.. if he’s got a cold when I ring, but he doesn’t want to leave Rotorua as the few friends he has left in the world are there or thereabouts. Maria and I intend to pay him a visit in April when we’re in New Zealand for a short holiday, but we’re not going to…

..pulley, at the top of the building and hoisted up a couple of barrels of bricks. When I had fixed the building, there was a lot of bricks left over. I hoisted the barrel back up again and secured the line at the bottom and then went up and filled the barrel with the extra…

..& roll and proudly wearing my legendary brothel creepers (made in Australia). There was a dance on at the local hall. They had a Maori band playing who could play anything and they were pretty good I thought. They must’ve had a talent quest segment because I found myself up on stage and the band…

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…

..Rock, near the Geelong sewage outflow, to Barwon Heads. On the Saturday we went about half way along so that we could return in time for lunch and wine with friends, but on the Sunday we went the whole way there and back. Two interesting things. On the Saturday Mary had dropped one of her…

.. is no immediate evidence for this assumption. For example, there have been occasions when we’ve been playing to an apparently indifferent crowd, and yet when we’ve finished playing, a selection of those very same people has made a point of letting us know just how thrilled they were with the music. That has a…

..“Geordie” (which the Danes renamed ‘Skotten svinger hammeren’), “The Belles of St Trinians” and ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’ were soon to delight us with their gentility and niceness. No, these were films of gritty realism, difficult subject matter and controversy. Films that made one think rather than leave the cinema with a warm fuzzy feeling. I…

..relations add up to it being a non-starter. The one thing that’s obvious from an Australian perspective is that the cartoon’s overtly and undeniably racist. Given that, I found it interesting that the debate in The Press is centred on whether the cartoons are actually racist or not, which shows that context is playing a…

..not generally natural to where wombats delve. Many fragile metres of foil and fibreglass were regarded as a mere inconvenience to its general construction and mining operations and were demolished both rapidly and noisily in the small hours of a winter morning as it waddled and crumped its way under the house to directly underneath…

.. culture in which process BBC radio and TV played a pivotal role. The preservation of The Arts as a rarefied pleasure reserved for those of noble birth couldn’t be sustained and so the definition of culture had to be broadened, and broadened in such a way as to include and respect the way of…

..area of expertise whose utility in the context if the universe is on a par with the politicians and the clergy. It justifies its existence through largely demeaning activities designed to engender a sense of feigned happiness, whilst disguising that its role is to extract the maximum amount of work with the minimum amount of…

..hold them up to the light, they’re as transparent as the shroud of Turin. I suspect if Jesus were around today he would be just the sort of bloke to wear corduroys. It seems a long time ago now, but corduroy was once (briefly) a fashion fabric. It was The Beatles of course, but other…

.. of not acting, but being. I have only seen Olivier on film, but always, from Othello to the character of Archie Rice in, ‘The Entertainer’, you went away thinking that you had seen a magnificent performance, superb ‘Acting’ but not the quiet revelation that Scofield could give. Most of our generation know him in…

..and roost there? In the spirit of inquiry I paused under the first talking tree and looked up. Yes, there they all were. I couldn’t really tell what brand they were, and just as I was thinking that they started to get nervous and about half of them fluttered noisily from the canopy in some…

Dick’s Toolbox cont. .. the Iraqi population believe that they are worse than before their country was ‘liberated’. No matter – we now have a new democratic Iraqi government that represents the forces of truth, hope, and unification but which, as ‘The Age’ noted, took five months to elect a Prime Minister who still hasn’t…

Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. under my breath, I eventually opted for XL, and then spent another five minutes trying to find a Bonds’ five pack in the right size. I eventually found a pack of gaily-coloured XL cotton hipsters down the back of the L rack. By this stage I just wanted to…

..marking Australia’s ‘coming-of-age’, should be seen as a quite brilliant Turkish victory against superior forces that led to the creation of the modern Turkish state led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – the country’s first president. It would be better to say that Australian forces really distinguished themselves on the Western Front under the brilliant General…

..as my Latin teacher for the last two excruciating years of Latin – and so I found it expedient, if not absolutely necessary to become a conniving plagiarist rather than bear the brunt of Harry’s ire or, God help me, actually do some serious study. It was in my last year of Latin when I…

.. of the aluminium dinghy, vacuuming the Axminster or bathing the pigs. The watch’s movement is composed of either 686 or 694 parts (depending on whom you believe) that come together to form twelve of the most allegedly consequential horological complications**; the tourbillon, perpetual calendar, moon age, leap year cycle, day of the week, month,…

As a young person I read some of the writings of Carl Jung. There was a section in it that I couldn’t quite come to grips with about how inanimate objects are living, sentient beings in a living, sentient world. I think that my story demonstrates that my scraps dish and bread board, otherwise perfectly…