My memory of primary school years is still pretty good. An old Go-Set top forty chart from November 1969 sent my mind whirling back to my fifth grade classroom and specifically, the last day of school for that year. Why, you might wearily ask?

This was the day of the class party, when desks and chairs were cleared away (though we may have had morning lessons), save those that made up the makeshift places for the party food that we all brought from home. 5A's teacher, My Morley, was a young and enthusiastic man who kept a tight rein on our miscreant selves, though as for that, we were largely well-behaved.

Some of us had brought music (in the form of 45's) to enliven the day. I had my brother's Beatles single, 'Come Together'( I think it had 'Something' on the flip side) which was duly played, and marked me out, or so it seemed, as the epitome of modernity and style. Well, if only. Mr Morley had dutifully wheeled out the standard-issue record player and had collected our contributions. I guess he was also the DJ for the event.

It was the top forty chart with the listing 'Come Together/Something' at number 3 that reminded me of the party on that day. My shorted-panted self, the year of the first man on the Moon, President Nixon before his disgrace, a time before the confusions of puberty, one also before the onset of the West's cultural crisis, all this, rolled into one, chips, fairy-bread and Tang celebration.

There were many problems in 1969 and many injustices. There was a lot of fixing up to be done. But I do feel for modern kids. There is too much choice. And that is a tyranny in itself.

One of my volunteer job friends likes to needle me about my faith in a kind of good-natured way. We co-host an astronomy/space program and he thinks that he can throw science back at me to show that God cannot exist.

Quite apart from the fact that science has no interest (nor capacity) to prove or disprove anything of the sort, he is dealing with someone who believes in science. If science wants to show what an incredible Creator we have, then it can go right ahead, I retort.

What about the Sun brightening in about 600 million years and the threat to life? How about the collision with Andromeda in about 2 billion years? How could a loving God permit such a thing? 

Anyone who looks at the planet and the human condition and thinks that that will be an issue in 500 million years is kidding themselves. We won't be needing the sun or Andromeda to put paid to life on Earth. Humans in their brokenness are doing a very fine job and that is entirely on us.

My internet provider supplies me with a little supplementary box that allows me to access additional channels and content on my ageing TV. Of course, I have to rent it and the content costs a monthly fee, though nothing like what I used to pay with a previous provider. My needs are pretty simple, a few news channels, the capacity to watch football (soccer) highlights and such like.

One of the channels in my package is CNA, not be confused with the US network CNN. The former is an English-speaking Singapore-based news service. It is an excellent distraction from the awful Australian networks and has the added benefit of making you feel as if you are living overseas when you are not.

I raise this only by way of making a different point. I took a shine to one of the background music themes for the CNA world weather about three years ago - an ambient piece with an interesting chord progression - and yesterday, thanks to an app that cleverly tells you what the names of songs are, I found the artist and the original track.

I was reflecting upon this, how impossible this process would have been even twenty years ago, like finding the proverbial needle. But there it was, in only few seconds, in the palm of my hand. It's both remarkable and terrifying at the same time.

A Sydney daily recently published  a survey of attitudes towards the current Israel/Palestine conflict in the Gaza strip. It demonstrated that there was a wide gulf between Boomers who largely supported Israel and Millennials who were mostly sympathetic towards Palestinians. Of course, these are not cut and dried positions, for one can be supportive of Israel's right to defend itself and opposed to the bombing of civilian positions, even if this kind of thinking presents a logical dilemma.

I wondered why there was such a gulf, and while noting that young people do tend more readily to take on causes that promote social justice, climate action and so forth, there are plenty of reasons why older Australians should also be very active and vocal too.

I worry also that the issue of Israel's right to exist, denied by Hamas and other radical organisations, has been overlooked in any discussion. There is also the question of the passage of time - the Shoah is now an event as old as World War Two, something which looms large in my mind, but which may be fading from view in some quarters. It seems a long time ago.

I could go on about the rise of antisemitism and the absurd conspiracy theories that I have heard from perfectly reasonable people, but I won't give them the oxygen of publicity.

Having said all that, a two state solution in which both sides accept the right of the other to exist is the only real way forward. I have my doubts that Palestinian politicians will ever back down on this issue. But I continue to hope. A wider peace depends upon it.

