Finally, I’ve got my car back. Sixteen months after a “mate” asked to borrow my Mitsubishi Verada wagon, he returned it this morning. Sixteen months!

It’s been a rainy day today so I haven’t inspected it yet, but I’m dreading what I’ll find. He is not known for being clean and tidy, to put it mildly. He says he’s done a cut and polish of the paintwork, and patched some small areas of rust, so we’ll see. He also says he’s done an oil change and new filter, as I asked him to. But he made a big point that it doesn’t use any water – so he never had to put any water in the radiator. That’s not the point – coolant has to be changed at 12 month intervals whether the level is low or not. Coolant is not just water – that green colour means something, it’s additive which is anti-corrosion. It needs to be renewed.

The other point is that when he borrowed it in February last year, 2022, I told him that the rear tyres are worn and probably not legal, and I said I’d want to replace them. “No, don’t worry about it” he said. So for 16 months he’s been driving it, on my insurance, on illegal tyres. He didn’t say he’s replaced them, so I’ll be interested to see what they’re like now.

Bloody hell! If the situation was reversed, if I’d borrowed his car, I would regard it as of the highest importance to return the car in at least as good condition as when I borrowed it, if not better. At least as good! I would never do as he’s done to me. It’s not as if I haven’t been asking for him to return it – I’ve been asking for it back for the last five months.

The result has been months of stress and anxiety for me. Worry about the insurance situation. It’s only on 3rd Party Fire and Theft, meaning that if he had a prang, the other party’s bills would be covered but not mine. Damage to my car would not have been covered. All depending on blame, of course.

So never again. This is not the first time he’s “borrowed” something from me and “assumed ownership” of it, meaning I’ve had to apply pressure to get it back. Well, this is it. No more!

Sun’s out now, so I guess I’d better go and have a look. I’m nervous about it!

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So what did he do about another car? He bought another one of the car that was written off in his prang in February 2022, a Mazda 2 wagon. That’s his third example of the same car. That means he’s got two dead ones parked in his back yard and now he’s bought another one! It’s taken 16 months for him to make up his mind to buy it.

I didn’t ask what he’s paid for it. I’ve been making it explicit for several months that I wanted him to buy the Verada from me, and if he hadn’t taken so long, I would have given him a good price, a big discount. But not now. He always made excuses why he couldn’t buy it from me, so it’s academic now, but grrrrrrr!

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People don’t return calls. I’m waiting on multiple people to call me back, as they said they would, but they don’t.

• Cardiologist – the receptionist didn’t seem able to sort out the appointments schedule, said she’d call me back. That was 10 days ago. No call back.
• A lawyer’s office, for an appointment. I phoned yesterday morning about 10am and I’ve heard nothing back. How long does it take to make an appointment?
• Some news about a delivery for my replacement dishwasher. It’s been nine days since they said they’d call me to arrange a delivery time last week. No call.
• Two mates who I thought were friends, to meet for brekky and coffee. It’s been more than three months since we last met and despite my repeated attempts to arrange a meet-up, I can’t get any answer back. I’m getting the message that they don’t want my company any more. Bloody hell! I try to be pleasant all the time, but I keep getting snubbed.
• It’s taking weeks to get in to see the GP (doctor). I’m in pain!!!! I tried to have a nap just now but I can’t lie on my left shoulder. Changing to my right shoulder doesn’t help. Taking the pain relief tablets that were prescribed a couple of weeks ago doesn’t help.
• Another long-time friend – two weeks ago I phoned her mobile, no answer, left a message, sent an email. No reply, no answer. Don’t people check their messages? Even if she’s away, surely she would get messages?

Get the message? I’m feeling very neglected.

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Re the dive on the Titanic and the loss of the “submarine”: the feeling I have, although I’m very sorry for the loss of those people, is that they were being nosy tourists and deserved what they got. They were being somewhat arrogant, trying to show how intrepid and brave they were. It’s a pity the vessel failed, but it sounds to me that they took too many risks, cut too many corners. They were warned that the vessel had defects. So, BANG! It failed as predicted. I can’t bring myself to feel too sorry for them.

The only consolation is that, as I read, they wouldn’t have known what hit them. As soon as a crack started, it would have been all over within 20 milliseconds or so, faster than it takes for a nerve ending sensation to reach the brain. They wouldn’t have known it had failed. RIP.

