A new world awaits our intrepid Seniors with the addition
of some old binoculars |
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| Mike's
Pith & Wind -
Next Door |
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My back
has been in a perilous state almost from the moment Maria
and I first started planting trees, (thirty at last count),
and it finally gave out on Saturday night when I was doing
my customary back stretching exercises that, until then,
I’d fondly imagined had been keeping such back problems
at bay. I waddled awkwardly to the bedroom where M was
avidly studying her iPhone and got into bed incrementally
and with the appropriate pained sound effects that she
eventually couldn’t ignore.
Fortunately I had implemented a plan that very night that
involved my not drinking tea after five o’clock
that I hoped would not require me to go to the toilet
to pee my customary three or four times, because the one
time I did have to pee on this night took about five excruciating
minutes and that was mostly getting to and from the toilet
and safely back in bed.
I didn’t sleep very well in any case and spent most
of my waking time painfully adopting one of the three
positions I felt most comfortable in, only one of which
I am regularly able to sleep in, and so I fully expected
the next day to be one of more pain and very little movement
for its entirety.
The first half an hour lived up to my worst expectations,
but to my surprise the level of pain improved quite rapidly
and not long after feeling obliged to eat my breakfast
standing up I was actually able to do an impression of
sitting down without too much discomfort.
In fact, I was soon so confident about sitting I felt
that I could even cope with travelling some distance in
the poodle, which, as you know is designed exclusively
for very tiny French people. I suggested to M that we
should go to Glen Waverley as we’d planned the previous
day and have a look around the Waverley Antique Bazaar,
(that M considers her 'Cabinet of Curiosities' and I’d
previously thought of as the Aristoc Warehouse) to look
for some second-hand binoculars.
The reason I was keen to get binoculars is that we have
access to an extraordinary range of bird-life up here
in Mt Evelyn and we’re both getting interested in
checking the birds out more closely. We’re still
in the early stages of planting our personal exotic mini-forest
so the birds aren’t overly interested in our place
yet, but Next Door is quite a different and much more
attractive proposition.
There is a hint of mystery about Next Door. Our place
is very new, as are the places to the front and back and
right of us, but Next Door is pretty much a simple wooden
shack hidden amidst the unconstrained bush that occupies
the rest of the section.
Being shy by nature, M and I have been somewhat reticent
about making contact with any of our neighbours, but even
so after a decent.. read
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| Dick's
Toolbox - The Saint
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It’s
not often that you come across something that you read
sixty years ago to be surprised by what you remember and
have forgotten.
How this came about is simple. I am something of a voracious
reader. We were on holiday and I ran out of books to read.
Being, like many people somewhat financially bereft after
the exigencies of Christmas, I went into the Salvos, which
was right next to the full retail local bookshop. I was
curious to see what the citizens of this growing seaside
resort had donated from their extensive, and hopefully
cultivated, libraries. Perhaps a selection of recommended
reading from the Times Literary Supplement or the New
York Review of Books?
Well, a short inspection head tilted to the right, wondering
about the strange smell and wishing that I had remembered
my glasses, revealed that their main intention was to
give away all the crap literature on their shelves. A
worse thought was that they had chosen to give away the
best of what they had. In short, the choice was between
rubbish and more rubbish, so much so that I wondered how
most of the books came to be published. Somewhere an editor,
hopefully drug free, had thought that there was an audience
out there, thousands of readers prepared to give away
their money for badly written stories of suburban lust,
demented magic or maniacal crime written with the ability
of a primary school drop-out.
I soon discovered that there are lot of books worse that
Dan Brown, in fact that Dan Brown might be the Tolstoy
of the donated book. But at two dollars a book I was determined
that I would find something and fortunately there were
just enough of books of note that you could confess to
having purchased them. In fact there was one absolutely
delightful surprise, ‘Silver Light’ by David
Thomson, normally a film historian, that made the journey
worthwhile. He writes like a dream.
But also there, amongst the other four books, was “The
Best of the Saint”, containing sixteen shortish
stories by Leslie Charteris. Even better, it had a forward
by the late Sir Roger Moore, who had played The Saint
in the early 1960s and who was probably the only TV hero
to drive a Volvo – a 1962 P1800 coupe is my recollection.
At the time of the TV series in the 1960s, the then quite
young Roger Moore was not a bad fit for the role of Simon
Templar. Leslie Charteris thought him quite apt, and he
was definitely better that when he played James Bond as
an aging wax-works animatronic.
Was The Saint popular? Well over 40 million copies in
twenty languages, fifteen feature films, ten radio series
and a comic strip would indicate that the answer to that
question is yes. read
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