Today was a most unusual Christmas Day. The passing of my mother meant that the annual ritual of the traditional family Christmas roast and pudding - to an exacting English standard - together with the nuts, crackers, silly hats and jokes, was temporarily in abeyance, perhaps till next year.

Ann wanted me to go with her to Cabramatta, a major centre for the Vietnamese community in Sydney. Considering the day, it was a very odd thing to do and it felt surreal, over and over again. But we had a good time wandering through the crowds, past the queues and street-side markets, the whole place humming with activity. And banh mi for lunch - well that just tops it off!

Still, I would have preferred the option of seeing my dear mum for one more Christmas, with all the trimmings!

In recent years my telephone calls to mum at her Dee Why apartment grew and grew. Some days I would speak to her several times on the phone, especially in the past few months. Loneliness and the closing in of her circumstances meant that she needed to talk. She was lucid, remarkably so, with an extraordinary recall of events that I could barely register. Her body was breaking down but her mind was still agile.

About 8.30 in the evening was the most regular calling time, just after a program like Heartbeat, Father Brown, Yes Minister or As Time Goes By. 

I feel a real gap at 8.30 now, a connection that is lost. She will not be there to answer should I call.

This has been been the oddest and most challenging Christmas season that I can remember. My mother has passed away, my wife was suddenly taken to hospital on the same day and I have a strange infection of a facial gland which came out of nowhere. I won't even go into the events of recent months which can almost rival these. Suffice it to say that this has been an annus horribilis.

Not to complain - these kinds of things affect everyone at some time - but the piling up of disasters both small and big in such a short period of time is unprecedented in my lifetime. To cap things off, we found a dead possum in our wheely bin this morning. Ann and I gently removed it and gave it a decent burial up in the back yard. It was a very cute one that we had often seen walking on the power lines.

As a Christian I am aware of how St Paul dealt with the hugely varying circumstances in his life. In Philippians he wrote,

'I have learnt the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.' (Ph 4;11-13)

He was an extraordinary man in many respects, but I yearn to emulate the sense of being content when troubles build upon troubles, no matter what. I have a long way to go, but it is possible for he adds in the same verse, 'I can do all through him who gives me strength.'

Yesterday my mother June passed away at the Royal North Shore Hospital. She had been growing increasingly frail for months but had picked up remarkably in the last two weeks. Our daily conversations were lively and she had many spot-on reminiscence's, things I could barely recall myself. She sounded happier than I have heard her in a long while.

But a stroke finally did her in, something that at 95 she could not beat. Her passing was peaceful and not drawn out - a blessing for both her and the family. Nobody wants to see a loved-one wasting away in a bed.

My mum came to Australia with her mother Ivy as 10 pound Poms in 1949. That she wasn't keen on coming was neither here nor there - her mother, as all parents did in those days - assumed control of the circumstances and didn't ask, 'Is this what you want too?' She worked in a bank, made an unhappy marriage to my father, and had five boys. Yes, five!

She was the centrepiece, the rock and very foundation of our lives for decades, despite being mild mannered and often quite shy. She paid the mortgage when my father became sick, worked a number of jobs, travelled, became a jazz afficionado, helped us whenever we asked for help.

I know she didn't lead the life she would have chosen, the sacrifices made that all too difficult. Her life was chosen for her. Now she is gone the world less one kind, self-less person.

I am sure that she returned to God in recent months, rekindling the faith of her teenage years. And I am sure that she will be welcomed by the Lord as one of those special ones called to serve others.

A lot of things are posted online that are wrong, misleading or utter rubbish. The task of discerning between the true and the false is becoming harder and harder and with the advent of more sophisticated AI, harder still. Some critics talk about a post-truth world, though I would argue that the truth will always be there. It will just take much longer to find it, if you're willing to make the effort

Photos are a common source of  such confusion, since software can now radically alter and recreate (or indeed create) with equally misleading descriptions attached. I don't know why its come to this - perhaps folks like throwing cats amongst the pigeons - but just about everything nowadays needs to be verified.

All this leads me to what seems like an innocent mistake. A Japanese page I subscribe to on FB posted the following photo (not exactly this one but the same shop) with the caption, 'a cafe in Japan'.

It is certainly not unlike many of the cafes I have seen in Japan, so I googled the name Cafe Chez W to check on its specific location, and found, not entirely to my surprise, that its actually in Shanghai, China. Now that is a big mistake - different country, people and language. Since the whole operation only took me less than a minute, I wondered why the poster hadn't made a similar check before.

The comments were fairly scathing as others had obviously done the same thing as me. Innocence, laziness or deceit? I don't know.

2005 is, remarkably, the 20th anniversary of this blog. I can't remember why I started writing one, beyond the fact that it was novel at the time and I felt that I might have something to say. I had kept a couple of hand-written diaries in the past, notably in the 1980's, but they tailed off ultimately through boredom or forgetfulness.

This one has endured, probably because I like typing out entries (my thoughts are better collected) and perhaps because working in Japan made it appealing to keep writing. There was also the added benefit of adding photos, maps and the like to supplement my meagre scrawls. Around this time I also started writing some poetry again.

I am giving weight to the proposition that an end point might be coming when the actual anniversary arrives. I don't know, though my editor, should he or she exist, will doubtless cheer me on.

Lately I have been dipping into some videos about warships from WW1 and 2. They are the kind of resources I would have given anything for in my teens, a period when I built quite a few model ships. I managed to score the odd library book with tiny black and white photos, but nothing like the footage available today, including computer reconstructions and much else besides.

I don't know what happened to my collection which I left boxed up at the family home in the 1980's but never saw again. It included (principally Airfix) models of battleships and battlecruisers HMS Hood, Warspite and Rodney; the Bismarck and Scharnhorst, the USS New Jersey and an assortment of smaller ships including the HMS Suffolk and Campbeltown. There was also a smaller scale version of the Yamato which came out looking like a pocket battleship rather the massive beast that it was. I also modelled tanks, artillery and aircraft, winning second prize in a local competition for an Italian light bomber, whose name I cannot recall.

It was fun at the time and we had some massive battles on the front lawn, using matchsticks shot from small cannon as ordinance. Together with sport of all types, that was how my youth was spent.

The box lid of HMS Warspite, exactly as I recall it.

I haven't had much chance to pick up my guitar in a while. It's not because I don't enjoy playing and singing, but that I am tired of the selection of songs I have collected over the years. Many date from my time playing at the Anglicare Café in Mt Druitt. A lot of those songs had to be fit to purpose, ones that everybody knew, that I was able to adapt to my level and that created the right ambience for a busy environment.

I have downloaded a few songbooks that sundry kind souls have put together and the usual suspects crop up time and again - Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkle, James Taylor and so forth, all great song writers but perhaps too often heard to interest me.

I think the problem is probably laziness. When I had the café gig I was constantly looking for new material to make the repertoire larger, which was a weekly chore. I don't want to sing in a café again - that is out of my system - but I would like to sing joyfully at home. 

So I had better make the effort.

In the early evening yesterday, I came across a dead bird alongside my garage. It seemed to me that it had misjudged the glass window in the side of the building, thinking it an entrance or escape route. It is very unusual at this particular window because beyond the pane is darkness. Other windows around the house, notably at the front door, seem to offer just such a passage to garden brightness on the other side, which of course, is an illusion, though understandable from the bird's point of view.

My guess is that it is a young bird with limited experience. Looking online today the closest match was with a juvenile bower bird, probably thatched a few months ago. The bower is in the far right corner of my garden and today I noticed the male bower bird flitting from tree to tree, perhaps in search of its doomed progeny.

I buried the youngster at the back, not too far from home, but far enough to be missed.

A female bower bird with a juvenile in the foreground. (photo courtesy Blue Mountains Nature)

There are probably hundreds of potential solutions to the Fermi Paradox, the puzzle, first mooted by Enrico Fermi, that, there is a discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of  advanced extra-terrestrial life and the likelihood of its existence.

Without challenging the fundamental logic of the paradox itself, there seems to me to be one abiding factor that makes it likely that we will never meet up with those hypothetical aliens. The universe is so vast - our galaxy alone is mind-boggling big - and the speed limit is so constrained by the laws of physics, that no advanced civilisation would bother to want to get much beyond their solar system.

