锁木从未被一群蜜蜂刺痛!

Two years ago, at the end of a fortnight’s holiday in Asia, my mother, my brother and I had a rest day in the scorching heat of Ho Chi Minh City, where we had had a good walk around the previous sweltering day.

I had bought copies of the 1903 and 1904 Wisdens with me, and I began to re-read familiar sections of the former issue, when I said:

“of the Surrey bowling there is nothing to be said except that 锁木 (“swǎw–mòo”) had some wonderful days and that Richardson, though no longer great, worked most strenuously.”

锁木 means “Lock Wood”, and referred to William Henry Lockwood, a deadly fast bowler for Surrey between 1891 and 1894, and between 1898 and 1903 after a series of accidents completely nullified his effectiveness between 1894/1895 (Ashes tour) and 1897.

My brother, who studied Chinese vastly more seriously than I ever did, still did not recognise what I meant by “锁木”, and – as I tend to do myself, read “swǎw–mòo” (I have never mastered the tones in Chinese) as “swarm–oo”. Without understanding who this “swǎw–mòo” was, my brother joked that he “died because he was stung by a swarm of bees” based on the mispronunciation! Bill Lockwood was very accident-prone and during his Australian tour severely cut a hand when a soda syphon exploded, and narrowly escaped both drowning and losing an arm. However, there is actually no evidence Lockwood (锁木) was ever attacked by a swarm of bees as my brother joked during any point of his life!

In the two years since we returned from Vietnam, I have again mentioned “锁木” and my brother repeats the joke about him being stung by a swarm of bees – to the extent that my mother finds it offensive even though she does not understand the Chinese pronunciation. In recent months, as I have actually tried to look at real cases of people being stung by a swarm of bees, this has become embarrassing because – although the claim is my brother’s joke – I have found that people can indeed be killed if a swarm of bees stings, and Mummy had known that for a long time. However, the joke is just too funny despite it’s silliness and the fact that my brother has long been pointing out to me that foreign names (“Lockwood” etc.) are almost never translated into Chinese by meaning (“锁木”) but are almost always translated more prosaically by the nearest allowable sound (thus “洛克伍德”, “lwàw–kèr–wǒo–dèr”).

Not Thèrése Neumann’s favorite sign!

Today, on the last day of a great holiday in Tasmania – an island unrivalled for its comfortable climate and beautiful scenery – my brother has seen this sign on the banks of the Tamar River:

My brother says this would be Thèrése Neumann’s favorite sign because she (believed along with her parish priests that she) ate nothing but the Holy Eucharist for the last four decades of her life. Whilst I find the story endlessly titillating, it annoys my family to an extreme extent.

However, it is a ridiculous joke to say this sign would be Thèrése Neumann’s favorite! For one thing, she was not aiming that others not eat, although her inedia was an extremely special grace accoridng to her advocates. Much more importantly, the sing does not forbid eating per se, but just the Tamar’s shellfish because of potential contaminants!

The historic Tasman Peninsula

Today, after a sleepless night with the news my uncle had succumbed to cancer in the morning, Mummy, my brother and I, very sad about it, nonetheless decided to go to the Tasman Peninsula. This peninsula, with the typical hilly, green terrain of Tasmania, is infamous for its penal settlements and as the site of the 28 April 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, where Martin Bryant killed thirty-five people in a shooting spree. This tragedy led to demands for the banning of private ownership of automatic and semiautomatic guns and a gun buy-back scheme, which most outside of radical Trotskyists and the libertarian right (as you will know, I have never ridiculed either of those groups) believe to have reduced crime.

Mummy told me firmly not to ever talk about criticism of Howard’s tightening of gun laws when we decided to spend our last day in Tassie on the peninsula, and to look at the scenery. The weather was slightly cooler than the previous day, but remained very warm and with a hot sun in Tassie’s clear air, as we drove the same way out of Hobart before turning towards the peninsula.

The Tasman Peninsula was chosen as a convict settlement largely because it was difficult to escape from due to the narrowness of the land bridge and the steep cliffs. As we drove across the narrow highway into the peninsula, we saw one of the earliest convict prisons in Tasmania. it was fascinating to look at it inside because, despite being unrestored, it gave some interesting details of convict life, which are especially interesting to me because I am fascinated with rural life.

After this, we drove further into the Peninsula, into wetter forests than found near Hobart owing to the heaver rainfall, but soon turned to the sea, where my brother took a long dip despite not having any appropriate swimwear. I chose not to but had terrible trouble sitting down on the rocky shore and was very nervous as Mummy saw down on some hard twigs and rocks.

Next we drove into a low forest on typically poor and leached soils to look at some major ruins. In comparison to previous drives around Tassie, this one was very hard and on unsealed roads that fortunately were dry and not difficult for a small Hyundai. The ruins were almost completely destroyed but still recognisable as a prison, and the vegetation was intact enough to show numerous Superb Fairywrens (Malurus cyaneus) on what was in fact quite dry ground. The walking was definitely tiring and the red-brown soil clearly quite dry despite the region’s humid climate, so I enjoyed out return to the black Hyundai for the day.

A taste of Western Tassie

Today, the third day of our holiday, we decided to take a long drive to Lake Pedder, the lake famous for its role in environmental protection of South West Tasmania after the Hydro-Electric Commission (now known as Hydro Tasmania) managed to drown the original tarn to create a major power dam.

In contrast to the previous day’s journey to Richmond and Swansea, we knew Pedder would be far from even basic provisions, so after we awakened after a poor sleep due to noise from a fully opened window, we went to the Hobart Market which was open for this Saturday morning. The shops we had visited on Thursday were tough to recognise because of the market (though I eventually did do so) and there was a wide variety of the gourmet food for which Tasmania has become renowned. I did buy a pork and bacon sausage – we cannot have large breakfasts in out small hotel room – and it was very tasty.

