Scammed!

Tags

computers, scams

1. Ring me at 8.30, just as I'm getting ready to retreat for the night.
2. Tell me my Windows gateways are damaged.
3. Quote me my licence ID number.
4. When I become cagey, threaten a complete breakdown of my computer.
5. When I say I want to talk with my computer advisor, tell me he has neither the access nor the skills.
6. Show me a great long list of error warnings, and insist that I look at every one, even though I don't have a clue what they mean.
7. Repeat that you are based in Newtown Sydney, and that your name is David and that I can ring this number to check (except that I'm already on the phone to you.)
8. Tell me my firewall is not … something.
9. Ask for money.
10. Tell me that payment is through the Bank of Baroda.
11. Reassure me that your name is George, and I can ring this number…
12. Now you have me comatose, tell me the clean up of my computer will take about 2 hours, but I don't need to sit there with it.
13. Be aware that when I return to wakefulness tomorrow, scepticism flourishes. I ring my computer advisor, change my bank password and cancel my credit card.

 

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Little things give great delight

Tags

illuminated stair well, parsley

I don't need much to give my mind delights that I can revisit in deep night with deep pleasure. Mind you, I also wonder about a mind that finds such easy, minute enjoyment.

Stair light

It all began when the light above the stove blew. Over three days of greasy groping, I worked out how to slide the cover off and remove the dead globe. My confidence grew.

At the bottom of my stairs I have a very blingy mini-chandelier. For ten years it has been globeless and I've fumbled my way upstairs in the dark, or made a huge effort to remember to take my head-torch on a rare after-dark journey. Why didn't I replace the globe? It looked like an odd size and I didn't want a collection of misfits. To peer under the chandelier skirt required me to balance on a milk crate on one of those turning-corners, wedge-shaped stairs. All too hard!

Until a recent return-from-Warsaw access of fix-the-house. I risked the balancing act; ascertained that it was a bayonet pin I needed and risked spending $5 on a globe that might be wrong. I balanced again, vicariously this time, dragooning a passing visitor, and watched as he twisted the globe into place. Suddenly the dark abyss of the stair well became a warm pool of light, and I developed the habit of switching the light on every time I passed the top of the stairs, gazing into the light pool as I do into rock pools.

Having had the let-there-be-light experience, I became addicted. Three outside lights had also gone dark, so I called the electrician to check and re-illuminate them too.

 

Parsley

Driving home from book club and a sleepover, I decided I'd better buy the two new tyres that I probably needed for my Queensland trip. I didn't want to. I was in the middle of finalising flights and accommodation for Warsaw and I needed an uncluttered mind for final decisions. But I didn't want a blow-out on the Pacific Highway either.

So I pulled into Glasshouse Rocks Rd, and at the trye replacers I found an unexpected outdoor office space where I could sit at a table in the sun under my straw hat and make those decisions and bookings via my iPad. I even tracked down the link to information about applying for a 10 year Polish visa, confident that my one-year Visa D was in the mail. I had time to soak up the sun and watch the passing parade: the man, strapped for cash, weighing up options at the counter in a slow drawl: the woman with black nail polish on her toenails and mobile in hand; the car that stopped and five minutes later engine-coughed; the old couple who had to release themselves from their vehicle slowly and uncertainly.

As I sat idly and a bit sun-dopey, I saw a flourishing patch of parsley in the most unlikely place. It was growing out of the paving hard against the brick wall. It matched my gold standard for parsley, in the garden at the Blue Earth cafe in Bodalla: thick, green, tightly curled, watered occasionally by hand but mostly by heaven, and obviously finding that place in the sun as congenial as I did.

I left with two new tyres and a bunch of parsley to sprinkle thickly over Saturday morning's steamed veggies.

 

 

 

 

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In praise of young men

Tags

"The transfixed", Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Darwin, George Raper, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Nicholson, wombats

Usually I collect stories of ninety year olds who run marathons, sail down the Ganges with their sketch books, finally and reluctantly give up cycling, graduate with a doctorate or even take up line dancing.

But suddenly I’ve found myself with a collection of the stories of young men who’ve done things that catch the imagination.

The unlikely standard bearer for this troop is Peter Nicholson. As a lad of 16, while he was at school at Timbertop, the exclusive wilderness school in Victoria, he spent his nights down wombat burrows, learning about their habits to such an extent that he is still cited in wombat research today. I first read about him years ago in Australian wildlife, one of those buy-a-magazine-a-month-and-build-them-up-into-an-encyclopedia deals. Unlike most things I read, it lodged in an easy-recall part of my brain, so I’ve been collecting information about him on and off ever since.

What impressed me is the daring of his enterprise; the focus and thoroughness of his explorations; his youth; and the covert blessing the school gave to his night-time absences.

Charles Darwin is famous for many things. However, as I read The voyage of the Beagle recently, it was his youth that I was in awe of, and not only his youth but the vastness of his knowledge. He was interested in geology, botany, biology and had already at the age of 22 read voraciously and entered into correspondence with experts in each of these fields. Then he embarked on a five-year journey around the world, exploring on land whenever the opportunity arose and speculating with boundless curiosity about everything he saw.

