This will hurt me...

A hot, humid evening. A long day's toil. A cool refreshing home brand icy pole. Bliss.

Coming in to land. Seven Mile Beach. October 2011. All I can muster is, "What would Robbie Burns say?" To which all I can reply is, "Mah god! that is indeed a body enormoos metal spyug up thaur in th' lift!" To a Mouse, On Turning her up in her Nest with the Plough , Robert Burns Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie, O what a panic's in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Wi' bickering brattle! I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee Wi' murd'ring pattle! I'm truly sorry man's dominion Has broken nature's social union, An' justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor earth-born companion, An' fellow-mortal! I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve; What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request: I'll get a blessin' wi' the lave, And never miss't! Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin! Its silly wa's the win's ar...

How he manages to smile like that when the water is so achingly cold is beyond me...

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...

If there is one thing guaranteed to get a double thumbs up from Henry it is DINNER OUTSIDE . Provided there is no lettuce, tomato, capsicum, chilli, sweet potato, beets, beans, melon, cucumber, eggplant, pumpkin, corn, zucchini, artichoke, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, celery, kohlrabi, swedes or turnip.

Busy bee. Royal Botanical Gardens, Hobart. October 2011. Theme Thursday today, and they've thrown me a curveball. You see - as I bemoan in an October 2009 'classic' TT post - we down here in the Antipodes (Greek for "arse end of the world") do not partake in the "Festival of the GOURD". At least, we never used to. You see, the big supermarket chains have been trying very hard in the last couple of years to muscle in on the Halloween racket and increase the profit margin of the obesity epidemic among children. I suspect that a cabal of powerful dentists may also be in league with the sugar merchants, but I have no way of proving it. Quite how we are meant to celebrate the end of the harvest festival smack bang in the middle of spring and scare the living daylights out of impressionable old folk as the evening light stretches even longer into the night is beyond me. Moreover - much like gorging on chocolate in celebration of a baby egg-laying rabbit nail...

The subject was falling. The photographer was falling. The golf ball was falling. Everybody falling all the time.