Rest in Peace, John Burke!

 

John Burke in the centre of the photo and I at the ANZ Banking Group Retired Officers' Club's Christmans lunch at the ANZ Bank Head Office in Martin Place in December 2010

 

Walk a mile in someone else's shoes, they say, but how can you even begin to do that when that someone spends three days a week hooked up to a dialysis machine? How can you even imagine what that feels like unless you've gone through the same agony?

When John Burke wanted to divert himself from his dialysis sessions which he had to undergo three times a week to stay alive, he found in me a willing listener when he phoned me several times, on some days as often as five times. But there were occasions when I was elsewhere on the property, and I would arrive back at the house totally out of breath, only to find John at the other end again, wisecracking or wanting to reminisce about our time together at the ANZ Bank almost sixty years ago. I knew it helped him break up the tedium of removing unwanted waste from his blood, but it got mine boiling at times which is why I asked him to limit his calls to perhaps just two a day. Unwisely, as it turned out, because he took it badly and I never heard from him again.

Until yesterday when I received this email from another retired ANZer:

 

Evening Peter, Not sure if you have currently been in touch with John Bourke, not been well last few years but we have just been advised that he died on 25th June. Don’t know any funeral details yet but should be available shortly. Regards Noel

 

John Burke, as head-ledgerkeeper at the ANZ Bank in Canberra Civic, had been my immediate boss during my first two years as ledgerkeeper from 1965 to 1967 during which we were also "inmates" in the same boarding-house. John was a fun-sort of a boss. He got things done not by cracking a whip but by cracking a joke! Under his tutelage, my compulsory two years in Australia simply flew by. He was again my boss as accountant of the Kingston branch where I worked as a teller for another nine months or so after I had come back from South Africa and before I went to New Guinea.

 

 

We met again after over forty years at the ANZ Banking Group Retired Officers' Club's Christmas lunch in 2010, followed by several meetings at my old watering hole, the Blues Point Hotel in McMahons Point, and the nearby Kirribilli Club, and continued to stay in touch by telephone until that fateful out-of-breath call after which I never heard from him again. How I now wished that I had held my breath instead of being out of it!

 

 

Rest in Peace, John! You have left your mark on my life, and there'll always be a place on the South Coast where you will be remembered!

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No introduction needed: Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island

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What a trifecta: the online book - click here - , the above video clips, and you can scroll down to five recordings of the audiobook "Notes from a Small Island" by clicking here (there's a whole hour's worth of recordings and I promise you, you'll love them!)

Of course, I bought and read the book a long time ago, and more recently I also bought the audiobook - and so can you: click here.

 

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Last Cab to Darwin

 

 

There was a time when we aspiring males would bond over stories of how many beers we could scull without falling over. Some sixty years later, the same but now expiring males bond over stories of the number of pills they take. Some of them even have those monthly pill organisers featuring 31 containers sitting in the centre of the lounge room table as a kind of status symbol.

 

 

This male bonding took an unexpected turn the other day when over a cup of coffee - of course! - and scones with jam and cream the almost unspellable and hitherto unpronouncable word "euthanasia" cropped up in the conversation, those Greek words "eu-" as in "well" and "thanatos" as in "death" both neatly packaged into an almost sweet-sounding word.

Even though another German had already dealt with it - "A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at the end, for a pleasant death" (Friedrich Nietzsche) - I hadn't given it much thought; instead, I practise my own "youthanasia" with a steady diet of books which, if nothing else, keeps at least my mind young.

All I could offer to the discussion was to tell them to go to YouTube and watch Michael Caton (remember him in "The Castle"?) in "Last Cab to Darwin". Watch it before it's too late --- by which I mean, I swear it, before YouTube deletes this full-length movie for copyright reasons.

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The Perfect Wife

VINNIES' bookshelves

 

I don't usually read unbelievable fairy tales but there it was staring me in the face at the local op-shop: "The Perfect Wife" by a JP Delaney of unknown gender. "Should I buy it?" I asked Padma. "Don't bother to buy it", she said, "I wrote it!" And so I didn't.

 

Read the book online here

 

But I picked up three other beauties: a critical study of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" edited by Paul B. Armstrong; David Marr's "Panic"; and a beautiful hardcover edition in almost mint condition of Bill Bryson's "The Road to Little Dribbling" which I had bought as a paperback only some months earlier on ebay. The hardcover edition won me over!

 

Listen to David Marr here

 

'There's cold in them thar hills', and this year is probably the coldest winter I've ever experienced in the hills around Nelligen. Even the people in the Bay are walking about all wrapped up in winter clothing, which isn't too good for the many outdoor coffee shops that've sprung up over the years. Whatever happened to all those BUSHELLS TEA-drinking Australians? And why does that small minority of coffee drinkers who used to be content with INTERNATIONAL ROAST suddenly demand this endless variety of coffees? Remember dinosaurs? Extinct! Remember video shops? Extinct! Remember internet cafés? Extinct! Coffee shops???

 

www.smartburn.com.au

 

What won't go extinct if this weather continues for much longer are shops like BARBEQUES GALORE where I spent over a hundred dollars this morning on two "SmartBurn" devices and two firebricks to place them on. Is it my imagination or is the fire really burning so much better as I sit right beside it to get started on "Burma Sahib" which arrived today?

Please pass me the "Glühwein", perfect wife.

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The happy man

 

Read along here

 

It is a dangerous thing to order the lives of others and I have often wondered at the self-confidence of politicians, reformers and suchlike who are prepared to force upon their fellows measures that must alter their manners, habits, and points of view. I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows oneself? Heaven knows, I know little enough of myself."

"The Happy Man" is a short story about giving advice. The narrator starts off with his general thoughts on giving advice, and then tells us about the time when a complete stranger walked into his house and asked for advice. W. Somerset Maugham never imposes his views on the reader. He puts a question and then leaves it to the reader to answer it.

I agree with Maugham that "life, unfortunately, is something that you can lead but once; mistakes are often irreparable, and who am I that I should tell this one and that how he should lead it? Life is a difficult business and I have found it hard enough to make my own a complete and rounded thing."

"The Happy Man" has a happy ending as seems to have had my own life - although I haven't yet come to the final reckoning - as I sit close by the fireplace, beanie on my head and rug over my knees, and contemplate my own roller-coaster life full of downs as much as exhilarating ups.

 

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