Diary of Another Day

Friday 23rd of June 2000 was a particularly good day. I awoke at 8.30am, which was late, as I had had trouble getting to sleep the night before and had ended up taking a Normison tablet. As soon as I got up, I spent about an hour on the Web looking at my email etc. as I usually did at that time.

I then rang a Real Estate agent to put my house at Forest St on the market. The land was zoned for home-units (or condominiums as Americans call them) and a big block next door had just been put up for sale so selling mine at the same time would give a developer a chance to consolidate a big site. So my land was worth more at that time than it would be worth at any other time. The property cost me $130,000 eight years earlier and was worth at that time about $165,000 by itself.

I had my usual breakfast of two bread rolls with cheese, lettuce and onions on them and the agent then arrived. He estimated that I might get as much as $220,000 in conjunction with the place next door. Conveniently located inner-city land had become very hard to find for unit developers. The price pleased me greatly.

I then went in to my Moorooka GP and had three skin cancers frozen with liquid nitrogen. Such treatments are painful for only about 15 minutes and they then heal quickly.

While I was there, Jenny rang to say she had a migraine so I went and picked her up from work and took her home to her place. I then read the papers for a while and left for my daily trip to the Ipswich boarding house at 12.45 instead of my usual 1.30pm as I had a prospective tenant who was in a hurry to get a room.

When I arrived at Ipswich I first went to the old Metropole Hotel and collected his rent off old Reggie (my longest-staying tenant) as he is a habitue there. I then went to the boarding house and my new tenant turned up promptly and took a room -- bringing occupancy there to an all-time high. I also collected a fair bit of money from tenants whe had got behind with their rent -- leaving me with no problem cases for the moment.

The electrician was also there installing 10 amp circuit breakers on all the power circuits -- thus making it fairly impossible for my tenants to use electric heaters and thus run up huge electricity bills for me. I was very pleased to have that job done and paid him $200 cash out of my pocket for it.

I then went to the Police Station and asked for Robert Fogarty (from the Aboriginal house 2 doors down from the boarding house) to be charged with trespass as he kept disobeying my warning to keep out. I took two Statutory Declarations with me and that seemed to make some impression on the Police.

I then went home, finished reading the papers, watched some programmes I had recorded off the TV the night before and then at about 5pm decided to write a FORTRAN program to track my share investments. That was of course a great pleasure and I had basically finished it by the time I left for G**'s place at 6.10pm.

G** gave me a very pleasant dinner of sausages and that great Northern Italian favourite -- Polenta. We went up to bed at 7pm.

We listened to some very good Baroque music during the evening -- including lots of Bach -- and I went home at 9.45pm. I then put the finishing touches to my shares program. A very fulfilling day!

Diary of a day: Seeing in the new millennium

G** arrived at my place at Forest St at 12.30pm equipped with picnic things. We drove to the Moreton Bay foreshore at Wynnum and had our picnic lunch under a shady tree on the Esplanade there whilst enjoying the view out to sea. The bright blue sky, the sand and mudflats in the foreground, the green sea in the middleground and the dark blue Bay islands in the distance made a pleasant scene -- with lots of birdlife, some sailboats etc. as well. We then went for a long ramble along the foreshore.

Afterwards we drove back to G**'s place and had a swim in her pool. Afterwards, we had a shower together to rinse the chlorine off. We got pretty friendly in the shower however so I ended up dragging her out of the shower and into the bedroom, throwing her onto the bed dripping wet and "having" her there and then -- which she absolutely loved.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in bed talking and listening to CDs of Albinoni and other classical composers played on the computer she had in her bedroom. G** then made us some very good spaghetti for dinner.

We then drove up to the top of Brisbane's very own Mt Coot-tha equipped with a Thermos and drank our tea whilst enjoying the always pleasing spectacle of the multitudinous and many coloured lights of the city of Brisbane spread out all around below us and into the far distance.

When we arrived back at G**'s place, we found that she had not taken her house keys with her. So I had the unexpected excitement of climbing up on the roof and through a bedroom window to get us in. We then adjourned forthwith to bed with much activity ensuing. Around 11pm, we had some chocolates to eat and I then went home in a pretty knackered state.

So we had two trips to scenic spots, much bedtime, two meals, several cups of tea, one swim and a roof excursion all in one day. Active but very enjoyable!

MERRY XMAS 1999

This time last year, my son Joseph was 5'3" tall. By the time he turned 12 this year (in July) he was already 5'6". Perhaps I am easily pleased but I rather liked having a 5'6" tall 11-year old! He now towers over his 5'1" Nanna and is also much taller than Suzy -- one of his adult half-sisters. He is something of a premature teenager -- his voice has cracked already and he spends hours talking to his friends on the phone -- but he is still quite jocular and cheerful so I suspect that he will end up the gentle giant type.

He has been learning piano since he was 4 but is no virtuoso. He still seems to enjoy it, however, and claims he does "heaps" of practice. I am also pleased that I now have a son with his own email address: Josephray@hotmail.com. Perhaps that is the modern day coming of age rite.

