ink marks on a blank page

ink marks on a blank page Mon 5th Jan 2010

2010-01-03T16:57:00.000-08:00

Life could be regarded, if looking for a metaphor, somewhat like peering into binoculars. As a young person one looks into the distance, correcting the distortions so that all becomes clearer. The older you get then we look through the glasses around the other way so that what we see fades into the distance and what future there is gets smaller and smaller.
Some years ago a professional photographer I knew asked me to do some media for his exhibition, when he asked how much I said pay for the materials, I'll do it for nothing.Duly done he wanted to re-pay me somehow so he sugested that he do some really good portraits of Hortense and I. He asked to use some props so I suggested we gathered about us a collection of 'things' that meant something of import to the both of us.There was a toy double decker London bus, son's 40yr old Teddy bear, a stool that my Mother made,the three wheel trike that two generations learnt to pedal, a large cast bronze hare that I bought in the UK and hid for her '03 Christmas, an A4 picture of son and daughter (he at 14,she 7) in the trike carrier tray there were several objet d'art and meaning,for the print we were shot sitting on one of the chesterfields beneath a large painting of the four seasons.
Nothing about those objects was planned before hand. Andy had simply arrived, we had dinner , he got his stuff together then we threw the bits and pieces about. When the final print was chosen and it was framed there it sat on a table in the main bedroom as these things do. This picture taking etc took place about 7yrs ago, Andy's exhibition was a success , life moved on. During 2008 at a median point in my life I was sitting on the bed gazing at the picture ,picked it up and had a shock of insight into exactly what the picture was.
The eclectic collection of memorabilia there had defined us as people,each of the objects were datum points in our life together as a family and as individuals. Like most 'things' that we all gather about our collective selves ,each treasured object can tell a story, is a reference point to some part of life.We can look at that 'thing' dispassionately most days ,but then one day we see 'it' for what it was or represents. Families all have photo albums which at various times get dragged out and pored over. Gee was my hair that bad, how did I ever think I looked good in THAT ! We all do it at some time, or during special times as a family ritual. Somehow though the actual objects that made our lives get overlooked , the reasons that they were important still are there, but not re-inforced by touch or reminiscence.

When we lived on the farm one of our near neighbours had a very large farm house/vineyard about a kilometre away. This place was hidden from the road in a fold of hills and had a long sweeping driveway. He and his wife had enlarged and beautified the original house to where it was a showpiece full of priceless antiques from both sides of their families. Both families had been settlers from the first wave (1800's) of migrant vessels to Australia . Over the years they had kept all the wonderful artifacts that had been handed down through the generations, had gone back to England many times to bring back their respective pasts from what was left there. They were both lovely gregarious folk often stopping by to chat as they went on evening walks past. One Friday they left to go to a function in the city and stay there that night.Sometime during the night a person broke into their house and set it alight,whether by design or just plain stupidity we will never know,no-one saw or even noticed the house going up in flames. Nothing of any value either intrinsic or monetary was able to be salvaged apart from a sewing machine of her Great-great grandmother's. Over time the house was re-built and they moved back in. Although he started walking back up and past our house he never stopped in , she stopped walking altogether. On the odd occasion when I was able to actually speak to him he only ever said hello and kept on walking. Perhaps he blamed us for not seeing the fire and alerting the local fire truck, as the years rolled on we saw them at a mutual friends functions as she was their daughters God-Mother. Gradually they started speaking again and it became clear that they did not blame us at all, but very obvious there were other reasons why they had become almost recluses. It was clear that they felt, he more strongly, that they had lost their collective families identity. Lost the history of generations that their son/daughters would never have to show their children who they were and who they have been. He eventually told me only last year that months after the fire he woke up one morning not knowing who he was, that the massive wealth that he had amassed and the business that his Grandfather had started was no longer his, was lost to him.

That is what matters in lives, the import of existence, objects that in themselves might not have much monetary value but are links to points in life, each little piece has its own story to tell and is a focal point in the history of life.I mourn a father that I never knew as he died in 1942 when I was but 3 months old. I go to his grave as often as I can because there lies the man who was what I am, that is my reference to where I came from.

Yes Hortense you have such a like connection ,all the cousins who you couldn't remember that we love and visit each time we go back to England. The house we were able to walk through in Wales where your father was born. Your lovely aged Aunt who tells us stories of what you did when you visited her as a little baby,then as a young child, your grandmother's sewing basket that you still have . I loved meeting Doris and Stan who were your parents cycling club pals for many years. They used to have us stay at their house in Putney each time we went over. The first time we ever caught a London bus it was from the stop not 50yards from their house.Then the shock of it when years later just after they sold, we looked at that toy London bus and realised the destination stencilled on the front was of that very same bus we used to catch( the No.14) so often in front of Doris's house. See, , when we have things like that to remind us who we are, we will never be lost or alone.

Ink marks on a blank page Mon 20th December

2009-12-20T20:25:00.000-08:00

There it be, wasn't going to write again until after 'THE' day, but there are one or three things that weigh heavily over the robbi at this moment. Nothing so heavy that you will be sick with angst or want to rise up and dowse one with flames, or maybe you might. Should you be animal lovers, or more to the point , admirers of Rattus norvegicus, then look away .Go no farther.

We all have things that in life we do not mutter about in polite society, or should do, just little pecadilloes about oneself that are best left under the blanket ,to use a metaphor. I am one such, for it are in life that it is my downfall ,some would say, the robbi is a little bit of a softy. To be a softy is not a pecadilloe or something to despise, not at all and possibly when I started to use the p word you came over all hot 'n' bothered like, are we going to get into the good stuff now, a la bold & the beautiful et al. The robbi cries in movies ,at weddings/watching some plays/reading great poetry/listening to good music at toddlers who the cutest things and when I slip off the pedals of my bike to hit the cross bar.

Oh I feel that I am rambling but shall endeavour to make a point, which is.

That I live in the suburbs of a small city(1.8mill) in an newish house, which is opposite a park that has a river running through. Said river is about 50 yards from my front door. The house itself is reasonably large and on a flat block slightly elevated up from the road that runs in front. The block size is 925 sq metres and has a large front garden composed of native plants bisected by a dry creek (of river pebbles). The back has a side garden of native plants and a pond, a raised herb bed two citrus trees,bay tree,plum ,two nectarine,one apricot,one peach and a 5thous gall rain water tank. The fruit trees are espaliered onto frames which contain within a chicken house complete with two chickens. The whole is complimented by various gates /paths/a shed/compost bins and the minutae of living. There are several pieces of statuary of mine scattered about with a totem pole that I made (carved) for my grandchildren,now 4 off.Along the side of the house is a pergola that extends over the pond. The pond was really a mistake as I dug it in a fit of pique one day when upset with Hortense, one of those projects that one does in a flurry of bad temper and much sweat. I say mistake as after installing said pond it are somewhat of a chore to maintain, also to keep the water from growing masses of algae come summer I had to build a pergola over it. That is also why one should never do in fits of pique, it always invariably blows back in your face. That we are well pleased with the garden as a whole is a comfort, therefore the pique never gets a mention. To save the grandchildren from floating in the pond I have placed temporary pieces of mesh over it, said mesh somewhat removes the esthetic effect that pond lends to the ambience of the place but it do stop little people from drowning.

The above is not meant to convey to you a sense that the robbi is a landscaper extreme, or the most diligent of gardeners nor anything else that springs to your collective mind(s), merely though to illustrate perhaps a small point of the robbi psyche,ie softy.
For the thing is y'see if you have fruit trees in your back garden in OZ you will have rodents who visit when the fruit is ripening and or falling to the ground , ripe. my guess is that in other climes it are the very same, but although I have lived amongst others in different cities/countries I have only ever grown fruit here.I have read in various tomes too that when in a city one is only ever no more thant ten feet from a rat, two or four legged I have no idea.
Rats are not my favourite persons, either variety, the human or other.From herein this gets amight squeamish to recite, so I shall be as brief as I can. We have ascertained several facts, the growing of fruit attracts rodents, they spoil the fruit, I don't like them, the robbi is a softy. So I saw that rats persons were eating my glorious peaches, I purchase bait,they ate the bait. So much so did they eat the bait I assumed that either the rat(s) actually were getting fat on my bait or I was harbouring several packs of the beasts. I purchased rat cage, the gentleman selling the cage told me that it would catch a rat, to dispose of said rat I was place rat cage into a large bucket of water and proceed to instruct said rat into the art of swimming underwater without a snorkel or any other method of gaining air with which to breath. Lo, the very first time I set rat cage up I caught a very fine, large specie of Rattus norvegicus. Bucket of water at the ready I proceed with swimming lesson uno. Alas the cage was just exactly the same height as the bucket resulting in rat being able to tread water and just keep its little pink snout above the water line.Dilemma, what to do, grab the hose turn water tap to max and force snout under the water.
Damn but that little bugger could turn a nifty somersault or three I can tell you, also in the course of somersaulting rat was taking deep breaths. Eventually though the force of water and the iron will of the robbi caused rat to ingest enough so as to sink gracefully down, but I swear to you with such a look of "help me please' on its face I found it hard to get t sleep that very night.

There you have the saga of robbi who has had to go back to the laying of baits as he cannot face having to endure giving more underwater swimming lessons.Oh do not mutter amongst yourselves that I should just get a deeper bucket, as it is each time I walk past that bucket I can still see rat turning a soulful eye toward me, I swear that one arm was raised in a farewell gesture as it breathed in the last mouthful of H2o.

I leave you with a small pictorial of the robbi garden, do not judge me too harshly, a man sometimes has to do that which he thinks a man must do.

ink marks on a blank page Fri 18th Dec

2009-12-17T16:10:00.000-08:00

Well 'tis sort of getting around to that time again, seems as though 'it' starts around October these days.Here that is just about the case ,most stores have some sort of bauble or three up and running, by mid November all the malls seem to be echoing to the sound of sleigh bells and the like. Might be just me being an old curmudgeonly type but that , sleighs/snow, really irritates the life out of me, we have heaps of snow here but in OUR winter. Life in OZ December is mostly about the beach ,surf, sand and cricket. yes I know there are lots of folk here who at one time came from a place where there is snow in December, all my folk did too, but for everything there is a season.This is also the dead season for TV and radio here in OZ, nothing but repeats or fourth rate shows on all channels, radio fares no better as even the public broadcaster we listen to on our brand new digital radio has its second string announcers on. To make matters worse the Copenhagen conference is on everything , what a load of toss that is as well. Our oppostion party here would not pass the prime Ministers Emission Trading scheme before he went to the conference, and a jolly good thing too.
Can anyone tell me what an Emission Trading scheme will do to stop pollution? The way I understand it works is like this; company A is a steel mill, they are heavy polluters so for each tonne of carbon they emit they will pay a levy.That money goes to the Government of the day.But how does that stop pollution?? They way I see it if the steel company has to make steel to stay in business then they will make carbon, let's say they make a hundred tonnes of carbon a week to make 5 thousand tons of steel so that they remain in profit. That carbon makes them polluters, so they pay a tax, the Gov gets the money(some middlemen get to cream off a bit too).They still have to make that hundred tonnes of carbon to make their weekly total of steel so that they can employ people and make a profit, so they still send up into the atmosphere that hundred tonnes of carbon, all that will happen is because they have to pay a carbon tax their steel will be more expensive for the consumer. The consumer will then eventually say bugger that dear steel from here,I will go buy my steel from India or China or perhaps Brazil as they are developing countries and don't have a carbon tax.
Thwe robbi is not a climate change denier, I freely admit that we as people have sent great plumes of pollution into the atmosphere, one of the reasons I left the farm was the seasons began changing quite rapidly and where we used to get a large crop of one type ready before Christmas it became harder as our December got colder and the bees weren't around to pollinate. I do believe that the Earth is continually evolving and changing, what was weather patterns fifty years ago will not be a pattern today, man has also had an effect on that pattern, but not to the degree that AL Gore would have us believe.The fossil record bears that hypothesis out as any geologist will be able to show.73 thousand years ago there was an earthquake and a volcanic eruption which changed the ecology of most of India, these cataclysmic events are happening all the time as each volcanic eruption spews many millions of tonnes of dust and ash into the atmosphere ,mixed in with that is large quantities of Sulphur. When those Sulphur particles mix with the ice in the upper stratosphere a chemical reaction takes place , the resultant particle formulation stays in the stratosphere for a long time and creates a warming blanket effect for many months.That warming also speeds along climate change over the area that is covered by the eruption, so man alone is not all culpable .
The following I wrote in another forum, the tenet of that was what I was going to write for this blog, I just got carried away with the hot air minutae of Copenhagen. (Breaking news from Copenhagen)The developing countries want us 'rich' nations to stump up $110 BILLION dollars to give to them, just how many AK47's will that lot buy ??? Bugger that I say, if they want money sure give it them, just make SURE that every last cent gets spent of fixing up their pollution and not buying Cadillacs and tanks for the ruling junta. Just an aside, I do believe that most of the really good fairy stories have been written in Copenhagen well before this summit.

Here we are again, the month of months. How many of us are saying that it seemed like only yesterday that it was Christmas '08. Well in terms of the age of Earth it was only a blink away. I tend to think along those lines because, as y'all know, I am a few years older than most of you.That doesn't make me some sort of troglodyte or one given to crusty sayings a la morgan freeman whilst swinging on a porch seat. Oh no, I give out crusty sayings porch seat or not, ten a-penny, or if you care to listen long enough they come free. I grew up reading people like James Thurber, chuckling over cartoons by him and Charles Addams, writings of them,S.J. Perelman and Robert Benchley. These writers and others of their ilk wrote and cartooned for the New Yorker and from the earliest of my reading memory I read their words and studied every line of their cartoons. Therefore I have an arsenal pf pith with which to assail your ears.As my children are oft heard to say"You do talk a lot of pith too" Thurber was oft fond of pillorying Christmas as a sop to overspending and indulging even before it became a blood sport to do so. We all like to make fun of Christmas in some form though don't we? One cannot walk through a shopping mall in mid November without hearing faint strains of Silent Night. Everywhere you go here there are cards depicting sleighs /holly/ reindeer/pine trees etc none of which we have or are endemic to this country at this time of year.We do have snow ,lots of it as well, but at the right time when it is OUR winter. Don't misunderstand I, the robbi loves Christmas, as it are I have never grown up and just can't sleep on the 24th so I get up early to see just what Santa has brought me. I make sure mother Christmas bakes two Christmas cakes so we can scoff a piece each night until the DAY, oh delight of delights.Then on the day I eat so much that moving is out of the question so have to have a BIG sleep after lunch. Do I hear some of you muttering that robbi has entirely missed the actual import of Christmas, well before you do I must tell you that I am agnostic and it is my understanding that the celebration really was a pagan one at that before it was hi-jacked ,that is. Don't let's argue anyway, this is the time to forgive etc and be jolly tra-la-lah. So I will take this time to WISH you ALL, the compliments for the time that it be,.MAY YOU LIVE LONG AND PROSPER xxxxrobbi
No Hortense I haven't forgotten your contribution for the year, not only the year little one, my whole life .'Tis true Horty, I owe you my all. Now don't blush girl, 'tis all that life is, just how all unfolds,and that's the way of it. Next year come 30 January will be the 45th, I like that,has a grand ring ,can't wait for the 55th though,now that will be a day.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxrob

ink marks on a blank page Thurs 26th Nov

2009-11-25T14:59:00.000-08:00

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.

ink marks on a blank page Wed 18th Nov

2009-11-17T15:48:00.000-08:00

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.

ink marks on a blank page Tues Nov 3rd

2009-11-02T22:47:00.000-08:00

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!!

ink marks on a blank page Monday 5th Oct

2009-10-05T02:56:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick write as I'm getting ready for a trip. I am a hopeless packer, as one who travels a reasonable amount you might think that I should have learnt the art of packing by now, not so. When I was in the Navy it behooved one to travel light, two dress uniforms two work ones and numerous shirts etc /undies/socks/one pr boots/one shoes/flip-flops. We used to roll everything up in tight little sausages then pop them into a hold-all, and it did. After leaving the Navy all my packing sense got left behind for someone else, the Robbi now needs a furniture truck to go downtown for the day.Perhaps it is the babyblues but in all my travels overseas I have never had to pay excess baggage. One trip back from the UK I was able to bring back a bicycle that I had bought in Southampton as cabin baggage.Still don't know how I managed that, but I did, the bike and I ride around the park as often as we can.
Back to packing, that onerous task of which I am not overly fond, been okay though with moving house and at that I became highly organised. perhpas travel isn't the same cathartic extravaganza that moving house is, as you know very well you will be coming back to that which you are leaving. Food for thought actually and one I shall pursue amongst persons of my aquaint.

Life here at chez robbi is at times , to put it mildly, bland. That is nothing much of any real note passes through the front door, to that of course I must add ,'tis the way I likes it.
For more years than is natural the robbi very existence was one long harrowing tale after another, the highs /lows graph resembled something like the latest Global meltdown chart. Strangely enough I/we preferred living that way, both of us worked in hospitals so the adrenalin rush was a constant, also most of the friends that you pick up along the way were in that field as well, all grist for the mill. Now in retirement I don't miss the patients at all, or the rush, just the people that I worked with plus the satisfaction that was at the end of the day knowing I had done my best. That I loved my job was a bonus, the life I have now is just as fulfilling, grandchildren et al.

Indeed Hortense we were busy busy, were we not? You like me being retired, that isn't what you say when you have to go to your stint at the Hospital. Grumble about it you do mostly, but funnily never when you look up your salary. No Horty I never get tired of seeing the $ there either, long may you grumble yet dash off early to the place. That is something I am puzzled about, why you grumble so yet always get there at least half hour early.Oh, you like being able to read all the notes in peace?, good for you then . Great little movie you dragged me off to, Julie & Julia. I actually don't like Meryl Streep (as an actress) at all yet I loved her in that. You liked the Cocolat after too, yes I know I licked the bowl clean, it was yummo. Sure, I will say goodbye to the folks for you as well Horty, it is only for a few weeks, not long.Okay, okay, I'll finish packing tonight.

ink marks on a blank page tues 15th Sept.

2009-09-14T22:51:00.000-07:00

Is it that time/date I mumble? of course it is you numpty.For one thing I'm not Rip Van Winkle , yes I do love my bed . But of course the reference here is to the passage of time vis a vis how swiftly your (mine) children grow up and age before your very eyes, whilst of course you don't. This past weekend I have spent ferrying my daughter around to various venues as she flew home for a class re-union (20 year) from her school , daughter is 36, married and has 1 & 7/8ths children.
Saturday the 26th; Oh there I am, no I didn't sleep a whole week and a bit in. I got really really busy and just lost all enthusiasm for anything much other than trying to stay sane. We have had the grandaughters for two weeks and also the next two as well. as their mid term hols start monday.Their mother had to fill in for someone at her office so they got dropped off in the morning, I drove them to school then picked them up and brought them home here after school.These are two delightful little girls,mostly, not really much trouble, sometimes, but it is rather wearing . One is so conscious of the fact that YOU are responsible, heck I am never resposible, but looking after some one elses brood is daunting. which is why I haven't felt like attacking the keyboard for anything other than few mails.
Getting back to the opening bit about daughter flying in for her class re-union. Her friends had , as she has, physically changed.They are all about 36+ and have varying jobs from running a school in New York/Chartered Accountant/International Banker/Engineer/Senior Political Journalist/Prosecutor et al including motherhood, so they are a well rounded lot. As personalities and individuals they have not changed a jot.We lived on the farm in those days and her friends loved coming up to there on weekends and holidays, apart from lots of school trips and assorted functions I ferried them around the city for years and got to know who they were really well.For the latter few years of her school life I also had the luxury of being retired, I had decided at 42 that I had enough to live well and my g(o)od lady person was well ensconced at her country Hospital so I finished my daily toil and took on being daughters taxi. In reality it wasn't that simple, as I came home from work one evening my wife looked at me and said "you look 62 not coming up 42, this job is killing you, we have enough, finish up", so I did.
But seeing those super kids grown up,some with families, some starting family, then to know that they were the same people in their hearts and minds after 20yrs, was something wonderful.
We bless the day that the decision was made to send her to that partyicular school, it wasn't always a bed of roses ( for us) but the end result was well worth the effort. The physical effort just getting to school was bad enough as it meant for her three hours on a bus each day, the money was easy come stuff, but the logistics of transport and then when she eventually went into senior school with odd lesson times ,trips into art galleries etc, shock horror . When she eventually came of age to get her driving license I actually breathed a sigh of relief, tempered with a hefty dose of anxiety when she failed her first test. She passed the next test easily,just nerves the initial one, afterward we were both on life support whenever she took her car out.

Yes Horty I do know you do most of the looking after the grandkids, and yes I am an irascible old bugger at times and get short with the youngest one.But fings is fings old girl and if she wants me to teach her to play the piano then she has to be taught the right way, which is my way, not hers.They are little sweethearts and yes I will take them to Cocolat in the holidays. Yes Hortense you will get an invite too , can't have the chief cook missing out now can we.Pity that lovely little film we saw on the weekend was so far from Cocolat, I fancied a spot of gelato, you did too? well I never, you should have said, lets go Tuesday eh?

ink marks on a blank page wednesday 2nd Sept

2009-09-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

We have a commercial here in OZ that uses ,and don't hang any labels on one please, dozens of very attractive young Australians singing as a lovely choir a song that is at the very worst a lovely patriotic tearjerker and at best a great plug for multi-cultural Australia. They sing this ditty in some of the most breathtakingly beautiful spots we have and are all just the sweetest bunch of kids you could wish for. The thing starts with what looks to be about 75 of these kids in some absolutely remote wild location on a drop dead gorgeous day singing ,and the first words are" we are one , we are many, we are..we are Australian etc etc" This is actually an add for Qantas our national airline, you know the one Dustin Hoffman refers to in the movie 'rain man',damn fine movie that was too. I digress but really there are two points I would like to make, one is of course about multicultural OZ and the other is movies, of which I am a fan of (both actually). I do like film that ties itself to a particular genre, deep film noir is not my thing but films that I prefer have to have a solid base,one that is recognisable so that the viewer can immediately identify with the script.As in ,hello I'm watching a college sports jock(comedy) flick here so shall exit by the first door ,and quickly. In saying that I thought 'planes ,trains and automobiles' was one of the funniest(sad & predictable) films I have seen. As a young child growing up in a far country town I was much influenced by film.We ,our little gang of scruffy summer kids, would go to the saturday matinee and then on the way back would re-live the feature,scene by scene. There was always a fight as to who would be either the Phantom/Superman or Hopalong Cassidy, but the animosity only ever lasted minutes.

Can I then be forgiven in the way I go to a film then get into it so deep actually want that to be the way I live life, normally lasts 5 minutes only then reality sets in. Surely just a hangover from my years of matinees .That I never saw Forest Gump is possibly a good thing,dontcha know,'cos I really don't think life is a box of chocolates. Some of the movies that really did make an impression on me were,lost weekend/ rebel without a cause/the wild one/blackboard jungle/on the waterfront/streetcar named desire/to kill a mocking bird/ catch 22 (the book was better)/the road warrior/from here to eternity/pulp fiction/the thing/all star wars/lord of the rings/star trek(all)/blade runner/all the harry potter(they equal the books)giant/east of eden/drive he said/lantana/10 canoes/the tracker/ japanese story/priscilla/muriel's wedding/pride and prejudice/bridget jones/4 weddings/planes trains and automobilesnanny mcphee and possibly a 100 more.

