A change is as good as a holiday

Click on image

 

For a change, this Thursday we drove to Tuross Head and had lunch with the Turossians at the Tuross Head Country Club.

Tuross Head is a small tightly-knit community of perhaps 2,000 people who are surrounded by water on three sides: Coila Lake on one, Tuross Lake on the other, and the mighty South Pacific out front.

It has everything the Turossians need: a small shopping centre, several cafés and restaurants, a tavern, a club, even a doctor who performs head surgery.

Not that the locals need him much: having settled in this glorious spot, they've already shown they have their heads screwed on the right way.

 

Je ne regrette rien

 

Which is French, of course. But then so is eating frogs, cruelty to geese and urinating in the street. Anyway, Edith Piaf sang this song. I regret nothing. What an epitaph!

Sustenance is no longer a struggle for me. Food, clothing, and shelter are no farther away than the back pocket of my trousers. In fact, if I put the money in my shirt pocket, I'd never have to get off my ass again.

And yet there are moments when I have to remind myself of Edith Piaf's song. In French? Ah bien sur, en Francaise.

Mind you, anybody who tells you they have no regrets in life is full shit or has a pharmaceutically addled mind (which is the same thing). We all have regrets; it's what makes us human. The trick is not to dwell on them. I'm still working on that.

 

The measure of all things?

 

Not so long ago, auctions were the refuge of a tiny group of professionals who stood in silence, barely moving an eyelid, as the auctioneer deciphered their every tiny twitch.

Today's real estate auctions, in particular, are like gambling rooms, vanity parades and surrogate stock markets, with overtones of bullrings, cockfights, dogfights, and gladiatorial man fights. It is as if the collective unconscious of the newly-moneyed world has come out of hiding and every last instinct of greed and cupidity and ostentation is let loose.

The audience waits for the moment at which two men, like Sumo wrestlers weighed down with layer upon layer of financial fat, match will against will and fat against fat. One of them has to give up, and in the end one of them does.

When the spectators burst into applause, they applaud themselves for being there but, more important, they applaud the end of a private and personal combat, with no holds barred, between man and man. They clap their hands at the proof - if proof is needed - that money is the measure of all things, at least in today's world.

 

I still have the old wanderlust

 

But these days my mind is the only thing that still wanders. And once in a while it discovers some real beauties such as this 'Slow Train through Africa' clip of Griff Rhys Jones' trip through Namibia - or what was South-West Africa when I lived and worked there in 1968/69.

Thanks for the memories, Griff! Lüderitz and Kolmanskop and the surrounding "Sperrgebiet" are left-overs from a time when the British Empire covered a quarter of the globe while the German Empire consisted of a small sausage factory in Tanganyika and - well, Lüderitz and its surroundings.

Lüderitz in all its German-ness is still there and so is the sand and the everlasting wind and the freezing-cold Benguela Current which meant I only ever went for a swim there ONCE!

But that wasn't the only reason I didn't stay long: Apartheid, an Afrikaans word for an inhuman system of racial segregation, didn't sit well with me:

And here's a documentary from and about the same era:

But there's more:

 

Plus ça change

 

In two thousand years nothing has changed: the cupboard is bare and yet the Government is still bribing itself into another term in office by taking away from those who work to give to those who don't.

When that sort of thing happens, the outcome is pretty predictable: the number of those who've been on the dole for so long that they've forgotten what kind of work they're out of keeps growing until they find themselves a sympathetic GP whose medical diagnosis of "unable to get out of bed in the morning" gets them onto a disability pension.

Of course, they've nothing to fear from tonight's budget which is more of the same: take from those who work and give to those who don't!

Advance Australia Fair!