We had to embark upon the trip almost immediately after returning to the room, so we boarded the car with provisions of apples, bananas, rolls, paté and cheese, and searched for the road to Pedder. Once Mummy had found the road to Pedder after an early detour in the lower Derwent Valley, we drove steadily across very varied and hilly terrain so typical of Tasmania. At first there was hop-growing country, then dry sclerophyll forest, then wet sclerophyll, areas of rainforest and then plateau moorland as we approached Lake Pedder and the company town of Strathgordon. I had dozed off at times during the trip, but still saw some beehives and flowering shrubs that were different from the vegetation I knew in Victoria. There were some closed beehives for the famous leatherwood honey what I sometimes buy despite its high price in Woolworths.

This is a view of Southwest Tasmania from the company town of Strathgordon.

This is a picture of Southwest Tasmanian scenery – cool, wet and bleak – from the road.

When we reached Lake Pedder and Strathgordon, we had a simple but very tasty lunch and had our first look at the quiet, lonely moorland scenery, which Mummy admired for its silence rather like Sara Maitland did Scotland’s moors (where she has lived for a decade) in her 2008 A Book of Silence. Mummy in fact compared Western Tassie with Scotland, a comparison which I understood because of reading Maitland – whom I knew for a long time beforehand and recognise as a modern heir to the Catholic Decadents of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. I consequently came to look more closely at the landscape and its cool, wet, windswept moors, as well as the animal life – on a brief look at the forest on the way I had heard a beautiful small bird but could not recognise it.

The trip back – even if I was criticised for talking about topics like stigmata and inedia – was actually more interesting that the outward trip. We had a beautiful afternoon tea of coffee, carrot cake, and an orange and almond cake similar to one I cook frequently at home – only denser with coconut added. An unusual sight was a group of Superb Fairywrens (Malurus cyaneus) on the opposite side of the Derwent, which I knew were fairywrens although I could not see them. As I looked more carefully for birds, I saw another fairywren on the way back to out Hobart hotel, as we saw a number of fruit orchards (especially cherries) that were not visible going to Pedder.

This is a picture of the Derwent River as seen on the highway to Strathgordon.

The trip was extremely enjoyable and the weather, with an easterly flow, unusually fine in the normally hyperhumid southwest of Tasmania. Around midday there was some blue sky for the first time in out stay in Tassie, and the warm sun made the weather – which ranged from 20˚C in Hobart to a mild 14˚C in some of the cool forests – considerably hotter than it felt yesterday.

A first glance at Tassie

On Thursday morning, I went for the first time to Tasmania – whose weather my consistent praise had long made my mother and brother wish to take me.

I regrettably had only four hours sleep on Thursday morning – though it was very good sleep given the hot, humid night that resembled an equatorial climate – and despite a delay from refuelling we got to Hobart in good time and despite an inordinate delay getting a rental car we still had a lot of time to look at Hobart itself.

Hobart is a hilly, sprawling city, surrounded by fairly steep green hills and a deeply indented coastline. The city itself is of only moderate size, with no more than one hundred and seventy thousand people, though the central business district where we were staying is still fairly dense. Many Hobart streets – including some very wide ones – are one-way, which severely confused Mummy when she tried to drive though them. We climbed to the top of Mount Nelson, which gives even on a wet, misty day impressive views of Hobart, and then descended the mountain to have a look around Battery Point, where we had an ice cream and sat on the wall overlooking the water.

Although the weather yesterday was rainy despite the total rainfall being listed as a moderate 5.4 millimetres or 0.21 inches – 10 mm in a January day has been reported in Hobart 154 times since 1894, with 25 mm or more on 34 occasions – it was by no means unpleasant as it was merely warm and cloudy with a breeze. We had a good look at the shops near Hobart’s port, and I had a really nice chicken burger for lunch with some cheese. We then had another walk around the pier and port, during which we managed to see numerous interesting sights and old buildings.

I was too tired to do much after we did a little shopping and had a ham and cheese roll for dinner, so I slept very soundly this morning. We had decided yesterday that we would go to Swansea – the place in Tassie that I have often claimed as having absolutely the best climate in Australia and one of the half-dozen best in the world – and we saw not only more Hobart sprawl and the hills, but even got to feed some tame grey kangaroos at the Tasmanian Devil sanctuary in Bonorong. Although almost all marsupials are nocturnal, we could actually see Tasmanian Devils outside, though they were mainly very old animals that were not breeding. Many of the animals at Bonorong were injured on roads – this is common with the beautiful Tawny Frogmouth – and could not survive in the wild but were still very interesting to watch. In fact, looking at the Yellow-Tailed Black Cockatoos (Calyptorhynchus funereus) attracted so much of my attention that I did not focus on the Tasmanian Devils.

Here I am feeding a number of tame grey kangaroos at the sanctuary.

We also saw wombats, a tiger snake, and lorikeets at the sanctuary.

These are some female Tasmanian Devils at the sanctuary. They are normally nocturnal, but were active while we were there at around 10:00

We next went to the historic town of Richmond, which in common with so much of Europe and East Asia where agriculture can no longer compete with land-rich Australia and Africa, has become devoted to tourism. Richmond actually was a very well-maintained small town owing to its history – with the oldest bridge and oldest Catholic Church in Tasmania – and we saw some rails for the first time along with some unidentified small birds under the bridge. Lunch was a lovely steak pie, but we heard sad news about my uncle being close to death.

We went again on winding coastal roads to Triabunna and Swansea, where we turned round since the ferry to Maria Island was unaffordable. The scenery changed notably from the relatively fertile ‘black earths’ to the typical ancient red texture-contrast soils (‘Acrisols’) of Australia – found elsewhere at so high a latitude only in much wetter climates on very poor parent materials in California. Most of the towns, whilst not so “touristy” as Richmond, were still influenced by tourism – a fate normal in so many places as they cannot compete (due to expensive land and labour) with Australia and Africa in their former mainstay of agriculture. At Swansea, I was very nervous on the beach about getting sand into my clothes and walked about aimlessly on the beach before briefly sitting down. I had a large cappuccino but my brother thought I was too rude asking for more chocolate, and then we returned to Hobart. After a rest as I remained very tired, I went to look for a Chinese meal for dinner, which Mummy and I ate more fully than we usually do with Chinese take-aways at home. There was the unusual feature of duck with the rice and a fried noodles, as almost our last action before going to bed still tired.

