Friday, September 6

Jamie's put me on to a website called Medium which is for people who like reading and writing.   Each day there are some interesting bits of writing and tips for budding writers.  Today, among other comments, was this gem:

John Green: Writing is a profession for introverts who want to tell a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.

I can relate to that.

Thursday, September 5

It's Adult Learners Week in Tasmania and much energy is being expended in trying to winkle oldies out of their chairs and on to their feet.  The intention of the exercise is to is to lay out some potential activities or hobbies that bored retirees might see as the solution to their loneliness and that will have a positive effect on the levels of senior mental health and save the government some money in the long term.

Jamie was in the Library the other day and noticed a series of events which they were offering and which he felt might suit us.  He's not at the stage yet of arranging stuff for us and expecting us to take part, but he does go out of his way to ensure we don't vegetate in our little cottage, with watching the birds as the highlight of our day.So, if he finds a decent TV program or a community event which might spark our interest, he passes it on.

He suggested Marilyn might like 'Crocheting with Beads' and it would be an opportunity for her and Zenaida, Nera's mum, to take part in it together.  And for me, he chose Creative Writing.  It was held yesterday. Sadly, only one other person turned up and she was hardly a senior.  Toby, the facilitator, told me she was a published author and wrote stuff for Mills and Boon.  Praise, indeed! We only had a couple of hours and he wanted to talk about editing our writing.

We had been asked to bring 300 words of something we'd written so I took a poem.  Apparently, this exercise doesn't work well with poetry so I scrolled through my iPad to find some prose, in fact a description of the town where I lived in Scotland.  The first step was to reduce that 300 words to 250, then 200, then 150, then 100, then 75.  It seemed a ridiculous way to tidy up your writing but I went along with it.

My original 300 words which I thought were well-chosen, interesting and informative became a brief, sparse comment about nothing much in particular.  All the adjectives were gone, and the interesting and colourful language and the humour ... and the point of writing it in the first place.  Still, it was a useful exercise if the problem I was trying to fix is that I was saying too much and needed to reduce the wordage.

The other participant was a youngish woman who had brought a piece of writing on small sheets of paper covered with highlighted sections in two colours. She explained that the original piece was 900 words and the highlights were excised  sections to bring it back to 300.  It was written in rhyming couplets so she had a terrible job to reduce it further while trying to maintain the rhyming.

However, it has encouraged me to find out more about the techniques of writing and I've been looking at possible on-line study.  There's an 8-week course with The Open University, starting on September 9, which might be worthwhile.

I came across a TV series which looked interesting: The World's Most Luxurious Trains. I like trains and luxury is always good so I downloaded the first episode to watch.  It was awful.  The introduction was not about trains but about the super-rich who demand the very best and why it is important that we provide the luxuries they deserve.  It was a paeon of praise for the impeccable taste of the robber barons who have milked the system for years, and for their spoiled children who wallow in inherited wealth, contributing nothing to society.  My socialist soul was offended so I ditched the program before it was properly started.

Tuesday, September 3

One of the birds which uses our yard as a cafeteria is a galah with a broken wing.  He's usually the first to arrive in the morning, peering in the window, hoping to get an early start on the food before the other birds muscle him out of the way.  I try to slip him an extra handful but he's very timid and toddles away if I come near.  I suppose he really has to take his chances with the others; survival of the fittest is the rule at our place.

Because he can't fly, I thought he was living among a big pile of rocks at the front of the yard because I've seen him there but I'm not so sure now.  This morning, I got the food to him before the others arrived so he did well.  Then I watched him head over to the fence, crawl through to the next door property and proceed to climb up a scrubby little wattle tree, using his beak to drag him up from branch to branch.  Unbelievable!  He reached the branch he was aiming for and settled down for a snooze.

I've been calling the bird 'he' but, with the determination it's showing, I think it must be a female.  No bloke would go to so much trouble.

Sunday, September 1st

Fathers' Day and we were taken to the Country Club Casino where we were promised good food and giveaways.  We expected to see hordes of 30-somethings with their kids but everybody seemed to be in our age group, or older.  It says something about our changing habits that the Casino, once the go-to place for celebrations, now has to depend on the older generation for their survival.

Marilyn had offered to cook lunch for us all but it was decided she didn't need the worry and we went out: Jamie and Nera, Zenaida (Nera's Mum) and Chrislin, (Nera's sister).  It was a great outing: the food was good and there was a good singer who enjoyed the same sort of music as I do.  She even asked us to join in the chorus of Simon and Garfunkel's The Boxer - how esoteric.

I looked forward to the giveaways but discovered they were only given away to those who invested $50 in the pokies.  Oh, well - a $200 Bunnings voucher would have been nice but I gave the pokies up years ago and don't want to re-visit that particular bad habit.

Friday, August 30, 2019

I have decided to join the Launceston School for Seniors which offers courses in a whole range of topics.  It seems there are over 500 enrolled in their courses at the moment so it's a pretty dynamic concern and covers things like Mahjong, Model making, French and History.  I've been writing a bit and wanted to learn some techniques so I've enrolled in Creative Writing Co-op. which meets each Friday morning, starting on October 4th.

We'll be away on Registration Day so I sent them an email to express my interest and was delighted to receive a 'phone call back from their secretary whom, it turns out, we knew well when we were living at Grammar.       She surprised me by saying that she often checks my now-defunct blog to see whether I have written anything recently.  So, to thank Vicki for expediting my enrolment in the group, I've dusted off the blog just one more time.

