Mid-Air Mayhem

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If you fly often enough you’re going to encounter the occasional “moment”. I remember a work colleague telling me of a discussion he had with the company pilot many years ago. The pilot told him that flying a plane is 99% sleep inducing boredom and 1% blind panic. Those of us sitting behind the pilot, preferably behind an internal wall and even more preferably, on another level (somewhat counter-intuitively, the bigger the plane, the less likely it is to go down) hopefully don’t experience all of those moments of blind panic but occasionally we do although to be fair to pilots, what causes us passengers to white knuckle our fingerprints into the metal part of the arm rest are probably just ho hum moments to those who’ve seen it all.

So there have been times I’ve contemplated rapid religious conversion and another time I would have taken up smoking again if the no smoking sign had gone off. Let me tell you about this episode – my first brush with a melodramatic death. But first a precursor to set the scene.

The night before, I was attending an Australia-India Business Council dinner at the Australian High Commission in New Delhi. The residence is a very nice building with beautifully manicured gardens, as you would expect. The dinner was taking place under a large marquee in the garden and everything was going swimmingly until a rip roaring storm stampeded through town. These storms charge in from the nearby Rajasthan Desert so orifice clogging dust and high winds precede torrential rain. As the storm picked up steam (and everything else in its path), the guests decamped from the marquee to the residence and watched the carnage as trees were stripped of leaves and what wasn’t nailed down disappeared into the distance, including the marquee. It finished up in Pakistan. Not the country but over the wall and into the back yard of the Pakistan High Commission which was and still is, next door. Afterwards the garden looked like the Pakistanis had bombed it in retaliation for launching surface to surface missiles at them cunningly disguised as a large tent.

The next night my agent and I flew down to Madras as it was known then and is still known now, by the locals. I think only cricket commentators and politicians call it Chennai. As luck would have it (or not as the case may be), we encountered one of these storms in a most inconvenient place – a few thousand feet above the ground.

To make matters worse the plane was rather old – a 737 1 Series which was so old it didn’t have overhead lockers; it had a luggage rack. Having flown many times before and having learnt what is a normal sound or movement (and by process of elimination, what isn’t), I felt and heard the plane take off at maximum throttle in a steep climb then after a short time, ease back on the throttle and lessen the elevation as we gradually began climbing to cruising altitude. Talk about being lulled into a false sense of security because a few seconds later, the engines roared back to life and the nose went up so high I thought we were on our way to the moon.

Then it began. And it seems a little wimpy looking back but I was pretty certain this dilapidated old plane was going to disintegrate and I didn’t have a parachute. I had never to that point and probably have only one other time since, experienced such mid-air violence as the plane was thrown around the sky. And the no smoking sign was on so I couldn’t take up smoking again and my agent couldn’t get the top off his bottle of scotch lest the contents finish up all over the surrounding passengers. And as I looked out of the window I could have sworn I saw a marquee fly past in the sandy gloom. I can only assume the pilot had decided that the best plan of attack was to spear right through the middle of this storm. Going round it or under it was for cowards.

Now my then agent and still good friend is a pretty cool customer who was quite used to the privations of travel round the Indian sub-continent as well as the vagaries of the weather. When I saw the look on his face I knew we were dead. But that was not to be because after what seemed like an hour and was probably ten minutes at most we hit clear air. The rattling rivets that were still in their holes relaxed back into place, ashen faced strangers silently started at each other, the relief on their faces palpable and couples pledged to never take each other for granted ever again, ever.

That first Oranjeboom went down like altar wine when we hit the bar at the Taj Coromandel a couple of hours later. The blood pressure was back to normal after about a week.

A Bevvy in the Boulders – Part 2

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Since the CB and I decided to do a reverse tree-change and move from a semi-rural acreage setting to a townhouse closer to the city one thing we have missed is the view or in our case, views. There’s the horizontal (or slightly elevated) view to the hills in the distance and the vertical view to the incomprehensible splendour of the Milky Way. We hadn’t seen the Southern Cross and its Pointers for four years because of the blocking effect of city lights but a few nights ago, there they were.

Stanthorpe only has around 5000 people and we were out of town anyway so if he’d been there, Darryl Kerrigan would have been in his element – how’s the serenity. This piece of trivia would not have registered with those of you who haven’t immersed yourselves in the Aussie cultural equivalent of the Renaissance, a movie called “The Castle”. Watch it. Here’s a taste.

