For toast and marmalade in the afternoon.

The pain of loss so great that only distraction measure it’s significance. Unbearable to forget, unbearable to remember, a sort of planned denial is the only survival. I miss her so, and still cannot understand her death. I cannot introduce her to my boy, who she would have loved as if the world. It is surreal that I can [...]

meanwhile, in Cairo…

  “Activists are under the threat wherever they go, Dina (17 yrs old) and Israa (19) Abdallah Abo El-Azm, two sisters detained by the army three days ago for distributing flyers are now to be sentenced in front of a military court. In reality they were only walking down the street in Cairo at midday. [...]

Salute Vera Lynn

My mother was pretty much an unreconstructed (though we made the effort) anglophile, despite having lived 54 of her 65 years in Australia, but for sure she would have been wholeheartedly supportive of Vera Lynn’s current dalliance with the legal process. All salute Vera Lynn, at 91 still doing the job for an anti-fascist Britain [...]

Eyeballs on the Rats

I played guitar (somewhere between competent and bad) in the 1970s. King Rat, a band of mates I rehearsed a bit with, took their name from the 1962 James Clavell novel about the wartime Prison Camp called Changi in Singapore (now name of the airport). (They eventually went on to Metal rock god fame as [...]

Snowy Mountains Scheme

The Snowy Mountains River (hydro-electricity) Scheme was a massive building project in the eastern areas of Australia in the 1950s/1960s which, along with steel/shipping projects like Port Kembla, employed my father and lots of other migrants to Australia – a massive industrial hydro project, which redirected rivers and tunneled through mountains, and – more importantly [...]

Writing Diary

The diary, a memoir, notebooks, letters from the field – the ephemeral residue of the research process of anthropology has increasingly attracted attention, become raw data for cultivation, sifting the soil. This text offers an elaboration and personal appropriation of the flux of comprehension across the unusual long-time visitation of a peculiar mode of culture [...]

Stairway to Heaven

The resurrection of Led Zeppelin at their 02 Arena event evoked long suppressed memories that lurch from the awful to the wonderful. In the awful column: bad versions of ‘stairway’ being hacked out by spotty youths in guitar shops (and now, I am appalled to report, regurgitated by buskers on the London tube where everyone [...]

Travels in the war

One of the things I have been doing on and off for a while is writing about my Grandfather’s adventures in the second imperialist world war, and following him to places he visited – Malta, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon… Somehow the idea is that I’d do a travel diary during the ‘war on terror’ to match [...]

Zen choice

Hey hey hey – take me back to the dyakshya yoga youth refuge I first ran to after Grandpa Tate thought I shouldn’t keep camping out in his backyard shed… I was 14 – Crikey, there is a long story I have to tell one day… but already I can see this is going to [...]

Trinket Crimbo

XMAS TEACHES KIDS TO LOVE CAPITALISM This old graffito favourite (I will post pics sometime) returned to mind this morning when I was rudely awakened by some god-bothering Bishop (Nazir Ali) on Radio Four’s Today Programme complaining in ever so slow plummy tones that something about diversity legislation – vaguely referenced as ‘political correctness’ – [...]

Kim’s Game

I have a brother called Kim (Hiya) and in the book I am writing now (‘Jungle Studies’) I will have some sharp things to say about Rudyard Kipling the creator of Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera and Akhela, as well as about his close friend, Baden-Powell, founder of concentration camps and of the Scouts. It was in [...]

Box

The Box Brownie camera, circa 1962, was clearly designed for ease of use. Anyone can just pick it up, focus, and shoot. Rather hard to see the image in the viewfinder if I remember correctly – but I am not so sure I do remember this – its taken on the veranda of grandfather Thomas [...]