Many famous people have been cat lovers. Looming large among them is the 18th Century man of letters Dr Samuel Johnson, who had a cat called Hodge whom he adored. Continue reading Companion cats
I’ve had satire on my mind for the past few days, which led me to write this piece about why this particular type of humour can fall flat in the Arab world.
In the course of my discussion of the history of satire, I mentioned Tom Lehrer, a particular favourite of mine.
Space then didn’t permit me to discuss his contribution in more detail.
Lehrer came to prominence as an undergraduate in the mid 1940s with a parody song, Fight Fiercely Harvard. He went on to sell self-funded records on campus.
Within a decade, he’s become something of a sensation, and by the early 1960s, he was appearing on the cabaret stages of the world singing such songs as Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and The Masochism Tango.
It is widely believed that Lehrer came unstuck when he dared to send up Dr Werner von Braun, the German rocket scientist who might have faced war crimes charges had he — and many others — not been whisked away to America to work on what would become the space program that eventually took the good guys to the moon.
Lehrer’s statement that von Braun’s “allegiance was ruled by expedience” became the subject of a law suit. But Lehrer wasn’t sued out of satire, he just went back to being a mild-manned maths professor.
Thankfully, he left behind a wonderful legacy of satirical songs, including The Vatican Rag (about the Vatican 2 reforms of the Catholic Church), Be Prepared (about the Boy Scouts) and I Got it From Agnes (about venereal disease).
His songbook even inspired a musical, Tomfoolery.
Enjoy the videos above and below and, if please Google Tom Lehrer to seek out more about him and more of his material.
There’s this guy I run into every few months and each time we see each other, we have a chat.
I know quite a lot about him now. He’s from Ireland and he works as a teacher of children with special needs. I’ve also met quite a few of his colleagues, and they are all very nice people.
There’s just one problem that makes it uncomfortable for me each time we meet. For the life of me, I can never remember his name.
It became especially embarrassing on our last encounter, because he called me out on it. “You don’t know my name, do you? I remember your name, but you don’t remember mine!”
He’s right and I really have no defence. He’s a red-headed Irishman and his name is Sean — which is probably the first or second name you’d guess for an Irishman.
But the thing is that I only now know that his name is Sean because I wrote it down. I hope to remember it next time I see him without having to consult the notebook in my pocket.
In the meantime, I’ve been trying to discover why it is that I have trouble remembering Sean’s name.
According to a newspaper story based on some actual scientific research, there are three possible reasons that may work alone or in conjunction with each other.
The first is that we often usually have no way of associating people’s names with their physical characteristics, so we can’t use one of the most popular memory tools.
The second is that often so focussed on ourselves when we meet people that we don’t listen to what they have to say, even when they tell us their name.
The third reason is that we don’t care because we don’t expect to see that person again, so his or her name is dispensable information.
Since I’ve already seen Sean at least three times in the same place, and he really is a bloke who’s worth talking to, I really should start to care.
The next time I see him, though, I’m definitely going to ask how it is that he remembers my name.
Another small excerpt from my unpublished book for young and general readers. Inquiries from potential publishers welcome!
While dogs have a far better reputation when it comes to selfless and loyal behaviour, the world is not without its cat heroes. Continue reading Elvis’s cat came back
Many years ago, I decided to write a book about cats for younger and general readers (it’s no academic tome, folks). It never quite got finished, and was never published. But I’ve decided to publish some of it here, lest someone on the webs has an interest in picking it (or, indeed, me) up. Continue reading Of cats and kings
Of course, it’s an incomplete answer because there are many things we didn’t know yesterday that are so mundane that we have no interest in knowing them at all.
A more complete definition might also include something about the event being relevant to the audience, or being somehow unusual or unexpected. For example, a car accident down the street from where I live is more interesting to me than an equivalent event in a town in Armenia, but for an Armenian person it may be the other way around. However, if the car accident in Armenia involved a Volvo being driven by a chimpanzee and a semi-trailer carrying a load of bananas, then we’d both be interested.
