Musings, mutterings and bright lights

The 1960s was the age of the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and above all mass street protest on an unprecedented scale. Indeed the age of youth rebellion. But it was more than drugs, sex, and rock and roll. The Vietnam War cast a long shadow across an entire generation world-wide with rarely a day going by without front-page headlines and TV vision that brought the conflict into our living rooms. It was our first televised war. I write as a veteran of that war in 1968, the height of the war. This is my story. Firstly I must confess that I went to Vietnam as a regular soldier and not a conscript. This is deeply embarrassing and I’d find it easier to admit to having been in prison or a mental asylum. But when I was a naive 17-year-old, and quite immature, I craved travel and adventure far beyond my relatively comfortable life in Perth, Western Australia. But even in my mid teens I had heard strong arguments from a very smart frien...

I feel very uneasy about Brexit and positively alarmed at the rise of Donald Trump. Hence the following. Imagine the cry Make Germany Great Again. Such a sabre-rattling slogan would echo the war cry of the 3 rd Reich’s for a return to German supremacy and world domination. Hopefully, it would quickly be dismissed, in saner circles anyway. Conservatives generally stand for unfettered individualism; opposition to change, or what others would call progress; for king, country and nation; and for conservative "family values" or opposition to same-sex marriage to name an instance. But many conservatives dream of a return to an imagined golden age, of empire, manners and a social order to their liking.  Enter the debate for Brexit and MAGA. Brexit and MAGA are in part a sentimental yearning for a past that was blind to political correctness, to a past where right is might and might is right, and where advantage and entitlement were nature's way, the survival of the fit...

Poet's Room There are mountains, molehills, monsters and buried dust-covered memories. I open a drawer and a million bits and pieces tumble out, daring me to discard them daring me to shake them loose Give them a clean. Acres of storage clutter my life, filing cabinets and boxes and within the boxes layer upon layer of memories of money changing hands of decisions made and items taken home cozy like orphans awaiting renewal, adoption. Maladjusted memories and endless tautologies keep sparking in my addled brain. Alarm bells surround the house outside my brain I permit myself some weary sighs and sentiments abound From withering heart beats to my frontal lobes. A crisis is evolving as I scan shelves and books. Where is that missing link, that cable, that slot? That tattered copy of Leaves of Grass with a photo of Walt Whitman? Desperately lost but finally found, sometimes Where I last misplaced it. I need a secretarial service, for lost and  found...

“Sleep no more. Macbeth has murdered sleep.” I don’t have the murderous ambitions of a Macbeth but I do, like many, have issues with sleep. I could certainly do with more of it. Even before retirement, I had a night or two every weeknight where insomnia took hold and the work day that followed was tiring. Time to look at murdered sleep. My nocturnal habits are becoming a challenge as I wrestle to get my six hours worth of sleep. Forget about preparing for bed routines. I have absolutely no problem getting to sleep, it's remaining and getting back to sleep that's the issue. Maybe it's my aging bladder that stirs after about 3 hours of sleep and requires a trip to the loo, after which I struggle to resume sleeping. Certainly, as we get older we need to deal with weaker bladders but, according to my GP, we need less sleep. With no work to attend to, we can always doze or catnap to recover later. Not true when we have meetings and chores in the waking hours.  ...

Fire and Fury, Inside the Trump White House , would better be subtitled A Comedy of Errors in the West Wing . It is about what has played out in both the Trump Administration and even in the Trump campaign to win office.  This can be summarised is in Sean Spicer’s lament:  “You can’t make this shit up”.   For all his bluster Emperor Trump’s New Clothes are badly soiled and the stench of incompetence carry from the Oval Office to the corridors of power in the West Wing.  Fire and Fury is a rattling good read although depressing: it’s about the same Donald we have long known and loathed for some time: the Donald whose mantra is you’re fired. This mantra should apply to him. Now it's totally predictable that Trump brushes the book aside as fake news, his usual line when news stories don’t flatter his colossal ego. He tries to discredit the author, Michael Wolff by saying that he made it all up, but to repeat Spicer’s words,   like the in...

I’m not known for my sartorial splendour and have largely spent my life dressing down for occasions of all kinds. Dress: informal has always suited me, as I'm a casual sort of guy. Friends have remarked, how can this be so when your brother Tony has specialised in upmarket men’s clothing. Easy, we have lived and worked in different worlds. My indifference to clothes goes back to my university days, to the times when I brushed up with the alternative life. It seems that my blood hasn't diluted much since my hippy days. Shakespeare was perhaps speaking tongue in cheek, in Hamlet, when his character, Polonius, pompously said to his son Laertes, “Clothes maketh the man.”  Straighten that collar son. How can you expect to make a deal dressed like that.  I’ve been fortunate and have never had to dress up for work. I was an English teacher for over 30 years and only ever wore a tie once when I was sent by my organisation, as a Vietnam War veteran, to represent them in an AN...

I can’t imagine life without my Kindle although I haven’t always been a great lover of books. School bored me and I learned to read largely through the comics I collected and swapped in my early years. In my late teens, I was starting to read books with earnest and rarely ventured anywhere without a paperback on hand. Even as a soldier in the field in the Vietnam War I carried a book, to read when safe, and then to swap with others.  The same dependence on a having a book packed applies today. As a university student, I belatedly discovered literature, my major, and intoxicated browsed the shelves of the Uni Bookshop searching for what I could afford to buy next. Of course, garage sales and markets quickly became another source of cheap reading matter. My personal library grew alarmingly making moving house, moving interstate, or overseas a grim business as I didn’t want to part with any precious books. It was understood that all books with literary merit were there to ...