The two movies I was in,the bit part on TV you can wipe off the face of the earth, that I have a copy of the 1st movie is only down to my wonderful wife who purloined one from 20th century fox (may she be forgiven), hired a cinema and invited family /friends in for my 60th, yes it was a complete surprise, for all I think. I do not resile from the fact that I loved it,was watching the movie again an earth shattering moment for me ,no it wasn't, re-l(o)iving the memory was though. The memory is what this about isn't it? we see a film that hits a chord that provokes a memory that brings an emotion that creates a link, so the chain goes on. We give that movie a mental tick for changing our lives for just an instant. Does that mean we want to change ourselves to fit the premise of the screen-play, no. If that were the case the first film I flagged, lost weekend (ray milland), might have stopped me becoming an alcoholic, it didn't ,and I did. That I thought about scenes from the movie at times , yes I did, so there must be a residual effect somewhere . I rode in a motorcycle gang like Brando, but I was riding with them before the movie, played in a rock and roll band too and I know that the reason I did that was because of movies, heck, band members got ALL the chicks. Did I want to be JAMES DEAN , oh surely so.

Yes Hortense I know that in being James Dean I failed miserably, try that I did though. We all danced to the tune at some time or other did we not Horty? One of the great rock and roll songs of ALL time came from the pen of Matt Taylor, he of the band Chain. it goes summat like this...1,2,3,...4 "I remember when I was young, the world had just begun..and I was Happy, I think about it ALL the time, h...e..y" Just Google that up on youtube Horty,that will take you back to the place we met, you surely do remember that smokey club, the Sunday night the handsome young james dean look alike fell off the stage into your life? I see a small blush there Hortense, I must be on the right path. Must say though you do take me to some odd films these days. Quentin Tarantino must have seen some very different film on his saturday matinees if Inglorious Basterds is a yardstick, we did enjoy it though, mostly. I myself pass on the gore.

ink marks on a blank page Sat 22nd August

2009-08-22T02:57:00.000-07:00

For us here in the Antipodes Spring, and all its renewables is just around the corner. August,for me, is always a profound month,details of which I shall not bore you with except to add that it concerns the 28th and 1972. As a result some Augusts become watersheds of agendas,the setting of , at times completions of. I'm talking about leap forwards, change, moving on and all that entails. That I do so at this time is not through some mystical force of habit but is in part due to how everything else is changing around me. This year I feel is going to be special,there is such an energy about, not just in my garden but in the park opposite and in Nature per se. I noted earlier this year that the parrots and lorikeets had outstanding colour in their coats . The year forward has borne that out , we have had good rains with the prospect of a nice folllow up lot to come. Looking out of the window at breakfast this morning,I saw a group of Adelaide Eastern Rosellas fly past to land in the large gums across the road,there to feed.Their coats were so brightly coloured in an almost luminescent green the morning sun glinted off them. My fruit trees out in back have got blossom on, the buzzy bees are even at this early hour are working hard.So, what do you think,let's go get 'em , aye....move on ,change, up and at life big time....just do it ! IT"S TIME The picture I post is from the front seat of my car as it barrells along the Calder Highway (Victoria) ,note the ice in the ditch to picture left,it was early morning and damn cold. Driving towards something new is always for me a metaphor for change, as this trip was, so shall it be done.

Done it has been.You might have guessed that the above was written some days ago, or perhaps it really doesn't matter as this write is for the here and now, this instant,forthwith etc etc. I once participated in a judgement where the presiding Judge made an order forthwith,lovely word that, resonates with not only a natural sound of deliberation but one of finality coupled with great purpose. Back to the object in hand, it is so that I as an individual have done some nice things,some good things,one or three really great things and some not so very nice things. Of the not so very nice that I speak about at this moment. Refer to November 1972, after the events of August of that year, I resolved that the not so very nice things should be expunged from the slate of the robbi life.That is all the folk that had been wronged at my hand would be contacted by all and any means, and properly apologised to, asked forgiveness for and/or if possible absolution. Over much time ,lots of effort, all the addresses,phone numbers etc etc were laid before me so I bent to the task. We aren't talking about hundreds here, there were to my memory about 15, no more than that. Really though 15 is enough isn't it?
Did my thing over about a week, two rang me as they had been rung by another ,saying not to worry I can't remember you anyway. But have a guess just how many did care or want to get me to say 'Mea Culpa' ? Right, you have it in one, not one person actually cared less. This of course had me in a quandry, did I matter so little that even my boorish ways went unnoticed, was I so insignificant that even peeing into Jane's tuba in a drunken stupor mattered naught? Was the night I spent locked in Christine's loo because I couldn't find my way out causing the rest of the guests to use the bushes outside whilst I slept in the bath oblivious, was that not a hanging offence? Perhaps not, it may be if course that these good folk saw the mirth in the situations described , chuckle mightily over the years , then turn them into amusing dinner anectdotes to amaze their collective A list friends. All that did leave me a trifle deflated, not dispirited mind, just a wee bit flat.( no pun intended). That this exercise is not repeated each August is down to the fact my long suffering Hortense keeps me from uttering a word about November 1972, a good thing as well. But in reality, I do miss the hair shirt a little.

The movie today was spot on wasn't it Horty old girl. You concur, well that is a turn- up for the books, normally you disgaree immediately. District9,odd title that but that really was the whole point wasn't it so Hortense, just referring obliquely to Apartheid actually. We grew up with that you see Horty, most of our younger readers would have no idea just how bad that time was. Nelson Mandela incarcerated in that dreadful prison, the man must be a saint the way he came out of there with so much dignity. Talking about saints Hortense, at Cocolat the lass who made our gelato today was a little humdinger wasn't she. Such large and generous scoops she gave, sublime wasn't it, of course I'm talking about the gelato Hortense, what else?

ink marks on a blank page Sun 2nd Aug

2009-08-02T04:50:00.000-07:00

I have been away visiting family in another state,no, I don't take a laptop with me to keep up with anything. Neither do I Twitter,sms, except in emergency, hate calling folk whenever and where-ever, so if I should go places then I go silently. Not that I decry anyone the use of those ,or in fact any, forms of communication, just prefer not to use them myself. We have an unwritten law in my house, no-one rings here after 9-30 ,unless of course www3 has erupted and I am to be called up to go back in the navy.Do they take white haired old curmudgeons?

Possibly wouldn't go anyway, I never did get on with Navy life, far to straight backed for my liking,more fond of chaos me. Some funny ,or rather odd things have befallen I lately.Went in for an eye check up, a regular thing for me, my consultant said that I needed some immediate laser surgery.So that threw me al ittle but like the trooper that I am did as he asked ,the rub was though it took another 6weeks to find out if the laser had done its trick . Mother and the priests always told me that it would send me blind, well not yet . Y'all know me well enough by now to remember that I don't hold much truck with holy orders, prefer to take a more realist view on life. Should some of you, even all of you out there in blogsphere, take the more fundementalist tack then good for you, a belief system is fine it is just that I know why a jumbo can fly. The good folk at Boeing made it so, that's why.

My physical presence at the time of this epiphany was in a Catholic private school and at the time of the 'bolt from the blue' I was possibly about 10. We used to have a mass on friday morning and the bishop used to make a special effort to give us a rousing harange or three.
My normal thing was then,still is, to sit at the very front of any lecture, this day was no different. I think that I had worked out at a very early age that when sitting right in the front row you only ever got noticed once,answer corectly and sit quietly then for the rest of the time ,nobody bothers with you.
There I was,sort of awake but not, father was in full flight,when all of a sudden he straightened, raised both arms high in the air, the Lord will save the sinners he shouted.With this I woke with a start and there in front of me was fathers un-polished dirty street shoes and two missmatched socks. Shocked, I stood bolt upright and in full reedy ten year old voice cried out"Jesus wears dirty shoes and wrong socks" Naturally at this point the whole church, shocked by fathers stentorian voice fell deathly quiet so my piping little tinkle was heard all over,possibly into the street beyond. You might wonder at why I said that this was my epiphany, my fall from grace if you will. Think on this,for as a student in a Catholic school the priests and nuns were the living embodiment of Him, to us mere little pip-squeaky students anyway.To see father wearing dirty shoes and wrong socks was a revelation, he WAS human, just like Mr.Easterly the old drunky man who always wore wrong socks and whose shoes were never clean,God was only human y'see. Oh what a downward spiral from there folks, but yes it was, fun too I might add.
What did Billy Joel say,"Id rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints"

Please Hortense don't be like that,of course the good folk wont think I have horns or anything like that. Blog persons are well read intelligent people who have a balanced view on life. You don't think our leaders are like that Horty? you think that they are clutzes of the first order who should know better because we pay them heaps and give them lots of time at home.COuld be true old girl, this lot federally are not much good are they?Can you list one actual thing that they have done right since coming into power,all falls over doesn't it. The schools fiasco,broadband/building houses for the remote aborigines/ all students to have a pc/the health system , darn the list is not only endless, it's hopeless. You read the each house they are to build in remote areas for aborigines will cost $750k, that might be the reason they haven't built one yet. Not bad for a promise that no aboriginal family would be homeless by the end of 2009, there are about 3000 families need housing immediately too, work that out at $750k a house. Got an apology too Hortense, no Cocolat this week m'dear, got to take the car in for the 15k service and housework needs doing, next week then okay.

ink marks on a blank page Thurs 9th July

2009-07-08T22:42:00.000-07:00

Odd little things move me, snatches of song, a different bird darting in an out of a bush or flower, something someone or a child says...I stop , if I can, and try to fix that point of time in my mind.Then in a quiet moment, a reflect on the day time, reclaim that 'thing' from my recent past. I am particularly fond of Leonard Cohen(songs) for that, though one can hardly call them songs as he really doesn't sing as in speak with a golden voice.. They are for the most part histories that are linked with music and written in a poetic form. Music that forms the base of my listening though is classical, but anything that is played well and if it has words,the words will have to mean something profound .

Here in OZ there are lots of fine musos who can write good lyrics and great melodies that compliment the lyric. Many years ago I knew a young fellow,Doug Ashdown ,who wrote many wonderful songs and then at the height of his acclaim here went off to America and wrote a song called 'Winter in America'. Youtube it, as it still gets lots of plays and was a major No 1hit for Doug 30years ago. Whenever I play that song I see Doug on the back of his brothers Triumph motorcycle riding up to the Koffee Cup in Glenelg and then the brain clicks back to that part of life. Coming out of the clock radio tuesday morning as I got up was a song by a local group(melbourne) Little Heroes, called 'One Perfect Day'. Oh but I got some memory mileage out of that. We all have songs which will strike a bell in our collective memory stream, they have words which resonate and glue certain happenings into place, good or bad.Such was 'One Perfect Day', and it was in the throes of all that introspection that found me staring at the still water in my sweet spot on the river, that of the bend where the water rat has its domicile.

Looking at the reflections took me back to my childhood when on Remembrance day we would gather at the War Memorial and listen to the Dawn service. Pretty bog standard issue Memorial this was with a large cross, marble statues of warlike angels and in front a large still pool in which all was reflected. That's the key isn't it? a large pool in which everything was reflected.As a child I wondered why there was a pool there ,never asked my elders mind, perhaps I thought it was just such a straightforward unecessary question, one of those things that even a small boy should know without even asking. Must have been about my 3rd or 4th Dawn service when I was standing there wondering why we were there when I saw reflected in the pool a large bird flying overhead, an eagle or something similar.Reflected in the pool it flew the length of the still water then all of a sudden I knew why there was a pool there, basically as well I also figured out why we were there too.

So I stand at the bend in the river most morns, not if it is raining of course,I might be different but I do know to come in out of the rain, gazing at the reflections of life as it unfolds in Paradise. Y'see I can watch the goings on in the trees opposite,reflected so clearly in the River Torrens. Gaze undisturbed at the parrots ,lorikeets and magpies flying in and out of the crowns of the trees on the other bank.Squabbling,shrieking ,hooting at each other whilst all the time trying to get in their daily rations. Perhaps that is how my bird calling man started his calling,the walking up and down furiously waving arms and hooting might just have been a reflection of what he saw there too.Notice I said have been, a semantic reference to the fact I haven't seen him for ten days, most unusual,most disturbing. Shame that you, the viewers, can't see what I see in my living camera obscura, life unfolding undisturbed on a daily basis.Should you be like me ,rise early,move about doing your thing in the house then go out walking you see and hear different birds ,creatures doing their collective thing at different but similar times each day.

The earliest risers here are the noisy miners, then the magpies/ducks/ibis followed by moorhens/cooters/lorikeets -grass parrots . The honey eaters arrive about 9 or later depending on the warmth of the day. The din that these birds make is wonderful,no wonder that St.Saens composed his'carnival of the Animals'.

So that is the start of the robbi day, a reflection on what has passed and passes overhead. Hortense worries that I do a little more reflecting than I should, perhaps, but I love my life and to reflect back on even the bad bits is cathartic and food for my meagre soul.

ink marks on a blank page Mon 6th July

2009-07-06T04:57:00.000-07:00

Each morning ,rain or shine , I trundle out of the house just on dawn and go for a walk along a pathway that winds around the banks of a little river . This is not a iver in the majestic sense of the term but a wee small thing that is more a creek than river, although we like to adopt a position of grandeur and call it river. Mostly I take my camera and push said machine into the face of any of the wild things that inhabit the water way.Often I have managed to photograph some once in a lifetime pics, once a pair of Kingfishers fighting in mid air, the water rat going about its business, one that lives on my favourite bend in the river. A woodduck flew up in front of me, kept flying straight towards me at head height, I managed to get the camera up and fire off a few shots as it got close. Then there have been numerous times that I have seen rare birds scurrying about in the reeds and also times when I have seen where an Echidna has been.
Lots and lots of different trees that have bent and twisted into weird shapes, many beautiful parrots and my great mates the magpies. Crows are another favourite too, as when I lived way up in the desert country the only sound you could hear sometimes , apart from your own and the horses breath was the cawing of crows.They became good travelling companions even though clad as they are in funereal garb and are hurtful cruel creatures , when there is nobody else we cling to any companion do we not.

But my main exercise lately has been to look at trees, and just in this one stretch of our park where I walk there are at least thirty species. There are some that are indigenous to the area, others that are native but from other states but grow and prosper here, and there are those that are from other countries. One such is the pepper tree, not a genuine pepper of course but an exotic lovely tree all the same. A native of South America and Mexico actually and not at all indigenous to OZ although many grow here, and very well too. So much so they are regarded as a pest and a noxious weed . Go to any country town in OZ and you will find the pepper tree planted everywhere. There are quite a number in our park here, possibly some that were planted by the river as the early farms got established along the way, others of course sprouted from seeds ingested by birds. Many country butchers used the larger offcuts to make chopping blocks for quartering up their meat, they were much prized for that purpose in the dryer country towns.Relatively slow growing they do however have a long life and even though they are not native I personally have a very fond attachment to them. My first true love and I had a tree house in a massive big pepper tree that had a leaf spread that was all of forty feet across and so dense with branches that wept,drooped, down to the ground. I wrote a poem about her last year as she still figures in my thoughts after more than 50 years.The older trees grow galls on their trunks that we used to see 'things' in, then we would carve the gall to fit the image we could see, I shall try and do the same to the one pictured as I think that there is the hint of a baboon there on that large gall on the left (midway up). Perhaps one needs to be either a child or regressing toward that state to see it.Forgive me an indulgence, as I re-read this I thought once more about my pepper tree love, so will post the poem(again) although it concerns not pepper trees but a tidal creek and a very warm and languid Autumn afternoon (and I am overcome with the emotion of remembrance),but it is about love ( of which I am most fond).

oh shirley
pirouette of my childhood
redgold autumn hair glinting in dusty sun,
you laughed and teased
spun dreams with indelible lies,
and bade me love you
for I did

warm memories of forever summers
and hidden fumbles
etched your heart on my soul,
as the days spread open you blithely danced your schemes
whilst I segued my way through each tangled web ,
then waited in weary eagerness for night and sleep,
just another passage to the doorway of your history becoming my dreams

we watched the autumn dragonflies
as they flew joined in loves grace together ,
kissing still green water then once ,
you said we could do that
as all innocents have and will, we did

perhaps it was then ;
when the taste of your saltiness awakened lust
I knew that this was where life began
the child had left ,
we had lost the icon of youth,
summer magic became just a fleeting season
the days were simply numbered hours ,
sleep reclaimed the night
age overcame the reason

ink marks on a blank page Monday 29th June

2009-06-27T02:42:00.000-07:00

Slightly damp this Am and I had to set off earlier than usual so attired myself suitably and swanned off into the gray dawn,tinged slightly pink by a weak, albeit slowly rising sun. Each morning I wander down to the bend in my river to try and get a pic of the water rat as it wends its way home from getting in the days shop,or whatever water rats do of a night.Mostly all i get to photograph is the ripples where said rat dives as it spies me or hears laboured robbi breathing as i lumber to view. Sometimes on the opposite bank a gentleman appears who marches up and down making bird calls. These aren't your everyday strangled childish attempts, like graggggh/hoot, they are full bloodied exact cries of parrot/crow/magpie/duck and other assorted winged creatures. Not all at once mind ,but done on seperate days and normally in various ways.As a parrot he runs about busy like,magpie calls, he is studied in movements etc etc etc, you get the picture, do you not? Sort of in costume if you may, he finishes the cry of the day and strides away at a majestic pace not to be seen for some days, I know that 'cos i go to that spot each day and he only appears about once a week,or in a busy birdy time ,twice. This day (saturday) he was there on the opposite bank uttering cries of great distress like a badly love sick moorhen, but a very very agitated one as he was pacing about most furiously,flailing arms and hooting quite loudly. I do not fear for my safety as I am firmly ensconced on the opposing bank and unless he actually can take on all the characteristics of a bird and fly, I feel quite safe, for myself.. Alas I do feel a trifled concerned for his condtion as with the addition of the moorhen cry he has gone through the entire species of bird on the river, what next ?

In truth I do know that we are all different and there but for the grace of god go I, and self will be the first to admit that his bird calls are very similar to the real thing, buuuuuuuutt?

Leaving all the birdy stuff to one side it would appear that an event which threatens to overtake that of 'the' bomb going off somewhere, has awoken the interest of all bar those who live in outer space. Do I refer to the passing of that icon of crotch grabbing, quite possibly I do. Will anything I say on the matter make one iota of difference, not an atom, so I shall just finish at this point.

There is not one person or thing on the planet that can be all things to all, so whatever floats yer boat.

Many little things grab my attention, sometimes I feel that life is so full of just so much wonderful happenings, of course I dont discount all the crapola, that would be stupid and I know that I am not that. At my time in life I can truly say that I understand most of what makes ME, as a functioning human, tick over. There is no burning desire within me to be something else, I mean to be George Clooney would be okay,if you were George Clooney but imagine how hard it would be to be you and George. Do you see what I'm getting at? See, you are you,okay?, but by some act of something then you can be you and then someone else, just how hard would that be.

I would have liked to have been Marlon Brando when he played in 'The Wild One' because at that time I rode with a motorcycle,call it? a gang okay, DD/MC. (Darlington Devils MC) .
I designed the insignia, the skulls head from the old Mercury Record label(our band did a 45 for them) underneath that a pair of crossed pistons. Yes I did read a lot of books about chivalry, and okay so some of went to my head.The head really was a bit empty back then, looking back it was all pretty awful and juvenile. Perhaps we were the forerunners of Hells Angels here, who knows, but perhaps not as we were pretty tame stuff compared to how they are now. Don't forget this was in 1958 and life was rebellion then for most at 16.The film itself took ages to actually play here in OZ as the local censors were afraid that it might corrupt us poor innocent antipodeans. But all that is well in the past, although it took ages to outgrow the love of riding fast motor bikes as I only sold my last one 7yrs ago. Reaction times just don't cope with a machine that can get to 100kph in 6.6 secs once you get past a certain age. I raced bikes ,tore 'round the streets madly for years and dare I say was an absolute lunatic on them yet never had an accident worthy of the name. fell off a zillion times, but nary one bad prang.

Yes Hortense I know what you are about to say, given half the chance I would be down at the bike shop in a jiff, but not true old girl. Know my limits now, although it would be nice just once,
just like our esteemed prime minister who went to a strip club in New York, just the once mind.
We have had a very strange week in the federal sphere,politics I mean. But the oddest part of the whole week was that the person who actually committed a really heinous affront to parliament was the Treasurer and because of the way the Government could spin the words and muddy the waters, he wasn't made to answer any of the allegations. The opposition handled the affair badly and missed an opportunity to show up the Government for just what it is,on spin cycle numero 9. Wnter here so Horty and I haven't had the nerve to head off to Cocolat, we managed a meal at the Greek restaurant just afew doors up , that was super .Generous plates and lovely food all for $41 for the two of us it's still possible to eat well here in Adelaide at a reasonable price. I feel like indulging myself a little so I am going to leave one of my poems behind. This just came off the cuff from a line someone else wrote that grabbed my fancy, it is like all my stuff autobiographical. I liked writing it as there are memories there that I will hold onto. Grazie per quelle ricordi.

the fish monger sold samphire

(before you steam samphire
wash it carefully under cold water,
then steam over a pan of boiling water
a couple of minutes,
serve with melted butter.)

we picked samphire
she and I,when we wore younger clothes
washed our pickings in the crystal waters
of Salt creek as the tide rushed in
then lay in the lee
of sandhills that were Camelot,
she as Guinevere,I Arthur
and we did as all innocents will

here, it was market day ,
samphire was legitimate
encased in furled paper

a fine morning
with a sometime quick breeze
replete with scudding clouds,
late sun lifted, then
warmed ones back as it should,
given the month
though my June is never warm
unlike this place,
where skeins of history and life mixed,
colours of a different palette

an empty book, artfully laid carelessly to table top
seemingly randomly left, although contrived
forgettable memoirs of a pop diva or some such
lunch arrived , followed by
small talk, brushing the edges of compassion
mixed with truth and regret
reflections that were etched into the glass of time
so it was left to the question,
half full or half empty?
I plumped for half full
but then optimism is a forte,
thus the day was sweet
as time spent like this should be
its memory forever mine
better than pieces of eight

June 27th 2008

Ink marks on a blank page tues 16th June

2009-06-16T05:15:00.000-07:00

Just by way of explanation some of you might have noticed my last blog was almost a month ago.That it is I have been a little slack perhaps could be noted, but then again y'all have no idea what is i have been up to.Y'see don't jump to hasty conclusion,could i have spent the last few weeks floating down the Nile in a felucca, searching for the l;ost tombs of Karnak? oh i does wish that were so, or might i had wended my merry ways up a still crystal blue fjiord in Norway. Cuts to the chase and tells you that all this time i have been at home doing not much of anything.
That being almost so I cannot tell a lie so inform you that all this time I have been away from you lot I flailed lens to the bone getting awesome pictorials for all to peruse.In between times I also worked in spot of laser surgery to my left eye,will know the outcome in 6weeks.