The problem with journalism is that you can’t just sit around waiting for the news to come to you. Unless you work for one of those aggregation sites that merely put a spin on stories already published on the web and wire services, you have to go out and find the news for yourself.
And that involves going to places where you anticipate that something newsworthy will emerge: say, local council meetings, speeches by dignitaries or courts of law. And, of course, sporting fixtures.
It is, again for example, only natural that the media would cover a sermon by the Pope. And so, every so often, we get news stories the Pope calling for peace, love and harmony. Occasionally, especially, with the current pope, we get something considered a little left-field, which tends to suggest he supports a few causes that popes are generally shy to talk about. But, more often than not, it’s generally pretty much the same, worthy thing, and it gets a good run online, in newspapers and on news bulletins. That’s often because anything associated with the Catholic church generally lends to good visuals — they sure know how to put on a colourful show, with lots of ceremony, bling and interesting costumes — but it’s also because it would be a waste of resources if they didn’t run something they’d spent a lot of time in effort in covering.
In other words, you know you’ll be in the news when you call a media conference and the media actually turn up. (And you know you’re yesterday’s news when, as the former Queensland premier Campbell Newman did recently, you hold a book signing and nobody turns up.)
As much as covering speeches and council meetings are a journalist’s bread and butter (or they used to be when there were enough journalists to do these things in every city and town), the stories you get from these events are generally not exciting in the same way as a big, unexpected incident that has you scrambling to the scene.
Well, for most journalists, anyway. There’s always the (probably apocryphal) story about the student reporter who returned to the newsroom after being assigned to cover a council meeting. “Where’s the story?” the editor asked. “There is no story,” the reporter replied, “they had to call off the meeting because the building burnt down.”
A brief earlier version of this post appeared on debritz.net in April, 2006
Like millions of children of my generation, the one before it, and the ones since, I’ve watched thousands of hours of cartoons, live-action television shows and movies in which the characters have died in the most awful ways.
It has not inspired me, or the vast majority of others who consumed this material, to take a weapon to another person.
Yet, every so often, we hear somebody wanting to ban or censor violent TV shows or video games because of the damage they supposedly do to youngsters.
In the West, a cartoon is probably the closest a child is going to get to a death, other than the demise of a family pet. In some parts of the world, children are experiencing the deaths of others — friends, parents, neighbours — on a daily basis.
As the much-publicised perversities of the so-called Islamic State (ISIL/ Daesh/ ISIS; call them anything) have shown, what happens in real life is worse than anything any animator could imagine.
Kids of my age knew it wasn’t not real when Wyle E Coyote was squashed by a rock, then squeezed out from under it, dusted himself off and wrote off to the ACME company for some other device with which to fail to capture the Road Runner. Just as children now know, that as crude as they are, the situations in video games are just imaginary.
To think censoring films and television programs beyond the restrictions already in place will magically solve schoolyard violence is, at best, naive and at worst dangerously misguided. Good parenting and good schooling will make a difference, though.
The challenge for parents and teachers, however, is when and how to tell children that the footage they see on the television news, or on YouTube, of the obscenities committed in war and terror attacks are real, and that poverty and disease do exist.
Harder still will be the discussion about how this genuine threat may encroach on their own lives unless all generations and nationalities act now to stop it.
An earlier version of this article appeared on debritz.net in 2006
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwYr4LAIUjk
I don’t often get excited about advertisements, but I really loved this Emirates commercial featuring Friends star Jennifer Aniston.
Aniston puts in a fine performance, but for me the whole point of it is made in the casting of the “other airline” crew near the beginning of the one-minute clip.
Anybody who has ever flown long haul on an US air carrier will recognise them. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t even actors, just actual staff from any American airline.
I know that American Airlines, Delta, United and others are in a “free skies” legal battle with Emirates and Etihad at the moment. Whatever the arguments are at the political and commercial level, this ad sums up the situation from a passenger’s viewpoint.
Not everybody gets access to the shower and the bar on an Emirates A380, but I am willing to bet that, even in cattle class, you’ll get treated better in the air by a Gulf-based airline that you will by an American one.