The speed of light is that limit and getting anywhere near it is well-nigh impossible. There are serious problems with trying to travel that fast, including the infinite amounts of energy required and the strong possibility of colliding with even the tiniest particle, lethal at those velocities.

Currently Voyager 1, which travelling at quite a clip, would take over 70,000 years to reach our nearest solar neighbour, Proxima Centauri, a mere 4 light years distant. Aliens may choose to invest in long-term robotic colonisation via self-replicating spacecraft (see von Neumann probes) but even then, what is the return and why do it?

Why not settle for exploring the local solar system, with perhaps a robotic foray or two to the nearest star system? I think this is probably why we will never meet ET, though there does remain the possibility of detecting life at a distance, as we are now doing with SETI.

I have been thinking about the 'sensate society' since I was a young man, though I didn't have the words for it back then. Nor did I know that others had thought much about it.

Materialism, the consumer society, existentialism, the loss of faith - these were all swirling around at the time and were often reinforced by my readings at university and beyond. I lapped up the plays of Sartre and Camus, delighted in the the writing of the absurdists (and later the Dadaists) , though a part of me must have known even then about the logical consequences of such theories. Disintegration, madness or a surrender to hedonism were all possible destinations.

My charismatic modern history lecturer (Dr P. Edwards), a specialist in the 16th century, gave us Luther's perspective at that time - 'Man can only sin', though I am at a loss as to where the quotation comes from. It is not that he agreed with Luther mind, but it gave us free-thinking undergrads an entry into the zeitgeist of the Reformation. But I digress.

The 'sensate society' was coined by Russian scholar Pitirim Sorokin way back in the 1940's. In essence, Sorokin posited that societies move through three cycles, and leaping ahead to the last phase, we find the sensate society, a civilisation based on the material, but centrally, also based on feelings and  sensations. There is no room for the spiritual and decline becomes inevitable. Practically, this will lead to the emergence of a different set of values and practises that will essentially degrade and perhaps destroy that society. The guard rails have disappeared and there in nothing to hold things together.

It is my estimation that things have become far worse than when I was at university. This is not old fogey syndrome but the collective observations of many. When you dismantle the practises, institutions and beliefs that built the sub and superstructures of a successful society, then what is to hold it up. This is not to say that there are not positives, such as righting historical wrongs, ending forms of discrimination or indeed the progress of science and medicine. These are good things on the whole.

Yeats wrote in The Second Coming,

'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,'

I hope it isn't so but I have thought that it might be for a very long time.

There are five man-made probes that are destined to leave the solar system, never to return - the two Pioneers, the two Voyagers and New Horizons. In addition there are various rocket stages that will also, albeit more slowly, end up in inter-stellar space.

Voyager 1 is currently the most distant of these probes at approximately 25 billion kilometres from home. It has already breached the heliosphere but will still have to navigate the Oort cloud for thousands of years to come. It is operating at the very edge of its capacity, one that will inevitably end in decade or so.

Recently Nasa sent a command to Voyager 1 telling it to turn on one of its heaters. Something was lost in translation (it takes 23 hours for the signal to reach the craft) and Voyager appeared to cease radio contact. Strangely enough, it popped up again on a different radio frequency, having inexplicably turned on an old transmitter that was last used in 1981!

The investigation into the how and why continues. But these stories and the legends that these little probes will create for themselves will be enduring.

Image courtesy Discovery magazine.

Readers of this blog (surely none -ed.) will know that I am fond of the verse of Christina Rossetti. She writes both secular and devotional poems. Her connection to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood through her brother Dante Gabriel makes her even more interesting. Sometimes she would end up in their paintings!

The following short poem is one of her devotional pieces that I particularly admire. For me, it is gem of articulation and faith that bears reading over many times.

Lord, Thou art fulness, I am emptiness:

Yet hear my heart speak in its speechlessness

Extolling Thine unuttered loveliness.

I am often amused when folks from the Boomer generation (which of course includes me) post images of older technologies that they are certain would befuddle young people today.

Invariably, the cassette tape, the cathode-tube TV and the rotary-dial telephone are dragged out as the kind of objects that would inspire panic and perplexity in these unfortunate young men and women. They may, of course, be joking, but a moments observation and even 10 seconds on Youtube would resolve any difficulties encountered, if any existed in the first place.

The same kind of meme comes back the other way, perhaps as a kind of revenge by Gen. X and Z partisans. These often portray very old people completely misunderstanding what modern technologies can and can't do with hilarious or absurd consequences.

It's just another manifestation of the so-called battle of the generations, which is not really a battle, merely a matter of opinion, cultural change and the vicissitudes of memory. I confess that I have very little interest in social media, except for my rarely-used FB presence. I really have better things to do.

I have had a very disrupted schedule lately, with all the 'normal' things that I do thrown into doubt. I have not been regularly to either 2RPH or my choir rehearsals due to events that were simply beyond my control.

Today, at least, I can attend my choir's concert in Springwood, even though I have missed some key practice sessions. I always try to make this up with study at home. Fortunately we have a choir site at Harmony which allows songs to be downloaded and played and much else besides. I do think I am ready, but should my memory play tricks, I can always do my time-honoured practice of dropping out for a bar or two whilst miming. Simply put, you never acknowledge mistakes to an audience.

Here's the flyer for today's gig which should be a good session of singing from very different choirs. And all in a good cause too!

Despite being in the midst of a world of trouble over the past few weeks, there is much to be grateful for. Yes, 'when sorrows come they come not single spies, but in battalions' (Hamlet) but there is a way of surviving the dark valleys and emerging in the light at the end, if an end there is.

Not all people endure the battering. No one, I think, comes through unscathed,  or changed in some way, unless they are impervious to pain and suffering. If you are a stoic, I suppose you might anticipate the worst in order to pass through whatever wrath is to come. But ordinary folks can fall by the wayside, or become consumed with running from problems by whatever means.

Which brings me to gratitude. If you can find the good amongst the bad, the joy amongst the pain, then you are blessed indeed. I think it pays to stop, momentarily cease the relentless pacing of the mind, and look around for something that brings hope. It is usually something very simple.

 I am having a lovely time giving ChatGPT 'literary challenges.' I had read an article in the Smithsonian Magazine that described an experiment in which the subjects of the that experiment were asked a variety questions, including some which required them to distinguish the real work of famous authors and the AI generated fakes. Most could not.

So off I went to Chat GPT to give it a few tasks that might test it's mettle. First up was the poet Philip Larkin. I had Larkin's 'Home is so Sad' in front of me and asked the bot to create a poem in the style of Larkin entitled Home is so Sad. Epic fail. The slightly sardonic tone and sense of regret was there, but the style was way off the mark.

Consider the bot's opening verse,

'Home is so sad,
It sways like a tree in the wind,
The rooms, once warm, now sag
Under the weight of what’s been.'

Its not bad as verse goes, but Larkin would never have written this. Not even when he was in primary school.

But other challenges have been far more successful and might well fool the unsuspecting. I asked ChatGPT to write scenes in the style of Shakespeare, Pinter and Beckett. Also a monologue in the style of Woody Allen. All were competently executed.

There are many potential downsides to this capacity, especially concerning plagiarism. But there are also wonderful opportunities to generate new bot-driven literature which could be a lot of fun. Back when I was teaching English and Drama, this could have been a very creative blessing for students, so long as they also did original student-driven work themselves. I mean the AI variety as a supplement and stimulus principally.

Of course, AI might yet destroy us all. But for now I have more tasks for ChatGPT. I hope that it gets to write better poetry though.

Storm clouds can arise for anyone and anywhere and, if we are wise, they catch our attention in deeper ways. These are metaphorical storms, of course, the ones that loom suddenly and sweep us into difficult and sometimes debilitating situations.

There is no one on the planet, no matter what their wealth or status, good looks, rude health and otherwise fortunate circumstances who will not experience the storms that bring suffering and pain to their door. It is almost always unwelcome and invariably wished away. 

You can face them square on, or give them side-wards glances, or try to turn your back, but the storm must be gone through, no matter what. Drugs, alcohol, tranquillizers and hedonistic living merely stay the moment when matters must be dealt with in some manner.

Because I have faith, I can yield my circumstances to God. I can only know the tiny portion of what is, like a pin hole in a sheet of cardboard held up to the eye. I do not know the end from the beginning, or how seemingly chaotic events can work towards a better end. That is a matter of trust for me.

