Murphy's Law or... Shit Happens

A few weeks ago, we decided to remove our fairly large pond and find new homes for the seventy-odd fish who lived there (we started off with three, but they got pretty friendly with one another).  Then we shipped in a few cubic metres of top soil and I spent a couple of hard-graft weekends wheel-barrowing it from the nature strip to the back yard, spreading it, levelling it, replacing bandaids on blisters - the whole deal.  Re-mortared the veggie garden wall, set up a bird bath (because the pond was nothing if not a fancy bird bath), fought off three million mosquitoes and planted three silver birches, which I've been watering every day this summer...

And then got a call from the Water Authority the other day.

There's a sewerage pipe that runs across that section of our property, it seems, which is in a state of collapse and has been causing the neighbours a blockage of poo or two, and so now the workmen need to come in with a bobcat and dig up everything I've just put down.  Out come the silver birches, my rock wall, the veggie garden, a lime tree - the lot.

Ho hum.  Oh well, might as well laugh as cry.

Lisa Mitchell: Wonder

Listening to Lisa Mitchell's wonderful album Wonder a lot at the moment.  Had an iTunes voucher to spend a couple of weeks back and wasn't sure what to buy until I heard Oh! Hark playing on Triple J.  Listened to a few more tracks on YouTube and loved every one of them, so knew this was an album for me.  Delightful stuff.

Enjoy - I hope you do.

Recent reads: Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo

Love these lazy summer days (and how, as a migrant from the northern to the southern hemisphere, Christmas heralds the onset of them), and especially love the opportunity to kick back, cook, eat, paint, swim ... and catch up with loads of reading.  It becomes a guilt-free pleasure during the holiday.

Read a couple of plays last week, in preparation for 2011 (and Happy New Year to you, by the way), which I always enjoy as quick reads. The first was Cosi by the Australian playwright Louis Nowra and I was particularly looking forward to this because I'm a big fan of one of his other plays: Radiance.  Cosi is set in a mental institution in 1970 against the backdrop of protests against the Vietnam war, and tells the story of Lewis, who is employed as a director to stage a production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte... with the "help" of the patients.

The other play was an old favourite by the Italian playwright Dario Fo: Accidental Death of an Anarchist. As the blurb to my edition notes, this "is a sharp and hilarious satire on police corruption in Italy ... [and] concerns the case of an anarchist railway worker who, it was claimed , 'fell' to his death from a police headquarters window in 1969."  I don't usually enjoy farce, but this is a major exception.  As plays go, it made such an impact on me that I gave a nod to it in my first novel, The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore.  It's the play Kate Hainley is reading (in Italian) when she meets up with Tom one time in Northampton, but her mood is muddy and so is the river and the sky.

There's nothing muddy about today, and so it's almost time to pour a glass of wine, grab a book and swing in the hammock a while.  Happy reading!