I’ll leave you with a quote from 1983’s Worstward Ho- Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Fail better! Even this is sometimes too high a bar for me...More

Letters From Quotidia 47 Waiting for the Drought to Break

I started writing Everything Goes, shortly after learning that I was not bullet-proof in 1998. I was dissatisfied with it and couldn’t work out why so I left it and started to write a pean to music and love, entitled Restless Paces, which was also OK , but about which I remained less than satisfied. And then, one afternoon, I put them together with a linking musical line and-voila- in my humble opinion, it worked! More

Letters From Quotidia 46 Everything Goes/Restless Paces

In some sad corner of my imagination I am in that dance-hall to this very day, moving along a line of increasingly lovely girls who reject me in a variety of fiendishly humiliating ways. More

Letters From Quotidia 45 The Ballroom of Romance

The first authenticated daily tally (i.e.the number of sheep shorn in a single day) was 30 sheep by Tome Merely in 1835. By 1892, the legendary Jackie Howe managed a tally of 321 sheepMore

PFQ 11

I remember when Eichmann was captured by the Israelis and tried in Jerusalem. I looked in vain for the mark of the Beast on those bland features. More

Letters From Quotidia 44 Paul

We sit, chained to the walls of our caves watching the dancing shadows projected from the fire behind. Time for the truth? Listen, now, to the answer given in the song, Pandora’s Box. More

Letters From Quotidia 43 Pandora's Box

We all know, now, there are no safe areas: who would have thought a pre-Christmas coffee and cake at the Lindt Café in Sydney’s Martin place in 2014 would have turned into a horror show so soon after 28 Australians were among the 298 innocent civilians slaughtered above the Ukraine in July 2014 as a Russian missile tore apart Malaysian Airways Flight 17.More

Letters From Quotidia 42 Oblivion Mountain

People who seek information about their forbears are more likely to advertise relationship to a pirate than an accountant. Note also, that privacy for individuals becomes an increasingly rare commodity in inverse proportion to the growing obfuscation surrounding the activities of transnational corporations and governments.More

Letters From Quotidia 41 Rose

Sam Hall has been in my repertoire for decades and when I discovered that there were chimney sweeps in my ancestry it made sense at a deep, even DNA, level. The song is twinned with a great tune recalling the gold-rush days in Far Northern Queensland.More

PFQ10

I am listening to a track that I thought was lost and gone forever- thanks to the power of musical streaming and downloading. I am referring to Billy the Mountain, by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention from an LP I bought in Wollongong in 1973 entitled Just Another Band from LA. I lost it, with a whole lot else, somewhere in the Seventies.More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 40 Patrimony