This year will be a busy one for this family. Ann has started a certificate course in Aged Care in Parramatta. She is also scheduled to finish her AMEP English course at TAFE, though she can continue at the next level. JJ starts at Springwood HS after completing a bridging course with flying colours at Evans HS in Blacktown. Tom will hopefully grasp the nettle and make an effort in his studies, though, as I well know, teenage boys can be very slack in this regard.

As for me, I feel more like a manager of events, for I am in constant demand to assist with all manner of things - assignments and homework, cross-cultural negotiations and much else besides. Truthfully I enjoy being in demand as I have quite a lot of time on my hands and I do have the capacity to help.

I know also, from sometimes bitter experience, that the best laid plans of we humans can go astray. So often I crave certainty while knowing at the back of my mind that everything can be thrown up in the air at the last minute. Nobody I know has a lively expectation of being in a car crash or falling off a cliff, but they happen. Folks lives are turned around by chance events that, for the most part, could have happened to anyone. Their random occurence in the flow of ordinary life is what leads to such confusion and hand-wringing, such plaintive 'whys?'

It has always been so. Read the ancient philosophers or Ecclesiastes. On this matter, there is nothing new under the sun.