.. months older than I am. I’ll have to do some work on my avuncularity. Nigella Lawson is slightly more problematic. I find her simpering to the camera lens a little disconcerting, but if I’m so dog-tired I can’t even manipulate the remote, I’ll hang in to Nigella’s show till the family arrives with the…

..staggering Lear-like around a deserted caravan park. What legacy will he leave? Missed opportunities, doors closed that might have been opened, darkness where there should have been light. The opportunistic gall, the sacrifice of principle to expediency and the denigration of truth and transparency will rankle less than the utter mediocrity of the man and…

.. expand its floor space) can be an exercise in angst and frustration as you sift through the many variations available in every conceivable item. Should you buy this version of raspberry jam because it’s an Australian brand? Or is it just packaged here while the fruit is actually from Korea? Or is some of…

..the Titanic, you really just want the boat to sink and take Leonardo and Kate down with it – the plot and exposition get in the way of the cataclysm. The critical mind will find there are plenty of moments during the movie to wander and contemplate what the rest of the world might be…

.. tell me to tell me that he was 29 years old, that he was serious about his rap music, that one of his rap nom-de-plumes was Jules Rockwell, that he was registered with Centrelink, that his mother would prefer it if he could hold down a steady job and that she preferred Massive Attack…

..day for four weeks was one, immediate punishment for yelling out the window at the band that they should play in tune was another. Actually it wasn’t all that bad as it was the so-called ‘university intake’ with, I think, only two people in my platoon who weren’t at university. The army didn’t really want…

..having no foreign-speaking nations literally on our borders takes the heat out of having to learn another lingo, but New Zealand has given respect to the indigenous Maori population by making the learning the Maori language compulsory, and while I can see there are problems emulating that gesture in Australia, it does bring up the…

..painting of mine. The original purity of design has been a trifle compromised by the modifications but there were impracticalities inherent in triangular garden beds. Manoeuvring wheelbarrows around one hundred and twenty degree angled corners being one. During the reconstruction effort I have discovered that red gum is very much heavier than I thought, moving…

.. their lack of salesmanship, because after twenty minutes of standing in the bitterly cold wind that was whipping round the schoolyard in a numbed kind of reverie interrupted only by the unwanted blandishments of the blotchy-faced woman in the crocheted poncho selling wax cups of tea and $2.00 raffle tickets (prizes of this year’s…

S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…

S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…

..computing. I realised as I poured over specification sheets, internet sites and price lists that I hadn’t bought a computer since 1989 when I commenced a Post Graduate course in Computing at the then Chisholm Institute which was soon subsumed into the cavernous qualification mill of Monash University. I remember more than twenty years ago…

..however, have a patently mad Abbott and a quite peculiar Bishop. Corruption is relatively minor, flourishing at the local council level (how else does a flood plain become a housing estate after all) but is not the rampant pervasive cancer as in many countries near our borders. Governments change civilly and without rancour perhaps because…

..which in its turn used to be known as the Bank of NSW – aah, those were the days!). She had a young son, Jack, who was at his first year at school. All the first years had to be assessed for their swimming prowess, to which end a dozen or so were lined up…

S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…

..adventure couture-wise, mostly in an attempt to be the opposite of Spectrum in every respect, but also reflecting what was going on in the pop scene at the time with the advent of glam rock – you could say that visually at least we weren’t all that different to Gary Glitter and Marc Bolan, both…