Pictures of Singapore

Amidst a sojourn in Hong Kong, I spent almost a month with my brother in the sauna-like heat and humidity of Singapore and briefly Kuala Lumpur, where my brother was. It was very enjoyable, though, because I enjoy the companionship of my brother even though he calls me “zuiington” after the Chinese word 嘴 or zuǐ, which means mouth and refers to my habit of talking about funny and silly topics from my youth such as the Famous Five Adventure Games. I absolutely hate being called “zuiington”, though I am not as nasty towards my brother as I have been in the past when my mother likened us to “Saint Bernards puppies”.

One feature of the trip is that with Chinese a prominent language in Singapore and dominant in Hong Kong, I relearned quite a number of characters from my high school Chinese studies. My brother still says I struggled with the tones, which I never tried to master and instead tried to use head movements to remember the tones because I do not have very good understanding of pitch as is needed for Chinese.

Hong Kong holiday: Third and Last Day (5 January 2012)

Thursday was our last day in Hong Kong before returning for another week in Singapore. Although Hong Kong usually has warm but not horrible winters, a strong Siberian High was driving very cold air into the East Asian outer tropics. I had prepared for weather slightly hotter or similar to the delightful winters of southern Australia, but in fact the weather in Hong Kong this Thursday was not only very cool, but also (as is typical for southern China) extremely gloomy with low-level fog. The low-level pollution problems of the region are exacerbated by the fact that the superabundant labour supply has encouraged extremely intensive industrialisation.

The chilly weather - I was really surprised to find it was only 11˚C which is about the average maximum of a Tasmanian winter - meant that my brother decided that we would not go on the long trips of the previous day. Instead, we went to the Hong Kong Museum, which was a fascinating trip through the history of this small, mountainous city-state. There were some details new to me, especially regarding the Yue people who lived in Hong Kong before the Qín Dynasty unified China for the first time, and of groups of Chinese who were almost completely based in small water craft around Hong Kong and only set foot on land to trade for essential supplies.

There was also some fascinating information on how Hong Kong came to look the way it does from the high mountain views I had seen on Tuesday and Wednesday; revealing how the terrain and rocks of Hong Kong were formed by Paleozoic orogeny and Mesozoic volcanism. It even went into details of how Hong Kong’s climate has changed over time; though with a brief exception during an arid period of the Mesozoic it has generally been remarkably stable over long geological periods, and showed the subtropical rainforest that would cover Hong Kong in the absence of the disturbances that has degraded or removed the whole territory’s natural vegetation.

The last and most interesting part of our museum trip looked at colonial Hong Kong, and it revealed how a deadly trade in opium and China’s extremely xenophobic cultural attitudes allowed the British to take over Hong Kong and use it as a trading port. Under British rule, Hong Kong developed rapidly, and one of the best aspects of our museum trip was that we were able to actually look at how life in Hong Kong changed during the 1960s and 1970s as new conveniences were developed as a result of vast private sector investment in the city-state, which has mistakenly led to Hong Kong being seen by the Politically Incorrect Guides as a model for development in very poor nations with no natural inorganic resources. There was also some very good information on how Hong Kong actually evolved politically during its period under British rule, and how it has continued to evolve since being handed back to China. It was surprising to note that modern income taxes developed so early in Hong Kong.

After leaving the museum, I had a look at an interesting travel book about major destinations for travel, and about the history of Hong Kong - which seemed interesting but which I never read more than a few pages of. Next, I had a minor accident whereby I hurt my head trying to sit down, but after that we went to look at Hong Kong’s vast, super-dense business centres and in the process I had an excellent Italian meal that did not even remind myself of what I often eat at home. After this, we had a look through Hong Kong’s shopping stalls for a USB port for myself (the one I have only allowing 500 MB of memory) and for clothes for my mother. The clothes in Hong Kong are generally much too small for Australians, so it is not surprising that we did not buy anything.

To finish our last full day in Hong Kong, we returned to the hotel and had a relatively relaxing evening in our hotel room. The stay, which we completed with a brief look around the city on Friday 6 January, was one of the best travelling memories I have had since Kyōto and Mount Fuji at the end of 2009. The highlight of Friday was viewing towards China, which I love to call following Tony Cliff the SCDC for “State Capitalist Dictatorship of China”, as shown below:

Hong Kong holiday: Day 2

For my second day in Hong Kong, my mobile phone (which I was trying to charge) woke us up at 6:00 and I had to sleep in for another hour before having a hot shower. Given that the weather in Hong Kong was even cooler than on Tuesday and much cooler than the average 18˚C January weather, my mother ordered me to wear two T-shirts to compensate for the lack of jumpers or proper shoes. I had as a result to wear my “pyjama” T-shirt over a white one which acted like the flanelette singlets I wear during winter at home, but Mummy said that I looked better and less fat because my outer T-shirt was not tucked in as I usually do to avoid my pants tickling.

Once we were all dressed, we headed down to the first floor for a breakfast that my experience in (otherwise disappointing) Kuala Lumpur twelve days ago had showed could serve as a full day’s meal. When we reached the dining room, I gorged myself on two bowls of Coco Pops, one of Sultana Bran, and later on bread and jam, with additional meals of fruit adding variety along with some sweet white coffee. After we left I was full, but my mother said I should have eaten more vegetables rather than carbohydrate to reduce my calorie intake and mass.

After going back up to plan the day’s excursions, we decided to travel up the mountains adjacent to Hong Kong’s famous cable car on the outlying island of Lantau, though at first my brother was confused and we went on the wrong train line and we saw areas that looked even more run-down than we had seen the previous day. Once we found the right train ride, however, the day became a memorable and exciting trip through very scenic mountains and endless shades of green.