As Danish physicist Niels Bohr may have said, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
And when we start to think about the future, people of a certain generation will say: “Where’s my hoverboard?” — a reference to the 1980s Back to the Future movie franchise which suggested, among other things, that we’d be able to buy levitating skateboards by now.
The message is that before you try your hand at prediction, bear in mind how bad we’ve been at it in the past.
The Washington Post has published some drawings made by Jean-Marc Côté and other French artists in the late 1900s and early 20th Century purporting to show France in the year 2000.
Of course, they mostly look absurd because the artists were extrapolating on what they already knew; imaging refinements to technologies and behaviours already in existence. They were not able to envisage true innovation.
One of my favourites, which I’ve inserted at the top of the post (I believe it to be in the public domain, somebody please correct me if I’m wrong), shows a postman on a flying vehicle delivering a letter or some other paper documents to a man on a balcony. The artist perceived, correctly, that door-to-door delivery by a man on a bicycle would no longer be the norm in the future, but couldn’t imagine a plane without a propeller let alone the fact that the document itself could be digitised and transmitted across wires and the airwaves.
When I visited a museum in Saint Petersburg with a Russian-speaking Belarusian friend a few years ago, she suggested that she buy the tickets. “Why?” I asked. “Because we will get in much cheaper.”
“Why?”
“Because there is one price for Russians and a much higher price for foreigners. So you just shut up and we will get in cheap.”
As a fairly seasoned traveller, I was not unaccustomed to having pay more than the local population, and I was prepared to do so. But I also like a bargain, so I just shut up and we got in cheap.
A dual pricing system operates in a lot of places, especially poorer countries. It is particularly prevalent in Thailand.
I hadn’t thought about it for a while, until I noticed this story in the Bangkok Post, where a Thai citizen who looks like a farang (foreigner) complains about being charged 10 times as much to enter a popular attraction in Krabi.
“It’s like racism,” he is quoted as saying.
Now the story doesn’t really make it clear whether he is objecting to the dual-pricing system per se or the fact that he was a victim of it on the grounds of mistaken identity.
The logic behind dual pricing is simple. It is, usually correctly, assumed that foreigners can afford to pay more, and accepted that they should subsidise the locals who might not otherwise be able to get in to certain attractions.
But is it fair to charge a different price based on someone’s appearance or passport? There are, after all, rich Thais and poor farang.
Either way, there would be outrage, and almost certainly an action by the discrimination commissioner or some other authority, if a venue in Britain, the US or Australia adopted a policy of ethnicity-based pricing.
This is something of an unusual post for me. Usually, I write something here and the post the link on Facebook (and other social-media platforms). This time, I posted a simple question on Facebook and got such a big response that I decided there must be a blog article in it.
So, what happened was a discussion over the brunch table on Friday about the value of tofu, which, according to Google, is “a soft white substance made from mashed soya beans, used chiefly in Asian and vegetarian cookery”.
For many people, tofu is in the category of a “faux meat” — a substance that has been created artificially specifically to create some psychological comfort in people who have become vegetarian but, deep down, really want to be carnivores.
For others, it’s a kind of wonderfood.
Anyway, after some robust debate around the table, I posted the following short sentence on Facebook:
Table talk. Tofu: food or not food?
Here are some of the responses:
“Abomination!”
Food! Absolutely! Korean style teriyaki tofu is one of the tastiest things on the planet.
Delicious. What would a good laksa be without it?
Funny, you never see meat advertised as tasting like tofu …
Disgusting muck. (This was from a quite well known food and beverage writer.)
Paper. Food or not food?
Yes, buried in a stir-fry, it’s all well and groovy but I think we need to accept that tofu — unadorned by various sauces, soups and condiments — does not stand up to the the stand-alone taste test. One could cover a sock in peanut sauce and make it delicious.
Add soft tofu to scrambled eggs. Takes a pedestrian dish to another level.
Food. Icecream, flour, candles, yoghurt — all a bit suspicious!
