Pistols at dawn?

 

I'd rather go and see a proctologist twice a day than go and see anyone in Council even once a year; however, when I received their plans for the planned Water Meter location I thought that 'biting-my-tongue-until-it-bleeds' had to stop for just this once.

 

 

The duelling commenced with an email I sent them. It was promptly responded to with a succinct "Thanks for your email last Friday. Please see a response to each of your questions/statements in red below."

 

I have received your water and sewer plans. With regare to the water supply, I noticed that the Water Meter location is at the outer extremity of the property. Does this imply that, in order to connect the property with the water mains, I as owner would have to instal all the necessary infrastructure from that far-away Water Meter location all the way to the house? Yes, this is correct. To connect the property to Council’s water mains you will be required to install all necessary infrastructure between your house and the water meter. If that is so, I would have expected that the Water Meter be located at least near the entrance of the property marked on the plan as "Gate". Furthermore, I would have expected that the sewer discharge line and the water pipe could be laid along the same route at the same time. Council requires that the water meter is located within 1m of the boundary of the frontage to Sproxtons Lane and as close to Council’s water reticulation pipe as possible. Council is not connecting existing plumbing to the water reticulation system, this is the property owner’s responsibility.

 

That "property owner's responsibility" would mean laying at least some 150 metres of waterpipe instead of no more than (say) 60 metres if the location of the water meter was at the front of my gate. Quite apart from the part that the indicated location is the lowest point of Sproxtons Lane and almost constantly full of water and a veritable wilderness. Good luck to anyone who wants to install anything there!

Reloading on the run, I emailed back:

 

Thank you for your prompt reply. Given your reply, it is highly unlikely that I would ever connect to the water mains, not only because of its prohibitive costs but also because it is almost impossible given the existing topography, which perhaps has not been taking into account by your office. I would have thought that a logical arrangement would have been for the digging and pipe-laying of the water mains to be at the same time and follow the same path as the sewerage, but I guess logic doesn't come into it. Am I therefore at liberty NOT to sign off on the Water Meter Location Plan since I don't approve of it? As a matter of interest, could you indicate to me where the Water Meter Location would be for Number 33 ? Also, on the point of the topography, is the sanitary drainage from point BK to the right-angle bend by the gateway inside my boundary or outside?

 

Council didn't take long in replying:

 

As your properties are zoned RU1, Council is happy to exclude your properties from the water supply scheme for Nelligen. As a result, we will not provide you with a connection to Council’s water reticulation system and you will not be charged the annual water availability charge. The water meter for #33 Sproxtons is proposed to be located in the South East corner of the Lot. The pressure sewer pipe is currently proposed to traverse within your property boundary, however, after reviewing the design I believe the main should be located outside your boundary in accordance with the revised plan attached.

 

And here's their revised plan which is their tacit admission that the location is impossible, but they only admit to relocating their Sewer Boundary Kit. It's 'up yours' for the impossible Water Meter location.

 

I have attached the two signed-off Sanitary Drainage and Water Meter Location plans. I find it interesting that, following my criticism of the almost impossible location of both the Sewerage Boundary Kit (BK) and the Water Meter, you readily agreed to a relocation of the BK but did nothing about the similarly affected Water Meter.

 

Pistols at dawn? I don't think so. I'd rather go and visit a proctologist! However, I did fire off a parting shot:

 

Further to my "provisional" signing-off on the location of the Water Meter ("successful installation at that location highly unlikely because of prevailing topography"), I still maintain that the better location of the Water Meter, for both you as meter-reading authority and for me as user, is by my front gate. Please discuss this with the powers-that-be, and if they insist on the same location, I would like to be quoted chapter and verse why the water meter must be located there and not, as is most sensible, by my front gate.

 

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Ein Adventgedicht

 

 

Es Blaut Die Nacht
Die Sternlein blinken
Schneeflöcklein leise niedersinken
Auf Edeltännleins grünem Wipfel häuft sich ein kleiner weißer Zipfel

Und Dort
Vom Fenster her durchbricht den dunklen Tann' ein warmes Licht
Im Forsthaus
Kniet bei Kerzenschimmer die Försterin im Herrenzimmer
In dieser wunderschönen Nacht hat sie den Förster umgebracht

Er war Ihr Bei der Heimespflege
Seit langer Zeit schon sehr im Wege
So kam sie mit sich überein Am Nicklausabend muß es sein

Und als
Das Rehlein ging zur Ruh', das Häslein tat die Augen zu
Erlegte sie - direkt von vorn'- den Gatten über Kimm' und Korn
Vom Knall geweckt rümpft nur der Hase zwei-, drei-, viermal
Die Schnuppernase
Und Ruhet weiter
Süß im Dunkeln
Derweil die Sternlein traulich funkeln

Und in der guten Stube drinnen, da läuft des Försters Blut von hinnen
Nun muß die Försterin sich eilen, den Gatten sauber zu zerteilen
Schnell hat sie bis auf die Knochen nach Waidmanns Sitte aufgebrochen
Voll Sorgfalt legt sie Glied auf Glied, was der Gemahl bisher vermied

Behält ein Teil Filet zurück, als festtägliches Bratenstück
Und packt zum Schluß - es geht auf vier - die Reste in Geschenkpapier
Da Dröhnt's Von fern
Wie Silberschellen
Im Dorfe hört man Hunde bellen.
Wer ist's, der in so tiefer Nacht im Schnee noch seine Runde macht?
Knecht Ruprecht kommt mit goldenem Schlitten
Auf einem Hirsch herangeritten!

