Sometimes you just can’t anticipate how things might turn out. Even when you set out to do something quite ordinary and usual, events can take an unexpected course. The human imagination just can’t take in all the possibilities the universe can throw at you, which means there’s always the potential for a surprise, even if …
You will of course be familiar with my distaste for the popular tendency to anthropomorphise animals – not merely because of a grumpy, jaundiced outlook on the world in general and mankind in particular, but because that’s not what wildlife is really about – it’s a human-centric way of looking at the world, and look …
Yesterday I thought I saw a platypus! This deserves an exclamation mark due to its unexpectedness – I didn’t set out to find one, but to paraphrase the Bard, some people achieve platypus and some have platypus thrust upon them. I hadn’t given platypi much thought – there was a vague notion that they were …
Remember that stuff I wrote about Adam in the Garden of Eden, and how in his pre-Eve bachelorhood he spent his time wandering about giving things names? It was also pre the serpent and banishment into the harsh world, so very much a state of grace. It’s an attractive idea – apart from the nudity, …
Remember that movie about the people who spent all their time driving across the continental USA in pursuit of tornados? Twister, I seem to recall it being titled. It depicted the lives and loves of people so obsessed with extreme weather phenomena that they’d risk life, limb and ute to hunt a tornado and subject …
When you think about the animal kingdom there are hierarchies just like in most systems – different exemplars of the type can be arranged into descending order according to various attributes they may display. Sometimes it’s handy in making sense of the whole by arranging its constituents in this way: big to small, hot to …
There are days when the to-do list seems to ‘spiral out of control’ (to channel the relevant cliché) as task after task, job after job, add themselves willy-nilly to the total, and with every new addition, priorities get jumbled and it’s ever harder to work out just where it would be best to start. Such …
More and more it’s about the birds. Getting up in the morning at the moment is a musical delight, as the local avian population gives voice to their appreciation of warmer weather, and earlier sunrises, and all the things going on that excite them. Flowers are busting out the kinds of salady grub to ensure …
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, …
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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