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I was always an anti-Brexiter. I groaned when the Poms passed the referendum to leave the European Union. It was the worst act of self sabotage in the history of the UK, a slow form of national suicide for Great Britain. It was crazy!

Sure enough, I would have predicted, grumblings are swelling in Britain. None of the promised benefits are coming to pass. Food is much more expensive, immigration has not slowed down, trade is grinding to a slow halt, it’s much more difficult to do import/export business, London has lost its status as the European banking capital and Britain’s reputation is sliding down the toilet. These are just a few of the negatives. I don’t think there are any positives.

As predicted, British people are starting to realise this, and the grumbles are welling up. Apparently 55% of Brits now regard leaving the EU as a mistake. No kidding.

As well, people are starting to ask, quietly, if it can be reversed. Ho ho ho! It’s only been seven years, but I don’t think the EU citizens will be too keen to let GB back in. Britain proved what many people thought, that Britain is an arrogant, difficult, selfish country, hard to deal with. Really? How can you think that? Tut tut.

I’m afraid GB is going to have to slide down the pole a long way yet before the EU would even begin to entertain the idea of reversing the Brexit process. And even if they did think about it, I think Britain would have to make some very big concessions. Very big.

What a crazy idea it was. Stupid, stupid.

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I’m very sad. I had a conversation with a long time friend last week about many things, but in particular about two things – (1) the referendum to allow an amendment to the constitution for a voice to parliament for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, and (2) the apology that PM Kevin Rudd made to parliament in 2008 for the Stolen Generations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_to_Australia%27s_Indigenous_peoples).

For people who don’t know, number 1 regards a referendum that will be held probably in October this year to insert a change into the Constitution that will allow for the setting up of a committee (a Voice) which will advise the federal parliament on matters affecting Indigenous people.

My friend is adamant that he will be voting No. He does not want this Voice to be heard. I am astounded and saddened. I can not understand how anyone can be so negative, so intransigent. Why? He seems to think this Voice or committee will have too much influence. At least, I think that’s what he thinks. I don’t think he knows what he wants. I don’t think he understands what the referendum means.

He says that he “loves” Aborigines, that he admires them and so on. But he doesn’t want them to be heard except in the way they are now. The problem is, the Aboriginal people are adamant that they are not being heard now.

Life expectancy 20 years below that of white people, many hundreds of deaths in custody (ie at the hands of the police), police brutality, awful rates of preventable diseases, terrible racism …. I can’t see that they are being heard or treated properly.

Yet he doesn’t want them to be heard any more than they are now, which is bugger all. I can’t understand his attitude. To me, it’s racism, pure and simple.

On the second point, the apology for the Stolen Genrations – to explain, up until around 1990, it was common for Aboriginal children to be taken from their parents and farmed out to white (European) families and institutions with the aim of supposedly giving them the chance to grow up as whites, go to white schools and to effectively erase their Aboriginality. Mostly they were prohibited from speaking their own language, forced to speak English only, and to dress and behave as Europeans.

But too often, the environment they grew up in was cruel, with beatings and punishments if they tried to assert their Aboriginality. If they ran away to find their parents or go back to their tribal lands, they would be rounded up, caught and brought back to their white “parents” or ther institutions they were confined to.

Naturally, this caused severe psychological and mental illnesses, distress. Many of these “Stolen” people suffered badly, and still do to this day.

Gradually attudes changed and it was realised the harm this had caused. The previous Liberal-National Party (conservative) governments refused to apologise, mainly with the excuse that they felt it would open the floodgates for law suits for compensation.

But really, this was pure racism. This was white supremacy. This was the attitude that “We only did this with the best of intentions” and we don’t feel we should have to apologise. So the L-NP governments, with that racist prime minister John Howard, took the lead in refusing any apology, despite a massive change in community attitudes in favour of apologising. In the early 2000s thare was a mass march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to show public solidarity in favour of an apology. Yet Racist-in-Chief PM Howard went as far as actually prohibiting any members of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party from joing the march!!

Finally, in 2008 and with Labor back in power, the new Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made an apology on the floor of the House of Representatives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_to_Australia%27s_Indigenous_peoples). I thought it was dignified and reverential. I was proud to hear it.

