Celebrating the Equinox ... with a lovely morning walk

At 7 am yesterday morning, just as the sun rose, I and a good friend, Alun Davies, undertook a long walk through some lovely countryside on the northern outskirts of Armidale. We're still on Summer Time here so although the 21st March 2020 was the equinox daylight started an hour late. These pictures tell the story.

We drove our vehicles to the end of Blue Wren Road to start our walk on a dedicated path through the rolling wooded countryside or skirting pastures belonging to neighboring hobby farms. We saw kangaroos hopping along and butcher birds singing

Some of the paths were grassed and others were dirt like the one above. All the countryside you can see has an altitude of a 1000 m or more (c. 3280 feet). For comparison, Mt Snowdon in the UK is about 3500 feet. Mount Duval, which was visible on much of our walk is 1393 m (4570) - much higher than Ben Nevis. By the way, despite the height and the season, the temperature on our walk was about 15 C and very pleasant. The picture below shows the rolling countryside to the north steadily rising towards the Guyra plateau - which has similar height to Mt Duval.

A beautiful river ran through the territory around us - Tilbuster Creek and the pictures below show it to good effect.

I loved the play of the early morning light on the grasses and hillsides as the next three photos show.

And this picture looks towards Mount Duval in the distance.

I waited until the morning sun was hidden by a tree to take this view of the morning mists covering low ground in patches around us.

Yet another view across to Duval, but this time with a lot of farmland in the middle grounds recovering nicely after all the rain we've had in early 2020.

More patches of mist, but with a flock of sheep in the foreground.

A nice little home snuggling among the trees. One can appreciate why Armidale is surrounded by hobby farms ... and even bigger commercial operations.

An ant's nest ... and the ants were bloody big. Alun warned me not to couch them, but we both hammered our shoes on top to elicit their fierce reaction.

Alun explained that this trees had been decapitated by a bolt of lightning some time ago.

We saw some roos in this paddock but they leapt well ahead of us and eventually ran out of sight.

Mount Duval, which lent its name to the High School that both Emily and Rebecca attended.

Nice, eh? The walk took us 80 minutes and we covered 5 km in the process. A great start to the day, and no sign of COVID-19. We were isolated for 99% of the walk and met up with only one other walker and two cyclists on mountain bikes.

AS

An almighty rush to buy toilet rolls

One of the insane acts of the current coronavirus epidemic is the hoarding of toilet rolls by many members of the public. Dot and I were becoming worried as we were beginning to run short of toilet rolls, but we found local supermarket shelves empty of this item. Nor could we find boxes of tissues or kitchen rolls, which might act as substitutes. I imagined a point would come when we would have to wipe ourselves with discarded newspapers!

It might seem odd to you, but this is exactly what happened on one trip I took in about 1982. One of the dreary features of life in the former USSR was the timely delivery of essential items ... like toilet paper. And I once took a railway trip in the Soviet era from Moscow to Khabarovsk - a distance of 8250 km (5125 miles). That's a long way to go and what alarmed me almost from the outset was that the toilet in my railway carriage had no paper! So I did what others taught me and used old copies of Pravda instead ... not the entire journey, but a good part of it. Yes, some Russians spoke English, including a science professor whose compartment I shared. Pravda, by the way means 'Truth' and it was then the newspaper of the communist party. Since its contents were far from the truth, I had little concern about putting to a more practical use!

The train, by the way, was often short of good food ... although on one day I was offered caviar for three consecutive meals! Back to toilet rolls. Last week our major supermarket chains came up with an interesting strategy. They decided (a) to open at 7 am and (b) to restrict entry to persons of pensionable age or with serious handicaps. This commenced for Woolworths last Tuesday and I arrived at the gate at 6.50 am expecting to be first in the queue. No way! In fact I must have been at least 20th in the queue and I gathered that many people in front were heading for the aisle containing ... guess what! Toilet papered stack overnight.

Here are all ready with trolleys in front.

