..graced either the stage, or the bench. The reception afterwards turned into the party of the year and threatened never to stop. My aged mother was persuaded to dance or at least bob slightly in the same spot, and the music, highlighted by Mike singing “I’ll be Gone” unaccompanied, was non-stop and loud. Relatives were…

.. nylon-string guitar for instance sounds unnervingly ambivalent and jangly as a result, especially in the top three strings. Not to mention that my right ear is so shot to pieces that I prefer to wear an ear plug rather than a hearing aid when I’m playing or listening to even slightly amplified music, as…

.. advised me there might be a good twenty minute wait as there were a few patients ahead of me. Indeed there were, but it was actually over an hour later that I was finally called into the surgery. In the meantime I’d read The Australian (thoroughly), sent elaborate texts to various people, written an…

Dick’s Toolbox cont. .. Finnish or Urdu for a moment longer. Not only that, their TV, books, magazines and newspapers are all in a foreign language. And whilst the canon of English literature is vast and strewn with masterpieces, such as Peyton Place and Harry Potter, we only really know the literature of other languages…

Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. ..the sushi bar in the arcade and had some sushi rolls and miso soup before finally heading to the carpark and my date with the supermarket. When I got to the carpark I was astonished to find the lone busker still baying at the sullen sky, so I walked up…

Dick’s Toolbox cont. ..whose pecking order was determined before we arrived, and that survived, indifferent to our presence, after the year or less that we spent there. The law of the jungle was demonstrated on the monkey bars, and the odorous boys’ toilets, that had green high water marks from incontinent seven years old trying…

‘I won’t be fooled again’, I muttered to nobody in particular, knowing full well that I will be fooled again – and again – by a relentlessly and pointlessly changing world. However, there are small victories to be had for the vigilant observer. School children don’t need to have our attention drawn to them, but…

..of the words, foolproof and incapable of error……’ has come to me from every electronic device I have tried to live with culminating in the locked-down ‘we know so very, very much better than you’ world of Apple. We have become inured to the sights and sounds of assembly lines dominated by robots, one or…

..Fiddling Fool from the Spectrum Part One album, which he’d apparently opened the first Pojama-People show three or so years ago. It’s an extreme example of a very small song idea I’d written being taken by the band and expanded exponentially over time – notwithstanding in a quite disciplined way. The result is a very…

..arrived in England courtesy of the English soldiers who were then campaigning in the Lowlands as part of the Thirty Years War. Gin almost became the national sport. It was estimated that every fourth house in England was a gin mill and employers provided gin as part of their pay to workers. It is alleged…

Which is all very well when this surveillance is being supervised by a force as benign and reassuring as the cast of The Bill, but what happens when the slightly darker cast of, say, Spooks is in control? It seems to me there’s an awful lot of trust involved here, because it appears that all…

..the resting of containers and consumed beer by glass – or in New Zealand by the jug. I can still remember a bar in Sydney with white tiles on the floor and sawdust on the floor for the same reason as abattoirs had them – it made it much easier to hose the blood and…

..late twenties, early thirties, dark complexion and some variation of Asian ethnicity. There’s a cheerful bespectacled Asian chap who also mans the counter and who converses with her in whatever Asian language whom I suspect could be her father, except for his entirely opposite disposition. Everything is too much trouble for this woman. I’ve tried…

..a glass of water. But after a few kilometres of uphill a rest was definitely called for so we glided in with all the grace of our combined one hundred and thirty-two years could muster. Which was limited. So there we sat outside on the sunny veranda, two OMILs (Old Men In Lycra), Doug with…

..Enza Pantano’s voice supplementing the usual Bill and myself singing and playing nylon-string guitars. Serendipitously, one of the songs he discovered was one I thought that I’d lost for good in the transition from analogue to digital called Recycle Your Love. Every now and then I come across a reference to it but the musical…

..taciturn demeanour would be interpreted today as at least pathologically reserved, if not downright stand-offish. His behaviour even seems a little odd in the context of the era, but perhaps because I missed some of the early series I’ve also missed the rationale for the apparent chip on his shoulder. I wasn’t alive then, despite…

For Bill, portraits were an occupational hazard and a source of income; workmanlike, but oddly at variance with his other work, i.e. landscapes largely empty of people. Had he painted only portraits he would have been a very minor footnote in New Zealand art, but fortunately he spent nearly fifty years defining the landscape of…

..incisors eventually surrendered. I could tell the difference between linoleum and the Italian tiles that they tried to imitate without needing to resort to a hammer and chisel. In the film ‘Stagecoach’ when the Indian fell amongst the team of horses, went under the stagecoach , caught the axle and climbed back onto the swaying…

I’ve mentioned the ABC TV show Big Ideas before. I tend to record the various episodes on IQ and review them at my leisure. There’s no particular theme to Big Ideas and I can easily be put off viewing a particular episode just by scanning the synopsis, but sometimes the description is so inscrutable that…

..also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe.’ These days he is a relatively unknown figure, but during WWII he pulled off one of the more extraordinary stunts of the conflict. It was made into a passable film with an entirely miscast Dirk Bogarde, but achieved true immortality…