Peter’s Blog

I need to place on record my feeling that overwhelmingly throughout my life, my contact with my fellow men, women and children has been a total delight.
It is a recurring pleasure which I experience each day and is among the precious things which makes my life rewarding and worth living, not least because moments of the keenest enjoyment can as readily occur with a complete stranger as with family and friends.

 

 

The Film Diary includes photos as well as video frames because it contains the blog’s biodiversity content. It is also the blog’s second biggest category, after Other. The video content dates from 2008 to 2021, when I ceased videoing. The photographs date from 2014 to the present.

 

The Brisbane Line was the e-bulletin of the now defunct Brisbane Institute, to which I contributed the articles featured, between 2006 and 2012.

 

Not The Brisbane Line contains my other essays from 2005 to the present.

 

 

A cherished dream, my book   One small place on earth …  discovering biodiversity where you are,   self-published in August 2019, has been long in the making. Jan Watson created its design template nine years ago. The idea of doing a book seems to have occurred during my stay with Clive Tempest, the website’s first architect, when I was visiting the UK in 2006. By the time Steve Guttormsen and I began sustained work on the book in 2017, much of which I had already written, the imperative was to create a hard copy version of a project whose content is otherwise entirely digital.

 

 

People may wonder why there is little mention of climate change – global warming on my website. There are two related reasons. Firstly, if former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2007 remark that climate change is the “great moral, environmental and economic challenge of our age” is true, we have not acted accordingly before or since. Rudd’s statement is only true if we collectively live as if it is true, Rudd included. Instead, our politics has wasted decades favouring business as usual, and a global economy excessively dependent on fossil fuels – in the wilful absence of a politics intent on achieving a low carbon economy. Secondly, although it is open to individuals to strive to live the truth of Rudd’s remarks, the vast majority of people, myself included, do not. I salute those who do. The precautionary principle alone makes me regard climate change as a current planetary crisis, but because I have only marginally changed the way I live, and still wish to fly, I am not inclined to pontificate on the subject.

 

 

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Other / 26.04.2024

Today, during an hourlong operation, the urologist removed the kidney stone from my bladder, using a laser to zap the stone. This was the first time I have had a general anaesthetic and the first time since my birth that I have spent a night in hospital.  In fact, I spent another night and was collected by Steve and Paulina on 28.4.24 who drove me home. I treated them to a roast lunch at Bungunyah.

PS By 3.5.24, the tenderness and bleeding had stopped and I was well on the way to recovery. The urologist booked me for a de-brief on 27.5.24.

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Film Diary / 19.04.2024

The moment I saw the moth under the eaves of the garage wall in Central Avenue, I knew it was a species I had never seen. I needed my stepladder to photograph it. Miraculously, when I returned today, it had shifted its position to a better angle for the camera. The species has an interesting distribution, being found in southern Africa, Asia and widely in the Pacific islands, including New Caledonia, Fiji and central Polynesia. In Australia the species occurs in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. Wingspan is 4 cm.

 

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Other / 02.04.2024

This afternoon I saw the urologist. His surgery was as busy as a railway station waiting room. He showed me a photo of the stone which he described as large and told me that I would need a general anaesthetic and be kept in overnight. I chose to have the operation at the Pindara Private Hospital and spent time with the doctor’s administrator dealing with the paperwork. I ended up hand-delivering the forms at the hospital on April 4.

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Other / 20.03.2024

At about noon on March 6, I noticed blood in my urine and went straight to the medical centre in the shops behind my unit block. I was prescribed an antibiotic and told to book an ultrasound on my bladder. For two or three days I was glued to the toilet and experienced pain and discomfort. I booked the ultrasound for the following Monday. I was told to drink a litre of water an hour beforehand, but given the UTI, I only managed 600 ml and even then, went to the toilet twice. The nurse had difficulty in conducting the ultrasound because I had to have two more visits to the toilet.

I was booked to see the doctor on the Thursday, but he had not received the result of the ultrasound. I had hardly recovered from the UTI when I had a recurrence a fortnight later. My regular doctor prescribed an antibiotic and promptly chased up the errant ultrasound report. I again spent two or three days glued to the toilet. When I saw her, the ultrasound showed a kidney stone in the bladder. She referred me to a urologist who ordered a CT scan of the… Read Complete Text

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My Travels / 05.03.2024

Gina sent me an email stating that a paper Britrail pass was available. I opted for 8 days anywhere in the UK within a month. I revised my thinking about a Eurail pass, which is only available electronically, in favour of a Britrail pass, because  my only train trip outside the UK was to travel by train to Germany, whereas I developed the idea of  a six day rail jaunt from London to Inverness to Thurso and Glasgow to cover the period between my time in London and Somerset. The train from Glasgow to Plymouth stops at Taunton. Since I won’t be travelling by train to Germany, Gina booked a flight from Heathrow to Frankfurt on July 26, which means I will be extending my stay in Somerset by a day.

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Film Diary / 04.03.2024

I had another and better opportunity to photograph a Little pied cormorant at the pond in Driscoll Lane, two years after photographing a juvenile bird there. This is one of Australia’s most common water birds and is found throughout the country. This bird is an adult.