Well you do all know where I live as I'm forever banging on about the place and how lucky I am to li(o)ve here. Okay, so y'all live where you do because it is just perfect,understood all that and really you didn't have to say it,'cos where you live would be just right, three bears porridge an all. Doesn't matter where I have been and lived, my philosophy reads like this,once you know your way back from what passes for the corner store ,then you are home',isn't that just so though?On my morning walk I pass the same folk each day,the lady who wears the hoody and walks a maltese dog ,the fellow who rain hail or shine walks in flip flops and leads a huge mastiff, or rather it leads him.
They both say morning to I, as does the lady with the odd looking poodle thing,dog that is. The chap who rides towards me just after her, he nods his head in a sort of ,I want to be friendly but am peddling so can't stop expression. The man who follows about two minutes later, doesn't matter what I do,he never even rings his bell,just peddles on grimly as if I was something he'd rather wish not get stuck on his tyres. I would like to think that's because he wear little sunglasses like John Lennon even when it is dark or very dim with heavy black cloud, he always has his light on too.
That reinforces my theory of folk who wear sunglasses at all times, even 9o'clock at night, and I don't live in midsummer Norway either.They,(darkish glasses wearers) live in a type of jaundiced nether world where all is colourless/muted and amorphous, so to him peering through Lennon type haze I perhaps look like a golem or creature from a dank nightmare.Actually I kind of like that idea of I, might just run with that next dress up day.oh, by the by, the pic is of the sunrise this am.

Inded so Hortense old bean the locals are restless at this moment are they not.what with that lovely Mr.Costello giving Parliament the old heave ho after 20years was no real shock now was it.We all knew he only had until the 30th of this month because they have to bed in new canditate for his seat.
The journo's seem a bit out of sorts with our Prime Minister too, he was flavour of the month a while ago now it seems even they have got tired of the spin cycle always on fast forward. He had his face on the TV so much some even thought he was the new logo for that free to air station. Would it be dear Horty that you have been right all along about him, he really is a bit too good to be true. Then yesterday that old gangster fellow 'tuppence ' Moran got himself executed proper goodfellows style coming out of his favourite deli, seems rather ironic as well that today the police arrested his ex sister-in-law and her sister/boyfriend for setting up the hit and then doing it. Hollywood might well have written the script Horty, except it was real and tuppence got his come-uppence.
That movie we went to was abysmal,('a film with me in it' ),those actors should have been shot instead of tuppence. Just as well life doesn't always imitate art is my new motto, the gelato was great at Cocolat after though.

ink marks on a blank page Sunday May 17th

2009-05-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

Seing as none of you were really interested in our Federal Budget 'cos it turned out to be a complete waste of time even having it on TV as the damn thing was such a negative and nothing thing, this then in the main is a blog about a wonderful little marsupial that we have here in OZ call a Bandicoot. But first I shall endeavour to give you a bit of background into our animals vis a vis yours.
One of the more endearing things about the names of animals here in the Antipodes is that none of the nomenclature of the little beasties sounds threatening or majisterial. Unlike those beasts of Africa ,Europe,Nth /South America and Asia we here in Australia don't having any screechy roary, mad things that will devour you in one bite. None of our nasties are like that,bit like us really, we do have nasty things that snap, poison and kill very quickly but all that is done with style and finesse.The taipan snake is the deadliest in the world,no roar at all, dead in 30 seconds, funnel web spiders creep beneath the sheets,one nip, goodnight you,not a peep out of it either.Box jelly-fish, get that down your speedos and look out, lets hope the beach resort is close to a hospital.Keep the trainers on when you go for a paddle in the waters of Queensland's Great Barrier Reef, that's in case you step on a stone fish,oops you didn't need that leg anyways.Ssssshhh though, notice just how quiet our deadliest things are? Unlike other countries .
Take TIGER for one, doesn't that conjure up a fierce, striped wild animal with enormous great teeth and very bad breath that will just be waiting in the wings to bite off a slice, of YOU? Then on the other hand we have here in OZ, the echidna, ooohhhhhhhhhh, how sweet, a little cutey pie thing that just curls up into a wincy little ball when frightened and only eats ants, those nasty critters that spoil your picnic, shame on you ants.Like the platypus, Echidna is a monotreme, an egg laying mammal. Next there is Rex the LION.Great hairy bit of a thing it is too, always poncing about the veldt like it owns the place, well you try and tell it to shove off then, see how you get on sistaaaahh.In the OZ corner we have the platypus, soft sleek furry type of creature that just burrows in the river bank for worms and stuff, doesn't even make a noise when doing so either and if frightened by any loudness will whip into its burrow where it hides until the nasty crashing about thingy has sloped off. Last but not least is the ELEPHANT, a monstrous great lump of a pachyderm that you cannot even make piano keys out of anymore, really good for nothing else than leaving massive huge piles of 'IT' all over the grass . Noisy sod of a beast too, trumpets away sixty to the dozen, then stomps all over the farmers maize crop,useless.
That is just Asia / Africa, space wont allow me to list all the yelling loud things from Europe along with the Americas .I have shown you just some of our nice little creatures who have no real obnoxious habits and finish up with a most personable lovely chappie who is a soft cuddly wuggly, that I myself relate to well.
We have the wombat, a pleasant sort of fattish fellow who is most congenial only coming out of his burrow at night making no sound as he goes about his business. He just eats, roots and leaves.
Enter my lovely little BANDICOOT.Not a monotreme like his friends the platypus and echidna just a common old variety marsupial and very shy, also where we stumbled across him, quite rare.To see him well you will have to enlarge the pic.
So there we have just some of our lovely sweet harmless denizens of the forest and glens of OZ, nice homely sort of a quiet likeable spot is OZ, but don't stand under the black wattles in midsummer as a pile of follow- me -caterpillars might drop down on you and their collective bites are deadly,no known antidote either.....sorrrrreeee, but I did warn you.

No Hortense I don't know the official name for those caterpillars, we used to see them on the farm. Remember when they fell on the horses neck and he could never race again? those little green ones that ball up together until one crawls out and they all go marching off in line.If you pluck the middle one out they all stop and ball up again until a leader just wings off , squash them and they give off a really punguent eucalypt smell. You do remember !, and that green stuff you could never get off your blouse so you had to throw it away, was a nice shirt that too.
Horty you didn't really like that Government minister who rabitted on about the infrastructure spending this morning, the Hon.Anthony Albanese . You don't like him, good, he sounded like a goat talking about billyons of dollahs then wouldn't admit to the fact that all the money he talked about wasn't actually going to be spent this year or even next,not for another 10 yrs Horty. What a load of old cobblers girl, to be quite frank m'dear I think he didn't really give a damn , just wanted to hear himself talk over the top of the interviewer.
Good deal that going to see 'angels and demons' friday then 'star trek' today, I does like a rollicking good movie or two.The gelato was at its best in Cocolat as well me lovely, in all, a top weekend

ink marks on a blank page Sunday 10th May

2009-05-10T03:01:00.000-07:00

Our federal budget day looms on Tuesday, not that it will bring any surprises as most of the details have been carefully leaked to the media over the last few days. The treasurer is a chap who like the three main players in this Government appears to have completely mastered the art of talking whilst the mouth is full of marbles and under water at that. The whole of the cabinet can mouth the same mantra of rhetoric at warp speed, and really have been able to spin at force ten of the cycle. For some weeks now the top movers and shakers in Government have been flogging themselves ragged to sell just how wonderfully conservative and fiscally responsible they are, at the same time though they have been handing out cash to all and sundry like drunken philanthropists. Poor old OZ is going to be in debt forever and three days, the legacy of their largesse will be carried by the grandchildren of this generation.
Okay so I'm not an economist, who has to be when there is at this moment the country is saddled with largest national debt ever and theGovernment of the day can't even tell us, the people, how they will manage their way out of the fiasco. The only thing that they can actually say forcefully is "Why haven't the opposition been putting forward their policies". Got news for the Government, the opposition aren't actually wielding the reins of power, you lot are.
We are relatively well off here with a very stable banking system, there once was a lovely big surplus in treasury as well, we still have stuff to dig up that folk need and we beat the New Zealand team in the rugby test, so all is not so bad in the land down under.

Just made myself an espresso,cut a wedge of home baked fruit cake then sat down if front of the TV . Not much of note flickering away on the lcd, puerile offerings even on the public channel that I normally watch. So I turned to the commercial lot, even worse there. One of the commercial stations had a really slow cops and killers show,on one,football (oz style) another,a more juvenile USA cop shoot 'em up, last also very least was a chat show run by 30 something folk who all spoke in shouts with lots of face gestures. One segment on the chat thing was a young fellow who looked as though he had been dressed by the op-shop doing a voice over to a filmed piece on the philosophy of fate. The only thing interesting was the title , but perhaps I show my age here as all the 30 somethings laughed their collective heads off. Never like to get on stage about age either, you are each and everyone of you all sorts of age. I am 67, love being that, cannot wait to be 68 then 69 etc etc etc. My generation had all been married for years with children when we were thirty, not saying that was a good thing, but it was different times with a different set of values. Here in OZ we had lived an insular sort of life for years even as far up to the Vietnam war, the normality of life hadn't changed much for most of us until after that conflict had been and gone. Lots of young Aussie men and women had been to wars all over the place as far back as the Boer war but had come back here then just picked up as nothing much had happened. Perhaps it was the tyranny of distance from anywhere that was anything that isolated us, or was it just in the national physche that we were who we are and that made us different ,willing to stay the same. Folk from OZ travelled far and wide doing all sorts of things but they always came back and then settled back into being parochial Aussies almost as they stepped off the plane. Just about every jouralist who interviewd any visiting famous o/s person as they stepped off the plane asked this question,"What do you think of Australia?" There was a famous incident in Melbourne when Frank Sinatra was asked a bunch of really fatuous silly questions, he got very upset with a female journo then called all Australian female journo's "$20 Hookers" The local transport union got so incensed they refused to allow Sinatra's plane to take off. We really didn't appear to be very cosmopolitan at that point but life here moved on allowing us to gradually catch up with the world. So we are now at our place in time where on a per capita value we have almost as many murders per thousand as London, drink more beer than the Germans, become alcoholics as fast as the Russians, rack up credit card debt at a rate similar to Americans, have the same rate of obesity in major cities but thankfully we now smoke less per thousand than almost all Western Democracies. We have devoured the American way of life so well most of our children know more words of the American national Anthem than their own. A survey was conducted recently where the respondents related more to Barack Obama than their own Prime Minister. Hey, but who could blame them,that man is charisma. One thing that we must stop doing as a nation though is having our movers and shakers fly o/s, get sold the latest snake oil(that dont work), then come back here to install it to be the next great hope only to see the wheels fall off two days later. Grow up OZ, we can do our own version of snake oil!

Indeed so Hortense, news wise it is a mighty poor week. you rightly point out too m'dear that most of the budget has been leaked out. That might make a mockery of the journo's all getting locked in a room with no communications to read the budget papers, then when the doors get opened all run to file their stories at the same time, so as not to spill the beans scoop wise an all.
As if! Yes I do agree Horty, the treasurer is a sort of smarmy looking fellow at that, the sort who when he was at school would tell the teacher on you before you did stuff,then swear he didn't.
Sorry about the trip to Cocolat old girl, no movies this week either.Still Mothers day lunch was pretty full on, the call from daughter was great, life is good init.

Ink marks on a blank page Sunday 3rd May

2009-05-03T05:30:00.000-07:00

Been away for a week or so,went to see daughter and her family in another state,Victoria that is.

Nice trip, but missed the goings on here in SA ,the rain and then more rain. All good that, it did pelt down too. Just in case y'all didn't know we are or were going through an almighty drought, worst for years so 'they' say. Mind you ,a lot, and 'they' said it as well, all down to climate change, 'they' said. Let me put you in the picture regarding the robbi thought on climate change. Notice I said thought and not the plural as I only ever have the one thought at a time. Of course it is all down to climate change, irrefutable reasoning that as it be the Earth is continually changing and has done for millenia. Humans have repeatedly polluted the Earth, been doing so for 40k years or more , the Australian aboriginals lit huge bushfires each year to burn off country to 'manage' it for their way of life. The burning off in some places altered the ecology of Australia and made the Eucalypt the dominant tree specie there. So much so that many indigenous shrubs and trees do not reproduce each season unless there is fire. We had been living on our farm for some ten years when a wildfire came through and after the next rains some two weeks later on the roadside verge across from the house there were three species of plant growing that had not grown there for ten years(acacia family). Some of our natives need smoke to germinate,Discaria pubescens and those in that family are just some. This blue ball we live on is in a continual state of flux and change,so why am I back on this hobby horse? as I seem to remember not so very long ago I waxed on lyrical in a similar vein.You may well ponder but there is a simple answer, not related to a senior moment either.
On the way back from Victoria I decided to make a detour and drive the coast road(Great Ocean Road) to a place in my state called Nelson. One reason was to see if I could get down on a beach called Dinosaur Cove( in Victoria), yup there are lots of nice fossils there to scrabble for if the tide is out that is. Hortense had never been to that part of the country as well but I do not equate Horty alongside fossils either.

I do have more that a passing interest in fossils and this particular place is a great example of the early Cretaceous period (100+m-y), bad luck robbi the tide was well in and as I only go 5'7'' in my shoes I would have been about a foot underwater. However the drive is nothing short of spectacular and for 400kms the scenery is just awesome. You drive into the bottom half of the Otway ranges which has some of the best stands of mountain ash forest in OZ and some really dense rainforest as well. The tree top walk (rainforest) on suspension bridges is one of those things that make your head spin, in an inspiring way. Coming out of the Otways the descent down to Apollo bay is breathtakingly beautiful and the town itself is friendly and just a great spot to lunch, plenty of top restaurants and a couple of good bakeries.

Drove on after lunch to the Twelve Apostles and then stayed the night at Port Campbell.

The Twelve Apostles have been carved out of the cliffs by wave action as well as the normal gyrations of the tectonic plates over millenia and are sculpted into amazing shapes,whilst the cliffs and bays are geological time capsules that show how the Earth has continually evolved over time. After Port Campbell comes the Bay of Islands and for me the most spectacular of sights and if the weather is on,that is a stiff onshore breeze blowing with the tide incoming the blow-hole there is a fantastic sight. We had a long drive back home on leaving the motel so although the day promised a good breeze we had to get there at 0700 when it was relatively calm. Good things happen when you least expect, walking up the track to the viewing platform there in front not 10mtrs away was a bandicoot. These little marsupials are very shy and rarely seen in daylight, especially here where there are normally lots of people. I managed to get quite close and took as many pics as I could before it scampered away in the undergrowth. Bandicoots have become rare there as they have no defenses against feral cats and foxes, they are also solitary animals and seem only to pair when they mate.
The drive back to Adelaide was about 540kms, a good road, no hills until Adelaide so I just put the cruise control on and we were home at 1830 that night. Got some top pics which I'm about to load on here now.

Hortense hasn't had a Gelato fix for a week plus so we must wend our way to Cocolat in the next day or so, a plan do you think? She is also a little more than miffed that I haven't been able to wind myself up about the Government at all, just far to busy driving and looking at OZ. There is a late news flash though. Surprise surprise, our federal Government is delaying and reducing the Carbon Trading scheme it earlier promised to get elected to one that is going to set the carbon price down to $10 a tonne and will also can the start date until 2011. Old cynic that I am there could also be a stop put on the thing altogether as the next federal election will have to be in 2010, is the timing convenient or what? The Global recession is a godsend for this Government, they have blamed everything from cold coffee to where do the flies go in winter down to it, but then as Hortense will tell you, I really am an old cynic.

ink marks on a blank page Mon 20th April

2009-04-20T04:11:00.000-07:00

I haven't looked through all of the old blogs( ink marks) to ascertain if at some time or other there was some waxing lyrical about where chez robbi is situated (Adelaiode, South OZ). Perhaps there is, but if so then it is back in the annals of and I shall refresh the memory buds anyway.Y'all just knew I'd say that now didn't you, ego tripper that I am. Adelaide being what and where it is folk who live here just mostly accept their lot. We live in a temperate clime, not enough rainfall at the moment but that might change. The city is ringed by hills, faces like most OZ cities, the sea. A great coastline as we are at the top end of a gulf (St.Vincent) plenty of great fishing ,water sports galore couple that with good weather with a smallish population then the recipe is set for a good mix. The population stands at about 1.2mill in the city/suburbs with around 800k living in the country.We have our unique problems of course, any homogenous lot do, but in the main we tend to get along with ourselves and others pretty well.

Adelaide was different in that it was specifically laid out by a surveyor,one Col.Light, settled by free men, plus land was divided up by a title which was unique in the world for its time. The Torrens title, named after the designer, gave unfettered access to a parcel of land in a suburb/subdivision, to the registered owner of that piece of land inviolate to be included on a Government register with the sole purpose of creating one title to ownership. This meant that it became a simple process to but sell or transfer land in one transaction and without re-surveying each time the land was sold. Boring? useful though.

Apart from this great method of flogging land we are reasonably well known for the wine we make, some of the best reds in the world and getting up there with the reds, lots of great whites too. To go with all this fantastic drinkable stuff there are about 800 or so pretty good restaurants in the city and suburbs with lots out in the country as well, especially in the wine region of the Barossa valley, Mc Claren flat,Limestone coast ,not to forget the Clare Valley. Not only do we make great wine, South Australia was the first to give women the vote, forward thinking lot are we not?

I have travelled over a lot of OZ, not all ,but a rather large portion.My own state of South Australia I have covered many times, lived in some of the really remote places. Even survived getting lost in the outback on a couple of occasions, so I know, admire,love it well. I have also been to many many countires all over the globe and will readily admit to being an Anglophile but whenever I return here just the smell of the place brings my legs to quiver. There is just something about Eucalypts that brings out the tears in me, which I suppose is why I live where I live.

Where I live is right on what is quaintly called the Linear Park at Paradise. My front door opens to the garden, a smallish road then the park, so on a water rushing day I can actually hear the river gushing along singing its song. The Linear Park starts at Athelstone right on the Hills Face and follows the Torrens River all the way down to the sea at Henley Beach, some 37kms of park. One reason it is called Linear is perhaps because the Park itself at the widest point would only be 750mtrs and on either side is a cement/bitumen path just wide enough for maintenance vehicles. As befits even the smallest of rivers such as the Torrens it trickles around gracefully with plenty of meander so there is actually a plethora of paths and parks for picnics,lovers to spoon,trysts to make and children to play. Funny quirky little things like a fully functioning suspension bridge such as one would see in a Tarzan movie and of course lots of Billy Goat Gruff bridges for children to look at trolls. We shifted from the farm then across to a Hills village then down here, so folk who knew us were at first horrified to think we would shift back to the suburbs after 30yrs of living like real people, until they saw the place that is. We ride our bikes on several different 5km rides each week, each morning at 0630 I walk up to the big road bridge on Darley rd and back, that takes about 35mins unless I get waylaid by taking pictures. Please don't think that I paint this word pic of my suburb because I want you to believe this is the creme de la creme of living , not at all , just suits me well really. I'm going to put a few pictures that I have taken this week up, you can judge for yourselves.

Oh Hortense I do know that not everything is perfect in Paradise. Look at all the trouble Mr Tom Koutsankanis got himself into as the Roads Safety Minister. Someone found out he had something like 58 tickets for speeding and running red lights etc and then told the newspapers. To make matters worse Horty he went on talk-back radio and said that he was speeding because he was very busy going to important meetings and the like. Tut Tut Hortense, very busy just didn't cut it at all with the good folk of Adelaide so he had to resign that portfolio. Shame isn't it that the honest people who actiually paid their fines, unlike him, they didn't get any reward as Tom did they, $148k per annum plus a driver , not bad for a young chap eh? We finishe the day off well did we not, took the g/kids off to Cocolat for some of their fine Gelato and that lovely young Barista chappie Thanth, made us a super little coffee. A great day !!

ink marks on a blank page Thursday April 8th

2009-04-08T02:18:00.000-07:00

Just a little bit of trivia to start the day. Some years ago Feng Shui got a bit of a roll on here, and possibly just about anywhere there was enough money to start up and run a Feng Shui business. Not that I am knocking it , not at all, as I have always believed that cultures such as the Chinese can teach us many ways to live a better life. Many years ago my maternal Grandfather had a great deal to to with the Chinese and worked in business partnership with them. He often told me of the degradation that Opium had caused the Chinese and laid the blame squarely at the feet of the East India Company and its practise of paying the Chinese in Opium and conversely enlarging the Opium trade. Australia played a part in this and an Australian diplomat and adventurer ,Morrison, was so incensed by the corruption and double dealing by some of his diplomatic colleagues he tried to stop this trade. He was also a bit of a wheeler dealer and womaniser himself and possibly was not quite the white knight he appeared on the surface. Grandfather painted such a dire picture of Opium dens, the joss houses, that I lived in fear of falling into one on the way past the local Chinese herbalist shop.
Have you ever been into a genuine Chinese herbalist? They are fascinating places and for a small boy with a large and vivid imagination simply worth all the trepidation of falling into an Opium den or Joss house just to visit. The shop we used (Mr Wu) was an Aladdin's cave full of dried shark fins, snakes and things in ceramic pots, stranges twisted roots, powders in large jars all to be weighed out on brass scales and wrapped in brown paper, the bill was totted on an abacus at lightning speed and written in a neat hand on strips of very light paper like a present day cash out strip. Mr. Wu, who appeared to be the apothecary, was a tiny man normally to be seen sitting on a high stool with a rattan back and gazing out of the window into the street as if he could somehow mesmerise customers into coming in. His parcels were always wrapped in brown paper and tied with a dark brown twine whilst his recommendations for taking the medicine were written both in Chinese and English on the left hand side with your name printed in large block letters on the right. Heavens knows why he bothered to write in Mandarin as to my knowledge there wasn't anyone in the family who could read the characters. If by any chance it was me who needed his potions and Grandmother couldn't come with me I would appear at Mr Wu's with a note from her, place it on the wooden counter top and repeat, in my piping little voice, exactly what Nana had told me. "Please Mr Wu my Nana says I am to ask you nicely to read her note and then ask me what is wrong" Whereupon he would leap from his chair ,read the note and then come around the counter and hold my chin in one hand and look intently into my eyes. He then would take my hands one by one and look very carefully at the back first then the palms,each of the fingers/nails. He would speak very slowly in measured very quiet tones "Missy Grace say you feel not well here,(poke) ahhhh so, that is feeling bad?"Sometimes he would look through my hair, take a few strands and disappear into the back of his shop. I could then spend time gazing in wonder at the various odds and sods on the shelves and hanging tied with that brown string all over the shop. What was I looking for, I never asked myself that, but quite possibly it was eye of newt, frogs tongues, bat wings or dried dragon blood, anything that a small boy might think he would find in a Chinese apothecary. Once, after reading a story about Brooke of Sarawak and the Dyak headhunters I ran to Wu's shop looking for dried and smoked human heads,alas none to be found, but it was fun to sneak into the shop when he was busy and look.

Back to Grandfather. Over years he made many Chinese friends and along the way developed a love of Chinese architecture, artifacts, including the Chinese way of doing business. He used to tell me that if you do 'good' business with a Chinese on the shake of a hand then years later you will be able to do the same business with his son and his son and their cousins and their cousins relatives. The Chinese played a big part in the development of early Australia as thousands of Chinese came here in the gold rush days to work the emerging goldfields and create business such as market gardens in the mining settlements. Melbourne, which was at that time the richest city in the world, became a hub for the Chinese immigrants as did the provincal cities of Bendigo and Ballarat. Many Chinese also landed in the port of Darwin and stayed there to make a vibrant and busy culture. Gowdowns became during that early period a feature of the wharves in Darwin and much trade was done in trepang,beach-de-mer,shark and pearl shell to many Asian countries. Grandfather was a part of all this and I have been fortunate in being able to keep some of the artifacts and antiques he collected or was given over his years in dealing with the Chinese traders.