Storms are still painful, but there is solace in knowing that I am not the captain of this ship.

There is much to marvel at in the Australian story but there are times when I am sorely disappointed. Just recently I have been immersed in the hospital system on behalf of my wife and my son and found it to be first class, compassionate, professional and skilful.

But today was cause for one of those great disappointments, made greater and more impactful by the fact that it effects my family directly. We had applied a Tourist Visa for Ann's son Aran to visit us for three weeks early next year. The application was meticulously completed and all the required documentation (and much more besides) supplied. I leave nothing to chance and we had a very solid case for its approval.

Today the application was denied. The reason. Aran has no job to go back to. Never mind his healthy bank balance or the fact that we had provided details of how we would put him up and show him around. Apparently not having a job makes him a flight risk in Australia. Yet if he did have his old job back, the most leave he could take each year was 5 days. So he could not have come even if he had a job. So job or not, you can't come!

I can't tell you how upset I am at this ridiculous bureaucratic nonsense, worthy of a Kafka short story. There is no appeal, no refund, no proper explanation. Just the stroke of an unthinking pen. It is very unjust but what can you do about it?

 There are multiple narratives emerging about why Trump won yesterday, all of which may have some truth. The post-covid economy of high inflation, the focus on too progressive policies in the White House, a loss of focus by the Democrats on the working class and so forth. The result is pretty close to what many canny observers of the polls were saying, that Trump would win comfortably. So I wasn't at all surprised, even if I was very disappointed.

Its hard to say how badly things will pan out in the next four years given how chaotic Trump's first term was. There is something cultish about his support - he is - after all, a celebrity and plays the political with much underestimated skill. Will 16 million illegals be deported? It's doubtful. Might tariffs go to 100% What do you think? Will he exact revenge? Probably. Will Putin get the Ukraine with a red ribbon attached? Hmm.

Let's wait and see.

With the US Presidential election upon us now, there is much trepidation in that country and around the world. Aside from the usual suspects - Russia, North Korea, Hungary etc - the leaders of most nations do not want a Trump victory. In addition to his odious behaviour on the stump, the sheer chaos of another such administration strikes genuine fear in sensible and thoughtful people around the globe.

But there you are, the contest is statistically deadlocked with a better than average chance that Trump will win a second term. The polls themselves are difficult to discern - a point up here and a point down there for either candidate - with much hand-wringing about 'shy' Trump voters (are they counted in the polls?) and tiny last minute swings in key districts.

I confess that after weeks and weeks of election watching and listening to the pundits, I have no idea who is likely to win, though I have a suspicion who will win. I hope that I am wrong.

The last day of October. Birds are diligently and somewhat urgently gathering food for their young, whose plaintive cries can clearly be heard from the stand of trees at the end of garden. Like human parents, the birds respond instinctively to the sound of their hungry offspring.

Now and then I put some food scraps in the garden, especially when we have had little rain and our avian friends are scratching for a meal. Usually they will take whatever is offered, but lately have been getting very choosy. I expect they know what is best for the nestling diet. But today a satin bower bird swooped on a half a slice of toast, skilfully taking it out of reach of some adult magpies.

You can spend a lot of time gazing into the garden at this time of year and its never gets boring.

Tom found himself in ER at Katoomba two days ago with a collapsed lung. I don't know how lungs 'collapse', but he seems terribly young to be in this predicament. Further tests are pending at Nepean tomorrow. He has moved back home too, at least for the time-being and I am very happy to see him.

I don't blame young people for getting lost in social media and drugs - lamentable as it is - given the world they find themselves in. It may not be all that different from the world I found myself in, but the volume of noise generated is much, much greater. The foundations of truth are constantly undermined and voices clamour for attention from all directions.

Who is the one to teach discernment, how to distinguish between right and wrong, worthwhile or junk? Where are those clarions and can they be heard amidst the din?

A few days ago I received a second hand copy of the 'Selected Poems of RS Thomas' from a well known pre-owned book supplier. I could see no evidence of its having been read or perhaps even opened, so I count it as almost brand new, even though it was printed 20 years ago.

Thomas is a very interesting and a very good poet, an Anglican priest whose parishes ranged the Welsh countryside. He learned to speak his native tongue so he could better talk with his parishioners and understand their lives. His writing has the very blood and bones of the Welsh countryside in its making, peopled with lean, lonely but determined characters. I am half-way into the volume, and I am left, quite often, with a sense of the grim, the sparse, the forgotten.

Consider this stanza from 'The Welsh Hill Country' and you will see what I mean.

'Too far for you to see
The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys,
The nettles growing through the cracked doors,
The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira,
There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight,
And the fields are reverting to the bare moor.'

It is not that Thomas does not love Wales and its people, but rather, that this is the truth of what he sees.

Vis a vis my last post about visa applications, I am compelled to note the final section of the tourist visa form. There are a large number of questions about character followed by a stern series of inquiries about criminal activity. One is invited to answer, hand-on-heart, whether one is a terrorist, a slave trader, a child molester, a bomb maker, a money launderer - well, you get my drift, I'm sure.

I can't imagine any actual terrorists answering this truthfully, unless they are very dim. Ditto for pretty much every other nefarious activity that is listed and about which actual miscreants would surely answer 'no'. I guess it doesn't hurt to ask, but I cannot fathom its practical purpose other than saying 'we don't want these kinds of people in Australia.' Or perhaps they are trying to psyche the applicant out of going any further.

I don't really know how we get any tourists from countries whose citizens must complete a visa application to come here. It is long and intrusive and at times impertinent. I know we have to protect the citizenry, but where is the hospitality?

I had quite forgotten the joys of completing visa application forms on behalf of others for the Australian Government until I opened up Ann's ImmiAccount again today. My mind flew back half a dozen years to a period where collecting seemingly endless amounts of data - documentation - to support the already enormous process of completing an application, was my bread and butter for what seemed like months. For all I know, it might have been years.

At that time I had been applying for permanent residency for Ann and JJ, one after the other, followed by citizenship a little later. This time Ann's son Aran wants to come for a holiday, which is great, but it falls to me, as it must, to go into the breach once again. 'Surely a mere tourist visa will be a knock over?', I thought, as I nervously tapped at the keys to open the account on my computer.

How wrong can a man be? I had forgotten about the needless information gathering, the lack of auto-fill, the one-size-fits-all questions and much else besides. And I haven't even got to the section where data must be collected, translated, certified and uploaded.

I remember saying to an immigration officer once that the amount of effort expended completing the residency applications was deserving of a PhD, if only for the quantity of time spent on the project and the arcane nature of much of it. He thought I was joking.

But no, I was not.

I swing between viewing the world today as being a worse, more dangerous place, or the pretty-much-the-same place of my youth. If I look closely at the 1970's, for example, I note that there was a continuing war in Vietnam, a number of proxy wars in Asia and Africa, a massive number of nuclear weapons, wars in the Middle East, as well as high inflation and unemployment in the West. Military juntas had seized power in Chile and a number of African states. There was actually a lot of bad stuff (did I mention Pol Pot?) going around, to coin an academic phrase.

Today we know much more about climate and how we might prevent making it unbearable in the future, there are fewer nuclear weapons though more nuclear powers and there are wars but not as many as before. Living standards across the globe are higher, medicine is better - in fact there is much to like about how things have improved, by certain metrics.

On the other hand, public behaviour and discourse has declined, crazy conspiracy theories are believed and a new form of extreme thinking has emerged on both the left and the right, heedless of the historical record. Mental illness seems to have exploded and there is little doubt that mainstream popular music is poorer melodically and lyrically. I just threw that last one in.

I'd like to get a set of old fashioned scales and set them up to see which era has the worst (heaviest) record. But this is all too subjective anyway and tomorrow I might come back with a different list altogether.

This being my birthday, I shall be a little self-indulgent and choose a birthday poem for this post, albeit one that is more reflective, less celebratory. Linda Paston, who passed away a year ago, is an American poet, whom I not heard of before. But she can write, so I look forward to reading many more.

Counting Backwards

How did I get so old,

I wonder,

contemplating

my 67th birthday.

Dyslexia smiles:

I’m 76 in fact.

 

There are places

where at 60 they start

counting backwards;

in Japan

they start again

from one.

