Afternoon. A tram trundles past my hunkered-down world. I’m home alone for the next ten days and can expect to both work really well and feel exposed. It occurs to me that it’s seven months since I turned 65 and shifted from a “Big Decade,” day-by-day challenge mode of living, to a deeper “slow glow” five-year perspective. The trouble is, glowing slowly can…
A few days ago we realized that the summer of 2020/21 was the first in a long time, and possibly the first of our four decades of marriage, that we’d spent every night under one roof. We’d normally travel somewhere, or hike with tent, or bunk down in a summer house. Melbourne summers encourage beachside sojourns. Today I counted the days since we returned from our only 2020 hike, one…
Some days, I wake thinking I should really retire, as nearly all my friends and colleagues have done. Part of me knows I’d be hapless in retirement, adrift, insomniac, and ruing my lot in life. But equally dissatisfying is working on a never-ending project at the same time as other projects jostle for room just outside the brain’s door. One such is the 15 Cranes project (see my blog…
Despair and exultation. Exuberance and senescence. Loved and lonely. Ascetic and drunk. The daily dichotomy.
I recently reread Kittyhawk Down, the second in Garry Disher’s brilliant police procedural series set on the Mornington Peninsula. Listen: Challis glanced around at them one by one. ‘But I’m saying keep an open mind. That should be the first rule of police work. We gather the evidence, analyse it and follow where it leads us.’ This is very close to the mantra oft repeated…