For us who live in the Southern part of OZ sometimes we forget that at the tip of our country (Cape York) it is only 20 nautical miles to a foreign country which is part of Asia. In 2007 I stood right on that very tip and if you look at a map of OZ you will see that Cape York goes to a point. Well I can vouch for that as I stood right on that tip and looked down into the crystal clear water I could see the tip of OZ. The helicopter I had hired landed some 60metres from the actual tip saving us a three hour walk and a massive climb down (and back up)from the normal landing site. That time ,(hour or so) I spent there was in retrospect an extremely cathartic experience, as not many folk actually get to go there for to drive from the nearest settlement is ,if the road is passable, about a four hour trip and then you have at least another three hours of strenuous walking and climbing.

Yes Hortense I do know that our esteemed leader can speak perfect Mandarin and that he is great mates with everyone who is anyone in China. Me?, you also know that I have a few words of Mandarin, don't look like that, I do know that there are some of those phrases I could never use in polite society. Being friends with the Chinse is wonderful stuff Horty but I don't think that our Defence Minister should have had his business trips paid for by that lovely Chinese lady who seems to know every top General in the Peoples Army. He also rents an apartment from her when he is Canberra too, possibly gets a cheap deal I would think. Do you think he asked her what all the echoes and beeps / whistles were in every room whenever he discussed Government business? Oops! best I stick to stuff I know lots about, like the wonderful selection of Gelato at Cocolat we had Saturday morning after the moving picture show. Wasn't such a bad movie either, 'The Boat that Rocked', not Gone with the Wind or anything but it was great fun. Nope,I'm not going to apologise for leaping up from my seat and singing along with the EasyBeats to 'Friday on My Mind'. Oh, and I wont mention that you sang along with the Supremes either.
Great day it was Hortense and I thank you heartily for being the you that you are,"gonna have fun in the city, be with my girl she's so pretty,I'll be right tonight, toniiiiighhhht, for I've got friday on my mind, na nah nuhhnahhh na nah....i've got friday on my mind"

ink marks on a blank page Thursday April 2nd

2009-04-02T01:49:00.000-07:00

Some of you ,after reading this, will possibly be left with a feeling that I am over critical of my fellow humans. That I must put my hand up for if so labelled, not really the way that I see myself but one really cannot make an arms length judgement of self that is exact and to the point of being as how others view. Goodness that was long winded ,convoluted and pompous was it not, but something that had to be said, clearing the decks . Follows next why I have said the above.

Today marked the first major day of the G20 talks in London. What scenes did we see on our television news? Thousands of people demonstrating in a violent and anti-social manner screaming out slogans such as "Down with money" and the like, folk by the thousands pinning police officers up against a wall and a loon high up on a building trying to set fire to it. I well remember the violent anti Vietnam demonstrations, the Weathermen bombing and others of the same anti establishment ilk all around the globe doing exactly the same thing. As serving Navy during the early part of the time of Vietnam I was apalled at the treatment returning soldiers here in this country got from the general public as they marched through the streets of Sydney. People were right in condemning the Vietnam war and I do uphold the right to protest as all in a democratic society should have that right, all peoples should be able to exercise their right to protest at what they see as unjust and cruel. However I do not see where violent anti-social behaviour can be justified in any protest as in my opinion being violent just plays into the hands of those right wing elements who seek to contain the right to any protest.

That, (the above)was the main thrust of this week blogging on Ink Marks,but as the G20 ended with very much an accord and with a degree of hope for the future I deleted most of my write in favour of just letting the status remain at quo.

The second point about human behaviour I would like to touch on is this; Trends and counter trends. Or: What the heck is happening?

The robbi is unfortunately a slow learner, by that I do not mean that life has to bludgeon itself around my head to push in a few facts. Nope, not at all. One of the terrible shortcomings I have is that I see lots of things as black and white. Take sunglasses for one, they are meant to shade human eyes from the sun , true? Yes I do have a pair, somewhere in the house is a pair of hugely expensive precription sunglasses with special lenses that make everything crystal clear and are ground to my special requirements so that I might drive with them and read, although not at the same time. That they are very rarely worn is not because I don't go out in the sun, I do, but I found that I still needed to carry my normal glasses in case I wanted to go into a building or someones house. That means having to carry two pairs of glasses ,being the robbi that I am carrying two pairs is really asking for one pair to be left on a park bench or summat. Plus of course the cars that we have always have tinted windows anyway so that negates most of the need for sunglasses. The point I am slowly coming to is; as I look about me I appear to be the only human not wearing sunglasses. Whole families wear them from the littlest toddler right through the ages. Sitting in the movies the other day most of the folk coming in to sit down had them on top of their heads,some actually wore them and only took them off to perch said glasses on top of the head as they sat down. needless to say I started to think that I must be missing something and got to worry. Monday this week the answer came in the form of a cartoon strip in the morning Murdoch. Garfield occasionally talks to a ball of wool, this Monday morning the ball of wool said to Garfield "I'm cool" Garfiled to ball of wool" You are a ball of wool, how cool is that" the next panel showed the ball of wool saying "See!", wearing a large pair of shades, Garfield agreeing that said ball was now 'cool'. Ergo, shades =cool. The point I ask myself is,what then is 'cool'? Am I somewhat out of a loop because I don't wear shades, does that make me a non-person?
Many years ago(44actually) I was laying on the lawn in front of the Adelaide Uni waiting for the love of my life and reading 'MAD' magazine. It was the paperback version 'Son of Mad' and I was laughing out loud to the extent folk walking past were looking at me with disdain and clucking ,"possibly drugs Henrietta, you know what these Uni types are" The panels I was laughing at were a 5 or 6 page cartoon of artsy folk going to a party and being fawned over because they were wearing dyed ,hand knitted jackets and trousers that had been made from sea grass. my memory can't extend to anything else about the strip except the couple in question eschewed any knowledge of TV saying it was passe and everyone else nodding sagely whilst rushing to switch of the myriad TV's around the rooms.I also think that some of the really cool guests had dreads as well whilst the two mentioned just kept putting down all those not wearing sea grass. Reading MAD was obligatory for me, they had a way of looking at life that seemed so much how this is what it will be in the future. Was I 'cool' in that I read MAD and therefore 'knew' ? The medium is the message ,everyone will be famous for ten minutes. Looking down a telescope the wrong way seems to be how society is going, life is a microcosm of itself and no longer are we content to let it just unfold it has to happen right in front at breakneck speed.

You see Hortense even you are subject to this creeping malaise that is society. Just now you were badgering me to go to a moving picture. When I looked at the trailers for the films you picked I could see that these were not for me. Yes Horty being the sort of chap that I am I would go to a film not of my choosing just to please you, sometimes. They do have to have a few redeeming qualities Hortense, not just because Viggo whatshisname is a gorgeous hunk, the film has to be summat I can sit through. You are on holidays and there is plenty of time for film,why don't we go for a pleasant bike ride instead? Then tomorrow we can go into Cocolat and peruse the film list whilst snacking on a lovely Gelato, sound a plan Horty. Indeed it are, let's do it!

Ink marks on a blank page Monday March 23rd

2009-03-23T03:48:00.000-07:00

Could be lots of things to write about this week, much ado about everything happening in OZ. There are some goings on that I think are best left to the judiciary to decide and here I refer to of course the horrendous fracas at Sydney airport, plus the sad demise of Justice Marcus Enfield, a former Justice of the High Court of Australia. Oh no he didn't die, but he did tell a few huge lies to get out of a speeding fine and that has landed him in gaol.

I don't really understand about the Hells Angel situation, we call them 'bikies' here in OZ , sort of lump them all together in an amorphous conglomeration of fat geezers who ride Harleys and deal stuff. So they are not all Hell's Angels, although the one that died I believe was. Of course none of you might know ,or even care, what the heck I am on about but it is my understanding by looking at the online news grabs, the story about this brawl has been picked up all over the world.Poor little Sam the koala has been forgotten for the moment.

The Einfield trial has been done and dusted so unless he appeals and gets let out whilst his appeal is being held then what I will tell you isn't subjudice but fact that has gone on record, so therefore is not in dispute.

Marcus Enfield was a senior Judge, he was speeding in his car, the speed camera snapped his vehicle going 70kph in a 60kph zone , ping , caught, pay the man $77. He swore on oath that he wasn't driving, subsequently was found to be lying went to trial after some nearly 3yrs ,found guilty sentenced to 2yrs in prison. What is disturbing some folk on the bench here and in parliament is that he actually did the same thing three times before, but was never caught. The position the courts must now find themselves in is a rather tricky one. As there is irrefutable evidence that as far back as 1999 this revered Justice had been lying about speeding fines by saying that he was not the driver of his car when snapped by the speed camera, what then is the truth about judgements he made from 1999 to the time he retired from the bench.

If he has lied about such a simple matter as a speeding fine then how can anyone believe the veracity of his judgements? The can of worms that this case will have opened will well ripen in the sun.

What I did set out to write on was a marvellous little film I saw on Sunday...'Dean Spanley'

Jeremy Northam as Fisk, Junior (Henslowe) (also narrator)
Peter O'Toole as Fisk Senior (Horatio)
Sam Neill as the Dean
Bryan Brown as Wrather
Judy Parfitt as Mrs Brimley
Jenna Pollard as the housemaid
Dudley Sutton as Mariott
Charlotte Graham as the woman in the park
Eva Sayer as a girl
Elizabeth Goram-Smith as a young lady of stature
James Lever as the cricketer
Ramon Tikaram as the Nawab of Ranjiput .

Simply a delight to see such a wonderful actor as Peter O'Toole in this role. All in the cast are just right for this film and the set is wonderful as is costuming and music.The screenplay is an adaptation of fantasy author Lord Dunsany's "My Talks with Dean Spanley", a 14-chapter novella published in 1936. After seeing the film I will grab a copy of the book from Borders or
some such and have a read. No car chases or four letter words and not even a bare boob, but a film that had me watching intently every minute. O'Toole's facial expressions and body language conveyed as much meaning as the lines he spoke and at times the acting was so good you didn't need lines to telegraph what was coming next. This isn't a film for a big audience, possibly never set the box office alight but hopefully have a following and the acting will be noticed. We all of us have familial situations that we would rather not had transpire, life is like that and most just move on to eventually get over whatever caused the angst in the first place. Families are a dynamic that is inevitable as the tide, we live within family and that makes a clash impossible to distance ourselves from, live on we must, so we do. All the people learn and live on gracefully in 'Dean Spanley', which seems au naturel for the period in which it is set, a period that on the surface seemed gracious and uncompromising but that of course was very far from the truth. This was the period that saw great changes in Britain, Darwinism had been the focus for years and all sorts of ism's had arisen over time. Phrenology, magentism et al and of course spiritualism which is the backbone of this storyline. Swamis and Gurus were as thick as Autumn leaves and the papers of the day carried advertisements for all the quack cures and latest fads imaginable. For all its so calledVictorian purity the late Edwardian age was full of salacious gossip and flashy newspaper articles about the goings on of the titled and rich.

I must admit to a clinging to the past mentality, yes much wrong with trying to clasp what has gone before to ones chest like a prize from the fairground. But what went has to me anyway great import and a reverence. Of course like most humans I tend to glorify some bits, forget others , but in the main I think that I am true to what actually transpired . Others might see their past that melded with mine in a different light, perhaps that salmon I caught from Brighton pier wasn't as big as it has grown to be, but for a ten year old it was magnificent. Will the children who are ten today have the same treasures to remember when they reach their 3score and? My feeling is that they will, a different set of wonders, but theirs will be a similar grab bag of love,laughs, tears and triumphs that so delighted my generation.

Truly Hortense that little moving picture did enthrall me so, yes Horty I know we only went 'cos you urged me so. It is because of you that I get to these little performances. I well remember the first play that you dragged me off to see,'Camelot', Richard Harris in the lead. We haven't stopped going to the theatre and film since. Yes indeed Hortense I do love to brag about seeing the original 'Phantom of the Opera ' in London too, but that was such a memorable night wasn't it. When that super scene of the Ghost poling that little punt thing along and singing as the mist rose up started, the hairs on the back of my neck rose up , and to think I don't really like much Andrew Lloyd Webber music either. A little like my conversion to Van Gogh after you dragged me off to the museum in Amsterdam, couldn't get me to leave.
Puts me in mind of Cocolat and the Gelato we had Sunday, now that was awesome was it not?

ink marks on a blank page Monday 16th March

2009-03-15T22:21:00.000-07:00

Driving back to chez robbi after a swift sojourn to the shops I was pulled up at a traffic light when I idly looked across and spied a gentleman sitting at a bus shelter. Nothing outstanding about that you might say, true, and normally you would be right,but. This gentleman looked exactly like Kenny Rogers. large in body , thick white flowing hair and a beard exactly as Kenny wore. Actually this fellow looked more like Kenny Rogers than Kenny himself does. As the gentlemen on the late night TV ads keep telling us "but wait there's more", there is more. He was also dressed, down to the smallest detail ,exactly like the MAN in Black....folks it's Mr Johnny Cash (We're doing mighty fine I do suppose/In our streak of lightning cars and fancy clothes/But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back/Up front there ought to be a man in black.") Right there bus stop 27 ( a go zone) Johhny Cash incarnate, and Kenny Rogers, though I didn't look to see if he was wearing a SuperMan T shirt or had his undies on back to front as the light changed and I had to move off.
I know what you are all thinking, robbi has such a sad life, really I don't mind that at all, happy in my quest to unravel the bizarre in our so-called normality and in fact I write this as the Kenny/Man in Black thing has a bearing on what I was going to write about (also is a picture)

Yesterday at breakfast I looked out the window and there perched on the verandah fascia was a large Praying Mantis( Hierodula majuscula ). We all know these insects, they use camouflage as a means of blending in to the scene so that predators cannot see them , thus not becoming a meal for an owl,bat etc.Mantids have hollow bodies so that they can 'hear' a bat sonar squeak as it flies through the night., and then duck for cover. The particular Mantid I observed looked just like a twig from the garden in front of the window,even down to the stripe in the middle of its back. Why was it on the fascia? well the rain pelted down some hours later so I guess it was sheltering from the coming rain as it was gone this breakfast time. Who (or what) was the man sheltering from at the bus stop? we will never know as I moved on, his bus would eventually arrive ( go zones run every ten minutes) leaving us none the wiser. Whatever he is seeking in life I hope that it crosses his path, he does have a 50/50 chance as he was being two things at once, whereas a Mantis only has one go at a time, your'e either a twig or a green leaf,Mantids cannot be both at the same time..

If the above sounds as though I am having a cheap shot at the way some folk like to wear their particular skins then not so, who am I to judge, a fashonista is something that I most definitely am not. That how we appear to folk in general is to define in a small way who we are is a social issue, one that I am not qualified to rule on . Needless to say if a chap wishes to dress like Kenny, then he should be able to providing he isn't up to nefarious acts .

I know Hortense 'fings aint wot they is 'sposed. Got a little ahead and also behind myself with this blog. As always though I was full of good intent, oh please don't say that Horty. I also know that many times I am 'full of it', you do not have to rub salt into the wound. Events of the week dear Hortense, made one a little busy don't y'know. That meeting I went to Monday night started the rot, I then had to write a very long email to that lovely Dr who is chair of the committee and tell him that as long as his bum points downwards then he has no hope of forcing this State government to do anything. His committee have to get the sweaty mass of the public onside, they can do that easily enough and mobilise public opinion. Talk about mobilising Hortense, you got that way this AM did you not ! Wow, I haven't seen you move that fast for ages.
When you opened that little diary you keep next to the phone and saw the huge Tarantula inside I thought the worst. But then the robbi saved the day and put the little fellow outside, swiftly ,calmly and without any fuss or girly like screams. Then you really freaked when you went down the passage to the bedroom and saw that huge Daddy long legs spider devouring his breakfast of an earwig. I thought that justice for the earwig so I just left the spider to it.
Note that I continually refer to these spiders as 'He/Him' when we both know Hortense that the really big agressive ones are the female of the specie, are they not. Just being a gentleman there Hortense and like all of my kind simply shouldering the blame and responsibility. Just like the Chairman of AIG insurance et al.

There is a small confession that I make Horty old girl. It is thus: On walking to the Hospital to attend that meeting I found myself trotting past Cocolat, not being one to pass a golden moment up I did slip in for a quick one, only a small one mind with two flavours only (vanilla/berry yoghurt). There, I have that slight aberration of character behind me and can face the world almost without a blemish.
We will go to the moving pictures Saturday and WE will have a Gelato, happy, sweet Hotrtense ?

ink marks on a blank page 11th march

2009-03-10T15:40:00.000-07:00

Simple is as simple does, that be life really . Days go, replaced by others, each one different but similar and it is the simple ones that I love best. None of us enjoys angst or drama, happens in the best of regulated lives but 'tis never the high point of the day. Excitement is fine, but I for one would not want to go through my life in a high state of frisson each and every minute. James Bond I'm not, think of all those endorphins rushing around colliding with each other. Makes me want to lay down with the energy of it all, not that I am a sloth, indeed not so, but having said that I do enjoy moments of torpor. Mostly in the afternoon around 1430 or thereabouts, just a nice laze in my favourite chair and now seeing as it is Autumn sat in front of the large windows that look out onto the park in front of the house. Said park is looking a litle raggy though, the drought took its toll months ago and what grass there was has just up and left not to be seen until the winter rains. That there will be rains I have no doubt as the rainbow lorikeets have started to fly into the next doors claret ash on our boundary. These lovely birds just adore that tree and come into it in numbers at the beginning of Autumn through to mid-winter and then again in Spring. How do I know that there will be rain aplenty? simple. When I had the 'simple' life on the farm it was in a district that always had 'good' rains, that is they came , they held, they watered well and long. Some seasons were better than others and we noted that the year before those 'better' seasons the parrots ,lorikeets et al all had very bright plumage that carried into the next year, the good year. As the season progressed sometimes Rainbow bee -eaters would appear and then the next rains for that season would be heavy indeed. The years when the Bee -eaters didn't come then that next season although it always rained enough, the hay cutting would be earlier and not quite as heavy. We do not get the Bee-eaters here but the rainbow lorikeets and the parrots have excellent bright plumage this year and as well the Sulphur crested cockatoos are a glossy white too.

Climate change is big news here in OZ and the terrible wild-fires in Victoria have been blamed on climate change by our conservationists groups and some political folk. They carefully forget that the massive dry understory and build-up of bark etc that they will not allow the volunteer fire service to burn off in the winter helped fuel and in some instances increased the fire risk. These groups lobbied councils in the areas that were severely affected by the fires to stop locals from collecting the dead timber that falls from trees along the roadside, the result? In those council where this practise was disallowed the roadside verges became firestorms in themselves as the years of deadwood that had piled up fuelled the fires.
I am not a climate change denyer as we humans have despoiled the planet with many years of pollution but we seem to be rushing in headlong without seriously cosidering the evidence from the past. Antartica did not exist as it is now 4ok years ago, sharks swam where Alice Springs exists in a semi desert today and the Himalaya were in a different place . I will post an excerpt from a geology of the Himalaya to show what is happening as I type this and will continue to happen always regardless of what some rabid conservationists say. This is not to refute climate change, it is merely to point out that the Earth is in a continual state of evolution and will continue to do so as IT(Gaia) is want to do : I quote;
"Over periods of 5-10 million years, the (tectonic)plates will probably continue to move at the same rate. In 10 million years India will plow into Tibet a further 180 km. This is about the width of Nepal. Because Nepal's boundaries are marks on the Himalayan peaks and on the plains of India whose convergence we are measuring, Nepal will technically cease to exist. But the mountain range we know as the Himalaya will not go away.
This is because the Himalaya will probably look much the same in profile then as it does now. There will be tall mountains in the north, smaller ones in the south, and the north/south width of the Himalaya will be about the same. What will happen is that the Himalaya will have advanced across the Indian plate and the Tibetan plateau will have grown by accretion. One of the few clues about the rate of collision between India and Tibet before the GPS measurements were made was the rate of advance of Himalayan sediments across the Ganges plain. There is an orderly progression of sediments in front of the foothills. Larger boulders appear first, followed by pebbles, and further south, sand-grains, silts, and finally very fine muds. This is what you see when you drive from the last hills of the Himalaya southward 100 km. The present is obvious, but the historical record cannot be seen on the surface because the sediments bury all former traces of earlier sediments. However, in drill holes in the Ganges plain, the coarser rocks are always on the top and the finer pebbles and muds are on the bottom, showing that the Himalaya is relentlessly advancing on India" end quote.

We have to change the way in which we as makers and growers of products do things in order to live on our blue ball, however, I do believe that we also must look into the past in greater depth to see what has gone on before so that we can understand how to effect our future. All very well for folk like Al Gore to make $140million on a massive scare campaign using exaggerated filmic techniques to sell 'his' message but let us have rational and scientific informed debate from both sides of the issue and then create a consensus to address this on a global scale.

Here in OZ the federal government is pressing ahead with its version of a Emission trading scheme whether or not our fragile ecomomy will be able to withstand the impost or not. As an observer in this I cannot understand just what emissions a trading scheme will stop. The way the scheme works is that a heavy polluter(steel mill) will always emit on a daily basis more than their permit limit so they buy credits from a small emitter(fairy dust maker) who emits far less on a daily basis than their permit allows. What I do not understand is that the steel maker will still put their daily pollution into the atmosphere and all that will happen is the the fairy dust maker will get money which will in part be passed onto the Government in the form of taxes. The steel maker will in due course have to bring in new technology that will limit its emissions, this is just a natural progression that industry will always do anyway to remain competitive. All that the Emissions trading scheme is going to do is increase the tax revenue and in the short term reduce the steel makers workforce . Hortense my little wonder woman this is making my poor little brain ache with the complexity of it all. You blame Al Gore, yes indeed, but you are a clever wonder woman at that and you do not even have a glass plane. Al is a cheeky little sod are he not? we all wonder just what he has done with that $140mill net he pulled from the movie,dogs home! I think maybe that will not be his first choice. Oh Horty old girl 'tis a good thing we are off to cocolat and a show tonight, we shall have a good laugh and put the Emissions trading scheme just where it belongs.

ink marks on a blank page 6th March

2009-03-05T18:25:00.000-08:00

As a bloke there are many of lifes mysteries that are denied me, one major one is the ability to understand women speak. I refer to the oblique way women have of conveying multiple messages in a short sentence like " I am going into the city for a few things" At chez robbi that can mean,'when I'm gone you will have time to vacuum the house' or "I wont be long so you could wash the windows", "And seeing I shall be exhausted from traipsing around the shops looking at stuff we don't need , I shall want you to cook dinner"
There are other little quirks of life that elude me as well. I travel a little and when flying normally cannot open those little butter /jam/condiment doohickies, why? Could this be a bloke thing or am I just one of the poor unfortunates who bumble through life spearing themselves with the tin-opener or splashing sauce all over self.
We had some budget type airlines come here and they don't serve a meal so I thought to save myself embarrassment I would fly with them. Flew back from my destination on a regular ,we serve you a meal you can't eat airline ,as the budget one had seats so close together I couldn't move. This am I read the encoded message well , so prepared to clean the charcoal grill but one little device tricked me.As she left to swan off to the city the last remark was " I left a new packet of barbque wipes on the sink to clean off the residue, a brand new pack so use as many as you want" Folks, do you think I could find just how to open the darn thing, took me all of ten minutes to figure just how it was done. Oh sorry me for when I did finally open the blessed little pack, I almost wept with the frustration of it all.
Then there is me saying" Just where is that set of things?" "In the cupboard" floats back. Yes I know that the'things' will be in the cupboard, but which one for goodnes sake. Yes I admit it, I lose my car keys and my glasses ALL the time , but surely that isn't just a man thing.
Got you there though, I CAN read maps, and when in foreign climes once you take me to a spot then I can always find my way back. Of course that is a fantastic party trick if one wants to walk around in ever decreasing circles, but nobody is perfect.