 

But the numbers

hardly matter.

It’s the physics

of acceleration I mind,

the way time speeds up

as if it hasn’t guessed

 

the destination—

where look!

I see my mother

and father bearing a cake,

waiting for me

at the starting line.

 

It is hard nowadays for poets who once wrote about topics of religious devotion to be fully understood by a modern audience. The pendulum of faith has swung so far in the Western world as to make such writers appear naive or deluded. I couldn't disagree more, of course, and love to read writers who are sensitive to the metaphysical in their lives. Christina Rossetti, about whom I have written often in the past, was just such a poet. She wrote both secular and devotional verse, so has a wide appeal.

The poem below is as close to a gem as I can think of. It improves with every reading.

I Am Small and of No Reputation

The least, if so I am;
If so, less than the least,
May I reach heaven to glorify the Lamb
And sit down at the Feast.

I fear and I am small,
Whence am I of good cheer;
For I who hear Thy call, have heard Thee call
To Thee the small who fear.

A few days ago, the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the organisation of A-bomb survivors who have worked tirelessly to promote an end to nuclear weapons. It is hard to think of worthier recipients of the award, not only because of the awful struggle they have been through, but also the threat that hangs over the heads of every living thing on the planet.

When I was living in Japan, it was common to find items in the newspapers about hibakusha, the name given to categories of people affected by the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was a struggle amongst these people for recognition, medical assistance and a fair go. Many were discriminated against because of ignorance about the effects of radiation sickness (was it contagious?) or the perceived potential for birth defects, which were not above a national average, in any event.

I once wrote about one of my adult Japanese English students, Mr Honda. Sent by his parents to Hiroshima to escape the bombing of Tokyo, he narrowly missed being a victim of the atomic bomb. He had gone over the mountain a few days earlier to stay with cousins, a short journey that saved his life.

I pray for all the remaining victims, the hibakusha, that they will be better understood, accepted and indeed, applauded for this wonderful award. I pray for those who have died. For the person, now gone, whose shadow remained on the concrete step on that day. For the tattered uniforms and lunchboxes and those who leapt into the river in agony. I pray for you all.

News that King Charles III will tour Australia soon brought back memories from my childhood, when my mother would dutifully fill the car with her children and head off to meet the Queen.

On one occasion, Her Majesty was due to visit the Spastic Centre of NSW (now, Cerebral Palsy Alliance), which was located in the nearby suburb of Allambie Heights. We lined up along the drive leading into the main building ( I don't remember any Union Jacks in hand) and waited while the Monarch met with the good people inside. Then in a flash she was off, a hand waving by a passenger window in the back of a Rolls Royce. It did seem exciting to us back then.

It is hard to say how the republican issue will play out in coming decades. The steam seems to have gone out of the debate - the world being as unstable as it is - more Australians are siding with what they know and what works best. The antics of royals such as Andrew and Harry ( who should surely have heeded the lessons provided by Edward VIII) have not helped the royal cause and Australia's population is changing in any event.

No more the Anglo-Celtic supermajority, though its influence is still overwhelming. Things can flip very quickly, though in the antipodes, we are not unaccustomed to watching the paint dry, whilst the grass grows.

That day in 1970.

Heading out this morning for a trip to Penrith, my turned key in the car ignition was greeted by inactivity. It might be more accurate to say that there was something, the muffled sound of a enfeebled asthmatic, perhaps beneath the bonnet, and a tell-tale flashing of lights on the dash. Dead battery!.

I can't complain because the current battery is the factory-install and nearing 6 years of age, which I am told is the maximum to be expected. Because we have colder winters in the Mountains, batteries are under greater pressure to perform, so going the distance is close to a miracle.

Ann and JJ have gone into town in search of food (Thai Town being the ground zero). I am up to date with all my recordings for 2RPH programs, having completed the Christmas edition of Writers from the Vault yesterday. I guess that means I am really a long way ahead but finding time to record, and the correct conditions for recording, is becoming more difficult.

But what have I to complain about? It is a privilege to do the work that I do, it always has been, and I am greatly blessed in being still able to do it.

We had the changeover to daylight saving two days ago, giving us darker mornings and lighter evenings. I used to love this period as a kid because we could play outside after dinner, the light not fading until about 8pm. There were no screens in sight as we kicked balls, rode bikes or had a game of impromptu cricket in the park at the end of the street.

This is not a criticism of technology per se, but the overuse of devices to the exclusion of other healthier pursuits. I faced similar criticism viz a viz television and playing records, but really these are hardly comparable. As I said. we were outside playing most of the time. Entertainments inside took a long second place.

This morning a group of birds were noisily protesting something at the front to the garden. It's a very different sound to that of ordinary bird chatter, more a pointed, squawky, 'get outta here' variety. Sure enough, my wife said that she saw a small possum being assailed by birds as it navigated some trees in the garden.

It is very unusual for an Australian possum to be out and about so late and I found it hunching on a tree branch. I will keep an eye on it because the poor thing may be sick or disoriented, in which case a call to WIRES will be in order. But I do hope that it can make its way home.

Forgiveness is never an easy thing. No matter what the offence, how great or little, pride of one sort or another drives us to hold on to slights and grudges. In some cases, the offending party is entirely unaware of what they have done, or alleged to have done. But there is no doubt that unforgiveness leads to bitterness and resentment, an emotional boomerang that hurts the one who is unforgiving. We all struggle with this, me no less than anyone else. I think that forgiveness needs to be a daily practice.

In the following poem, Welsh poet RS Thomas 'forgives' his parents for the circumstances of his upbringing. But he also realises that it is not their fault - they did their best and were not responsible for the nature of the 'drab town' nor the deleterious effects that being raised there had on his mind. It was just where they lived and they did their best. Perhaps there is even a tinge of guilt, on the poet's part, for the way he feels, in the final verse.

Sorry

Dear parents,
I forgive you my life,
Begotten in a drab town,
The intention was good;
Passing the street now,
I see still the remains of sunlight.

It was not the bone buckled;
You gave me enough food
To renew myself.
It was the mind's weight
Kept me bent, as I grew tall.

It was not your fault.
What should have gone on,
Arrow aimed from a tried bow
At a tried target, has turned back,
Wounding itself
With questions you had not asked.

The Servant-Girl at Emmaus

'Stop that clatter woman'

The gruff voice intoned,

'There's guests to serve'

She returned to her work,

Retrieved the fallen tray,

Tried to hide her trembling hands,

'Just do as I say.'

But she was lost, truly

Dared not shift her head,

Only what remained in view-

A pitcher, pestle, cup,

Scraps of discarded bread,

And heedless of the cost,

She never looked behind, instead,

Rallied every sinew to busyness,

And seeking more to do, thought,

'How can I serve those men again?'

To look upon a face she knew.

Just three days, was it?

Was it three?

In Jerusalem,

Dead on a tree?

Straining to hear his voice,

Straining, in lamp light,

Frozen, heart-burning,

She began again her turning.

'The Servant-Girl at Emmaus'  Valazquez c.1620

The first day of October and the weather seems to be paying attention. It's sunny and quite warm. In the background is a sea of cicada sound, their brief above-ground existence this all-encompassing symphony.

Today I'm off to the radio station in Glebe to host Features Forum, our daily selection of commentary and such like from the four Sydney daily newspapers. The format tends to get a little bogged down in politics and economics related material, somewhat hard to digest if it fills the whole 90 minutes. I try to encourage a wider range to include reviews and some lighter pieces to soften the serious journalism that is inevitably our lot, but it is not always possible.

On Saturday last I bought one of Pat's fabulous boiled fruit cakes from the Red Cross stall at Hazelbrook. It's pot-luck when they will next be there - usually every three months - so I am delighted when I do stumble across their cheery tables outside the pharmacy. Even happier when I see that there are still some cakes left, because Pat's fare sells quickly.

The Red Cross ladies are getting older and older. I wonder who will fill their shoes and generous spirits when that time comes?

 Yesterday I went again to Wat Buddharangsee in Annandale with Ann. I have been quite often in the past, sitting through a Thai Buddhist liturgy and then sharing a common meal in the adjacent hall. The centre supplies an English language version of the Thai/Pali script, so I can follow along and even chant if that takes my fancy.

