True blueI know we're in California and all, and it's beautiful and on the Pacific ... but here we just don't get skies as blue — as really, really clear and blue — and sea as amazingly, vividly turquoise as we do back home in Australia (above). Just look at all that blue!
I had only a few days in Perth before I returned to Albany to be back with Mum and Dad, and David and I spent them racing about seeing his family and meeting up with friends when and where we could. But before the two of us headed back to Albany, we did manage to squeeze in a weekend at the beach-house down south.It did us so much good!
We forget, over here on the other side of the world, up in the other hemisphere, how stunning Australia is.
This (below) is our dear friend Konrad, coming back from a gentle hour or two fishing at the bottom of the garden, bringing home the flathead and a few herring which we had that night before dinner - so good!

Konrad and Dace put us up while we were in Perth - they are the kindest, best friends. Thanks to them, we didn't feel quite so homeless returning to Perth without a house of our own! Luckily, they were both able to come south with us for the weekend, and we played lots of cards, ate lots, drank lots and generally unwound.
This is the beach ...... and this is the path from the garden. From the house, you get these little jewels of blue between the leaves of the gums and peppermint trees. And you can hear the sea — only little waves lapping on the sand — as you lie in bed at night. One October night a few years ago, I woke up to hear whales singing and cavorting in the water. Unforgettable. We couldn't get Will to wake up and come with us, but Dave and I grabbed a torch and went out in the inky blackness to stand at the water's edge. Nothing to see, but you could hear them out there splashing and breeching.
And while we're talking wildlife, here's a pic of a couple of roos at sundown on the farm up the road.Click on the pic to enlarge it. There are more roos visible through the trees on the left. The two in the middle are studying me intently to check me out! Unfortunately, I was upwind from them and just seconds later they bounded off. Does your heart good just to see 'em!

Excellent women, part 1
When we were in our early thirties and had been reformed smokers for several years (I quit on September 6 1983), David and I amused ourselves one night — when we were missing the after-dinner light-up — by saying that when we turned sixty, if we were still hale and hearty, we'd take up cigarettes again.
Sixty seemed such a long way off then, and the sort of age when decrepitude and senility were just around the corner anyway, so seeing out our remaining few years with a hacking cough and an antisocial smell about us seemed an okay way to go. Of course, now we're in our fifties, sixty is fast approaching and hey! We'll be old! Isn't that strange? I , for one, am still waiting to think of myself as a grown-up ...
Being about to turn sixty is what prompts Maria Sharpe, the engaging heroine of Virginia Ironside's fun book, No! I don't Want to Join a Bookclub, to start a diary.
While Maria embraces her age with mixed reactions, the desire to remain 'young-at-heart', or to take up a new lover or weird pastimes is not among them. Instead, feeling mature, confident, and endowed with experience and intelligence befitting her years, she looks forward to relaxing into her old age with acceptance.

'The great thing about age,' said the therapist [at a dinner party with Maria and friends] ... is that it's never too late. You can do so many things. Take an Open University degree, go bungee-jumping, learn a new language ...'
'But it is too late!' I argued. 'That's what's so great about being old. You no longer have to think about going to university, or go bungee-jumping! It's a huge release! I've been feeling guilty about not learning another language for most of my adult life. At last I find that now, being old, I don't have to! There aren't enough years to speak it. It'd be pointless!'

'... I find, approaching sixty, that the real pleasure is that so many things are impossible ...'

Of course, there are drawbacks to being old. Like Maria, we have to learn to deal with the infirmity and eventual deaths of friends and others who have been close to us all our lives. But this can be balanced by the joy of grandchildren and a brand-new phase of family-hood.
I've loved Virginia Ironside ever since I read her columns when I was a teenager in England and envied her that extraordinary name - so strong-sounding! Last year, when I shouted myself to a subscription to the Oldie, I was delighted to find her name among those of this UK magazine's other illustrious columnists and regular contributors.
This is a crisp, funny book that is sentimental at times without ever resorting to the maudlin or wussy. Maria is acerbic, intelligent, a warm and loyal friend, and an all-round excellent woman. Recommended.

Booking through Thursday
This week's question:

You should have seen this one coming … Who is your favorite male lead character? And why?

