..those console models with doors that you opened when the family gathered around for the evening’s entertainment, and then discreetly closed again when the TV station went off the air at 11 o’clock, so that the unsightly TV screen was hidden from decent people’s view the next day and all you saw was a rather…
– and in fact it was just two days later I got the fateful phone call. The problem sewer is a wrinkle the new owner is probably unaware of as yet, but I guess if you’ve got $1.29m to spend on a property, another $10,000 to upgrade the sewers isn’t going to make a lot…
Anyway, at that age Dick and I actually enjoyed the old Dakota bouncing around and roaring like a banshee. (I use that simile loosely, never having heard a banshee’s roar, but I think you get the picture). We also enjoyed the attention we used to get from the hosties (stewardess’) even more, but that’s another…
..be burying thirty-five of our citizens per week. It would attract some comment in Melbourne as the trains would effectively stop running. But I suspect that the trains in Mumbai cannot afford to stop running more than momentarily given that seven million people use the suburban rail system on a daily basis. Naturally on the…
..some lost pride with a fast and lucrative sale on Gumtree. It was overcast anyway and it was also getting dark so I had to move fast. I was heaving the antiquated looking beast into a more photogenic position one of the wheels fell off – and then I remembered that was one of the…
..big smiles from some picturesque extremity of Victoria. So, we walking dilettantes have a much to be modest about, but despite the take-up being less painful than the first time, (I didn’t get the stiff calves for instance – not that you can discern actual calves on my stick legs), I still find walking for…
..she was still only ninety-six this was still a source of on-going annoyance. In her later years she had been persuaded to give up driving half the length of the North Island to visit my mother after she revealed that she was constantly worried that she would not be able to pick up a hitch-hiker…
.. have them still. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to have to be painstakingly transcribed from vinyl to digital, so belatedly the songs are getting the love and attention they possibly deserve, even if it’s of the frustratingly nit-picking kind. It’s been interesting reacquainting myself with some of the recordings, particularly from…
..clothes. When Mike is over for a meal he can at least sing for his supper whilst the stereo sits darkly in the corner. Sometimes we forlornly and plaintively complain to the electricity purveyor we are currently signed up to. The frequency and ongoing nature of the failures seems to indicate that there is little…
.. Mum’s dad Norman, on the other hand, was as bald as a badger (what does that mean?) well before he died at the frighteningly young age of 55. I can remember touching his clammy pate when we were jumping all over him at the end of the day as he tried to relax with…
..burn your effigy of choice – I would recommend Rupert Murdoch if you are of an incendiary mind. In the Northern Territory and, until this year the ACT, you could still buy fireworks perhaps because they calculated the fun versus injury equation in favour of fun. In my youth, a state that as for most…
Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. rammed down our throats then and so retained a healthy sense of inquisitiveness and, well, a healthy naivety. I feel sorry for kids missing out on a chunk of their childhood because they’re confronted with adults’ version of reality too soon. No wonder youth suicide is an issue… but…
Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. ..but it couldn’t make up for the subsequent psychological scarring – it was an utterly humiliating night. To give you an example: there was a farcical minute or two when this guy tried to engage me in a meaningful conversation, blissfully unaware that I was actually playing at the time!…
..three dimensional look. For those who didn’t do basic film studies a cel is a sheet of transparent cellulose acetate that it can be laid over other cels or a painted background, then photographed. The cels change subtly with each image so that the images flow almost naturally when projected at twenty-four frames per second….
.. to TJM. Anyway, now that the parameters of my existence are becoming confrontingly clear I’m not sure that I’ll have the time to expand on an idea for a sequel to TJM called The Cosmic Detective that my late wife Helen and I started working on in the ‘90s. I got as far as…
His generational respect for the law, (and mine), even in this manifestation as an unjustified petty regulation, should be supported rather than undermined, and a good box round the ears administered to this inconsiderate and self-absorbed teenager by a crotchety baby boomer might have actually saved society time and money in the long run. Mind…
Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. rammed down our throats then and so retained a healthy sense of inquisitiveness and, well, a healthy naivety. I feel sorry for kids missing out on a chunk of their childhood because they’re confronted with adults’ version of reality too soon. No wonder youth suicide is an issue… but…
Half out of the corner of my mind I heard emerge from the noise matrix of a video installation the phrase ’So many people living without me’. Was it a girl’s voice? I paid little attention and continued my way through the art gallery – being oddly impressed by the soft pendulous glooping of the…
..attempt to try to be cool is to fail. Now I will be the first to admit that I am inclined to write with excessive gravity about subjects that would bore the pants off a member of the Ayn Rand Institute, the Enid Blyton Book Club, or the Young Farmer’s Association. I realise that it…
.. the Rudd boys originated. As a film it exemplified the last embers of ember that were still being instilled in the bosom of New Zealand’s youth. What I had not realised was that the 2.6-metre tall marble statue, which was badly damaged in the earthquake, had been sculpted by Scott’s wife Kathleen. It had…