These days I go with a somewhat different lens on what unfolds before me, having returned to Christianity two years ago. This is not a superior or critical view, but one which is both interested and engaged. I have had opportunities to become a buddhist in the past, but I realised on all occasions that it was not the right fit for me. It would not have worked at a deeper psychological level.

There are certainly similarities between how the two faiths see the problems of existence. Death, suffering, loss, pain, disappointment, sorrow and so forth are common aspects of life. We can't avoid them. Buddhism argues for a casting off of all attachments to the world, Christianity demands for a surrender to God. Both are giving up, letting go of. 

I have made my choice and I am happy with it, though any faith is a daily commitment. Facing life without such a window on the world and eternity is a tough ask indeed.

As part of my Christian life, I read a couple of devotionals every day. By a coincidence, perhaps, one of these daily studies is examining the Book of Ecclesiastes, and the other, the Book of Proverbs. It doesn't take a scholar to know that these two tomes form part of the 'wisdom' literature of the Bible.

If you were to entirely reject religions of all stripes but still want to engage with relevant ancient thinking, then you could do worse than study these two books. I read somewhere (by someone who had tried it) that applying the principles of Proverbs alone can dramatically alter your life for the better. Ecclesiastes contains similar wisdom, though it is presented in a narrative form, teetering at times on the edge of pessimism. The latter ('life is meaningless') can seem quite dark, but is ultimately saved by the knowledge that God is good, even if Man is often not. Do we really need to make sense of things, or is trust a better option?

I find both of these texts reassuring. I need to be on track in my life and proverbs is just the tonic, whilst Ecclesiastes suits my own hopeful pessimism to a tee.

Had I not married a Thai woman, it's unlikely that I would have come to know 'Thai Town' in Sydney's Haymarket area. I would probably have noticed the area, running along Campbell St and roughly bounded by George and Castlereagh Streets, but not in the way I do today.

Here you find a lot of Thai restaurants and cafes, Thai grocery shops, Thai travel, Thai massage and so forth. There used to be a Thai music library and other services, but they seem to have disappeared, or moved elsewhere.

My wife Ann regularly goes to the city to get specialised groceries and vegetables. Sometimes she picks up a home-made food order or even buys fresh durian when it gets flown in during the growing season. I admit to having hung out there quite a lot, though I am not the only farang to do so. 

Ann often directs me to wait on the footpath outside whichever grocery shop she is in. I guess this must be a Thai thing because other foreign husbands are similarly positioned, all looking mildly uncomfortable. I'd rather be inside looking at the produce on the shelves, but mine is not to reason why, is it?

The new Metro line in Sydney, the extension of which recently opened, is a surprisingly worthwhile addition to public transport structure of the city. I have been on bits and pieces of it since its first iteration a few years ago. On that occasion I took the train from one terminus (Tallawong) to Castle Hill. It was very impressive.

Since the opening of the extension from Chatswood to Sydenham, I have made time to make some short side trips, all for no apparent reason, though yesterday Ann and I went on to Chatswood. In the parlance, we alighted at said station so she could investigate a Thai shop in the Mandarin Centre.

I confess to being a little nervous on crossing under the harbour - thinking of the volume of water above us - but all went well. As for Chatswood, it is simply a different place to one I used to frequent in the 1970's and 1980's. Tower blocks, shopping malls, new pedestrian plazas, I could see nothing that had not been changed so maybe it should have a new name too.

The map below shows the existing and future Metro lines.

Like many kids 'back in the day', my family had a healthy collection of Little Golden Books. I can't remember all the titles but the covers often leap to mind. The artwork of illustrator Tibor Gergely was so striking that I can picture the volumes long before recalling the titles.

The other day I bought my first ever, second-hand Little Golden Book. I had been haunted by the cover illustration of The Taxi That Hurried since it had popped inadvertently onto my computer screen a week or two ago. The image of the yellow cab on two wheels being halted by a policeman was worth the few dollars I paid.

Some of the stories are undoubtedly dated now, the vast sophistication of the modern era always knowing better. I may buy others too, contrarian that I am.

The garden is awash with flowering trees, plants and vines. The old plum trees, those that have survived the bamboo nightmare of recent memory, have delicate white blossoms, tinged with pink. Those of the pear tree are hinted with a yellow, matching a dazzling potato vine of a similar hue on the front fence.

So, spring has arrived with full force, though today is actually quite cold. The sun is warm, but a southerly breeze harkens back to early August and the last of the combustion stove fires. There is a lot of sneezing about too. I suspect hay fever sufferers will suffer, for the pollen count is high.

What else can I say? Our parish priest, Father Joe, is moving to a new parish in North West Sydney - though I think reluctantly - and we await news of who the bishop will appoint in his place. I was sad when I first heard, for Father Joe was there at my faith formation classes and presided over my confirmation. He had been a encouragement and a rock since I began attending St Finbars over two years ago.

May God bless him in this new endeavour.

The US Presidential Election remains the tightest of races. It is a contest that will be decided, most likely, by a few hundred or a few thousand votes, here or there, across a slew of 'battleground' states. The chances of either candidate winning by a landslide are beyond remote. The US is a bitterly polarised society where the number of 'moving' votes has shrunk in recent decades.

Harris made a compelling case in tonight's debate and effectively put to rest the disaster that was the first debate between Trump and the ailing Joe Biden. She commanded the material and she commanded Trump, for the most part. The latter was hobnailed by self-inflicted  and unnecessary flights down rabbit holes and a chronic inability to stray on message. 

Trump's capacity to free-range is both his best friend and his worst enemy. In front of adoring crowds it is largely an asset - he can shoot the breeze about anything that comes into his head and nobody minds. In a debate, the structure of the exercise requires a certain discipline and a mastery of the each topic.

But as I said, the margins are very tight and either of these candidates could wake up President on November 6, the morning after.

Today is our 8th wedding anniversary. I first met Ann some two years earlier when I spied a cute bespectacled woman in a photo taken at Bondi Beach, Very few of us know the outcome of first meetings (ours was near the fountain in Hyde Park), whether love will bloom, or not.

I do think its harder for younger people, not because they don't have a huge array of dating apps at their disposal, but because many of the rules of social engagement have changed or fallen into disuse. The rush to the bedroom is one such fraught development, allowing no chance for the gradual unfolding that a romantic relationship should take, if it is to have any chance or working.

I am lucky to have my wife. She has been a most devoted companion. You can never rush into that.

As mentioned before, I have been singing in SATB choirs for three decades now. On the whole, they have been a great blessing for me, offering not only the chance for friendship and mutual endeavour, together with the joy of singing, but also myriad other opportunities. Such as meeting my first wife, going to Japan, spinoff singing projects...I could go on.

These days I am with Moo Choir (we meet at Warrimoo) and it is probably the consistently strongest group of singers I have ever sung with. A good choir relies upon a good director, without which you may be average or less than average. Moo Choir has been graced with several excellent musical directors, passionate people who work hard and have set a standard and pushed us to hit that standard. Thirty average voices can achieve a lot when properly trained and rehearsed.

A few weeks ago we sang at the Winter Magic Festival, a regular gig for all the Mountain's choirs. It is, alas, but a shadow of its former self, but we gave it our best anyway. The closeup shot below features some of the bass and alto section on this occasion, including yours truly. Oh, and the hand of our director, Rowan!

Almost gale force winds again today. The gusts are strong enough to unsettle the walker or topple the unwary. Birds remain on their branches or bound to the earth. Choir is cancelled tonight due to a blackout.

We are hunkered down. This old cottage still has its roof intact and the walls have yet to blow in. Ah, such blessings from God! I wonder if the possums will do their high-wire act tonight, or if they will find less tortuous routes to their destinations.

Tonight, too, we may 'feel the roots of the house move,' or see 'the window tremble to come in.' We may indeed.

Well I hope not, but there is a wildness abroad that will not brook the foolish or the gullible. Think of the storm in King Lear, and the madness that ensued.

Yesterday was the hottest recorded winter's day in Australia at many locations around the country. Sure, we are only a few days away from the beginning of Spring, but the signs are ominous. Taken together with all the other weather-related occurrences around the world, and their often tragic attending consequences, the picture of a changing climate seems almost irrefutable.

There are still people arguing against the notion that human-induced climate change is real, but both the science and the facts on the ground in real-time argue otherwise. I think it is almost a pointless exercise to debate folks who would deny the nose on their own faces, which is essentially what they are doing, so I don't.