And I mention the Southern Cross because it’s very much part of the Australian psyche (and flag). And it and Orion’s Belt are the only celestial constellations I can identify.

Day 2 was a wine tour – all day. Four wineries and the Queensland College of Wine Tourism for lunch. That was about 38 wines all up. For professional tasters, that’s all in a day’s work. For amateurs like us it’s a serious challenge which was approached with all of the grit and determination we could muster. There were four of us (plus the driver) on our tour, the CB and I and a honeymooning couple who spent their time on the back seat of the mini-bus while the CB and I admired the scenery.

For the pros, wine tasting is all about the five “s’s” (pronounced “esses”), as in swirl, sniff, sip, swoosh (round the mouth) and spit. For us amateurs there’s a variation on this theme that goes swirl, sniff, sip, swallow, serve (the next one). And by the end of the day you might find the real amateurs doing the sip, swirl, swallow, sip, swallow, sprint, spew.

In these wine growing and wine making areas with lots of cellar doors you’d have to assume that, especially on the weekends and in high season there will be at least a few half pissed tourists on the roads. Which could explain the signs near all of the main intersections which tell drivers to stay on the left because this is Australia. Apparently these signs are all over the country but this is the only place I’ve noticed them and also apparently it’s because of the proliferation (in non-covid times) of fruit picking backpackers. In these covid times some fruit rots on the vines because our entitled youth and unencumbered older types are too lazy to pick fruit for $25/hour. There’s a strawberry runner farm in the area which employs about 600 people at peak times but….despair.

The CB and I would have offered to help out but with my dodgy back and her bursitis ravaged shoulder the best we could do was make a financial contribution so we signed up for wine clubs and bought a car full of produce, mostly of the liquid variety. And as previously mentioned, the Ugg Boot Lady got a couple of sales (four if you count each boot). And we bought Christmas stuff (and chocolate) from the Christmas farm because it’s May already and we don’t want to leave it too late.

Back at the cabin, after a long day supporting the local vintners, it was time to relax in front of the fire and not go to the bar because it had closed at 5.00pm. Incidentally, we did attempt to grab a cleansing ale at about 4.55pm but the lady behind the bar assured me that they closed at 4.45pm. I pointed in the direction of the reception area and reminded her that there was a sign there that said it closed at 5.00pm but she assured me it said 4.45pm. It didn’t and when I went to take a picture of it the next morning for this blog, it had disappeared like so many conservative Twitter accounts.

We had plenty of wine and beer but there was a principle involved here. After dismally failing to invoke the principle it was back to the cabin and the fire. It was then that the CB and I discovered we would make useless arsonists. It only took about four goes and a box of fire starters to get a decent fire going. I should know better because fires burn oxygen and as the oxygen content in the room drops, sleep creeps up. And that was that.

A Bevvy in the Boulders – Part 1

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Well the xhild (her new pronoun – no, actually it’s a typo – the “x” is next to the “c”) bride and I have finally escaped, albeit for just a few days. Our travel plans were decimated last year for obvious reasons and this year hasn’t been any better. So we loaded up the car and hit the road. Of course any excursion that involves more than one night away from home rivals D-Day for logistical complexity because you never know when you might need…… (fill in name of appropriate item or inappropriate as the case may be, a truffle trowel, for example). We did however manage to leave enough space in the car for a few cases of wine and that space was duly filled because wine tasting was the primary motivation for visiting that particular part of the world.

We stayed at a rather rustic establishment that came with cabins and its own micro-brewery just outside Stanthorpe, a pretty little town (if rather rocky – it’s in an area called the Granite Belt) in south east Queensland once famous for apples and snow. It is just about the only place in sub-tropical Queensland where it does snow occasionally.

Incidentally the little town just outside Stanthorpe called Applethorpe has a school which they have self-titled “the coolest school in Queensland”. Applethorpe has the cold and the apples covered whereas (and here’s the geologist in me making a rare appearance), Stanthorpe is named after Stannum, the Latin word for tin which was mined in the area (in the late 1800’s) before they started growing apples. And those of you who remember any chemistry will know that the chemical symbol for tin is Sn.

Now onto more frivolous musings. Oh yes, I almost forgot. Stanthorpe is now known for apples, snow and wine.

