An amusing memory

Around the year 2000 I owned a 22 room boarding house in the poor Brisbane suburb of Ipswich. The demograhics were adverse, with a significant fraction of the tenants being fresh out of the "big house".

I reserved a front room for myself. I would spend time there watching TV while tenants came to me with rents, problems etc. My TV was an old B&W monitor drawing on the signal from an old VCR that was no good for its original purpose but still had a working tuner. So all the tenants could see that I was using a VCR without knowing that the VCR was useless for recording or playing back video tapes.

One or two of the resident thieves saw this and decided to steal the VCR to sell it to a pawnshop or the like. But that was not easy as I had placed deadlocks on all the doors.

Nothing daunted, they took advantage of my room being fairly close to the ground and moved a wheelie bin to underneath my window -- and climbed on the bin and broke in via the window. The deadlock prevented them from exiting via the door so they had to climb back out of the window with the VCR

When I saw what had happened and the trouble the thieves had taken, I was much amused and liked to imagine their conversation with the pawnbroker and the look of both surprise and disappoinmenton on their faces when they were told the VCR was worthless! They would not have been able to figure out where they got it wrong. I mentioned the matter to some of the other tenants so the the thieves would have become quite a laughing stock throughout the boarding house

Well, bless me!

I was recently critical of Google for "search blocking" my Blogspot blogs. They do however now appear to have reversed course on that and now most statements on my blogs will appear in response to a Google search on the topics they cover.

So I was curious to see if they indexed statements on this blog. This blog has only a tiny readership so could fairly reasonably not be indexed by Google -- though it is hosted on Google servers!

Anyway, I was not surprised to see posts on this blog being ignored by them. But here is the funny part: They do index the copy of this blog that I put up on one of my backup sites! Colour me surprised but grateful!

See: http://jonjayray.com/memoirs.html

UPDATE: Since I wrote the above, Google have started indexing the Blogspot version of this blog too. I get the strong impression that someone at Google is keeping an eye on me! Probably mediated via their AI

I am a happy monarchist

Being both born into a monarchy and a citizen of the only country to have an entire continent to itself is pretty pleasing to me. Leftists for a while were always telling people to "check your privilege" and I acutely feel and appreciate my privilege of birth.

And the monarchy of which I am a subject is also undoubtdly the grandest one on earth. No-one does monarchy better than the British. And the amount of publicity they have been getting lately has been phenomenal. Politicians would kill for that sort of coverage. I have particularly enjoyed the coverage of the King's birthday celebrations -- even though it is actually not nearly his birthday! A delightful British eccentricity.

I was particulaly moved by the following report:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13537765/trooping-colour-royals-balcony-prince-louis-comment-kate.html

Like half the world, I was delighted to see Kate looking so well after battling cancer at such a young age

And I had to reflect that the British do military uniforms surpassingly well. And I am pleased that the royal family are an emphatically military family, wearing uniform on most public occasions. I did myself for a time serve in the armed forces so I have to a degree put myself where my mouth is in that respect.

And the young children who were on the balcony for the flyover were a delight too, with Charlotte being a typical big sister by telling her younger brother what to do

And our King is obviously a kind man of goodwill

Raw milk does taste better

A few years ago there was a controvesy in America over dairy farmers supplying milk from their cows directly to customers without going through pasteurization or going through any official channels at all. Farmers were prosecuted for it.

The matter was resolved by everyone involved claiming it was sold only for bathing in! Once you had it, drinking it was up to you.

I tasted it in my childhod and and still remember it as tasting richer.

It was when we were living at 41 Campbell st in Innisfail. The farmer had his herd where we could see it from where we lived. His name was Augie Sorensen. He used to supply unpasteurized milk (probably illegally) to quite a few Innisfail households -- including ours for a while. People would leave out a container and Augie would come along and fill it with very fresh milk.

The memorable thing about him however was his milk delivery vehicle -- a white horse-drawn cart that looked rather like a chariot. It did however have pneumatic tyres. The milk was stored under cover at the front of the cart and Augie stood up at the back to "drive".

I can still see Augie, tall and thin with his typically Scandinavian golden-brown skin and wearing his white pith helmet while standing up proudly in the back of his white cart guiding it along with his long reins. His big chestnut horse always used to have blinkers on -- probably needed if it was to be driven among motor vehicles.

My mother did not patronize Augie for long. She went back to bottled milk -- probably because of health concerns.

