So many reasons

It’s Christmas time and I have to arrange all this Christmas stuff for work.

I’m moving to a new job in another city early in 2008 and it takes lots of time/worry/effort to do that.

I’m trying to sell a house and buy another one so we have a place to live in the new city. Heaps of time/worry/effort in that pair of activities.

I had to watch the start of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht race.

My son and his wife are on holidays and we are looking after their four year old daughter. Grandparents have heaps of time — but only for going to the park or reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar several times a day. Today we went down to see the newborn foal not far from here, that took a bit of time. He’s very friendly, so is his mother and older brother from a few years ago. Just the kind of family we needed to introduce the world of close up horses to a four year old.

Oh yeah, the dog ate my homework.

So there you have it, all sorts of reasons why I haven’t added anything to the blog for two weeks. And soon it’s New Year, and then we’re going on holiday, and then we’re moving house (as long as we can find a house to move into) and then the new job starts up with a vengeance. So it might be another gap before I post the next time.

So have a Happy New Year y’all out there.

Un-Gone

I blogged a little while ago on two ‘Gone’ guys here in Australia. And the opposite of gone?

How about that guy in the UK who walked into a Police Station and said he’s just come out of amnesia? Couldn’t remember anything for the last five years, he said. There he was out canoeing and suddenly he’s somewhere else and he’s lost five years of everything he ever knew.

Turns out he’s changed his story since then. They can do wonders these days with the right medicine. But he did give them a clue or two. Well, for a start, how did he know it was five years if he had amnesia? Bit of a give-away, that one.

Then again, the man used to be a prison officer. Perhaps he’s just used to measuring time in 5 year lots. Most guys doing time would rather forget about it, so I can’t say I blame him for not wanting to remember anything.

Not only that, but his wife has started to remember some stuff about him as well, such as how he was living in their wardrobe for years when everybody else thought the poor bloke was dead. OK, I promise I won’t make any Narnia jokes. But C.S.Lewis must be turning in his grave. And that was not a Narnia joke.

Everyone knows that you have to have a good memory if you are going to be a successful liar. So claiming to have forgotten absolutely everything means you start out dead in the water. People are starting to wonder if his story has more holes in it than his canoe seems to have had.

One can only wonder what makes a man pretend to have amnesia. I’m sure all that life insurance money that his wife had already spent had a bit to do with it. However much it was. Can’t recall just now but it’ll come to me.

For a while there I thought the two might have called the whole charade to a halt so they could sell the story to the newspapers. But then I thought, ‘What would they be able to write about?’ Let’s face it, a secret life in a wardrobe is not very eventful. Unless you are C.S.Lewis, of course. But he’s already claimed that as his own and I do not think that Mr Darwin is going to be getting any awards on this trick.

So there we have it. Welcome back to the wide-awake, dimly remembered, not so happy world of the un-gone.

Rejection

Rejection does not mean dejection.

That is Scribbly Gum’s First Law of Getting Letters from Publishers.

OK, you guessed it. I just got a rejection letter. A rejection email, but the result is the same. After all, they wanted the sub on email. The publisher has had the full manuscript since mid October. It took eight weeks for them to get back to me, that’s normal.

The letter was polite. That is not necessarily normal but probably an increasing trend.

It was a SNARL - which is not as bad as it sounds - a Sensitive New Age Rejection Letter. A friendly snarl, one with a smile and a final line of good wishes with other publishers.

The result? I refuse to get dejected. I’ve had rejection letters before. They exist. They float around out there in the ether or in cyberspace or wherever it is that things float these days. And having floated, they settle on people. Tonight one settled on me. I shook it off before it’s little brother ‘Dejection’ caught up with it.

I will work on the novel. I will consult with people who give solid advice. I will submit to another publisher. I will re-invent the wheel. Oh, wait a minute, somebody’s already done that.

Jeff

Jeff lives across the road. He’s an energetic kind of bloke. In fact he inspires me with his energy. He’s always out on his ride-on mower. Always.

