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Blog postThere are few things in life more guaranteed to disappoint than going back to a fond childhood memory. So I took a mighty risk going back to Magnetic Island. Where is this magic island, you might well ask? Answer: it's a 25 minute ferry ride (about 8 kilometres) from the tropical city of Townsville in the north of Queensland, Australia. The Great Barrier Reef is not far away.
A bit of background first. My father was born in Townsville, and my mother was brought up there. They met in -
Blog postIt’s often said that if you want something done, ask a busy person. I’ve had an example of this in the last couple of days.
If you've read my blog entry If You've Nothing Better To Do then you'll probably have taken a look at the two superb short films by Roy Zimmerman (pictured above, guitar at the ready) and Kylie Scott (also pictured above, lip-syncing Donald Trump as a drunken woman in a nightclub). If you haven't seen them, I strongly urge you to do it now. Just click here.
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Blog postAustralian aboriginals use song in a way that is little discussed but potent all the same. Many aboriginal tribes have a kind of witch doctor called a kurdaitcha—there is no written aboriginal language, so the spelling varies—whose job it is, among other things, to kill people by singing them to death. You can see what a kurdaitcha looks like in the picture above.
Now I don’t accuse Roy Zimmerman of being a kurdaitcha or of wanting Donald Trump dead, but he’s certainly committed to s -
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Blog postYou may well have already seen Roy Zimmerman's wonderful parody of Wimoweh, reshaped as Vote Him Away and aimed at removing guess-who from the White House. I wrote about it in an earlier blog If you've nothing better to do ... (16 April). Roy's original version was such a success, with 87 million views and counting, that he decided to release a new version every month until the US Presidential election on 3 November. So below you'll find August, and we can look forward to September, October a
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Blog postThe brave new post-Covid world is beginning to take shape. A couple of days ago I had an e-mail from a friend in Hobart, Tasmania advising me that he had a new e-mail address. He had been teaching at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, so I'd been using his University of Tasmania address. Now he would be teaching at the University of New England, so would I please use the new address? UNE is based in the country town of Tamworth, New South Wales, a mere 1346 kilometres and one ocean crossin
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Blog postIt was Oscar Wilde who wrote to his friend Ada Leverson: 'One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell (in Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop) without laughing.' It would take a similar heart of stone to read about Donald Trump's encounter with Covid-19 and not laugh. Decorum requires that we don't do it, of course. But surely a discreet snicker among friends and family is permitted?
There are those—come on, admit it, I’ve heard you—who would like to see Donald Trump -
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Blog postThis is one of those keep-you-awake-at-night thoughts. We are all waiting anxiously for the announcement of a vaccine or a treatment drug for Covid-19, right? And until we have one or both, it's unsafe to drop our guard and whip off the face masks, end social distancing and open the bars, theatres, stadiums, churches, football grounds and restaurants, right? But those clever scientists are bound to come up with either a vaccine or a cure, or both, pretty soon, right?
If you believe t -
Blog postMoses is not the sort of chap to be trifled with, I can tell you. He was on chatting terms with God, and God entrusted him with the Ten Commandments. So you will understand when I say I'm not quite ready to go against those commandments, particularly the seventh, which is usually reduced to: Thou shalt not steal.
In this case the tempting target for theft was my daughter Anouchka, pictured above centre with her mother (left) and daughter Dot (right). Anouchka is a London shrink who h -
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Blog postI don't know about you, but in the strange world of coronavirus lockdown my friends are taking a break from playing Solitaire and old Beatles records and are instead sending jokes by e-mail. Every day my inbox has a fresh stack of material sent from all over the world. Some of it is quite brilliantly clever as well as being very funny. My particular thanks to Mim McCune, Nicole and Christian Pigeon, Rossie Seale and my daughter Tamara for contributing mightily to what follows. It's there for
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Blog postI've just finished watching Edouard Philippe, the engaging French Prime Minister, and an array of lesser mortals, tell us what is in store for us from Monday in the way of lifting the lockdown. A quick summary might be that most of France will be open, with the exception of bars and restaurants. The two geographic exceptions will be the Île-de-France, which is the region around Paris and includes Paris, and the French island of Mayotte, which is in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar an
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Blog postThis is real science, folks, not fake. I'm going to use my two years studying statistics at Sydney University to show that here in France people are getting back to work, whether the government likes it or not. How do I know? I've been counting cars and trucks on the road.
A bit of explanation first. The French government has decreed that we each can take limited exercise once a day outside the boundaries of the house, as long as we do it for less than an hour and as long as we stay -
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Blog postThe picture at the top of this blog entry may not look like much to you, but to all of us it is a breakthrough. Yesterday 2 June restaurants and bars opened throughout much of France, including on our island of Oléron. So there are four of us - our Parisian friends Colette and Paul
de Backer, my wife Roslyn and your humble scribe - looking well pleased with ourselves after eating and drinking well at a local restaurant La Guitoune ("The Tent"). Roslyn and I calculated -
Blog postIn the midst of all the horrors of the Covid-19 pandemic, there are occasional glimpses of light. Who could fail to be moved by the Italians (pictured above) serenading each other from their high-rise balconies? The sign ANDRA TUTTO BENE, by the way, means: "Everything's going to be fine." Or what about the so-called 'balcony concerts' in Paris (see picture below)?
As I said in an earlier blog entry, my daughters have often asked me what life was like in the 1960s. My stock -
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Blog postIt's only fair to say that Covid-19 hasn’t inconvenienced us all that much, now that we are back in France. We are in lockdown, of course. Here on the island of Oléron that means all bars and restaurants are shut (In France!!), most shops are shut, the cinema has closed, the beaches are closed, we can’t play tennis and we can’t meet up with friends. Having said that, life goes on much as before. We shop twice a week instead of every day, but otherwise home life hasn't visibly altered.
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Blog postThe most formative event in my parents' lives was, as best I can work it out, not World War 2 but the Great Depression. Even in comparatively rich Australia, after the great crash of 1929 they witnessed abject poverty, together with despair and hopelessness among people who had no control over their destinies or their disastrous circumstances. The memory never left them. I'm writing this in the early days of the Trump Virus catastrophe, and I have a feeling we are going through a similar expe
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