Never ever been good with working out dates either, some folk can say just from the top of their pointy head. "Oh the 25th, that's a Friday isn't it, not a problem just switch the meeting date to Tuesday which is the 29th" I would have to have a calendar in front of me and a pencil to mark in the date. Also I have a problem or three when typing, for some reason that just rattles past my cage in a flurry I tend not to space between words a's that I write, that is I hang ana on the back of words, then continually have to stop and respace the a in a sentence, already done it 9 times this para. At least if I write to you but forget to sign my name, as at times do, you will then know for certain that the letter comes from me. Should have said a missive contain begging requests for large sums of money then it most definitely would have eminated from this keyboard, money orders are better than cash so run on down to the nearest Western Union and fire some off, you have the address.
Another 'thing' falls to mind about one, can be a trifle absent minded at times. Once someone said that my brain reacts faster than I can think, perhaps that isn't quite correct as I do forget exactly what he said but that sounds almost right. He was testing me for a resume that I was to write in application for a job. Can't quite remember what his job description was but he wrote some very nice things about me that was in part one of the prime reasons I got the position. No, I do not think that his rather large fee that I paid in cash was any reason he wrote glowingly about my prospects, and I could show you my test results to back that up if I could only find them.

Sorry Hortense, feeling a little left out are we? Yes I have sort of rattled on about self, it was all me me me. Perhaps my introspection comes from that birthday I have looming, although my age is not something that figures largely in my daily ruminations.
Age must figure in the machinations in our esteemed Federal Education Minister's mind though. The largess that she is handing out a la those cash grants to schools has to be accompanied by a suitable plaque on the wall of the building that it has funded, extolling the virtues in part of the Education Minister come par excellence Julia Gillard. There is no nepotism in this Federal Government as well, although the hairdresser fellow who lives with , and is the boyfriend of, our Education Minister got a paid gong on a Government board. Yes Hortense I take your point, he would be good at sharpening scissors, they would come in very handy for stabbing ones opponents in the back wouldn't they, wonder if Julia knows that?

Well what I do know Hortense old love is that it be YOUR birthday Saturday and we shall sup well on cocolat...yea har!!

ink marks on a blank page Sun 1st March

2009-03-01T01:18:00.000-08:00

This was supposed to be all about Holly Hill Nature walk in Southampton England,weeeell, I can sort of alter the pitch a little can I not? Will explain, then you can make up your collective mind(s) whether or no I should proceed with this, or stick to the original game plan and tell you all about Holly Hill. Okay, thanks for that so that's fixed then I shall tell you all about my afternoon here at chez robbi.
Y'all know that we had Lance Armstrong here riding in a Pro Cycle race we run yearly called the 'Tour Down Under'.You did, and just love bike racing but can't figure it out, but adore those really fit young fellows in lycra jumping up and down on the pedals, you do don't you.
So we here at chez robbi ride bikes around our park most days, I do every day but she has to go to work in order to keep me in the style to which I am accustomed, ie. eating each day, so only rides when there is no work. As befitting a bicycle rider she got all keen to read Lance Armstrong's book 'It's not just about the bike' and duly passed same on to me to read. I got into about 40 pages and to be quite frank thought if I could watch grass grow that might get me going more. Until today.
Off she went at 1430 to earn the daily crust when I spied 'the' book on the kitchen table, what to lose I thought, not much going on here and the drought is so bad even the weeds have stopped growing. I might as well read a few pages and then check that little weed out there to see if it has put on an inch or three.1828 came just as I read the last page,wow, this Lance man is different!

What a great weed he would make, I mean those little buggers even spring up through concrete, Lance is the Texas weed to end all weeds. This fellow is THE survivor and growth specialist is he not? In my job I saw many many Lance's and in their own quiet way lots of recovered cancer patients ,who by the very nature of their recovery beat all odds , going on to lead lives of hope and fulfilment.

Back to Holly Hill.
The very first time that I went to the UK as an adult gave me a tremendous culture shock. One forgets childhood memories and more the pity, relatives and places, they become faint cobwebs of what was and like cobwebs are easily brushed aside. So there we were at Heathrow(1990-1) being met by a charming couple in their early sixties who had been great friends of the family and on hearing we were to be in the UK would not hear of us staying anywhere but in their home. Driving from Heathrow to Putney was then not so bad, traffic wasn't as dense as it is now so there was plenty of time to 'see' bits of London.Also, there were only a few of the ghastly high rise apartment blocks that now dot the landscape as frequently as rabbit poop on a field.The next ten days were a revelation as each day we saw more parks/gardens per square foot than in OZ. The suburb of Putney seemed to have green space everywhere and the house gardens were just bursting with colour. Sure they knock down one large house and build two or even three where there was once one, some public buildings are just plain damn awful monstrosities, but lots of councils seem to really care about how their constituents live and where they live. Here in OZ we went through an awful phase were it became almost a public duty to knock over anything that was more than twenty years old, in the UK there is more pride in retaining as much heritage as they can. Green space is at a premium given the physical size and population density of England but it is still surprising to see just how much green is available to wander in.
Holly Hill Nature walk in Southampton is one such place, 35hectares of planted exotic species and retained native woodland with 11 lakes and many rock pools all connected by meandering paths that are all maintained and nurtured lovingly. At one point one of the walks takes you down to a viewing platform that overlooks the tidal reaches of the river Hamble, we counted 15 species of bird feeding in the marshy area. Holly Hill, another part of the green and sceptered Isle.

Indeed Hortense, perhaps I should make supper, extra housework more often. Yes I do make the bed each day and do a portion of the housework, could do more though .Nope aint a tear Horty,but you know I does love the place so . Best I get to the nub of it too, start actually talking about real day to day things of more import than self. Meant to say earlier Horty, did you read in the daily Murdoch about our wonderful federal Labor Government going to spend $45 million on trying to fix the problem of Australian livestock ejecting METHANE into the atmosphere. Does appear Hortense old bean that 12% of the OZ greenhouse gases are the farts of our livestock, so our Gov is going to fix the problem by spending $45mill . Corks anyone? Woohoo, does that make the mind wobble a bit old girl, just how are they going to stop the 12mill head of beef and 24mill sheep from farting? Plus all the koalas/kangaroos/emus/lizards /spiders/snakes/fish/etc etc etc, oh and us too Hortense, I forgot, ladies don't, do they.

Cocolat a night on the town and a show Saturday Hortense, you betcha old girl.

ink marks on a blank page thurs 26thfeb

2009-02-25T15:21:00.000-08:00

That I am a full, rusted on Anglophile is of no doubt. I owe this allegiance to many factors, one being that growing up in the era I did we were always asked "when are you going to visit the Mother Country" (meaning England). So it was during this period when TV in OZ was in its infancy the picture one got of life in England was of row after row of dismal terrace houses and grey days followed by more grey days. I did know that this wasn't the whole picture of the UK but most of my contemporaries had that fixed firmly in their minds. Relatives in the UK would send 'snaps' of themselves cavorting on the pebbly beaches or picnicking somewhere and I would dutifully hand them around to much guffaws from my immediate circle at work whilst colleagues who were English migrants would stare wistfully at the scenes and then precede to tell everyone that the tomatoes don't taste the same here in OZ as they did back 'home'.
They don't either, fruit and vegeteables do taste better in Europe ,as the growing conditions are much kinder, ie soil and water etc. Some of the products that we have here in OZ that are on the supermarket shelves in the UK don't seem to be the same either when made up here in our kitchen. Birds custard powder is just one I can think of quickly , in the UK it has a fuller richer taste, always seems different here. Yes indeed I know that this could be just another manifestation of robbi bias, possibly, but the potato difference is just one that is glaring.

When we lived on the farm we knew the president of the Potato board of South Australia quite well and it was I believe in 1991 that we had just come back from a lovely 3month trip to the Old Dart, when we went to our Royal Show here in Adelaide. This is primarily an Agricultural show which is held on a yearly basis where all types of locally grown products are shown to the public. Like all such things all over the world there are rides ,machinery, log chopping and all sorts going on.
For some wild reason that totally slips my mind we found ourselves in the potato growing pavilion deep in conversation with the then president of that society. I remember saying, in my normal non-confrontational and not at all 'picky' manner, "why is it Bill that you only have 3 varieties of spuds here on display, in the UK there are at least 15 or twenty sorts" . I then went on to regale him with a word picture of the last market(UK) we had been to where there was a fruit stall and on one trestle was a large mound of rich brown dirt and behind the dirt was a lady with bright green rubber gloves on pulling fresh Jersey spuds out and weighing them up. "God man we don't need stuff like that here, we have three sorts and that's enough. One for frying, roasting and a general purpose variety which is a cross between the two, then we grow a seperate lot for the chip business."

Now all that might sound a little mundane and icky picky, true it does but then you have to look behind what was said and you then get to the mindset of lots of Australian thinking at that time. We were terribly parochial and set in our ways, couldn't see the wood for the trees, that applied across the board into just about every field of endeavour. Every carpetbagger, snake oil salesman worth his or her salt had come over from the US and seduced us to the detriment of our own culture and growth. Most home-grown Australians don't know that we were amongst the first to have a full length narrative movie made , even before America, or that Australians invented the stump jump plough and a mechanical harvester. The first photo copier and the 'black' box which every aircraft in the world is fitted with. Every rat-bag scheme that had been tried elsewhere in the world and failed was trotted over here by successive Governments and flogged off as the new 'miracle' cure for what ailed the Education/ Health or other process that a particular department had sent folk over to study. By about the very late 1990's we had begun to slowly understand that home based things just might do the job as well as rubbish imported from overseas so we began to 'grow OZ' and be proud of just what we had here. So much so that now on the supermarket shelves we have so many different varieties of spuds it's hard to make a choice. But with the last federal election some new ideas began to creep in, most notably was the Education minister wanting to import the Education model that is used in New York. Our Minister is very much taken with this process and has gone as far to have invited the architect of that scheme to come here and show us how it works. I would respectfully inform her that most Australians do not live in areas that resemble downtown New York city and that just one major concern of Education in this country, that of Aboriginal Australia, is not remotely like New York City in any way shape or form. In all of this I am not advocating a return to an island state mentality but we should be adult enough to use our own expertise to develop an Education model that will fit our schools across the whole of OZ to educate our future children for the 21st century and beyond.

Oh yes Hortense the robbi got well and truly sidetracked there didn't he. Started out to tell the good folk all great things and with the intent of showing just how green and verdant England is, then got stuck into Julia Gillard's grand Education designs.Again you really do not need to sit there with that po face you pull so firmly fixed on your dial. Justified you say, uh okay, this time I grant that it is but next blog I promise that there will be no diverging from the original intent and to that end there will be some green and luxuriant pictures posted on the next blog.
Sorry old girl , no cocolat this week, but come March old bean.....yea har, full on.

ink marks on a blank page Sat Feb 21st

2009-02-20T16:01:00.000-08:00

Much or little, if you are one of the workaholics that frequent my life, has been happening on the robbi horizon of late, and if that sounds obtuse then of course it is. To regale you good folk with the inner workings of the robbi week would not only be downright boring (to you) but counter-productive (to me). One must have a modicum of secrecy don't you know, as perhaps to the robbi, his life might be racy ,full of fun,upbeat amongst other superlatives but to the well travelled and jaded jet-set as boring and hum-drum as bat poop. I do understand that amongst my reader(s) there are any number of folk who could hold themselves up to be the glitterati. Certainly that is a hope of mine anyway,would hate to think the only folk who read this stuff were plebeian slobs like myself. A moment of high drama just passed through my day, an ant was spied crawling up the side of my LCD (recent purchase) screen thing,which was duly dispatched, the ant actually.

That little episode brings me onto the cusp of an aside,namely. Driving through the back streets of my local suburb to the shopping mall ,that when I am forced through circumstance ,I go. There, on the footpaths, was a collection of old type PC screens. We have all had them and perhaps some of us still use one, they still work and perform the same function that their design was for originally but because of the advent of the LCD type screen they have been deemed obsolete. There on the footpath I counted six screens ,two at one location and the rest singular. Please don't point out that I should be watching where I was driving and not rubbish on the footpath, did and was thanks. My point? I have no idea really, are these screens the dinosaurs of 2009, or is it how we the consumers view our place in society the reason for the throw-away mentality. This part of the robbi world I take a shortcut through is not what is commonly referred to as 'affluent' suburb, rather a little down at heel and worn out, but reasonably neat.
So there it is,my one Saturday morning trip into suburbia becomes an exercise into the mores, whys wherefores, foibles of society 2009 that hasn't even answered why or just why ever not, and surely it is only the business of the throwers of the screens, or what did you do with your old one anyway.

See Hortense, I get myself into so much angst over zip. Life is bigger than that old girl, let me just draw a deep breath to get over said rubbish then get onto something else that I know ought about. Indeed Horty old girl ,once over the barrel m'girl, one never forgets that experience. I refer of course the the machinations of government.
The story that came out yesterday in the morning Murdoch about the dad who was left with three young children(one went to school) who applied for full time benefit so he could look after his kids and was then told he should get a night shift job(he had a trade) so he then could send his one child to school and catch up on sleep when the other two napped. No mention therein about who would look after the children whilst he was away at work. That of course would strengthen his resolve and he would then become a better parent. I wasn't privy to what he told the person but imagine that it wasn't , oh thank you for that.
Like now Hortense, that smart man at Salisbury council (Adelaide)who has designed all those wetlands that trap ,clean, store naturally the storm water run-off and who can sell that water back to the factories in his area cheaper by far than the Government water supply folk, cannot get his ideas accepted by the Government. Although he says that for a quarter the cost over ten years that the Government is spending on a desal plant in one year, he can store more water and supply same to all of Adelaide. The desal plant will cost $89 millions a year to run as well Hortense, wetlands, about $500thou.Apart from the minuscule costs too,wetlands do not use any greenhouse emissions, whereas a Desal plant runs on coal produced electricity. Now old girl if I was a conspiracy theorist then there would be several arguments that could be raised here, one being that the Government would not be able to actually SELL the water to joe public like it can the DESAL water if it came from storm water run-off, which by the way is more than the entire city of Adelaide can use in a year.But then I'm not any sort of theorist at all,what do I know.

What I do know is that we are going to live theatre tonight to see the Kranski sisters et al, but before that Horty we shall wander into cocolat for gelato, does that sound a plan? you betcha it do.

ink marks on a blank page Sun 8th Feb

2009-02-07T22:07:00.000-08:00

I am a Thomas Hardy fan, there said it,been practising for hours to write that as if it were dirty washing or stuff so secret no one should know it about me. But I guess lots of you have read Thomas Hardy, no , yes? maybe or not. I see, wont admit to it eh, oh well we haff ways you know.

You all know that I came out of the closet ages ago re my Anglophilia, being a Hardy fan is just a manifestation of that, but in a more subdued way. Sort of clenched teeth, controlled, anal retention without the anal. Hardy was more or less the original script writer for the Bold and the Beautiful, get my drift?. Far from the Madding crowd was I think one of 'THE' novels of the genre and of course so wildly popular that the title has become a staple of the lexicon and is used ad nauseum by such pretentious writers such as yours truly. Everyone knows the plot, even those of us who have never seen an episode of Bold and Beautiful, and if you have to ask what is Bold and etc then we all know that you actually watch or tape episodes when you go away. The heroine has a most B&B name too, Bathsheba Everdene, which could be an anagram for, 'the best heaven, her bed'. A most theatrical name for a person who really is a bit of an actress herself, loves a few histrionics and likes to be pulling the strings. Some folk will say that the Mayor of Casterbridge or Tess were better books and perhaps they are but just contemplate this gem of thought. Far from etc is part of our word culture in itself and that speaks volumes for what is the style of the book, how it grabbed the mind set of generations, how that title described the content of the book,just what the heroine thought so well, that it became a narrative in itself. For Whom the Bell Tolls / Blood on the Sand / Of Mice and Men /The Postman Always Rings Twice. Yes, I do understand that the Scottish poet(Burns) first coined the phrase 'the best laid plans o'mice and men' and Steinbeck based his story around that. If you type the phrase into Google Steinbeck's use of it comes up more times and first, so I naturally chose the most relevant for the times. Oh heck I cannot fib, never could get into Robert Burns so I used the author I preferred, how's that for unfettered bias. C'mon, make your own list of famous novels whose titles have created meaning which is in use many years after the novels themselves were well read. The main theme of these great novels? boy meets girl and after great hardship either wins girl or gets into deep doo doo trying to. Ain't love grand?

I know Hortense, why do I continually rabbit on about stuff that is clearly above me. Well it's like this old dear, I am trying desperately to lift myself above the normality of a typical life of suburban mediocrity. Do I really think anyone actually reads this outpouring of whatever. Well it is like this Horty, I have an ego and also a bruised psyche for years of trying to keep up with you as a person of the gender I admire as being most capable of clear thinking and debate, unfettered by gender based affiliations. That is you don't stalk off to the pub with your mates to talk sport until you all get legless , then ring up the ones at home looking after the kids to come pick you up. Okay, just don't put your head to one side like that, I will get on with some reality.
Here in OZ we have had some horrendous hot weather.In my little state something like an average of 43.2c over 6 days with the temperature going down to 38c for a few days then yesterday rocking back up to 46.7c . In Victoria just across our state border they had 48.6c Saturday, then some halfwit started a fire which has now burnt out at least 5 villages and towns and killed to this point some 60 people. The actual acreage burnt is in the many many thousands of hectares and the number of houses lost is about 150 with stock and wildlife dead or dying in the hundreds of thousand. No one aid or Government body has yet put a dollar figure on the loss but just in human terms it will be incalculable. The senior Senator for the Greens party, a chap by the name of Bob Brown was quoted on radio as stating that this fire was caused by Climate Change, and as the senior Greens senator he will be calling on the Government to step up its Climate Change policy in the wake of this fire. Might I add as fact too that as long as folks bum's point downward the Greens will never be able to form a Government in their own right so therefore they will never have to formulate policy or deal with an emergency of any kind, let alone one of this National magnitude. A good thing as well for they are a bunch of nincompoops.

As a person who was once a farmer and a member of the volunteer fire fighting brigade I respectfully inform Senator Bob Brown that Climate Change had very little, as a matter of fact nothing, to do with the fire at all. SOME BLOODY LUNATIC LIT IT. Calling Climate Change responsible is drawing the bow trifle long good sir, and, a scare tactic of the worst kind.

Yes Hortense it was Sunday and wasn't that gelato at Cocolat just super and just the ticket too after seeing that funny little film Ghost Town with Ricky Gervais. He is hardly George Clooney dear girl but he is funny.

ink marks on a blank page Thurs 22nd Jan

2009-01-21T17:32:00.000-08:00

I have to tell you about the arcane delights of eating ripe nectarines straight from the tree. Perhaps this does not equate to such pursuits as winning the national Lottery and then being able to make monetary advances to George Clooney(wasn't he just so beautiful in 'Burn Without Reading') Yes I am a bloke, no I only bat with a straight bat and I can say stuff like that because (a) it is true (b)it is 2009(c) and if my bat was only slightly out of shape he would be the first I would pay money to.

But eating ripe nectarines is one of life's real pleasures, and straight off the tree is sublimity in a nutshell. First off I have to explain all about this particular nectarine tree. I (we) built this house about 9yrs ago now and as befits the way she wants to live one of the first things we put in was a compost bin. Yes, yes, I know the chickens are supposed to eat all the kitchen scraps, for heavens sake there are only two of them, you want the poor little things to burst? They stuff themselves with pasta anyway and sometimes are just to full and would rather sit in the dust and burp.
The second thing was the fabled chicken house, and about two weeks after the chicken house was all ready ,carpeted and fully fitted out with hot and cold running chickens the first batch of compost was spread around. Wonder of wonders in about three weeks a little tree started growing in front of the chicken hut. Pretty soon this little sprout grew into what my canny eye knew was a nectarine tree. Quoth I to her in my best imitation of George, that girl, hurrrumph, is a nectarine tree. "OO she trilled, now we will have lovely nectarines" Oh no says I, this is a self sown tree and as such will never bear fruit, however, because I am full of bonhomie and love for my chickens I will let it grow to provide shade and such like to the hens."My hero" she replied, you are so knowledgeable about life and things" "come she said, I will anoint your brow with unguents and cooling oils then prepare a sumptuous repast for you"
Actually I do stretch the truth somewhat. all she really did say was "what do you know" and then walked off.

The tree grew and darn well grew ,by next season it was about six ft. tall, almost that across. She kept saying how good the compost must be (she is in charge of that), all I could repeat was that because it was self sown, blah blah yudder yudder. Did I tell you that I was on an orchard (we had 8thou trees) as such I knew all about what grows or what don't. As a male also I am full of all sorts of great knowledge like that, practical stuff that only males very much like George Clooney seem to possess.

Was 'bout this time 2003 the robbi waltzed out early one morn to get the eggs and with jaw dropping/ double take/ shock horror/ awe noted that there were four nectarines growing on the by now ten foot tree. You guessed it,each year the tree grows even bigger and fruits like bunches of grapes. To make matters really worse the damn thing is one of the old white varieties that is the very best and sought after fruits, one that you never see in the greengrocers either.

Robbi Humble pie is one of my very favourites, as well, hers too. Happens heaps at chez robbi.

Fantastic isn't it Hortense. You know me well enough now and can attest to the fact that when I am wrong I will admit to it.No, I never have my fingers crossed, well maybe that once I did.

Barack? nope, can't see him ever having that(humble pie) on the menu at the White House. he seems to be a pretty clever chappie, one not prone to just shooting off his mouth without considering the consequences. Just jumped right into work too didn't he, our new bloke here did that as well, just as he said he would. Only one difference there though, Barack doesn't need a paper to read from, our bloke can't open his mouth without reams of it spilling out, and none of it makes sense either. They still think(our government) that their silly carbon trading scheme can just go ahead full steam and not cause any downturn in our economy. The only folk who will win out of this will be the people who get the licences to do the carbon trading, the folk who will suffer will be the OZ public and the businesses that will go under.Sure we humans have wrecked the planet, are we wholly to blame for global warming, not on your nellie, just ask the 650 eminent scientists who say we are not and that the Earth could be actually heading for another mini ice age.

Oh Hortense, no, gelato is off the menu tomorrow but I promise we will do it all again on Sunday 'Tis the great bike race tomorrow, that top Texan Lance Armstrong will be there also about 133 other bike riders all in stretch Lycra, you are blushing Horty old girl, that is a maidenly blush I see. You only go there to read the lettering on the Lycra Hortense, yes I guessed that

ink marks on a blank page Sunday 18th January

2009-01-18T03:09:00.000-08:00

So, chickens don't know when it's Sunday. That might just come as a surprise to some folk, as I know it did and sort of didn't to me. Perhaps a fuller explanation would be in order. Since leaving the farm , building a new home in that hills village and then subsequently moving down here we have kept up the farming facade by having chickens in the back yard. She says it is so I can have some(one)thing to talk to during the days when she is off ministering to the sick etc. Actually how the chickens manage room and board at Chez robbi is by supplying the household with fresh eggs on a daily basis. Therein is my little epiphany about chickens not knowing it is Sunday.
More background information is as follows; when on the farm we had up to 20 chickens all running about the place laying furiously so what the crows didn't pinch I used to pick up each day.In all those years what with the crows swiping eggs and new chickens coming in there was never any need to know who laid what or when. Eggs just appeared, were gathered either by crows or self and life just tumbled on.

