This will hurt me...

High winds have a tendency to make the surface of the water do unexpected things. I promise that your regular service will return as normal from here.

My apologies for the lack of commentary today, but I thought I’d share the pictures from yesterday's rather extraordinary day of weather . Here is the view south, down towards Antarctica at lunchtime. Compare it to the week before to get a sense of the haze. The wearisome excuse is that old chestnut: work . Yes, work is again out of hand and Monday is a Australia Day , where we are supposed to think about stuff like red dirt, grit, courage, determination and all that gear, but in reality it increasingly involves a bunch of pissed idiots in singlets draped in the [horrible] Austalian flag fighting and flashing their breasts. Consequently, the pressure is on to finish things on Friday.

If there is one thing guaranteed to get my goat, it is the continuing tendency of people – often people employed in the media – to immediately blame the state of the road for fatalities. You know what people; highways don’t lurk about in the dark, plotting and scheming before cunningly setting about to “ claim victims ”. If the road DOES happen to be dodgy, show more bloody caution! On this theme, it is about time we got rid of this word ‘accident’ from the reporting of car crashes. Someone falling asleep at the wheel and running headlong into another car is not an ‘accident’. Someone four times over the legal limit flying off a cliff because they can no longer see straight is not an ‘accident’. Someone doing 175 kilometres an hour in an 80 zone losing control and hitting a wall is not an ‘accident’. To my mind, an ‘accident’ is a quite specific, identifiable, unexpected and unusual external event, without apparent or deliberate cause but with marked effects. The person that drives...