He has now finished up at Greenslopes Primary School after three years there. He was Dux of his school in the English language attainment test again but was only in the top 30% Statewide so it is obviously a pretty undistinguished school. For next year we have had him accepted to do High School (year 8) at Clairvaux McKillop College -- a large Catholic school at Upper Mt. Gravatt. I don't know that St. Bernard of Clairvaux is a role model I much admire but Roman Catholic organizations these days seem to be more bureaucratic than theocratic so St Bernard will probably not rate much of a mention despite having the school named after him!

As private school fees go, the fees for Clairvaux are pretty reasonable -- at around $2000 all up per year. The school does however appear to have a good name and it suits Joey's religious convictions. I rather hope that he does not end up wearing a long black dress and putting the letters "S.J." after his name but you never know. I do at least like the intellectualism of the Society of Jesus and clerical celibacy will probably become optional with the next Pope. I was very religious in my teens and still ended up a thoroughgoing sinner so it is all very early days yet. I am betting on the attractions of sin, myself.

Joey was however -- at his own request -- confirmed into the Roman Catholic faith on 4th June. He was baptised only late last year. He greatly enjoyed his preparatory studies in the faith and is now probably more of a Catholic than many of those born to it. He tries to say grace before dinner etc but sometimes forgets -- He then describes himself as a "forgetful Catholic". We have assured him that there are many of those.

Even though we are both unbelievers, Jenny and I were delighted to arrange his confirmation for him as faith seems to have a valuable disciplinary and protective role in the difficult teenage years. If we said he could not be a Catholic and he turned to drugs instead we would never have forgiven ourselves, would we? His confirmation ceremony was something of a family occasion at St. Bernard's Church, Mt. Gravatt with those present being: Jenny, myself, his sister Suzy, his Nanna Lena, his Godmother Jill, his Godfather Prof. John Henningham, John Henningham's wife Helen and my then girlfriend Cheryl Jorgensen.

Judy and I had another one of our breakups early in the year and I met Cheryl in March. She is a flautist, a schoolteacher and a Communist, among other things. A genuine Red in the bed! She is multi-orgasmic and wears a D-cup bra, however, so that tended to make up for ideological eccentricities. We got very much involved for a few months but the relationship did not last. I of course tend towards the Tory persuasion, so that was a slight problem. We were both very keen on classical music, history and literature and Cheryl has in fact had some success as a writer of fiction.

After Cheryl, I restarted my affair with another old girlfriend -- Dorothy. Dorothy has a higher degree in psychology and actually is in private practice as a psychologist. She is also very tall, very slim and very busty -- an unusual but entirely desirable combination from my point of view. Dorothy is however always complaining about something. She is a neurotic. I tell her how destructive that is but she cannot seem to help it. Perhaps her being a Pom has something to do with it ("whingeing Poms"). I have certainly had happier ladies in my life but we have finally got to the stage where she is just a friend now, not a girlfriend.

In October I took a short trip to South Africa. I had got to know an Afrikaner lady called Hester -- a Classical pianist -- on the Internet and seemed to get on especially well with her. She lives in Bloemfontein so I went there to meet her in person. It was interesting and expensive but not a success from a romantic point of view -- which was a considerable disappointment to both of us. I guess that going half-way across the world to meet a lady was pretty romantic, though. For "romantic" read "foolhardy"? I was in South Africa in 1979 under Apartheid and it is notable how much it has now gone downhill under black rule. I sure know how to be politically incorrect, don't I?

Recently, however, Judy and I have started an affair again. We first met over two years ago and it seems to have taken that long for us to sort out our differences! Perhaps we are both a bit pig-headed. After all the girlfriends I have had in the last two years, it is nice to be back with someone familiar and the fact that Judy has a higher degree in the social sciences and a great figure does not hurt either! I am resolved this time to do all I can to make her a happy lady. She too was a Communist in her youth but now dislikes both Aborigines and the welfare state! She was once a nurse working among Aborigines so her views about them are at least well-informed.

Judy had fairly short hair when I first met her but she has since let it grow to well below shoulder length and all that long soft blonde hair is most attractive, in my view. Too bad if it's not fashionable! Why so many women crop their hair these days I do not know. Both the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:13,14) and the human race's oldest known literary work (the Epic of Gilgamesh) say that women should have long hair and men all seem to agree with that. I suspect that cropped hair is often in fact a sort of anti-man statement.

Two things that I go to regularly are the Westside Music Circle and the Friends of Antiquity. The Westside group arranges classical music concerts in private homes with live performers and the Friends are associated with the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland. They give an interesting talk each month on some topic in Roman or Greek history. The archeology of Pompeii and Latin Romantic poetry are two topics I particularly remember. I do not go to a lot of plays but Sheridan's "The Rivals" and Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" were fairly memorable this year. During Cathedrals week I also went to St. Stephen's Roman Catholic Cathedral to see a play based on the life of Hildegard von Bingen. It was actually a monologue but was very effective nonetheless. The best (most amusing) film I saw was without a doubt "Analyse This". It was about a psychologist who got tangled up with the New York "mob".

My favourite classical music concert venue is the Long Room at Brisbane's old Customs House. It is a magnificently restored and gracious old Victorian building and I seem to go there at least once a month. The building is now owned by the University of Queensland and it is their Music Department that puts on most of the concerts there. The Sunday morning ones are free.

