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 entries are selected items from the diary I keep whenever I film. To check location references, click on ‘Tamborine Mountain’ on the top information bar then hit the ‘Tamborine Mountain’ button on the map.
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.
I at last heard from Clive after more than a month of silence. He has confirmed my stay with him and is about to fly to Finland to conduct his retreat. I have booked dates to see the family in and near London. The train journey from Frankfurt Airport to Rot Malsch, was too tenuous, given the limited time to change trains at Frankfurt Central Station. Peter and Gabi Silver offered to meet me at the airport and I reluctantly, but gratefully, accepted.
Today I collected my Galaxy Z 5 flip phone. I had to wait a month and a day after buying the Samsung A 15, which I found too bulky and unwieldy. The Z 5 is lighter and more compact and a better fit in my trouser pocket. It is as easy to use. All the info on the A 15 was successfully transferred to the new phone. I contemplated roaming, but the way I use my phone, it makes more sense to buy a sim card in the UK.
Popped into Gina’s travel agency so that Jodie could transfer the QR code for the West Highland line ticket.
One can expect the kind of presentation and functionality issues (which Jackie was able to promptly resolve) to occur after such a major upheaval to the website. However, I emailed her today about a new set of difficulties I encountered when I tried to overcome the failure of certain photos to download to the albums. They were present on the admin site, but not on the website. When I attempted to create a new image, I was either not allowed to change the sort order (the position of the image in the album) or save the changes. Instead, a 403 error page appeared. Nor was I able to add new images to an album. Jackie replied, saying she would get on to the problem.
Today, Jackie installed Animal Builders as a new category on my blog post page, specifically to contain this article explaining my interest in the subject, and compliment, and provide a link to, the new Animal Builders album. For many years, I have felt that the lack of a blue-chip documentary series about animal builders, has denied a global audience access to an abundance of fascinating information about a major aspect of natural history. One only has to think of beaver dams, bird nests and bowers, wasp nests, spider webs and egg sacs and the huge range of cocoons, mounds, burrows, dens and lairs created by animals. And the list only refers to terrestrial creatures.
I have trawled through my images and found plenty of material for the album. My focus for all the previous flora and fauna albums, had been on showing what a species looks like, hence the preponderance of close ups and zoom images. For the new album, the emphasis has shifted to using wider shots to best show a complete structure. Fortunately, when videoing an animal builder species, I included shots of the structure which they built, as best I could, although… Read Complete Text
With the post-op debrief out of the way, I was happy to make the final payment on my UK/Europe trip for hotel accommodation in Scotland and Singapore. Meanwhile, I decided to book a ticket on the West Highland line, the day before my Waverley cruise. It amounts to another long day of travel, from Glasgow to Mallaig and back.