Once on Lantau Island, we had no trouble reaching the number 23 bus which took us to Po Lin Monastery. Although my mother and brother hate religion, they did take a long time looking at the Big Buddha statue amidst the beautiful, often bare mountain scenery of Lantau Island. The bare patches of granite were surprising in such a hot, wet climate at elevations that do not exceed 957 metres anywhere in Hong Kong, but they made the landscape both more beautiful and more familiar for one who used to read pictures of protected areas in my Australian homeland. The Buddha statue was both familiar in form and surprising in size, but the views from Po Lin over even the village were quite amazing. There were some unusual flags to add to the view, and it was one of the most spectacular I have actually experienced, beaten only by my view of Mount Fuji in Japan.

After going back down to the village, we had a warm hot chocolate in Starbucks and then, despite an intense debate, we went on the cable car, and it was a terrific experience. Although I feared what would happen if the cord of the car broke - and imagined it as worse than falling on soft or slippery snow in a properly cold climate - we got through the whole trip remarkably smoothly and had no troubles at all. The scenery was superb and even wild; and in spite of the low-level fog from the Siberian High there were some very good sea views.

The cable car took us so far down that after a short sojourn in a souvenir shop we went up again on a different bus, this time seeing a quaint fishing village that reminded me of what Hong Kong was like before industrialisation. The specialised fish markets - though we did not buy anything - were particularly fascinating to look at with the old people drying fish for sale and salting them to keep for lean periods.

The last part of our journey, by which time I was really tired, saw me make an unfortunate mistake of not clicking on my “Octopus” card before going back to the ferry on the bus. Actually, I deceived the driver thinking the bus ticket bought before going on the number 23 bus was adequate, but the driver ignored this. We still saw some really wonderful forest scenery - even a wild bovine of a type similar to what I saw in the Night Safari in Singapore a week beforehand just by the very narrow road. By the time we reached the ferry back home, I was really, really tired and did not even feel like eating much.

Nonetheless, I rate this Wednesday as one of the best days I have had on any holiday. The contrast between the uninhabited mountain scenery and some of the densest populations in the world is nothing like anything I have ever seen, and even though the presence of plants like casuarinas obviously imported from Australia shows the land is not pristine its colours were still wonderful. Moreover, the cooler weather meant I was less tired than I have been walking around in Singapore’s horrible climate.

Hong Kong holiday: Day 1

For the past three days, as a break from the awful year-round heat of Singapore, I have been travelling with my mother and brother to Hong Kong. I have always thought southern China has wonderful weather in the Australian summer and have viewed it as a great destination for travelling long before this trip, but visa costs precluded a trip to Xiàmén, which I had suggested in October before the trip was planned.

Hong Kong is often compared with Singapore as an example of free-market success in a resource-poor small city state, for instance by the Politically Incorrect Guides to American History and Socialism. Upon seeing Hong Kong, I was startled by the amazingly dense and seemingly run-down flats that characterise almost all the residential areas of the city and even exist on top of commercial buildings. (My mother said that Hong Kong’s desnity is nothing compared to what is found in Shànghǎi).

Our first day (Tuesday) in Hong Kong was short, and dominated by a trip on the tramway to the top of the Peak. It was extremely crowded at the entrance to the tramway and there was some very interesting information about its history in the aisle between the ticket office and the boarding platform. Although it was very hard to find a seat on the tram - seats had to be restricted for safety reasons on the steep route - we were able to get a tram about twenty minutes after paying for our tickets and the trip to the Peak was very quick and efficient.

On top of the Peak, in contrast to the year-round heat and humidity of Singapore, the weather was pleasantly cool - in fact too cool for someone only having clothes designed for 30˚C weather with very high humidity! Nonetheless, we did some easy walking down from the Peak and it was very enjoyable because of the views of Hong Kong’s mountains and a small residential village on the opposite side. After returning to the top of the Peak, we had a look at the sizeable shopping centre adjacent to the tram terminus; though there was quite a bit worth buying, we did not buy anything since it was quite a bit more expensive than on the lowlands. Thus, we travelled back down in weather that with wind chill and altitude added was probably colder than a typical southern Australian winter.

After going on the return tram journey, the always-foggy weather from the northeasterly winds off the Siberian High became cooler still as it became dark, and we turned to a big meal after I had not eaten for over a day. As it turned out, I had a delightful, if not remotely Chinese, meal of steak, chips and vegetables that cost HK$49, which is much cheaper than one can obtain such good meals for in Australia. The steak was well-cooked and very tender, even though a little thin, and the vegetables were an excellent accompaniment.

Lastly for Tuesday, I had become very tired and went to bed unusually early, though unfortunately I had forgot my pyjamas and had to sleep in the same T-shirt I had been walking in. Still, I slept better than I had in Singapore where the air conditioner‘s breeze made it difficult to obtain a pleasant temperature.

A difficult mother’s birthday - and a wonderful cake!

This past few weeks have been difficult for me owing to my mother having to have two operations for a breast tumour and my having to spend three hundred dollars to replace the whole frame of my bike. The problem was discovered in an unusual manner when I was travelling to visit Christian Ganaban in Richmond and the bike appeared to move out of alignment.

This has made me very nervous about my future, with concern I will have to work much harder than I have been doing lately. The last few months have been dominated by grazing and grazing on Sesame Wheats and Monte Carlos, so that my mass, which over the middle 2000s I had curbed the growth of and even achieved some loss, has risen to quite unprecedented levels.

In spite of this, today I have done a good deal to redeem an appallingly late night where I was not in bed until 3:00. After recovering from a prolonged sleep, I went quickly to get the 1999 Geelong v Melbourne game from Christian Ganaban and to re-deposit money in my saver’s account that had been used to pay for the bike frame. I did not - as I have been doing - hand around Name A Game, but after buying meat, mushrooms, cake and ice cream went straight to prepare for a dinner planned by my mother of steak, chips and mushroom sauce. After buying the steak and mushrooms, I came home to cut the potatoes and watch a surprisingly good game between The Cats and Demons in a year when both became awfully disappointing.

