After a number of false starts, Spring appears to have arrived. At least, the birds think so. Their song is lilting from all corners of my garden and beyond. Just now a Kookaburra has started up, it's insistent vibrato jarring in the mild sunshine.

Just now I submitted a lesson plan for the final phase of my online TESOL course with iTTT. I am not a huge fan of English grammar but there is a purpose in my getting better at it. I would like to re-invent myself as an English Doctor and offer my services in Sydney. I don't know how that will go, given the vagaries of any marketplace, but I am flexible about pretty everything. It is not about money, though I would like to at least break even. I just want to be useful in a way that I am quite good at. Communicating and motivating.

Just finished another instalment in my ongoing China project, this one, a short book on Bo Xilai. Garnaut's The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo charts the fortunes of the Bo dynasty in China. This is a family with venerable origins in the rise of the PRC, Bo Yibo being a Long March veteran and influential player in Chinese politics. His son, the charismatic and talented Bo Xilai, rose swiftly in the post-Mao world of reform, eventually becoming a senior politbureau member in Chongqing. Now Bo Xilai languishes in prison, following a sensational trial earlier this year. But this being the PRC, nothing is set in concrete. His father survived disgrace in the Cultural Revolution to mount a comeback in the 1980's. The younger Bo might yet rise again.