With perfect skies and moderate temperatures, Ann and I did another walk today. This time it was the South Lawson Circular Walking Track, which has an entry point just down the road from Ann's workplace in Honour Avenue.

I did this walk many years ago - I may have done it a few times - but I had forgotten how lovely the falls are and how interesting the topography is. The Australian bush is like no other. You know when you are in it and you miss it when living elsewhere. 

Quite a lot of people were up from Sydney to do the circuit and we met a number of lucky dogs, all of whom looked like they had been for a dip in one of the many creeks and pools. If you come to the Blue Mountains, take time do a walk or two. The bush speaks it own language and you can't help but be refreshed by it, throwing off 'the mind-forg'd manacles' even for a short time.

Curating and hosting an astronomy program on 2RPH as I do, I would never expect to come across theological comments or thinking. Despite being a Christian, I understand that, even if they wanted to, physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists would have no practical way of factoring God into an equation. Sure there are mathematical statements of sorts in astronomy that have unknown variables (I'm looking at you, Drake equation!) but as a rule, God is not a part of the thinking, nor could be.

So it surprises me when I hear some prominent cosmologists talking about the 'God of the Gaps', which I assumed was a sarcastic poke at Christianity. It posits that we find God only in the those gaps in our knowledge about the universe, the mysterious bits, if you like. Man can explain the rest. Of course, as those 'gaps' are filled, God grows smaller.

The idea of a God of the Gaps emerged in the late 19th century and was theorized in an epoch when it seemed that science might explain everything, given time. It is certainly not a serious theological position for any church to hold, for it ties God (outside of Biblical revelation) into a system that must surely fail. The Bible holds that God created everything (we don't know how, of course) and he holds the whole shebang together. In this sense science becomes a marvellous tool for understanding, as best we can, how this creation unfolded.

As the Catholic Catechism holds, 'there is no conflict between good science and good theology.' Amen.

Autumn Ascent

Coming back up another way,

I pause again for breath,

Sit by a fractured stone,

Aware of the many trees death,

The dire cascade,

All around,

Red, yellow and brown,

In variegated sheets

Flash and ebb

Upon the unlit ground.

Here bush and gardens meet 

I, trace back the burn-off,

Mark the way down

To the tenebrous valley floor.

Where swollen smoke

Sits, creeps and winds, and

Impalpably coils by

Hapless ferns

And riven gums,

And dragonflies

Pent in mid-air.

I'd put a face

To my thoughts,

If I could,

But would that help,

Their roiling?

 Anzac Day was first commemorated in 1916 to honour those lost at Gallipoli. The latter was a futile campaign cooked up by British generals in response to the stalemate on the Western Front, one with very little chance of success but with a great chance of being killed. The landscape was impossibly forbidding and the Turks, very good soldiers.

Similar incompetence was on display (yes, British generals again) at many battles on the Western Front, where decent men were sent on impossible missions, most often to their deaths. It doesn't take much of a military brain, not even average intelligence really, to understand that running into fields of machine gun fire with little or no cover is crazy and futile. This happened, doubtless to the surprise of German soldiers, on many occasions. Specifically, it occurred for the Anzacs at Fromelles, where, despite attempted interventions by Australian officers, a massacre occurred where one should not have. It is puzzling to find such  wilful stupidity on display, a callous disregard for one's own soldiers.

Nevertheless, today we remember with sadness and gratitude the sacrifice of these brave souls. The Great war was a baptism of fire, to coin a cliché, for the new nations of Australia and New Zealand. The consequences of that awful conflict were very much taken to heart. Today Anzac Day is as strong as ever and Anzacs include all those who have fought in wars since then.

I hope that in future conflicts, should they occur, that Australian forces are under the command of Australian officers, top to bottom. 

'They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.'

Lest we forget

Now that she is free of her early morning job, Ann has more time for leisure activities. I promised if she quit that shift, we could do a lot more together. And I have been documenting some of that here.

Yesterday, for example, we set out for Mt Wilson, which is on the other side of the Blue Mountains. Mt Wilson is a delightful village comprising show gardens, tree-arched lanes, historic buildings and a gentle leafy ambience. I last went there likely twenty years ago and had only a dim memory of its "winding mossy ways."

We found a popular garden to wander through - Breenhold Gardens - 40 hectares or so of trees, paths, garden beds and feature walls. Later we went to the old Victoria Antiques Café in Blackheath for lunch. I am keeping up my end of the bargain, which is busier and costlier, but well worth it. My wife is a lovely woman.

Ah, the long lines of trees!