When Mummy came home at 18:00, I had already prepared the food for cooking, and we cooked it very well - indeed only one of the two steaks was required. I enjoyed the dinner even if I expected more varied flavour and Mummy said not to cook the onions and garlic I had prepared as she wanted a pure mushroom sauce for the steak.

The highlight of the day, however, was the way in which the cake shop (I am familiar with it but have never bought from it) gave my mother a piece of white chocolate with “Happy Birthday” on it! She was amazingly delighted, even though we had to remove the chocolate spirals to cut the cake into a piece small enough for eating, and in my view the cake and ice cream (of which there were two flavours, vanilla and banana, which I bought because bananas have been appallingly expensive ever since the major cyclones of last summer) were the real highlight of what I fear in my worst dreams will be my mother’s last birthday dinner, although she says that the cancer is not invasive and will not reach the lymphatic system.

Laughable game to attack Thèrése Neumann - could Ignatius refute it?

Yesterday, whilst we were in a hotel in Newcastle so I could see an old friend who moved there during the 2009/2010 summer, my brother – always on the alert for me talking about anything he views as failing to fit essential scientific evidence – wrote a programme to simulate what he believes to have been the true life of German mystic and stigmatist Thèrése Neumann. In this programme, my brother assumes dogmatically that Thèrése Neumann ate in secret and did not enjoy the Eucharist so much that she could not live without it for more than a day.

In a later version, my brother changed the writing to German and added more detail, like saying “Ich bin durstig” if Thèrése was not given water (Wasser) but once he had the problem of it failing to say she was dead if she just had the Eucharist. What I said to him was that in reality, when she was given the Body of Jesus, Thèrése would say “Das schmeckt so gut, daß ich Darohne nicht leben kann” (“That tastes so good I cannot live without it”)!

In the words of Joan Carroll Cruz, Thèrése Neumann’s life is supposed to be ebbing away just before she received her daily Holy Communion, and she was revived as soon as she received the Bread of Life. However, as you can work out from the attached diagram which my brother sent me, there are some key assumptions that people who knew Thèrése Neumann had strong eyewitness evidence against.

The most basic is that Thèrése Neumann was capable of eating ordinary nourishment. The impression one received from reading Joan Carroll Cruz and Michael Freze is that she and other stigmatists would suffer illnesses such as vomiting and fevers as soon as they were given food or drink other than the Eucharist. Freze says quite definitely that such occurrences have been observed by eyewitnesses. If Thèrése Neumann really could not eat ordinary food, then she would have felt very bad if she ate donuts (Krapfen) or fried potatoes (Bratkartoffeln) at any time, which would make what my brother says absurd. Sophy Burnham says that people who were anything but mystical have had the problem of coughing up any solid food given to them, as with Xiong Zaidong who had a fever of 42˚C. If Thèrése Neumann had such problems, she would at the very least have had to take a very special diet to survive, which might not include typical food from the Germany of her time.

Another is that Thèrése Neumann actually was carrying out normal bodily processes. Eyewitnesses like those cited by Adalbert Albert Vogl say that as a result of her illness, Thèrése’s body no longer carried out normal functions like excretion. If as eyewitnesses say she was not excreting, Thèrése would have been able to retain minimal nourishment and might have struggled even more to add something like fried potatoes.

Some have also suggested that Thèrése’s stomach contracted because she was not eating, though I have no evidence for that claim being medically examined.

Still, if any of this is true for whatever reason, it means that we must be careful about assuming Thèrése Neumann could eat freely and/or could be fed as an ordinary person would be.

The lucky break for us with the holidays

Today, as my eldest cousin has his first child and indeed
the first child of any of my mother’s siblings, I can look back on the 2009/2010 and 2006/2007 holidays and think how fortunate I really was travelling when I did to the northern hemisphere (I joke about it being to escape the Australian summer but in fact even I admit I would rather travel in hotter weather).

In the news consistently over a Christmas period that has been rather uneventful with my brother away in Japan - and due to be away in Singapore for next year as he has taken a job in NUS from April - has been the violently stormy weather over Europe and the east of North America. Although on my 2009/2010 holiday I did experience some exceedingly snowy weather during my stay in Helsinki, it failed to cause any delays in either ground-based or air transport. This northern winter, however, snow even in normally mild England has been sufficient to ground flights and halt surface transport. It is painful to imagine what we would have done had we been forced to cancel or alter large portions of our trip last year because of snow blocking the possibility of travel across a region. Since our holiday was planned in November of 2009, we would never have been able to alter our accommodation schedule should the means of transport between cities have been completely eliminated as they have been this year.

Although people might expect these kinds of travel problems to arise with people who travel in the off-season for reasons of cost or schedule (as with us), such problems are not impossible even in peak tourist seasons in some places. This can be seen with occasional winter floods in the northwest of WA and the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. I recall Daddy travelling on the Birdsville Track during the winter of 1986 and seemingly forgetting about him. Yet, in Birdsville, the rainfall for July 1986 was twice that of any other winter month in the twentieth century! In fact, the 107 millimetres rainfall is two thirds of the normal annual rainfall and ten times the average for July. Daddy must have been lucky to be able to get through: roads in the north of South Australia were quagmires after torrential rain early in the month originating from a series of systems that had flooded a number of Pilbara rivers in June moved slowly eastward and caused major flooding in the Flinders Ranges and even in Central Australia. If Daddy had planned the trip earlier or later, he might well have been totally bogged rather than seen an unusually lush outback landscape in what is normally the “drought” season. The same thing would have happened to many visitors in northwestern WA in 1992 when the coastal highway was cut by severe storms in June, and in 1998 during a winter very like the August to November of 2010.