 Keats once wrote,

'But when the melancholy fit shall fall

       Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

       And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

       Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

             Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

       Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

               And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.'

This is the second verse from 'Ode to Melancholy' written by the poet in 1819. Keats doubtless had a melancholic disposition, or was prone to bouts of it, His prescription for the engulfing sadness that can accompany its arrival, 'like a weeping cloud', is to focus on the natural world, to pay attention to it. He further enjoins that we feed deeply upon the 'peerless eyes' of an angry raving mistress, something less obvious perhaps. I'll take nature anytime I think, though I certainly understand what he is getting at. 

While today the condition of melancholy is entirely associated with clinical depression, the literary genre that Keats wrote in would have seen it as something less serious, one associated with a cultural movement, dating back to the 15th century. In this iteration, melancholia was more the province of the artistic or literary soul, something connected with great intelligence. John Dowland, who wrote many fine madrigals in Elizabeth's court was 'always Dowland, always mourning' and Hamlet was better known as the melancholic Dane. It became fashionable to have a somewhat gloomy interior.

I tend towards a very mild melancholy, born largely out of years of contemplating the human condition. It has more in common with, say, Keats, though my prescriptions for its relief may differ. I agree that a good bushwalk will always lift the soul, no matter what. Still another aspect of this kind of non-clinical melancholia is the alienation induced by modernity, the consequences of which are all around us.

 

I don't know if its a matter of my own incompetence, or an issue with the brakes and weight ratios on my bike, but I came off my bike this morning and took chunks of skin off elbows and knees. I had had to brake sharply at a modest speed (about 15kms) because of a car coming around a blind spot near an underpass. It was no-ones fault but the bike came away suddenly from under me and I lay crumpled on the ground. It is hard to explain what happened except in terms of the brakes being wildly out of kilter and the bike itself having a fundamental design flaw regarding the wheel base and distribution of weight . Or I am just hopeless!

I had read somewhere that smaller size e-bikes did have a propensity for being unstable under certain conditions and this may be a case in point. My only defence against it is constant vigilance and caution, something that would likely take the joy out of riding. Maybe I'll have to consider a larger bike in the future.

It was H.G. Wells who first coined the phrase 'the war to end war' in his 1914 book of the same title. It seem unlikely that anyone but the most naïve optimist could possibly believe that any conflict, no matter how destructive, or supposedly cathartic, would somehow be the catalyst for an end to all wars forever more. Had Mr Wells not been so famous, the phrase (which later morphed into 'the war to end all wars') would probably have been quietly laid to rest.

Instead, The Great War, whose end we commemorate today, became bitter tinder for future conflicts right down to the present day. Germany was effectively denied the chance to become a functioning, prosperous democracy as a result of the short-sighted harshness of the Treaty of Versailles. The seeds for the growth of authoritarian rule were planted in 1919. The fall of The Ottoman Empire created the conditions for the Middle East conflicts we still see today, and in fact at this very moment. The defeat of Tsarist Russia ushered in the abysmal experiment that was the Soviet Union and we live with those consequences too. I could go on.

That in no way nullifies the importance of Remembrance Day. No matter what the folly or how we might wring our hands at the benightedness of the human condition, reflection upon this awful war should lead us to be grateful for those who died. It might also lead us to action to head off future conflicts, by whatever means at our disposal, to speak out against the beating of the drums and the shouting of slogans, to read aloud again the diaries and poems of the men who served as a warning. 

Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting', where soldiers from opposing sides 'meet' in death, ends,

'I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now.....'

Owen himself died on the Western Front before the poem was published.

'At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.'

Lest We Forget.

 My son Tom has finished Year 12, completing his final exam last week. Even though he doesn't expect his results to be spectacular, the very act of completing 13 years of schooling is a worthy end in itself. It is noteworthy, as I have often told him, that he is the only member of his friendship group from either primary school or high school to complete Year 12. While many of his friends have taken up apprenticeships, some have fallen by the wayside and are yet to take hold of life in any meaningful way, though I hope that they all do. There is nothing wrong with being a late bloomer, after all.

