Hey hey, the Choughs are back, ten of them, to dig up my garden and gladden my battered heart.
But where have they been? Busy breeding I guess.


Corcorax melanorhamphos
Hey hey, the Choughs are back, ten of them, to dig up my garden and gladden my battered heart.
But where have they been? Busy breeding I guess.
Corcorax melanorhamphos
I once said to my doctor:
“I say there’s always someone
worse off than yourself”.
She said to me
“and do you find
that helpful?”
… is prologue.
My book concerning fire in the Australian environment, extinction of the megafauna, and Indigenous interaction with the environment in general (and in total opposition to the works of Flannery, Pascoe and Gammage, among others), is available online. https://www.routledge.com/The-Pure-State-of-Nature-Sacred-cows-destructive-myths-and-the-environment/Horton/p/book/9781865081076
All my individual publications in this field (and others) are available free online at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Horton9
Also many of my older essays are still available here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/david-horton/28320
“An odd thought strikes me:—we shall receive no letters in the grave” (Samuel Johnson)
It strikes me that there will be books written, music performed, art created, films directed, science discovered – that I will never know about.
As long as
counter-
intuitive
is a thing,
common
sense
isn’t a thing.
Comes a time in
everyone’s
life when the most
thrilling event
of a week is
not a party
or a present
or promotion
or lottery
win, but just a
low blood pressure
reading for once.
Once upon a
time I was much
more than the sum
of my ailments
and side effects
of medicines,
but now I have
no time left for
anything else.
Anxiety
will cunningly
disguise itself
with the symptoms
of heart disease
and the cancers
playing hide and
seek with your mind.
It would be good,
would it not, to
live in moments,
completely,
and not try to
anticipate
and retrospect
every last
heartbeat each night
Monsters in
the cupboard?
Or monsters
under the
bed? No, the
monsters in
my body
set off the
night fears now.