We're quite busy at the moment because Nera's family are visiting from the Philippines. First two sisters came with 2 of Nera's nephews and stayed for a month.  Now her mother is here with one of the sisters and their plan is to have a three-month holiday.  Jamie and Nera will go back to the Philippines with them in December to celebrate the marriage of the youngest sister, Keisha May.   

Nera, of course, is working full-time so Jamie takes a lot of the responsibility of looking after them during week-days.  He occasionally brings them out to Dilston to have lunch and spend a couple of hours with us for a change of scene.  Nera's mother is struggling with the cold weather but it's still a great adventure for her.

Marilyn and I have been doing a couple of days a week volunteering at the local Salvo's shop but I'm finding it difficult to do some of the tasks required and I'm afraid I'll have to give it up.  My knees won't take long periods of standing and my back struggles with bending tasks, so I'm a bit of a write-off.  My mind is still active, though, and I still enjoy working on the computer.

We visited an old gentleman in Deloraine recently.  He's 93 and has been a wood craftsman all his life.  In his living room, apart from his collection of craft, he had a stack of exercise books in which he was writing in long hand.  He explained that he was writing his memoirs as a series of stories or anecdotes.  He'd given some early bits to someone to type them up but she'd lost them, so he was having to re-write - at 93!

Marilyn suggested, if I wanted to do something similar, I should get started before it was too late.  I hadn't really thought about it but have taken it on board and joining the Creative Writing group is part of that project.  How hard can it be?

Wednesday, February 13

On  Sunday, to celebrate my birthday, Marilyn and I decided to have lunch at a small restaurant called Sue Na Mi in the village of Beauty Point.  Jamie and Nera were keen to join us.  With the name you might expect Thai or something more exotic but it was unpretentious and the board out the front offered Sunday Roasts.  The only people in Tassie who eat out on a Sunday are Seniors and Bikers.  If you don't want hairy men in leather jackets cluttering up your restaurant, you need to aim for the older segment of the market.


In fact, the food was great.  Jamie and I both chose the steak cooked on a hot stone at our table and served with garlic prawns. It's a bit cheeky, expecting the customer to cook his own lunch when he's paying for the expertise of a trained chef!  But it was good.  The last time I had my food cooked on a hot stone was in 2006 at Clark Quay in Singapore.  After this delight, we moved on to Raffles Hotel to drink Singapore Slings and throw peanut shells on the floor.  We were in Singapore for our 40th Anniversary Cruise on the Gemini.  Great memories!

So, more than three quarters of a century have passed and I'm still taking up space on this planet.  Twice in the past week I've heard mention in the media of the movie Logan's Run where people who had passed their productive years were helped on their way.  I'm not a proponent of that idea, but I do want to think that I can still make a contribution.  I think a lot about how to minimise my effect on diminishing the world's resources and worry about the multi-billionaires who can't live without their personal jets, enormous yachts and conspicuous spending.  I hope the size of my footprint is reasonable for an old bloke who lives simply.

Wednesday, September 12

We’re in that awkward part of the moving process where the decision has been made but it’s too early to start packing. So we are twiddling our thumbs, bored out of our tree.

We have made a couple of trips taking things from the shed and from the top cupboards but Jamie has pleaded with us not to bring any more until he and Nera manage to remove all of their stuff. Our original plan was that we would move Jamie and Nera and allow ourselves a week or so to give Dilston a good clean, tidy up some painting, have the carpet shampooed, and so on, before we moved in. But, sadly, those plans have been set aside and any jobs that need to be done will have to happen while we occupy the place.

We tried to be sensible but made the mistake of giving ourselves too much time before we move it. We’ve pulled back two weeks from that original decision, which will help, but it’s still three weeks before the removalist arrives and those weeks are going to be very difficult.

One saving grace is that Robyn is arriving in a week or so and we’ll be busy in that week showing her around.  She probably hasn’t realised that she’s going to be pretty involved in our moving. We’ve worked out that there are three cars we can involve in the process  so Rob is going to get a set of keys and a selection of stuff to transport.  The removalist will take all the big stuff but our clothes, linen and bric a brac will be our responsibility.

We’ve moved too many times in our career to be excited by the process but it is nice to have the idea of going back home.  There are some issues with renting which we hadn’t anticipated. Even though we look after the place as if it were our own, there’s always the thought that the landlady might pick us up on some aspect. In fact, the couple of times we’ve had to ring to ask for something to be fixed, the landlady has arrived to have a look. We found that very intrusive.  In our own place, a scratch on the skirting board or a chip of paint from a door can be fixed at our leisure without the worry that prying eyes might criticise.

It’s our next movie afternoon tomorrow when two other couples join us to watch one or two movies together with lunch. I have chosen a couple of movies but one of the couples announced to me they have seen both so I have to go back to the drawing board. The movies I chose were Light Between Oceans and Viceroys House. The first is set in Western Australia and is the story of a lighthouse  keeper and his wife who find a baby in a wrecked rowing boat. What’s nice about it is that the first half of the story is filmed in Port Chalmers near Dunedin in New Zealand and the second half is filmed at Stanley just up the road from us in Tasmania. Apart from the interesting story it was great to see scenes of two places that we happen to know quite well.

Viceroys House is the history of the partition of India and Pakistan in the 1940s and the terrible violence that followed. The viceroy at the time was Lord Louis Mountbatten. I hadn’t realised what an impressive fellow he was and how important he is to the royal family (assuming that the movie is reasonably accurate and not just a bit of pro-royalist propaganda).  I suppose it’s appropriate that the latest addition to the royal family has been called Louis in his honour.