Last night was the SHS Formal at Penrith Lakes and Tom took his girlfriend Emma. Formal occasions like this are one of the few rites of passage that we have left. I can't remember my formal in 1976 all that well, except that I rented a suit from a hire shop in Chatswood and that the event itself was held in a room upstairs in the local Grace Brothers. Maybe it was called the Silver Room.

I haven't had a report back from Tom as yet though I'm sure it was fun and worthwhile with lots of, em, Kodak moments.

 'Writers from the Vault', the radio program I host, is always leading me in new directions. No matter what area of research I undertake, the subject of that research invariably throws up one or two writers I have never heard of. In the English language alone, there have been an untold number of people who have taken up a pen, or sat before a typewriter, to write something creative, something new, something that made it into print in either, newspapers, magazines or books.

Often as not, much of their work has fallen into obscurity. Some of it doesn't wear well; styles of writing and attitudes have changed. Things fall out of fashion. Moreover, the digital age and the decline of the printed paper word has added to the pile of books that sit mustering somewhere or are destined for landfill.

On the other hand, worthy online projects like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg are reviving many of these old texts and making them available for anyone to read. They have both been a great blessing for my program and have given me hours and hours of material that I can use. I heartily thank all the volunteers who have made this possible. What a labour of love!

In the meantime, I look forward to running into more poets like Sara Teasdale to admire, or writers like Hyman Strunsky to ponder over. I didn't make that last name up, by the way. It's a gem, don't you think?

The cult of winning, of being extraordinary, of living a life somehow different, more elevated than the run-of-the-mill is destroying lives. People, who might have been happy settling for what is disparagingly called an 'ordinary' life, rarely find happiness in striving for things like celebrity, wealth, status and all the other related trappings of materialism.

For let there be no doubt about it, the anxiety created by the mad rush to be more clever, richer, better looking or famous than the average takes it toll, leading almost inevitably to disappointment, dissatisfaction, self-abuse, mental illness and even suicide. I have often wondered why conservatives of all stripes have so lauded a rapacious economic system that attacks the very things they love - stability, tradition, family, faith and so forth.

Of course, a few people do get there - that place they dreamed of and strove for - only to find it hollow and demanding more of the same, yet another chimera in the making. 

Just look at those who claim to have it all. No, really look, hard, and see if they aren't actually quite miserable beneath the doctored photos and posed-for moments. It is buyers-remorse writ large and you can't ever show the remorse, which would as good be an admission of failure.

It is such a waste of lives.

I gave the 'new' Beatles song, 'Now and Then' a few plays this morning. Digitally recovered and enhanced in extraordinary ways from a muddy-sounding cassette that Yoko gave to Paul decades ago, the song draws a final line under The Beatles output.

More properly understood as a Lennon piece (it would fit unobtrusively in say, 'Double Fantasy'), the other members have all made contributions, Harrison back in the 1990's, Starr and McCartney very recently. It makes for a pleasant, well-produced pop song. Hard to say, however, where it ranks in The Beatles pantheon.

But I do have to say, it's wonderful to hear Lennon's voice, clear as a bell, singing 'new' material. For this alone, it was worth releasing.

I don't have any subscriptions to streaming sports providers, so must content myself with the truncated highlights that are provided by some of these companies on YouTube. Watching 6 or 7 minutes of a 100 minute Premier League game hardly gives you more than a taste of the action. Even then, it's just the goals, goal-mouth action or any controversies that emerged, such as a sending off. You miss the flow and flavour of the game, so when pundits later provide their considered opinions of the very same game, it can seem like you haven't watched anything at all.

I suppose that I should be content that I can watch the brief bits and pieces that I do at all. Before the advent of the kind of services provided courtesy of the internet, the best one could hope for was packaged weekly shows on TV. You were beholden to whatever the content was that was chosen for you. Yet I still have fond memories of 'Match of the Day' and the other programs that brought the beautiful game into my living room.

Of course, we are spoilt for choice and there does remain a universe in which one day I am able to cull the providers I don't watch (but other family members do) and choose one that let's me watch whole football games from the UK. Maybe that day will come and maybe it won't but until then, it will simply be the scraps that fall from the table.