Skipping Stones

This is a picture of William with the kids. They're looking through old copies of the Guinness Book of Records, having a great laugh, the biggest ever person, the biggest feet on a living person, that sort of stuff. William is a Professor of Japanese at the University of Sydney. Not many anglos in Australia speak Japanese, much less teach it. His father was in the Second World War and he grew up with stories of the war; thus, for some odd reason, beginning his fascination.

It's been a long week already; what with all the various ructions that have been going on. It's probably not fair to post them, much as I would sometimes like. These were the long battles; things that would never be written, at least not now; not in the instant living memory of things; not with kids and conflict and a past better forgot. The story over Muslim cartoons keeps on going. Yesterday I spent in a suburb I, and probably 99 per cent of the rest of Sydney, had never heard of; a place called Leonay; named after Leo Buring, a famous Australian wine maker who had vineyards along the edge of the Nepean river, and his wife Nay. Attempts to change the name of the suburb failed. They all acted like they had died and gone to heaven. The centre of the suburb was the golf course. Healthy women in their sixties strode around the golf course, had lunch in the club. They had no idea how lucky they were. The rest of us work; the heat just kept coming at us; the phone kept ringing; there would never be any peace.

Suzy's car ran off the road on her way back to Moree and she made the local Moree champion today; a Moree woman who's car had run off the road at a flyover and ended up on the train tracks. The car was a right off; a brand new car which had irked me, and is now gone anyway. And it looks like the insurance won't be valid; just like the other car we totalled. Thank God the kids weren't in it. They'll turn 14 and 15 in the next few months; and I've got a couple of strapping teenagers on my hand. Parenting For Character; rings the title of the book. A lot of days I just finish work and feel exhausted; but at least I work. The top 40 per cent of the country is supporting the bottom 60 per cent, and the Howard government, a so-called conservative government, has been as assiduous a distributor of wealth away from those who earn it as anybody else. The entire Howard social policy was dreamed up by Centrelink bureaucrats; and the massive incompetence at the top continues to astound me. At my age I've seen them all come and go, the left and the right, and it's impossible to say that one is any worse than the other. They're all absolutely hopeless as far as I'm concerned. I resent paying taxes; so someone else can send their kids to private school, so someone else can afford private health insurance; so someone else can get a first home buyers grant; so someone else can have their rent subsidised and sit round doing nothing while I go to work. Like the rest of the country, I'm absolutely sick of the entire bloody farce.