Incidentally, back on the travel thing, just to show how out of touch the CB and I are, we went to a bottle shop in Stanthorpe on the first afternoon and as we browsed we separately asked the attendant if they had any local wines and he pointed us to the section which had a large sign over it which read “Local Wines”. Now as any regular traveler will know, it’s advisable to have your metaphorical antennae up when you’re out of your homely comfort zone. You need to be able to notice stuff. However this was Stanthorpe not Mogadishu but we have been out of practice so both claim immunity from accusations of stupidity. And why were we buying wine from a bottle shop when there were dozens of cellar doors within staggering distance? It was the first afternoon prior to visiting any local wineries so we needed supplies to get us through the next few hours.

But here’s the real reason we needed to stock-up. The place where we were staying had a very nice bar which shuts at 5.00pm. Let me say that again. The bar opens at 10.00am and shuts at 5.00pm. Not 5.00am but 5.00pm. The first day, we got there with enough time to order one drink. The bar lady asked me if I wanted a 10oz beer, a 15oz or a pint. Nice lady, stupid question. If she’d offered me a bucket after a day of driving and considerable stress, I’d have taken that.

Stress, you say. Yes, something happened between arriving in Stanthorpe and getting to our accommodation, apart from the mercy stop at the bottle shop. This was something I had never done or even contemplated in my many years of existence. I bought a pair of Ugg boots. These have long been considered, along with flanno’s and mullets as integral parts of bogan culture. And I wouldn’t or hadn’t ever contemplated such a flagrant act of cultural appropriation, apart from eating Indian (and Thai, Chinese, Japanese etc) food, driving German cars, drinking ….well any nationality actually….beer (apart from non-alcoholic Iranian beer which I tried once in Iran, funnily enough, and tastes like what I would assume camel’s piss tastes like) and on and on the list goes. Having said that, the inner bogan does emerge occasionally. My wife and daughter once scolded me for wearing jeans and thongs (the ones that go on your feet not in your arse). Who knew?

So a bridge too far, or in this case more like an elephant’s foot too far, had been crossed and I had succumbed to warm feet syndrome. I have never been a fashionista and I’m as likely to follow fashion trends as I am to go bungee jumping. And by buying Ugg boots, I broke the bungee.

More to follow.

A Contract Job

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It’s difficult to conceptualise this now but when Bob Hawke, Australia’s then prime minister and previously the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, sacked a bunch of airline pilots for striking, all hell broke loose. The pilots were members of a union and the number 1 card-carrying union member in the country told them to take a hike.

This was such a long time ago that one of the planes that was brought in to replace our grounded pilotless planes to help move people around, was from Yugoslavia. Astute observers of history will be aware that Yugoslavia doesn’t exist anymore. The Yugoslavian divorce started in 1991 and some would argue it’s still underway which doesn’t auger well for Bill and Melinda Gates who have much more treasure to divvy up than the Balkans ever had.

Our pilots’ strike was in 1989 and I remember the time vividly which is just as well because I am about to tell you a story to which the pilot’s strike was of peripheral importance and the geopolitical strife brewing in Belgrade was of no significance whatsoever.

However what I am about to relate to you has some significance to what’s happening today trade-wise but you’ll have to bear with me here because it may appear that I am drawing a very long bow. Long story short, China is busy blocking exports of various Australian products to its markets and other countries are stepping in to take up the slack. One of them is India which is taking more and more of our coal which is currently persona-non-grata in China. The Chinese also don’t want our wine (that’s a heroic sacrifice on the part of the Chinese authorities), our lobsters (ditto) and a whole range of other things, the latest of which appears to be liquified natural gas. But back to coal.

The groundwork for India’s growing imports of Australian coal was laid by a few intrepid Australian companies and a small band of marketing brothers back in the 1980’s. I was one of them. And the first foundation stone was laid in 1989. I fear the introduction to this story will be longer than the story itself but here we go.

Three companies and six coal marketers had been negotiating with the Indian Government steel authority throughout 1988 and 1989. The prize was the first long term coal contract that the Indian Government had ever signed. As it turned out they awarded five and our company got two of them. The business between India and Australia has since grown exponentially, hence the above reference to stepping in.

Now I don’t know whether it was naivety or mischievousness but our counterparts used to think they could call us over to India as if our office was across the street. Flights were few and far between back then so getting in and out at short notice was problematic at the best of times. And a visa was required.