Well, there are any number of male equivalents of the sort of female character I like (smart, gsoh, ddf, fta, ld/nd, n/s, w/own teeth and hair*).
Nominees could include Mr Darcy, Gandalph, and the guy who gets the girl in A Suitable Boy. But there is one who stands tall, head and shoulders above the rest: Atticus Finch.
He's a thoroughly good man, fits all the above criteria, seems ever-so-slightly vulnerable for all his strength and character, and looks like Gregory Peck.


* In personal ad shorthand: smart; good sense of humour; drug and disease free; likes fun, travel and adventure; light drinker/non drinker; non smoker; with own teeth and hair.

Due Preparations for the Plague
I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of Janet Turner Hospital before I found this amazing novel in a bookshop in Perth, while I was grabbing a few Australian books to bring home to the US. Now I'm counting my blessings at all the books of hers I have yet to read.
JTH lives in the US — she's a professor of English at the University of South Carolina — though she was born in Melbourne, brought up in Brisbane and still considers herself a Queenslander.
Due Preparations for the Plague is one of the most gripping novels I've read in years, a very intelligent psychological thriller that is as tautly written as it is tense to read. While the main action takes place over five uncomfortable, claustrophobic days in 1987 — when a terrorist group hijacks an Air France flight from Paris to New York — the narrative shifts and swings dizzyingly through time, location and from person to person, at times as bewildering for the reader as its ghastly events are for the characters involved. And on top of that is the question of who can be trusted, and who's watching whom ...
Like the plague of the title (borrowed from Defoe), terrorism and war are inevitable occurrences, yet how can we ever be ready for them, let alone come to terms with them?
The terrorists are persuaded to let all the children off the Air France plane: 'Passengers reach out to touch and caress as the little ones are pushed down the aisles.' We see them in 1987 and again in 2000, once they've 'grown' from damaged, tortured youngsters into damaged, tortured adults unable to get past the cataclysm that so shaped their lives. They keep in touch via the internet and try to piece together any information about the hijacking they can lay their hands on, in the hope of healing/catharsis/redemption. Or an understanding, at the very least.
But can the truth make any difference to them? As kids, their release from the plane inspired high hopes of a happy outcome for all those left on board. And as adults, they're still clinging naively to hope.
In this novel, published in 2003, two years after 9/11, JTH makes incisive observations about both sides in this drama and draws chilling parallels between American intelligence operatives and the terrorists. CIA recruits, for example, are told by their instructor:
'In our profession (making the world safe for stability, as we like to say; and sometimes, relishing our own esoteric wit, making the world safe for moral systems) it is a given that chaos is all; that order is not only arbitrary but evanescent, and that it is the task of a small strong circle of like-minded people to establish and guard it. Exactly which system of order we sustain — morally and politically speaking — is immaterial. We support the system most likely to stay in place.
'Hence our dilemma. I am not speaking here of personal disintegration, or of that futile and panicked attempt to withdraw from the field ... This is not a field from which you can retire.
' ... Retirement from this career is not an option. We keep your soul in an escrow account. Take note: of the twenty of you in this room, the creme de la creme who have made the cut and registered for this course, nine of you will leave us before the end through one of the two trapdoors I just named. The wages of sin in the Intelligence community are erasure. I know you understand this. If you did not, you would not have reached this class.'
It's suicide on both sides of the equation, then.
JTH sprinkles the text with quotations from all manner of sources and references to others throughout history who were tainted by 'the madness of true believers'. Shakespeare, the Bible, Boccaccio, Defoe, Buddha, the Ancient Greeks and a host of others all get a look-in in this crackerjack read.
Thoroughly recommended.

Albany revisited
Though I was only there because my dad was so sick, I had a great time revisiting Albany, capital of the Great Southern region of Western Australia. It's a beautiful port town of about 20,000 on Princess Royal Harbour, secure from the wild seas of the Southern Ocean — next stop south is Antarctica. The region is famous for wheat and sheep farming, meat and dairy cattle, and, increasingly, wine.This pic (above) is of country near Nornalup, on the coast about 60 miles west of Albany.
Being about 250 miles south of Perth, Albany's weather is a lot milder, with more rain and far more bearable summers.

