Yeah, it’s a long time since I wrote, sorry. We’re back in lockdown again, I’m afraid, but it’s only a short one, and if things don’t go suddenly bad, it should end at midnight on Saturday. It doesn’t really affect me, each day is the same to me. I self isolate as a way of life.

Unfortunately, the woman who brought the virus home from Sydney last week is from this northern beachside area and even did some shopping at the Coles shop that I use, at Ocean Keys, Clarkson. I usually do my weekly grocery shopping there on Fridays, but strangely, for some reason, I shopped at a different local shopping centre on that Friday. Sixth sense?

I’m due for my second vaccination shot on Tuesday, so that will be good. I feel pretty safe. Keep buying those LOTTO tickets, eh?

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I did a bit of grocery shopping at a local IGA shop on Tuesday. This is the one that closed down for about a year, crushed by the competition from the new Butler Village with its Woolworths supermarket.

Then last year, it opened again. Whacko! I was pleased because it’s convenient for me. The downside is that it’s much more expensive, so you have to accept that. It’s not for your regular weekly fill.

They even started staying open 24 hours, although why anyone would want to buy groceries at 3am is beyond me. That would have been a boring, boring shift.

But sad to say, it’s visibly dying again. Whole blocks of cold cabinets are boarded up. A whole double row of shelves has been removed. The opening hours are back to 9pm closing. I do my best to support them but you have to accept that you’re paying a donation on your bill.

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Attached to the supermarket is a Cellarbrations liquor shop and I find their prices to be very competitive, so I tend to use them.

In the past couple of years I’ve been chatting a lot to a woman behind the counter there, and last Tuesday I was surprised to find that she’s from Iceland! Name of Helena. She treated me to some Icelandic speech, which I think is a dialect of Swedish; I must ask her about that. She’s got a broad Aussie accent, though, having grown up in Perth.

I happen to be watching a series on Netflix at the moment, set in Iceland, called Kapla. Phew, it’s a bleak, raw place. Spectacular scenery, but cold and windy. It’s the subject of many photo essays these days, but after the first few, they tend to have a certain sameness about them

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I mentioned the Kindle books I’ve been reading by James Rosone and Miranda Watson, on the theme of what World War 3 might be like. All I can say is, WOW!

Don’t expect literary masterpieces. These are just an ex-US Army guy writing from a veteran’s knowledge. But he has a very wide view and what he writes is very, very plausible. I have the feeling that he writes the military action stuff, and his co-writer Miranda Watson writes the “interior” stuff, the meetings and conferences where strategy is discussed by the President and the military and civilian chiefs.

I read the six novels in the first series about one scenario. I’m now about a quarter of the way into book four of the second series, a different scenario involving nuclear war in the Middle East after New York and Newark are destroyed by two nuclear devices brought in on ships.

In this scenario, Japan reneges on its commitment to come to the aid of the USA, trying to stay neutral, then compounds the betrayal by buckling to pressure from China to form an alliance and commit to a surprise attack on the US West Coast, California. They use the deception that they are still friendly to the US to spring a surprise attack on Los Angeles. I’m only at that point so far, but I have the feeling that they may be in line for another nuclear response from the US on the Japanese mainland.

I’m afraid these second series novels are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, probably one per page. Given each book averages 400 pages, that’s a lot of errors.

One especially ridiculous editing failure is that when detailing meetings of the British war cabinet, they repeatedly call men with knighthoods, such as General Sir Michael Browne, or Admiral Sir James Parkinson, as “Sir Browne”, or “Sir Parkinson” and so on. It seems elementary to me. They couldn’t have done much research.