So, it’s 8.00pm on Sunday evening, October 3rd 1989 and my wife and I are relaxing with a glass of wine (her) and a beer (me) when the phone rings. It’s my boss and he advises me he’s been talking to our agent who has been talking to our potential long term customer in India and they told our agent who told my boss who’s telling me that they want to sign the long term contracts on Tuesday October 5th. Did I mention that there was a pilot’s strike. And I didn’t have a visa. Or a signing authority for contracts the size of which I was being asked to sign. What happens next is called focussing the mind….or operating in a state of panic.

I had an Indian mate in Melbourne who was mates with the Indian consulate visa guy in Sydney (as luck would have it) so I rang him immediately and asked him for a favour – contact the consulate in Sydney, tell them what’s happening and ask them if I can drop by some time tomorrow (morning hopefully) and get my passport visa stamped. This process normally takes a week or two. I then rang our agent in New Delhi and asked him to book me a hotel room for a couple of nights. There was nothing else I could do that night so I either had eight more beers or went straight to bed – that bit I can’t remember.

First thing next morning I rang our travel agent and asked her to book me flights to New Delhi…..today. Oh and did I mention I need enough time in Sydney to go to the Indian Consulate in North Sydney to pick up a visa then get back to the airport (in south Sydney) with enough time to get an international flight. When she had stopped laughing and picked up the telephone off the floor she asked if I was aware that the pilot’s strike had somewhat restricted the availability of seats on planes. But being the professional that she was, she proceeded to get me a seat facing the side of a plane rather than the front. It was on an army C130 Hercules from Brisbane to Sydney. Sydney to Bangkok/Singapore/Hong Kong and Bangkok/Singapore/Hong/Kong to New Delhi were works in progress.

On arriving at the airport I rang my boss (no mobile phones back then kids) and asked him to organise a signing authority and to fax it (no email either) to our agent’s office in New Delhi and then rang my mate in Melbourne regarding my visa. He said it was being arranged. I got on the C130 and headed off to Sydney, not knowing if this adventure was going to stop there.

At Sydney airport I was advised that our travel agent had me on a flight to Bangkok (but Bangkok/New Delhi was still up in the air – yuk yuk) so I rushed off to the Indian Consulate, got my visa, rushed back to the airport in time to get on the plane and slump down in my (business class) seat with a glass of champagne and relax because there was nothing else I could do until Bangkok.

Eight hours later the nice lady at the transit desk in Bangkok airport advised that I had a booking on the next Thai International flight to New Delhi, in a couple of hours…..first class – love that travel agent. It had all come together in less than 24 hours.

What happened next was classic India. After moving heaven and earth and arriving in New Delhi in the early hours of Tuesday morning my agent and I fronted at the steel company office at 9.00am and were told……they weren’t ready for us and could we come back tomorrow. Now India can be a frustrating place at the best of times but in this case the prize was beyond valuable so we bit our respective lips and retired to the hotel to wait. Wednesday morning – same. Thursday morning – same. Friday morning they were ready to sign. But there was another twist and it didn’t involve travel because I had a bit of spare time to organise flights out and had taken the precaution of booking out on Friday evening, to be safe.

The other company marketing managers and their agents and me and mine were all pacing in the waiting room in which we had all spent far too much of our lives up to that point. After the contracts had been typed (yes typed) then checked and amended where necessary we would be asked in one by one to sign. After metaphorically drawing the short straw, my two contracts were numbers four and five in the queue. By mid-afternoon we were just starting on four. By about 6.00pm we were ready to start five when the steel company’s senior manager asked me if we could come back on Monday to do the last one.

Through gritted teeth I advised that in the circumstances I would prefer to not spend one minute more in that office than I had to. I may have said something a little more polite but the message was the same nonetheless. So at my insistence the typists and my counterparts soldiered on and we finished about 10.00pm on Friday night. Then the power failed so the lifts were out and we had to walk down 13 flights of stairs but I didn’t care as I had two contracts worth upwards of A$100million in my bag.

I don’t remember anything about the flights home but my log (which I kept for all of my business trips) tells me I came back first class on KLM to Singapore and on Qantas to Brisbane. I can’t remember if I was authorised to fly at the pointy end back than but that time, I didn’t care.

Taking a Tumble

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If you lived in our townhouse complex you may have been privy to a quite ridiculous situation a few days ago. Let me set the scene.

The child bride has bursitis in her left shoulder and has recently had a cortisone injection so her left arm may as well be made of wood, such is its uselessness.

