There’s a Whole World Out There! … or … The Joy of Walking

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Jaycee sent me this piece this afternoon, when I admitted to feeling more than a little blue about life in general. He told me, “This was written a few years ago when I was living in a different place…a different space…but the principles are still the same….” Thank you, Jaycee, for your sane reflection in an increasingly insane country – very much what I needed. I hope other denizens of The Pub will feel likewise.

(Image Credit: Shoot)

I now have no car.

That statement in itself may require an explanation in these self-commuting times, but I think I’ll leave that reason at a loose end …

And speaking of another thing that has ended … I feel I can state quite categorically (as an observant walker) and declare it official that the daisy bush has replaced the geranium as the stalwart mainstay of verdant flowering flora in the domestic front garden!

The long-lashed cheeky button flower of the daisy has edged the precocious petals of the geranium off centre-stage. I suppose in this age of “go-get-’em” attitude and “in-your-face” aggressiveness the battling geranium could hardly match the many blossomed. Fast growing daisy-bush ….. might, is now right!

I notice these small things on my walks into the town where I live. Hybrid roses too have muscled-in on a place next to the footpath, all bright and starry-eyed like the young starlets they are, their many-hued blooms huge and alluring to the passer-by ….. although I myself, religiously adhering to the adage: “Always take time to smell the roses”, find little delight in discovering so scant a scent in such wonderful blossoms. … and I feel a little cheated, like false advertising that encourages false expectations, for surely, if there is any flower that looks delicious enough to kiss. it is the rose …. and like any kiss, a fellah needs to take away with him an exotic, lingering scent of delight to caress and steel him against all the crassness of the outside world and…but I think I have made my disappointment plain..; the hybrid rose, without its scent, is as a romance without mystery!

(Image Credit: LA Times)

It is Summer where I live and the fruit trees are bearing bountifully. None more so than the cherry-plums along the railway track that I cut across on my way into town. For some reason these delicious trees are shunned by the public and much of the fruit is left to fall and rot on the ground. Bearing no such animosity to such bountiful harvest, I make feast on their berries!… These, and plums galore, accompany the walker on his journey and I make note the fruit of the nectarine tree leaning precariously over the corrugated iron fence of “Such and Such Ltd …. Motor Repairs” is deepening its crimson blush and fattening itself up for the picking!… .. not long now.

(Image Credit: Allotments and Gardens)

A Serbian I once worked with told me of his struggle against hunger in his youth after the war, and how he made it his business to note when every fruit tree, every vine in every backyard or lot in his village was ready to be raided … such are the necessities of survival. In Australia, where we take such things for granted, it is one more joy to be embraced on my walks.

Another thing I have noticed, although it has fallen out of fashion with the onset of “estate housing”, is the front fence. The front fence is one of the last and lasting expressions of individuality in a world of shrinking imaginations. In Australia – indeed, the world – the front fence, like certain hobbies, was open slather to any fetish of taste or tastelessness. I have seen them constructed of everything from shells to bits of ironmongery ….. “TAKE THAT!” was the creed for some of the monstrosities separating the incumbent from the innocents in the outside world. From bits of off-cut wood to animal bones and limestone rocks.

(Image Credit: Toothbrush Nomads)

And what was the flower that inevitably graced these icons and filled the gaps in the masonry? The geranium! Alas, it is gone now, as is that generation of front fence makers who, although predictable in all other mannerisms pertaining to urban life. could be counted upon to equal or maliciously outdo the neighbour in design or complexity, the Bastille like structure of the front fence. And gone, also, is the geranium … alas, alas!

(Image Credit: The Garden of Eden)

Windmills, simple in structure, were a regular feature of front gardens, but these too have been replaced by more complex “paddling duck” or “rowing men” and even by mass-produced “cupid” bird-baths. Some of the more bombastic citizens plant spread-winged eagles gargoyled on top of gate-pillars which gaze threateningly down on the walker as he moves past. I remember seeing a young woman innocently walk past a live wedge-tailed eagle perched on a fence at eye level next to the footpath. I was watching from a stopped train. As the woman drew abreast of the bird, she turned her head toward it (there is an impish spirit that provokes these actions!). I presume she didn’t expect to see such a large creature a foot or so from her face. The sudden leap to the centre of the road was Olympian to say the least! and when her knees buckled under her I thought she was going down for prayers on the bitumen! But no, she swiftly regained her composure and with only a few deft adjustments to her hair, promptly moved on. Against such nerves of steel, the male of the species has no chance …. though to this day I don’t know if it was the bird that screeched or the woman.