Did the sky fall in? Did law suits start flying out of the lawyers’ chambers? Were there marches down Pitt Street demanding this apology be reversed? OF COURSE NOT!

Yet my friend mocks PM Rudd and doesn’t think this apology was right. Calls PM Rudd Elmer Fudd. Ha ha.

I’m very sad for him. He can dress it up all he likes, make any excuses, but to deny this apology is racism, pure and simple. I’m very saddened. It’s shameful.

There’s no doubt in my mind, Australia is still very much a racist country.

Haematuria. That’s a polite way of saying there’s blood in me piss. A lot. This is the third day. This happened a couple of years ago and the GP seemed unconcerned. Sure enough, it stopped after a couple of days. Could I have a kidney stone and not be aware of it? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, it’s too bloody cold for me. My tiny fingers are frozen. Crumbs, it’s only 17C, a balmy summer day in northern hemisphere climates, but it’s too cold for me.

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I’m not a touch-typist and I need to look at the keyboard as I type. But I do make mistakes and I find I instinctively know it when I do. Something just feels wrong and I know I have to look up and correct it. It’s like editing in my head. In addition, I always read my typing back. It’s obvious to me that most Facebook people don’t bother to read what they’ve typed. The errors are so glaring that they can’t possibly have read it back. So careless, so lazy, so slapdash. It’s typical of lazy Australian people, I think.

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I’m not very proud of us as a nation. We do produce some outstanding people in innovation, sport, science and so on, but the laziness, the “near enough’s good enough” attitudes, the slapdash workmanship, the racism, the crudeness, the lack of manners … I could go on.

I remember years ago that a guy in WA was making small ornaments out of welded railway spikes, with bits of rod and nuts and washers welded together, set on a wooden base. They were crude junk, but they sold. I was friendly with a Japanese lady at the time and I remember feeling embarrassed that she would see them. I didn’t want her to think that it was all we could do.

I compared them to the beautiful craftsmanship of Japanese artisans in their wood carvings, lacquer work, masks, calligraphy, costumes, dolls, swords and knives and so on. A Japanese craftsman would laugh at those rough, crude junky ornaments being produced in WA. Actually, he absolutely would not laugh, Japanese are too polite to do that.

This is a metaphor for much of the work we produce in Australia. Yes, there are shining examples of top level work, but most of the “stuff” we produce is just that – stuff, rubbish.

It’s very noticeable to me that most of the examples of outstanding work here, in whatever field, art, sculpture, architecture and so on, are done by immigrants. People from Britain, Italy, Scandinavia, other parts of Europe. They might live in WA or elsewhere in Australia, but their talent comes from their countries of origin, not from Australia.

I’m also pretty tired of programs about what a great nation of inventors we are, with the old saws about the stump jump plow and the Hills Hoist. I will give credit to a few innovations like the polymer bank notes and the Cochlear implants, but show me something on the scale of the Boeing 747 or the Concord or the F-22 fighter aircraft, or a thousand other British, American or Japanese inventions. We don’t work on the same level.

This will be controversial.

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I notice the next financial debacle is developing, courtesy of Malcolm Turnbull, “The man who trashed Australia’s broadband fibre-optic network”.

This is the man who, as minister for communications and the man who thinks he understands technology, had to change things about the NBN when the Liberals got into power in 2014 just so he had a point of difference from the previous Labor government, the visionary innovators of the scheme.

Yes, it was going to be expensive and it was taking a long time to develop, but Turnbull wanted it done faster and cheaper. So he made major changes that have rendered it to be a sub-standard network, compared to the rest of the world. New Zealand had gigabit (1,000Mb/s) fibre, country wide, years ago. We still don’t have it! Australia ranks something like 37th in the world in internet speed rates.

Anyway, his other big idea was Snowy pumped hydro. Build (dig) tunnels through the Snowy Mountains linking high and lower level existing dams, and pump water up to the top level dams in the day time using solar power, letting it speed down these new tunnels at night to drive the turbines lower down.

In theory, it works. But as usual, the costings and the time scales were way off the mark. I think the initial cost estimate was around $2 billion, with completion around 2026, and five years later the cost has already blown out to around $10bn with completion maybe 2030.