And yesterday, after lunch at the excellent Birches restaurant, it started to rain. Being the chivalrous knight that I am, I went down the ramp to the carpark first and towards the bottom, turned to tell Mum and the CB to wait out of the rain while I went to get the car. As I turned, I put my foot halfway onto a small step, twisted my ankle and went down like Monica Lewinsky. Unfortunately there was no Clinton of any persuasion to break my fall, only a concrete path and it was not happy to see my right shoulder, right elbow and right hip so took to them like Mike Tyson to anybody.

Consequently, today I feel like I’ve just played the All Blacks….at my age.

So, there are industrial bins for our household rubbish. The lids are at about nipple level for me and top hat level for the rather diminutive CB. With both of us being appendage challenged, as in being unable to lift our respective right and left arms more than about 10 degrees we each had to take one small bag of rubbish to the big bins. I lifted the lid with my left hand and the CB threw the bags in with her right.

In the mining game we call this double handling. In our townhouse complex it’s called pathetic if you don’t know the circumstances.

Fortunately I don’t watch football with my hip and shoulder although they do together comprise a rather brutal function in the uniquely Australian version of football (or “footy” as it’s colloquially called). You can google “hip and shoulder” to see what I mean.

And I don’t need them to drink beer either as I have a perfectly normal functioning mirror image pair on the left side of my body, not that I need my hip to get a glass to my mouth, but it does get me to the fridge.The next challenge is to see if I can slide a guitar into that 10 degree gap.

Your boundless sympathy is much appreciated.

Do You Remember When…

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Back on 9/11 (this year) I intended writing one of those “do you remember where you were when….” essays but I forgot so I’m writing it now. I finished the (paying) work I do each week yesterday and the (non-paying) garden work half an hour ago and it’s raining so I thought I’d impose a bit of cancel-culture on procrastination to fill in a few minutes until beer time. Incidentally, that’s the only time you’ll see the words “cancel-culture” here other than as a target of disdain and ridicule.

There are very few events in human history that warrant remembering what you were doing when they occur because most of those memorable moments are the reasons you remember as in, I remember what I was doing the day I got married – I was getting married.

No we’re talking about disconnected events fusing together into an unforgettable nuclear marriage of inconvenience. For me, only three immediately spring to mind.

The first was when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd 1963. I was a small boy getting on a ship in Southampton in the UK with my family to travel to Australia. A note was left on each table when we fronted for our first meal onboard advising us of what had happened. As master of ceremonies at one of my brothers’ wedding, also on November 22nd I was able to remind him that an event of earth-shattering infamy happened on that day, some 30 odd years before. Also, Kennedy got shot.

The second was the actual day of 9/11. I was in Seoul, Korea and had been out with a work colleague, our agent and some customers for dinner and drinks and on returning to our hotel our Korean agent received a phone call from his wife, advising him that a plane had flown into a building in New York – no other details. After a suitably shocked exchange of comments we retired to the bar. On returning to my room and turning on the TV, the full horror of the events that day were revealed.

Seoul is a garrison town for the US army and the hotel I was staying in is next door to the imposing Seoul World Trade Centre. It’s not uncommon to see military activity in Seoul both in the air and on the ground at the best of times. At the worst of times it was chaos. Organized chaos I’m sure but you can imagine the traffic when all but one entrance to the very large army base are shut. And there were more than the usual number of choppers in the air, many buzzing around the building next door, not to mention the troops on the ground. Seoul is after all, only about 50km from North Korea.

Incidentally, I’ve been to Korea over 60 times (I used to keep count) and have never been to the DMZ. The Child Bride has been to Korea once and when she went to the DMZ she brought me back a hat.

After doing what we had to do that day we made our way to the airport to catch our flight to Osaka to connect with our Ansett International flight to Brisbane. Ansett was doing it really tough right then and rumours were swirling that they were about to go under. As we flew into Kansai airport, I saw the big bird with the “A” on the tail – relief. After boarding (and getting upgraded to first class – some good things did happen on that trip) I was privy to a conversation between two flight attendants which filled me with, not so much dread considering what had happened the day before, but considerable disquiet. They weren’t sure whether the plane would actually leave Osaka. Fortunately, it did – relief.

Our flight was scheduled to fly from Kansai Airport to Brisbane and then on to Sydney. Bearing in mind that the airline was on its last legs (wings? wheels?), the announcements as we approached Brisbane went like this:

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Please ensure your belongings are stowed….etc

A few minutes later…..

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Would all connecting passengers please deplane and re-board when the announcement is made. We’ll be in Brisbane for approximately one hour.

A few minutes later…..

