Now that she is free of her early morning job, Ann has more time for leisure activities. I promised if she quit that shift, we could do a lot more together. And I have been documenting some of that here.

Yesterday, for example, we set out for Mt Wilson, which is on the other side of the Blue Mountains. Mt Wilson is a delightful village comprising show gardens, tree-arched lanes, historic buildings and a gentle leafy ambience. I last went there likely twenty years ago and had only a dim memory of its "winding mossy ways."

We found a popular garden to wander through - Breenhold Gardens - 40 hectares or so of trees, paths, garden beds and feature walls. Later we went to the old Victoria Antiques Café in Blackheath for lunch. I am keeping up my end of the bargain, which is busier and costlier, but well worth it. My wife is a lovely woman.

Ah, the long lines of trees!

Ann and I went to the Australian Museum's Ramses and the Gold of the Pharoahs on Friday last. We decided to go because, while it is best to see these kinds of exhibits in situ, it's unlikely that I will be making a trip Egypt. I have been to a few of these kinds of things before but this was by far the most impressive, given that technology makes it easier set up visual recreations and 'virtual' spaces.

Ramses II is acclaimed as the greatest Pharoah of all time, though it is not that easy to separate the facts from the self-aggrandising fiction of his reign. The Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites was essentially a draw (he did not capture Kadesh) but was broadcast as the greatest triumph of all time on whatever piece of stone was available. Nor did he face the Hittites single-handed at one tumultuous moment, else he would have died on the spot. 

There is also the matter of the placing of his own cartouche on the monuments and buildings of previous kings, lots of them in fact, in a massive credit-claiming exercise. He was a great builder but it seems unlikely that he erected temples and monuments that predate him by 500 years. Some of that was the work of his son Khaemweset, a kind of early Egyptologist, who would have made an interesting pharoah had he lived long enough. 

Anyway, the exhibition, which includes artefacts from other dynasties as well, is well worth seeing. My wife took the photo below of Ramses coffin, his final and only resting place. Alas, his mummified remains did not come with the exhibition to Australia.

During the years I lived in Japan and right up until my departure in 2007, there was much commentary in the Japanese press about tourism. More specifically, the lack of foreign tourists who came to Japan relative to other popular destinations around the world. Japanese themselves travel extensively inside Japan, particularly during festival seasons. There were certainly foreign tourists in Kyoto and Osaka whenever I dropped in, though not in vast numbers. My own town of Sanda was definitely not on the travel circuit. But there was a foreign tourist problem.

However things have changed and recently I have read about Japanese concerns about the 'hordes' of of foreign tourists who have descended upon Japan since the end of covid. They are starting to experience the same problems that 'over-tourism' is presenting elsewhere, particularly in Tokyo and historic centres like Kyoto and Nara. Some shops are even displaying 'Japanese only' signage in their windows, likely from fear of language issues than xenophobia. Though there is that too.

When I moved up here 30 years ago, I bought a copy of Jim Smith's seminal 'How to see the Blue Mountains', the guide at that time to bushwalking in this neck of the woods. Over a number of years I did most of the walks that Jim had painstakingly recorded (together with his hand-drawn, pull-out maps), sometimes with friends or even a girlfriend now and then. I still have it, though the other day I bought Veechi Stuart's more recent 'Blue Mountains Best Walks.'

Ann wanted to do a particular walk at North Katoomba, the relatively mild and quite short Minnihaha Falls track. Veechi had faithfully mapped and recorded details of the walk, so we set off for about an hours stroll (with some steps and an incline as you descend to the falls). There were a lot of walkers, particularly families, so we had company pretty much the whole way. The falls themselves were splendid, roaring down into a rock pool from about 30 metres, full of recent rainfall. It was such a lovely autumn day that I took this picture. I hope that this is the first of many for us, now that Ann is semi-retired.

I was thinking about a Thomas Hardy poem, a fragment of the poem, yesterday, and decided to try to find it in one or two of my collections of his work. I had recalled buying a copy of one anthology, The Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy, fairly recently, and set out to find the volume, which I thought was in my bedside table.

How could I be so sure? Because I had originally bought the book having read somewhere in another place that Philip Larkin had kept this very compilation by his bedside for many years, a recommendation if ever there was one. His version was likely the little blue original first published around 1930. These being quite expensive now (about $60 due to their antiquarian nature), I opted for a plain jane paperback from the 1970's, hoping that the contents were in fact the same.

Do you think I can find it? Despite extensive searches in all the usual and expected places I cannot locate this book. It seems to have disappeared, not unlike my wedding band, though that's another story altogether.

Now I am wondering whether I actually bought it, or if I dreamed it all up? Is it possible it was all in the imagination? The transaction seemed so real, the receiving of it, the unpackaging, but there is no record of purchase nor notification by email.

Where is a person from Porlock when you need one?

A week or two ago I was working in the garden, pulling out weeds and long grass for the fortnightly green recycling collection. I enjoy doing it and it gives me a lot of satisfaction to close the lid on a bin brimming with a few hours labour.

But on this occasion, having removed my gloves and come inside to wash my hands, I realised that somehow my wedding band was not on my finger anymore. It is something you detect straight away, the sensation of nakedness, the absence of the gentle pressing of the band. I rushed outside to look in my gloves - the most obvious place - but alas, no.

Then began a three days combing of every inch of the garden I had been in, the emptying of bins, the sifting of materials. Nothing. Vanished off the the face of the earth.

For the time-being I have given in - the ring may reveal itself in the fullness of time - but for now I have pressed into service a gold band with Celtic patterns that I bought from a shop in Scotland way back in 2004. It has been sitting in my sock draw for at least a decade and being a perfectly acceptable wedding band, it is now on the appropriate digit. Sad about the other, of course, but a happy marriage is better than a ring any day of the week.

 According to most people I meet, the world is in a parlous state. It is worse, they usually add, than it has ever been. I can see how this pessimistic outlook has been arrived at, and it is difficulty not to want to jump in an join them in a community of woe.

So why would so many would arrive at this opinion. Well, there are two fairly major and highly destructive wars in progress, earthquakes in odd places, bridges brought down, extreme weather, inflation and the cost of living, bleached coral and much more promised. Media of all stripes who operate in a total time environment (24/7) pump out images and messages of doom and disaster on a daily basis with grim prophecies of what is to come. There are loads of pundits doing the same.

Notwithstanding my faith, I tend towards a pessimistic world-view myself. Were I of the absurd nature of a Pangloss, I might be able to put an optimistic spin on whatever disasters befall us. But I'm not sure that I would convince anyone. least of all myself.

The Christian faith is an eschatological one ultimately, in which 'end times' are predicted and expected to occur. Many Christians see the current malaise and chaos as being symptomatic of just such an 'end time' and it is not hard to see why. While Armageddon has been a lively topic for many centuries, with the faithful believing that 'now' was the time, there is little doubt that we live in a uniquely dangerous period (nuclear war, A1, climate change etc) and so have reason to think that there is not long to wait.

It is always best to cautious of course and not be presumptuous. Everyone who has predicted the end before has been 100% wrong. And only one Person knows the actual timing, anyway.