Wednesday 25 November 2009

ink marks on a blank page Thurs 26th Nov

The state of South Australia where I live, is about the size of Texas in the US but the population numbers only just on 2 million. We are in Australia governed in the Westminster system as it is practised in the UK. That being so for the actual governance there is a central Federal government, each State has its own Premier, having the same powers and gravitas as a US Governor, who is responsible to a two tier system of state politics within that state. For those that are confused that a country with only 22mill people would want to have so many politicians then there can only be one answer, we want our liars and cheats where we can see them !
Seriously, as one who has been in politics I do understand that most politicians do the job for the good of the people, some are bent , some are duplicit, most are very hard working doing a thankless job that has a high burn-out rate. Modern politics though has become the PR persons paradise, once I was a fan of the UK leader Tony Blair but soon realised that his was a government of polished spin and no substance. The local chap who runs this state is a personal friend of Mr. Blair and has shaped his Government in the same mould. If asked a direct question there is no minister of his Government that will come out and give a direct answer. When asked why there were people fainting on the new trams (it was because the air-con system didn't work) the Minister for Transport said" They should be wearing less clothing", in winter yet? You get the picture don't you. By this you might be forgiven for thinking that I am not a fan of this particular Government, no I'm not, and having been a member of the political party concerned it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that this is the way we are governed. I write this because our Premier has become embroiled in a scandal that although will not cause him to resign, it is of such a poisonous nature that at some time something must be done, if not to bring down his Government then to arrest the amount of spin on every subject. This then is the background;

When the present Premier was the leader of the opposition (some 10yrs ago) he befriended a young ( married) waitress who worked in the Parliament dining rooms, he at that time was single, divorced, but was in a close relationship with a lady who eventually became his wife. He formed, in his words, a close, flirty, sharing confidences warm friendship with this waitress, so much so that when her sister visited from the US he took them both on a guided tour around Parliament house and served them coffee in his private office. He is about 18 yrs older than this lady(the waitress) and is a charming erudite confident man of the world with of course the showmanship and carisma of the consumate politican that he is. She was (is) a young lass who had been married at 17 (pregnant) , then whisked off to Australia by her husband who apparently did not get on with his US in-laws.
Our politican became Premier some 8yrs ago, until 2006 kept up a very close warm friendship with this waitress, who is by the way a very attractive intelligent blonde woman.

The reason this warm friendship stopped in '06 became obvious last week when the young waitress went on local television claiming that this man (Premier) had an ongoing sexual relationship with her from the time they first became friends until 2006 when her husband found out about the affair and seperated from (her) his wife. They have since divorced.
During her television appearances she came across as completely plausible and honest, expressing shame and remorse for her conduct and behaviour.That she was paid for this interview is to me of no consequence as she is a single mother with mouths to feed with children still at school( her eldest is 15).
What has transpired since these revelations came out is nothing short of shameful. The Government has rallied behind their man and have portrayed this lady as some sort of two headed monster. Yes it does take two for something like this to take place, guilt must be shared though and this chap has done nothing to carry any of the burden. He continually says that she must be having a hard time in her life, alluding I think that she must be deranged. The funny thing though he has ruled out (catergorically) suing her. Strange that don't you think, if she was making up lies then the first thing he should do would be to have her in court so he could show the world what an honest man he was.What erks me is how all of his Government,including the ladies in it, are trying to blacken her name and cast doubts on her veracity and mental state.

To me it matters not that he and the lady had sex many times or even once, what concerns me is that this man and his PR team are trying to gloss over the fact that a Premier had a warm, sexy, flirty in confidence, friendship with a much younger married,waitress. The issue here I believe is that a young naive woman would be overawed by an older powerful man of the world, so much so she would forget the responsibilities of married life to be carried into a heady affair with him and to heck with the humdrum of normality.
The gravitas of this mans position in life surely must count against him having more than a "hello , nice day" type of connection with his waitress, when in fact he was texting her many times a day with messages of an extreme personal nature.
I must state again that for me the issue is not that he had sex with her, it is however that he denies it, and to my thinking he used his position and carisma to seduce an innocent naive young woman into an affair from which she had only one route, being divorced by her husband.