I had only one bout of 'flu for a few days in midwinter but have been otherwise remarkably healthy during the year considering my idle lifestyle. I take no drugs or pills for my health at all. Even my blood-pressure is fine so I am unlikely to die of a heart attack. I did however do the right thing and had a scan during the year to see if I had any prostate problems. I was told that only 20% of men in my age-group have no prostatic enlargement but I am one of that happy 20%! The fact that I do not smoke, drink alcohol or use any psychoactive drugs (not even caffeine) may have helped there. It seems fair to me that wowsers should have better health!

I do however keep having to have skin cancers removed -- growing up in the Tropics was not a terribly good thing to do for someone with skin as fair as mine. So I may be pretty healthy but all that sun-damage has made me look even older than I am. When I was 55 people were telling me that I could easily pass for 60!

Business has been bad for me recently. My boarding house at Ipswich is not going at all well and is mostly more than half empty. All the defectives who live at Ipswich do not make a good customer base. They move in, steal from one-another, have drunken parties, fight with one-another and then move out again to get away from one another, leaving a mess behind. They are mostly on the dole and the first thing their dole money goes on is beer and cigarettes. From my experience at Ipswich, I would say that the poor are usually poor for good reasons. I have been trying to sell the boarding house for a while now but nobody seems to want to buy it. Funny that!

My ex-wife Jenny recently moved into a new house at Upper Mt Gravatt. She sold her old house for a lot more than the new one cost her so it was a good move financially and she likes the new house better anyway. It is also only a short walk from Joey's new school. It was cheap because its walls are made of fibro and anything with asbestos in it is mega politically incorrect these days, even though nobody even claims that fibro has ever hurt anyone. The new house has a big granny flat downstairs so Jenny's mother (Lena) has moved in -- which suits everybody. It gives Lena company and it helps to have someone keeping an eye on Joey after school while Jenny is at work. Jenny and I still normally dine together once a week.

Joey's speech has always been a bit unclear so we are going to have him "elocuted" next year. Elocution too is now politically incorrect and elocution teachers no longer appear in the Yellow Pages. They are now called "Speech and Drama" teachers. What a crazy world we live in! Thank goodness for friends and family.

56th birthday

Jill did of course help me to celebrate my 56th birthday. Jill, Lewis, Cheryl Jorgensen and I went to the Clansmen for dinner on the Thursday. Cheryl was not as ebullient as usual because we had just had a breakup but was still very sociable so it was a pleasant occasion. I wore full Highland dress (including my black Glengarry to walk in and out) and ordered the orange duckling, which was perfect. Lewis and I split the cost of the evening.

The next evening I dined with Dorothy Hallam at the University of Queensland Staff Club and on Saturday Jill shouted me a lunch at K&Ks -- an Austrian restaurant where I slightly overindulged on their delicious and very Germanic cakes.

On Sunday Jenny gave me a very nice lunch --with Nanna, Joe and Suzy also present. So my 56th birthday was good too.

MERRY XMAS 1998

Well, the BIG news for me for 1998 is that my son Joey reached 5' tall early this year whilst still aged only 10 years old. At the time of writing he is 5'3". What bets for an eventual height over 6'? I am 5'10 and Jenny (his mother) is 5'8" but Jenny's father was 6'3". Since Joey is quite strongly built he seems likely to be a big man in general. Hard to believe of the cute little tot I knew for so many years! He has already got markedly broad shoulders plus his mother's regular features so he should have an easy time with the ladies in years to come.

Joey also decided during the year that he wanted to be baptised. He had not been Christened as an infant. So at age 11 on 8.11.98 Joey was baptised into the Roman Catholic faith. Jenny and I are unbelievers with a Protestant background but we sent Joey to a Catholic school for his first four primary years and he has continued to go to Catholic religion classes at his State school (Greenslopes Primary). The Brother who takes the religion classes felt that Joey understood what he was doing in wanting to be baptised so Father Brady of the Little Kings movement (a Catholic charity for handicapped children) consented to baptise Joey despite his not coming from a Catholic family.

The Brother who takes Joey's religion classes is from the Little Kings movement and the baptism took place in the Little Kings chapel. I arranged for Prof. John Henningham and Jill Hillman-Marks to be the Godparents. Religion can be a support to people so neither Jenny nor I endeavoured to dissuade Joey in any way. His main reason for getting baptised seemed to be a wish for a religious identity of some kind.

The staff of the Little Kings movement were obviously much taken with the sight of a little 11 year old boy from a non-Catholic family embracing Rome of his own accord and quite a few photos of the ceremony were taken. I gather that any baptism at all was a rare event in that chapel as they had to use a glass bowl for a font. There were eight of us in the chapel to lend Joey moral support and Jenny bought him his first pair of long pants for the occasion. Father Brady is a very kindly old priest and it was a delightful occasion for all. Joey himself must have enjoyed it because he said afterwards that he was now looking forward to his confirmation.

