You know, through the long, sweaty Singapore years, cooped up in our high-rise apartment, we often talked in a misty-eyed fashion about a golden future in which we’d have a garden. It would be an elegant, well-groomed, peaceful place, with gently tinkling rills, shady trees, lush lawns and rank upon rank of fragrant roses, peonies, …
Today it feels like spring: the breeze is balmy, the sun shines warm and welcoming, birds cheep and flutter in the bountiful hedges, and the sap rises audibly in tree, plant and weed. Hullo clouds, hullo sky . . . It’s amazing how much of a psychological lift you get when all is blissful and …
Spurred by yesterday’s bike-borne expedition into the unknown, I squandered a bit of time last night looking for further local loops to explore on two wheels. Modern internet-based social platforms make this kind of thing so easy. For example, I have recently joined a service called Strava, which enables weekend warriors and endurance sports weirdos …
OK, I have a whole bunch of posts half-done and awaiting the final push to force them into shape and spewed out to an indifferent world. The problem is that they are all rather complicated and serious, which is a difficult look to sustain around here. In the meantime, things need to keep inching forward. …
As your faithful narrator has probably mentioned, the urge to tinker with stuff and maybe dismantle it is a lifetime one, especially when stuff doesn’t work (and dismantling stuff usually guarantees it will never work again). As youths, my group of mates were always building, making, destroying, repurposing and generally getting in where we shouldn’t …
It wouldn’t be surprising if, unlike me, you aren’t familiar with the finer points of the first Muppet Movie. Maybe it’s a generational thing, or maybe we were starved of sophisticated entertainment in sanctions-bound 1979 Zimbabwe, but be that as it may, for some reason this jolly musical romp remains vivid in the old memory …
It’s been a while since I’ve been on the tools, mainly due to the weather -- all that cold, rain and mud aren’t conducive to outdoor exertions. But there’s been a particular task weighing on the old mind and today was the day allotted to completing it. Remember the weeds in our lawn? Well, both …
Isn’t it embarrassing when you get up on your hind legs and spout out a bunch of opinionated rubbish about something you really know very little about? Especially when soon after you’ve nailed your colours to the wrong mast, the facts – which everyone else is fully aware of – are brought to your attention? …
The Bible relates that one of the tasks occupying Adam’s early days in the Garden of Eden was to go about bestowing names on everything. It makes sense: being the first human and all that, he will have needed to start getting a handle on stuff so he could talk about it when Eve showed …
Yesterday afternoon it was into the old German sports car for an expedition to the Bowral, NSW, childhood home of Don Bradman. It was a lovely drive: turning off our familiar King’s Highway (amusingly called the B52) instead of zooming on to Canberra, we traced our course via Lake Bathurst (where no lake could be …
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