There is no returning to the seventies hair cut

Steeleye Span are coming to Sydney's Seymour Centre. Is that amount of nostalgia worth 88 bucks a seat? I can't say I know the answer.
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Lift up your eyes

Let me step into the light, emerging
from the darkness of a life
converging with another thought,

not of how a man might be diminished,
of how we fail and fall or fumble,
of how we drop the ball or miss the boat
or tumble into minor tragedies
as if, asleep behind the wheel,
which some call fate and others
happenstance, we did not see ahead
because the road will sometimes bend

but this: the better, brighter, bolder
half idea that we are never truly lost
nor on our own and need but look to see.
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There is mildly stressed and there is barking mad

We're dealing with the latter.

Karl Marx wrote, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."

The truth is that public service employee relations are neither tragic nor farcical; just a pain in the arse. It's almost impossible to believe that all of a sudden I'm back in a workplace drama of truly bizarre proportions. The simple fact of the matter, however, is this: a manipulative or mad woman gets to make wholly unfounded allegations against her supervisor (this time not me but I'll get sucked into it ... just wait and see) then leaves the office (never to be seen again, I'll bet). She'll get an insurer financed pay out. We'll cover for her absence and be left with the shit. The only thing that matters is that no more damage is done to Miss Millie, who is a more than decent person.

The revolution has been postponed

I can't recall the last time I quoted Mao in a speech. Today, as if 30 years had not elapsed, I offered this to my polite audience: “We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.” Some smiled in recognition. Some nodded. Next week the Chinese delegation visits Sea World.

Throw me a fish!

This the group whose leaders I was speaking to. Tell the truth, it was a decent presentation.

China Disabled Persons' Federation

This week's New Yorker

The New Yorker

there IS a pot of gold beneath the rainbow

Spike's knitting is complete. This is a face that only a mother could love ... and there might be a question about even that unconditional maternal urge!

No rubber chicken, thank God

We were invited by Diana Palmer of IDEAS to join her at tonight's 2009 Fellows Dinner of the NSW Association of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. I was a referee for Diana who has succeeded in her application to visit the USA, the UK and Hong Kong to research tourism and people with disability. I'm a little surprised that it turned out to be an enjoyable evening (which tells us more about me than the evening).

The food, surprisingly, was quite decent really, given the nature of the event. Giant wedges of beef for most diners; mushroom risotto for those of us who have renounced raw flesh. The chocolate desert was good enough to have the less cultured among our number ... that'll be himself ... lifting its dregs from the plate with sticky, licked fingers. Spike tells me that the Shiraz was better than decent enough.

Our companions at the table (a vast rectangular affair in the middle a small sea of otherwise round tables) were genuinely pleasant and interesting folk from Tumut (where Diana's office is based) and Gundagai. Chris and Janelle Becker engaged enthusiastically about glass art with Spike. Narelle and Robert Mac??? who talked of their busy lives in the town of the dog on the tucker box. Narelle struck me as something of a force of nature ... leading the development of supported accommodation in a region of rural NSW for people like her adult son Christian; experimenting with sculpture built out of eld machinery parts; painting and poetry. Someone who lacked imagination might describe them all as 'the salt of the Earth'. I may lack that imagination. I'm glad to say, however, that I overcame my characteristic taciturn nature and may even have come close to being personable and chatty.

The short speeches given by each of the 2009 Fellows were at least genuinely interesting and sometimes quite moving. Each of the speakers seemed truly humbled by the experience and the very idea of having been awarded a grant to travel the world to purse their, at times highly idiosyncratic, dreams. There was a young man who spoke lovingly of an 18th Century instrument I'd never heard of before - the viola d'amore; a special school principal off to sub-Saharan Africa to follow the refugee trail taken by the likes of one of his pupils whom he described as the most traumatised child he'd ever met; a hip young City of Sydney official off to London, New York and Paris to look at different ways vibrant city night-life can be made less prone to street crime; a man who rescues large animals trapped in unlikely places ... a horse beneath a house, a horse stuck up tree?

Diana was obviously enjoying a good night out, as were we. She deserves it.
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