I wish that it weren't so, but wishing is not the same as believing that it isn't.

I had my second dose of 'photodynamic therapy' yesterday to deal with some minor cancer spots on my head. I hadn't heard of the treatment before a doctor suggested it as an alternative to an excision, so I thought I'd give it a crack.

It's a little fiddly and a tad messy and quite expensive (this being a dermatologist, not a GP). A special cream is applied to the affected areas, the patient (for it was me!) waits for three hours for the substance to do its work, then the area is inundated with the rays from a special lamp. Mild pain in the form of red hot stabbing needles ensues, then the area is bandaged and one is sent on their way.

I am not sure how it will turn out, but it seems better than cutting and stitching, though not entirely as effective. But we will see. I found the doctor, nurses and staff to be very good - kind and reassuring and competent.

And I am confident too that I was not secretly dosed with gamma rays!

We awoke this morning with the outside wrapped up in wild winds and the house creaking like an old barn. August is traditionally a time of wind though I suspect the peak gusts today are much stronger than the average,

Earlier I walked the garden, retrieving shoes, cushions and tarps that had been dislodged overnight. I collected a fair bundle of fallen branches and watched as wary birds attempted flight, and then thought again. Their more experienced brethren stayed put, anchored to sturdier branches, awaiting a subsidence in the emphatic chaos.

I invariably return to Ted Hughes masterful 'Wind' on such occasions, the 'winds stampeding the fields under the window', the 'blade-light...flexing like the lens of a mad eye.'

And yes, 'the skyline (is) a grimace/At any second to bang and vanish with a flap.' It is just so.

 Scripture warns us about pride. Traditionally, it is seen as the most deadly or lethal of sins. Proverbs 16:18 says, 'Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.'

There is nothing wrong with healthy pride - being quietly satisfied with the job you are doing, happy at the achievements of your children, having self-respect and balanced self-esteem - you know what I mean. It is its opposite, of the poisonous variety, that so exercised the minds of the church fathers. This includes vanity, conceit and arrogance.

You might say, 'well I am none of those things.' But is far more subtle and insidious than you might think. I take umbrage at a remark I hear on the train. Pride! I know better than that that person. Someone gets a promotion ahead of me. Pride! I am a better candidate than that person. You see some folks acting badly on a reality TV show and laugh smugly. Pride again! I would never act like that. I am a better person. Comparisons of one sort or another invariably have pride at their root.

Thinking about this topic on a walk this morning, I realised that so many of my faults and foibles, things I want to get past or fix up, are tied in with pridefulness at one level or another. It is really a toughie, almost inscribed on the human condition. I need to be on my guard, fully surrendered, prayerful.

But it is hard.

I think I have mentioned before that I sing in choir. I have been singing in SATB groups now for over 30 years, interrupted only by the time spent in Japan as a teacher. It is fair to say that making the decision to first join a choir, Crowd Around, in 1992, was a seminal one that has reverberated to this day.

It was my membership of Crowd Around that lead, by the by, to getting a job in Japan and meeting my first wife. It also informed other music projects, such as being in a band, recording a CD, doing the cafe thing as a singer, to name but a few. It really has been influential in my life.

Tomorrow night we perform again at the Blackheath Choir Festival, one of the best festivals in the state. It is quite an honour and the standard is high. I don't get the same thrill as once I did (having done so many performances over the years) but I do look forward to it, nevertheless.

Moo Choir take the stage at 8.40pm tomorrow night and if you google the festival, you'll get all the information you need.

a strange flower

for birds and butterflies

the autumn sky

It isn't autumn of course. We are at the very end of winter, though a cold snap or two may come, and both trees and birds are truly confident of its imminent onset. The front window plum has begun to blossom and a plethora of birds of all stripes are piping up, swooping and chasing each other. Now and then their exuberance causes them to fly into a glass pane!

Out local magpies are back (from whence I do not know) and are eyeing us with the kind of familiarity that speaks to a generation or two, or three, having lived here and done all the hard yards.

Matsuo Basho's haiku above is such a gem. Fancy the sky being 'a strange flower' for birds and butterflies! A bit of creative genius from a master of the form.

Degrees in the Arts are very important. Perhaps I have a bias, with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in arts subjects. I also have a long history as an English teacher, as well as a literary radio program for 2RPH. So I suppose my bias is huge indeed.

A few years ago the Australian Government vastly increased fees for arts courses, favouring 'jobs-ready' offerings instead. I am all in favour of cheaper science or engineering degrees, but the turn against arts subjects is a very retrograde step and much to be deplored.

Firstly, it presupposes that tertiary education is all about getting a job once graduated. I have always opposed this notion. There are pathways at university that do more readily lead to jobs because of their very specific nature within the framework of a modern economy, whilst there are other studies which, while they may lead to future employment, serve other, much broader purposes.

Such as gaining critical thinking skills, developing the capacity to gather, consider, critically analyse and respond to whatever is going on. To challenge, where needed, dominant paradigms, suggest reforms, hold institutions and governments to account, in a manner that is logical and reasonable.

Secondly, the arts develop and mature the personality, allowing us to see into the lives of others, develop compassion and empathy and deeper understanding of the human condition. They should, in theory, make us into better people and better citizens. They help us to 'get' wisdom.

This utilitarian push will reach an end-point someday, hopefully not too late for a generation. I urge governments to be fair to the arts and to treat them as serious, worthwhile studies.

It is easy to look at the news over a relatively short period of time and think that everything is going to hell. Despite centuries of what many characterise as the march of progress, despite the more enlightened view we have in the West of the differences between people, there is a nagging doubt that very little has changed.

I mean in human nature, which remains in the thrall of ancient drives and perceptions that rise to the surface in both small and large circumstances. Crimes against children, against women, against others are not decreasing. In fact they are more commonplace and often just plain inexplicable.

Some like to point to mental illness (also rising) but are quick to ignore the harsh reality of human evil. It is real, it exists, it is on the march. It's not fashionable to talk of evil as a present reality, much as sin is seen as being outmoded too. We pathologize pretty much everything, this an attempt to give a rational explanation, but miss the clear danger of what is and was there all the time.

Alas science is not equipped to deal with what is actually a metaphysical problem. We could do worse than humble ourselves in the presence of an all-merciful God and pray for insight. The alternative (more of the same) is looking increasingly grim.

We have a problem with birds flying into a particular window. Clearly they can see the other side but not that there is a glass pane in between. It is mainly lorikeets that run this gauntlet. Today, a crimson variety smacked hard against the glass as it made its way from front to back garden. 

Usually I monitor the bird for about 30 minutes, by which time it has regained its bearings and is ready to take flight. Today, the crimson lorikeet sat for a good two hours and I thought that it may have damaged either a wing of its spine. I was on the phone to WIRES when it suddenly took flight, to my great relief.

The window now has a temporary opaque obstruction erected in the centre of the pane that should do the trick until I can find something a little more artistic to put there. I hate to see native creatures in pain or distress and I hope that any future impacts can be avoided. The fix is ungainly but that is better than the alternative. After all, we are here as stewards, not conquerors.

My dear mum has been ailing for some time now. Doctors seem to be in agreement that her body at 95 years is and will continue to be in a constant state of deterioration and that little can be done. Rehabilitation is pointless and may actually make matters worse. The miracle is that she has made it so far and continues to wake up every day. Her life now is very difficult, dependent on carers, medicines and a stoic determination to stay alive.

I guess that this is one of the reasons I searched for and found one of her favourite recordings - one that I've heard played dozens of time. Antonio Carlos Jobim's 'The Composer of Desafinado, Plays', a near legendary Verve recording from the early 1960's, was an accompaniment to many of my teenage years. Mum would put it on the record player whenever she was in a gloomy mood, most often due to an ongoing unhappy marriage. Latin music and Frank Sinatra were the bookends to that time.

I located a CD copy of the album online and ordered it today. It's a Japanese pressing so the purchase dove tails two great loves together. Sure, I can play the same album on Spotify anytime, but I'd like to be able to take it to 2RPH and play it there now and then. It will be a tribute of sorts, even if I am the only one who knows why.

