My diet

I am a normal human omnivore with no allergies or other restrictions on what I can eat. Zoe however has very strong "alternative" ideas She believes that we are healthiest if we eat a diet consisting wholly of raw food -- uncooked fruit and vegetables. And she urges me to adopt that diet

I grew up on the same diet that generations before me of my ancestors did: Meat and three veg. And my diet is still of that general type. Lots of my relatives lived into their '90s so I think my diet is healthy enough.

But whenever Zoe comes over, I bow to her wishes. She makes me a collation of raw foods -- mostly grated -- and I eat it for my dinner. I am inclined to think that such a diet has some benefit and I note that my blood pressure has gone down over the course of this year. So that could well be a benefit of what Zoe feeds me. There is no other change to explain it

I have rather bad skin. It grows a regrettable number of cancers -- due to the fact that as a kid I was fed cough mixtures that contained arsenic. Such was the medical wisdom of the day.

Zoe has endeavoured to help with my skin problems by spraying me regularly with a solution of a chlorine compound -- similar to swimming pool water. Some skin eruptions have gone away under that regime so I appear to have got some benefit from an "alternative" medicine treatment

One rather welcome change is that my hair and beard have got blacker as a result of the spraying. I am getting a marginally more youthful look

I thank her for what she has done for the benefit of my health and welfare

I'm astounded

According to ResearchGate, a publication which tracks such matters, my academic publications are getting a lot of attention from other academics. They say that "Your Research Interest Score is higher than 95% of ResearchGate members". The score is mainly made up of citations.

Why is that surprising? Because I last published something in the academic journals back in the '90s. The general view of adcademic publications is that if it is more than 10 years old it no longer exists. But the advent of the internet means that someone researching a topic will usually do an internet search at some point and that will turn up something relevant regardless of date. So as long as your writings are online they are readily accessible. Most of my publications were written before the intrernet existed but I have made sure to put them online retrospectively. ResearchGate has them all. Being really old means that I can look a long way back.

And the fact that I have had so many papers published (250+) of course increases the likelihood that I will hit on something of interest to others.

But I mustn't get a big head about it all. I have kept some track of my citations and they mostly come from places like Pakistan and Poland -- not great sources of cutting edge academic endeavour

Another reason for humility is that my papers that other people cite are rarely the ones which I think are most significant or important. Instead people cite papers that are more technical or utilitarian. Still, it is nice to be still ahead of the pack even after 30 years. I did after all devote 20 years of my life -- from 1970 to 1990 -- doing all that research and writing.

I have also now spent 20 years blogging -- from 2002 to 2022.

In all my writing I have aimed to say things that are informative or helpful to others and I think I have achieved that to a small degree. I do get "thank you" messages occasionally, which I appreciate.

So now that I am pushing 80, have I spent my time well? I am not at all sure about that. I have had 4 marriages but also 4 divorces. Disappointing 4 fine women is not something to be proud of. So I think I should have given more attention to my personal life. Still, I have rarely gone long without a partner and my present partner and I please one-another greatly.

ALL CLEAR

I have just got the results from my latest PET scan. And there was NO cancer found anywhere in my body. Even my prostate cancer is gone -- which is very rare

So the combination of immunotherapy last year and my naturally good immune system has wiped out not only my stomach cancer but all other cancers as well. And an old guy like me should have had Covid by now but I have had no trace of it. The immunotherapy was three infusions of Keytruda

It's the second PET scan to show no prostate cancer so it is a firm, if amazing result. Prostate cancer usually kills men sooner or later. And my prostate cancer had aready started to metastasize when first detected

So am only months off 80 and all my tests show no negatives. I already knew from previous tests that I have strong bones plus normal heart, liver and kidney function. And my last BP reading was a safe 130/60. So today's results really put the icing on the cake

And the latest results combined a CT scan with the PET scan so showed something else of interest -- that the recent fracture in my chest -- now completely healed -- was in my sternum (breastbone). I had thought the crack was there but the emergency doctors thought it was in my ribs. Sternum fractures are slow to heal and mine did take around 4 months to heal. Fortunately, I was not badly affected by that problem either. And my broken ankle healed in about the minimum time. And my arthritis is minimal.

So for someone of my age I am now in remarkable health. I am however extremely unfit and see no end to that. 15 minutes is about the maximum time I can walk and I take stairs slowly.