The project is currently stalled, with one of the tunnel boring machines stuck in a tunnel only about 100m in. It seems no-one realised there was a soft sandy deposit above, which collpased on the machine. now they’re trying to dig it out. What an embarrassment.

I’ve also read that the financials just don’t add up. The initial costings didn’t include the cost of the new transmission lines to get the extra power from the Snowy Mountains to Sydney and Melbourne.

As I said, it’s just another debacle to the credit of egomaniac politicians.

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One Aussie thing I will take my hat off to is Utopia, the ABC-TV program at 8pm on Wednesday nights, made by Working Dog Productions and starring Rob Sitch.

What a fabulous program! If you haven’t seen it, it’s a send up (but without a laugh track) of a fictitious government department, the Nation Building Authority (NBA). It’s filled with characters based on observations of the way real government departments operate. Only a few of the characters have any ability – the rest just get by, or their blunders are not noticed. Rob Sitch plays the head of the authority, constantly battling to inject rationality into the crazy ideas of politicians and other wannabe power trippers. It’s brilliant!

Many people who have worked in government comment that it’s like an operations manual, an eye-in-the-sky for the real life in government departments. One or two competent people constantly battling the hangers-on, the egomaniacs, the time servers and wasters. Sigh.

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I’ve just finished watching a Netflix series called The Days. It’s Japanese made with dubbed dialogue, about “the days” after the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and subsequent nuclear power station meltdowns. It’s a true story and it’s still going on. It’s not over, by a long shot.

There are eight 1hr episodes and it’s a drag to watch. It’s very well made, showing the devastation that the earthquake produced in the power plants, but it’s so s-l-o-w. I thought about giving up a few times, but I watched it all.

What it showed is the incompetence of many of the politicians, heads of government departments and engineers. Many of them didn’t know the answers when asked questions and just sat there with their mouths open.

But what made it especially slow was the long silences between speakers. Sometimes the characters took 10, 15, 20 seconds of slack jawed silence in the dialogue. Was this real? Is this the way Japanese speak? It got very tiresome.

The thing is, this is real, this is ongoing even now in 2023. The fuel rods in the reactors really were exposed when the cooling water pumps failed due to loss of electrical power and started to melt through the concrete containment vessels. No kidding. The only way they can keep it cool even now, 12 years later, is to use sea water to cool them. The result is that the sea water becomes contaminated with radioactivity and has to be stored in giant tanks.

The problem now is that they’ve run out of storage. They don’t have room for more tanks, so they are going to have to release huge amounts of this radioactive water into the sea again.

Naturally, this is causing huge controversy, but what choice do they have? There is no other way. They are banking on the dilution of the ocean to solve the problem. It may be OK, but I wouldn’t be buying any fish caught off the NE coast of Japan for the next few decades.

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I’ve just read an item in last weekend’s newspaper that set me back on my heels. Like many people I’ve stopped using cash, coins and notes, in my everyday life. I haven’t used an ATM in several years, I couldn’t pay the lawn mowing man last week because I don’t have any notes/change.

But something I hadn’t thought of is that this is killing busking. You know, street performers who ask for donations ino their “hat” as they make music or dance or whatever on the footpath outside shops. The trouble is, people don’t have coins or cash any more to donate. Wow, I hadn’t thought of that.

Nice day, if a little cool, 18degC. But wow, I wished for rain last week and wham! We’ve had rain. We’re only nine days into June and already we’ve exceeded our average for the month. And cold to go with it! I’m sure people from really cold climates would laugh at my complaints, but it feels cold here.

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One of the casualties of my kitchen ceiling collapse in February was the dishwasher. It just started making a lould hum when I turned it on, and the repair guy said it would cost more than the price of a new one to fix. So this beautiful piece of machinery, made in Germany (Miele) is rendered worthless, junk. It’s criminal the way companies plan for obsolescence. It’s a beautifully built stainless steel machine, simply needing a new motor, but no, can’t be done. I cry.

Anyway, the insurance company, NRMA, accepted that its demise was caused by water and insulation getting into the motor and agreed to replace it. Whacko! A rare win in the insurance game.