The next biggest piece of news is, I suppose, that I bought a 20-room guest house at Ipswich, near Brisbane, last January for the grand old sum of $185,000. Is that a lot of bedrooms per dollar or what? Guest houses do take a fair bit of management but can be lucrative in theory. I was in fact quite happy with my financial situation previously but when I saw 20 bedrooms for the price of a Sydney bachelor flat it was just too much of a bargain for me to pass it by. So I am now a genuine slum landlord providing accommodation to the poor! For the price of a free room, however, I have caretaker there who does most of the managing and collects some of the rents for me. Good in theory but the first caretaker I had soon decamped with a fortnight's rent (the police eventually caught him and got him convicted, however) and the next three after him also scarpered. I am supervising the present caretaker on an almost daily basis however and he seems OK so far. I have still not succeeded in getting full occupancy -- even at the pensioner rate of $40 per room per week -- so the place is in fact only barely paying its way. Being a slum landlord is not all beer and skittles!

One of my great-grandfathers (Joe Copelin) was a rough-tough goldfields publican who made money selling booze to the miners so I think he and I might have a similar outlook. I am sure his drunken miners were as big a pain as my drunken tenants! I had a bit of difficulty borrowing the money to buy the guest house with but the National Australia Bank ended up financing the entire purchase at their best interest rate (5.49%). They do seem to have somewhat more sanity than most of the other banks in Australia. The Colonial State Bank wanted to charge me huge fees plus high interest and Metway Bank solemnly informed me that they could only finance me into a $45,000 purchase. Isn't competition wonderful?

Metway were particularly hard to believe. When I rang them what I got was a girl in front of a computer screen who knew nothing beyond what was on her screen. I pointed out to her that I had very large assets and no debts but I was wasting my time. All she knew was what was on her screen. Why a bank would put its big borrowers into the hands of airheaded teenagers quite eludes me. I would have thought that any sanely managed bank would treat housing borrowers as VIPs. Metway also could not find the title deeds to two of my other properties that I had once mortgaged to them. They swore blind that they did not have them and it was only when I faxed their general manager with threats of legal action that they finally found them. And I always thought that banks had to take good care of their records!

Another acquisition late this year was a new computer -- a bottom of the range job running a 266 mhz Celeron chip. It may be bottom of the current available range but I have still not filled up its 4 gigabyte hard disk. I have plenty of games for Joey that I could put on but 4 gigabytes just takes so many of them. 4 gigabytes is of course 4000 megabytes. Compare that with the first computer that I bought in 1989. It ran at all of 8 mhz and had a 20 megabyte hard disk! Time marches on! In less than 10 years, processing speed went up 33 times and storage capacity went up 200 times. Another amusing contrast is with the first computer I ever programmed for -- the GE mainframe at the University of Queensland. It had 16 kilobytes of RAM compared to the 32000 kilobytes on my Celeron. But that WAS over 30 years ago.

Buying the computer also had its amusing side. When I was ready to replace my old one, I found the cheapest Celeron being advertised in the paper (by a firm called Global Computers) and rang up and ordered one. When I arrived I asked to test the machine to see that it worked, only to find that the computer was nowhere near ready for use. All they had done was put it together. They had not even formatted the hard drive. So I had to partition and format it myself (warned by past experience with computer shops, I "just happened" to have a DOS boot disk in my pocket) plus set up access to the the CD drive plus set up the soundcard -- all of which took me about 20 minutes while the salesman just sat on his bum staring into space.

At the end I found that the sound did not work and pointed this out. He asked his technician about it and was told that a special piece of software would be needed to get the sound running. I asked if he would like my phone number so he could let me know when the sound was running. He did not seem to want to be bothered so I just walked out the door with my cash still in my pocket. As I walked out he said: "Thanks for wasting my time". He was angry with me because I would not buy an inoperable machine! So I then rang someone I had long known ("Game Dude") and asked him for a quote. He charged $1321 -- about $200 cheaper than what the moron was charging. And when I went to Game Dude he had everything all set up. I just had to walk in, test it and hand over the cash! Shopping around can make an amazing difference. Game Dude was of course an owner/operator of his business.

I met and got involved with Judy Power. She has a generally very slim figure (but takes a DD-cup bra!) so my nickname for her is "skinny" but she herself thinks that she is fat! She was born in Mackay and is a 5'7" tall blue-eyed blonde. She had a month-long trip overseas during the year in which she went for a trip along the Trans-Siberian railway and also visited Mongolia. Judy is a nurse who still works in nursing but is by now heartily sick of it. She can hardly wait to reach pensionable age. She owns her own house at Rocklea (5 minutes drive from my house at Moorooka: Very handy!) and has some investments so she expects to retire in some comfort.

Although Judy and I first got together only a year or so ago, we have had several bust-ups in that time but we now seem to have settled into a stable relationship. Despite the bust-ups the attraction between us made us keep coming back to one-another. Romance among the oldies! I am 55 and Judy is a little older. As Judy is a shift-worker we see one-another only a few times a week at the moment, however. Judy finished doing a Masters degree in the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at the University of Queensland during the year so our common background in the social sciences is a help in some ways. She and I ate out a lot together at first but I eventually realized that she is not really much into food unless it is chocolate! She and I in fact both love dark chocolate with nuts in it -- which has a much more unfortunate effect on my waistline than on hers. She was only 3lb when she was born so I think she is just constitutionally slim.

