On Friday I attended a lunch for 2RPH volunteers at the Glebe Town Hall. The latter is a magnificent pile dating from 1880, beautifully restored in 2018. The event itself was delightful, mostly in that I could mingle with people I had not had a chance to meet at the station yet. My shifts on alternate Thursdays and Fridays do not afford much of a chance to meet anyone other than my own team (who are just great!) and sometimes folks from the preceding and following shifts. Of course, I am not there to socialise, but to work, but it's always possible to do both at the same time. Well, usually, anyway.

2RPH has been short of announcers and has recently been trying to promote the idea amongst its somewhat reluctant "reading" cohort. It is understandable really, for the announcer, who is also the producer, needs to master the technical side of running a program (computer, board, timing, crosses, announcing etc) and also allocate reading material to the readers. Those who read only have to read the material they have been given and do not need to worry about how the program is going.

So it was with some trepidation that I put my hand up for training as an announcer. The board and computer are not that difficult, but the combination of other elements make it a challenge for the beginner. I will do a practice session by myself in a week or two and then a real live shift the week following. I think that keep calm and carry on will be the mantra for that program and all that follow.

Friday's luncheon.

sunlit curtains,
bees in shadow puppet play
with dark blossoms

In China, the Communist Party is trying to impose culturally normative values on the population through the proscription of 'bad personal behaviour." Doubtless this has something to do with China's rapid rise as an economic power and the change in circumstances, for the better, of millions of people. While it may well be 'glorious to grow rich' as Deng so aptly put it 30 years ago, the act of growing wealthy and chasing the filthy dollar, or yuan, can detach people from their roots. It can also change attitudes and behaviours for the worse, for affluence has its own price.

In China this is a double whammy, for not only does 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' have to deal with the contradiction of having swallowed capitalism almost wholly, but a society steeped in centuries of Confucian ideology must deal with the most rapid changes it has faced in hundreds of years. I doubt that President Xi would be interested in a Cultural Revolution 2.0, which wreaked disaster on China the last time, though he may be interested in reinventing Mao as a kind of wise ancestor.

Most of the proscriptions on behaviour are perfectly understandable, with no spitting, shouting and general anti-social behaviour apparent. But there are a few curious examples too, such as "No square dancing that disturbs others". Perhaps an innocent square dance is just one step away from an insurrection in the minds of the authorities. Strangely enough, there are no injunctions against the mass display of umbrellas, wet weather or not.

only the moonlight,
my eyes dark though the glass
blossoms suspending

Sometimes I feel like I have been washed up on a familiar shoreline, on a beach whose low breakers gently push me onto the sand. I feel this way sometimes when I have spent time with my library, the vast majority of which is in my garage. It used to be a much bigger collection but moving back to a smaller house and having a larger family to accommodate made its relocation and culling essential. The core of the library remains, with a lot of plays, novels, poetry and history books apparent, amongst a motley selection from Christianity, Buddhism, Psychology and Cultural Theory.

I love to pick up and dip into a book I haven't read in 30 or 40 years, finding a kind of peace and also an abiding joy in unfolding the dry pages of memory. Little gems spring out too - a train ticket, a receipt for a chocolate bar from a now defunct confectioner, a political advertisement that I cannot remember cutting from a newspaper, all re-purposed as bookmarks.

It is not really nostalgia and I cannot give it a name. I mean, the feeling I get, like sunshine in winter through a solitary pane of glass, a warm, unsought after spot that unclutters the mind and offers solace. I don't get that same feeling from my kindle, for though it holds many wonderful books, it does not array them in all their dusty, page-worn, lop-sided glory. Books knock up along-side each other like students in an old school photo.

Oh, I do so hope that books and bookshops make a comeback one day, when the gimmickry of technology begins to bore, when people seek a more tactile immersive experience.

Some years ago when I was teaching in Japan, I had what you might call my favourite classes. I didn't play favourites of course. It was just that some classes were more fun or more pleasant to teach than others, which is only to be expected.

On Wednesday afternoons one such group of kids rocked in the door about 4pm, their bicycles forming a line outside the front gate. They were three grade 5 elementary school boys from Sanda Shogakko, who had belted up the hill after the final bell, full of enthusiasm and ready to study. Imagine such a scene in Australia! Sorry, but I can't.

One of the boys, Junpei Yamaguchi, was the son of one of our Japanese friends, Shuko. We had first met Shu in the playground of the school during a special school athletics event. She had sauntered over, introduced herself and then asked us to write the lyrics to a song she had composed the music to. We did, but I digress!