So I’m just waiting on the repair guy to get back to me about installing the new one and how to dispose of the “old” one. I’ve been thinking about the logistics of how to manouver these big devices when it comes time. Luckily my floor is all big ceramic tiles, so I can just slide the boxes around. I’ve got a big sheet of cardboard in the garage to slide it on. On the other hand, the installation guy will probably make it easy. No need for me to worry about it.

I’ve specified that I want a white one, not stainless steel. S/s shows fingerprints, whereas white devices clean up with a quick wipe if needed.

I’ve been without it for four months now and I sure miss it. I don’t use many dishes and pots and pans, only needing to wash up about once a week, but the dishwasher does such a great job, especially getting glassware so completely clean. Hand washing doesn’t do such a good job.

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Damn, hard drives! I’ve got all my Europe 2008 photos and especially video clips, around 1,000 of them, stored on two hard drives, and both of them have died! One is completely silent and stone cold, so I think the disc motor has died, not the discs themselves. That means the data should be recoverable in a clean room.

But my “backup” drive is making the ominous clicking sounds, which means the heads are searching for data and not finding it, hence the repeated back and forth clicking. It’s possible that it may be recoverable, but I doubt it.

I have a full pro backup program that backs up my C drive at 9am each weekday morning to another drive. This is mainly so that if I’m ever subjected to a “ransomware” attack, where your C drive is locked up by a hacker until you pay to have it unlocked, I can just tell them to take a running jump, reformat my drive and restore all my stuff.

Of course, what happens if my backup drive containg the C-image fails. Maybe I should have a backup of my backup. This gets crazy. I have complete copies of my “Images” folder (10,000+ images) and my “Music” folder (1,000+ CDs) on solid state drives sitting on my bookshelves, but again, SSDs can and do fail. maybe I should have backups of those? As I said, crazy.

I’ve been thinking about getting a multi-disk RAID array, where the failure of any one disk in a group of three or four can be rebuilt once the dead drive is replaced. But the enclosure costs around $450 and each drive costs about $100, so it mounts up. One o’these days, Norton, one o’these days.

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My headline title for this post refers to my history of having to deal with dragons, that is, females. While going through old documents the other day, I came across my documentation of the hell I went through from 2006 to 2008 with my female next-door neighbour in the Trigg house. I shouldn’t have read it all, but I did and it upset me all over again. What a pity it was. I used to have aneighbour who was a PhD in psychology, very intelligent, I mean. For several years we got along great, talking over the fence, doing each other favours. I even got to know her father until he died.

But around 2006 she changed. She busted up with her girlfriend (yes, she was gay) and seemed to throw herself into her work as compensation. But she overdid it. I could see the fatigue in her face. She was drooping. From then on, for some reason I became the enemy. She wanted a high fence between us, so no more over-the-fence chats. The fence became a huge limestone wall extending up to the front property line, completely enclosing her house.

But in having this “Berlin wall” built, she wanted me to pay half the cost, which was going to be around $2,500 as my “share”.

I had never agreed to this wall being built, I hated it, and as I had no contract with the wall builder, I only paid him $500 as my half of a “sufficient fence”, i.e. the cost of a Colorbond fence. She refused to pay the wall builder the full cost of the wall, which meant he came after me for the $2,500. I refused, saying I had paid my share and I had never agreed to this monstrosity. That led to him putting a debt collector onto me, and I had to see a lawyer for a “cease and desist” letter, at a cost of around $120.

This infuriated her and she started accusing me of shifting dirt to the nature strip on the other side of the road; she wrote to the Stirling council about it, accusing me and telling them that I was sick. She made threats against my dog. She came to my front door in full confrontation mode, and when I refused to listen, she shouted at me through my window. She wrote a pseudo “legal agreement” and demanded I sign it, which I refused to do. It was nearly three years of hell. This was a woman scorned. I became afraid of her.

Luckily in 2008 she disappeared. She seemed to have sold up or something and I never saw her again, which was fine by me. There’s a LOT more to this story. You wouldn’t credit it.

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Model railways – I keep buying bits, but will I ever make a start on actually building? I’m beginning to wonder. I’ve got boxes and boxes of bits. I’d guess I’ve bought around $3,000 worth of stuff, and I’m wondering if I should just sell it all to one of the many companies that advertise that they want to buy collections, and quit the game.