The barriers to entry were removed right on time and we filed in without any fights breaking out. However, most of the elderly people were not too agile on their feet and plodded in column to the relevant aisle. I adopted another strategy. Rather than following queue, the I ran up an adjacent aisle to the top pushing my trolley, took a sharp right bend and raced to the top of shelves containing the paper. I was just in time to seize one of the few remaining four-packs (we were restricted to one each) ... and beat a hasty retreat to seize some other items in short supply.

In desperate times one has to be agile both physically and strategically! Perhaps I've not revealed the best side of my character! Apologies for all the exclamation marks.

Oh! I have one postscript. How come I took that Russian trip? Well, I was at a conference in Moscow en route from England to Australia. I found out that train travel was absurdly cheap and that I could travel to Khabarovsk for A$14!! So instead of flying with a Japanese airline from Moscow to eastern Siberia I junked that tick and took the train. I took a couple of days off at Irkutsk to look around that city and ride the hydrofoil down the river to Lake Baikal. I even found a couple of US colleagues staying in the same hotel! By the way, on the final leg to Khabarovsk I was arrested for illegal photography and had film confiscated! Luckily, I was allowed to check in for my flight to Niigata on the Sea of Japan. From there I flew to Tokyo, walked around the city and the Imperial Palace, took a trip to the base of Mount Fuji, and eventually flew back to Sydney and Armidale. One other memory. In Tokyo I stayed in a capsule hotel! Look that up at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel .

AS

Ghastly Limerick

I'm probably going to get roasted over this post, but who cares in the midst of the Caronavirus epidemic? Have some grotesque fun at my expense. Because of the long and severe Australian drought in 2019, all the plants in our garden, where they've survived, are struggling to keep up with normal schedules. One example is our Dahlias. They're running about two months late having just sprung into life.

Their appearance reminded me of well-known down-under Limerick, which is remarkably true in some ways. Here goes:

There was a young man from Australia
Who painted his RS (!) like a dahlia
The colour was fine
Likewise the design
The aroma ah that was a failure.

Well have a look at some of our dahlias:






























There's nothing wrong, as far as I can see, with the colour or design ... although perhaps the yellow version looks a little moth-eaten.

Alas, the aroma was a complete failure. I couldn't smell any scent coming from the flowers! Perhaps that's my fault and not the plants'. After all, I have a bit of a head-cold.

No! Don't jump to conclusions! I do not have a dose of COVID-19. That dreaded disease has yet to appear in our region and hopefully things will stay that way.

Fortunately, we live at high altitude and no ocean liners dock at our door to discharge dozens of infected people. Nor do we have an international airport similarly unloading dozens of international travelers from who knows where, maybe South Korea, Iran, Italy, or the USA. We also spend 95% of our time 50 m or more from other humans.

AS

Armidale's new evening food markets

Armidale's mayor and council have been thinking of ways to jazz up the use of our pedestrian mall in the heart of the town's Central Business District. Originally the heart of retail sales, the mall has been losing customers and pedestrian flows for many years as the town's planners have allowed no less than three indoor shopping precincts to emerge! This is in a town whose population is about 25,000. What towns in Britain with a similar population now have three competing indoors shopping plazas in the middle of the town? In Armidale's case there are at least three other scattered retail spaces located away from the town centre. Also, of course, quite a bit of retail trade is being siphoned off by various kinds of on-line retailing, making things even worse.

Council's latest attempt to re-invigorate the town centre involves staging regular - once a week I gather - food fests, where a wide variety of different ethnic foods are sold. That, in itself is probably not difficult. Our regular farmer's markets provide a large array of foods associated with such countries as Turkey, Bhutan, Nepal, India, and Germany. Dot and I attended the first such food event last Friday and the mall was humming with large numbers of people. Again, let my pictures tell the story.


As you can see from these first three pictures, the mall area became quite lively after a slow start and, by the time we sat down to eat our interesting meal, the seats and tables the council had provided were fairly full.

The council also wanted to attract a wide range of households and play facilities were provided for kids.


