We’ve been trying to figure out if he’s left handed or right handed. Whenever he’s mowing both hands are working independently of each other. The left hands steers the mower and the right hand controls the beer.

For a while we thought that perhaps he’s ambidextrous. Then again, we’ve never seen him spill a drop of beer but there’s sometimes a blade of grass that he’s missed. Right handed has the odds for the moment.

Oh, and a postscript to yesterday’s post on Wellies. Check this out.
http://www.smellywelly.com.au/index.php?p=1_7

Wellies

Here in Australia we have gum boots. When we were living in England we found ‘Wellies’. They’re still gum boots, but.

Posh people wore green wellies. The posher types had green wellies with fancy fabric lining and corduroy tops to grip their trousers. Some even had buckles to tighten the top around the leg. What a wonderful country to think of all this just to raise the standard of the gum boot.

We were so taken with green wellies that we brought these home with us.

We wondered about the name for a while. Why ‘Wellies’? What’s wrong with ‘gum boots’ for a name? It didn’t take long to recognise a bit of a pattern of English life. We realised that the English are always naming things after other things.

We first saw this in relation to cheese. See how far from wellies we’ve come already? The thing about cheese is that we thought it was only Wallace and Grommit who loved cheese. But the whole country is mad about the stuff. They are so mad about it that they even name their towns after it. Good on ‘em, I reckon.

Here in Oz we name towns to reflect Australian life, such as my old home town Kickatinalong. Hundred miles further west there was Wheelabarraback.

New Zealand named their capital city after these green boots because the place is so wet most of the year. Can’t hold that against them. They say NZers are more British than the Poms so it’s a very natural process.

Billy Connolly wrote a song called ‘The Welly Boot Song’. Then along came John Clark and re-wrote Connolly’s song and now it’s a gum boot song. This is one area of life where everyone wants to change the name of the simple boot.

Way back in England’s almost forgotten history there was this bloke named Arthur Wellesley. Arthur was very taken with his wellies, even to the extent that he did a minor name change on himself and was known as Wellington forever after. Not many people know this.

Anyway, back to our precious little souvenir wellies. It’s been a few years since we lived in England and we have given in to the inevitable - we are using them as soap. Bit of a silly time to do it, really. Well, there’s this drought on and water is a bit scarce, so it’s not as if we’re going to be using too much soap for a while. Our wellies are safe for a while yet.

But enough about life in England.

Selling

It’s true. Nine years here and we are on the move. It’s the longest we have lived in the same house for the past 32 years.

See more here — http://users.tpg.com.au/kkmiller/House/

And we’ve decided to see if a couple of old dogs can learn a new trick. We are selling the house ourselves without using a Real Estate Agent.

Can’t be too hard. We’ve sold a car or two without professional help. And we managed to sell the children off for scientific experiments a while back. But that was when such a thing was fashionable. That fad seems to have gone the way of the Edsel.

Oh yeah, also sold Grandma as I recall. It was my business partner put me up to that. “You’d sell your own grandmother,” he used to say whenever I got the best in a deal. I could never figure out why he complained, after all he shared the profits.

Anyway, now it’s the house. Any takers?

What I really mean is, “Any buyers?” We are not really interested in people who want to just turn up and take it. Please don’t take offence.

Tatiana

In a moment of trying to do nothing much at all last night we wandered innocently into Dr Tatiana’s Sex Guide to All Creation on SBS. There went innocence for the evening, but what lot of fun.

Dr Tatiana is a blending of TV foodie Nigella Lawson and Australia’s very own Umbilical Brothers. Some of you will probably have to do a bit of googling at this point.

What a wonderful world we live in!

MiniRant

It’s what we do to the Earth

Eat it
Beat it
Heat it

OK, MiniRant mode off.

Gone

Two ‘gone’ things to think about this week.

John Howard.
Lost his seat after a long battle. It was Australia’s most dysfunctional election to date with both major parties seeming to be on the same side. Some people will miss Howard, some will wonder what’s missing but not be able to put their finger on it, and some will spend lots of time harassing the ears of others on how they won’t miss him at all. For many years Howard managed to lie to the people of Australia and get away with it when so many other politicians were scuppered on their own words. I think people grew weary somewhere along the way.