 If she is known for nothing else, Dorothea Mackellar will be forever known in Australia for her poem, 'My Country' It's likely that a large swath of the population are familiar with the second verse (often thought to be the opening stanza) which begins 'I love a sunburnt country.' It is still the meat of national days, advertising people and may still even get a guernsey in primary schools and high schools. It is also one of those pieces of writing which seeps into a nation's consciousness, forever to be somewhere in the background.

Mackellar is sometimes portrayed as a one-poem poet, a foolish misrepresentation at best. There is no  doubt that she wrote in a pre-modern tradition, though there is nothing wrong with that. I am sure that Ezra Pound would find her verse appalling, but it is still appealing in the same way that any poet from the period is. And she also had the distinction of not being a fascist.

I was surprised to find her first published poem in Harper's Monthly Magazine, dating from July 1903. It was written in response to the death of her brother Keith in the Boer War. Considering she was only 15 at the time, I thinks it's a little gem, bespeaking a considerable yet nascent talent emerging.

When it Comes

How would I like to die, to die?

Without a cry,

In a hard fought-fight where blows are dealt

And the death-strokes less than a girl's kiss felt -

So would I die.

So would I like to die, but where?

In the open plain, in the open air.

Where the red blood soaks through the thirsty grass,

And the wild things tread my grave as they pass -

There would I die.

When would I like to die? At night,

A moonless night.

The still-white star-shine overhead,

And underneath the still-white dead.

There would I die.

I think she is certainly worth a second look.

The opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics was very interesting, boldly departing from the stadium-held productions of every preceding games. Using the Seine as both the means and a backdrop, and interposing various media 'events' at a variety of famous locations nearby, the ceremony succeeded in being as eccentric and eclectic as it was very very long.

The latter is my one criticism. A good editor might have snipped some of the to and froing up and down the great river, were it possible to do so on location beforehand. I enjoyed the singing and dancing at fringe locations on the Seine, the pianist playing in the rain upon one the bridges, the oddity of some of the choices, which combined high art with sheer schmaltz.

The controversy of the Last Supper piece (which is disputed, see below) which I didn't recognise at the time, may be a little overstated but is certainly understandable. Sure, it was foolish and in poor taste to parody a sacred Christian event and the addition of drag queens (why on earth do they exist?) was inflammatory. But the Lord can take care of any insults, if they were intended, and an apology has been offered. Surely there are more creative ways of celebrating works in the vast collection at the Louvre. Consider the sheer volume of painterly or sculptural themes if you will.

This was one blot on an otherwise fine opening event. I wonder how the closing will go? Meanwhile, to the Games!

ps. I am aware that the painting 'The Feast of the Gods' by Dutch painter Jan van Bijlert (completed two centuries after da Vinci's Last Supper, is a good match for the ghastly tableau alluded to above. But Bijlert spent four years in Italy and would undoubtedly have seen da Vinci's masterpiece in Milan. So there is still a likely derivative quality to it that could not have been lost of the organisers, though it does give them c    over.

It is hard to put into words what a lovely wife I have. I have never had a companion who has been so loving and attentive. I am the sort of man who was brought up to do all the domestic things - cooking, cleaning, washing and so forth, while enjoying all those traditional 'outside' chores as well. 

When Ann came along I noticed all these little things being done for me - turning down the bed, setting out the tea making stuff, creating healthy snacks, the list is extensive and very long. I have never asked nor would ever expect a partner of wife to do anything for me, except perhaps to remain loyal.

Because things get done before I get to them, I tend to focus more on the garden, making and tending the fire and so forth. Sometimes I manage to get to the washing up before it gets done. It's a bit of a race really that I often lose.

It's lucky if you find love and luckier still if it works and stays working.

Musing on my previous post, the question of suffering in life is not one that is approached lightly. There is no one source that answers the 'why' to every bodies satisfaction. Even people of faith approach the matter with a sigh, because to say 'God knows the beginning from the end' or that 'no suffering is wasted in God's plans for ultimate good' will only please so many people and might infuriate others.

If you are a materialist then you are able to present the the stark reality of your vision - that suffering is unexplainable (though it can be described), that it just 'is' as a bald fact of how the universe is ordered. There is no point in looking for meaning.

Human beings will, of course, always look for meaning, so to talk about the meaninglessness of such a significant part of existence will fall flat for many. For the stoic, or the depressive, it's manageable.

I have always felt a sense of loss. It's not because I feel I have failed at everything, which clearly is not the case. Call it a pervasive sense of sadness, a kind of emotional mist for which I cannot find a solid core, that comes and goes. It's probably why I tend more towards pessimism (with occasional loud bursts of optimism). It's why topics like suffering appeal to me.

Of course, things could always be worse. Just ask S.T. Coleridge.

'Come, come thou bleak December wind,

And blow the dry leaves from the tree!

Flash, like a Love-thought, thro' me, Death

And take a life that wearies me.'

Not one of his better days, methinks!

The late Baptist minister and preacher, Dr Charles Stanley, would often note that we should try to see all the trials that come our way as being 'sent by God.' He did not mean that God  actually sends every bad circumstance our way, but that (as Christians believe) the Lord has the capacity to allow or not allow such trials to come. In a sense, it amounts to His giving tacit authority to everything that can afflict us. Why is this a good thing?

Scripture tells us that affliction, suffering and all the variants thereof come to us to make us better people. Even non-believers know that affliction can  sharpen us, making us wiser, kinder people, more able to live our lives, increasing both our capacity and agency. In the Christian faith, to see every trial as being sent by God allows us to better respond to it, because we believe it is sent by God.

This can work on many levels, from the most mundane ( a traffic jam, stuck in a line, being verbally abused) to major events such as ill health or financial loss. If we think that the Lord is behind it, then it can only, ultimately, be for our good, no matter how dark the situation seems. Though we cannot see it, yet there is a plan and a will that guides us towards a greater, joyful outcome somewhere down the track.

This will sound crazy to people who don't believe. I understand. It is an issue of faith, no doubt. But I am reliably told that it works and I aspire to it every day, hard as it is. Proverbs 3:5 sums up the right way of thinking about stuff that perplexes or challenges us.

'Trust in the Lord will all your heart

and lean not on your own understanding;'

I like to think of my 'own understanding' as being comparable to holding up a sheet of black paper in front of my face, with a single pin hole to look through. That is my view of all the things that are much larger than myself, heedless of space/time or my own limited logic.

This has been a week, so far, of surprises. Or perhaps they are not quite surprises and might reasonably have been predicted.

Firstly, at the Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament, the sole Yokozuna, Terunofuji, has defied the odds and leads the tourney 8-0 at the present. Now yokozuna should be winning most of these competitions, but Terunofuji has been carrying injuries and has withdrawn or sat out a number of them. He always comes onto the dohyo with heavily strapped legs. But thus far, he has been wrestling at the seeming height of his powers. We can only hope that he stays fit.

Secondly, the breaking news today shouted that Joe Biden has withdrawn from the  Presidential race. Some might have called this inevitable, given the pressure from both Party and media that he has had to weather. Had he stayed, he would likely have limped to the election and been thrashed by Trump. Now there is some chance of  building a different momentum, or stemming losses in Congress.

I wish Mr Biden well after a long life of public service. He deserves a happy retirement.

The 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing has just passed and many social media sites have been posting photos and celebratory material. NASA has released previously unseen photos and also 'cleaned up' quite a few old ones using AI technologies.

Surely, this landing was one of the seminal events of the 20th century. Surely it was one one of those bright spots amongst so many disasters before and after. Even if we discount the two world wars, the sixties alone were a time of change and chaos.

Apollo 11 and all the folks who made it possible deserve that rare place in human history where it can reasonably be said that human beings are a special group in the animal kingdom. Or at least, they have some claim to be special, notwithstanding all the downsides.

As a fifth grader I watched  the grainy black and white images in the classroom and wondered at the sheer marvel of it. Only a six months later I was deep in conversation with friends about how Apollo 13 might get home safely. We did rotations of the playground turning over everything we had heard for possible clues. What a time!

Space is a super-deadly place and it will try to kill you if it can. The brave men on these missions were always at the edge of disaster, one small step from oblivion. Their achievement is simply massive, no matter how you measure it.

Last night was a night of high wind. Through the panes I could see trees careering as if masts on a storm-locked ship. The moon and stars were sharpened by the sheerness of each gust, and the windows of this old house shook and rattled in the midst of the rude invisible assault.