But to do that I need to catalogue it all, and that’s a huge job in itself. I don’t even know what I’ve got and what it’s worth. Maybe if I stopped wasting time writing blogs like this.

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I’m not sure if I mentioned this, but – The Diplomat on Netflix. What a magnificent show!! Only eight episodes unfortunately, but it ended in a cliff hanger so I hope for a second series.

It’s about a female US ambassador to “the Court of St James”, i.e. the UK. Her husband accompanies her and as he’s a former ambassador himself, he has expertise, but he’s at a loss as to how he fits in. He has no official role but he can’t help sticking his oar in at times. Sometimes successfully, sometimes blundering. There’s a monumental argument between him and his wife on one occasion.

But the thing is, the dialogue is fast, intelligent, believeable, erudite. The characters are charismatic, appealing, even though it seems as if the writers felt the need to conform to current ideas of diversity, in colour, race and sexuality. It doesn’t intrude.

But as I said, the dialogue is crackling good. I was so entralled that I was watching two one hour episodes in succession, unable to switch off. It’s a magnificent program. More, please.

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I’m hoping I might get my Mitsubishi Verada back “sometime soon”. I lent it to a friend after he had a crash in his car, but that was in February last year! He’s had it for over 16 months and seems reluctant to return it. Yet although I’ve asked him several times to either return it or buy it, he doesn’t do either.

I’ve got him to reimburse me for the registration and insurance that I continue to pay out, but I’m upset and worried. When he took it away last year, I knew the rear tyres were well worn, almost certainly illegal then, and I offered to get them replaced, but he waved me away. She’ll be right he said. Well, if there was an accident, she wouldn’t be right! The insurance wouldn’t pay out. It wouldn’t matter so much about my car as it’s only worth around $4,000, but damage to the other party wouldn’t be covered and that could be tens of $thousands. That would come back on me as I’m the licenced owner. Grrrr.

As well, this friend is not the tidiest or most fastidious person and I shudder to think what the condition of my car is like after 16 months of his use as his work car.

So I’ve put it to him that he has to make a decision: either buy it or return it. But if he returns it, I want it to be in the same or better condition than when he took it. I suspect he won’t be able to match that. The thing is, I want to sell it and I feel it’s suffered 16 months of depreciation in his hands. It’s not worth as much as it was at the beginning of last year, and so who bears that loss? Grrrrrrrr!

Fourth day of winter and it’s a clear, cloudless blue sky outside, around 18C. I hear rain is coming and the wind is stirring the leaves a bit, but we’re well below average in rainfall for the year so far. More please. *see below!

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Another magnificent photo:

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Long time no posting, sorry. I’m still suffering from pain, which takes the pleasure out of everything. Right side torso this time. Sharp needle pains, with a nagging dull ache just below the right breast. I have to use the “pain patches”, which help tremendously, but they only last a week and after I remove each one, the relief lasts a week and the pain comes back again. Thank goodness I have them available.

I had a CAT scan and an MRI scan late last year which covered the whole chest, obviously, and no problems were seen. The needle pains are random in location, even extending to my fingers and thumb occasionally, so there’s no precise location. I guess it’s just gettin’ older.

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I’ve just made a comment on The On-line Photographer web site (www.theonlinephotographer.typepad.com) after the owner, Mike Johnston, wrote a piece praising a book which philosophises that there should be no political parties. I wrote:

“I think it’s human nature to form groupings or teams. Very rarely do we do things in isolation, hence teams become parties. A solitary politician can’t achieve much, if anything.

“It’s akin to something close to my heart, unionism. I just can’t believe it would be better for every worker to negotiate alone with the groups or teams (or unions) of managers.

“Every aspect of society forms teams or groups, including employers. Lawyers, doctors, judges, and yes, employers, form teams or groupings or ‘societies’ to argue their case coherently. So should unions of employees. It’s obvious why the modern day ‘robber barons’ are so against unions – it’s divide and conquer in action.

“So to circle back to the point, I can’t see government working without parties. Sooner or later parties would form, like planets coalescing from dust.”

I often think, regarding unions and the bosses’ arguments that all workers should negotiate their wages and conditions individually, that I can think of very, very few aspects of life and sociey where we don’t work as part of a team. Or to put the opposite, that it’s better to work as an individual. Nearly all people, whether employee or employer, works as part of a group or team.