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Would all connecting passengers deplane and wait for an announcement regarding your onward journey.

A few minutes later…..

This flight will now terminate in Brisbane. The ground staff will advise arrangements for your onward connection to Sydney.

A few minutes later…..

Please be advised that all of the passengers heading to Sydney will have to make your own onward arrangements. We don’t know how we’re getting there either.

The airline had expired while we were travelling between Japan and Australia.

And the third time was only recently so only time will tell whether it sticks with me but I’m betting it will. It was one of those occasions that will only happen once in your life – my father died.

My mother and one of my brothers and I had been to see Dad in the morning and it was not a pretty sight. He was in stage 7 of Alzheimer’s which means an inability to swallow, amongst other things. Mum struggled to even look at the handsome athletic man of her youth now a shriveled shell of a man struggling to breathe. We left after a few minutes and returned to her home about 10 minutes drive away from the nursing home Dad had resided in for the past few years.

We had been there for about twenty minutes when Mum’s phone rang. Now those of you who have frequented nursing homes will know that a lot of the staff are Asian, in this case many were from the Philippines. My Mum still speaks with a distinct Manchester accent but, ironically struggles with other accents. She hates ringing the phone company or the electricity company because she will generally find herself talking to someone in Manila or Bangalore. Anyway she could not understand what the lady who rang was saying. If I hadn’t been there to take the call maybe she still wouldn’t be aware that Dad died just after we left.

I cheated a bit with the third example. It wasn’t a disconnected (from my life) event that imposed  itself on me to the extent that it never leaves but, what can I say other than I won’t forget that day.

I just thought of another. The day Gough Whitlam was sacked as Australia’s Prime Minister on November 11th 1975, I was at university. There was a great rending of garments, wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the communist student union types. My lot, we did what we normally did – went to the pub.

St Crispin’s Day

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Apologies for the history lesson (and the recent paucity of posts – go back to the start for the reason why) but you may or may not know that today is St Crispin’s Day.

So what, I hear you ask?

Well, some rather famous things happened on this day.

So what I hear you ask again There are 365 days in a normal year and calendars of various descriptions have been around for thousands of years so it’s probable that something of note happened on every day of the years in human history. January 10th, for example was the anniversary of the CB and my nuptials, just shading the birthday of Pat Benatar for significance. But I digress.

St Crispin’s Day has religious significance obviously – the “St” bit gives that away. It commemorates the martyrdom of Crispin and his twin Crispinian in 286. They were beheaded by the Romans for preaching Christianity. Rather a severe consequence for something so seemingly insignificant but such were the times. But I digress (again) as that’s not the focus of today’s lecture.

Today in 1854 was the ill-fated but heroic Charge of the Light Brigade during the Battle of Balaclava in Crimea. But more importantly it was the day the Battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415. And if you’ve read this far, you’ve got to the crux of the story.

If you haven’t already read it, I’m going to share with you one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches. How did we segue to that you are asking? Well in his play Henry V, King Henry (or Harry as he liked to be called) makes the famous Band of Brothers speech just before the vastly outnumbered British take on the French at Agincourt.

Harry’s would be one of the most inspirational pre-battle speeches (you can keep your “because no one can take away our freedom”, Mel Gibson) in history, if it wasn’t made up by Shakespeare. But fiction of non-fiction, it is said to have inspired Churchill’s famous “Never was so much owed by so many to so few” Battle of Britain speech and many others. So I am reproducing it here for your reading and edumacational pleasure. It starts with the King’s cousin lamenting the lack of numbers:

WESTMORLAND. O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

KING. What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin, Westmorland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmorland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words—
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester—
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Be inspired!

Not Happy!!

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted because it’s a bit of a struggle at the moment. As you dear reader know, I try to lace my missives with the quirky and ridiculous and funny. While the second of these currently applies to world events in spades (am I still allowed to say that?) it’s the allowance of a piece of Seattle to be hived off into a new country type of ridiculous and not the frocks worn to the Oscars type of ridiculous that I’m talking about here. As a consequence I’m mad as hell as my previous post probably indicates although it has to be said the intransigence of the “authorities” has moved on from a mere virus to a threat to Western Civilization. And aren’t the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians and the North Koreans loving it.

I’m mad as hell because I cannot imagine a parallel universe where what is happening now around the world and especially in the USA would be tolerated by sane people. A very very small minority of morons is being allowed to dictate terms to the silent majority because left wing politicians (where they have jurisdiction) and a complicit traitorous media are supporting them and promoting them and level-headed law-makers are doing nothing about it. And you want me to kneel because of my white privilege? How about you just fuck off.

