Old crocks

  Stimulus What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing …   Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves. Albert Camus, 1963 Northern Ireland I found Derry to be one of the most interesting places that we visited. The delineation between town and country was stark. Kerry and I could see rural fields near the horizon as we walked around the city walls that originally protected the old town and yet we were in the middle of the settlement. The troubles are touted as a thing of the past but th...

  Introduction There’s something about travel and I’ve always recognised the opportunities it presents to compare and contrast. In fact, travel is one instrument that helps point you to the regions of experience, understanding and reason. Rather than merely providing locations and natives to adorn photos, status updates and predictable recounts, travel at its best challenges, confronts, comforts and condemns in ways that make descriptors like ‘quaint’, ‘iconic’ and ‘awesome’ child-like and inadequate. If it’s a straight blow-by-blow description of the Regans’ 2018 European campaign that you’re seeking then you won’t find it here. The content sample and logistics Our journey took place in August and September of last year and included traipsing around parts of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. The first three target areas featured car travel while the rest were incorporated into a cruise which commenced in Bergen and finish...

  Greg Norman’s latest offering (and there have been a few) of his ‘buffed’ bod to the adoring masses is symptomatic of an increasing number of punters in their sixties who seem to think that they still have it in the looks’ stakes. Delusion and denial are becoming the defining processes of seniors who are desperately hanging onto the fantasy that their physical presence adorns and enhances any social gathering or event. You only have to view super, sexy, sixty plus social media walls to realise that narcissism and self-promotion of the ‘visage’ are the order of the day as we encounter each of these critter’s online journeys towards a Top of the Pops podium finish in the handsome/ beautiful seniors’ category. But there’s a slight technical problem. Denial and delusion can only take you so far. If you can stand it, these new images of the athletic Greg reveal exactly what he is……. a sixty three year old man. There are folds and crevices in his ‘formidable’ frame t...

  I don’t mind water but I don’t do water. It’s been years since I had a swim anywhere and I can’t see that status changing before the coil is sprung. However when I was a kiddo, the role of water was a little bit different. The Regan ranch was located in Abbotsford and that was a suburb which was bordered by water on three sides; to the west was Hen and Chicken Bay, the north featured the Parramatta River while the east (give or take a few blocks) collided with Fig Tree Bay which then morphed into Five Dock Bay as you snaked around Chiswick. It wasn’t so much the water that was important but more the shoreline. In the ten years when I was growing up between 1960 and 1970, the bay and river borders were the sites for much of the stuff that sprogs engage in before growing hair in ungodly places. Those two year markers correspond to yours truly motoring from five to fifteen years of age. A disclosure here is necessary. I have a fucked memory of most things that have ...

In Bogan Greystanes, time is definitely not at a premium. This is no idle description because, to me, it has become the signature feature of life in my mid-sixties. And it’s taken a bit of getting used to. Whether you attribute it to ‘retirement’ or ‘old age’ is largely academic as far as I’m concerned. Punters sometimes ask how I like not working and I routinely respond with ‘It’s good.’ ‘Then how do you fill in your time?’ This follow up question is trickier. However, my answer to this is just as routine…. ‘I do nothing.’ Such a response elicits confusion and I’m often forced to explain. But all of this stuff misses the point. The challenge of retirement lies not in filling up the diary with bucket list activities or posting social media friendly status updates but in accommodating and wrangling the large amounts of free time that now come out of your arse without a grimace or a grunt. Even allowing for jobs and duties around the ranch, I have blocks of hours where seve...

On occasions, the realms of 'getting old' and 'becoming invisible' do coalesce and I've certainly witnessed- and been party to- this over the last few days.   I was in town yesterday evening for the purpose of hooking up with an ex-colleague and, prior to our planned rendezvous, I took a quick bolt down to Red Eye Records to catch up on the latest 'arrivals'.   No problem, you say. Well, there wasn't except that in my travels I noticed that those spruikers, who distribute handbills for 'exotic' massages and fitness centres to anyone and everyone walking by, parted like the Red Sea as Moses (i.e. Me) shuffled by. The Exodus narrative may have been completed but I didn't have even one piece of papyrus to show for my journey.   The same sort of thing occurred again today. My mobile phone account isn't noteworthy for much telecommunications activity these days so that when an 'event' happens- like it rings!- this i...

Mario Millo’s 1975 assertion that Life, Love and Music are the three paramours of today’s man has always seemed to me a convenient and justifiable description of the male condition. It’s as apt in 2015 as it was nearly forty years ago.   Sure, one can get into arguments about the order that L, L and M should be placed but it’s largely academic and I’m certainly no long hair and have withdrawn my application form for membership to Sydney’s Push decades ago. I don’t think they would have accepted me anyway and, besides, I don’t own any black trousers and still remain challenged by Germaine Greer…… but that’s another story.   If you’re going to be unfaithful, then the femme fatale known as LIFE is a worthy mistress. The problem with her, however, is that she is capable of kicking you in the teeth at the most unexpected of times. When my daughter finished high school I was in denial for about six years. You see, it’s only a few years since I finished high school an...