Judy did, however, appreciate it when I took her to the well-known "Clansmen" restaurant at Annerley here in Brisbane for a "bon voyage" dinner before she went overseas. "The Clansmen" is in a gracious old building set in spacious grounds which is vaguely modelled on an old Scottish country house so it has good decor, good service and good food. A hard combination to beat! I always wear the kilt when I go there so I have become one of their better-known patrons.

Judy is very soft-hearted so when she told me that one of her cats needed $70 spent on it to fix an eye problem I suggested that maybe it was time to trade in the cat on a new cat. She said, "I knew you would say something horrible like that!". We both knew it was just a tease however and had a laugh about it. Perhaps another sign of how soft-hearted she is comes from the following little story: Judy reported to me once something of a conversation she had had with one of her friends. Apparently her friend asked her about me and asked was I "nice". Judy replied: "No, he's not nice at all. He's quite arrogant in fact. But he is also unfailingly courteous, considerate and kind." Isn't romance wonderful?

Someone interesting I met during one of the break-ups with Judy was a rather remarkable young lady named Irena Mavroleon: A very attractive French girl aged 30 who also happened to be a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Queensland. As I have had papers on philosophy published in the academic journals we could have been well suited to one-another. Unfortunately her French existentialist philosophy clashed with my British empiricist philosophy so we parted company with some regret on both sides. We both enjoyed having dinner-table conversations on such rarefied academic topics as "causality" and "self-theory" -- two topics on which we did see eye to eye.

I had an attack of what seemed suspiciously like chronic fatigue syndrome around last Xmas and into the new year. My main symptom was a complete lack of energy to do anything. I took it very easy with lots of bed rest but it still took me a month to get over it. I suppose I was lucky to get over it at all. At least I lost some weight during it. I seem subsequently to have found that lost weight again, however!

I had a robbery in March in which my old Hi-Fi and a lot of old cheque books and credit cards were stolen. The police caught the thief about a month later in Darwin but only after he had bounced cheques and run up credit-card bills in my name all over North Queensland and the Northern Territory. He put over $4,000 on one of my credit cards alone. As it was not my signature on the cheques or credit-card vouchers however I did not have to pay. Interestingly, he did not steal my credit card itself. I always carry it on me so he couldn't. He just found an old statement for the card and had a new card forged using my numbers. So keeping your card itself safe is not always enough. To be really safe we would have to destroy immediately all receipts and statements arising from its use.

My fourth wife Kathryn divorced me during the year, which saved me $500 and a lot of paperwork. So she must be aiming at remarrying. As it will be her 5th marriage she has a lot of heart! My ex-wife Jenny (mother of my son Joey) had to go into hospital for a minor operation in April but recovered well and is now feeling fighting fit. She still seems to be a long way off remarrying, however. I like to think that I am hard to replace! She does however have a very good friend in Jeff Roberts -- someone we have both known for many years.

My retirement from academic life is now more or less complete. I am no longer an academic. I am now a slum landlord. My only paper in the academic journals for 1998 will be a letter in "Political Psychology". My major hobby activity is going to classical music concerts -- of which Brisbane has lots.

55th birthday

Jill and I got together for my 55th birthday. We went at 6pm to a "Twilight" concert at the Long Room of the old Customs House for a concert put on by the University of Queensland Department of Music. Some French Dances by Marais were the highlight of the programme for me.

Jill then took us to the Hilton for their smorgasbord -- which was very good indeed. She wore a very fancy and pretty cream-coloured crocheted blouse plus her black Harrods suit.

Afterwards we adjourned to her house ("Siena") for the rest of the evening. As Dorothy Hallam took me to dinner at the Sultan's Kitchen the night before and Jenny gave me a birthday lunch the following Saturday (with all the kids present) my 55th was a good one too.

MERRY XMAS 1997

My academic career has at long last more or less ground to a halt. I retired from my Senior Lecturer's job at the University of NSW in 1983 when I was 39 but I still kept on writing for the academic journals. For quite a few years I would still be sending off a paper almost every week. I still do write a bit but only once or twice a year now. Nowadays I am a true retired man and really enjoy my afternoon naps. I saw a saying recently that I rather like: "The older I get the better I was".

My interests these days are very much in the personal sphere. I always have had a lot of fun with the ladies but in my 50s I really seem to be doing better than ever. I had my 4th marriage a couple of years ago to a magnificent red-haired creature named Kathryn. She was 47 but looked 35 and was roughly the same size and shape as Elle McPherson. Did she look good in a mini-skirt! We were both rather wilfull, however so the marriage lasted only weeks. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, however! Since then I have had lots of girlfriends but no more wedding bells are foreseen.