Rimbaud was a grubby youth, morally and physically, prowling the underbelly of France from the time he was 13. Although he gave up writing poetry at 20, he is remembered as a great poet. None of my preconceptions about him prepared me for the empathy in The transfixed, which certainly doesn’t read  like the work of an adolescent wild one. Black in the snow and fog, at the great lighted air-shaft, their bums / rounded, on their knees, five little ones – what anguish! – watch the baker making heavy white bread.

An idle conversation in my local book-shop introduced me to Patrick Leigh Fermor. When he was 17, he decided to walk from Holland to Constantinople instead of completing school and set out in winter in 1933. As he travelled across Central Europe in the days before the war, he slept rough on many occasions, but he also overnighted with aristocrats, farmers and monks, finding surprisingly few hints of things to come. When he died recently he was in his nineties and still working on the final volume of his young man’s travels.

George Raper is the latest in my pantheon. He sailed at 17 with the First Fleet. By then he’d already been at sea for 3 years. When he arrived in the fledgling settlement, he sat with his watercolours and painted the flowers and birds around Sydney Cove with the tablet paints from his new paintbox. Many of his paintings have only just surfaced and the colours are still splendidly vivid. Before he was 20 he had watched the Sirius go down near Norfolk Island and by the time he was 27 he was dead.

These are five young men I admire: the close observer of the natural world, the explorer / polymath, the poet, the traveller and the artist. These are lives I could have wanted for myself. In fact, these are the lives I live, albeit in relatively puny, pallid versions, now.

Transcript of Australian Story about the Wombat Boy

Complete text of “The transfixed”

Obituary for Patrick Leigh Fermor

George Raper on the ABC: download audio or read transcript

Tears splotches on a pink T-shirt

Tags

After Romulus, Raimon Gaita, Red dog, Toomelah

Recently I came out of The Kinema at Narooma and noticed great splotches of moisture on my bright pink T-shirt. There was no hiding the fact that I’d been sobbing over Red dog. It’s rare these days that a movie does this to me, mainly because I prefer hard-edged movies, with such a dose of reality that tears are too easy a response.

What was it about Red dog that made me shed water in such copious amounts?  There was no sentimentality in the landscape. It was a landscape of intransigent beauty, filmed to show that beauty, (although it didn’t show too much of the havoc wrought by mining.)

I analysed the points in the story that provoked tears: the lonely men finding solace in the dog; the suicide attempt derailed; the depression cured; the death of John; the devotion of Red dog and his long search; the victory over the managers of the caravan park (albeit by a form of communal bullying); the new pup; the new love affair; the death of Red dog at John’s grave.

As I look at my list I begin to realise why I’m  suspicious of the truth of my tearful reponse. I’ve been tricked. These are all solutions far too easy for the problems they purport to solve, and my tears cloud this revelation. That’s why my usual movie diet doesn’t produce tears: because dream solutions are rarely offered at the end of the story. In Toomelah education isn’t really put to the test – it’s just a hopeful coda to the unremitting difficulty of Daniel’s life.

I’m never confident in my own thinking about such matters. I always want a second opinion. In this case I found a formidable one in Raimond Gaita’s After Romulus,  where he reflects on telling the story of his father and his mother. With that lovely serendipity  that often meets one’s needs, I was it reading at the same time as I saw Red dog.

As a philosopher, Gaita reflects on the nature of truthfulness, and decides that the impact of Romulus my father depends on its truthfulness. He saw the book as a “witness to the kind of goodness (Romulus) lived” and he pointed out that the integrity of truthfulness doesn’t survive invention. (p. 92) The question is “Was Romulus really like that?” I can apply that question usefully to Red dog.

A key part of Gaita’s attempt to be truthful was to resist pathos and sentimentality (p. 94). He allows that sentimentality is often sincere, but he also insists that sentimentality ” betrays our attempt to see things as they are”, which he sees as an important human undertaking. Sentimentality is in fact the form falsehood takes. (p. 103)

Can I really be adamant about judging a movie through the lens of integrity, truth and  reality? Yes, I can. After all, it’s my own responses I’m scrutinising, and I’m also trying to figure out what I value in a movie experience. I’m not really pure about this. I’m not sorry I saw Red dog. I’ve seen many enjoyable movies that wouldn’t meet anti-sentimentality standards; and read many a book of the same kind.

It was the large moist splotches on my pink T-shirt that raised all these questions. This time I didn’t slink out of the theatre leaving my tears behind me and I needed to account for them. 

My view of the world tends towards the sunny – another word for sentimental perhaps: I choose to see butterflies rather than falling rocks. However, it’s my aspiration “to see things steadily and to see them whole”.  In the effort to see things as they are, Gaita suggests, we need to rid ourselves of banality, second hand opinion, cliche, vulnerability to pathos and sentimentality.

As Red dog wins the Best Film at the AACTA Awards, I’m left with Gaita’s question: “Can we justifiably trust what moves us?” And my own gloss on this: “Are tears too precious to waste on the sentimental?”

Why I love you

You are sleek and suave and elegant, a joy to look at and caress.

You let me ruffle your perfection and readjust you to my liking.

You are there day and night, always available no matter where I am.

You continually offer me something fresh and new.

You maintain your flawlessness unsullied and without defilement no matter what I do.

You always acknowledge my needs and take me expertly to where I want to be.

You skillfully accommodate my body and all its limitations.

You allow me to trawl through your endless riches without resistance.

You carry me to places and pleasures I never dreamed of reaching.

Your name is Kindle.