This will hurt me...

There is no there's no old piano playin' hot. As far as we could tell, there are no people laughing a lot. We most definitely did not see any eyeballs peepin' through smoky clouds. Oh, wait a sec'. Oh, it's a YELLOW door.

Where she leads nobody knows. Mayfair Plaza Car Park, Sandy Bay. January 2012. Sunday means Sunday Top Five, which means cobbling together some kind of list. Hmmmm. I've got it! The Top Five Bowlers I've Seen Play Cricket To Be In My Side I Was Picking A Squad To Play A Test Against A Team Of Robots Programmed To Play Cricket Really Very Well! [In Batting Order.] Richard Hadlee Imran Khan Shane Warne Malcolm Marshall Curtley Ambrose Just missing the cut were Joel Garner, Glen McGrath, Wasim Akram, Michael Holding and Dennis Lillee. Backup spinners included Anil Kumble, Saqlain Mushtaq, Daniel Vettori and the bolter in Funky Miller. I can't bring myself to include Harbijhan Singh and Muttiah Muralitharan has been deemed ineligible. This line up gives the batting some depth, and whenever you have Imran as your workhorse, you know you've got a good attack.

What would Bon Scott do? Lindisfarne Village, Lindisfarne. November 2011. Just managed to complete the one book this week, and what a disappointment it proved to be. Hans Keilson’s The Death of the Adversary is an odd little portrait of a nameless young man tracking an unnamed “adversary” whom he watches rise to power in an unnamed country in the 1930s. Keilson – a German Jew – wrote the book while in hiding in the Netherlands during World War Two. Interestingly, the novel itself has been lauded as a ‘lost’ masterpiece in the last few years. Now, I shall be frank and confess that although I think that the book is a really interesting piece of history, as a literary work it seems a little uneven to me. Perhaps it is a deliberate narrative device, but the jarring (and repetitive) series of notes ruminating on the rise of Hitler, his motives, personality, as well as the nature and causes of the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism is clumsy and wooden (perhaps this might be a poor translat...

A quick meeting is usually a good meeting. St Johns Park, New Town, April 2011. A trip away does not stop the run of books. Mixed fortunes in my selections this week. The first, Double Indemnity is considered a genre – crime – classic by James M. Cain. The film is probably better known than the book, but both are excellent. A brief but complex novel captures beautifully the tale of ordinary-guy-gone-wrong-at-the-hands-of-a-woman . It’s a gripping read, and (if you’re lucky enough to have the luxury), the kind of novel that you could pick up and finish in one sitting. Highly recommended. Decidedly not recommended is James Buchan’s Heart's Journey in Winter . Another genre novel (spies, Cold War and whatnot), it’s a dull read, poorly told. I can’t summon up the effort to say any more about it…

Is it just me that feels a little uneasy when you see a door especially set aside for a dubious role (and labelled as such) in the holding cells that are found underneath Tasmania’s Supreme Court. Look closely. No, it’s not a BELL. “Escape door”!?! In a cell? It’s political correctness gone mad.