You do concur Hortense do you not? no Horty old girl we don't do drawing and quartering anymore,sometimes more is the pity I think. Gravitas is a curly thing old girl, there are moments that I wish this lady has been of a more worldly ilk where she could have this chappie by them. Yes we will go see that new Coen Bros movie this Friday, and Cocolat.....of course m'dear, of course.

Tuesday 17 November 2009

ink marks on a blank page Wed 18th Nov

Took some time out of my busy schedule (har har) to clean out this room I inhabit. You will see in the pics just what I mean by inhabit. I mean there is stuff in here that if suddenly the whole was wrapped in plastic and sealed for 300 or so years forensic archeologists of that time would have field day. Can't you just imagine what passes for the Discovery channel for 2309 might construct,"here we have the abode of the lesser maned robbi, note the plethora of detritus that this creature was fond of and surrounded itself with" "Objects of arcane interest only to the initiates of some bizarre sect, objects that to the normal person of that era would hold no significance" "we can only conject as to what rituals were carried out in this room"
You get the point? I do collect some wierd loot, then tend to keep it close by forever.
So, a clean out of some degree was deemed timely. Not that I got very far, oh I tidied up some drawers on the desk, made space for the new camera bag on a shelf and sorted out some books, but then I discovered three boxes of photos from my childhood and early days ( before digital).

Robbi the magpie had a field day! I went through every photo pack and loose snaps that were there, took me two full on days. By the time I had looked at how life was ,gee didn't she look sweet in that one, and, he really hasn't changed all that much even now, I was a gibbering pool of "where has LIFE gone". Then it was reflection time, believe me that was cathartic and I realised that I do bang on in this forum and others about change a lot. Because that is how a life is made up, we change, circumstance /wealth, jobs/voting patterns/how we read and what/houses , gardens/routines/ cars/dress/likes-dislikes/music and opinions. I began to wonder about those folk who don't appear to change, some whose opinions are the same now that they were 30 years ago. Leaders in politics, union movements, civil servants,lawyers -judges. your neighbour who voted for Genghis Khan and still follows that dictum, the dogmatic folk we all know and sometimes loathe. We aren't of course, we follow our noses and vote with our feet, do we not?
Perhaps I do, sometimes, when it is necessary or a person I admire greatly comes up with a new direction. That I have effected great change in my life is a given, on looking back as I did( when clearing the cobwebs) change of a major nature appears in my life about every ten years. I then seem to lurch forward in the general direction of up, or going forward at this point in time if I were an MBA. Am I proud of my life, guess that I am somewhat, prejudices I have but few, give when I can, stand for the national anthem, as well as for old( and young) ladies.
The following I wrote yesterday in another forum, it was also as a direct result of my looking back into the future.
how sweet it is I don't suppose that most of you know / remember where that phrase , how sweet it is, came from.Some of you do, good. Well for those that don't it is from the days of black and white TV and a show called the 'Honeymooners' starring Jackie Gleason. I first saw this when I was in the navy, as on ships of the USN most mess decks had at least one TV set. The "How sweet it is' line is a reference to life as the whole show was in fact a metaphor for just that. For an Australian at that time to see first hand ,immediately actually, an American show which portrayed life as it really was for some in the States, was a cathartic experience. We watched Hollywood films,read US magazines and hung off the every word of the US music industry.The Honeymooners was none of that, they had menial jobs and lived in very mediocre housing, but were in the most part ,happy and at peace with their lot. The show always ended up-beat and full of hope with Gleason slapping his thigh and saying "Well there you go, how sweet it is' That is what he was saying, how life really is sweet, family and the future really mean something, how it really doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do, and do it to the best of your ability Sure, it was TV, not real. When I talked to the American sailors I understood that this was their lives, most of then anyway, in their own small way they were all Gleason's and that was one reason the US is such a great country , then, and now. The picture I'm posting in no way represents much to do with America at the time of the Honeymooners, but is a pic I found in some old files from when we lived in the UK. The kids aren't ours, we just borrowed them for the day, but it is a time that for me was the start of my journey of understanding of where I was in life, and the Honeymoon is still happening, how sweet it is.

As a postcript the young lass in the picture is now 30 and an MBA, the young chap is mid thirties and an exec with a major cell phone company, the place was Warwick castle (UK) and I still have that shirt and jacket( what change?)

