.. tastes embrace the elegant and refined, she still prides herself on being able to spot a bargain. Understandably she’s been hassling me for quite a while about the medieval trackie pants and a few weeks ago she spotted some bargain trackies coming up in Aldi. Aldi. Aldi was unknown to me before she and…
..socio-economic status of the students. Private schools send all their problems to State schools where teachers cope with extraordinary generosity of spirit. Most of the time. But this, perhaps not too tangentially, brings to my attention the absurd amounts that CEOs of large corporations are paid, which is both disproportionate and absurd in relation to…
.. species into a myriad breeds many of whom would be lucky to survive for more than a week in the wild. I may be wrong but a snotty, gasping little creature like a pug with its appalling sinus problems has no evolutionary niche apart from the second floor of a high rise apartment. A…
..whilst trying not to be disturbed by the repetitious recounting of weekend exploits of the young, old and terminally stupid. Should I so choose I won’t be working again, as just before Christmas I was packaged out from my place of employment of the past 20 years, the result of one of its periodic and…
..are carried away by the northerly wind that bends the trees; the sand is now too hot to walk on in bare feet unless one adopts the hot-foot walk of a Namibian lizard; canvas is cracking in the wind and the horizon has upside down mirages of the container ships queuing to pass through the…
..column over the years and regular readers will know it’s a love/hate thing anyway. Regulars will also know that the year drawing to a close always bothers me as my naturally sunny disposition is occluded by the clouds of general dissatisfaction with the state of Christmases past, present and future. (And I’m not a fucking…
..happened all those years ago maybe a few inchoate memories and feelings. When you become you is somewhere about the beginning of language and the ability to objectify yourself. Who is that little person in the mirror? Why is my brother hitting me? Why are other people bigger than me? Anyway, it is a delight…
.. traditional fasteners, but its use has spread into areas where buttons or studs do a perfectly serviceable job, and have done throughout history. Apart from anything else, I dislike the sound of velcro, and I imagine women who have hair removed from their legs and other more personal bits with wax strips like it…
..anything at all! Anyway, it was a perfect early autumn morning when we pulled over outside the Selwyn Gallery in Darfield, a two-horse town twenty minutes west of Christchurch where the snowless Southern Alps loom over the parched Canterbury plains, this day under a blank blue sky. Unlike the other very fine galleries we’d visited…
.. to your boundary. Theoretically unlimited download and upload speed. Unless you live in what is described as a Rural or Remote area which means that there are alternatives such as radio and satellite. These give lesser, but still very adequate, speeds by today’s standards. The technology for this is well known and the first…
..deliberately flouted and subverted. On the other hand this dereliction of governmental responsibility has given me ample time to attend to my inner thoughts and develop an almost Buddhist tranquillity and acceptance of the vagaries of travel. Or the absence of movement. My Zen training began in my early days of commuting. It was a…
.. and ineffectually for seemingly hours. But here’s the thing. It was actually only half an hour. And here’s the other thing. Apart from me, and the people round me party to my mutterings, nobody seemed to appreciate that it was pure crap. Because then, breathtakingly, Elvis left the stage. And not only that, the…
.. take his daughter roller-skating. Out of curiosity I opened the German phrase book at random, and the first phrase that I saw was ‘Ist hier in der Nähe ein Atomkraftwerk?’ which translates as, ‘Is there an atomic power station around here?’ A curious question to ask when you come to think about it, and…
..live on stage accompanying the movie and we’d arrived far too early. I was idly fiddling with my phone when Maria nudged me. ‘Isn’t that Julia Zemiro?’ she whispered – and then had to repeat the question because the ambient foyer-noise defeated my well-meaning but quite ineffectual hearing aids. I had to do a double…
..nowadays being arrested in underwear representing the flag of your host country. They don’t weigh you, no matter that you look like a beached whale and you’re being constantly towed out to sea. On they go, over-flowing the aisles and seats. This is in stark contrast to the old days when they weighed both you…
..Through Road, where I alighted and the wrapper continued on its involuntary travels. I observed that the departed burger-meister had eaten everything but a solitary slice of tomato, but as to whether this was due to time constraints or simply taste preferences I was naturally unable to tell. In fact, there wasn’t much I could…
Rosemary Jackson had parents like chestnuts roasting by the fire. Rich accents popped out from small round bodies that had emigrated from somewhere in Middle England. Their daughter was their single joy. Rosemary was of grave demeanor with skin that merited the accolade of peaches and cream, and she had dark lustrous long hair with…
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..Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. I think it’s my first ‘motion capture’ movie on the big screen, (although I’ve seen bits of Beowulf on Foxtel) and, while it’s impressively realistic in capturing movement accurately, it falls a bit flat in nearly every other respect. Having said that, the backgrounds are stupendously rich and detailed and…
..election campaign characterised by profound shallowness and intellectual mediocrity by both political parties and the media, I wrote …..“Many years ago I recollect seeing in scratchy black and white an interview between Walter Cronkite and an aging Dean Acheson who had been the Secretary of State in the Truman Administration. He had played a central…