The best bookshops - one hopes they’re not a dying breed

Today - or yesterday since I am writing this so near midnight as I hopelessly failed to get to bed last night before 4:00 proper - I have found a list of the best bookshops I have ever seen from Lonely Planet. I really hope bookshops survive the e-book revolution since I have a strong romantic love for books and CDs that I enjoyed in my childhood, but I am not optimistic judging by the news on this topic that has arrived lately. (Paper will still be in demand even if print books become obsolete for such uses as paper towelling, which when dealing with coffee and similar stains is totally indispensable since cloth cannot be washed). Often I feel that change makes things slip away from me and I continue to look for books in print - preferably early hardcover editions like one of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s proto-Wicca Lolly Willowes that I lent to my half-sister whilst she works in a rehabilitation clinic for her alcohol problems. (To be honest, I feel perhaps I should have done that sort of work when I had really nasty temper tantrums that had me banned from RMIT and Monash when I masturbated in the library, but I do not know what Mummy’s response would have been nor whether I could have done something like that just for violent burst of anger).

In any case, Lonely Planet’s list comperised:

• City Lights Books, San Francisco
• Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Livraria Lello, Oporto, Portugal
• Shakespeare & Company, Paris, France
• Daunt Books, London, England
• Another Country, Berlin, Germany
• The Bookworm, Beijing, China
• Selexyz Dominicanen, Maastricht, The Netherlands
• Bookàbar, Rome, Italy
• Atlantis Books, Santorini, Greece

It’s perhaps too bad that although I went to London and Berlin a few summers ago , I never went to either of the bookshops listed and in London came away a little disappointed at what I saw despite buying a couple of good books on my favourite hobby of old county cricket - even something as romantic as old county cricket is being digitised as I collect Wisdens even older than a few years ago I ever dreamed I would.

It’s also a pity in the context of this e-book revolution and my love of old things that secondhand bookstores appear to have been ignored. Strand Books in New York was for me more of a highlight of my trip last summer than even City Lights, which I did visit (and told my brother in reference to the Catholic influence on the Beats that Pope Benedict XVI would be more at home there than in most of the atheistic Pacific Northwest). If what I experienced of England is a guide, there must be a lot of really good secondhand shops there that have many valuable classic books (it is only since he died that I have even looked at my father’s collection) and a list of these would be wonderful - more so than of new bookstores.

The paradox of the iPad

According to an article by one Nicholas Carr, the new iPad, which I had heard of during one of my increasingly rare visits to the television, is not so much a step forwards as a step backwards in technology. He argues that the iPad will make it much more difficult for creative people to actually do creating because its structure does not, as a personal computer does, permit easy creation of writing or drawing. This is because the iPad, like the iPhone my brother bought as a result of losing his mobile in Dàlián two years ago, does not allow for easy personal work, which I love (too much I think):

Hell, I still haven't gotten over Apple's removal of analog RCA plugs for audio and video input and output from the back of its Macs.

Cory Doctorow says rightly that the iPad is really like the second coming of the CD-ROMs I used to have in high school, being severely annoyed that I could not write on topics I was at the time obsessed with like old county cricket.

Carr, looking from a Luddite perspective with which I have a fair bit of sympathy despite being an obsessive user of computers, says again:

If Ned Ludd had been a blogger, he would have written a post similar to Doctorow's about those newfangled locked-down mechanical looms that distance the weaver from the machine's workings, requiring the weaver to follow the programs devised by the looms' manufacturer. The design of the mechanical loom, Ned would have told us, exhibits a palpable contempt for the user. It takes the generativity out of weaving.

And Ned would have been right.

I certainyl do not want to have my own work taken out of this. I have had ambitious, and developing, projects of writing fantasy (of a sort) for a long time, and know very well that even when a more-easily-replaced software item like AppleWorks goes out of produciton I have trouble even replacing it, let alone learning how to use the best replacement software available. I imagine adding new software to an iPad will not be by any means so easy as to a computer, even though the space is much larger than on the currently popular iPhone.

Kyōto: a radically different Japan

After going to Mount Fuji, we returned to Tōkyō for our last night and prepared for a final look at the city and a 400 kilometre trip on the bullet train (shinkansen) to Kyōto, one of three major centres in Japan’s second-largest conurbation, Ōsaka-Kōbe-Kyōto, also known as “Kansai”, which means “west of the barrier” (a reference to the central mountains of Honshū).

The trip on the shinkansen was remarkably easy and a shame to every citizen of ecologically fragile Australia who has allowed the road lobby to waste billions on freeways and highways not a single one of which was remotely needed in a flat country like Australia whose terrain suits rail so well!

Entering Kyōto was as much a new experience as entering Japan itself. Whereas Tōkyō epitomised the modern, high-tech Japan on an amazingly grand scale, Kyōto was another world. The city was quite spacious – at least apart from the residential areas of which I saw very few – and in accordance with Japan’s very wet climate extremely green even during the fresh winter weather. Even the houses I did see amongst the large streets were very traditional – made of wood, an extremely abundant resource in hilly, fertile and wet Japan. Our hotel, in perfect accord with this, was very traditional and lacked the comforts we had had in Tōkyō, but it was actually less uncomfortable from merely a little more space. Inside, the room was dark and quiet, which rather suited me, and I enjoyed the relaxing experience and not having to worry about the Internet – which has led me to unhealthy obsessions which tend to cause unpleasant reactions dating from many years ago.

The second day in Kyōto was spent walking round the historic heart of the city, and much more memorably a number of royal gardens dating from when Kyōto was the imperial capital of Japan. These were the most beautiful sight I have ever seen: the houses in the garden were so well-arranged as to give a great surprise, and so was the walking path.

So good were Kyōto’s gardens that there was never time to have a look at shopping in the city – which did not bother me as I had enough to read in my email and to look at on amazon.com and eBay that there was very little time for this.

Mount Fuji: the most beautiful of sights

During my trip to Tōkyō, we went on one excursion outside the city to see Japan’s highest mountain, 3,700 metre high Mount Fuji. Despite the average temperature on the summit being well below freezing, it is sufficiently free of snow during the warm, wet summer that many people have always climbed it on foot without such gear as crampons and ice axes (which of course were not invented when the mountain was first climbed after the Meiji Restoration). It was regarded as a sacred mountain to many Japanese, which is why it was never climbed before the Meiji Restoration.

