Going Solar And Male Prowess.

The third one up is my place.

Hello Gerard Oosterman,Your Electricity Distributor, Endeavour has approved your installation.We can now send your solar install request to your installer.An installer will be in touch soon to work out a time and date that suits you.

Speak soon,

Origin Solar

The above I just copied and pasted from a letter I received 5 seconds ago. There you go!

For many years, Helvi and I used to ponder about installing solar panels. It first cropped up on our farm well over 20 years ago when solar panels first started to make their appearance. We had lots of roofs but somehow the costs were not as they are now and we were advised to wait for them to come down. Of course, now with Government rebates and the cost of panels a fraction of what they were it doesn’t make sense not to do it.  The quality of the panels have also improved. Even so, one has to be careful, we were told there are a lot of shonky operators out there trying to sell you a donkey for a horse.

I remember getting very annoyed with endless phone calls trying to lure you into getting solar panels. I ended up with a perfect solution by telling them we had no roof. You could hear their astonishment being told we lived in a house with no roofs! Another ploy I used was reading them a children’s story in Dutch. They soon hung up and it amused Helvi and I for a while. Such memories I tend to stick to. Laughter and a smile is good medicine and lately I haven’t been happier than right now. I made friends and I meet her, and others almost daily. In seems odd that during this Covid-19 pandemic, people seem to be keen in meeting each other and perhaps also make the time available to talk and give smiles.

Distances are still required and most seem to adhere to that. I haven’t as much as shaken hands with her, or others, let alone try and get intimate. Couples must be busting to get to each other, but… distance please…, eat a carrot instead. At my age, my masculinity is waning ( if you relate masculinity with sexual prowess)  and I have yet to consider asking the doctor for any help in the form of Viagra or other stimulants.

Years ago, that wasn’t an issue with me, but now with  getting older, some still seem to want to stick to what once was. I now avoid coffee, tea and other stimulants after 8pm as my sleep does need careful planning, and I do appreciate that more than a possible feeble rump about, under the doona.

In any case, lets stick to the solar panels for generating electricity. I was told that it takes about three to four years to regain the initial costs of the installation. That is a pretty good return and it would be foolish not to do it. I also bit the sour apple and bought the place next to mine as well. I am not sure but will probably rent it. A bit of a capitalist, and that, at the fag-end of my life!  Where did I go wrong, daddy? Of course with two places now, I also double my joy in gardening efforts in both places, and that balances the capitalist and the botanist (kasvitieteilijä in Finnish) nicely.

I am so excited.

Herrings

Please consider during these difficult times of  smoke and fire, brimstones and calamitous weather conditions, the eating of a simple herring. I know that lots of people’s lives have been upset and thrown about because of those raging fires and acrid smoke. Things are now quiet again and in some parts of Australia even a few drops of water have been recorded; time to repose and regain our momentum for the ongoing battle we might call ‘life’.

This is where the herring comes onto its own giving us the sustenance and tools to struggle on. Of course, coming from Holland I was practically brought up on a bicycle and fed daily herrings. My father told me when I was still very young (and during a stormy night) that I was born a week or two before my mother was due to eject me. It was, he told conspiratorially, that a fish bone stuck in my mother’s throat that brought on a coughing fit, et voila, there I was born of my mother’s gluttonous herring eating and I already screaming  for one myself. The doctor smacked my mother instead of me.

There are some interesting facts about herrings. Herrings generally spawn in shallows and coastal waters where they lay in levels on top of each other, millions of them. The female herring lays up to 70 000 eggs. So, herring experts inform us, which if it wasn’t for humans to catch and eat the herring and left to breed uninterrupted, they would within a short time and according to Buffon’s  calculations, produce a volume of fish twenty times the size of the earth. It would be easy to understand that that sort of volume would also mean the end of the herring mating and cavorting in the shallows. They would suffer their own demise by those tumultuous watery sexual congress without humans eating them.( post coitus)

Even so, in the past there have been such large shoals of herrings and so easily caught that entire fisheries were threatened by closure because of the sheer catastrophic glut of herrings. This is also why we should not forego eating herrings, especially now during stress and deep-seated gloom. A herring lightens the mood and give us the spring back in out steps. Try it, please.

The expert fishing trawlers and their skippers knew, born of legend and evening tavern talk, when the shoals of herrings were running.  They knew by the glow of their shimmering bodies and the fact they swim in strict wedge shaped formations with a pulsating glow skywards reflecting the sun falling at a certain angle. The fishermen, all peaked capped and storm coat wearing threw out their nets and lowered their sails.