Ann and I went to the Australian Museum's Ramses and the Gold of the Pharoahs on Friday last. We decided to go because, while it is best to see these kinds of exhibits in situ, it's unlikely that I will be making a trip Egypt. I have been to a few of these kinds of things before but this was by far the most impressive, given that technology makes it easier set up visual recreations and 'virtual' spaces.

Ramses II is acclaimed as the greatest Pharoah of all time, though it is not that easy to separate the facts from the self-aggrandising fiction of his reign. The Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites was essentially a draw (he did not capture Kadesh) but was broadcast as the greatest triumph of all time on whatever piece of stone was available. Nor did he face the Hittites single-handed at one tumultuous moment, else he would have died on the spot. 

There is also the matter of the placing of his own cartouche on the monuments and buildings of previous kings, lots of them in fact, in a massive credit-claiming exercise. He was a great builder but it seems unlikely that he erected temples and monuments that predate him by 500 years. Some of that was the work of his son Khaemweset, a kind of early Egyptologist, who would have made an interesting pharoah had he lived long enough. 

Anyway, the exhibition, which includes artefacts from other dynasties as well, is well worth seeing. My wife took the photo below of Ramses coffin, his final and only resting place. Alas, his mummified remains did not come with the exhibition to Australia.

During the years I lived in Japan and right up until my departure in 2007, there was much commentary in the Japanese press about tourism. More specifically, the lack of foreign tourists who came to Japan relative to other popular destinations around the world. Japanese themselves travel extensively inside Japan, particularly during festival seasons. There were certainly foreign tourists in Kyoto and Osaka whenever I dropped in, though not in vast numbers. My own town of Sanda was definitely not on the travel circuit. But there was a foreign tourist problem.

However things have changed and recently I have read about Japanese concerns about the 'hordes' of of foreign tourists who have descended upon Japan since the end of covid. They are starting to experience the same problems that 'over-tourism' is presenting elsewhere, particularly in Tokyo and historic centres like Kyoto and Nara. Some shops are even displaying 'Japanese only' signage in their windows, likely from fear of language issues than xenophobia. Though there is that too.

When I moved up here 30 years ago, I bought a copy of Jim Smith's seminal 'How to see the Blue Mountains', the guide at that time to bushwalking in this neck of the woods. Over a number of years I did most of the walks that Jim had painstakingly recorded (together with his hand-drawn, pull-out maps), sometimes with friends or even a girlfriend now and then. I still have it, though the other day I bought Veechi Stuart's more recent 'Blue Mountains Best Walks.'

Ann wanted to do a particular walk at North Katoomba, the relatively mild and quite short Minnihaha Falls track. Veechi had faithfully mapped and recorded details of the walk, so we set off for about an hours stroll (with some steps and an incline as you descend to the falls). There were a lot of walkers, particularly families, so we had company pretty much the whole way. The falls themselves were splendid, roaring down into a rock pool from about 30 metres, full of recent rainfall. It was such a lovely autumn day that I took this picture. I hope that this is the first of many for us, now that Ann is semi-retired.

I was thinking about a Thomas Hardy poem, a fragment of the poem, yesterday, and decided to try to find it in one or two of my collections of his work. I had recalled buying a copy of one anthology, The Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy, fairly recently, and set out to find the volume, which I thought was in my bedside table.

How could I be so sure? Because I had originally bought the book having read somewhere in another place that Philip Larkin had kept this very compilation by his bedside for many years, a recommendation if ever there was one. His version was likely the little blue original first published around 1930. These being quite expensive now (about $60 due to their antiquarian nature), I opted for a plain jane paperback from the 1970's, hoping that the contents were in fact the same.

Do you think I can find it? Despite extensive searches in all the usual and expected places I cannot locate this book. It seems to have disappeared, not unlike my wedding band, though that's another story altogether.

Now I am wondering whether I actually bought it, or if I dreamed it all up? Is it possible it was all in the imagination? The transaction seemed so real, the receiving of it, the unpackaging, but there is no record of purchase nor notification by email.

Where is a person from Porlock when you need one?

A week or two ago I was working in the garden, pulling out weeds and long grass for the fortnightly green recycling collection. I enjoy doing it and it gives me a lot of satisfaction to close the lid on a bin brimming with a few hours labour.

But on this occasion, having removed my gloves and come inside to wash my hands, I realised that somehow my wedding band was not on my finger anymore. It is something you detect straight away, the sensation of nakedness, the absence of the gentle pressing of the band. I rushed outside to look in my gloves - the most obvious place - but alas, no.

