We live in a large country

The other day - it may have been yesterday (one forgets so easily at my age) - a tweet from @amazinmaps caught my attention.  I retweeted it to my modest little band of followers (currently 125 rather disparate souls).  It was the map of Australia below, which I think gives you a clear picture of how very big this island continent I now call home truly is.  
 

My mind has played tricks on me in the past when I've looked at maps of Australia - maybe before setting off on a long drive.  On a page the maps look the same as maps I used when I lived in Scotland.  In books of maps the territory you want to cross may fit on a page or across several pages if it's a route map from A to B via C, D or E.  But when I look at maps of Australia or parts of it I often forget scale when I'm trying to process how far a drive or flight might be.  One inch on a map of Scotland may be the same as one inch on a map of Australia or NSW but if you forget that wee word scale you run the risk of making a big mistake.  So when I saw this collage of other countries with NSW and southern Queensland about the same size as all of South Africa; all of Italy barely a fraction of West Australia the map caught my fancy.

Kersbrook, Adelaide Hills.  Pic: David Mariuz/EPA

This too makes think about the size of Australia and the contrasting forces that play upon the land and its people.  Down in South Australia thousands of folk are watching and / or fighting fires that have spread across the bone dry land to the north of Adelaide.  Homes have been consumed by unstoppable flames, vast tracts of bushland burnt to ash, dog and cat kennels razed to the ground and thousands, probably tens of thousands of domesticated, farmed and wild animals killed.  Fortunately there's been no loss of human life.  At the same time, up here in Canberra, we've been sheltering from the torrential rain of another massive summer thunderstorm.  It was not easy to hear what we were saying to one another because of ferocious rain drops pelting the roof of the pergola, the crack of lightning and roar of thunder near and far made me jump at times and our poor wee cat has been hiding under the bed.  Even I have been a source of comfort and reassurance for Thistle the cat this afternoon.

The storm is now subsiding, the rain abating.  Soon ten squillion snails and slugs will emerge from their hiding holes undergroud to assault the seedlings - sweet pea, sunflowers, peas and beans and other veg - planted not so very long ago.  Then we'll witness terror as the avenging arm of Spike the snail hunter casts out the little devils.  There will be carnage.  It will not be pretty.

The illusion of happiness is a waterlogged pitch

Partick Thistle Football Club

It was with some trepidation I logged on to the BBC Sport web site to check out the football scores back in the 'old country'.  In the traditional New Year's Day round of matches the Jags had the never less than daunting task of hosting Celtic at Firhill.  The 'tic had not won their previous two matches - even worse they'd been sufficiently careless as to lose their last encounter - and a lifetime's experience (by which I mean approximately 47 years) tells me it is never, I mean 100% never a good idea to meet the Champions a week after they've had a bad day at the office.  They feel some overwhelming 'We Are The Champions' need to give their next opponents a monumentally painful going over.  

So it was with great relief, bordering on ecstatic joy, I read that the game had been postponed because the pitch of Maryhill's finest had become waterlogged, despite the best efforts of the home team's staff.  (References to ecstatic joy in the previous sentence may border on ironic overstatement ... but only just.)

Relatively speaking, therefore, New Year's Day turned out, as it happened - or more accurately as it didn't happen - a good day for the Harry Wraggs.  We didn't lose three points while the teams below us in the league were all soundly beaten, putting more distance between us and them than had been there on Friday - at least that's my not very sound theory.   

It will not last, of course.  A day of recokoning must come.  But for now, as the saying goes, I'll take any port in a storm.

And today's word is ...

INDECISIVE

I'm back in Prufrock territory, specifically:

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I am completely incapable of making any decision today.  We all have them, do we not?  Days of indecision.

I refer to the smallest, most inane decisions, of course, rather than weighing in the balance the pros and cons of invading a small country or privatising a nation's steel industry regardless of the social and economic damage that ensues.  No, like Prufrock, I have been rendered immobile by small, comparatively inconsequential decisions.  On such a stiflingly hot day as today is it too late to drive to the supermarket at one 'clock when the temperature reaches 35?  But if I don't, what'll we have for dinner?  Should a new desk sit straight across a room or at an angle or not be placed at all in the room for which I thought it was intended.

Good God Douglas!  Give us peace man.

I am an irascible, hot, bothered and bothersome old man.  By and large decision-making is beyond me today.  I can't even work out who or what to blame for my predicament?

Oneself is probably the beginning and end of the search to answer that question.  Roll on tomorrow.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot ...

Auld Reekie lit up at The Bells

You may be able to take the boy out of Scotland but it is not possible to take Scotland out of the boy.  It's odd - or maybe not so hard to make sense of when you think about it - but somehow it just never feels that my New Year celebrations are complete until I know the fireworks have lit up the sky above Edinburgh Castle.  