Of course we don’t truly know what a herring feels. They communicate not like we do but no doubt been told that we eat them. Not a nice thing to contemplate when as young herring in puberty and growing, looking forward to an honest mating in the shallows of the Dogger Bank…only to be eaten afterwards!  When life has fled, the herring begins to glow and that’s also a reason why people buy them. They hold a fascination that other fish, like the mackerel or flat-head species don’t have.

Queuing for herrings in The Netherlands.

A pity that one cannot buy a fresh herring here in the southern hemisphere. The bottled or vacuum packet ones are  not the same but I intend to go to Holland (The Netherlands now, sorry)soon to catch up.

You just wait and see!

Some of this information came from ‘The rings of Saturn’ by W.G. Sebald.

 

Dropping a bombshell.

When Cardinal Pell declared some years ago, that the health hazards of homosexuality were worse than that of smoking, he sure showed his cards. The fact that as a priest his anti gay stance drove young aspiring men to suicide did not seem to trouble him the least.

Pell will get his trial and no matter the outcome, the catholic church is receiving a king-hit right now. It cannot risk losing support from their own staunchly conservative anti-gay, anti same sex marriage of ‘true’ believers, nor from those that were hoping that this new Pope would finally steer the church into a more progressive direction. It is a real dilemma and a nightmare. One can just imagine the battles being fought between the younger progressive cardinals and the concreted conservatives. I would not be surprised it coming to fisticuffs with mitres flying about, littering the Vatican’s corridors.

I reckon the Pope would have been tossing and turning last night. A restless sleep. He needs all the advice that his most trusted cardinals can muster. The whole Vatican must now be seething with anxiety, lawyers getting copies of briefs, ready for the Melbourne procedures. It is clear that Pell’s TV appearance last night was already pointing out at great lengths that ‘character assassination’ and ‘media gossip’ will be used as one of his best modes of defence. It might be argued that his trial cannot possibly be fair when so many allegations of sexual abuse have already been ‘relentlessly’ aired and tried by the media. Against that is the belief that ‘no-one’ is above the law, not even the Pope.

My own parents gave it all a miss many years ago. Mum reckoned she would have used the pill if available in earlier years. She was a great supporter of her own children later on choosing the number of children they wished to have. It begs the question, if the pill would have been available in my parents time, some of us might now not be here to tell the tale! The bombshell when I announced my plan to travel to Finland to get married was received with total mayhem and utter despair. “You used to be such a nice young man, Gerard,” was what my still fervently believing catholic inspired mum told me. Dad was more understanding or just less orthodox. Either way, the idea of marrying a girl they never met, was  much less of an issue than the fact she wasn’t ‘catholic.’ It was one of the most irritating questions we were asked by mother, when dating a girl; Is she Catholic?

I would like to think that my trip to Finland might well have been the catalyst in their slide-down into becoming ex-Catholics or non-believers. It was slow in coming but gathered speed as the years went by. It had a liberating effect on my parents. The final knock-out blow to their Catholicism was delivered years later, when they watched a TV segment whereby their former ‘nice-boy Gerard’ was interviewed about his recent vasectomy. There could not have been a more enthusiastic supporter for the cut to the vas deferens, than my mother.

The surgeon was Barbara Simcock. I read years later that she performed thousands of vasectomies.  What she doesn’t know about testicles is just not worth writing about. The seventies was just the beginning. Vasectomies become so popular the term vasectomania was used. It still is the preferred method for male contraception. Just type in ‘vasectomy’ and one gets the most mouth watering invitation from dozens of clinics offering a host of very tempting procedures. One even offers a three-day trip on a luxury liner.

 

The mind boggles.

 

Only the lonely

 

But where are the people? This was very often a question asked during the time we had foreign students living with us. We lived in Balmain. It is a suburb which many Australians would classify as having medium to high density living. We always look back with fondness of the twenty years we lived there. It is the place where our children grew up. So, how come this question; but where are the people?

The foreign students came from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Germany with a couple from Holland. The question has to be looked at from the perspective of living in cities. Australia right from the start understood it had space.  Space was lacking in England, especially in the big smoked filled cities. Thus the suburban block here was soon to be seen as desirable for people to be housed on. At the beginning, people lived in terrace houses joined together forming complete streets. Balmain was one of those earlier suburbs of Sydney with streets of terrace houses. Parks were everywhere and it still felt very spacious.

However, the foreign students came from cities that were teeming with people. They would form throngs on the streets. I am sure that those that have been to Asia understand there is a huge difference between density of people there in cities compared to here in Australia. It were those people on the streets that the students were sorely missing, even in inner city Balmain.

My parents soon after arrival in 1956 went to live in western Sydney. Real Estate agents and blocks of land were the main topics of conversation amongst the migrants.  We too were swept up into saving a deposit for our ‘own’ block of land.  There was no real understanding of the social consequences in making a choice of where to live.  To be near a rail-station was desirable but as for other desirable needs, it just wasn’t about or questioned. Migrants had a need to have a roof and security of an income, all else was secondary. It was like a fever. One got caught up in the frenzy of making a new life. It was all a bit puzzling for my dad. He was different.

