Ziggy played guitar

Booked

Firs stop - Tokyo

Our itinerary is more or less sorted.  The flights are booked.  The day has been given over to the search for accommodation. Looking for wheelchair accessible showers is always a challenge but we've started.  One hotel booked for four nights.  3 nights sleeping on long haul flights.  That leaves 30 nights to resolve while the clock ticks down to departure. Excited.  Bit freaked out but we'll be fine.

Old habits die hard

Friday night  there, Saturday morning here and the day's first news: my football team back in Scotland progressed to the final 16 of the Scottish Football Cup.  Any ship in a storm Douglas.

No single fact can ever define us - two strong women

Another two short stories from Philip Hensher's anthology bit the dust today; both by women whose long lives straddled the turn of 18th and 19th Centuries, both of whom experienced mental breakdown, both of whom survived their traumas to write.

Hannah More by Henry Pickersgill

Hannah Moore was born in 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rebellion.  She wrote plays, poems and short stories such as the morality tale, Betty Bridges, the St. Giles's Orange Girl.  It's too easy to observe that such a one-dimensional tale of the moral improvement made possible through hard work, thrift, respect for God's laws and the beneficent power of the philanthropic middle-classes could not be written today.  But it's just as true that Miss More wrote her short, unmistakably 'Dickensian' fable three years before the great chronicler of London's poor was born.  Hannah was a leader of the Bluestocking group (maybe not proto-feminist but certainly supportive of educated, intellectual, socially-conscious and engaged women).  And when it came to the great cause of her day - the abolition of the slave trade - Hannah More was on the right side of history.

Mary Lamb

Mary Lamb was born twenty years after Hannah More and lived to the middle of the 19th Century.  What sorts of changes must these two women have seen in their lives, each of more than eight decades?  It was an era of enormous change in the structure, economy, society of Great Britain - the great age of the industrial revolution that made Victorian Britain the largest Empire the world had ever known.  Where Hannah More's story centred on the misfortunes of the urban poor and the reforming efficacy of the emergent middle-class, Mary Lamb's nostalgic rumination on childhood, The Farm House, harked back, I think, to fabrications of a lost (perhaps never-existed) agrarian idyll. I was startled, then, to discover that aged 32 Mary Lamb stabbed to death her mother who was sitting at their dinner table.  Mary was convicted of lunacy, spending short periods in institutions throughout the rest of her life.  She and her brother Charles were, however, fully engaged members of London's literary life.

Spike's first pear

It's like that advert against drugs ... Just Say No!

So today's Guardian has another of its doom-laden speculations about how everyone (except The Guardian) is underestimating the threat posed by Donald Trump.  Unless we waken up, it cautions readers, we shall enter January 2017 surprised to find President Trump staring down at us.

I disagree. I think his standing has - in part - been inflated by the very media circus that warns us of the fate worse than death to democracy Mr. Trump represents.  Mostly, of course, I think his effervescent rise tells us exactly what a rich megalomaniac can buy in the way of public opinion before real people start to cast real votes.  I'm betting, not just hoping, the Trump bubble bursts by the end of March.

I should know better than join in but the article annoyed me - the fact of it as much as its 'straw man' contents.  I wanted to stamp my feet and shout ... just stop it please!  Instead, despite my better judgement, I allowed Mr. Angry from Gilmore to leave comments 'below the line',  I wrote:

I know it's not in any way fashionable to make the following claim but I believe the underlying evidence of everything I've read indicates that Donald Trump's preposterous and distasteful tilt for the Presidency will be effectively over by March 2016 at the latest. His legacy - if that's not too polite a term to use - will have been to drag all the other Republican candidates to the right because they lacked the moral and political courage to stand up to the charlatan nincompoop posing as a politician. It's a depressing state of affairs but the good news is that not even the Republican Party will follow that megalomaniac over the cliff, never mind the rest of the American people.

Someone who goes by the login name of honey1969 responded;

Trump/Cruz 2016 

You can't stop the Trump Train!

And I wrote back:

The Trump train will be lucky if it makes it out of the station once real people start voting rather than answering pollsters' questions. Good luck to you if you support him but be prepared to watch the Trump Train Wreck.

Someone by the name JohnMappin added:

I know it is hard for the died in the wool left wing intellectuals who have been feeding from the mamaries of their own self created media delusion bubble for best part of a decade to grasp - but Trump is appealing across the spectrum to republicans and democrats alike Americans want to win and they see the standard politicians as losers. Trump is their one shot and like Eminem they are going to take it..

And I wrote back:

I believe that American voters - Republican and Democrat - see through that charlatan and when it comes to making real choices in Caucuses and Primaries they will vote for other candidates to flush Donald Trump down the toilet of political history. If he's the Eminem of 21st Century politics my name is Beyonce.

"Died in the wool"?  I resisted the temptation to be a pedant.

Now Douglas, have you got all that off your chest?  Good.  Then please Douglas, just stop it!

All our yesterdays ... or maybe some of them

What would we do without Facebook, now?  How did we survive without it before?  With our mobile phone cameras and a narcissistic attention to the trivial pursuits of an ordinary life, almost anything may now be preserved for posterity.  In this case, three years ago today, it rained in Canberra.

This morning a computer-generated message popped up on my Facebook feed.  "Douglas", the message read, "we care about you and the memories you share here.  We thought you'd like to look back on this post from 3 years ago." I wonder about the 'we' in that message. Who cares about me? My best friend, the Facebook algorythym. 

Suspended below the message was a photograph Spike took from the balcony of the odd little room we rented for nearly three months while we waited to find, then move into, permanent accommodation; the house we bought in Gilmore and now call home.  We were staying at the Capital Executive Apartment Hotel on Northbourne Avenue, North Canberra.  I was at the start of my twenty months with the National Disability Insurance Agency and we had moved out of the apartment in Ashfield but not yet found our 1980's brick bungalow on the city's southern fringe.  We were always amused by the sign outside the building offering the dubious attraction of the hotel's "Cuddle 'n' Bubble PACKAGE"  Did we miss one of life's opportunities by not paying the extra?  I think not.

It had been a painfully hot start to the year.  At times it was easier to stay put in that cramped space than venture outdoors.  But that afternoon the Heavens opened to give us brief respite.  The photograph does not do justice to the way the rain bounced off the road and pavement.  Next day, as I recall, the heat returned and my ordinary life continued ... but sadly unremarked by my friends at Facebook.