(Image Credit: Ozleworth Park)

I keep a small box at home in which I place all the “treasures” gleaned from the roads when I walk. There are shiny( they have to be shiny!) bolts and hose-clamps, a squash-ball, a portable phone, spanners and other miscellaneous objects, some unidentifiable but interesting …. what few coins I find I spend. The gutters and the shrubs are receptacles for all the detritus of mankind. Bits and pieces that fall off cars end up scarred and scraped into the kerbside gutters. Drink containers and waste paper end up stuffed, like bodies up chimneys, into any nook or kicked under bushes. At nesting time any excess chicks forced or pushed out of nests end up little mounds of fluff on the footpath or flattened on the roads. I can’t help but feel pity for these helpless chicks. who don’t even get a start in life before it is brutally taken from them. But then. what animal in the wild (even domestic) does not meet with a violent end? Though once, when a flock of starlings flew over me, I saw one fall, for no apparent reason, out of the flock. to my feet (almost) dead as a doornail ….. heart attack.? Old age? Who knows. But it was only once that I saw that.

(Image Credit: Etsy)

Walking can be very educational, peaceful and fulfilling. One’s thoughts fall into the rhythm of the step and rare is the worry or problem that cannot be resolved in the space of a good long walk. The relaxing contrasts of sunlight and shade, water sprinkler and breeze, the chlorophyll odour of fresh-cut lawn near the lake, the idle paddling of the ducks mixed with the joyful cries of children at play, lend a certain visceral ambience to the atmosphere of the clinging world around us that we call life…

Oh the joy of walking!

779 thoughts on “There’s a Whole World Out There! … or … The Joy of Walking”

  1. New South Wales Treasurer Mike Baird has been elected as the state’s 44th premier after the shock resignation of Barry O’Farrell.

    The Liberal party room met this afternoon to formally accept Mr O’Farrell’s resignation and elect his successor.

    Mr Baird stood for the leadership unopposed, and is expected be sworn in at 5:30pm today. Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian was elected deputy leader.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/

  2. And a thought just hit me, if the Coalition loses NSW in March and Queensland whenever, that would be a huge event in Aus politics. Any government that gets too radical and idiotic in Australia, even if they’ve been elected in massive landslides, they can be undone just as quickly.

    But I wouldn’t be too confident until the next round of NSW state polling at least. The last one was just weird, at about 51-49 to Labor on Nielsen but 58-42 to the L/NP on Newspoll.

  3. That was a dirty bit of business, making the navy men take the hit on what was in reality an instruction. That coward Morrison, will get heat over THAT little bit of bastardry!

  4. Fiona, I sympathise with you sharing a carriage with Pru and her OH, David Barnett. I think you can blame me.I introduced them after Mr Barnett split from his wife, Maureen. He has changed over the years into a far right apologist for Howard, wars and the AS issue. A bitter old man.

  5. “I did check the cables, and everything seemed alright. Oh well, moi is not always infallible.”…saved in documents for future blackmailing!…suggest others do likewise!!……………quickly!

  6. Mark Kenny makes a good point –

    No pun intended, but there are few more liquid assets than Grange Hermitage, given its prestige, its trade-ability and its appreciation potential. People buy it as an investment, sometimes not intending to drink it at all. To that extent, it might be seen as a way of handing someone cash in a less obvious form.

    If this were a cash gift, say, an envelope containing nearly $3000 tucked into the inside pocket of the Premier’s suit jacket by a businessman, it would constitute a bribe – plain and simple – and could result in jail time.

    Could this be the reason Bazz ‘forgot’ to list the wine in his register of interests? It seems so obviously a bribe, and it so obviously had results.Nick di Girolamo was appointed to the board of the State Water Corporation a few months after sending the wine, a bad look on its own, but there’s more, funnily enough from Quentin Dempster –

    It has emerged that soon after Di Girolamo had the Grange delivered to the O’Farrell residence in April 2011, he was registered as a lobbyist for Kores, the South Korean coal company which was seeking to develop its massive Wallarah 2 long wall mine under a contentious catchment in the central coast.

    O’Farrell had famously told the locals in 2009 that there would be no mining in the catchment – “No ifs, no buts … a guarantee”. But in government Kores got the nod from the director general of Planning, Sam Haddad, and a Planning Assessment Commission is now merit assessing the mine on social, environmental and economic criteria. The locals are furious and feel betrayed.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-17/dempster-an-antidote-to-the-new-south-wales-disease/5397352

  7. Now tell me. Who is surprised that uniforms were the only ones to take the fall for the incursions into Indonesian waters?