And late entry from Twitter:
Next: Is couscous grounds for divorce?
I once had a colleague who had an aversion to stories about anniversaries and contrived annual events.
Someone would say, for example, “It’s World No Tobacco Day, perhaps we should write about that”, and he would reply: “Well, somewhere in the world there’s probably a National Pickle Day. Would we write about that?”
He didn’t know it at the time, but there is a National Pickle Day, in the United States (of course) on November 14. But I’m not going to write about that. Not today, anyway.
Today I’m writing about International Coffee Day, which is — depending on where you are in the world (and, of course, when you are reading this) — only dawning, currently in full swing, almost over or just a sweet memory.
Why it’s on October 1, I’m not sure — perhaps all the other days were taken — but I don’t have a problem with there being a day dedicated to coffee.
It’s a mostly harmless substance — although I have a friend who once gave it up cold turkey and suffered withdrawal symptoms as a result — that’s a perfect pick-me-up and a great conversation lubricator.
So if you happen to be having a conversation around a cup of coffee, perhaps you might also contemplate that October 1, 2015 is also the 51st anniversary of the first trip by Japan’s famous Bullet Train; the 69th anniversary of the convictions of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hermann Goering and 10 other high-ranking Nazis at the Nuremberg trials; and the 107th anniversary of the debut of the Model T Ford.
And, on this day in 1918, Arab and British forces commanded by Lawrence of Arabia captured Damascus from Turkish forces.
There’s plenty to talk about there.
PS: Today is also Vegetarian Day, but I have no interest in that at all.
Purely for professional reasons, my colleagues and I were pondering the concept of “happiness” yesterday.
It’s a word we throw around a lot without really knowing what we mean.
I have an ex-girlfriend in Belarus and, for the first few months of our relationship, I would often ask her: “Are you happy?”
Despite having perfect English. she was bewildered by the question and, indeed, the notion of happiness. “What do you mean by ‘happy’?” she would ask. And, of course, I couldn’t really say. Life can be challenging in the former Soviet republic, but the people are wonderfully stoic.
It’s now a joke between us. When we chat online, I will type: “Are you happy?”, and she will respond: “Of course not.”
That makes me smile, which, I suppose, is one manifestation of happiness.
Exactly what do you think you are doing, Brett? If only I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that.
The most recent was yesterday, when a colleague asked me why I am writing this blog. The answer I gave was that it was to exercise my writing muscles, to write about things that wouldn’t have a place in the newspaper I work for, and to stretch my brain in different directions.
In the course of a working week, I commission and edit opinion pieces about world events and politics, and I write editorials about all manner of, mostly serious, matters.
This blog is my space for relaxation, a sandbox where I can attempt to discover a different voice that may eventually propel me in a new direction. Subject and style-wise, it may be all over the place, but there is some method to this madness.
As part of this process, I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes certain commentators, be they newspaper columnists, radio “shock jocks” or television pundits, more popular than others.
If only, many a writer has thought recently, I could be as successful as Katie Hopkins, the former British reality TV star whose column has just been poached by the Daily Mail from The Sun.
Make no mistake, Hopkins and her like are not being paid for sober, well-considered analysis of world events. They are being paid to provoke people — to promote a certain type of extreme public opinion. The people who agree with her lap it up, and a surprisingly large number of people who hate what she is saying are nonetheless addicted to hearing her say it.
So: how to become the next Katie Hopkins — or, Bill O’Reilly or Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt or Jeremy Clarkson?
The first trick, I’ve been told, is to be able to say things you don’t actually believe. Or, at least, to amplify the things you do believe (or ideas you sometimes toy with) to the point that they get attention. And this idea goes back a long way.
In his 1729 pamphlet A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick – 1729, generally referred to just as A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift argued that the poor should eat their babies. Now, Dr Swift was not really advocating cannibalism among the lower classes, but he sure got a lot of attention — for himself and for the issue he was writing about — by saying so. Nearly 300 years later, A Modest Proposal remains on the reading lists for many university writing courses.
