Alain de Botton is the thinking man's thinking man

 

 

Early morning at "Riverbend". All is quiet, nothing and no-one is awake yet, and so, before the coming day descends into banalities --- "Have you had your breakfast yet?" "How did you sleep?" "Want to go for a walk?" --- I listened again to my favourite modern-day philosopher, Alain de Botton.

He’s written fifteen books, which have become bestsellers in thirty countries, all of which emphasise philosophy's relevance to everyday life. They include "How Proust Can Change Your Life" (1997), "Status Anxiety" (2004), and "The Architecture of Happiness" (2006).

Annoyingly, even this great mind has now bowed to wokism when he prefaced his question about "going out with a woman who make you suffer" [go to 16:40] with "making a heterosexual assumption". Grrr!

Banality has just reared its ugly head. "Have you had your breakfast yet?" Who wants breakfast when there's so much food for thought.

 

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TAREing my hair out

 

 

Rudyard Kipling's poem "I keep six honest serving-men" has long been my favourite. So much so that I had a calligrapher inscribe it on a piece of vellum which I framed and hung above my office desk wherever I worked.

So when I became financial controller for a big commodity trader in Saudi Arabia who regularly bought grain in bulk, shipped it to Singapore for bagging, and then sold it in 50kg-bags, it didn't take me long to ask why 20,000 metric tonnes of grain, bought in bulk, should still be only 20,000 metric tonnes after it had been stuffed into 400,000 bags.

How could that be? What about each bag's tare weight of 500 grams? Where had the 200 metric tonnes of grain gone that had been displaced by the weight of the bags? And who had taken them?

Asking my Arab boss was of little help as he had never heard of tare weight. It took me a whole day - and a lot of TAREing-out of hair while sipping dozens of thimble-sized cups of cardamom-flavoured coffee - to convince him that there was something missing. A whole 200 metric tonnes of grain, in fact, from each shipment!

 

As it turned out, the Chinese bagging contractor in Singapore had not only been handsomely paid by us for the cost of the bags and the labour and the equipment hire but he had also profiteered from the 200 metric tonnes of grain displaced by the weight of the bags which he quietly sold off on his own account - several times a year and at a time when the grain sold for as much as US$800 a metric tonne!

And there was nothing we could do about it as my Arab boss had allowed him to write his own bagging contract which stated - ever so innocently - that each bulk shipment would be reshipped "gross for nett".

Arabs (and many other people, I am sure) don't like to be outsmarted and they like even less to be found out to have been outsmarted. So, yes, we did engage a new bagging contractor and, yes, this time we did write our own contract terms, but, no, my boss never thanked me for having put a stop to this outrageous rip-off. (I never received a Christmas card from the previous bagging contractor either!)

I reflected on this and many other work experiences as I idly paged through my collection of employers' references. Once so highly treasured, they are now, in my retirement, just so many pieces of paper. The mere tare weight of an engrossing career in commerce.

 

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My old office is now a café

 

My old office as it looks now
To watch the full video clip, click here

 

Is there anything one can not find on the internet? Here is a photo of my old office in Lüderitz in what was South-West Africa when I went there in 1968. It was a very German town in what had once been a German colony. The hot desert winds never stopped blowing and the freezing cold Benguela Current made swimming impossible. It was not the Africa I had expected.

 

My old office as it looked then

 

Less than nine months earlier, I had returned to Germany after two years in Australia. Why had I left Australia again? I had made new friends there and built up a new life, so why leave again? Why had I not stayed in Germany? I had found promising employment and had met up with old friends and previous colleagues again, had even met my old girlfriend again, none of whom ever thought of leaving. What made them stay when I couldn't? Was it habit; lack of imagination; lack of opportunity?

And why did I leave South-West Africa again? Was it the place, the people, the apartheid? Even though I felt uncomfortable about apartheid, I had no ideological reservations about it, as it simply seemed to be the law of the land. What made me leave South-West Africa and all the other places before and scores of places since was a feeling of not belonging. So what was the best thing about South-West Africa? That it was halfway from Germany back to Australia - and six months later I was back there and eight months later in New Guinea.

For more fifty-seven-year-old photos, click here.

 

P.S. You want to see more of Lüderitz than just my old office. Watch "Lüderitz: The Town of Wind, Salt, and Stone" and "Wonders of Namibia".

 

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Walk into Paradise

 

 

Everyone who's lived and worked in New Guinea would have watched "Walk into Paradise@, starring Chips Rafferty, but do they know that one of the supporting actors, Fred Kaad, had been a real District Commissioner in Papua New Guinea?

This tribute reads like something out of "Boy's Own":

 

Click on images to enlarge

 

By the way, while the full-length feature film "Walk into Paradise" is on YouTube now, it may not last, so why not buy yourself your own copy on DVD? At $10 it's the cheapest PNG-souvenir you can buy! Click here.

 

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If it's Thursday, it must be "Pension Day"

 

 

Judging by the long queue in front of the cash register at the Moruya Bowling Club's restaurant, it was! At eleven dollars a meal (twelve dollars for non-members), it beats cooking and washing up - in fact, as one regular suggested (a lady from the former Yugoslavia near Trieste who, as she told me in very accented English, comes every day), you couldn't even buy the ingredients for that price.

I ordered bangers and mash - which, incongruously, came with a helping of sauerkraut - and Padma her usual battered fish'n'chips and we settled in for the wait, for which I had come prepared with "Innocent Reader - Reflections on Reading and Writing". I knew I already had a copy which I had read many years ago and which was in my library at home, and so I had picked up this spare copy for a couple of dollar at my favourite Vinnies shop, together with Martin Wolf's "The Shifts and the Shocks - What we've learned - and have still to learn - from the financial crisis".

 

 

Debra Adelaide's book went well with the bangers and mash, but Martin Wolf's book will have to wait until I find the time to plough through its five hundred pages. So many books yet to read and so little time left!

 

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