And a big thanks to Jenny, Anne and Zoe for standing by me during my difficult days. Jenny takes a keen interest in medical matters so she was with me when the specialist gave me the latest results.

UPDATE: One of my readers had a witty comment on this post. He wrote: "May your health continue to be jolly good. My health is generally splendid, but have started to have some aching joints and muscles. I hope I will not suffer from irony deficiency, that and other medical puns can be hard to stomach"

Early days with John Henningham and Denis Ryan

Most of the memoirs I put up here are of very recent events but notes about the more distant past also have a place in memoirs. I have quite recently put up a record of one of the men's dinners that I occasionally put on. In it John Henningham got an honourable mention, as he has often done in these notes over the years. He and I have been friendly for for over 50 years and have kept in sporadic touch over all that time. So I thought it might be appropriate to put up here a brief note about how we originally met.

I think it must have been in 1969 that I rented a terrace house in Wentworth Pk. Rd., Glebe, in Sydney (WPR). It had 3 bedrooms so I asked among friends to find people who might move in and share the cost with me.

I was referred to two young men with a love of cars, Henningham and Croucher by surname. I became quite good friends with both (Henningham and Croucher were already old friends -- school friends) in a bantering sort of way. We address one another by surname only. I address the other two as Croucher and Henningham and they address me as Ray, so how you define that sort of friendhip I have no idea. You just have to be part of such a friendship to understand it, I think. It is an unusually strong friendship. People who have been to school together or in the Army together often address one-another that way. It is sometimes referred to as a "muscular" friendship, associated with constant but not serious abuse of one-another. For many years, my usual greeting when I rang Henningham up was: "Christ you're a shambles, Henningham!".


Henningham when he still had hair

We greatly enjoyed our times at "WPR", in part because we shared attitudes that were at least not incompatible, including a liking for the music of Leos Janacek and "The wonderful world of Barry McKenzie" by Barry Humphries -- a comic book, no less.

In fact, when I was first introduced to Henningham and Croucher at a small party, they gave me the McKenzie book to look at as a sort of test of cultural compatibility. They regarded it then (and I think still do) as the apogee of Australian humour. After I had been chuckling over it for ten minutes or more somebody said wonderingly: "He's still on the first page". So my credentials were firmly established.



All three of us became great devotees of McKenzie. All of us still use some McKenzie slang, particularly in one-another's company -- including an unusual meaning for the word "feature". Henningham was real fun back then but has become a bit more restrained since he married.

One interest we did NOT share was an interest in sporty cars so my purchase of a humble Mazda 1300 was greatly derided. When a car-lovers' "Bible" (called "Wheels", I think) came out and named the Mazda 1300 as "car of the year", there was therefore great embarrassment. That issue was hidden from me and no mention was made of it until many years later.

An incident I remember at that house was when Henningham, Croucher and I were about to take out some insurance. The salesman, George Serhan, was of Lebanese origin and a real bull-artist. We rather liked that side of him. We thought it an art-form and quite amusing (He even had a chauffeur!)

My girlfriend Nola was there, however, and also detected the insincerity. Did she get up him! She really gave poor old George a tongue-lashing. We almost had to pull her off him. It is lucky I am so exceptionally blunt and straightforward or else I would never have got on with Nola.

What I eventually learned about insurance at that time is chronicled elsewhere


The three amigos lunching at Southbank a few years back, with two wives. Croucher is sitting beside his Chinese wife

Denis Ryan, Henningham, Croucher and I had quite a few parties at Wentworth Pk Rd. If ever we got sick of our guests, however, we would put on Janacek's Sinfonietta. We all liked classical music but not very many other people do and Janacek is a bit much for even some classical music lovers. The Sinfonietta would clear the house within minutes. They would even leave their beer behind!

It didn't work for Denis Ryan, however. I think he introduced us to Janacek in the first place. He would say "This is good" and settle in. Not that we minded. Denis was always good fun. He had that Irish roguishness and was a great raconteur. He had been a shearer for most of his life and later moved to Sydney to manufacture shearer's clothing.

For quite a while he used to drop in at our place after work for a few beers with us: The real Australian male thing (except for the classical music in the background). We enjoyed it greatly. He liked Resch's D.A. but we drank Flag. We used to buy D.A. especially for him. We called it Denis's Ale, though D.A. really means Dinner Ale.