Yesterday Victor Davis Hanson said that the wind went out of the #MeToo sails when Joe Biden was accused of sexual assault. When it’s one of your team and that person can’t be jettisoned as collateral damage like Harvey Weinstein was, the hypocrites on the left are as toothless as a sock-puppet. Watching various A through F grade celebrities splutter and bluster when confronted with this inconvenient Biden truth (remind me again of the Kavanaugh fiasco) makes me laugh….with disgust. As a corollary it’s likely that the coalition of thrill-seeking middle-class teenagers, Antifa scum, perpetual student rent-a-crowds, gang members and lazy, good for nothing drug-addled chancers will only be forced to disperse the day after they are given Nancy Pelosi’s address. Then Democrat governors and mayors in cities that have been controlled by the Democrats for many decades will be ordered to re-take control. If Trump hasn’t already done so.

The irony of what is going on across the USA is that the people most affected by the riots in places like Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, St Louis and Washington DC – residents and small business owners, black, brown and white – are the people who regularly and monotonously vote for the clowns who are allowing this to happen. Nobody deserves to be innocently caught up in a self indulgent block-destruction party and see their life’s work go up in flames especially when Hollywood shit-bags are providing funding for the occasionally arrested arsonists, thieves and thugs who have taken your life’s work off you. But if you keep voting for them, my sympathy only stretches so far.

And where do you think all of that money that Hollywood and beneath contempt, virtue signalling corporates are donating is going? Into legal-aid funds? To feed the inhabitants of CHAZ or CHOP or CHUMP or whatever the hell name the “warlord” who runs the joint has dreamt up today? To pay for the removal of garbage? To house the homeless? To buy weapons (and drugs and attendant luxuries) for Antifa? If you chose the last option go to the top of the class (when the school reopens). If you think that’s too harsh tell me who has control of the bank accounts and who their auditor is.

I just hope for their sake, that all of the skipping and jumping, selfie taking, isn’t it all such a spiffing wheeze with all the like, chanting and like, marching and like, swearing (not too loudly), fresh faced (but masked), outer suburban teeny-boppers who just love, like, sticking it to the man as long as they can borrow daddy’s car, aren’t still hanging around after bed-time when patience runs out and the vigilantes arrive or the legally sanctioned shit really hits the fan because their new chums from CHUMP most definitely won’t have their backs – more likely their back-packs.

I Don’t Remember Voting For This?

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Let’s get one thing straight about this virus panic. The people making the decisions and the people enforcing the new “rules” have no skin in the game. Politicians, run-of-the-mill bureaucrats, health bureaucrats and police are not taking pay cuts (okay, there is an occasional example of tokenism) and are not in danger of losing their jobs. In fact their pay and the subsidisation of their jobs comes from the very people who they are destroying with their decisions and enforcement of “rules” which are not real laws because they have not been legislated. More on that later.

It makes my blood boil seeing state premiers parroting the old better safe than sorry clichés like a bunch of boof-head footballers after a game running through the phrases they have been told they are allowed to say (and the only ones they can remember) by the club PR machine while not actually saying anything of value.

People are getting mightily pissed off with the imposition of poorly explained and in some cases, useless restrictions like not being allowed to play golf. Don’t these clowns know how big a golf course is. Maybe they should restrict it to people with a handicap higher than 15 so they’ll know for certain that policing of social distancing rules will be totally unnecessary except at the tees after which balls will be sprayed all over the fairways and beyond.

The people who pay for everything – EVERYTHING – are being smashed through unemployment, business closures, both temporary and permanent and yes, domestic violence and suicide. Some of us in the payer category are willing to take the risk of getting life as we know it back underway, so back off those of you in the payee category. One more week, just to be doubly sure, is another business that is lost forever, another bout of depression and another smack in the mouth.

I repeat, we the ones who are taking all of the economic risks are willing to take the one in a million or three hundred thousand or whatever it is risk of catching a virus that may have no material impact on our health. So what if there’s a spike. We’re paying for the hospital and protective equipment. We’re paying the doctor’s and nurses’ salaries. You, governments all over the world, can print more money and completely fuck our economy and collectively the global economy for generations and put your hand on your heart and say “it was the virus what done it” because you are protected from the consequences.