Last week the grown-up Junpei came for a short trip to Sydney and I met up with him for lunch and a touch of sight-seeing. Junpei is now in his twenties, has a job with a a firm named Takeda in Hiroshima, and is planning to get married next year. His English is pretty good, for which I must take at least a little credit.

Spending the afternoon with him not only jogged my forgotten Japanese from its hiding place, but reminded me of one of the happiest times of my life.

Thanks buddy!

"Now listen, you who say,'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, car and make money on business.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 4:13-14)

I was reflecting on these New Testament verses last night, how deep and almost nihilistic they seem (though James does go on to urge us to put our full trust in God) and also somewhat stoic in tone. Epictetus would have probably agreed and then added,

“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions."

Together, these two positions mock at the contemporary vogue (though it is ageless) for having control of one's life, of being the captain of one's destiny. The thrust of modern education, of business school ideology, of media commentary, is that you do have control of your personal circumstances, even if the world around seems impervious to those efforts to manipulate. Thus an illusion of control is established, where we are led to believe that our reach is far beyond what it really is. You can see the consequences for this kind of thinking - anxiety, frustration, anger and depression - over not being able to rule over the opinions and behaviour of others, nor of coming to terms with chance events, the laws of nature and just plain bad luck.

So we ask 'why did this happen to me?' when the furniture of lives is abruptly upended. It can happen to anyone at anytime, as James reminds us. How we respond to calamity is strangely within our power, however. Our thinking is the key; all else follows, for better or worse.

Alas, when a light dusting of snow falls in the Upper Blue Mountains, a percentage of Sydneysiders lose their collective minds. I encountered a large number of these folks as I was driving back from Penrith, the roads clogged for kilometres by their over-sized vehicles. I knew full-well that most of the snow this side of Blackheath would likely have melted by early afternoon, the sun now becoming warmer as we prepare for Spring, a sure hazard to the thinning layer of snowflakes. But I wish them well and happy hunting.

Snow brings on deep thoughts and I think that a melancholy might result from gazing too long into its omnipresent whiteness. It can erase the detail and colour from a landscape as much as add to it. I think living in snowy climes might have the effect of inducing withdrawal from the world and going deeper into the self. I remember feeling as much during the cold Japanese winters, a hot sake an adjunct to the process of ongoing reflection. Mr Frost may have felt so too.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."

On a lighter note than my previous posts, my family have had a few outings recently. By family, I mean the new and improved version, which now includes Ann's daughter JJ. I think its important that we do things together, all of us, sometimes, notwithstanding my son Tom's desire to cloister himself with computer and mobile phone.

So we have been to my friend Wayne's 60th Birthday Bash on the Central Coast and my Mum's stupendous 90th Birthday Luncheon at Dee Why. Here are two pics that show the two gangs on their respective occasions.

In recent months I have been reading a lot of short fiction, stories that are sometimes no longer than a few pages. Most recently I have read Bernard Malamud's The Jewbird and yesterday I finished the last paragraph of James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues. Set in the same city (New York) and at a similar time, they could not be more different. The former might well be called magical fiction, for a talking bird of the Hebrew faith is the central character. Sonny's Blues is far removed from this world, located in the tough realism of being black in Harlem, though told with an often beautiful poetic, intense language.

All this is leading me to another short story, Updike's A & P, which I was halfway through when news came on the TV that another gun massacre had occurred at a Walmart in El Paso. I stopped to watch (not in disbelief given the frequency of these events in that country), but really out of a desire to try to understand why someone would do such a thing. We have much tighter gun laws in Australia, thank goodness, or else people with mental issues and /or irrational points of view might well be doing the same here.

Looking at the images that came out of El Paso, it struck me that the America of Updike's short fiction was a very different place to that inhabited by the innocent folks of that unfortunate border town, who were going about their own very mundane business, only to struck down by the delusions of another. That someone was heavily armed, not because it makes any sense to be so equipped, but because of another delusion that equates owning guns with liberty.

The A & P is really an innocent tale of male rights of passage perched on the cusp of the revolutions that were about to engulf the West in the 1960's. It pits the dawn of the new with the mores of the old. I am not saying that either is right or wrong, for only time will tell in that respect. Suffice to say that humans have a way of throwing out the baby with the bathwater where revolutions are concerned. May Aristotle's Golden Mean be a guiding principle.