The street that my parents ended up living in was like millions of suburban streets anywhere in Australia. There were people living in houses but you would rarely see them. It felt achingly lonely. Sometimes a curtain would stir or a car would drive by. For me it was deadly, spiritual dehydration. Sure, the petunias and rockeries were plenty. Rosellas would be screeching and flying about and then there was cracker night. This was a yearly event with bon-fire on the street, somehow mysteriously related to Guy Fawkes or something. It was an occasion for neighbours to meet up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes

All this in response to having read a lecture by Hugh MacKay. He is a well know social commentator. “The State of the Nation starts in your Street.”

http://theconversation.com/hugh-mackay-the-state-of-the-nation-starts-in-your-street-72264

It seems to fit in what is happening with all that card swiping and waving at poles. We are forced to dealing with less and less people. Banking is done silently in front of an ATM. People buy food on-line and sit at home all sated and possibly overweight. The steel posts at rail stations. Most work will finally be done by  steel posts and robots. Soon we might go to bed enjoying the icy embrace of a steel post or with a rotating robot with a waving of cards giving consent to heaven knows what sexual delights

.

I don’t know what can be done to liven up lonely suburban streets. My mum did her best and was fearless in her search for social contact. It was difficult. All those Venetian blinds and that obsession with privacy. A sign of change is that most people now prefer an apartment close to the city. People do seem to want to live close to each other, able to walk to shops and work. People need people.

We shall see!

Grasshopper, my Friend.

The Grasshopper

 

Just when the feverous counting of white spaces with fonts reached its peak, salvation turned up. It always does. We left the books on the outside table and nipped off to see a very good movie. It is called ‘Spotlight.’

“It’s not a stretch to suggest that “Spotlight” is the finest newspaper movie of its era, joining “Citizen Kane” and “All the President’s Men” in the pantheon of classics of the genre. Full review

Ann Hornaday·Washington Post.”

It is perhaps the best movie of the year and I can see it winning lots of awards with ‘Carol’ running a close second.

After  seeing the movie I felt pleased our own Cardinal Pell will finally front up too.  After the skirmishes between scores of lawyers and doctors he will finally, and by hook and by crook, but more by crook,  while luxuriating from his delightful 4 star hotel in Rome, face the victims of years of dreadful abuse by his church.

What I would not give for our Government to face similar scrutiny about the abuse, including sexual, of the asylum seekers.  I think it might well be inching its way to there.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-24/australias-immigration-policies-violating-international-law/7195432

But, the movie was not the end of it. With reckless abandon we went straight to Harris Market and bought a great rack of lamb for afterwards. A barbeque was coming. Actually, already before the movie and still counting lines of yet another book, I felt a barbeque coming on. You know how sometimes two people are subconsciously thinking of the same thing and at the same time. I don’t think that a barbeque is necessarily pushing itself on the consciousness of filmgoers just having seen a movie about child abuse. Perhaps a couple merging into a single unit. Or is it a kind of telepathy perhaps voodoo thought transference?

But this movie was so much more. With sighs of relief  the audience  were stunned, and remained seated going through all the credits at the end of the movie without a murmur. No one seemed to want to get up, go home. It is that kind of movie! Right at the beginning of the movie we were greatly comforted that the audience were not the usual or habitual food-eaters. Perhaps a couple of choc-tops ice- creams; it was a hot day. No buckets of eggs wafting pop-corn or cartons of chilli-con-carne. We were a serious lot. This movie had in its credits a list of the over 70 paedophile priests that were shifted around from Parish to Diocese in Boston and seemingly around the world, and included Australia on the receiving end, with at least Bendigo  and Mittagong  receiving paedophile priests that were soothed into escaping  justice by the presiding cardinal.

The Grasshopper

Anyway, the Webber was fired up and the rack of lamb, after getting marinated with rosemary, garlic and lemon juice, was just perfect and still pink inside. While eating the rack of lamb with Jap Pumpkin I noticed a friendly grasshopper staring at me while crawling over my hand. I was intrigued why it wasn’t hopping. I always thought they could only hop. Not this one though. It walked putting one lanky leg after the other. We both got on very well. It finally left my hand and went straight to a bottle of wine that I opened to go with the lamb. It was cheeky little number. Quite ambitious with a lot of peach on the middle palate.  The hopper knew it too. It climbed the bottle to the top.(one leg after the other). Having reached the top it found the cap screwed back on. A bit of a bummer, don’t you think? I quickly took my iPhone and here are the two pictures I took.

Enjoy!