Heh, gute Frau, habt ihr noch Sachen, die armen Menschen Freude machen?
Des Försters Haus ist tief verschneit, doch seine Frau steht schon bereit
Die sechs Pakete, heil'ger Mann, es ist alles, was ich geben kann
Die Silberschellen klingen leise
Knecht Ruprecht macht sich auf die Reise
Im Försterhaus die Kerze brennt. Ein Sternlein blinkt
Es ist Advent.

 

"Your coming here would give me a new lease on life"

 

The main street of Mount Perry, circa 1956, when it was still in its heydays

 

It is possible, I suppose, to construct hypothetical circumstances in which you would be pleased to find yourself, at the end of a long day, in Mount Perry, Queensland - perhaps something to do with rising sea levels that left it as the only place on earth not under water, or maybe some disfiguring universal contagion from which it alone remained unscathed. In the normal course of events, however, it is unlikely that you would find yourself standing on its lonely main street at six thirty on a warm summer's evening gazing about you in an appreciative manner and thinking: 'Well, thank goodness I'm here!'"

So wrote Bill Bryson in his book "Bill Bryson Down Under" in chapter 12 about Macksville, New South Wales. I took the liberty of quoting from it, only substituting Mount Perry for Macksville, both of which I know, Macksville because an old accountant-friend from my days in New Guinea had opened an office there, doing little more than helping cow cockies fill out unemployment claim forms, and Mount Perry because my best friend, also from my New Guinea days, had settled there sometime in the early 1980s when I was still working in Athens in Greece and started receiving letters from him postmarked "Mount Perry Qld 4671".

That was years before the internet, and I had no way of knowing where Mount Perry was or what it looked like. That eye-opening revelation was left until mid-1985 after I had returned to Australia and, unable to find work in Townsville in Far North Queensland, I moved down to Sydney and visited Mount Perry on my way south. By that time the last traces of some former mining boom had disappeared, the picture show had been closed for years, the local mechanic had just moved to Gin Gin, the only shop in town hardly ever saw a customer, and the post office which had postmarked all those letters seemed on the verge of closing. In fact, my friend who waited for me in town to guide me to his lonely plot of land, had parked in front of it, and his was the only car in the main street.

He'd sent me this photo while I was still working in Greece and after he'd just bought himself this small prefab on a five-acre plot. It was the sort of place where you went when you had little money and life hadn't been too good to you and you needed time to lick your wounds.

 

Noel's prefab on his five-acre plot. As he wrote on the back,
"It's as isolated as it looks, but plenty of crows and wallabies for company"

 

Following my return to Australia due to a misdiagnosed case of home-sickness, life hadn't been too good to me either, and I was also licking my wounds in Sydney when my best friend invited me to join him at Mt Perry. "Your coming here would give me a new lease on life" he wrote - words from a quiet, lonely man who had sought a refuge and become stranded. He had stayed away too long, and everyone had forgotten him. It was the nearest he'd ever come to admitting that his own home-coming after a lifetime in New Guinea hadn't worked out the way he'd hoped, and he was feeling lonely and in need of like-minded company.

My friend's cri de coeur - for that is what it was - never quite registered because, while I'd experienced my own bouts of loneliness which had always been cut short by the excitement of forever chasing work around the world, I still had another twenty-five years of work ahead of me.

As so often happens, the story had a happy ending for both of us: I left Sydney for Canberra where I was able to establish my own practice, and Noel could sell his isolated plot with "plenty of crows and wallabies for company" and resettle on the edge of Childers, within walking distance of shops and pubs and medical facilities, where I revisited him in 1990 to spend our last Christmas together before he passed away in 1995.

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Bill Bryson talks about the first book he fell in love with

 

 

Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had."

So begins "Lost Horizon", the book which gave us the word "Shangri-La". The Shangri-La hotel chain bought the rights to the book and placed a copy on every bedside table instead of the usual Gideon Bible, which is how I obtained my first copy of the book when I stayed at the Shangri-La Hotel on Singapore's Orchard Road in January 1983. It became one of my favourite books and it is also the first book Bill Bryson fell in love with.

(By travelling we develop our web of associations. Ever since my stay at the Shangri-La, whenever I read "Lost Horizon" I think of Singapore and my friends there. Sensibility is one of the unheralded fruits of travel.)

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

I still have the book and also the shirts from the hotel's laundry

 

The plot is straightforward. A plane crash leaves four Westerners stranded in the remote Himalayas. They are promptly rescued and welcomed into the valley of the Blue Moon — a hidden paradise nestled among brutal and impassable mountains. They are sheltered in a tranquil lamasery named Shangri-La, where they eventually learn about themselves, each other, and the mission of the lamasery itself.

 

 

It's a book that soothes the soul. Overloaded as we are by the excesses of modern life, we can eagerly relate to a book which has moderation at its heart and soul. It leaves us wishing, as in the last three minutes of Frank Capra's classic movie from 1937, "that we all find our Shangri-La".

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To begin at the beginning

 

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now."

 

 

I know Llarreggub about many things, but I do know that Thomas's sloe black, crow black, boat-bobbing, poetic creation is one of the BBC's most enjoyable radio dramas. If you haven't yet acquainted yourself with his rich rhetoric and magical mischievousness, then please do!

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