I was there on Sorry Day, Tuesday February 13, when our new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, formally tabled a motion in federal parliament apologising for injustices and wrongs done to Indigenous people, especially those who were part of, and continue to be affected by, the Stolen Generations. It was such a moving and important day. My brother, Garry, and I assembled with about 500 others near the harbour in Albany ... (that's Garry just left of centre, above, with white T-shirt and long ponytail)

... and we all marched up York Street, Albany's main street (below), to celebrate this historic occasion. On another day, I visited friends who have moved to a beautiful bush property near Albany ...... and after lunch on their deck, ringed by bush, flowers and trees, with birdsong to accompany us, we fed the splendid wrens that came happily in for a feast of desiccated coconut. These (above) are all females, with only a hint of blue on their tails. It's the males that have earned them their name::: The drive from Albany to Perth was, as always, a beauty. I sang along to the entire CD of Attempted Moustache, a fabulous album from the '70s by Loudon Wainwright III (father of Rufus and Martha) and stopped here for lunch:This fabulous spot was just north of Kojonup, which proudly states on signs as you enter the town that it was Western Australia's 'first shire with 1,000,000 sheep'!
A bit farther on, I stopped at Arthur River, a tiny town which is almost exactly halfway between Albany and Perth, to take a look at this little country church on the side of the road.Built by and for old settler and farming families, it was consecrated in 1880 and is still in use today. I was particularly moved by the grave of young Cissie ...
... who lies in the churchyard within view of the golden wheatfields and eucalypts.

:: We had a great sleep last night; first night in our own bed for over a month. I love our bed. And our cotton sheets. And my pillow. We'd stayed up until as late as we could — hey! there's a guy from Perth who's a dead cert for the American Idol finals — and slept really soundly, despite three interruptions from the alarm on David's new bedside clock, which he had inadvertently set to 'sleep' instead of 'off'. Fixed now!
:: With all the comings and goings and toing and froing, I've completely missed Chapter III's first anniversary! Such a fun year it's been, and I'm delighted to have several friends in the US, the UK, Australia and elsewhere who come by often and regularly, as well as my family and mates from back home, who were the inspiration for it all. Thanks, guys!

Happy landings Home to a cool, bright sunny day in San Diego, with a lovely feeling that spring may be on the way down here.
The pic above is the view from the Jumbo just before we landed at Melbourne on Saturday arvo. Nothing to do with today's post, but when I close my eyes, I can still see the inside of a jumbo from row 50 seat F in the centre section ... aaaagh!
We drove south from Los Angeles this morning, dazed and a bit stiff after the thirteen-and-a-half-hour flight from Melbourne and 19-hour time difference which meant we arrived before we'd taken off.
The hills of Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base, and the only section of the 100-mile drive that is not built up, were a mass of dense green, sprayed with masses of the lime-yellow flowers of wild mustard and clumps of bigger orange flowers amid the yellow that I failed to recognise at the speed we were driving.
Utterly gorgeous. Only a few weeks ago, these hills were brown and parched where the wildfires of last October had burned through, in some places right up to the edge of the freeway.

:: I was unpacking upstairs when Mum told me on the phone that Dad was back in hospital again, after a suspected stroke. Gulp. Now, a few hours later, the news is not so grim: a CT scan proves he has not had a stroke (praise be) but everyone is baffled as to the reason for the symptoms he's showing - dizziness, fainting, and a numb and floppy left leg (not the one with the new knee).
Anyway, let's be more cheerful. Here's a pic of Mum and Dad out for a stroll at Middleton Beach, Albany last Wednesday, my last day with them ...Despite the summer's day, dad is wearing the socks I knitted him in the middle of last year! They've been washed and washed, and have been darned at the toe, but he insists on wearing them.
:: And this is me having a last yummy cuddle with my gorgeous grandson, Mack, just minutes before we left for Perth airport and the plane to Melbourne on Saturday.:: I'm far too tired (trying to keep awake to go to bed at the right time to ward off jetlag) to do more than sign off and watch a taped episode of American Idol - YAY! It's back! So I'll see you later!

Homeward bound
I'm in Melbourne (fabulous, fabulous) until Tuesday, when David and I fly home to the US. I'm just briefly logging on, via a friend's computer.
It was sad to leave Perth, and our friends and families - especially Simon, Marnie and Mack - but all seems well in Albany with my dad and brother, so that's a huge relief.
We've had a wonderful day in Melbourne, having arrived last night and been immediately whisked off to dinner by some of our friends. Today began with breakfast in St Kilda, then lunch on the beach there.
Melbourne has long been one of my favourite cities in the world, an opinion David shares with me. But this is our first time together in this city - and that's something to celebrate!
Back next week with pics and the full monty.