Yes Hortense it were a couple of intense days going through those photos, much ado about lots . You change Horty, all the time, but always for the better,but there again you started from a pretty good base too, whereas I was a naughty boy from way back. Great isn't it, what do I mean? life old girl just that .The pursuit of it ,yes indeed Horty and Gelato at Cocolat too, that always is part of the equation is it not. And "How sweet it is", you make it so Horty old girl.

Monday 2 November 2009

ink marks on a blank page Tues Nov 3rd

This has been a lively few weeks for me myself and I. Driving a thousand kms to visit my daughter isn't such a big deal, that is the part I enjoy. Much as we love our daughter, son-in-law and grandchild there really is no place like ones own bed. Oft I ask myself is it my age? am I so set in my curmudgeonally ways that having to be in someone elses house makes my good nature suddenly evaporate.Their house is vast, so we don't trip over each other, but they don't watch our TV shows, and once the babe goes to bed at 8pm the TV gets turned down to whisper, so if the phone rings or he wants to read the paper and pass comments on the days politics to her, the TV watchers have to lip read.
Then of course having a very lively 2yr old all day does get a little tiring, plus getting up to go for a walk is an exercise in logistics. Two dogs,one grandaughter,a pram with assorted toys that she cannot do without, then the last minute drama because she really wanted Mr Squeaky to come too. She is rather a darling though, no tantrums, just a plaintive cry or three. There were plenty of times when I wondered just how we did all that with our own, and managed careers and a house/garden. Both us us worked in a field where we did shift work, so the children, who were 7yrs apart in age always had a parent about.

Those were of course simpler times ,less pressure and seemed so much friendlier, so we just sailed through regardless.

People have ,it seems to me, higher expectations in this era. We built our first house just after getting married, couldn't afford a bedroom setting except for the frame and mattress, so for the first couple of years the bed was resting on bricks instead of a proper base. Curtains for the kitchen and dining room were actually left over check material from making her uniforms.That house did us for just on ten years, then we moved up to the farm.
By that time we had become much more finacially stable, had no mortgage, thus were able to indulge ourselves in a style that was more suited to my pretensions of grandeur. I think that when we started to travel widely, our expectations of wanting to live in a certain way, just for ourselves, instead of how convention would have us live, began to take hold. Each time we went away I would say on return, I want to live there, we never did though. But we did change the farm-house completely three times in the 24 years we lived there. The time( year of '97) we spent in that apartment in Paris was perhaps the turning point and on returning from there we decided to sell the farm sooner than later and build a new house from scratch. The house that we built in the little country village was perched high on a hill and had a panoramic view over hills studded with cows and sheep.Because it was on a hill I built a sunken garden along one side, glass walls gave an uninterrupted view over the tops of trees into a valley.Why did we leave there after only 3yrs?. The drive into the city each day was getting monotonous, dangerous as the village got bigger which made for more cars on the road. The village school went from 46 students when we moved there to 132 within three yrs, and no, we didn't cause the exposion of little folk.
Funny how the best laid plans of mice and men 'gang awa', when we made plans to sell that house we had another property in a nice suburb that was rented out, the property here(where we now live) had a rather dated late 60's house. So, we would knock the house down which stood on this block and build new,sell the new house that we now lived in and the rented place. Of course the moment all that was decided the bottom dropped out of the housing market. There was no trouble getting finance for the new build so throwing caution to the winds and blowing what cash we had, full speed ahead,damn the consequences. All worked out in the end, somehow.

So here we are Hortense, and have been this 8 almost 9 yrs too, in the normality of life that is Adelaide 2009 ( and prior), a place that we don't like leaving but do so every chance we can. If that leaves anyone confused it does I as well,but that is the short of ,the essence of how we are as folk.did I hear someone say odd? you could be correct, but we love travel, not the going but the being .Perhaps what I love the most Horty old girl is the coming home bit,then the bragging to all and sundry about the sights we have seen. I still say from each place we go,"gee I want to live there". Hortense perhaps I shall post up some pics of that garden I made in the house on the hill, funny I should hark back to that, although it was pretty special were it not? Our son, who is 43, often drives past the old place where he grew up, our first home, and always refers to it as "the best place". Must be some truth in the old saying then about heart and hearth. Also there are some pictures of the great ocean road from the trip back last week,that I took with my all singing all dancing new camera, but none of the most delightful Cocolat experience we had Friday, YUMMO!!