Pedalling home along a tree-lined street which is set aside for bicycles, I heard a crash. A man reaching up to put his brown wine bottle in the brown glass bin had tipped forward and toppled like a tree – at first I thought he must be drunk. There was nobody about, just him and me. […]
A knock at the door when we finally trudge home, carrying our groceries, exhausted. It’s the darlingest neighbour in the world. “Oh, hi!” “Hey Cathoel. Just wanted you to see the last supermoon.” I have gasped and clapped my hand to my mouth. “Oh my god!” He is telling me, “It was even better last […]
I was chopping wood today & remembered a guy from Wales many years ago who was missing two fingers from his left hand. He described how he felt the sickening, impossible thing… then his first thought was, as he told me in his furry accent, “You stupid, stupid bastard.” He says instantly the pictures started […]
It’s getting dark. The gentle end of a slow and satisfying farm day. My farm is a tiny lakeside property which belongs to an absent friend. I am alone today. Last night we walked round the lake, or dam, and I told my German visitor all about bunyips. Today he rang from a nearby mountaintop […]
Fought the good fight, and won. The battle if not the war. We came home an hour ago to the sound of jackhammers ringing up and down our street. It was 10pm. I rang the police. They said, they can do nothing, I would have to ring the Council. So I got on my ugg […]
At my last place I cut down one of those plastic “NO JUNK MAIL PLEASE, thank you!” stickers and clapped it on my letterbox so that it said: NO JUNK. This didn’t stop some people who felt that their pizza-shaped pizza menu, Thai takeaway special delivery offer or local dentist’s surgery was immune. So at […]
Most joyous demo/march I’ve ever been involved in. There was a sense of colourful exultation, a kind of rejoicing, a feeling of laughing at each others’ placards and of coming together to ridicule the ridiculous. So many intelligent, open facial expressions, so many cool handmade signs. Someone had made extra signs, proper ones on poles, […]
The longing for a messiah is understandable, but dangerous I think. Individual responsibility – that is, individual freedom of action – is for me one of the most joyous lessons life teaches.
In a sense it is true that every inch of every block of every city centre we have is wasted. As we’ve made a lot of cities – that’s a lot of real estate. That’s real as in ‘commons’, ‘waste land,’ ‘abandoned land’, ‘no one’s putting it to much use.’ Oddly enough the same is […]