All four of us tended libertarian, which is sometimes seen as Right-wing. Denis had been a Communist in his youth (not uncommon among shearers, I believe) and knew an awful lot about politics. He had not had much education but was quite intellectual and cultured for all that. Apparently you do sometimes find that among shearers, according to Denis. He was in his late 30's at the time. Sadly, he is now deceased


Denis at home in Abergeldie St. with his Japanese girlfriend

Nola and I drifted apart, though we still kept in touch, and I took up with the the red-headed Dawn. So after about a year at the terrace house, I left to marry Dawn, which rather broke things up

With the arrival of the internet, however, Henningham, Croucher and I were able to create a "virtual" WPR, with frequent emails exchanged: almost entirely of a jocular or even nonsensical nature. We even have a sort of strange inflated language that we use only between one-another.

Henningham was later to become Professor of Journalism at the Uni of Qld but is now retired, and Alf Croucher was to spend much of his life in China as an academic.


Henningham as he was just a few years ago, at lunch at the Sunnybank Mosburger cafe with his wife Helen and my then-girlfriend Anne



ADDENDUM: I am putting up this addendum pending advice on whether I should put it up at all. With unusual concern from my autistic self, I fear that what I am about to write might in different ways reflect badly on all three people concerned.

In the early days of our joint residency at WPR, there was a certain tall lady in our social circle. It's not an overriding consideration for me but I do rather like tall ladies. And I was myself of above average height so such women were accessible to me. I did not long ago marry a lady who was just a fraction short of 6' tall. A happy memory.

So I paid some attention to the tall lady in the WPR social environment. It was however a complication that Croucher was interested in her too. So what to do about that? I withdrew. I felt that I had a much better chance of finding another lady than he did so I ceased all approaches to her. I actually abandoned potential romance for the sake of a male friend. Whatever else that says, I think it firmly establishes my credentials as an Australian

My time as a High School teacher

After I did my M.A. at the University of Sydney in 1968, I went to the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University to do my Ph.D. I supported myself initially by part-time tutoring in Social Psychology at Macquarie. Later I had the idea of doing High School teaching to support myself. I had no Diploma of Education so the New South Wales Department of Education gave me the heave-ho but a small regional Catholic school (at Merrylands) gave me a job teaching economics and geography. The school was Cerdon College run by the Marist sisters.

Australia was so short of teachers in those "baby boom" years that my one year of Economics at the University of N.S.W. counted as sufficient qualification for teaching the subject at High School level. I in fact taught upper level economics, which was not far short of university level.

For geography I just kept a chapter ahead in the textbook. In my own schooling I had only ever done Junior geography. But my students all did well enough at exam time

Merrylands was a working class area but all my students eventually did well in their H.S.C. economics examinations. As I recollect, all my students passed their HSC and four got on to the statewide order of merit list. The Higher School Certificate serves as the university entrance examination.

Sister Aquinas, the Head of the school, was a very smart lady. I liked her. I wonder if her vocation endured. I see that she was still in the Marist Sisters order in 1980 so perhaps it did. I believe her birth name was Joan McBride. Her choice of her religious name suggested an intellectual orientation and I believe I saw evidence of that

In the photo below, I am the guy in the back row with the black glasses. I had more hair then. The photo was taken in 1970. The photo is of all the school staff. In those days Catholic schools still had religious staff, at least in part.





Later, in my early years as a lecturer at Uni. N.S.W. I got permission to do outside work part-time and was thus able to return to Secondary School teaching.

I again taught Higher School Certificate Economics -- this time at a now defunct "progressive" ("non-directive") school at Birchgrove called "Chiron College". "Progressive" meant little or no school discipline. A.S. Neill's "Summerhill" school was very fashionable at the time so was part of the inspiration for Chiron College. The school has since ceased to exist. It was associated in some way with artist Charles Blackman, who I think supported it. A number of students came from artistic homes and most came from generally wealthy famiies

The students did not all adapt well to the low discipline. About half of them skipped many classes but greatly improved their skills at playing cards. The other half however did quite well because they came from homes where educational achievement was expected. In other words the parents had to provide the motivation that the school did not. So they turned up for my classes. So the HSC results were very mixed. Around half did well and half failed. In summary: For a certain bourgeois minority, "progressive" education can work. For mass education it would be a disaster