November 2018

Kalo mina: have a good month. October is over, and it so happens that I have just come across a thought from Denis Norden, a famous British comedy writer. It’s a funny kind of month, October. For the really keen cricket fan, it’s when you discover that your wife left you in May. I suppose Australian cricket fans make this somewhat sobering discovery in April.

The year is slipping (galloping) by at quite a rate now, I’m noticing. This is to be expected; what isn’t to be expected is the continuing idyllic weather in this neck of the olive and orange groves. The sun keeps on shining day after day, but there is no rain, which means the olive harvest has been affected, of course, although it’s an ‘off’ year, anyway: the olives deliver a bumper crop only every second year. What was on the trees this year dropped off to a large extent in high winds that blew about a month ago.

The world grows no better. My most recent Eureka Street pieces concern the problem of homelessness and the gun violence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (See www.eurekastreet.com.au). Extremely depressing topics, but I feel I have to at least squeak up about these things. In the meantime I tend to repeat the thought that it is more or less our duty to be as happy as we can, and to think positively about the good things that do happen. One example of this is the Muslim support expressed towards the suffering Jewish community of Pittsburgh: the former quickly raised a substantial amount of money to be given to the families of Jewish victims.

I’m also fond of quoting the famous British politician Benjamin Disraeli. For many reasons. As an American friend of mine once said: Dizzy was a gas. Many people know what Disraeli had to say about the ages of man: Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.I suppose every age and phase has its regrets, but one I have is that I was not thoughtful and radical enough when young. I seem to have sleep-walked through study and work, largely ignoring outside events way back then, but have become steadily more radical as I’ve aged. Although probably not radical enough by many standards.

But I am very much agin the government these days, especially the Australian Government. I deplore the policy that involves detention of innocent children on Nauru: how can politicians who are fathers and grandfathers sleep at night, knowing that they are responsible for this sort of action? One phone call would probably remove all children from Nauru immediately into a much more suitable environment, one that would encourage them to thrive, rather than one that seems to produce what has become known as resignation syndrome.Then there’s the matter of climate change, which the world ignores at its peril…but tell that to people currently in power in Australia.

A friend says that once upon a time politicians had standards; now, however, he thinks we are in what he calls a ‘moral bog.’ An apt phrase, I think. The so-called Christian men in power ignore the weak, the poor, the needy, not to mention the old and disabled, while pouring millions into ventures such as the Adani coal mine. Never mind the Great Barrier Reef, never mind projects involving renewable energy, never mind our children’s future. Not to mention the future of our grandchildren. One bright spot is the election of Kerryn Phelps to Wentworth, a safe Liberal seat for decades until now. Phelps may be the person to get the detained children off Nauru for once and for all.

There is a move in Britain to bring the elderly and the very young much more together in schools and care establishments, to the benefit of each group. When my late father was in a very comfortable and pleasant retirement home in suburban Melbourne, the local kindergarten children and their teachers often came to call. I was present on one of these occasions, and was struck by how successful the visit was. The oldies were impressed by the children’s natural ability to entertain. A friend recalls a similar occasion in Britain: one of the children asked an old person whether chickens have belly buttons. I imagine enlightenment followed fairly speedily.

Speaking of chickens, I recall a similar query from my eldest son, then aged about six. I was driving us all to school, and nearly crashed the car when a voice from the back asked, ‘Do chickens have eyelids?’ Of course I didn’t know, and said so. When I arrived at my school, I asked the biology teacher, who looked taken aback. ‘I’ll look it up,’ she said. We met again at recess time: ‘Yes, they have,’ she said. We learn something every day.