  9. “Now tell me. Who is surprised that uniforms were the only ones to take the fall for the incursions into Indonesian waters?”
    The MSM, obviously!!

  10. Libs pissing and moaning about Kate McClymont's reporting, remember she won a Walkley for exposing Thomson & the HSU. Didn't complain then.— Wyn (@WynRichards) April 17, 2014

  12. Kirsdarke,
    With both NSW and Qld having Optional Preferential voting I find it difficult to make anything out of Newspoll Neilsen etc.,TPPs.simply because somewhere around 55% of votes for minor parties expire before they are allocated to the two majors yet the TPP always adds up to 100%. Do the pollsters take this into account and therefore express the TPP as percentages of the estimated total of effective votes or do they just assume that everyone that votes for minor parties will allocate preferences.?

  13. @Barry J

    As far as I know with Queensland and NSW, the pollsters always apply the preference flows of the previous election to the calculations of the 2pp votes from the primary votes. This includes the exhausted vote rate for the minor parties.

    While it does seem unreliable, especially in rapid rises of parties like KAP and PUP, they have been fairly accurate in most elections so far.

  20. Post on The Drum…: [ICAC might also indirectly claim a few scalps in the media, with the immediate sidelining of award winning journo from The Australian, Ms Berbakov, who so angered Abbott with that corruption question yesterday. Today’s edition of the Oz has no column from Ms Berbakov despite all her preparatory work yesterday. Instead it features the usual screamers with some air brushing (Barry was a good bloke etc) and to create some diversions (Its Labors fault). Moreover this self-serving rag didn’t even have the decency to acknowledge that the Berbakov skirmish with Abbott even happened.]

  21. Given the crap Gillard copped over such trivial things as her nose I wonder how they will treat the new deputy leader in NSW?
    From the side she looks like the toucan on the fruit loops box!

  22. Barry J,
    ‘Sorl right.

    Jaycee,
    Unlike certain people of my acquaintance (the Resident Nerd comes to mind, for some reason) I have never had any problem admitting to mistakes.

    But then, I so rarely make them …

  23. Funny how there was none of this chip spitting and snarling when ICAC was going after former Labor MPs. Not so long ago it was all matey slaps on the back, lots of ‘Well done, old chap’, congratulations all round at getting rid of some sleazey Labor identities. Gloating by the truckload. Not a word could be said against ICAC. Now it’s suddenly different. When Liberal coruption is exposed despite the best efforts of the media to cover it all up things change. The process, it seems, has been found to be flawed. Things need to change, presumabley so no more Liberal Parry crooks will be embarrassed. All we here are dummy spits, the stamping of feet and petualnt screams of ‘That’s SO not fair!’

    Will Mike Baird try to call a halt? Hartcher and Co are due in court at the end of the month. Someone will be desperate to stop the process before it exposes corruption at the top.

  25. Did anyone else notice the forced smile when Baird was asked questions about Di Giromalo?
    My prediction is that he won’t last til the election.

  26. Al Palster,
    You are forgiven – it was actually an amusing experience.

    It was in Car C of the Sydney-Melbourne XPT – first class, but occupying only half the carriage, the rest being the snack bar.

    Ms Goward, Mr Barnett, another person, and I were the only occupants.

    Ms Goward and Mr Barnett ignored the two plebs and conversed loudly on all sorts of matters that they perhaps should not have been discussing in public.

    I had to exercise considerable self-restraint to avoid laughing aloud.

  27. Fiona, Mr Barnett is well worth avoiding, has a column in the local paper and spews out all manner of rubbish. Just about to have a go at the editor because he put a letter in yesterday that was well over the maximum word limit. editor has pinged me many times for too many words so I’m about to have a go at their editorial policy.

  29. You know…I bet we’ve been mugged on this O’Farrell resignation thing!…do you remember yesterday, I posted a little anecdote on my being in the office when the spec’ builder demanded his client ; the property developer to send the flowers IMMEDIATELY as a token of APPRECIATION of a job done?…..well, it just dawned on me, THAT is how the “Southern European / Mediterranean” mindset works…
    ie; you do not send gifts in ANTICIPATION, but rather in APPRECIATION of a favour….put that theory in context to the fact of O’Farrell resigning so suddenly and you have to ask ; “WHO was the person who originally sought the favour FOR Girolimo and what was the favour done?”
    If you think back to the days of Labor in office and you see Iemma, Rees and finally Keneally getting done over and Obied’s clique getting massive payola….you have to ask if the political loyalties didn’t overlap into the capital gains for members of both parties?
    Perhaps the Labor govt’ was done over as a convenience to get the Libs in office so deals could be done on the water thing and Barry resigned so swiftly so the names of the associates of Girolimo (those who did him a small favour, hence the Grange as appreciation) did not come to light?
    But of course..I could be wrong!

