Sunday, September 16th .....

I’m sitting at Sydney’s Central Station waiting for Marilyn to arrive from Mudgee on the XPT. It doesn’t arrive until 8.49pm so I still have a couple of hours to waste. There was one little bit of excitement; a train pulled into platform 1, pulled by 2 ancient diesel engines and a horde of railway enthusiasts poured out of the nine carriages. What do you call a group of train-spotters? I’ll have to look it up. (I did look it up on a site devoted to collective nouns and found several suggestions: an anorak of trainspotters, a sadness of ... and an aspergers of ....  Not very imaginative and a bit cruel).

I find it extraordinary that people can become so fanatical about mechanical objects like trains, or cars, or planes, but they seem to get unending joy looking back at their photos and DVDs. It seems to be a father-son thing and I feel for the long-suffering wives who have to show some understanding of their bloke’s passion. I rang one of the Rotarians the other week and he told me he was watching a video he had just been given of old trains in Tasmania - at 9 o’clock in the morning. Each to his own, I suppose.

It’s been a good few days in Wollongong. Mum is not with us at the moment and I find it difficult to watch her deteriorate. She talks in the broad Scottish accent she would have used as a child and her words, although I can understand them, don’t have any context. As you can imagine, it’s very distressing.

I took Uncle Archie out in the wheelchair; we walked along the beach and popped into a little café for lunch. I know he enjoyed it and, on the way back to the home, he wanted to go into MacDonalds for coffee. We talked for more than an hour, about his family in Scotland, and the information I had dug out about Mum’s family, the Donachies, whom he knew well. He told me it was the most interesting conversation he had had for a long time. I was pleased about that but, as we moved off with him in the wheelchair, he called back over his shoulder, ‘John, I really enjoyed talking to that man.’ Oh, well!

I had a chance to read the Sydney papers this weekend and I was reminded of how much I enjoy Peter Fitzsimons. His open letter to the rioters in Sydney said it all. What were they thinking? If they wanted to harden the growing distrust of Muslims, they could not have chosen a better way. I despair of this problem ever being resolved.