Newsletter

  • Hard Rubbish

    Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. moderately galling to find something one had thrown out as worthless selling for a handsome price at such a market. Or not. I don’t know – presuming I have the cash to squander I have the same dilemma at markets as I do at shopping malls, perhaps even worse…

  • Ballet good

    ..condition, in this version at least, than just the specified young-man-driven-to-suicide-by-faithless-lover motif and of course the dancers themselves are simply spectacular, with Marie-Agnès Gillot imposingly impressive. I’ve watched it a few times now (I even showed it to Bill) and I’ve shed a few tears every time – it’s that sublime. An interesting sidelight; when…

  • Anthems

    .. follower I’ve also had to endure on occasions Listening to a raft of national anthems in a row, like at the Olympic Games for instance, is not that different to being an unwilling spectator at the Eurovision Song Contest. It’s not just Australia that needs to review its choice of song as a national…

  • Fractured flickers

    ..on the street. Nevertheless, the lunch and the chat were great fun; the world’s problems with Intellectual Property and Copyright were discussed at length and the house pinot proved quite acceptable to boot, so I charged off back to the Casino car park full of bonhomie and anticipation. Perhaps I was cutting it a bit…

  • Dress standards

    ..Airport” as we started our descent in Whenupai, Auckland’s main airport until 1965. This inspired great confidence in the passengers, already frightened by the low altitude, turbulence, cloud and the single toilet. It was an age of muted optimism. Our father was a stock and station agent and would drive up from Eketahuna, redolent of…

  • Comedy

    ..in our collective brain I had my subject. The first thing to do was listen to Ad Nauseam and see whether it had dated or indeed had retained any of the elements that made it funny – or shocking – in the first place. I’d heard the first in the series (Live) many decades ago…

  • Tramming

    ..driving-in-the-city impatience and exasperation. It’s a neat trick I jotted down the music that had become my soundtrack and I’ve just checked the dertails on the ABC Classic radio website. It was a guitar piece called Chamber Concerto by Shaun Rigney, whom I’ve not heard of before, played by one Antony Fielding*, whom I’ve not…

  • Who am I?

    ..a polished head emerging in a straight line from the type of neck generally owned by South African rugby hookers or Gestapo torturers. Those tight rolls of flesh extrude out of a too-tight collar and there is too much gold jewellery that once characterized used car salesmen or proto-Mafiosi. His legs look like Christmas hams…

  • My left foot

    ..(Maybe that accounts for my neighbours breaking into fits of sniggering whenever they see me). It turned out that I’d cracked my left foot a mighty whack on the side board, but there was nothing much else worth reporting. My foot was sore enough, but it was obviously not broken, so I counted myself lucky….

  • The not-so-great game

    ..and Uzbekistan lie to the north, Iran the west, Pakistan to the south and the People’s Republic of China to the east. If you didn’t live there it would have little to recommend it and a large percentage of the population has become refugees from decades of conflict – mostly fleeing into Pakistan. Currently a…

  • Celebrity

    Anyway, there I am looking so 1972 with a big shirt collar and a porno moustache to boot, being seriously assertive while saying nothing of any substance. Once I’d got over the shock of seeing myself looking so fucking young, I was immediately reminded of a number of similar interviews I’ve seen on telly with…

  • Terror

    ..when I find myself there. The lights are very weak and the shadows and dark and endless. The switched are old, round and made of metal and sometimes they do nothing. There are doors down each side of the corridor. Often the doors are shut. Above some doors is a glass panel where occasionally the…

  • Manners

    Manners certainly didn’t apply in these fraternal disputes. I suppose there had to be some release from perpetually polite behaviour – we were lads after all – but our constant bickering eventually led to our having to be separated and given our own bedrooms. Of course I got the better bedroom and Richard was consigned…