The shift to the village changed all that as it took a while to get a hen house going and then we sold that house to move and build here. Of course in between all that there was a sort of limp career to consolidate after being on the farm for so long, life was at that time a tad odd and mixed up for a goodly while. Once here and the garden done , hen house built ,two chickens were installed. two seemed to be an optimum number as we were unsure how the neighbours would react to hens bawking about the place early on a frosty morn. They appeared to be placated with the odd egg or three and also some nice plums or nectarines from the fruit trees.

You may or not know that chickens do not lay every day,even when as well cosseted as they are at Chezrobbi. These two lovely red hens laid two brown eggs everyday except, wait for it ,Sunday. This went on for some three years and when we had several trips to the UK for 3months at a time the folk who looked after the feeding and care reported that two eggs rolled in every day except Sunday. Some Sundays there would be one egg but most Sundays were eggless. That lot of chickens eventually had to go to a friends farm out in the sticks , a sort of old chickens home in the hills, where they could live out the rest of their days in peace,(or the pot) we hoped.What we didn't know wouldn't hurt , so to speak. Another two chickens joined the happy band here and they soon settled into the same routine, as did their main carer, me. Oh heck no, I don't lay the eggs, it's the chickens stupid!Two eggs a day excepting of course Sunday. Last year off we went to the UK for another couple of months so those red hens had an early retirement trip to Mt Pleasant. On return we off to the red hen shop for two more, but once they started laying, shock and horror the routine changed. Now , some of you might think and say, so what, do I really care diddly what day his chickens lay or didn't?

Perhaps it is retirement, or sloth, or just a general loss of neurons that stopped me from realising until last week that these hens didn't not lay an egg on any specific day( such as Sunday) but their particular habit was not to lay on alternate days.Are you confused, what I mean is one week they didn't lay on Monday, next week it was the Wednesday and so on. But there was always two eggs on a Sunday. I know , I checked on the calendar where all the egg production is marked down in a very efficient manner, as befits a well regulated household(she says I should get out more). There you have it, a conundrum Miss Marple would love to crack. Worrisome to a small degree and you dear folk can be rest assured that the matter has been discussed at length with the two red hens but as yet there is no actual consensus in sight.

Of course I'm not batty Hortense, the good folk know that I don't really talk to chickens at great length, just short little asides about the weather and such is all.
I should stick to rubbish I make up instead Horty old girl, is that a question old love or a demand? Maybe you are right perhaps a little comment on current affairs.Is it okay to say that word when one talks about an American president?. Tuesday the good folk in the US are going to do that thing they do so well, install a new one. What a cracker he looks as well Hortense, damn but he looks the goods. This is just one of the really great thing the Americans do isn't it, oh heck Horty it is far far better than inventing liquid white out. You were joking? write me a note next time Hortense. He is rather sweet and seems to be quite bright but he has a big job to do. Methinks Hamas might just be escalating the situation just to make it hot for the young fellow, and don't they look like a bunch of losers . As this is being written they have just sent five rockets into Israel,pathetic isn't it. There are always two ways of looking at any perplexing situation,so lets hope the chickens settle down into a better routine or a higher authority might just answer the call.

Missed out on Sunday Gelato this week Hortense, shame about that but it was all down to those pesky red hens y'see. Next week I promise.

Ink marks on a blank page Sunday 11th Jan

2009-01-10T21:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, so here I am on a quiet Sunday and it really isn't all that hot outside, but I thought I should perhaps get in out of the sun. Like most folk of direct English extraction I am easily burnt to a crisp. Already in my short life I have had some 20 skin lesions dry iced from my face and an active BCC gouged out of my neck. So in I came, what to do ,what to do, sang that crazy woman who I can never remember her name, but she warbled on about Heathcliff and has a huge castle somewhere in Ireland. Y'all know the woman I'm sure.

I have been busy of late though, scurrying down here most nights working away on my book. The days I spend mostly in heavy contemplation of my navel, as well of course reading about the times when things were young, real, and dinosaurs ruled. I have on my desk a pile of genuine dinosaur poop, yes indeed I do right next to the petrified wood and only an inch or so from the crustacea I found up in Coober Pedy. That's an arthropod to you folk, opalised it is and all. There might be a few of you who went to the movies and saw my hero Mel Gibson in the film series Mad Max. I think in the US they were re-badged as 'The Road Warrior'. Well the one Tina Turner was in was shot in Coober Pedy, on location just out some way of the town at a place called the 'Moon Plain' ,given that it looks a little like the surface of the Moon. That is where I found lots of lovely little fossils, all sorts of shells and little pieces of opalised bone, and lots of very very old oyster shell. Coober Pedy is of course some 3-400 miles from the now sea but back then of course lots of sea covered the land and even right the way up to Alice Springs you can find fossil sharks teeth and shells. I have to confess a little backsliding here folks, I do have another life, strange as it may seem. That life encompasses all sorts of weird and not so wonderful things, Paleontology is one, writing poetry and photography another one or three. Travel though is my real vice and the book I am writing is a series of photo books of my last visit to the UK. Some time ago I confessed to this very vice on here but then got distracted by Hortense, trying to save the world from itself and Gelato. Wonderful pursuits in themselves but I lust for my thoughts of England and greenery. To this end I shall devote this blog to a wonderful place and person,Bess of Hardwick, and endeavour to show you why on your very next vacation you should rush off to that green and sceptered isle.

The place: Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire
The Person: Elizabeth Shrewsbury (Bess of Hardwick)

Bess was born of humble origins in 1527 and by dint of four successful marriages to some of the richest men in England became a confidant of Elizabeth 1 and the second only to her as the richest woman in all of Britain. She died in 1608 at 80 yrs of age in her beautiful home, Hardwick Hall, which she had designed and built in 1573. The hall is set in some of the prettiest rolling downs and pasture country I have ever seen in England, the magnificent gardens and surrounds are maintained by the National Trust who have owned the property since the late 1960's. The Dukes of Cavendish who are the descendants of Bess had to gift Hardwick to the crown in order to pay the massive death duties that had built up over time. The house itself is almost as Bess had just left it with all the original furniture and wall hangings still in place. Her design for the exterior used, for the times, huge amount of glass and the wits of the day had a rhyme that went, in part" Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall" The Trust have done a remarkable job in keeping the place going as she would have run it as a working farm selling produce ,running free range pigs and the like. The on-site restaurant which is run from the original kitchen and scullery uses all their own produce so what you see all around is what you get.Have the Hardwick own pork sausages in red wine/onion gravy when you go,they are just superb! If I had a problem with the visit, then the day we spent there wasn't enough. Next time !

No Hortense I didn't have the Gelato as I am true to my very own Cocolat. We had some new flavours Friday after seeing that terrific movie 'Slum Dog Millionaire', didn't we Horty old girl, was just yummo too wasn't it.The film was well worth the ticket, so do yourselves a favour and go.

ink marks on a blank page thursday 1st Jan

2008-12-31T21:17:00.000-08:00

There are pleasures and then there are pleasures. Should that come across as being a little obtuse or even inscrutable isn't really meant to be. At the moment we here in OZ are blessed with the presence of Paris Hilton and her sister,why I am at a loss to know. She was paid $100k by someone to swan about the place and just be, well here. Her first stop was Melbourne where she spent the night swanning and the next day, yes you guessed, swanning about the shops. That folk get some degree of pleasure seeing her here is a given, ergo some dolt paid her all that money to come. I give no reasons for maintaining a degree of animosity towards such creatures as Ms. Hilton and ,it would seem, her equally vacuous sister. There are more pressing and deserving people in this world to concern myself with and if I had $100k to splash about there would be I think more positive things to do with that sort of money than the Misses Hilton's.

Pleasure..... a state of gratification, but there are degrees of. Today for instance we went 100 metres down to the end of our road and there is a remnant of the farm that used to be here on this spot 80 years ago. The last bit of the orchard that was here, a massive old Mulberry tree. Each year about this time,even in a dry year, the tree fruits well and we go pick Mulberries. Normally it goes like this, one for the bucket, three for the robbi. But folks it is pleasure, with a capital P, and that don't stand for Paris. No cost involved, just get into some old clothes and enjoy.

So, as we have established there are some differences as to pleasures. There is the Paris Hilton kind where she can do odd things on video, get into trouble that causes her to be locked up. Then gets heavily into the Bible becomes a sort of saint and a role model for impressionable women . Or , one can go out on a nice day in the park, walk the dogs, go pick Mulberries and gross out on fresh healthy juicy fruit. I only have one thing to say about the latter, it didn't and will never earn me $100k but it sure was fun.

Yes indeed Hortense it was rather fun at that. I got really well covered in Mulberry juice as well, oh indeed you have seen the photo.Would you believe Horty old girl I also got some in my hair, and on my jeans shirt face and arms, grub robbi that I am. I should think about more serious things Hortense, like? Oh the poor Hamas folk Horty, it is a terrible shame isn't it. I mean what have Hamas done to deserve that Hortense. Yes I know , all they do is lob a few hundred rockets into Israel Horty, in a sort of indiscriminate fashion , nothing really serious Horty, all done in the hope they just might knock over a few bits of Israel. Just boyish enthusiasm really Hortense, and then they go put their offices and arms dumps in the Palestinians homes and schools Hortense. Funny about all that really, I mean it isn't actually funny, odd more than hilarious. I often wonder how I would feel as it is I live in South Australia, the neighbouring state is Victoria, if all of a sudden the boys in Victoria started lobbing rockets at me and mine , just because I lived there next to them. I mean Horty old girl, all my pleasures in life come from going down the end of the road and picking a few Mulberries, weird little things like that. Yasser Arafat, he ran that place for a few years didn't he, then he upped and died, Hamas sort of rolled in, took over. They didn't get elected or stuff like that, they just rolled in and killed a few folk and took over, just a bit of boyish good fun. Yasser managed to save a bit of money too , some 2 or 3 billion $'s, frugal sort of fellow no doubt. In all of this we could forget the ones in the middle, the normal folk from Palestine ,the Gaza folk.They must be suffering very badly but perhaps the man who runs Hamas might from his hide-out in Syria will want to send some money for food and the necessities of life rather than new rockets and ammo.There is fault on the Israel side of course,one has to acknowledge that, some terrible right wing hardliners espouse all sorts of foul gibberish. In this world no person or group of are perfect and Israel must have some awful hard cases too because that really nice little man from Iran has vowed to wipe them off the face of the Earth, not my words Hortense , his. Of course Hortense what do I know about all this, in the words of that immortal philosopher Sergeant Schultz " Ooooowww, I know noooothing"

But I do know that it is holiday time and already I have had three servings of Cocolat Gelato this week , time for another when we take Princess Chloe to the airport don'tcha just know it.

ink marks on a blank page Sat 20th December

2008-12-19T19:52:00.000-08:00

Actually no, I'm not going to go through the Saturnalia thing, once is enough as I am sure that the folks who get this far into my blogs are smart enough to remember I have done all that before. This time there is something a lot more pressing and I believe aligned , to what a blog is all about.
We have here in Australia, for a small population, an odd system of government.It is democratic and follows the Westminster system and is based on the English model of governance with a federal government at the top then State and territory based elected parliamentarians and a local system of Councils for the various district suburbs /shires. Basically the Federal Gov. makes the laws which brings in taxes etc to run the place and therefore organises the wars and other calamities, they have a house of Representatives, a house of review, the Senate, the whole shebang is presided over by a Governor General (this time a woman) who has no real power but is the Queen's representative in OZ. State govs.are run in much the same tradition excepting Queensland which has no upper house. There are six states and two territories each with a system of Government. The party in power at the moment federally is the Labour party(left wing) and they are also the party in power in all bar one state(Western Australia). State elections are held mostly every four years ,federally each three.The largest state is New South Wales which is also the oldest ,richest and most corrupt. The Labour party machine in that state has so much power it dumped the serving Premier without having to call an election and installed a puppet Premier who is heavily beholden to the union movement.This state was also hugely in debt even before the global fiscal crisis and is at the moment running on empty. The rest of the states are just about in the same position and although the mining boom made Western Australia very rich it too is close to deficit. The conservative ruling party there has just won office in the last few months so has had little time to do anything positive.The position in the two major manufacturing/population and finance states,NSW and Victoria, is akin to the Chicago era of Mayor Richard Daley, especially in NSW.

Life will go on here as it did in the US under Richard Nixon as it should , then does even in dire times. The people muddle through regardless of how inept or corrupt the Government of the day is.
What has started me off on this rant about government ,especially our federal one, is the fact that in 2009 the Minister in charge of Communications (read internet) is going to move in the house that we in Australia will have a mandatory system of federally placed filters on ALL ISP's in the country.Ostensibly this is to combat 'child porn' but according to EVERY provider and technical person the effect will be to almost shut down peer to peer transfers, social networks(facebook etc) music video downloads, blogs,TV shows and ad infinitum. Of course i do not suggest that filters will block everything, the persons who traffic in child porn can already circumnavigate any blocks people put on them, they wont be affected at all. What it will do is SLOW down 'normal' traffic so that it will be useless trying to download a cd or a movie. If for instance family want to send pics of their little kids in the bath to other members of family, or in the family pool, does that constitute something that a filter will block. Who gets to decide how the filters are set? what parameters will be used to define 'unconscionable' images and or conduct? What about the gamers who use the net, games that have rape,car chases /crashes/ death by machine gun or any death that is used gratiously in a video game, to set up a score, will these be filtered?
I have just watched a 2006 version of 'Anne of Greengables' on dvd with my two young g/daughters. This was a heartfelt and warm film but did have scenes in it which might cross the boundaries of a filter. Perhaps it should have been filtered as there were several scenes( also some of child exploitation) that had me misty eyed and caused a catch in my throat. I am against any behaviour that occurs where someone who is not , by the level of intelligence,age or social ability, able to make his/hers mind up on a situation that is presented to them as a fait accompli ,familial, threat or for financial reward asked to perform / take part in or watch an act.
That is MY filter and one that I will defend with all I can to uphold.(Shades of Dreyfuss)

Wow Hortense all that is a trifle heady ,dontcha just know.you agree, goodness are we aligning our planets Horty old girl? Of course you can say something, you would like to say that the labour party federally is bit hypocritical. Why is that Hortense do you think.Oh, because in the State Labour Government of New South Wales they have had one Minister go to jail for possessing and dealing in child porn in 2008?Another one for dealing corruptly with kids, whilst in the Federal labour party they had an MP who was investigated by Police for abusing her position and causing a nuisance whilst drunk in a public place.All this in 2008 Hortense whilst the holier than thou Minister was preparing to stop you and I from doing things on facebook, tut tut Horty. Well if it wasn't all about on the public record and actually in the courts I would never believe it old girl, even down to that bit where the Australian Labour Prime Minister , saying to the world in general about President Bush telling him over the phone he didn't know what day of the week it was. Funny isn't it as well Hortense, our Prime Minister used Facebook in all manner of ways to get himself elected, even down to calling the then Prime Minister a dill, well yes not just like that,we all knew what he meant though.Heck, almost forgot about the ex-labour Senator who has been sending lots of monies into Swiss bank accounts and had an investment burn down where he and other collected 15 times the value of the property through insurance. Tut Tut, but it is all in the court system Hortense.

Sunday tomorrow, gelato at Cocolat !! yea har....

ink marks on a blank page Wednesday Dec 17th

2008-12-16T14:27:00.000-08:00

The name comes from the Middle English Wednes dei, which is from Old English language Wēdnes dæg, meaning the day of the English god Woden (Wodan) who was a god of the Anglo-Saxons in England until about the 7th century. Wēdnes dæg is like the Old Norse Oðinsdagr ("Odin's day"), which is an early translation of the Latin dies Mercurii ("Mercury's day"), and reflects the widespread association of Woden with Mercury going back to Tacitus.
That is a quote from Wiki although I knew that anyway being the clever dick that I am. One of the things that I revere in my life is a set of books that my Father owned. They are a little dated now of course as he died in 1942 but I still read them each and every one at least once a year. These books are amongst some of the first that I ever learned to read,as befits the times when they were published (early 1930's) the print was large ,readable, plus even for scholarly tomes they were simplistic in language. In the main,there are six, they were historical but dealt with myth ,legend and ancient stories of the gods of Egypt,Babylon,the Celts and of course Norse heroes . The picture I am posting of Ishtar is one of my very favourites,as a young boy of six I fantasied about seeing the picture in its reality. The painter was Ernest Wallcousins who was an illustrator of historical books but the painting itself I was never able to see although on subsequent trips to London I have seen several works of his but never that particular one. The cynics amongst some of you that may read this will of course come to the most obvious reason why I used to glorm over this plate, yes she is naked, yes I was attracted to the fact she was naked but also I loved the metaphor within this picture. At the time I did not understand what it was that drew me to it but I had a very fortunate upbringing in that my Grandfather, who we lived with, was a very intelligent man who took the time to explain to a young boy just what it was he should see in this painting.

When he saw how interested I became in trying to learn he drew a large copy of the picture then marked off sections to explain just what the story (narrative) in the visual related to the actual script on the page. His enthusiasm was so infectious as even I could see at such a young age (eight) that a small colour plate could contain points of a story that took a whole chapter to tell the reader in words. I loved being ABLE to read,followed the comic strips in the Sunday papers avidly to the point that 58 years down the track I am still reading the Phantom each day. The importance of the so-called comic strips in teaching people to read metaphor cannot be over emphasised enough which is just one small reason why the popularity of the Japanese cult Manga comics has grown exponentially into a phenomena worldwide where the market in the US alone was over $500mill in 2007. In OZ as with countries all over the world we are faced with the growth of texting as a form of communication.

Some learned folk within the communication world,educators who have communication doctorates, are telling us dinosaurs that text type spelling is okay and should in fact be encouraged as it is a form of evolved English. Well that it might be that ur is a form of you are, gr8 also a form of great. I would argue that yes, it is a subliminal form of the 'proper' useage but is also a dead end for to know that gr8 means great then you first have to understand just what the word great in the whole form means. So to say that the txt gr8 will become the standard eventually for great is just pandering to the users of text(txt) is also a grave disservice to education . Understanding of how metaphor shapes our life go read some good works on Shakespeare and how he shaped(created) words to create then complete the meaning of what he was trying to convey within his spoken word,the sub text in other words, for many of the folk who witnessed his plays could not read. Gr8,Txt all the other so called txt words are in themselves metaphors for to use them it is imperative that the user knows what the whole word means. The simple word great has many meanings ,the semiotic explanation of such a small word can run into pages which can become meaningless .

Yes Hortense I did get a little carried away.Yes it might have been boring,and no I cannot apologise for that as it is just one of the subjects I do like to get my teeth into. Hortense do you really mean that, I should just stick to stuff I know nothing about?, at least that might be entertaining you think. Perhaps we should talk at great length about that fellow in New York who ripped everyone off to the tune of billions.wasn't that all about trust Horty, all those folk who lost money actually trusted him, the securities people TRUSTED him.Trust is wonderful isn't it Hortense. Who do you trust Horty? I know you don't trust me 'cos I pushed you in the mud that time when I said I wouldn't, but we are still great friends are we not, we are but you still don't trust me.Well Hortense that is the way of it isn't it, you live and learn just what to put your trust in, but you do know I wouldn't push you in the mud again don't you.That isn't just because you walloped me with your handbag after and I'm scared of you, well perhaps. A good walloping might just do some folk a lot of good then Hortense. What about gelato tomorrow my lovely friend

ink marks on a blank page Sat Dec 13th

2008-12-12T20:38:00.000-08:00

Saturday rolls from the tongue easier than, dies Saturni ("Saturn's Day"), or even as wiki will have us know from the Old English as Sæternesdæg. Imagine saying that after a few hearty ones on a fast Sæternesdæg's night. Not that I do these days, have hearty ones, I mean. Which is a good thing really as I cannot even say it in the fullness of my sobriety. That sort of reels in my grump for the week, hard drinking or as the pollies will call it 'binge drinking'. As a young chap in the fullness of my 'nothing can harm me mode' I was prone to the imbibing of far to much alcohol in a single sitting than was good for me or anyone else. That I eventually saw the error of my ways and now do not partake at all is one of the very best things I have ever done, not just for me, but those closest and dearest to me. If the individual can handle drinking and not have drink handle them, that's fine go right ahead,I'll even step up to the bar and buy you some. Once anyone starts to drink just for the sake of getting out of control, then STOP. End of the don't overdo it lecture, just enjoy yourselves this season.

What I did want to babble on about is the lizard that lives under the flat rock in my front garden. This is a large lizard (Blue tongue) that is native to this area and normally you will see one or two of these in just about every garden. Blue tongues are lovely things and live under rocks and logs in the garden and forage for snails and insects . At home here we are blessed with the one you see pictured (Stumpy) and also one out in the back garden that lives in our garden shed. Stumpy has been here for some years as before this house was built 7+ years ago we owned another house on this block for many years and there was always a blue tongue living under a small shrub, so I guess it is the same lizard as they are quite territorial and prefer the same locale. We hadn't ever lived here before building this place but had seen the lizard whilst visiting.
We call her Stumpy as one day at breakfast I looked out of the window and saw her dragging past sans the best part of her tail.She managed to struggle under her rock to I thought, perhaps die, so rather than just let her pass away we decided to see if she would take food and in doing so she might 'rest and recuperate'. The lizard man at our museum told me that they loved eating strawberries and grapes so I got some grapes and put them in front of her little cave. Wonder of wonders the grapes started to go and one Sunday morn we saw her eating one. That was four years ago and she has had a litter of young each year.This last year though I have been worried about her as she has taken to living in a drain pipe that opens onto the road and several times I have had to fetch her off the road and put her back under her normal rock.I get worried that we might come out to get the letters one am and find that some loony has squashed her . Today she crept out and was sunning herself so I decided to feed her some strawberries and then a few grapes, to my surprise she took the grapes from my fingers and then gobbled up the strawberries before returning to her cave. She looked a little fat around the midriff area so hopefully she will have another litter, this is normally the month they give birth.They are reptiles but birth live young.

Yes I know Hortense, a little mawkish and sentimental but I am a Pisces and we are like that.
That was one time when I did know just what I was talking about Horty, you are right, but I cannot take full credit in the knowing,.That lovely reptile man at the museum told me what to feed it and also that the tail would never grow back to a point, would always be a stump.
I should get back to muttering about things I know ought about, a lot less vomit making and mushy? Well what about this then Hortense, talk about things that live under flat rocks. What about that Mugabe bloke eh? just what rock does he crawl out from under. No Cholera in Zimbabwe ! gee , I really don't know if he actually lives in the real world that chap, and ugh, his name is Robert for goodness sake. Best I get into something else Horty, I can't talk about Sunday gelato now can I? not after all those news pics of the poor little buggers over there.

ink marks on a blank page Sat December 6th.