Katie Hopkins is no Jonathan Swift. When she calls the thousands of Syrian refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean on leaky boats and find a safe haven in Europe “cockroaches”, and claims the famous photos of the dead toddler, Aylan Kurdi, were staged, it’s not clear whether she believes it or not. If she does believe it, then I pity her for lacking a human soul. Like Swift, she’s saying it just to get attention, but unlike Swift’s readers, her core audience is likely to buy into her one-dimensional, send- ’em back-to-where-they-came-from argument than actively contemplate the issue and possible solutions to it.
The great thing about being Katie Hopkins is that you don’t have to do anything about the world’s problems, except moan about them in an attention-grabbing manner. But you do have to learn how to sleep soundly at night.
As for me, I’m happy to noodle about here as a means of self discovery and, I hope, provide some entertainment or food for thought for others.
In what we people aged 40 and over like to refer to as “the good old days” (the old days were never bad, by the way, even when they were), writing a piece such as I am about to write would have been quite a different process.
Having decided — or being assigned — to write about napping, I would have gone to some sort of reference book, or rung the PR person at the local university, to find an expert on sleep.
I would have then contacted that person and arranged to meet them, or if time were short, spoken to him or her on the telephone, and asked probing questions along the lines of: is napping good for you?
Now, I hope there are journalists out there who would still take the same approach, although I suspect the process might be generated from the other end: i.e. the PR person from the university would issue a press release saying one of its scientists had made some sort of discovery that napping was good for you. Or bad for you.
In any case, the story would be written on the basis of that one person’s opinion and maybe, just maybe, the complementary, or contrary, opinion of another scientist who was easily accessible or had already been on the record about this subject — i.e. her or his opinions were to be found in the newspaper cuttings library under S for sleep.
Nowadays, of course, to write an article about napping, the first thing I did was Google the phrase: “is napping good for you?” (This technique, by the way, also works with other subjects).
Now, from here it gets tricky. If this were a paid column for a respected newspaper or magazine, I would use that merely as a starting point for my long and detailed research, allowing me to get my head around the range of opinions on the subject, work out where the latest research in the field was happening, and identify the right books or articles to read and the best people to speak to.
As this is an unpaid column for my personal blog, I am just going to throw up some of the stuff Google found for me, along with some of my own opinion, which ain’t really worth very much at all. But, hey, you got this far, so you may as well continue reading.
As it turns out, Time.com published something on this very topic about a year ago. And the Mayo Clinic, always a reliable source on matters medical, has an advisory article on napping. Oh, and there are thousands of other sources, but who has the time to read them all? (You do? Go for it!)
Basically, napping during the day is good for you because it can help you relax, reduce fatigue, increase alertness, put you in a better mood and improve your performance, memory and reaction times. But napping is bad in for you in the sense that it can be an indicator of serious underlying health problems such as stress, insomnia and sleep apnoea.
But napping is not for everyone; some people wake up “feeling like crap”, according to the eminent Dr Sara Mednick, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside and author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life.
For those who do benefit from a daytime doze, the recommendation seems to be to keep your naps short, maybe 20 to 30 minutes, with first timers advised to take less in the beginning and work their way up. You should also do it in a dark room around 2pm or 3pm.
My experience is that I generally get very tired in the early afternoon, and I have to get up and take a walk, have a cup of coffee or wander around in the fresh air to “recharge my batteries”. This normally gets me through the working day. But on my day off and during holidays, I often have an afternoon nap and it seems to make me feel more energised. Today it gave me the mental wherewithal to write this article, and it even helped me magic up the hook (i.e. the bit about the good old days).
The next challenge, however, is to get the boss to accept that napping is not only a perfectly normal thing to do, it will in fact benefit the business by making employees more alert and all-round better people. And for the company to provide the facilities to allow it to happen.
Unusually, perhaps, for somebody involved in journalism for 30 years, and showbiz journalism for more than half of that time, I have never done “hard” drugs.
I’ve certainly consumed a bit more alcohol than I should’ve, and inhaled something I perhaps shouldn’t have, but I’ve drawn the line at doing a line or injecting something into my veins that wasn’t prescribed by a doctor.