My son Joey is now aged 10 and does well at school. There was recently in Australia a nationwide survey of childhood literacy done this year for the Federal Government by the University of NSW. Schoolkids from a sample of schools throughout Australia were tested for basic English language skills: Vocabulary, sentence comprehension, spelling etc. As you may know from the media, up to a third of Australian primary school students were found to be virtually illiterate. Joey's school (Greenslopes Primary) was one of those that took part. You would of course expect the highest score in the school to be obtained by one of the 7th Grade children as they have had the most English language teaching. In fact the highest scorer in the school was not a 7th Grader or even a 6th Grader but rather a pesky little 5th Grader. And that 5th Grader was Joey! Having a son who is the smartest boy in the school is, I think, pardonable cause for pride. When I got the results I was so pleased that I hardly slept that night. With brains and good looks all the boy needs now is luck! But as Joey was an IVF child maybe he had to be lucky just to be born!

Joey has been having piano lessons since age 4 but still seems to be enjoying them. He is also enjoying learning the trumpet at school. He has also recently taken up Tae Kwon Do -- a Korean martial art -- and seems very enthusiastic about it. He has been a devotee of computer games since he was 18 months old so I was very pleased to find that he also seems to be doing a lot of reading of books these days. He actually tackled the "Dune" science-fiction trilogy during the year --which is a huge book. He got interested in the book as a result of playing the computer game based on it. The first thing I ever saw him reading was a hint sheet for one of his computer games so computers can be good in surprising ways.

Jenny (Mrs Ray no. 3 and Joey's mother) is doing very well in her job helping to run the Queensland head office of Godfrey's Vacuum Cleaners and bought a new Daewoo car this year. She shows no signs of re-marrying however. She seems to think that all the good men are married already. As a much-married man (4 times!), how can I argue? Jenny and I remain on cordial terms. I did her tax-return for her this year with very good results so as a thank-you she made us all a very special dinner -- a Parsee Dhansak with green chutney and all the other Parsee trimmings. It takes about 5 hours to prepare so Jill and I wore evening dress in honour of it!

Joy (Mrs Ray no. 2) sold her $2 million waterfront mansion in Sydney during the year -- which was a great relief to her after many years of trying to unload it. She still has most of her other Sydney properties, however. Once she acquires a property she just hates selling it! She has now retired to the country but recently bought investment land on Bribie Island. We meet when she is in Brizzy.

Kathryn (Mrs Ray no. 4) completed her course to become a prison guard at Borallon MEN'S prison last year. With her nearly 6' of height I think she looks magnificent in her Prison Officer's uniform! She is in a new relationship now, however so I have not seen her recently.

Dawn (Mrs. Ray no. 1) is now a lecturer in Social Science at the Queensland University of Technology here in Brisbane. My brother Christopher (well-known as a media spokesman for Brisbane gun-owners!) got married at long last late last year. As he and Kym already had two delightful young children (Madeline and James), I suppose they thought they might as well formalize it. The wedding was however a good time to catch up with people I had not seen for a while. I was particularly taken with Katie -- the daughter of my sister Roxanne. Katie is the same age as Joey and has a quiet and serious nature that I could really relate to. She is pretty too! And I got the most delightful note in reply from her when I sent her a birthday card.

I felt greatly privileged in June this year when I saw the world premiere right here in Brisbane of David Williamson's latest play "After the Ball". It was a very funny play about family squabbles that also has to make you rather sad. As he now lives near Brisbane, the great man himself (Williamson) was in the audience. As he is about 6'6" tall, however, I was glad I was not sitting behind him! I have always been a great follower of his plays but maybe that has something to do with the fact that we both have an academic background in psychology.

54th birthday

My 54th. birthday was another good one. Jill and I first had a pre-birthday dinner with some old friends of Jill (Wendy and Barry) at the University of Queensland Staff Club dining room. They did a brilliant Wiener Schnitzel there at the time. I wore black tie, which Jill liked, of course.

Then Jill and I went to The Clansmen for a celebration dinner on the day itself. In general we went to either The Clansmen at Annerley or Weis's in Toowoomba to celebrate special occasions. The Clansmen is a Scottish restaurant a long way from Scotland and Weis's is a seafood restaurant a long way from the sea! Going to The Clansmen gives me the chance to wear the kilt and on this occasion, being winter, I wore my Highland jacket as well. Fun!

I rang in advance and even managed to talk the cook into doing a chateaubriand for us -- a dish which was very much out of fashion at the time.

A Moment in Time

It is surprising how simple the causes of great pleasures can be. One such occasion for me was when I was listening to a classical music programme -- the Margaret Throsby show -- on ABC radio on the morning of 17.4.97. I normally hate that programme because the music is chosen by an interviewee and there is usually a lot of inane chat interrupting the music.

On this occasion, however, my car radio was tuned to the ABC classical music station when I got into it so I just kept the station on, not really listening. Soon however, she put on Chopin's military Polonaise, which has always been a favourite of mine despite the fact that I am not a big fan of the piano. So I stopped and listened to that. Then she put on Paul Robeson singing "Old Man River" and I defy anyone not to be moved by that.

Then she started talking to her interviewee, who turned out to be Dr. Peter Doherty, 1996 Nobel Prize Winner for Medicine, an Australian and a graduate of my old alma mater -- The University of Queensland: Quite a change from the nonentities she usually interviews.

One of the things she asked him was did he enjoy being a Nobel Prize winner. He replied that he found it a great opportunity to promote the spirit of rational enquiry. That reply practically reduced me to tears. I hear so much from average people of all the so-called "alternative" and "spiritual" nonsense that they believe, that to hear a person speaking up for rationality and serious enquiry was such an enormous pleasure that it almost reduced me to tears.