2008-12-05T20:01:00.000-08:00

There is a chorus of voices saying"is it really the 6th of?" 'fraid so kiddies, and I hope you have all been extra good this year 'cos you know just what will happen don't you? The big bad world wide recession is coming to a country near you ,that's what, so if the folks you elected last time haven't done their job right...you had better watch out, no pressies for you lot! All this time you thought it was the bankers and politicians who had made the mistakes that got us in this mess when it was REALLY YOUR fault for electing the pollies who made the regulations so slack that allowed all this to happen, so there!! see it was YOU the voter, such naughty people.

Sometimes i don't know why I say stuff like that, perhaps there is a curly bit in my mind that stores rubbish and at a completely inappropriate time says,righto cretin, write me down real quick without even thinking. Make a complete ass of yourself , I'll deny everything so what, wasn't me, dolly did it. So I do, what do I know about the world anyway.

But what I do know is this: There is a large window in front of the robbi breakfast table, if you are really good and have elected the right one this time I shall take some pictures one day and show y'all the super view there is from my chair.
What happens on a regular basis is this ; we have these native birds in the garden (Manorina melanocephala ) noisy miner to you, and they have a nasty habit of attacking the other native birds who used to fly in and sup from the flowering plants. They also like to gang up on a sweet little bird who fossicks around on the ground like a mad thing. This little bird is an introduced species (Turdus merula) the common English blackbird and is an inoffensive sweet thing with a lovely song.

The noisy miners have learnt, and very quickly too, that if they see a blackbird in the front garden they can call two or three of their bretheren and make the blackbird fly up in panic. Then by careful sheperding can drive said bird at full speed into the large clear window where it will usually hit same so hard it breaks its neck. One such happening occured just as I drove up from a visit to the shops,the result is pictured. Okay I hear you say, David Attenborough has done that, we saw it on the discovery channel last week. Yes I can quote you on that,but how did the birds learn that, do they watch David too? What my question for the week is kiddies, how is this so. This house has only been here for 7 years, the noisy miners only moved in en masse about two years ago and I never saw them practising rounding up other species etc, and as they only do it to blackbirds what is happening here. Does Alfred Hitchcock's movie 'the birds' have star billing at the noisy miner's roost of a night, or are these the Einstein's of the avian world.

Is that scary or is it not Hortense? and why do I talk about stuff that I know diddly about? 'cos i can Hortense, nope ,read my lips Horty do I care?
Cogitate on this Hortense old fruit, when those gunmen stormed into Mumbai the other day shooting up the train station and a hundred or so innocent civilians,an academic from a Uni here was on TV saying one of the reasons they do stuff like that is because they are POOR and have no money or jobs so should be helped and understood, not shot at. Now then Hortense what I want to know is just how poor are they when a round for an AK47 costs a minimum of 28centsAUD even if you load 'em yourself,a rocket propelled grenade costs $1200 each and stun grenades cost around $340AUD a time. I know this stuff as it is I am a nosy basket so made it my business to find out. Don't even mention the training costs and rubber duckies ,fuel etc and ammo they used in training not to even talk about the mobile phones and comm gear they had.Well that is true Hortense, what the heck would I know, best I stick to knowing what day it is tomorrow,yea Sunday of course and the OZ dollar being what it is we should go spend our last few on some Gelato,a plan?

Ink marks on a blank page Friday Nov 28th

2008-11-27T14:39:00.000-08:00

Much ado about very little methinks.What am I talking about? why the critics response to the film Australia actually. Now I would say that wouldn't I? as an Australian it is my duty to champion what is of this country and who is of the country. The pure fact of the matter, and from one who has actually seen the movie, the critics both here and abroad have missed the point entirely. yes the film is long, no there aren't any deep and meaningful metaphors to ponder over that answer all of life's questions, there are metaphors a plenty but none that are full of unintelligible gabble that film critiques generally consist of. I can speak with some authority on this, unlike my usual protestations , as in doing my last degree I also took a year of film studies.

That doesn't give me carte blanche and sweeping powers of deconstruction I know, but what it does give is a little understanding about how film might work.As a 21st century film 'Australia' does have shortcomings, but as a film that highlights a place ( the Northern Territory) and society of the times in which it's set, the film and the direction does that admirably. My maternal grandfather was the controller of wharves and railways (in Darwin)during this period in history so I have first hand knowledge of just what it was like to be there and the cattle country in that era. For myself I also know just what it was like to be a drover, muster/drive cattle and sheep long distances, as I did just that in the 1950's. Australia at that time(1950's) was still very much a frontier country way up in the bush so what it must have been like in the 40's was more of the same only harder.The film captures that spirit and hardship so well I relived most of the worst times,and there were plenty, the best times(some) and all of the hardships. Like the time we took 5thousand head of sheep to a rail head, only arrived with three thousand and I had a horse die under me . The year it rained after 7 years of no rain at all, was March 14Th 3 days after my 14Th birthday. The first night out mustering I was told to get into my 'swag'(sleeping gear of canvas) early because I was the horse tailer. You might well ponder as I did what that was. The horses are unsaddled after work and let loose but one horse has hobbles and a bell so that it cannot wander far. The horse tailer takes out a bridle at about 4am and listens for the bell, finds the horse then catches it, bridles up and rides bareback around in the dark looking for the un-hobbled horses. When you find the 'mob' and on a big muster there could be fifty you round them up and drive them back to camp.

Australia the film, captures most of the hardships of this life and also the absolute grandeur of the country, so for just that it gets my 100% tick of approval for I know about these things. What I don't know about is kissing Nicole Kidman so on that I cannot speak with any authority. I once acted in a film produced by Twentieth Century Fox so the very sight of those searchlights and that opening music makes me edgy with anticipation. The film was 'Kangaroo' and there are scenes in 'Australia' that are reminiscent of 'my' movie as well so once again I was on similar territory. One of the problems of Australian society is just how parochial they once and possibly still are, conditions in OZ didn't change much for years and what was fashion in clothes/furniture etc(in the late 40's) was still fashion almost up to the 70's. In a previous blog there was mention of the 'laconic' OZ bush manner, and the main male character gets to express that quite often also with the dry sense of humour which is part and parcel of Australia.

This then is a BIG movie,not Werner Fassbinder or even Cohen Bros, but a great look and a good rollicking yarn full of real characters, and the young kid who plays Nulla, a star in the making. If you are searching for metaphor and meaning it is there, in huge dollops because what this film is all about stares you right in the face. The message is there all across the screen. 'AUSTRALIA', the narrative of this film is just that, the country and the land itself. Go see it, if you don't enjoy then come here, look for yourself, and you will see just what the critics missed.

No Hortense I didn't get billing on the credits although everyone else did, and yes I did cry, four separate times. Yes I know I shouted out when I recognised that lady I had met last year. A bit gauche Hortense, I did cringe too but possibly not as much as the Citibank exec who was trying to explain why Citibank were spending lots of that money nice Congress gave them buying up bad debts . They were really bad debts too Horty, and you want to know what is so funny? These were debts that Citibank created in the first place then on-sold to bankers all 'round the world so that eventually it all turned toxic and created the fiscal mess we are now in. Yes Hortense I do know that when all the dust settles Citibank will make oodles of money out of these debts, but first they have to lay off lots of workers over Christmas . Why is that? what would I know Hortense, I do know that Gelato is cheaper today than it will be tomorrow, let's go!!

ink marks on a blank page Sun Nov 23rd

2008-11-22T21:28:00.000-08:00

I am by nature, and perhaps now that I no longer work in the real world a somewhat solitary person.Not to say by the word solitary that I do not like my fellow humans, I do, but years of working odd hours and being at the beck and call of the telephone cut many of my acquaintances loose so to speak. Folk seem not to want to bother with a person if one is not around or sleeping when they wish to be sociable. Then of course was the period in my early 40's when we lived on a farm and that cut us adrift even more so. Farms being of a necessity to be well away from so called 'normal' civilisation. Then during that time I went back to University to do a degree, in the process of that I mixed with humans who were very much younger than I was so tended not to make friends as one could hardly bring someone home who was only afew years older than my son.

Australian rural society is much like rural human gatherings all over the world, the folk who have been born and brought up in that community have an initial distrust of the interlopers and tend to not accept them until they have 'proved ' themselves worthy and then remain in that community for a good settling in period. In the town that I dragged my family to, the normal settling in period before the family finished being called 'blow-ins' was about twenty five years.

Our case was somewhat different as my wife is in the medical field so was quickly snapped up by the local hospital, when I say local, it was in another town about 25kms away which in Australia is really on the doorstep so she became a native almost immediately. For me, being accepted took a little longer as I still had this weird job that no one local could understand and of course I was studying at Uni. At this time in OZ farming types had a great distrust of 'them what went to Universities' after all what couldn't you learn about life by sticking your arm up a cows back passage.The eldest (son) joined the local football/cricket team so he seemed destined to become a local even quicker than his mother and the youngest(girl) was ensconced in the local primary school so she also was a part of the local community. What to do about father, me , robbi. About two to three years after arriving several curious and I believe completely Australian character traits rescued me from oblivion as a person in my own right and not the husband of and or the father of.

Firstly, the local 'pillars of ' owned a very large farm and dairy, then used to deliver their milk in bulk to the surrounding farms. Because I was home during the day a lot I became quite friendly with this terrific fellow who used to be our 'milko'. Now this is where it gets into the OZ country character.As you well know I can talk the leg off a chair but owing to the fact that when he was in my kitchen yarning and drinking coffee I had either been at work half the night or had just got out of bed so was very tired and thus spoke in very short but succinct sentences. We soon became firm buddies and I looked forward to the delivery of milk as much as he looked to the coffee and yarn at my place. One of the character traits in country and rural Australia is that the archetypal OZ male is supposed to be tall,rake thin and laconic to the point of being monosyllabic. I am neither tall or rake thin but because of lack of sleep etc I was a trifle laconic and spoke little but by the standards of the conversation, with great pith. Naturally as he was a milkman he went into many kitchens around the district so spread the word that robbi was 'okay', ergo it wasn't long (about 2years) before I got a little nod with the index finger crooked to the forehead as I went about my business in the town. Three years down the track and the local post office couple started calling me rob and handing me the letters personally so I knew that I was on the way to becoming a local.

The second and most major thing that catapulted me into being part of the local scene came about purely by chance and no it wasn't the time I almost burnt down my hay shed and the local volunteer firemen had to rescue me. My son had arranged to go fox hunting, the skins were valuable and they are regarded here as vermin, but on the night in question when his friend drove in to pick him up he was ill with the flu. This lad was about 18 and tall ,rake thin,laconic etc etc but for some reason turned to me and asked" You ever shot foxes Mr S?" "why don't you go with me" I thought it might be perhaps a test of the family honour so said I would but could I take my own rifle.Their farm was about thirty minutes away through very forested hilly dirt roads and this kid drove like an absolute madman so through the whole journey I just kept my mouth firmly shut in a very silent scream. We drove around the paddocks for what seemed hours and not one fox did we see when he tuned and said, "we should go back I don't think there is any about tonight"By this time I had regained my composure and voice so I agreed but said I would just shine the spotlight over to the left along that bare hill.Fantastic, a very large very healthy fox but really so far up the hill when he turned and sat all we could see were the two coals of its eyes.

"Oh hell" the kid said," he's miles away and normally what we do is shoot so the bullet just goes in between the ears so it doesn't mark the pelt,get more for it that way".me under my breath, Oh YEAH ?"Right between the ears you say" was my reply. Lined up the shot and squeezed the trigger,boom, and foxie loxie went down.

Yes Hortense you are right, the kid ran up the hill and ten minutes later came back with said beast dead as, right between the ears. He never said diddley except a laconic ,"well we best be getting you home, it's late and I think he's the only one out tonight". On the way back Horty he drove ever so slow and careful but not one word about foxy or really anything at all.
Two days later Hortense I went into the town for letters and everyone in the district seemed to be there, the couple in the post office even put a rubber band around my letters, an unheard of courtesy for a newcomer and the garage man actually came out to wipe my windscreen. My boy came home from school and spoke to me for more than two seconds and my little girl caught us all by surprise at dinner with"daddy did well at fox hunting , didn't he"
What is my point Hortense? well I guess Americans are a lot like Australians old girl and that is just how it is going to be for that nice man come the 20th of , best he savour the moment as I did .
Yes I know, it is Sunday the day is blue skies , gelato is there for the eating

ink marks on a blank page Wed Nov 19th

2008-11-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

What you say, he is blogging on a weekday. Yes, true I am, and it is possible have done so before but only when it was absolutely necessary. You would note that I have a somewhat predilection for cynicism, that is not to say I view everything in this world in shades of 'shock horror', far from it. There are though, items around which in general lend themselves to a healthy dose of tongue firmly in cheek, oh and in that I do not take myself too seriously either.Never let it be said that the robbi is without blame, for I wear blinkers on a lot of subjects and am hidebound and all the other expletives one can conjure up.

We humans tend to age, immutable fact. This process has us at some age ,feel indistructable, then we move on to learning that maybe we aren't but at least we have come to the conclusion that if we stick our hand in the fire it will burn and thus cause pain. The next progress up the path is the realisation that we know everything and those who are older( 35) are past it and have no reason to be on the planet at all, our tutors at Uni are all dills and parents are just there to pay the bills. Somehow, and despite the fact that our professors are jealous of us because we are so bright and young they almost fail us, we get our degree and go out into the real world.

We then enter into a sort of limbo where it can be said that our ideals become compromised. That is because we actually have to work for a living to pay off our student debt so therefore get caught up in the corporate world and try to scrabble up the ladder and grab the big dollars the dills who taught us said we could earn. About this time perhaps we might find a partner with whom to share a life, so a new phase begins. This is a period in our existence where staying out all night and spending as if you had no arms abruptly stops, and our being suffers a reality check.

It is in this phase that folk who wear rings in unlikely places and adorn themselves with beads are refferred to by us as dirty lay-abouts and why don't they get a job. We have left all our uni photos with our parents at this stage along with all the memorabilia from the various music festivals and failed rock bands we played with over the years. That is not to say we decry all this material ,not at all, for at Christmas and or birthdays when we take the grandkids over there we drag out all these things ad nauseum and chortle over said artefacts whilst throwing down copius quantities of dad's best wine. Herein lies the plot though, we are very careful not to let the children actually see this stuff, they have to go outside and play, properly of course, no fighting.

Yes Hortense I know that none of this is actually going to save the world or indeed show the good folk how I actually became the cynic that you say I am. Yes Hortense I know that all that I have been saying was written on the wall of the bath house in Pompey and people all through history know that their generation was perfect. You do miss the point Hortense, and the point is?
The point is old girl, what are we going to do about it and when will we ever learn that in order to grow we all have to change. My point? well I do hope Hortense that this election in the US will eventually be seen for the groundbreaking huge step forward that it is. No, I don't mean just because he is African-American, that is part of the equation, but for me the major bit therein is the fact that the majority wanted to CHANGE the way they thought about a whole range of issues including the democratic right to exercise your vote.

Which reminds me Hortense, we should toddle off to the cinema and go to that new film the nice Baz man has done, see a little of our own country and perhaps repair off afterwards do lunch and Gelato, sound a plan?

ink marks on a blank page Sat Nov 15th

2008-11-15T01:59:00.000-08:00

Just a moment ago I was watching TV and savouring a coffee, well drooling over a coffee to be realistic. One of the things I do well in life is make coffee, that the machine I use does it mainly is not just a moot point but perhaps THE point. This particular machine is the 3rd one I have had, the 3rd different one as I had two of the same brand, not together mind , it just so happened that the first one was a very expensive machine that just fell apart, admittedly after much use, but apart it did fall.

I went back to the store and complained bitterly about said machine, the girl took my details and then sold me a different brand whilst all the time making cooing noises about how sorry she was the first machine was such a dud so she would take it up the the German company that makes them. Naturally of course I took all this with a large grain of salt, just opened my wallet and extracted the cash for a new machine (Italian).
The new coffee maker and I were getting along really well and we had become really simpatico ,making froth that a fancy barista would be proud of, when one Tuesday morn the door bell thing went(it plays reveille). Delivery chappie says "parcel for robbi" quoth I, "yea 'tis me" The German coffee machine making people being German were so upset that I had destroyed their prize thing they had sent me at no charge, a replacement. So that is how I had two of the same brand.

Now I do love a coffee or three, so do my guests and family, for myself I do short black but everyone else seems to want latte or cappuccino, so the new machine got the same thrashing as the first one. Alas the Italian job sort of fell over after 18 months so I went back up country a bit to the German replacement. That lasted about two years until it made more wheezing noises than I do after a long day.You lovely folk might live in a country where the ability to get things fixed at reasonable cost is thick on the ground, alack and whatever not here he sighed. We seem to have a throw away mentality,oh, broken is it, just put it out for the garbage. Crikey I can't wait to get a bit old and furry around the edges, boom, one robbi on the landfill.So off to the shop again but this time I thought, no more expensive rocket science machines, go for the heaviest and cheapest, so I did. Half the money and heavy as lead to lift about but it makes the very best coffee and has lasted 3years now, and the froth,wow, one could ski on this fluff it is so thick and soft.

Yes Hortense I know that you prefer it weaker than I make,but I also note that your mug is always drained down to the last drop and you do seem to make those smacking sounds that one does when well satisfied.
Oh the landfill Hortense, what would I know about that? Well nothing of course and about on a par with what I know about folk thrashing about in large 4 wheel drive vehicles making doco's on saving the pristine wilderness and stuff. Yes Hortense I do know that the bald fellow who used to front that rock band is full on about the environment, especially now he is the Minister in charge of it in this new federal Government. Landfill is the new black Hortense, he wants to get rid of all landfill sites, and do what? Where is all the garbage going to go, oh we aren't going to have any? How is that so Hortense, oh we will all be far to poor to actually have anything, possibly, but what about the men who run the Government Hortense, they wont be poor, where will their garbage go? Yes I get it, theirs will go into landfill Hortense, but it will be environmentally secure landfill wont it, the bald headed bloke will see to that wont he Hortense.Yes I forgot Hortense he is the one with the power to issue permits for landfill sites, silly of me to forget that wasn't it.

I know, Sunday tomorrow and Gelato isn't going into landfill is it, not while I'm about Horty old girl, not indeed

Ink marks on a blank page Sun Nov 9th

2008-11-08T21:26:00.000-08:00

At it again, cannot help myself really, I mean life is just one long blog isn't it? But there are one or two burning issues that I would like to get off my chest, that is stuff that I waxed on lyrical about over the last weekend up in Sydney town. Y'see the dinner was replete with lots of lovely folk, some from far flung corners of the globe, others were local, and some like me were from what the Sydney-siders like to call the rust bucket states. Pre dinner the talk was who are you and where do you come from? After dinner there was more general conversation loosened up no doubt by the number of times the waiters refreshed the respective glasses and seeing as it was all free largess was paramount. As you know I only drink water so by the time talk was cheap I had consumed most of Sydney Harbour, or so it seemed.

When in a crowd such as this where most are extremely successful and thus by definition rich as, the greater majority are rusted on green, that is they espouse the "let's save the planet NOW " doctrine. Because y'see they can AFFORD to. Personally I have no problem with that, as I have tried to do my bit by putting photovoltaic cells on my roof ,having solar hot water and a very large (24k ltrs) water tank in my back garden.

Hortense I do though have a large problem with the well meaning folk who bang on about this without thinking very much about the real issues behind all the green and good. Call me or label me an old cynic but do they really think of the 'reality' behind just how green all this renewable stuff is. Take the cells on my roof, and apart from the massive amounts of power used to make them they are also made from Nitrogen trifluoride which is 17,000 times more lasting and as damaging than co2 to the atmosphere. This gas is also used to make the chips that power this thing (the pc) along with the lcd screens we all love to use.

The massive wind turbines which we in the state I live in have 58% of ALL the wind turbines in OZ. These things are made of STEEL which comes from blast furnaces and ALUMINIUM which uses enormous amounts of power,plus none of these wind farms will ever produce base load power at any period in history. The cost of producing this so-called GREEN power is three times that from gas fired plant, and the noise pollution from the turbines is soul destroying. Nope I didn't stop there either Hortense, I also went on about the local scientist who has become the darling of our federal government and therefore their spokesperson on climate change. He recently made series of TV programs where he and a partner went all around the pristine wilderness in a very large 4 wheel drive and made many trips in lakes / rivers etc in a two-stroke powered aluminium boat whilst at many times being photographed from above by two different helicopters. Just think on the amount of diesel/kerosene/dust damage/electrical power and a myriad of other things that went into the making of those programs. No Hortense I do not want to shut down the TV industry or stop people making nature programs, I am merely trying to point out that doing anything comes at a cost and what seems all lovely and touchy feely on the first look aint necessarily so and it is about time folk owned up and fessed up.

Hortense old girl that didn't strike me as being very much a way to save the place or protect nature at all or am I really being a nark ? And no Hortense I didn't watch the program just couldn't help seeing the promos for it as I trawled through looking for the programs I really do watch, such as world championship wrestling and the like.Yes Hortense I do know the Gelato is all natural, let's get to it then eh?

Ink marks on a blank page sat. 8th Nov.

2008-11-08T04:41:00.000-08:00

There I was contemplating nothing in particular in a studious sort of way when i had this sudden compulsion to write up a blog. But what should I pontificate on? We've all done the elections us bloggers, writ up and dissected to the very inch of anything and everything, some have even done pieces on the sort of dog he should buy the girls. Like I mean who really cares, the whole universe is going to heck in a basket and folk are worrying about what brand of doggie poo will be on the White House lawn.
C'mon folks lighten up here, give the man a break let him pick the 7000 folk he needs to run the ship o' state.

I just have to put in an antipodean's two cents worth , and that's about all we would get too, this isn't just about you folk over there y'know, I mean this chap is going to be the leader of the free world as we know it. The Russians will have their noses out of joint too, for some weeks now they have been kicking up the dust of the cold war and over-flying US and Brit ships and making great noises about missile placements. Then along comes that nice young man from America and grabs all the headlines, shame.

Funny about that, and how is Hugo going to cope with Barack?, not at all well I shouldn't wonder.This is something that America does once in a while oh so well, and it isn't just the fact he is African_American, although that in itself is huge, he has only been in Washington since 2005. Granted he is highly intelligent and can really speak well and plainly too, not like our fellow who talks as though we were all MBA's , but he has that great knack of someone who is destined to be really something, he RELATES and without trying hard to, he just does.

Oh yes Hortense how would I know, perhaps it is 'cause about stuff like that, I really do. Or perhaps I just make it up as I go along and say the first trite thing that pops into my skull, could be Hortense but you have known me long and well enough to know that I only make some of it up as I go along, the rest I find on fantail wrappers. Sunday tomorrow Horty, Gelato at Cocolat?, sure why ever not.

Ink Marks on a Blank Page Wed Nov 5th

2008-11-05T03:07:00.001-08:00

There I was jetting up to Sydney town like the old rock-n-roller I once was, all frocked up in my Adelaide over the hill finery and stepped off the plane to 35c and muggy.Nothing brings one down to earth with a thump than looking like a full blown twerp. Everyone else is swanning around the terminal in board shorts and loose tops and I'm dressed up like the turkey on for dinner. I always say though if you want to be noticed then you have to stand out, and I did.Enough of that at least when I embarked it was cool to be dressed like a colonial refugee.