Some might say that’s an experience missed, but I prefer to think of it as a lucky escape. As a former girlfriend once said, why use something that might kill you on the first occasion (as cocaine, and many other drugs, certainly can) unless you absolutely have to?
At the risk of appearing to be “holier than thou” here, I want to make a point or two about the abuse of hard drugs, especially in the music industry. I want to make it clear that the following does not apply to everyone, or even a majority of people, in showbiz. But it does apply to a hell of a lot of them.
Over many years of writing about popular music, and hanging about on its fringes, the one thing that has really made me angry is the continuing casual attitude towards the use of hard drugs — despite the number of good, talented people who have died, or have been greatly diminished, by the uncontrolled use of drugs.
With so many great artists lost to the abuse of heroin, cocaine and their ilk, you might think that the industry would actively discourage the activity, participate enthusiastically in programs to rehabilitate drug users, and take great efforts to counsel potential addicts.
Instead, I’ve known of record company employees who’ve been tasked with scoring for the stars and very senior personnel at very big companies who’ve turned a blind eye while laws that could have them jailed are willfully and persistently broken. As an editor, I’ve had to counsel contributors for encouraging drug use in articles submitted for publication in a “family” newspaper.
You may say that people be free to do what they like, even if it hurts them — and I might even agree with you. But when you look at the industrial scale of drug use in showbiz, and the fact that stars are among the greatest influencers of young people, then maybe you’ll think again,
You may ask: why is it worse to buy and consume drugs than alcohol or cigarettes, which are also bad for your health? Because buying drugs puts money directly into the hands of criminals, while buying legal products at least puts it into the real economy where the people who make the goods get paid (admittedly sometimes not a lot or even enough) and the companies employing them pay taxes and duties (often at a very high rate) that go into a pool that’s spent on the whole community. They may be killers, but at least the producers of booze and tobacco put something back — and they are required to offer warnings about the use of their product, making it harder and harder for them to do business. Oh, and branded, legal products are almost always free from deadly impurities, which is often not the case with drugs bought on street corners or handed around at gigs and parties.
When a celeb gives endorsement by example to the illegal drug trade, they are supporting the exploitation of everyone from impoverished poppy growers and families in third-world countries (who live under the cruel exploitation of drug lords who use kidnapping and murder to further their business aims), to hapless drug mules (who can wind up being jailed or executed for their crimes) and users who can end up on guerneys in emergency rooms or slabs in hospital mortuaries. The only people they benefit are the criminals they make richer.
Occasionally, some of the worst abusers in the music world will put some small effort into a charity single or concert, perhaps to assuage their guilt for not being better persons.
If celebs they put their considerable wealth into buying legitimate products and services — be they yachts, cars, first-class airfares, stays at seven-star hotels or whatever — they are, at least, doing something for the rest of us thanks to the (imperfect) laws of trickle-down economics. By spending vast amounts of money on drugs, they are simply being selfish idiots who are doing more harm than good, no matter what they say when the cameras are on.
Here endeth the sermon.
I was a 20-something Aussie far from home. It was my first week of working in the UK, and a colleague greeted me with: “Good morning, Brett, how are you?”
“Well,” I replied,“I’m feeling a little tired. Just starting to find my way around, but …”
“No,” he interjected. “You don’t understand the convention here. When I say, ‘How are you?’, I’m not interested in how you are or what you are doing, it’s just an expression. I say ‘How are you?’, you say, ‘Good’, ‘Fine’ or whatever and then we just shut up and get on with the job.”
I was a little taken aback by this, because I am rather fond of small talk.
To me, it’s the trivial stuff that greases the wheels for the bigger conversations about great matters. An appetiser before the main course. The overture to the opera. The … well, you know what I mean.
Would it really have hurt my erstwhile workmate to at least pretend he was interested in my health and how I was adapting to life in a new country? At the time, it would have done wonders for my confidence.
