A vet from that time describes the effects of Darling Pea on livestock, They lose the ability to judge where their feet are. They become wonky, fall over, appear to be blind, walking into things. Now what does that remind you of?More

Postcards Edition Number 4

Not for the first time, I wondered how it could be that even in the farthest reaches of interstellar space, there wasn’t “nothing”: Nature abhors a vacuum as we all know, and it will create fundamental particles rather than allow “nothing” to persist anywhere in vastness of the universe.More

Open Your Eyes

I think of the protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces, Ignatius J Reilly, who is both a subversive, medievalist Don Quixote railing against the absurdities of the modern world and a fat, indolent slob, too timid to venture outside the confines of 1960s New Orleans. More

Looked At My Stars

All I know is this:/ he went out for his walk a man/ and came home female…Then he started his period./one week in bed./two doctors in/three painkillers four times a day…Carol Ann DuffyMore

All The Women

Cunegonde and Candide are re-united where he learns she has survived rape and disembowel-ment. She incautiously whinges about this to an old woman who retorts that she had to suffer loss of a buttock to feed some starving men.More

It is 1816, a sailing ship limps past Roche’s Point, its rigging all torn. Exhausted mariners, returning after months at sea... swarm ashore and make for the places of entertainment for lonely and thirsty sailors in the section of town known as The Holy Ground.More

Postcards Edition Number 3

The song, Surprised by Joy, was performed only once in public, at the newly opened Penrith Gaels club in Sydney in 1997. Unfortunately, I had neglected to tell my wife about this song, which had just been written. Indeed, the decision to sing it was spur-of-the-moment. As she listened to the lyrics, she realised the context and left the venue in tears.More

Crime takes centre stage as we wander from the first crime recorded in Genesis through murders in ancient Greece and Rome and the Ottoman Empire to a Shakespearean examination of the topic as well as how it is treated in 20th Century popular culture.More

caught in the coils of commercial-ism, having been harried by the pester power of the kids over the years, having the state of my kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, laundry, study- let’s face it, every nook and cranny of my dwelling, not to mention the garden shed and garage- sneered at by reno-vation shows and lambasted by lifestyle mavens, I have long since capitulated to capitalism’s handmaiden- commercialism.More

Easter Rises

On the Western Front, all went quiet when the strains of this carol drifted across no man’s land and the fighting men on both sides declared a truce and for one day, a minor miracle. More