The car was climate controlled anyway and by the time we got onto the Pacific Highway I was settling into cool mode.Sydney is really such a beautiful town, just a pity that it is full of Sydney-siders, folk who are basically nice people, just awfully rich and like nothing better to ask where one is from then when you mutter Adelaide they look at their shoes as though there remains the leftovers of some old droppings. I never know what to say either as the car sort of slinks past all these huge piles of brick where even the gate post must cost a months salary.
Oh don't get me wrong I live comfortable, and well within the sort of standard of run down genteel that I favour. Not through design y'know, I have just slid down the slippery slope of fading out quite easily, poverty is well within my grasp now. I should really cut to the chase a little quicker though as the flight sort of gave me that squiggy ear thing again and I feel a trifle off colour. My travel book/ pics went down with the professionals well though, I was well pleased and chuffed too,good stroke of the ego that was. The food at the dinner they put on was just out of this world and at every seat there was a personalised menu with your name on top, snazzy eh? Could I get used to being treated like a member of the human race, dunno about that, bit hard on the nerves trying to be pleasant for hours on end.

See I was right about those elections Hortense, and why didn't I win huge on the outcome? you know me Horty, I never back the favourite. The woman in the red leather jacket looked a little green around the gills though, she might just have to give it all back now don' you think. My guess is that she could just stick her hand up in four years, and then whattya think would happen? yeah, she'd lose it up to her armpits Horty old thing. What would I know anyway, but I do know this Hortense, that old man who can't raise his arms up higher than this gave a mighty gracious speech in defeat. Well he might too, he got thumped, but not his fault, you do have to sheet it home to Dubya. Got to tell you Hortnese that Gelato never tasted so good as it did today ,YUMMO

Well life moves and grooves always to the beat, and 'lo, the drum beat for the MAN.

Ink marks on a blank page .Thursday Oct 30th

2008-10-30T04:17:00.000-07:00

Been a while since I have sullied these hallowed pages. Not for want of trying or even lack of subject matter, it is just that I have had a pressing and torrid time doing a project for a loved someone.though 'tis never hard to find something to wax lyrical on in these odd times is it not? There have been folk who do say I could talk underwater with a mouth full of marbles, true, not that I have but let's say at times I am want to maybe just give it a shot.

Been packing for a quick trip to Sydney on the weekend, sort of part business and a really swish dinner to go for and as luck would have it I don't have to pay so that part is all good.The rest will be too, I just know it will be. Life is odd like that, things do work themselves out don't they.There you are frothing at the mouth, can't find that nice tie or a shirt that goes with the new coat and all of a sudden you are all packed and actually ready to go, wonders will never cease.

Don't know how many of you have been to Sydney but it really isn't my kind of place, funny too as it is one of THE beautiful cities of the world and I am one of these blokes what does like a bit o' beauty. Odd too that I feel more at home in London than I do in Sydney, perhaps that's the wannabe in me, bragging about the exotic places I have been to and lived in. But to me London has that homey feel, whereas Sydney is such a roaring fast place and the folk there are just at it all day every day.The harbour buzzes night and day, cars and trucks fly around and no-one seems to worry about the speed limit.Just seems like a don't care sort of place to me ,brash and in the face with high flyers doing the loop de loop buying and selling and the ladies all out seeing who can pay the most for a cup of coffee.

Don't get me wrong having a place like Sydney only two hours away by jet is an okay thing to have, but hey, nice to contemplate a visit but it is nice to know that Sydney is 'up there' and an affordable cup of coffee and a nice lunch that doesn't cost a weeks salary is here.

Yes Hortense I do know that the world doesn't revolve around gelato at Cocolat, and yes this is a sort of backwater, but gee it is a pleasant little backwater at that.
I should stop waxing on and talk about other stuff?.Hortense I am a wimpy old bloke with absolutely no status what so ever, what would I know.But I do know that woman in the US has a big mouth, and yes Horty the grand ole party did splash out a lot on clothes for her too. Yes I know she is just your everyday hockey mom, and yes I still haven't quite worked out what the heck that is supposed to connote.I think it means she is just very average, and yes Horty she is that and all in spades.I should stick to eating Gelati? lead me there Horty , lead me there.

ink marks on a blank page sunday Oct 19th

2008-10-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

Beautiful sort of warm cloudless spring day today but we did want to see the new Cohen Bros film, (burn after reading)what better way to spend a lazy couple of hours.The Cohen's have a unique way of filming, all their work bears very large question marks and one is left asking why this, why that.All good and they seem to work well with actors like Clooney, Malkovich et al. This was violent and seemingly there didn't seem much point to the extreme violence except in the final scene you understood why the violence was there. Robert Altman used similar techniques in that he tied in narrative and characters that at first glance seemed un-related but all made sense as a whole story and related to the main thread.

Good film is a wonderful device for painting a kaleidoscope that creates a frame so that us poor mortals can put into visuals the dreams and ideology of more talented folk. Even 'B' movies have a message, in the main good always triumphs over evil and the hero rides off into the sunset with the catch of the day.

Today being sunny and bright we did a circuit of the street market ,bought some hand made shower caps for our grand-daughters, then made our way to one of my favourite stores on Rundle St.East, Cocolat. This is a place that sells, Gelato(hand made) good espresso, snacks and the staff are pleasant .The reason it is called Cocolat. ALL the snacks and lunches have a chocolate base or theme. Nope, I don't usually snack there but the Gelati is the best I have ever tasted anywhere, and then some. They also do a large range of fat free sorbet which really are to die for.The deal is for $6-50 you get a large , and it is, tub of four flavours of gelati or sorbet and they don't use a scoop either. The stuff is ladled out with a large flat shovel so you get HEAPS, yummo!!!

Okay Hortense I know I could get fat but I did go for a 5km bike ride after dinner.Oh of course I could fit dinner in, the Gelato was lunch. Film? you mean that the Cohen's should make a film about Lehman bros and the fellow who has a name like a four letter word, oh, it is a four letter word. Just your little joke Hortense I know, but it was topical. So the team at Lehman's are all heading to a Grand Jury Horty? will it make a difference to those poor suckers that have lost a house and or their jobs? I don't think so but hey, what would I know. Best I stick with Gelati.

ink marks on a blank page -Tues Oct 14th

2008-10-14T04:24:00.000-07:00

We all live in a....you could say that, but in retrospect I never knew what they meant, nor really was I supposed to perhaps. It was the best of times and then some wasn't it, for those of you who were there, as I was . And really I was there, actually staring at them and standing crushed in a crowd of about 200 thousand people, or so it seemed. 'They', the Beatles, had landed at our airport in then very provincial Adelaide and from the air terminal to the city is about 6kms, the crowd was five deep all the way into the city so there cannot have been more than three teenagers at school across the entire city.

At the time I worked for the daily broadsheet (Adelaide Advertiser) and I told my boss that I really should be at the Town Hall to see what the fuss was all about as the mayor was holding a civic reception for them (sans Ringo)."Robbi,what a load of crap, if you think that these idjits are going to be anything and you go to write them up, consider yourself sacked!"

Needless to say ,I went,saw and was conquered but not sacked.All that started or really re-started the revolution I think,the Beatles and their music just had that impetus that motivated a country (England) to get out there and just do their collective thing. People from all walks of life started doing anything that seemed 'out there' and new.The whole country got working in all sorts of weird little ways, craft ,art,fashion and once again that little sceptered isle was the centre of the universe.

The folks on the other side of the pond did get a little jealous of the olde (ups)tart suddenly coming alive , and tried all fair and sometimes foul means to quash the Brit invasion. here in OZ we had our own little mini thing going on with groups like the easybeats (friday on my mind), and do yourself a favour ,go dig that track out, still worth a listen. Then our film industry had a revival as well,running off the coat tails of the English thing no doubt. For me just out of Uni by then married and at that time and right in the middle of 'that war' I started working for Big Blue(IBM).

I had been reading Sci-Fi for years and thought that computing was going to be the new 'black', the next REALLY big thing. Australia was sooooo slow in taking up the challenge though, people here just did not want to know about computing and as a result IBM Australia had a mind set that was locked into the basement when it came down to getting their users to accept new technology. IBM at that time as well had a corporate structure that was heavily immersed in what can the firm do for me and how best can one achieve stardom by doing nothing. If a manager stuffed up he/she was moved sideways into 'special projects' there to be forgotten until senility or death, whatever came first.

Sour grapes you say, possibly, but I resigned before the juice turned to vinegar anyway. In chasing my dream to work for a company like IBM I had learnt a very valuable lesson early on in life, that it isn't really what one does but how you do it that counts. I had joined that company because to me it was the pinnacle of success in what it did and stood for, paid jolly well too ,about twice what anyone else did and the pension scheme was awesome. I digress,but had I researched the company first before accepting the position then perhaps I would not have been so eager.

My experience with 'Big Blue' must have stood me in good stead because the next two positions that I took lasted most of my working life and in those places there was not one day when I had to force myself to go to work.There was a time towards the end of my career at the first (real) job when things started to get tough. We had been taken over some ten years prior and all of a sudden a much larger company decided to include us in their balance sheet. I was at the time reasonably senior and there was such a jockeying for positions I thought that with my finances okay it would be prudent of me to take my sanity and I could retire.

Yes Hortense I'm finally talking about something I know lots about, oh it's boring? Darn, well Horty old girl you have heard it all before, oh yes Horty many times.Why don't I talk about the things I know nothing about as I always do? Right then I will, and here in the local Murdoch is a prime example. The sage folk all over the western world are falling over themselves to prop up their banking systems, all a bit late Hortense dont ya know. The bankers will never let Goverments take over the running of banks,what would some guru in Government who has years of running a Government finance department and has several degrees in economics and who has successfully kept a Government and a country afloat for years know. Surely a 25year old with an MBA from some obscure mid-west American college could do it better, especially if he/she were paid obscene bonuses to take massive risks with other folks money so that their 55yr old bosses would get even bigger bonuses ? Yes Hortense I really do not know a thing about high finance ,best I get back to something I really know about, life.

ink marks on a blank page - Friday Oct 10

2008-10-10T16:22:00.000-07:00

Here in OZ there is a saying-TGIF - which I think is also in other western countries similar to mine.Translated of course it means Thank God It's Friday. As I am no longer working in a paid capacity and have not done so for I think three years, so sue me for not counting, then I should no longer use that acronym. However, it remains more firmly entrenched in my mindset than it ever did. Whilst at my daily work I was never an adherent to that TGIF culture as my job required me to be available at the ring of a phone and also I actually loved what I did. Not that I hated leaving each day or was first out of the unit, nope none of the above, but I was just very glad to actually like what I did and who I worked with and for.

Getting back to TGIF, and it is a mindset that has crept into the OZ workplace over years where I think people feel obligated to say and live by that credo whether or not they actually believe it. Here we have the very best of working conditions anywhere. For instance, long service leave and very generous sick leave (which accrues) , also 5 weeks paid annual holidays and on top of that 17.5% loading on the holiday pay. Pay rates are pretty good by international standards and as are conditions of employment.As well this is a great country to live in. But I would say that wouldn't I?

We do suffer from the tyranny of distance from where the centre of the universe is but that also keeps us out of a bit of trouble both political and on the rabble rousing front, although we have some homegrown idjits for that. Yes we do also import some of the worst excesses of US (culture?) product as well , hopefully some good sense and quiet heads prevail to keep us more aligned with our British heritage and I try my very best to do that by visiting the old dart frequently.

Life changes so very rapidly now, all good too I might add, change mostly for the better most times as well. Just this little exercise is a case in point and long I have been an advocate for the 'peoplising' of the web. Even this monetary crisis that has grabbed the world so quickly I think has some positives. That it gets world leaders together and working in concert might just be a good thing, perhaps a little more positive than Bono being on the short list for a Nobel Peace prize.

Yes Hortense, just what would I know. Oh but that is a moot point as although I am not Methuselah I have been around for a while and been there and done a bit, just like you Hortense.
Not quite as lucratively as that fellow from Lehman bros. but I dare say with a little more care for my fellow man. Obscene is possibly a word one could use, not as eloquent in the matter as some four letter ones I dare say but printable on the pages of a family blog. Something about Karma did I hear you mutter? And okay Hortense I will get back to talking about things I really do know, like the price of a Lehman brother perhaps?

ink marks on a blank page - Tuesday Oct 7

2008-10-06T20:29:00.000-07:00

Some days I'm not really sure about life. Obtuse? yes I know but that word describes my being at this very moment. Quandries are at every footfall and I know wild beasts lurk in every hedge, fraught is a miasma that pervades my all.

Could this be love? I know that feeling an observer might proffer,well may you ask, and nay I shall say for a deep and true love conquered me many years ago.Oh yes of course I have loved since, I am one of those unfortunates born under the sign of Pisces, we love madly all the time and at the drop of a hat. But no this is a malaise of a different kind and one that the curing of eludes me for the time.

This awkward sort of in-between and half out place I am in at this very moment has to do with understanding human behaviour and the reasons why happenings happen. What have I done you say? That is the root problem, I have not really much of an idea, the problem just arose out of nothing and I have no idea how to right what obviously is a wrong.

That really is underlined by the fact that I am male, we males do not know how to communicate to each other and obviously then onwards to the other side. Women have an easier path in that regard than us poor chaps, they have some radar and an innate knowledge of how to ferret and winkle out subtle bits of information from each other to then go on and 'know'.

Life here will go on, I shall be none the wiser but this condition is not life threatening. A trifle odd to worry about something that is in actual fact not in my real physical world, but there again y'see I am Piscean, that is a thing we do.

Yes Hortense perhaps I am on shaky ground, but the alternative is to talk about things I really know even less about. What things are those? Well for instance that woman striding up to the microphone at the airport where all those well meaning folk were holding up McCain placards. She leapt into condemning that lovely fellow and told everyone he had been best buddies with that dreadful Ayers chappie who bombed like the fourth July but on a weekly basis. Really Hortense what was she saying, he was only 8 yrs old for heavens sake,better she should concentrate on who sacked what State trooper in Alaska . You know the fellow that divorced the Governor's sister.
Yes Hortense what would I know, I leave you with this delightful cartoon from our weekend Murdoch, that tells a great story,what do you think?

ink marks on a blank page Friday October 3

2008-10-03T21:48:00.000-07:00

Hasn't the week just sped by, talk about the week that was ,or wasn't in my case.Who knows what a week will bring, well I guess those that make a living reading the future would do. That could be a touch boring though ,I mean to know what was going to happen. if I did ,know that is, then why would I even bother to say hello when I saw you. The reponse would be the same, you'd sort of stop, look at me with a quizzical look.

"Who is this fellow, do I know him", you would be asking, to yourself of course. You would hardly ask me, well I mean you don't know me do you, yet. But then because I knew what the future(ours) is going to be I would answer you back, before you got to the question actually 'cos that is how pre-cognition works,because I have seen the future, so therefore know what you are going to say before you say it. So anyway to save you any further embarrassment I have decide to spend the next few days in bed as I did not want to confuse you by having you greet me as if you didn't know me, which of course you do, because I have seen it all unfolding with my third eye.

No Hortense i am not confused, and yes I do understand that some might think the men in white coats are coming, not true. No, you can't ask me just how I know, suffice to say that I do.
I should have used my gift to make money on the stock market by short selling? Don't be daft, that might cause a panic sell off and people would lose their shirts. But then I would be able to buy back the stocks that were sold short and make heaps when they went back up again and I could do it all on borrowed money and not use a cent of my own. How and where would I do that Hortense ?, On Wall St..Isn't that how they got in such a mess in the first place? it is isn't it. I'm not sure that doing something like that would be ethical Hortense, oh it is and all the bankers at the brokerage houses did it, well good luck to them I say but I want to sleep at night.
No Hortense I know they don't, THEY are up all night short selling the stocks to make more money.

Yes indeed Hortense I do know that I wasn't going to talk about things that I know nothing about but you will forgive me this once , pretty please?

That woman was on TV with the Biden chappie. Rivetting TV it was as well Hortense, you remember that relative of hers , the one used to be a Monty Python, Michael Palin. He had a lovely little song he sang, I think he wrote it about her, reminds me very much of her it does. Remember, " I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok, I sleep all night and chop wood all day" Goodness gracious I can see her now all done up in a red check shirt, she do look the part do she not?

I will leave you Hortense with a sweet view or three of the pizza's I made this week. Next time Hortense , I promise.

ink marks on a blank page -Thursday October 2

2008-10-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

Deary me,dreary me? well a tad late for this one.Blame the son, his birthday and I had to cook.Did okay though they all ate up big and even took a whole pizza away with them for dinner Friday. Not that I cook very much or have an extended repertoire like new wave men are supposed to have. Really though I'm not in that new wave time frame, sort of receded or tide gone out wave,being the age I am. Don't feel or even look like my grandfather did at his age or should say the age I am now(66). Those chaps (and women) had lived through two world wars and all that goes with the times following on.

Just think on this . Most folk (UK) during the second war had rationing to cope with and bombs falling down around them and the threat of invasion for years. Where we lived there was intermittent electricity and not much water from the taps. At age three months I was of course oblivious to all of that but our mother wasn't. She had to leave her secretarial work and trundle off to a munitions factory to make ordinance. Grandfather /Grandmother coped remarkably well with us until I was out in the snow once and contracted pneumonia which then turned into diphtheria. Eventually we had to pack up and shift off to a warmer climate and that is how I finished up in a small Australian country town that was as dry and dusty as our old village was wet and snowy.

Indeed Hortense they were trying times as you well know, oh yes I well remember ration books too. Hortense i have been meaning to ask you for such along time, but during the war you never seemed to run out of stockings or chocolates did you ? Oh dear Hortense no I was not referring to the close proximity of that air base at all, now would I?

Some managed better than others ,that's all.

Just like now dear, you know what with the credit thing in Wall street. Tush,I wasn't going to talk about things I know nothing about,would I now? Only seems a little odd to me that the sales of Ferrai haven't slowed down at all there and so many folk in the US have lost their homes. Goes to show though, in the land of the free and plenty, some have some don't.

ink marks on a blank page -Wedneday 1st of October

2008-10-01T04:08:00.000-07:00

Another month just trundled by, did you hear it? Guess I must have been asleep as last time I looked up it was still July and the airbus 380 was just touching down. Nice plane but we sat on the tarmac at Heathrow for a couple of hours whilst the techs fixed summat that had come loose.
Never a great start to a long haul flight, but once in the air the darn thing just oozes class and is so quiet and smooth.

Flying isn't my love, travel is yes , just love it but the getting there at times takes the fun out of the first few days wherever you land I think.My big hate is jet lag as I tend to act even stranger than I am normally.Not a drinker these days as I haven't touched a drop for 34 years, and yes Hortense I am counting, it's what us alcoholics do, we brag about when was the last drink.
Jet lag brings back that out of control thing that is really hard to stop, you know you shouldn't but you do anyway.Does for me anyway, and no Hortense that isn't why the lady shouted at me,I certainly didn't touch her at all, you know how crowded it is on the Metro.

Do you like the way I snuck the word Metro in? That's to let you know I have been to Paris, subtle sort of point scoring thing that I do sometimes.
Yes Hortense I know it was way back in '97, yes yes, but we had left for Barcelona when SHE had that accident the poor love. See I did it again, now you all know I have been to Barcelona. Just sort of slipped out that did, I wasn't going to mention that at all, well not yet anyway.

But Paris really is the BIG thing y'know, and talk about innocents abroad, we walked from the Opera to where we had the apartment in Monmartre on a hot Paris day , was a Wednesday as I recall. Perhaps that's why I'm writing about Paris now, a deja vu thing, y'know sort of Wednesday "Heck I must be in Paris, it was Wednesday when we got there wasn't it"
There were lots and lots of people roaming the streets and every lane / alley/street we down seemed to have hordes of folk all going the other way. Finally we staggered up to the apartment block, flopped/ went into the vestibule. The concierge leapt up asked names and the normal things then looked about,"Pardon m'sieu, your taxi? and the rest of your luggage? I explained that we had walked, that seemed to render him speechless for a few seconds,"Oh m'sieu, mmmmm, Australie?"

From then on we were always introduced to the residents as the Australians who "Walked from l'opera", but with a slight inclination of his head and a sort of pointed finger at the ear as well.
Yes Hortense I do know that means he thought we were crackers.

Talking about crackers, what about Congress eh? Didn't folk use to say that if a butterfly flapped its wings in the jungles of Brazil the rain would tip down in London, or summat like that. Gee, just think of what the flap is like on Wall st. and what the ramifications of that will be.
Yes Hortense I did promise to only talk about things I know about,sorrrreeee,maybe next time then.

ink marks on a blank page-tuesday

2008-09-29T21:08:00.000-07:00

As if there wasn't enough turmoil with the American elections and McCain v Obama with some folks saying Obama must be Muslim because of his name, others repeating the mantra that McCain is too old. Old for what? being Pres . is a hard job but the incumbent has gone along in it for about 8years and hasn't woken up yet, so what has age got to do with it.See, gone and done it again haven't I, just as you thought I would only talk about what I know I go and spoil the dream.

Getting back to the real world takes a lot out of one, a revelation next you ponder , perhaps.

I am actually not just a follower of all things American but in real life I am a closet Anglophile.

Yeah, creepy aint it.

No Hortense, that doesn't mean looking at old postcards from the souk, just means the poor fellow is a little dippy about England.Hortense, now don't be silly,it isn't the same at all, really woman you are wicked.

That I should like to live there about five months of the year is neither here nor there, and being that I am here and not there I should really explain why it is I would like to live there. Whoops !Best I stop, and just get on with showing why, for I am getting a tad confused with all the here and there, and you dear reader must be as well.

The English cities flux and change rapidly,the immense surge in migration from EU countries has seen massive change, but the English villages and countryside seem to be timeless and to me as someone travelling there on a regular basis, have a permanence which gives off a feeling of solidarity and home.

The English also do pomp and circmstance well , changing of the guard, royal weddings,divorces even and garden shows.

This year we got to see the Chelsea Flower show again, simply magic and the sort of thing the Brits do really well.

ink marks on a blank page-monday

2008-09-29T02:49:00.000-07:00

Bit banal to start off by saying, 'where do I start'? That is the burning and leading question though and there is never really a cogent or clear direction.Start what ,how, is there an intent? does the writer want to inform / rage /vent /satirise or just let all and sundry know what his/ her opinion is on whatever the main topic of the day is. I live in Australia so I can't talk with authority on the American elections or the money crisis they have created which is having an effect world wide with any great authority.

Australia,as I have noted when I have travelled the world, does not receive much press about anything of consequence that happens here apart from when we wanted to cull some koalas that were eating themselves out of house and home on Kangaroo Island. Animals I might add that had been introduced to that place and have bred up out of control and are subsequently starving, but they are cuddly little critters aren't they, and they do feature on our national icon list.

I shall leave that as I know it is controversial, and for their first blog who wants to inflame without notice? Instead I shall post a poem I wrote, adding that most of my poetry is autobiographical.

Thanks for getting this far, robbi (29-09-08)

oh Shirley

pirouette of my childhood
redgold autumn hair glinting in dusty sun,
you laughed and teased
spun dreams with indelible lies,
and bade me love you
for I did.

warm memories of forever summers
and hidden fumbles
etched your heart on my soul,
as the days spread open
you blithely danced your schemes whilst I segued my way
through each tangled web ,
then waited in weary eagerness for
night and sleep, just another passage to the doorway
of your history becoming my dreams

we watched the autumn dragonflies as they flew joined
in loves grace together , kissing still green water
then once , you said we could do that
as all innocents have and will, we did

perhaps it was then
when the taste of your saltiness awakened lust
I knew that this was where life began
the child had left ,
we had lost the icon of youth,
summer magic became just a fleeting season
the days were simply numbered hours ,
sleep reclaimed the night
age overcame the reason