I think he was eventually shut down by the govenment. It was a loss. Back-to-nature enthusiasts would have applauded him. He was certainly a brilliant example of low-tech

The reason raw milk was eventually banned is that it was thought to transmit TB from infected cows. So it was amusing a few years later when we schoolkids all had to be tested for TB -- using the Mantoux skin test. We were all positive! We had all had TB without knowing it and were perfecly healthy. Augie's milk could have had something to do with that.

I am heathier than ever

I have just got the results from a big range of blood tests going back a couple of years. I was particularly interested in my vitamin D levels. I have spent most of my life hunched over a keybord so my D levels have always been a bit low. But I recently decided that I should take more care of myself so started taking 1000 IU of D3 with dinner

So I was pleased to find that my D levels are now mid-centre of the ideal range.

But the really pleasing thing is that a lot of things I was high or low on a couple of years back are now normal. I have got healthier over the last couple of years! Not sure why but Z would no doubt put it down to all the salad lunches she has been feeding me

Found it!

I knew I had written something about alexithymia in the past but could not find it. I thought it should be on this blog but a database search did not find it. I mentally blamed that on Google. It is suprising what they do NOT index and I have no idea what the guidelines are. Though I do know that nothing on my Greenie Watch blog or my Tongue Tied blog will be indexed

Anyway I have some old biographical notes from the 90s that have never been online and I found there what I had written. I think it is of some interest so I give it below:

"My mother was a bit of a social isolate and she inculcated her values into her children also. So that did not help my social development. She had a high opinion of herself and thought that everyone else was silly. I doubt that she ever had much fellow-feeling for anybody other than her own children.

I probably get my own rather flat emotional life from her. "Alexithymia" is the word for extreme cases of it, though alexithymics have psychosomatic illnesses and I do not. At any event, the sentimentality I inherited from my father made me much better able to relate to people than my mother could"

A trip to Capalaba

Capalaba is one of Brisbane's older satellite suburbs so is not far from the centre and has a myriad of shops. Jenny drove us there yestrday morning.

And it was a good trip. One of the coffee clubs survives there so we ate there. I particularly like their flat grills and the one I had -- camembert & chicken -- was just right. A big lot of salad too. We then went OpShopping and I did well at the Vinny. I got some cutlery I liked, some boxed hankies, a new wired mouse (which I am using at the moment. I prefer mice without batteries) and I got a fun watch. It looks like a $2000 watch with a lot of dials but they are all fake -- just painted on. Looks impressive if you don't look closely

We then found a real true old-style bank nearby with a counter and tellers, where I drew out some money. Minimal queues. No machines. It was a BOQ. They have always been best for personal service. It was like a trip back in time. Jenny and I joked that it was almost worthwhile to go out to Capalaba to do your banking

Some Jungian psychology

Unlike many psychologists, I have some respect for the psychoanalysts of around a century ago. John Maze, one of my tutors at the University of Sydney when I was doing my Master's degree there, was also of that mind and he did influence my thinking about that to some degree

Z likes the psychoanalysts too so she occasionally sends me something from that literature. Below is a comment on why some young men continue to live in the family home well into adulthood. They see that as a sign of immaturity

"What actually led to this phenomenon? Psychologists claim that the root of the problem is that we live in an era of the absent father (he does not have to be physically absent) - young men are expected to leave the comfort of home, overcome the mother complex and shape a worthwhile life, but without the psychological support of their father. It is very difficult, especially in light of the fact that the absent father affects the mother as well. This creates a situation in which the mother tends to become more authoritative in order to compensate for the lack of a male figure in the dream life, but also the failure of the father to give the mother love and support creates an emotional hunger in her that she tries to satisfy through the relationship with the child. This is the moment in which the "perfect storm" is created in which the mother becomes what the Jungians call the "devouring mother", reports "Academyofideas".

https://zena.blic.rs/lifestyle/jung-otkrio-kako-nastaju-slabi-muskarci-i-zasto-je-danas-svet-prepunih-takvih/v7pvnp2

That relates to a lot in my own life. My mother was clearly the boss in our home and she rather disrespected my father --so my father had very little influence in my life. And my mother was very permissive and supportive to me. And she was something of a "devouring mother", who tended to live through the lives of her children. I was aware of that and disliked it

Where the Jungians get it wrong however is how the chidren tend to react to parental suffocation. In my day we simply left home. I did so at age 16 and lot of my contemporaries also did at age 16. It was normal in that era (the '60s). We were NOT permanently "suffocated". We just left the scene. So kudos to the Jungians for some insights but their predictive powers were weak

From the Pantheon in Rome

Centred is a peripatetic person I sometimes lunch with. He is in good shape for a man in his 70s. Fortunately he is uxorious so his wife does not have to worry about some thirsty lady racing him off