Winter is drawing to a close and most of my fruit trees are either budding or beginning to flower. Today was very mild though dark clouds have been looming all day and weather reports claim that a drenching is in sight. I am not so sure, given our relative distance from the coast.

Thinking as I have been about ESL texts lately, I came across the soundtrack for Let's Go 1 an English text for young non-English speakers. The Let's Go series was a staple at Yes School for our youngest students, though they often tired of the format and style by the time they were in their early teens. Since parents insisted on a text for study, even for conversational classes, we were stuck with a number of unenviable options. Let's Go, with its supplementary materials, soundtracks, flashcards and predictable format presented us with a compromise. We could teach through the text with students and add to them where we needed to or whenever the boredom became too overbearing.

In additional, some of the more inventive material in the Let's Go series, such as songs and chants, was transferable to other situations. Once I had learned the chords to a particular song, I could export it and front up with my guitar for a lesson in an elementary or junior high school. Guitars trump cassette or CD players, I have found, in generating student interest. Even the cheesiest material can be transformed, albeit briefly, when rendered live by a foreigner.

The truth is that no text will ever be wholly adequate for ESL students but that some are better than others is obvious. Good teachers with big class loads (and therefore time-poor) will often have to fall back on textbook-based lessons, but they will also add value to each class by going beyond the page to engage their students.

My jazz loving friend in Japan, Shu Yamaguchi, wrote to me a few weeks ago and asked if I could write the lyrics to a song in the style of Tom's Diner, by Suzanne Vega. I have written songs for Shu before, most notably when we lived in Sanda. She would often as not supply the tune, or a fragment of the tune. Sometimes she would suggest an English language phrase or two (Fly to the Sea and Smile So Blue are standouts). Usually they would find their way into performance, though Shu had a knack of changing the arrangement on the way to a show or studio, which was quite freaky.

Last Thursday I bit the bullet and sat down and wrote the lyrics to a song I called Journeys, a meditation upon the sameness and loneliness of life in a big city. In writing for Shu, I have learnt to keep the lines and words short and simple and to keep well clear of my poetic impulses. It all ends up very prosaic and bland, but she is the kind of musician that can make it work.

Shu (right) seeking clarity with musical accomplice Mika.

I think that this has been a cooler winter. The combustion heater in the living room has been in constant use in the evening and we have awoken to a number of frosts, which crisp the grass to a dull white. Today it is one of those glorious late-winter sunny mornings - the sun is growing unmistakably warmer. The bees have been haunting the front-window plum since daybreak, their buzzing like the sound of distant high-frequency saws.

Ann has been asking for a while if I could teach her English, which I have been busily doing anyway, though not in the way she wants me too. My approach is one of constancy with occasional stoppages at a point of need, such as when she confuses the use of she and her. I speak clearly and in shortish, properly-formed sentences whose subject and object are not too far apart. Idioms are out.

What she really means by being taught English is sitting down with a text and going through exercises and grammar points and so forth. I am familiar with this approach (Yes School made wide use of student texts) but I have thus far resisted doing so for largely philosophical and pedagogical reasons. But yesterday I relented and having apprised a number of different textbooks at an ESL shop in Sydney, made an order on Fishpond. I am unfamiliar with the Cutting Edge series but I am familiar with the style and layout of materials, so we will see how it goes.

Tomorrow my choir, Moo Choir, sing at the Blackheath Choral Festival. I hope to grab a picture or two for this blog and may get back to you. Meanwhile, here is the program.

The Old Pruned Plum

new buds emerge where,
once the autumn-sliced wood was-
such is Spring's repair

Modern digital cameras render a much better image than the poor film-loaded devices of my youth. Unless you had an SLR and knew how to use it, there was no guarantee that you would get a clear representation of the subject. I can offer yesterday's shot as an example, for clearly someone was deliberately taking shots of the flying fox but the result could not be vouched for in every case.

On Friday I used an old iPhone to quickly snap this shot of Tom at his annual Athletics Carnival at Tom Hunter Reserve, Faulconbridge. You can quibble with the composition if you like, but the clarity is very good.

Going through boxes of bygone stuff in my garage yet again, I came across an old photo of my father and me. It is grainy and not well resolved in the manner of the photos of the day, when film and its development were expensive. Quite often the packet that came back from the pharmacy had its fair share of duds - photos that today would be instantly deleted and just as swiftly re-shot. Even if a good shot had been made, there was no guarantee, given the cheaper, instamatic cameras of the day, that colours hadn't bleached into each other or that a red wash of overexposure didn't ruin the picture.

In trying to place the event and the year I was somewhat befuddled, for a part of my memory thinks it is related to being in 2nd Killarney Boy Scouts and another echo from the distant past suggests that maybe it had occurred on a bush walk with Killarney Heights Soccer Club. In any event, the time is somewhere around 1971 or 1972, when I was about 13 or 14.

I don't have many good memories of my father as a father, so this fuzzy moment, on a flying fox in the Australian bush, is one such gem.

There are signs of spring about, from the new buds on my plum trees to the frantic activity of birds, who are chasing each other, though only half in jest. I have lit the combustion heater most nights during the last couple of months and the woodpile is in steady decline, though topped up from time to time by my friend Rick, who has a lot of dead timber at his property. A sure sign of the warming days is the fact of the washing on the line, which dries in a few hours. Ditto the realisation that my jeans are feeling a little too clammy and that the season of shorts is in sight.

In a few weeks I will be the best man for my friend Greg, and the following week I will be the groom myself. I think there is a hastening of the tying of the knot come September and I have joined that happy throng. My lot will be thrown in for a second time, hopefully for keeps. Ann and I will marry in one of those simple garden ceremonies with no fuss, the celebrant being none other than my choir director, Suzanne. Later, the plan is to repair to a local Thai restaurant, though the details are still (worryingly) sketchy at the moment. All is to resolved this week, my beloved tells me. And here she is, in a recent shot.

We had a National Census last Tuesday, the first one to be conducted online. Before the big day there was much hand-wringing and complaint in the land about privacy issues, since names were being asked for and collected for the first time. Notwithstanding the fact that personal information is in the hands of many government and non-government organisations (the ATO, Medicare, Dept of Human Resources, Banks and Credit Card Providers, Facebook, Wikileaks - actually, practically everyone when you think about it!) assurances about privacy by the ABS did not get much traction. Actually I'm guessing that some of the loudest voices were snapping selfies and divulging unsolicited details about their lives on social media, even as they tweeted indignantly about infringements on their privacy.

But all that has been lost in the great crash that occurred at the ABS site about 60 minutes after I completed my census document (very easy, by the way) and which has generated more bouts of hand-wringing and steaming gusts of hot air. Apparently hackers brought the site down (which is often what hackers do) and this is a disaster for which someone is to blame. Though surely not a Minister in the Turnbull Government, I prophesy.

There is a lot of whinging about these days and the tinniest thing can be a trigger.