The Tattersalls Hotel staged a bar on the adjacent pavement so that people could readily purchase wines, beers, and spirits to go with their food. They did a roaring trade that evening.






Council also provided a performance awning - below left where musicians could play their instruments. The lady on the right, whose name I do not know, certainly did a good job with her country-music songs.

Dot and I saw the stall on the left providing Corn Flower Pockets and we investigated what was on offer since we didn't want anything too large of filling. You'll never guess what national dishes were being provided here! I'll take that back and give an hour to come up with the right answer - Venezuela! Have any of you ever eaten Venezuelan food? I doubt it.

One of the trucks in the mall - allowed in because they stored food and often had cooking facilities - belonged to grill monkeys. This took me aback and I went to ask which country supplied the monkeys and which parts were being prepared for eating. I felt queasy about being something of a cannibal! It turned out that the owners just grilled the usual parts of sheep and cattle.

The final picture shows the tables and chairs provided by council at an early stage in the event when not many people were around.

 AS

Grand Designs

Dot and I love watching Kevin McCloud's Grand Designs on ABC TV. So we readily agreed to purchase tickets for his Canberra performance where he reminisced about his childhood and where he then lived, talked about house design principles and issues of urban planning, and other themes relevant to prosperous and convenient urban living. This event was on the Sunday evening, just a day after the events just reported on two blog postings.

The tickets were very expensive - c. A$140 each (or maybe c. 72 GBP). However, the audience was riveted for over 3 hours as he engaged in an illustrated monologue, occasionally interspersed with challenges for the audience in general or selected personnel who went on-stage to wrestle with questions or issues he raised.

As usual, I took occasional pictures of the event, some of which are posted below to provide an better sense of the occasion. Here's our host for the evening.
















And, as the screen behind him shows, we could if we were early enough, pose questions for him to answer. So he was definitely interested in stages a kind of public discussion.



As the next few photos show, his architectural interests stretch from the historical to the contemporary and from city to country - both in terms of design and construction methods.

Both Dot and I have notices how his program oscillates from week to week between those dimensions. If anything, Kevin seems to focus more on rural locations than city spaces and perhaps that's because city development  options may be constrained somewhat by various urban planning controls and reluctance of some residents to accept new ways of doing things - the famous NIMBY syndrome.

At one point Kevin bought on-stage a team of respondents who wore crash helmets - presumably to give them some kind of safety when they failed answer correctly the various questions he posed.

All up it was a great occasion from which I retrieved a few good ideas.

AS 

Dreaming on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin

The multicultural festival I have just reported on occurred on the morning Saturday 22nd February, but in the afternoon we were enthralled by another wonderful event.

This time it was a theatrical event - a performance of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" a little over 415 years from its first delivery. But the setting was unusual. This time it took place in the open air in parkland alongside Lake Burley Griffin. The audience sat in a grass circle and there was no stage. The actors performed their roles weaving their way among an audience sitting on towels or sometimes on folding chairs like the ones we had. The actors had microphones attached and their utterances were broadcast through a series of loudspeakers encircling the mass of spectators.

For me, this was the second performance of Shakespeare's wonderful comedy that I had ever attended. Surprisingly however, the previous rendition occurred in similar fashion at an open air performance located alongside another famous body of water. This was the St Lawrence River in the heart of Montreal. I wonder why Shakespeare's play encourages this style of presentation! Does any reader have a view on this? The Montreal performance was preceded by a 10 minute Hamlet! But this opportunity turn the dream into an omelette was missed by the Canberra team. Apologies for the play on words.

These pictures reflect well the spirit of the occasion. Here we are strewn across the grass in front of Australia's national library.

Recognise these two dudes?

And alongside us is Lake Burley Griffin.

The excellent actors, some of whom are shown in the next few images, rushed around and through the scattered audience reciting their lines.

 

A great day was had by all, and the weather - which was so damaged by bush-fires a few weeks earlier, was beautiful on this occasion.

AS