  30. I’m just wondering if anyone has ever been present when the media pack descends on a politician?
    Just thinking that some nicely timed exclamations of “for goodness sake, ask a proper question!” or “Good gods, even I can tell he’s lying!” would possibly cause some heartburn in the news editing suites around the country?

    But then, who would actually want to hand around the doors of a parliament house with a media scrum waiting to spot a politician?

    Just out of curiosity though … what would you interject to embarrass someone like McClymont, Kennedy or Uhlmann? (Or any of the others *wicked twinkle*)

  32. There may be more to come about that underlined all in the thank you note.

  33. Anyone care to make an educated guess at the next step 😀

    Four months after Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox gave up on broadcasting in China, the ABC’s international arm has reached a historic media agreement which will give the Chinese people access to Australian programs and create closer ties between the two nations.

    http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/apr/17/australia-network-opens-chinas-door-to-aussie-programs-after-abc-deal

  34. It appears Ms Middleton is getting a bit touchy;

    Karen Middleton
    @KarenMMiddleton
    Follow Follow

    Navy has declined to say exactly how their 7 officers ended up straying into Indon waters. We’re not allowed to know that, apparently. – 17 Apr
    More Tweets

    Ian
    @ausjournosrscum

    @KarenMMiddleton @jot_au .but I don’t understand.Even after all your vicious denigrating of JGPM + Abbott worship they still won’t feed you? – 17 Apr

    Karen Middleton
    @KarenMMiddleton
    Follow Follow

    @ausjournosrscum @jot_au Youve earned yrself a blocking, just by yr twitter name. You clearly don’t need to see anything from me, nor I you.

  35. Why do the ABC always put up Peter Lewis from essential research as some sort of representative from the ALP?
    He always comes across as a sniveling weakling.
    Oh, I think I just answered my own question!

  37. Scott Bevan leading a discussion on the Drum about what a nice guy Mike Baird is.
    Just stating it as a fact that Baird, despite being a nasty right wing bigot is a nice guy.
    Maybe we could get Julia Baird on to give us a more balanced opinion!!!

  39. I’m not surprised some commenter on that Quentin Dempster piece couldn’t find any mention of Abbott’s questionner in today’s Oz. The person’s name is Nicola Berkovic, not ‘Ms Berbakov’.

    Nicola Berkovic hasn’t tweeted since just after the end of Abbott’s presser yesterday, but that’s nothing unusual, she is not one for tweeting every five minutes. Nor does she have a piece published every day.

  43. Haha, Karen Middleton has always been a liberal mouthpiece, let’s not forget she was a political editor at the west australian.
    Is there a more thin skinned group of people that our scummy journos.

  44. Kate McClymont was also one of the journos who broke the story of the Canterbury Bulldogs salary cap rorts in 2002.

  45. I’ve just had a brilliant idea.
    Tha ABC should open themselves up to advertising from drug companies, namely those who manufacture blood pressure medication.
    After all the ABC do so much to help raise the demand for their products!

  46. http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/04/17/liberals-in-denial-over-ofarrells-error-should-learn-from-this/

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/17/we-could-benefit-from-a-new-sydney-airport-but-our-roads-need-fixing

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/17/a-lesson-in-logic-why-its-up-to-us-all-to-meet-cost-of-educating-australia

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/16/insulation-scheme-inquiry-unlikely-to-investigate-claimed-link-to-house-fires

    http://www.newstatesman.com/staggers/2014/04/bad-press-farage-doesnt-automatically-help-tories

  47. This little black duck

    Re China. There were many, way back when, who had a very cynical view of Rupes marrying Wendy and that by “coincidence” , it coincided with Rupes big push to get in to the China market.

  50. Also from comments on Quentin’s piece on The Drum..:

    It’s been going on for ever. Years ago I was a NSW Public Servant who proposed a prosecution for a “member of Sydney society” and true blue chap. The then Labor Premier despatched my Assistant Commissioner form Sydney to take my file and notes and tell me to pull my head in.
    So long ago it probably doesn’t matter now and minor compared to the crooks getting away with figurative murder now. Will the “proceeds of crime” be invoked if any of the crooks get to the courts?

    Why would a Labor man protect a “member of Sydney society”?

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