Bernie Banton.
Lost his life after a long battle. It was a war fought on two fronts - his own failing health and his relentless pursuit of the James Hardie Corporation. Bernie became one of Australia’s famous faces over the years. His determination to see proper compensation from JH caused them to skip the country and set up overseas. Bernie’s brother was one of JH’s victims a few years ago, as were most of the men with whom he worked in the asbestos industry. A state funeral will honour him for the integrity that he forced upon a corporation which fought him every step of the way.

Voting

Today us Aussies are voting. It’s compulsory over here, voting. Millions of us are getting out there and having our say. It’s a federal election, so the outcome might be a change of Prime Minister. Many people see that as a foregone conclusion.

Voting closes in about two minutes, 6pm local time, and then the counting starts.

It’s a funny thing, democracy. We vote these people into office and hope they will do as we want them to do. For their part, the politicians make all sorts of promises to get us to vote for them. Then they forget all about us and follow the party line. A few years later and the next election comes along and it’s all on again.

There’s something very dysfunctional about all this. There’s this community of people out there who are so bereft of self-esteem that they need to advertise their need for it nationally in the hope that people will fill in little form letters to tell them how much they like them.

Well, today, that’s what we are doing. Signing over the country to a bunch of people who don’t much like themselves. Any wonder something inside my mind wants to say something about used car salesmen.

Presents

Our anniversary I mentioned a few days ago. Remember the pineapple?

So there we are at breakfast, almost. I’m the breakfast getter in our place. My wife does not do mornings. It’s true, she’s even got the tee shirt.

I fill the kettle, plug it in, set up the teapot, open the cupboard to get the muesli, she wanders into the kitchen.

“I’ve got this,” she says and reaches into a shopping bag and brings out a pineapple. For somebody who does not do mornings, this is pretty good.

We laugh. We cut the pineapple. We eat it for breakfast as if we are Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.
(Except younger.)
(And better looking - both of us.)
(And with a more functional family.)
(And … OK, it doesn’t really matter …

We exchange presents. She opens my gift to her and starts laughing - it’s a funny present. “I almost bought this for you!” she says. I suppose I kind of bought it for myself anyway.

I get to work late. “Let them guess,” I say to myself.

Typos

Don’t you just hate them? Last night I found two in a manuscript I have recently submitted to a publisher.

One was ‘thought’ instead of ‘though’ - easy to see what happened there. The other was three words in the wrong order - the dyslexia kind of thing. I have read through this manuscript a million times and haven’t found them. I’m starting to think they are deliberately inserted by aliens.

Consider this. A bunch of aliens are watching some archeologists at work. They look at each other with those big oval shaped eyes and a bit of thought transference passes between them. They get into their space-pod and land on earth, let’s say several thousand years ago, and start giving the primitive locals a bit of a head start.

A bit of alien technology enters the tribal sphere, such as flint arrowheads instead of bone. Nah, tell you what. They give them metal arrowheads. Teflon coated stainless steel arrowheads. Or titanium, that’d do it. That multi-coloured titanium you get from heating it with a blowtorch. That’s what they give them, colourful titanium arrow heads. Then these aliens, they get back into their space-pod and scoot back to Alpha Centauri.

So now we’ve got one tribe with the high-tech stuff. The tribe over the hill can’t handle it any more and are all killed in battle. The titanium tribe gets their land. Without the enemy in the next valley the men get a bit lazy. They don’t go to war. They mooch around doing nothing. The women kick them out of the house. “Go fishing or something,” they yell at them. The men go off to drink beer and wait for somebody to invent football and television.

The women find these lovely coloured things. “Oh, look,” says Mrs Ogg, “these two match each other.” She threads wire through two arrowheads and uses them as ear rings. There are just enough arrowheads to go around, two for each women. One for each ear. It is as if the aliens had counted them already.

