,307 new places which is the number of islands in the Indonesian archipelago!