The trip from Tōkyō to the foot of Mount Fuji was a series of train journeys, some of which were on minor lines through extremely mountainous country. We saw very little of densely populated Tōkyō and the Kantō plain, instead seeing chiefly tiny plots that are uneconomic to farm in a country so land-scarce as Japan. In the winter, of course, there were rice plots that looked blond like the dry grass that is a familiar site in the same months all over Victoria. A notable and unexpected feature of the trip to see Fuji was the coloured train - something I did not expect from a country as hard-working and industrious as Japan is supposed to be.

When I. in a small town whose name I never bothered to remember, had a look at Fuji from a steep road in very cool to cold but quite clear weather, I was astonished at how spectacular a site I was seeing. Although I had seen something like the blue (pale blue) colour of the snow of Fuji before, it was only in Southeast Alaska’s glaciers which have liquid water underneath, and as I have said Mount Fuji does not have glaciers. (Indeed, apart from Kamchatka the maritime regions of Asia have no present-day glaciation whatsoever despite high rainfall and north of Tōkyō severe cold, probably because summer rainfall, which is extremely heavy at high altitudes, is very good at melting snow). The light reflected from the snow of a beautful, and massive volcano was something that I had never seen before.

Tōkyō: a dense maze

On Boxing Day, after five days in Táiwān, I got up very early for a flight to Tōkyō. It is annoying to have to get up so early - in fact we were unable to have breakfast in the hotel because it did not open before we had to be at Táoyuán International Airport. The taxi ride was, like the few others I took in Táibèi, very, very cramped and we had to pack an extremely full bag into the rear seat.

When we got to Táoyuán International Airport, we had little trouble with the flight to Tōkyō and spent most of the time eating breakfast. The flight to Tōkyō, though not nearly so long as some flights to come on this holiday, was still distinctly tiring for me and I was sleeping for quite a bit of the time.

When we arrived at Tōkyō, I had a bad case of not being "with it": I went, despite the old Berlitz phrasebook which should have helped me to communicate in Japanese. I did not at any point walk through customs as I should, though the signs were in English as well as Japanese.

After going through the airport, we went on a special electric train to Tōkyō, reaching it well before dark. The hotel was quite comfortable though cramped. There was a Seven Eleven outside the hotel where I was able to get at the quite reasonable cost of ¥277 ($3.50) some extremely tasty ice-creams by Nörgen Våz. Seven Eleven also had some very good Japanese food, which I took to much better than I thought I would. This was especially true of sushi, which is not that hard to find in Australia and I regret that I have never looked for it when in Melbourne.

On the first night, we had a very unusual but very Japanese meal in a restaurant opposite our hotel. It used sticks to pick up the meat and vegetables, which were strongly flavoured but extremely tasty. The location of the restaurant in an underground shop was also attractive to me. The next night, we had out first look at what is commonly thought of as the world’s largest city, and it was amazing. The public transport puts Australia’s dreadful service to shame (no excuse!) but most of the time it seemed to take us in circles as we looked through the numerous sites in the next few days. There were the squatting toilets in most stations, which were cleaner than I am used if not nearly so clean as the Japanese are reputed to be.

The main focus during the trip to Tōkyō was on the royal palaces and gardens, which were remarkable in their ability to contrast so sharply with the dense housing (of which we actually saw rather little). The gardens were grand and, for a climate that is humid but very extreme, they were manicured very well: exactly like cricket pitches in the more moderate English climate. The buildings were ancient yet very beautiful and even in the more built-up parts of the city there were notably tall buildings such as the modernist architecture west of the Royal Gardens. The views from this over Tōkyō’s maze were exceptionally good.

It was a pity that some of the old buildings we had intended to see were closed for the New Year. Walking around the vast area of Tōkyō’s old palaces is such a great contrast, though, with the dense housing that it was very enjoyable.

I had expected to do a lot of shopping in Tōkyō, but as it turned out there was only one late night when we had time to look in the main record store. I found quite a lot of interest, but as it turned out I had only one major purchase: a CD by British composer Jonathan Harvey titled Body Mandala. Although I had little time to listen to it on the holiday, I was impressed with what I did hear.

The trouble I had with the Australia-type mobile phones which do not work in Japan made it very difficult for me to communicate, but I learned that it was best to stay with Mummy and my brother, and I saw enough that I did not mind.

A day shopping in Táibèi

After a long trip across Táiwān, my mother and brother decided that for our last day on the island we should aim to have a look at shopping in Táibèi before travelling to Tōkyō on a morning flight.

It was a little unfamiliar travelling around on Christmas Day, but of course East Asia was never Christian. Thus, all the shops were open as normal and we did not hesitate after my usual big breakfast of chocolate cereal, bread and fruit to go to the nearby Metro station.

I was looking for a black belt to supplement my brown one, which was naturally of the wrong colour for my black jeans. I was used to belts selling for something like $20, as I had bought my two current ones for at Victoria Market. However, in Táibèi I was in for a rude shock when I looked with my mother and brother for a new black belt and for a bag to replace the worn, cheap leather one I had bought for $35 several years ago. Almost every belt cost the equivalent of over $100, and my mother refused steadfastly to pay that amount.

However, there was a wonderful treat in store nonetheless! I was able to replace one of several poor-quality leather bags I had bought several years ago at the Victoria Market. My mother, upon seeing my old bag, promised me that she would give me such a Christmas present, but it took us a little looking in Táibèi's department stores before I was able to obtain the right bag. Although it is not wholly leather - in fact only the sides are - my mother said that this bag will provide me with a greatly superior quality to the bags I had bought at the market. Probably as a result of simply feeling high-quality shoes and bags given to me as gifts, I have grown very averse to shoddy goods and am afraid of my tendency to treat everything I encounter very roughly without care, which is seen terribly in the condition of many of my books - most especially a 1984 VFL yearbook that made the amazing error of saying Chris Mew first played in 1908!

