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.