I try to think of anyone who doesn’t belong to a team, and all I can think of is a few creative occupations like painting, writing, literature if you like. Although even those turn to teams if the person wants his/her work shown to a large audience. A writer has to have a publisher or be part of the team which publishes writing, be it just books or newspapers or magazines. Everything needs teamwork to thrive.

So, no, political parties will form whether we like it or not. Just as animals form herds. Even the solitary lion forms a team with a female to raise cubs.

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My kitchen ceiling repairs are finally done, thank goodness. A guy came a few weeks ago to install insulation in the roof space, and now I’ve got a dimmer on the kitchen downlights and that is almost that. I’m only waiting on the insurance company, NRMA, to approve the replacement of the dishwasher. I have sent the repairer’s letter through to them, saying its demise was caused by water and rockwool getting into the motor, and I’ve sent a reminder, but although they acknowledge receipt, I haven’t heard anything more yet. They’ve been good so far so I’m not too worried. I’m sick of washing dishes by hand, though. Not that I do it much.

On the other hand, I am fed up and ropeable about the mattress I bought last year. AH Beard, remember that brand and don’t buy it! I don’t think they know how to make mattresses.

After I complained in January that it was too soft, they took the mattress back and “remade” it to a firm setting. At first, that seemed to fix the problem. But it’s reverted to almost the same problem – insufficient support at the edge and a ridge down the middle, such that I feel as if I’m sliding off. I think this has only occurred after I got the mattress back from the repairs.

I’ve stayed silent up to now because they never sent me a bill for the re-work, but I’m thinking of getting stroppy again and demanding my money back. I’ll tell them that I don’t think they know what they’re doing.

Luckily I’m sleeping well and I hardly move when I sleep, so I only notice the problems when I’m just settling down for the night. But, grrrrr!

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I’ve been doing a lot of work on the MyHeritage web site on my family tree and I’ve got the Croft side going back as far as William Croft 1393 – 1434. In the line are several Baronets, i.e. members of the House of Lords in Britain. All were associated or lived in Croft Castle, Herefordshire, and the baronetcy and knighthoods were hereditary for a few centuries. There were many sons, though, so where the inherited titles went is very obscure.

I must admit I’m sad that my branch of the tree ends with me. Having never married, I have no offspring so that’s that. They heavily push the sale of DNA testing and so far I’ve resisted, but at $87 maybe I should give it a go.

I was never into ancestry, but I must admit I’m chuffed to have got this far. I think this is all I need, though. They’ve sent me advice that my subscription will automatically renew this month for $345, but that’s too expensive. I’m sure I only paid about $85 last year. I’m trying to work out how to stop the auto-renewal. It’s not easy!

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Wow, what a fascinating outcome in the trial of Ben Roberts-Smith, that giant of an SAS soldier (6ft 6 inches tall and a bundle of muscle). He sued three newspapers for defamation when they published articles about his and his platoon’s exploits in Afghanistan ten or more years ago. It’s exloded in his face – he lost the case and has been labelled a war criminal, murderer and bully. He’s a Victoria Cross winner, but it’s possible he’ll lose it and possibly face further criminal trial. It’s been a bombshell of a case, probably as bad as anything he faced in the war zone. Wow.

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Damn, it looks as if the battery in the Peugeot has died. It won’t take a charge. Last time this happened was in the Honda and the RAC guy used one of his big capacity batteries to “dump” a charge into it. It worked and I’ve had no trouble since. I hope he might be able to do the same with the Pug’s battery.

A friend helped me get the rear number (licence) plate off so I can take t to the police licencing centre to get a new plate for the front. I lost the front plate a few months ago. You have to present the other plate to prove ownership to get a new one. Trouble is, I believe the licencing centre is slow, choked up with queueing and I’m scared to go there as I can’t stand for long. Oh well, gotta try. Gotta get a move on – the car is becoming covered in spiderwebs from standing unused for too long.

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I spoke too soon – the clouds are rolling over and the wind’s picking up. Our blue sky day is transitioning to rain. I asked for it and now we’re going to get it, but hooray anyway. I’ve just got my washing down off the line so it will miss out on the rainwater rinse this week. 🙂