So when she next put on Cherubino's song from Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro", the tears really started to flow down my cheeks at the beauty of it. Then finally she put on the first movement of Elgar's first symphony. I have always been much moved by Elgar's more wistful music (e.g. "Nimrod" from the "Enigma variations" and "Where Corals lie" from the "Sea Pictures") but I did not at that stage know the first symphony.

Peter Doherty said in introducing the work that classical music was the only sort that moved him deeply and that this Elgar work always "froze" him with its beauty. It didn't quite "freeze" me but it was the wistful sort of Elgar that I greatly like so the beauty certainly did get to me in my own way: The tears of joy flowed again.

I have always however been remarkably responsive to classical music. I sometimes think that my deepest and strongest emotions are reserved for music rather than for human relationships. Jill once said something like that about me too.

MERRY XMAS 1996

I got married (for the 4th time) late last year to a tall, slim, nice-looking redhead who is the same height as I am. Her name is Kathryn. I proposed only a month after we met and we broke up three weeks after the wedding! Not long after we got back from the honeymoon we fell out and neither of us was prepared to back down so she moved back to her own house at Ipswich. We have remained friends, however. It all sounds a bit like Hollywood, doesn't it? The genuine whirlwind romance. It was however great while it lasted and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Joey is now 9 and has just finished 4th grade at St Joachims. Next year we will be sending him to Greenslopes State school as Jenny and I both feel that such a small school as St Joachims no longer gives him enough scope.

My 53rd Birthday

My 53rd birthday celebrations were from my point of view certainly my best birthday celebrations ever up until that time. For a start, Jill gave a dinner party in honour of the day. The day fell on a Monday that year so we had the dinner party on the prior Sunday. We invited just John Henningham and his wife Helen. Henningham and I always have lots of laughs and lots to talk about so it would have been superfluous to invite others as well. Another factor was that Jill also knew Henningham independently of his being a friend of mine.

So the dinner was a very pleasant and relaxed affair. Jill of course set an immaculate table with lots of silver, crystal and white napery -- very traditional but also very stylish. She also served up food that was not only perfectly cooked but also perfectly presented.

Given Henningham's recent conversion to the Church of Rome and  my theological interests  the main topics of conversation were ecclesiastical and theological.

On the Monday itself I took Jill to The Clansmen restaurant. It has various Scottish features, a vaguely Scottish cuisine and is situated in a beautiful old colonial building at Annerley. It is a bit dear so I go there only on special occasions but when I do go I usually wear the kilt in honour of my shreds of Scottish ancestry (I have one ancestor with an Irish name [Joseph Kelly] who was born in Scotland and another ancestor with a Scottish name [Jane Burnside] who came from Ireland!).

On this occasion I wore full Highland formal dress: My red MacRae tartan kilt, white pleated dress shirt, black bow tie, black silk waistcoat, Prince Charlie jacket etc. Jill really loved it! I think "splendid" was her word for my attire on that occasion. Jill, of course dressed beautifully for the occasion too. She wore a shapely black classic suit she had bought from Harrods in London many years before and teamed it with a rather elaborate cream blouse that was also from Harrods. She has kept the same figure for many years and always buys classic styles so she can do that sort of thing. And since it was midwinter she put on her MINK jacket over it all to step outside the door. With her golden hair up in her usual chignon, with her fine white skin and her usual perfect grooming and poise she really looked as elegant a lady as any man has ever taken out.

I was equally aware that there was a brilliant brain behind the steady gaze of her pretty pale blue eyes I felt a very fortunate man indeed at that dinner.

As a final touch to the festivities, Jenny also gave me a birthday dinner on the Wednesday. She had most of the kids over (Paul was away) for the occasion so that was lovely too. Ken also came along and was good company as usual. Jenny interested us both by revealing that she had at long last worked out what she liked most in men: arrogance. That certainly accounted for me and Ken felt that he had been pretty arrogant in his youth too.

Anyway, it was certainly the first time that my birthday celebrations had stretched over so many days! I thought that being an old guy did have its compensations!

My Wynnum house

After my first Brisbane renovation job was finished, I decided that I had done well in creating extra value by renovating so found another house on which to repeat the process. That was at 43 Waterloo Esp in Wynnum.

When I first saw it, it had a white-ant problem, had holes in the floor and had lost many of its original internal walls. Apparently the owners at that time had considered demolishing it.

I saw that it was still mostly sound, however, and bought it. I then got Joe G. to put in new timber walls where the old had been, subdivided the bathroom into two bathrooms, modernized the kitchen and various other things. I also put in iron-lace (really aluminium copies) verandah railings.

It too was a very desirable house when I had finished with it (4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, airy new kitchen with attractive old coloured-glass casement windows).



I did at one stage want to move into it myself as its waterfront position would be hard to beat but it was so close to the neighbours on one side that you could hear their normal everyday conversations through the walls. Not for me!

Wynnum has always been my favourite Brisbane suburb so having one of the best houses on the Wynnum waterfront and not being able to move into it certainly was rather frustrating.