After the shopping expedition, we had some lunch. The food in Táiwān was remarkably good all through, though I will admit I made a few choices that were bad for my mass like buying cream cakes instead of the abundant vegetables found in Táiwān. In the afternoon, I was, as was by now becoming normal, completely exhausted and I rested for the trip to Tōkyō tomorrow.

A trip across Táiwān and back

After two days exploring the Táiwānese capital Táibèi, we went over the past two days on a trip across the western coast of the island to Kěndīng at the southern tip of Táiwān, almost 400 kilimetres from Táibèi. We initially went on an extremely impressive electric train service that does shame to the ultra-slow train services and track alignment that Australia's government has allowed to persist through its obscene wastage of money on roads.

in the early part of the journey, all I could see was a continuation of the urban landscapes found within Táibèi. There was nothing remotely rural apart from a few very small farms in tiny areas of flat land, and most of the initial train journey took place over large tunnels where no view at all of Táiwān's countryside was possible. The air was never clear at any point on the journey up to Táizhōng, and when I reached Táizhōng I was so shocked at the pollution of the city that I asked my brother for the camera so I could take a photo!

Beyond Táizhōng, even as we moved into one of the most densely populated areas of the world, there began to be rather more authentic rural scenery amidst the cities of Táinán and Gāoxióng. The train finished at Gāoxióng and by the time we reached that city, the weather was uncomfortably hot, but we still had a very long way to go to reach Kěndīng at the southern tip of the island.

The bus ride, however, can best be described as horrible. The bus we had to ride in was terribly tight, but far worse than that it was really, really bumpy and hard in ride. The result was that by the time we reached Kěndīng I really was tired despite having got to sleep and up at an hour that would seem normal to people with a much better rhythm of life than I have ever possessed. The plus side of the bus ride was that I was able to see some authentic rural scenery for the first time in my three days in Táiwān. Although Táiwān is a wet place, it was the dry season and a wide variety of crops were being irrigated by some very unusual pumps with conical blades. There was rice of course, but also such fruit crops as bananas and citrus. It was so interesting it is a pity I have no photos because of the terrible bus ride.

For the rest of the day, we walked round the beaches of Kěndīng. They were quite interesting, and had some very decent coastal scenery. However, with the weather so hot I was very happy to be in a huge hotel for the night where I could take a long rest. I did have one problem: that without my brother's computer I had no way to charge my iPod and as a result I spent the night fiddling around thinking about what to do to have it charged for the trip back home. I went to the Internet cafe downstairs in order to try to have it charged, but the machine could not charge it and I had to ask my brother to have hotel staff do it - and even then only so that my use could be limited on our return journey to Táibèi.

During the morning, we had a look at Kěndīng that proved considerably more interesting that what I saw on the beach the previous day. There were tropical rainforests that looked quite dry but were still recognisable, and some very good views of the sea at the southermost point of Táiwān. In the hot weather, we climbed a hill near Kěndīng but were already very tired for the return journey to Táibèi, which was complicated by the problem that we had a reservation for a 19:00 train back to Gāoxióng. The bus ride was rough but not as bad as the previous day, however, when we reached Gāoxióng, we had to wait a long time and thus we had a look around the city.

Although Gāoxióng is the second-largest city in Táiwān, it is only half the size of Melbourne and in terms of range of products exceedingly poor. We could find very little of value in the city's shopping centres, and I was more taken by the terrible air pollution - worse than Táizhōng and far worse than Táibèi ever was. We did not have that much trouble reaching Gāoxióng station with enough time to catch the train back to Táibèi. In the spare time, we had a quite conventional (for Táiwān) dinner. Not unnaturally, however, by the time we reached Táibèi, all of us were very tired and we were pleased to be back in the hotel, though this time we had a room in the top level.

Thoughts on two days in Táibèi

On Sunday, after my family reunion discussed in the previous post, I travelled from Melbourne to the Táiwānese capital of Táibèi via Hong Kong. Though the flights were much shorter than on my only previous overseas trip, the combination of them with an arduous cycling and rail trip to Spencer Street and Castlemaine left me extremely tired by the time we settled in at the Fullarton Hotel in the southeastern part of central Táibèi.

My brother spent a year in Táibèi (which in Chinese loosely means "North Terrace" - which coincidentally is a street in Clifton Hill near where I lived from 1996 to 1998) over the summer of 2002/2003. As a result, upon settling in Táibèi we spent the afternoon walking round the campus of Táidà University, seeing the places my brother lived at during this period. On the whole, in comparison to my experiences at other universities, Táidà seemed rather run-down: some of the rooms were even grotty - though in densely-packed Táibèi a lack of cleanliness was something I always noted travelling on the Metro and even on the freeway from Táoyuán Airport. Táidà still had some interesting points, most significantly the cubic Periodic Table in the science department.

On the second day of our trip to Táibèi we travelled, after great difficulty finding an entry, up Táibèi 101, which at 382 metres is that tallest building in the world. It cost us a greta deal of time and money to get up the building, with the most direct entry completely closed to the public and actual entry being in a terribly crowded queue which required me to give my backpack to the desk at which I got tickets for around 14 dollars each for me, my mother and my brother. The view, however, of Táibèi's night skyline was stunning and definitely worth fourteen dollars. We could see the whole area of Táibèi proper, as well as the mountains to its west, which were a luxuriant green.

Another highlight was the National Museum, which we visited the morning before travelling to Táibèi 101. There was a remarkable number of old artifacts and paintings from pre-1911 China that I had never seen before. The paintings from this period were especially beautiful, and also noteworthy was the range of materials used for the very old objects. Apparently rhinos were present in China thousands of years ago, judging by the carved materials from rhino horn in the museum - a fact I never knew beforehand! (Sad to say, Táiwān remains the leading buyer of rhino horn in an age when rhinos are critically endangered).

The food has also been exceptional. although we have drunk coffee - a very Western thing - and also eaten Western breakfasts with irresistible sweet cereal, the Chinese food we have had has been wonderful. The noodles in particular have been exceptionally varied and tasty, and I have learned to use chopsticks to a degree I never anticipated beforehand.