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.

There is a lot more interest, and much more written about, younger people, than when I was young myself. I recall very little being said about the habits of the young, save for a kind of bookended commentary connected with the 'Sixties Revolution,' of which we were apparently the lucky beneficiaries. There was a continuation of sorts with the '60's narrative about fashion, music and various forms of 'liberation', but precious little about the affect of so much change on the growing mind.

Today, it is rare for any news publication to not have a story about the young and social media, the young and drugs, the young and AI, the young and mental illness and so on and so forth. I do not remark on this with any envy, for it seems to be that entirely too much is being said, far too much. A weight is being placed on young shoulders that should not be, a pathologizing of a generation.

That doesn't mean that there aren't any problems that have resulted from technological and social change - of course there are - but that the constant drumbeat of largely bad news is a problem in itself, generating anxiety and victimhood upon an already media-saturated cohort.

Let's assume that there is a lot of resilience about and go about quietly attending to things that we see as detrimental or dangerous. That doesn't get many likes, I know, but it may head off a few problems.

We are in June and this being winter, we have experienced a unusually cold snap in recent days. It's not cold by Northern European standards, but cold enough in the evenings to light a fire.

My combustion heater is 30 years old now and somewhat the worse for wear, but I keep it going each year with a bit of tinkering. The glass screen is intact despite a tiny crack in the corner (for which I bought a hearth screen as security) and while it does not burn as efficiently as once it did, it does lift the inside temperature into double digits. I enjoy gathering wood and laying the kindling in the box, though I can no longer swing an axe because of my shoulders. Honestly, there is nothing more satisfying than laying into a block of wood!

Yesterday my choir (Moo) performed at a retirement village in Springwood. I think we made a good show of it and the residents seemed genuinely happy, some even having a spring in their step, as of yore. Singing, like chopping wood, is a joy.

The war in Gaza, part of a much longer and deeper conflict, has wrought division within communities thousands of kilometres from the epicentre. For multinational nations like Australia, this portends ill. There are bound to be differences of opinion between people from divergent traditions.

I was brought up, for my first decade at least, in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, which had and still has a sizeable Jewish population. All of my friends were Jewish and often I attended birthday parties where I wore an honorary yarmulke and was most welcome, the lone goyim amongst the group.

The yarmulke was donned again when two decades later I was engaged to a Jewish woman. Our engagement party was lively and carefully curated to ensure that certain food groups did not congregate on the same plate.

As a result of my experiences and as a long-time student of history I have a soft spot for the state of Israel. I have no illusions about the manner of its establishment. Nor have I any regard for the Netanyahu Government, which strikes me as intransigent and oddly disconnected from Israel's own best interests. I support the two state solution.

But support for a Palestinian state does not need to come with a concomitant dose of antisemitism, nor should there necessarily be any relationship between them. One too can be critical of Israeli government policy without falling into the same trap. Unfortunately this has been lost on many who, through ignorance, over-zealousness or perhaps genuine racism, are parroting the language of extremist groups who want no less than the destruction of Israel

The left has changed a lot since I was a young politically-awakened lad. I am happy to see the demise of communism, but many of the basic issues that informed the old left have been overshadowed by tribal grievances and bespoke identity politics. 

Misplaced much of it is, I think.

Alun Lewis wrote 'All Day It Has Rained' while stationed with the Royal Engineers in Longmore, Hampshire while training with that unit. The year was 1941 and despite his pacifist sympathies, Lewis had enlisted to fight and was later posted to India. He is considered to be one of the last 'Romantic' poets and is often seen as a bridge between the pre-war poets like Auden and Yeats and those of the post-war period, such as Hughes and Gunn.

This being the 80th anniversary of D-Day, that extraordinary invasion of Nazi controlled Europe, I print Lewis's poem in full. We need to remember the nature of the wickedness that was fought against and not lose sight of what drove men like Lewis to join up despite their reservations. Incidentally, Edward Thomas, who appears in the penultimate line, was a poet whom Lewis much admired and who was killed in action in 1917 in the Great War. 

Lest We Forget.

     All Day It Has Rained

      All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
      Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
      Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
      And from the first grey wakening we have found
      No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
      And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
      And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.
      All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
      Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
      Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
      Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly
      Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.
      And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
      Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
      Reading the Sunday papers - I saw a fox
      And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; -
      And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,
      And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
      Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;
      As of ourselves or those whom we
      For years have loved, and will again
      Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
      Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.

      And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart
      Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday
      Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard's merry play,
      Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me
      By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree
      To the Shoulder o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
      On death and beauty - till a bullet stopped his song.

I have had something to do with vegetarianism and it's more exacting cousin veganism for a long time now. I was a vegetarian for a dozen years or so and to this day, eat very little meat relative to other foods. Having a Thai wife means being offered many dishes with meat in them, so I cut my losses and stuck to a few options only. But I only do so occasionally, preferring the not-meat substitutes I tend to put into recipes.

I recall with some amusement going out to lunch with vegans, though in reality, dreading what was to take place once seated. This was back in the 1990's when menu's did not have all the accommodating options that they do now, so one took a stab at the obvious vegetable dishes, such as pumpkin soup. Vegans were never content to stop there, and a lengthy interrogation of the waiter ensued. 'Did the chef use chicken stock?' 'Was this cooked in the same pan as a meat product?' This could go on for ten minutes and there were times when we had to walk out, since the level of perfection had not been achieved. I usually gave the flustered waiter and grim smile, as if to say, 'better you than me.'

This early form of virtue-signalling foodism had political roots and still does. Today there is an unhealthy obsession with food going well beyond what is tasty and nutritious. The number of cooking programs which promote an epicurean attitude is extraordinary.

As for me, its a humble organically-grown avocado smashed on ancient grain bespoke breads, that will do the job. Washed down with pesticide-free almond milk flat white non-slave-labour decaf coffee, if you don't mind.