And maybe I could have teased out some information from him, identified a few mutual interests and a great friendship would have emerged.
As it happens, I did make some good friends at that workplace … just not that guy.
So, the conversation continues …
I’ve been reading quite a lot lately about hypnosis. I’m particularly interested in its potential for therapy, but I also believe I’d have made quite a good stage hypnotist. Perhaps there is still time for that.
I don’t believe I have ever been truly hypnotised — certainly not by a kind of creepy guy who tried to do it to me at an alternative health and wellbeing fair in Brisbane a couple of decades ago, and not by some of the tapes and videos I’ve recently purchased.
While the people who, supposedly, know about this sort of stuff say that anybody can be hypnotised (even those who stubbornly resist it, although they take longer), I think my problem has been that I’m too engaged with the process — wanting to understand what’s going on, rather than giving in to it.
Having said that, I have been in a kind of hypnotic state that occurs during dreams. While not entirely ruling out the possibility that I am a freak, I assume others also know about that point in your slumber where you are aware that while what you are experiencing may seem quite real, it is a dream. It usually happens to me not long before I wake up to attend to a call of nature.
Unless it’s a nightmare, I usually find it quite disappointing when I realise that nothing around me is actually happening. It’s especially poignant when the dream involves people who have died (like my father, who regularly appears in my dreams), or situations that evoke actual or contrived happier times.
I read once that our dreams all have meanings, and that we should record them in the hope that they cast light on current or future events. Prince Charles apparently does this — or, at least, has someone do it for him — but that may not be the best recommendation.
For that reason alone, I am now noting that I’ve just woken up from a nap in which I was at a dinner party with some of my real friends and family along with the comedian/ author/ polymath Stephen Fry who, for reasons now not clear, threw up over me. At the point in which I realised it was just a dream, and thus began to wake up, Stephen was furiously trying to clean me up with a towel while I was imploring another friend to grab a camera and register the moment for my Twitter feed.
I was sad to wake up because I really do wish Stephen Fry was among my circle of friends. And I’d certainly love to be able to post that picture.
When I went to school in Australia in the late 1960s and 70s, they played God Save the Queen every morning. In fact, in later primary school, I played God Save the Queen, as a drummer in the band.
A portrait of Elizabeth II was hung in every classroom, and in history classes we were frequently reminded about how great our ties to the “motherland” were.
The first time I began questioning this, I suppose, was in 1975, when the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, sacked prime minister Gough Whitlam and the elected government of Australia, and installed the opposition leader in his place in a caretaker role.
That can’t be right, I thought, the Queen will probably step in and overturn this. But the Queen did not step in, she let the unprecedented decision by her representative in Canberra stand.
Of course, my understanding of the events of the Dismissal is more nuanced now, but it was then and there that I began to think about the complexities of having a head of state who was so remote — by distance and, increasingly, culturally.
Things became a little more complicated for me when I sought, and obtained, a British passport. That document declares me to be a British citizen, and I have taken advantage of that fact over the years to live and work in the United Kingdom, and the get in and out of the European Union much more efficiently than my Australian passport would allow.
In the UK, I understand the affection for the monarchy, and I understand that the royal family, while controversial at times, plays an important role. It attracts tourism dollars, and, in many ways, it defines a certain type of “Britishness” with its pomp and ceremony. But it’s also expensive to maintain and represents a class system that no longer applies.
When asked if I’m a republican, I usually say: “In Britain, no. In Australia, yes.”
While I’d hesitate to call myself a monarchist, I think the system in Britain ain’t yet broke, so there’s no point in fixing it.
So, as the Queen celebrates the milestone of being Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, I remember the song we sang as children, and wish her many more years of health.
The discussion about what comes next can wait.
I’ve never been to Syria, so I shall never see the great ruins of Palmyra.
But their senseless loss, at the hands of extremists who don’t value human life or human achievement, has reminded me of some of the ancient or very old wonders that I have visited.
These sites are, thankfully, still there and continue to inspire us. I’ll post more pictures of these and other places that I care about — and we should all care about — in the days, weeks and months to come.