I do like the wind but I fear for fallen trees(on houses) and what the morning may bring - power lines down and shattered branches on the road. Sometimes it feels like a foreign landscape, familiar in some ways yet changed. 

What does Mr Frost have to say about it, I wonder?

Now Close the Windows

Now close the windows and hush all the fields:
If the trees must, let them silently toss;
No bird is singing now, and if there is,
Be it my loss.

It will be long ere the marshes resume,
I will be long ere the earliest bird:
So close the windows and not hear the wind,
But see all wind-stirred.

Political violence is no new thing in the United States. There is a sad history of assassination and attempted assassination which you can easily read about for yourself. The attempt by a clearly disturbed young man to kill Trump the other day plays into the same narrative.

At heart is a foolish interpretation of liberty, which equates freedom, in this case, with gun ownership. The US is awash with legal and illegal weapons and just about anyone can buy one. Given the rising temperature of political discourse, to which Trump had made a significant contribution, acts of violence against politicians will remain a constant threat.

There are many reasons to admire the US, but on guns, I am bamboozled.

One doesn't need to be an incumbent President to be forgetful or clumsy. In the past 24 hours I have managed to puncture my skin twice with sharp needles on a bush I was pruning, knocked a splitting axe into my sore knee and just now, run bang into a low branch, whacking my head. A scab that I had been waiting to show my skin doctor was blown clean off. Perhaps I should keep out of the garden before I sever a limb or swallow a chain saw.

I think it might be weakening eyesight or impatience or incompetence or all three. The truth is that gardening, like going into space, is fraught with big and small dangers. Unlike astronauts, I do not have to contend with zero gravity, increased radiation exposure or the risk of system failures that could lead to disaster. But one can fall from a ladder, bash oneself up on branches and thorny bushes, or mishandle a power tool (the latter might be fatal) though on the whole, injuries to self will right themselves.

And as you are lying on the ground recovering from the latest fiasco, there is always the blessing of air to breath.

My wife Ann loves new things. She doesn't quite get the Australian penchant for renovation, fixing up or repairing. It might be a Thai thing too, because I have noticed a similar pattern amongst her friends and relations.

Case in point is the air-fryer, which has served us reliably for five years now. One part of a holding basket had begun to wear. She wanted a new air-fryer. I found the spare part online, ordered and fitted it.

'But the machine is getting old,' she said, wistfully anticipating just how shiny and updated a new model would look.

Another case in point. The kettle. Another stalwart that had lasted 15 years. The auto-off function was broken and the lid had become stiff, but other than that it was a fantastic kettle. This was something that I could not get spare parts for or fix myself. So sadly, I had to retire it and buy a new one, which almost certainly will not last 15 years.

She was overjoyed to see it, of course.

I feel sorry for Joe Biden. He has proved to be a competent President and is by all accounts a decent man. But age has caught up with him and even though a person of 80 or older theoretically should be able to govern well, even in a complex and difficult job such as the US Presidency, some 80 year olds have cognitive challenges that mean they are unlikely to be able to do the job. Decline happens at different rates in different people. The debate last week was a clear indicator that Biden is on the wrong side of the decline spectrum.

The stakes are very high. Most serious thinkers do not want a Trump second term. I don't necessarily buy the hype that Trump will push the US in a dictatorship, for he is not a very competent person and he has a big mouth that says things he often doesn't mean. He might well be more authoritarian in style but the US Constitution creates checks and balances on government. Trump himself is limited by the time he can serve (another 4 years) and the looming barrier of his own age.

The Democrats need to get to work quickly to find a good candidate and Mr Biden needs to do the right thing, as difficult as that is. He has a long and proud legacy which he risks sullying if he stays on and is defeated by the challenger, as all polls predict. 

This is not a question of who is the better man or the better President. Biden wins that hands down. But the clock is ticking for him, as it is for all of us.

 

Spellbound   Emily Bronte

The night is darkening round me,

The wild winds coldly blow;

But a tyrant spell has bound me

And I cannot, cannot go.

 

The giant trees are bending

Their bare boughs weighed with snow.

And the storm is fast descending,

And yet I cannot go.

 

Clouds beyond clouds above me,

Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing drear can move me;

I will not, cannot go.

This is quite a cold winter, or it seems so. The supplies of wood for the heater have been rapidly dwindling and I may have to buy a new load soon. At nights if it is clear I sometimes steal outside for a few minutes. The sky is absolutely crystalline, shorn of any distortion. If there are clouds, they tend be scudding through the heavens, the moon and stars appearing and disappearing as if manipulated by a conjurer.

Unlike the poet in 'Spellbound', there is no snow here, but the sensation of wanting to linger in the dark and the cold is palpable. The Brontes were such a talented lot, though Emily is best known for Wuthering Heights, though she wrote quite a lot of verse.

This poem is due for an outing on Writers, methinks.

I don't buy many gadgets. On the whole, I like to get a long use out of any product. My flatscreen TV is 17 years old and going strong, I am not interested in the latest model of anything really.

But a week or so ago I did buy a little device called the Echo Dot which has the capacity to perform various tasks via Alexa. I can play music, listen to the radio, look up information, get a weather report and so forth, all by summoning Alexa and making the request.

Alexa is not a perfect assistant but does a reasonable job. She has a stock in trade of comments, jokes and songs to start and end the day and there are many kinds of questions you can ask. I can see how such an assistant might develop a serious capacity for conversation in the near future.

 Song of the Garden Cart

I sit here in desultory silence,

Known by birds and seasons differing,

The frost and sun will do their violence,

My covers shredded by the spring.

Each summer fed with gardening and grass,

Each winter loaded with sharp kindling,

The days of wind and leaf-fall come and pass,

I wait without a notion of their all-bringing.

Today I face the north, yesterday the west,

The dying sun set fire the ground beneath me,

From just beyond the shed you'll see me best,

Still silent, under a soaring macadamia tree.

We have a local cafe with the unusual name of 'Wikileaks'. It's unusual too in that, apart from offering some excellent fare and good coffee, it has an overtly political message. I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise. Until a few days ago, the essential message was to get freedom for Julian Assange. The latter arrived in Australia yesterday, having struck a plea deal with the US Department of Justice.

Whether or not you like Assange or approve of what he did (and there is much conflicting opinion about this) he surely has been punished enough. Self-imposed 'incarceration' in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and then a stint at the pleasure of Her Majesty more than addresses any perceived crimes. The man clearly had the best of motives even if his methods left something to be desired.

Meanwhile, the Wikileaks cafe has changed course following this resounding success. Today the window was plastered with posters to 'free Palestine'. Whatever that means (and the fine print is always worthy of examination), it will be harder than getting their Julian home.

I have been watching the Euro 2024 Football Championship with a great deal of interest. Unfortunatly the best coverage I can get is highlights, since full matches hide behind a pay-wall that I am reluctant to activate. But the 5-10 minute snippets and the more full-some YT commentary, together with regular news reports, give me a sufficient immersion in the contest.

The Round of 16 is almost upon us with the usual suspects - Germany, France, Spain and Portugal - amongst the favourites. The Italians, English and Dutch also present a threat. As for England, the tourney thus far has been bitterly disappointing. Sure, they finished top of their group - but the football! So much talent, so little cohesion.

Only England could take a team of such talent and put on such a wretched display. As a North Sydney Bear's fan of yore, I am only too well aware of the competency of a side that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. May it not be so in the next round for England.

 A have a high regard for atheists, not because I think that they are right (they are not), but because they are brave souls. It is far easier to sit in the kind of place that the majority of people sit - either as agnostics, or tepid believers in some undefined higher power. But atheists have made a commitment and that is worth admiring, even if it is fraught with terrible consequences.

Another thing too. The commitment that atheists make is genuine and they live their lives accordingly. The material world is all there so it is best to make the most of it. But the wishy-washy majority, those who claim that there is a God but act as if there is not, are essentially practical atheists. Their lives pay no heed to any spiritual dimension - they live as if this is all there is, just the material world. 

It might be sentimentalism or it might be superstition but it is mightily dishonest to say one thing and then act as if its not true. I don't how things will pan out, come the end of this human experiment, God will make this judgement. For only He truly knows the human heart.

I do hold out hope for those who do not believe. The strange thing is, the jump from one to the other is not so far and the bridge is a sure thing.