Fast forward several thousand years. The archeologists are digging up a stone-age burial site in a secluded valley. Suddenly one of them straightens up and calls for the others, “Hey, come and look at this!” He’s uncovered an arrowhead. It’s metal.

“What the heck is that doing in there?” they all ask. Nobody answers. Nobody answers because they don’t know.

They dig a bit more through the grave and find another. There is one on each side of the skull.

“They’re ear rings,” somebody says. “Even got little loops of wire.”

“Looks like titanium.”

“Titanium? Can’t be.”

“My teenage daughter wears ear rings like that,” says one. The others look at him. His eyes widen a little, just a touch defensive. “She couldn’t have put them in there, she’s at home doing her homework.” It sounds a bit lame but it’s the truth.

They all stand looking at the titanium arrowheads. Nobody speaks for a long time.

The aliens can see them on their intergalactic Skype-Screen. The aliens have no sense of humour, they are interested in science for science’s sake.

And that is where typos come from.

32

Thirty two years of history. And herstory. 21/Nov/1975

Beaujolais

We lived in England for a few years, living in the city of Exeter. 1985-89. What a great time. The Devon countryside is one of the world’s delights, especially the village of Kenn where you will find a pub called The Ley Arms. Built in 1190 AD, it was a popular haunt for us.

Our son was still a youngster so we preferred lunch there, gently soaking up the centuries until we had to pick him up from school. It quickly became our favourite wedding anniversary lunch spot.

November 21st turns out to be the day of the Beaujolais Run. No, we’d never heard of it either, until the pub owner came round with bottle and glasses and gave everyone in the place a free glass of red.

It turns out that on this day the French wineries of Beaujolais start selling their new vintage. And somebody decided it would be a good day for a race. A race to get the first cases of Beaujolais home to their local pub in Britain. The Ley Arms got their stuff rushed in by Porsche or helicopter or something, arriving half-way through lunch. So we made a habit of it.

We’ve been drinking Beaujolais for our wedding anniversary ever since. Until this year. This year we have just finished the Beaujolais, the evening before. Tomorrow we are having this.

It’s a newish local winery. I’ve been driving past the place for a year or so, until last weekend. I got off the bike and tried out their stuff. Very nice.

Here in Australia a galah is a native parrot. Grey wings and tail and bright pink elsewhere. They’re everywhere, and very noisy. To call somebody a galah is to suggest he’s a bit of a fool. I can handle that.

The label is too good to pass up for a wedding anniversary wine.

And hey, it’s no more foolish than rushing wine from the south of France to the south of England between breakfast and lunchtime.

Happy anniversary to us.

Pineapples

Bit of a hurried post here. I’ve just listened to the morning news and before going to work I have to get this distraction out of my head.

I’m a bit aware of wedding anniversaries at the moment. My wife and I celebrate 32 years tomorrow. My wife is a saint to be able to put up with me. But I knew that 32 years ago.

Back to this morning’s news. It was of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip celebrating 60 years. Good on them, I say. She’s the first British monarch to reach such a long lasting marriage. That’s because her predecessors were married to men like Henry 8th, I suppose.

OK, back, again, to the news report. They listed some of the things the royal couple got for wedding presents back in 1947, the years of post-war rationing. Among the presents was that of the Queensland Government. That’s not where the queen lives, Queensland, it’s a state of Australia.

Apparently the official gift from the Qld government was 500 tins of pineapple. I don’t know about you, folks, but I reckon that is one very unusual wedding present.

So as the news finished I said to my wife, “Do you want me to give you a tin of pineapple tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? What’s tomorrow?”
I looked to see if she was awake. She was. Then she woke up.
“Oh, tomorrow. Is it our anniversary tomorrow? Is today the 20th? I’ve lost track of the days.”

So there you have it. Rack up one point for the male of the species to remember the day ahead of his wife.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest I’d better get going to work. Nobody ever forgets the day there. The guys I work among in the prison know their release dates and how many days to go no matter how far off.

I can see the conversations coming up already. “Thirty two years? You don’t even get that for murder.”

With pineapples you get either the rough end or the sweetness.

That’s life for you.