The vast majority of these closet totalitarians have never run a business and on the left side of politics, most have never even worked in one. So we get these directives such as in stage 1 of the enlightenment, restaurants can allow 10 customers inside. The cost of opening and operating a business like a restaurant can only be covered if a majority (at least) of the seats and tables are occupied. It is cheaper to stay closed, as in the proprietor loses less than if the place opened for a small fraction of its capacity. But that is beyond the ken of our betters.

I’m reminded of the US constitution which begins with the words “We the people”. In more normal times, governments are elected by we the people based on their policies which we the people have approved through the ballot box. They then enact those policies and we the people have no excuses if we don’t like the unintended consequences which invariably occur when the actual policies begin with the words “Wouldn’t it be great if….”. Think of any green policy and that’s exactly what you get – unintended consequences. I should say that’s exactly what you would get if the electorate was collectively stupid enough to vote for those clowns. But never forget, half of the population has above average intelligence and half of the population has below average intelligence so also never forget the quote sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson – “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance”. Unfortunately we sometimes do forget and the current governments in Queensland and Victoria get elected. And the unintended consequences flow like a river.

I’m a bit of a student of American politics (the reference to their constitution may have given that away) and I never cease to be amazed at the standard of politician they elect, in many cases repeatedly. Fortunately the place is big enough to elect a majority of sensible people and the founding fathers inserted enough checks and balances in the constitution to ensure the more mutinous actions of a few (like what is happening now) are stepped on. But that doesn’t stop short term stupidity like electing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez or the governor of New York forcing nursing homes for the elderly to accept Covid-19 positive patients or giving booze and dope to the homeless as is now happening in California, all of which are being cheered on by the deranged main stream media and its cable and Hollywood lickspittles. People on the east coast and the left coast despise the people in flyover country and you can see why the feelings are mutual. And why there are now uprisings by the people against the ludicrous lockdowns in areas where the only virus is what you get on your computer from porn sites.

Speaking of Victoria, their government is the closest we have to a pack of rabid socialist totalitarians so as you can imagine, they are loving this virus. Governments of all stripes (especially the Victorian government) are ordering we the people around and fining us (and worse) if we don’t obey. I don’t remember voting for this shit. The ease with which the population has agreed to be confined to their homes by the imposition of threats must be a thing of wonder to those with dictatorial ambitions. A coup would be a piece of cake.

And I understand the three strikes rule will be implemented in Victoria in a couple of months if there is a second wave of infections. Three social distancing infractions and you will be executed. And all the infected will be banished like lepers to Philip Island, to live out their miserable lives in isolation where they can’t steal the oxygen from and pollute the bloodlines of the chosen ones. Godwin’s Law says that in an argument, whoever compares the other with Hitler first, loses. I wonder if the same applies to eugenics.

Corona Crazy

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The CB and I are into day 12 of our two week lock-down. We started to feel it after only two days. At that point we were starting to get desperate being down to our last internet, three laptops, one desktop, two smart TV’s, Netflix, Foxtel, Stan, free-to-air TV (whatever that is), 2 smart phones, 7 guitars and associated paraphernalia, a cupboard full of food, a fridge full of beer (and some food), a wine rack full of wine, countless toilet rolls, a house full of comfortable furniture and two children at our beck and call. It was touch and go whether we would survive the next 12 days.

But here we are with only two days left. To those who have been going stir crazy, I say harden up. It’s not that bad and if you prepared and have the mental capacity to withstand the range of deprivations dumped on us collectively by an over-zealous political sector (and I include politicians, bureaucrats and police in that over-reaching totalitarian collective), then you’ll be okay.

We aren’t in the least bit stir crazy and were perfectly okay until the two cats were returned from their “holiday” at the cattery which they endured while we were away. As usually happens, as soon as they got home they filed an eviction notice with the authorities as two people (us) had again squatted in their house. They do this every time we travel and it never works because the CB and I have more money than them and can therefore afford better lawyers. You’d think they’d learn.

But things will be back to normal in a couple of days except for the fact that stray people are now being rounded up and removed to five start hotel rooms I believe as well as being fined for exercising that sadly missed right to freedom of assembly. Compensation for this is coming in the form of money – our money being given back to us in advance because the government hasn’t taken it off us (and our kids and their kids and their kids etc) yet.

It must be great being the government. They can pump up the economy by injecting cash into it by buying back government bonds. But here’s the best bit. They just print more money to buy said bonds back. How brilliant is that. Imagine if we could all do that.