Then began a three days combing of every inch of the garden I had been in, the emptying of bins, the sifting of materials. Nothing. Vanished off the the face of the earth.

For the time-being I have given in - the ring may reveal itself in the fullness of time - but for now I have pressed into service a gold band with Celtic patterns that I bought from a shop in Scotland way back in 2004. It has been sitting in my sock draw for at least a decade and being a perfectly acceptable wedding band, it is now on the appropriate digit. Sad about the other, of course, but a happy marriage is better than a ring any day of the week.

 According to most people I meet, the world is in a parlous state. It is worse, they usually add, than it has ever been. I can see how this pessimistic outlook has been arrived at, and it is difficulty not to want to jump in an join them in a community of woe.

So why would so many would arrive at this opinion. Well, there are two fairly major and highly destructive wars in progress, earthquakes in odd places, bridges brought down, extreme weather, inflation and the cost of living, bleached coral and much more promised. Media of all stripes who operate in a total time environment (24/7) pump out images and messages of doom and disaster on a daily basis with grim prophecies of what is to come. There are loads of pundits doing the same.

Notwithstanding my faith, I tend towards a pessimistic world-view myself. Were I of the absurd nature of a Pangloss, I might be able to put an optimistic spin on whatever disasters befall us. But I'm not sure that I would convince anyone. least of all myself.

The Christian faith is an eschatological one ultimately, in which 'end times' are predicted and expected to occur. Many Christians see the current malaise and chaos as being symptomatic of just such an 'end time' and it is not hard to see why. While Armageddon has been a lively topic for many centuries, with the faithful believing that 'now' was the time, there is little doubt that we live in a uniquely dangerous period (nuclear war, A1, climate change etc) and so have reason to think that there is not long to wait.

It is always best to cautious of course and not be presumptuous. Everyone who has predicted the end before has been 100% wrong. And only one Person knows the actual timing, anyway.

Daily light saving ended last night. It would be more accurate to say that it ended this morning at 3am, but few people are awake at that time to celebrate the moment. 

The way out of the change is easier than the way in, for at the end, you get an extra hour of sleep. You might think that this is always a good thing, but sometimes that long night can seem to pass very slowly indeed. I usually wake several times at night, so there was a sense that I was in bed for much, much longer than I actually was.

I usually change all the analogue clocks before retiring to avoid being deceived in the morning, though I note that all the new-fangled do it all by themselves. When, I wonder, will shoes tie their own laces?

We had an extraordinary tempest the other night. It was the kind that you read about in novels, where the whole house is shaking under the tyranny of crazed unpredictable wind gusts and pelting rain. The elements always seem on the verge of breaking in and consuming all that is before them. Somehow the leaky lounge-room roof did not leak (a quirk of wind direction, I think) but the garden was inundated and the driveway partly washed away, as usual. Even today there are pools of water amongst the trees and everywhere is wet. The wellies are working overtime.

Added to the excitement of the elements was my getting the coronavirus for the second time. Like last year's visitation, it is not severe in terms of the symptoms. But it means isolating for a period of time, so I had to give up my shift on the Newcastle Herald yesterday, missed church today and will not be able to attend choir tomorrow. I'm sure that there is a lesson in this for me somewhere.

Ann and JJ have gone to Brisbane for a few days, Tom is at his mums, so I am truly isolated. I don't mind being alone though I do enjoy company, for are we not social beings? Perhaps tomorrow I'll record another episode of Writers.

The first anniversary of my program, Writers from the Vault (a literary hurdy-gurdy) is coming up. I am a few months ahead with recordings so it not due for broadcast until July. But there is it - 26 episodes that I would not have dared to even contemplate before I began the show. I allowed myself to get ahead because I was very nervous about the project, which was original from top to bottom, and my capacity to keep it up. Unlike other 2RPH programs, it is not time specific, so I have a lot of leeway in that regard.

Where do I find the material for a broadly-based look at the old literary canon? Well, there are some wonderful archives online (Internet Archive, Trove etc), there are public libraries, there is my own library of books and there are also things that I come across in my daily perusal of newspapers and so forth. I go down an awful lot of rabbit holes and often come up with stuff that I had not been searching for but liked anyway.

And what might a typical program look like? There will always be a couple of poems, a little bio on the authors, an extract from a  novels or short story, a feature article from an old magazine, a letter from a  famous writer, a short review of a book, a monologue from a play, a piece of writing about literature or a writer. Not always of course, since I am constrained by the 30 minutes allotted, but usually all of these are represented.

If you are at all interested in listening to an episode, go to the 2RPH website and find the program guide. We work on a two week cycle.