Darkest Tragedy!

Don't be taken in by the brightness of the wattle on the right of the picture. The general drabness of the scene strikes the right note. The pic represents the 'stiff upper lip' in the face of tragedy. A tragedy that makes the WFC and Global Warming just blips on a passing screen. It may well be found that many riots and uprisings around the world are directly attributable to the despair engendered by this tragedy! The unthinkable has become fact, the impossible has happened! Before 95 thousand spectators the Geelong Cats were bundled out of the semi-final leaving it to two negligible teams to fight it out for the AFL Grand Final next week end.

I know you will all be shocked by this news, but nil desperandum as we Bengali speakers say. It means 'wait till next year' - always supposing that there will be a next year! After all if the Cats can be bundled out at the semi-final, anything could happen!

The missing link.

I'm adding this because the important part of the "wattle throttle" bit somehow went missing. I referred to my previous blog about wattles and went on to say that they have been planted all around the Village by our gardener. I've given you three samples. The first is a ground cover, the second can be seen in comfort from our lounge room and the third is one I see on my daily walk. Our gardener reckons that there are over 200 species of wattle. It may be so. Anyway, I hope you like some of our wattles.

Wattle and throttle ...

A while ago I talked of wattles. Well, I'm still at it because, as you doubtless know, wattles of various types (I was told there are 2000 different species) bloom one after the other from early spring onwards. Our Village gardener has planted them at various spots around the place much to my delight. I'm supplying three samples--the first is one I see on my daily walk, the second is by the lake just where we can see it, and the third is a ground cover.

The pic up in the right hand corner indicates that the throttle is down. The long weeks of building and renovating are almost at an end. We now have limited access to our Community Centre with its library, coffee making stuff and the billiard tables. Here our manager and one of the residents try out the billiard table, while a painter in the background does a spot of patching up. By the way, our manager for some odd reason pronounces his name 'Ian' to rhyme with 'peon'. Some fellows will do anything to get noticed! Yes, the table felt is blue. "Where has all the green stuff gone?" as the old song might have had it.