Hear, hear
Far from the deafening crowd.
Ageless
Some people seem born old. For others, whatever age they have reached – 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 – seems impossibly old for them. It goes without saying, of course, that you yourself are one of the latter class.
Red
Young Silver Birch trees bend, bend, bend in the wind, But never break. Old Red Gum trees not so much.
Sail away
In days of old, sailing ship captains, of necessity, carefully planned their voyages. Using a compass, and a pair of dividers (set the distance apart a ship could cover in a day), they drew a zigzag line aiming to avoid hazards like reefs, sunken ships, zones with no wind, onshore currents, and take advantage of
Old Fred
Talk to anyone with a long career in showing dogs, sheep, goats, chickens, cattle, cats, guinea pigs, pigs, budgerigars, canaries, pigeons, alpacas, horses, and anything else that some agricultural show somewhere in Australia has a section for, and you get the same story. A tale, like a Greek odyssey, involving every triumph, every judge that
Don\’t know them
I know there are people who: stop learning early in life; are religious; vote conservative; damage the environment; hurt people physically and mentally; don\’t like animals; own few books and read none. But I wish I didn\’t.
In the parlour
Do spiders get bored I wonder? Their lives in webs seem to consist of very long periods of stillness punctuated by occasional moments of frantic activity.
Brain allergy
For people whose bodies are allergic to, say, gluten or peanuts, just a trace of the material in their food, perhaps derived from a mixing bowl or a beater or a knife, is enough to trigger a bad immune reaction. Similarly for anxiety sufferers a small event, a word, an image, perhaps part of an