The good side of this ex-patriot romanticism is that you get to enjoy 'the Bells' twice.  Not that one could see it through the night to witness the Scottish New Year as it arrived.  No.  When the clocks of Princes Street struck Midnight and the skies over Auld Reekie exploded with sparkling light we were fast asleep.  Some time later we woke pleasantly and slowly to a warm summer morning (just) and a lazy day ahead kicked off with a delicious breakfast.  Spike asked me if mangoes and melon would suffice?  Well ... as we say in the old country ... is the Pope a Roman Catholic and do bears shit in the wood?  As it turned out we enjoyed mango, melon, strawberry and blackberry fruit salad then creamy scrambled eggs on toast.  Not quite your typical Ne'erday breakfast in Scotland where there would be less mango, melon, strawberry and blackberry and more bacon, square sausage, black pudding and tattie scones to accompany the eggs - scrambled or fried or both.  The Scottish breakfast has no less magic in the right circumstances; just different... in a heart-attack way.

I found the photograph in a story about the success of Edinburgh's Hogmanay elebrations on The Scotsman web site.  One sentence in particular caught my fancy.  It reads, "Vast crowds had descended on the Royal Mile and Princes Street by early afternoon, lapping up the unusually mild weather, with temperatures soaring as high as 10 degrees."  As I sheltered in a cool part of the house, as far away from Canberra's 33 degree start to the year as I could reach, I thought, 10 degrees man?  No half bad for New Year's Eve.   

Hogmanay with Spike

It's all (a bit more than) double Dutch to me

The old year is drawing to a close with an unexpected flurry of socialising, which is a bit uncharacteristic for a grumpy old man like me. Yesterday my former colleague at the National Disability Insurance Agency, Ray Jeffrey dropped in to say hello.  He's a Gilmore resident like us but has been based in Brisbane since August to help prepare the ground for the roll out of the NDIS in Queensland from mid-2016.

Shortly after Ray departed our visitors from The Netherlands arrived to stay the night.  I've not seen Klary Van Keulen since 1974 or maybe (at a push) 1975 when I was 17 or 18 years old.  That'll be forty years ago.

Dib, dib, dib ...

We met for the first time in 1973 at the international Scouts Chalet in Kandersteg, Switzerland.  I was there with the 24th Glasgow (Bearsden) Scout Troop on what was my second visit to the Bernese Oberland. Klary was a member of a Dutch Scout Troop which, much to our adolescent Scottish boys' delight, included girls as well as boys.  That would be enough of a reason to be friendly as far as we were concerened but there were all kinds of other attractions, not least their smoking habits - Drum and Samson loose leaf tobacco extracted from bright blue pouches to roll into cigarette using just one hand!  How cool might that be to a teenage boy from Glasgow still wet behind the ears? Forty years on, none of us smokes.

The year after we met I took trains around Europe using the InterRail Pass ticket system which, at that time, allowed you unrestricted train travel in 17 countries or thereabouts for a month for a ridiculously low price. (The same pass today, covering about twice the number of countries, costs a bit under 800 Euro.  Is that still a bargain?  No idea.)  Not that it matters to anyone but me, but the fact my InterRail trip was my second time meeting Klary - this time in Enschede and Hengelo in The Netherlands - means I would shortly go to university which means I'd left the Royal Bank of Scotland (my first job after leaving school) which means I was 17 when we met in Switzerland, so - 1974 - forty years ago.  But I digress.

Klary, her husband Gerrit, Klary's sister Nettie (who I also met in 1974), Nettie's daughter Diana, Klary's daughter Margriet and her fiance, an Australian soldier named Clint arrived ysterday evening.  We talked, ate food, drank wine and beer, retired to bed then started the eating and talking again this morning over breakfast.  And then our Dutch friends left for Sydney where Margriet and Clint will be married on the 9th January.  By ten to five in the afternoon the tourists were posting photos of themselves on the beach at Wollongong having lunched with Clint's family in Campbelltown.  
 
An hour after Klary and her unambiguously Dutch entourage left Gilmore we were visited by a school friend of Spike, Stephanie with her husband Nick and boys Ruben and Fraser.  Outside of a school reunion earlier this year Spike and Stephanie had not seen one another for about 15 years.  It all makes me wonder, where does the time go?  But we both owe it to Facebook for re-connecting us to people we've not seen for years; decades in my case.  It's too easy to have a go at Facebook but you can't really argue with this re-uniting potential that it carries for all of us. Or is that simply an observation for old fogeys like me? Probably but what can a man do?  An old fogey is an old fogey.  Need proof ...?  While Stephanie and Spike were chatting Ruben, Stephanie's six year old eldest son, wupped this old man's ass at noughts and crosses on the youngster's iPhone.

Tragic old man.  But a happy old man who's had a lovely twenty four hours with friends old and new.

Carpenters - Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft

I never knew there was a longer version of the Carpenters venture into the trippy world of beyond.  Clearly, I don't have much on my plate today while poor old Spike has to make the house decent for our friends from The Netherlands who arrive this evening.