This will hurt me...

The morning sun of the office desk. No more shall be said. Curruthers Building, St Johns Park, New Town. March 2011. Another day, another too books! This week, the theme is depressing , albeit for quite different reasons. Book one is Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore . I’ve read a few of his books, and although he’s not the most refined of writers, one thing that Caryl Phillips can do is tell a story. This story is one of two people, both lonely and exist largely outside the mainstream of society. One is a retired teacher and the other an African refugee. Stylistically, the book's sections jump between the perspectives of the two main characters, and the story is relayed in a non-linear, broken fashion, so the reader is often caught on the back foot in terms of the narrative. This isn’t too frustrating, although the emerging fact that one of the central characters – who increasingly narrates in the first person – is unreliable, throws in a bit of a twist. Most novels of this kind w...

Hinsby Beach, looking to the south-east. Taroona, May 2010. If I could, I would locate any workspace I would be required to be at each day right on a beach. I am not too fussed which beach, just some beach somewhere, preferably protected from the elements by a well-placed bluff. That and a view off into a vast expanse of ocean with all the glories that sea and sky can conjure up through the day. A small, but well ventilated, glass box set upon a windswept coastline would be a vast improvement on a cubicle, strip fluorescent lighting and the now closed venation blinds that constitutes my vista these days. That’s my dream. What’s yours?

Some weeks ago I mentioned the art outside my office window that was causing a rukus: the piano, the sandpit and the wailing sirens (of the heaving bosom variety, not the " WHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! " kind. Well I have finally got around to posting a pic! It had something to do with Brian Wilson, apparently.

The past two weeks has seen a combination of drilling, jackhammering, blasting, digging, more jackhammering, more blasting, more digging right outside my office window . At first I thought that it was an innovative art display, but when the blokes stopped for a smoke and to display a genrous amount of arse crack to passing tourists, I was convinced that they were genuine, dinky di, ridgy didge, legit Aussie workers .

So Theme Thursday again, and I managed to guess the theme in advance. That has not made it any easier to find something to say. After ANIMAL, then VEGETABLE, it was no shock that this week we're talking MINERAL. What do I talk about? What photograph to show? Minerals are everywhere, and in everything! Do I show everything? Nothing? BAH! I could talk about the reliance on mineral exports to China, Japan and (a lesser extent), India, that Australia's economy developed. We used to make stuff with our stuff. Now we sell stuff to other people to make stuff to sell stuff to us. More cheaply, of course. But what photograph? BAH! So I'm looking around the office, for something to photograph. I'm thinking "c'mon, it can't be hard, minerals are everywhere !" Yet in being too common it's just too hard. So I settled on the light right above my head. Figuring that I might get a halfway interesting photo out of it, I take the snap. There has to be a host of mi...