Choose: people or ideas

My mate Ron, an eighty year old pensioner and resident of an old peoples home has suffered this winter, from cold mornings and nights.  He has never mentioned the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) or the Paris Accord to me in our early morning conversations over a cup of coffee.  He tells me that electricity bills have restricted his use of household appliances in his little pad.  A quick dip once a week, instead of a daily shower, television restricted to The Bold and the Beautiful ("Bill's a bastard") and Eddie McGuire's quiz show.  Ron is amazed by the breadth of Eddie's knowledge.  He doesn't cook anymore, on his electric stove.  He retires early, about 7pm to bed, as the cold of night invades his unit.  Some mornings past, his approaching form evoked in me, a singular curiosity: a blue and white hatched, lumber-jack styled shirt. Closer to me, I noted it was fleecy-lined, a good fit and crowned with a hoodie.  I became more curious when I realised this was no hand-me-down or St. Vinnie's bargain.  Ron's shirt was new.   "Ron" I asked - "a new shirt?"  "Yes, I opened the door this morning and found it next to the pot plants.  It's a lovely shirt - new too - still had the price tag on it.  It's a beauty - nice and warm - lovely."

Someone who is sensitive to what is going on in his or her's community was concerned about Ron's plight and did something about it.  Off to "Lowes", one of the last surviving blokes clothing shop, to purchase the shirt, followed by the anonymous delivery of it - to Ron.  Compare this action to the indifference of hubristic, virtue-signalling politicians and global-warming alarmists, such as Malcolm Turnbull,  Josh Freudenberg, Bill Shorten and the Greens, promoting "modelling" (a euphemism for "prophecy" - "theory") about the weather, resulting in unaffordable electricity prices, mental stress and physical suffering for the elderly.  Your choice: political ideas and prophecy or the humane, personal and practical sensitivities of Ron's anonymous friend.

Sartre and the absurdity of life

Sartre, returned to the writing-desk, after enjoying a smoke in the garden, and paused, struck by the realisation of the true meaning of life - absurdity.

Reading Monday's issue of The Australian, I found journalists and critics comparing Bob Dylan to Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe, and an Australian senator advocating the issue of licences to doctors, so that they may lawfully kill their patients.  Absurd but typical of  modern life, I remembered Sartre's epiphany.

A poem by Suzanne Edgar

                                                                  

                     Millais Does Shakespeare in Winter

                                                 The famous artist used his lissom model
                                                 to paint the maid Ophelia on a stream
                                                 with willows overhanging all its banks.
                                                 He was driven by his vision to begin


                                               
                                                but how would he depict the watery scene?
                                                He laid sweet Lizzie Siddall in a bath
                                                With lamps beneath the tub to keep her warm.
                                                Her palms upturned, she floated, fully clothed.


                                                So obsessed was Milais by his task
                                                He quite forgot to notice how time passed.
                                                Five hours flew by and each oil lamp burned out
                                                before he freed his model from the pose.


                                               Drenched and numb, the uncomplaining girl
                                               failed to recover from her long ordeal,
                                               Pneumonia followed; though Millais paid the bills,
                                               a stain removed to shadow her short life.


                                               The drowned Ophelia lives for us today,
                                               her story and her songs still tell the tale
                                               while no one cares for damaged Lizzie now,
                                               the victim of too literal a mind.        




                                              
                                                          Suzanne Edgar