The new Australian cabinet is a breath of fresh air compared to the previous venal, incompetent lot, but that in itself presents me with a gnawing sense of guilt. Chris Bowen is spruiking a new climate change bill (how wonderful to even have such a thing), but its “target” reductions by 2030 are far too low to line up with +1.5ºC. What’s more, not only is it not a proactive real…
I’m writing about the formation of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1957, on the back of a huge Geneva conference in 1955. I’m reading aloud Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway, America a year earlier. And I realized: I was born during that Geneva conference.
There’s a plan and it says: do this chapter today. It’s not easy.
Every cafe-cum-home should have one.
Yesterday, reeling from a family illness, I couldn’t work. I read. Surely it’s healthy to read homegrown fiction when challenged?
Feeling the cold, I’d hoped to avoid actually spending time with the two grandsons in the heated pool at Rosebud, but no, I was part of the job. The older one bobbed and dipped, splashed me (of course), torpedoed; his new confidence inspired me. P took the younger one for his enthusiastic lesson. Then the older one had his lesson and it was marvelous to see how he embraced it, learning to…
Love’s Executioner by Irvin Yalom feels like the kind of book you only read when desperate. Why are we here? Why go on? And truth be told, I’ve had it prescribed (gently) to me. I’m a tenth of the way through and can relate that it is riveting.
In a different world, I would never have commenced this nuclear book. By now I would have pumped out ten or even twenty sparkling murder mysteries set in Melbourne, in the financial services sector, over the 00s and 10s. I’d have sent out regular newsletters, maybe monthly. I would hope to have assembled fans and friends, and I’d have regularly yarned to them in my newsletters…
These boots have seen so much action: long hikes, brutally tough remote hikes, country base camps, day walks… But I stopped walking last year, needing time to write and live. Walking takes time, the more complex the walk, the more time it sucks out of you. But a challenge beckons. In eight weeks time, we hike the Cape to Cape trail near Margaret River in Western Australia. The seven days…
Melbourne winter is mild, not all that cold really and not beset with fog, and my friends laud clear-sky, crisp days, but I’ve always hated the three months of dreary cold. Chilblains, that’s what I endure. Over the past half decade, I’ve managed to find a way to spend at least a strategic fortnight in warmer climes, but not this year. The most challenging aspect of winter for…