The house had the additional attraction at the time of an absolute forest of huge trees lining the long back yard. Anyway, I eventually sold the place for a lot more than I spent on it.

Recollections of the young Joseph

Kids all do and say cute things and the young Joey was no exception. I think we were still at Queen Bess St when Joey managed to indicate (he had only just started talking) that he wanted to go out somewhere. He said he wanted to go to "Herhouse". We were a bit puzzled by this until we realized that Joey had asked a couple of days previously where Nanna had gone and Jenny had said, "She has gone home to her house". Joey not unreasonably took it that the place where Nanna lived was called "Herhouse".

Joey showed a sense of humour from an early age. Once when we were still at Queen Bess st., I had just arrived home from one of my trips to Sydney -- when Joey was around one year old. Nanna was minding him and sitting on the living-room floor with him. For some reason she hit the floor with a rolled-up newspaper and Joey thought that that was hilarious. So she repeated the action several times and it continued to be funny. I can still remember his little baby chuckle. Mind you, when she did the same thing next day he didn't seem to find it funny at all. I was very pleased to have been around on the one day when it was funny, however.

The young Joey always loved going out. When he was only about one and we were living at Gordonvale he would start whingeing during the morning but would shut up like a book the minute we picked him up and stepped out the door to go out. He expected a substantial car trip every morning!

Once when he must have been not much older than one, we were walking through a shop in Cairns and saw a keyring with a small plastic replica of a McDonald's hamburger on it. Joe saw this, pointed to it and said "gamish". That was of course his version of "sandwich". He did not by then have the word "burger" in his vocabulary so he used the nearest word he had -- thereby showing that he was already categorizing his world well (i.e. he recognized that a hamburger was a type of sandwich) and that he recognized the replica for what it was.

He also took an interest in geometrical shapes at an early age and would often refer to anything circular (such as a coin) as a "Dirkle". And we also heard a lot about "triangulguls".

Many of the fond memories I have of Joey the toddler originate from the time that we were at 9 Faversham St., Buranda. One of his earliest foibles was to be greatly concerned whether or not people had replaced the lid on something. Before he was two he had even learnt the word to express his concerns. If someone had (for instance) taken the cap off the tomato sauce (ketchup) bottle and not replaced it, Joey would point to the offending bottle and say loudly "LIDDON". He was quite a Tartar about it and policed all lids in this way with some zeal. This was so much so that when someone left the lid off a bottle during a party at George Parkinson's place and a fly got into it, we all said (jocularly) that it was Joey's fault for not supervising the matter properly.

Joey's pointing was not confined to lids. When we lived at Faversham St., I had (without really thinking about it) a certain ritual preparatory to going out. I would first put on my shirt, then put on my hat and then pick up my keys from the top of the bookcase in the corridor. Joey loved rituals of any sort and he detected that one even before he could walk. As soon as I started to put on my shirt, he would point his little chubby baby finger at my hat. As soon as I put my hat on he would point to my keys. He would then look pleased as I completed the ritual.

A little later Joey also detected a routine that Jenny had. Apparently when she tucked him up in bed at night she would often say: "Now you'll be nice and warm". So, after a while, when she was tucking him into his cot he would get in first and say: "Nice 'n warm" with a very satisfied glint in his eye.

I recollect my mother telling me that I did something similar when I was a toddler. When I would wake up in my cot in the middle of the night I would immediately call out "Whatsamatter, whatsamatter" as "What's the matter?" was what my mother would always say when she attended to me crying.

Something the young Joey particularly liked was doors and gates. In particular he liked to close them and would go around doing so. When we came home he always wanted to be the one to "close the glate" and would scream if someone else did it before he could. Once at Faversham St when he was still under two he worked out how to OPEN the "glate" however. We used to bolt it but not padlock it to keep him in so he had to undo what was for him a fairly big and heavy padbolt to get out. So he opened it while Jenny and I were upstairs and went for a wander down the street clad principally in his nappy. This was of course inherently very dangerous so we were most alarmed when we realized that he was missing and that the gate was open. I had however taken the precaution some weeks earlier of seeing where he would go if the gate was open and had observed that he headed downhill towards Taylor street. I therefore sent Jenny off in that direction while I checked uphill. She found him in Taylor street in someone else's yard trying to close THEIR "glate"!

On 17th. February 1989, while we were living at Faversham St., I took a record of his complete vocabulary at that time. It was as follows:

"Bye bye"
"Dough!" (meaning No!)
"All gone!" (most frequent expression)
"Gog" (dog)
"cat"
"Bum!" (facetious)
"One" (only when descending steps)
"Tiddly Om!" (said for fun)
"A" (in conjunction with alphabet board)
"Violin" (roughly - when looking at alphabet board).

When we were at Faversham St, when Joey was about 18 months, he was accustomed to calling his teated milk bottle his "moongi" (pronounced as in "boong" and presumably a corruption of "milk"). He would usually hold it high in the air while drinking out of it so that he could watch everything else that was going on at the same time. So once, when I was emptying a 2 litre plastic milk bottle by drinking out of it what little remained in it, I saw him watching me and said, "John's moongi!". He saw the joke and laughed.