IT DOESN’T help that I was another year older the other day but I simply can’t remember where I read it. It was an article I saw a while ago about having a glass of bubbly a day to keep Alzheimer’s at bay. I need to find it so I can take it to my…
ONE of the few things I can admire in Donald Trump, perhaps the only thing, is his mastery of the tweet. We’re roughly the same age, he and I, and here he is practically ruling the world with a social media technology that baffles me. I have never quite seen the need to subscribe to…
I GAVE up playing pennant tennis this season on the grounds that my opponents in my over-50s division were often 20 years younger. I might have to review that decision in light of the oldies’ success in this year’s Australian Open. The standout, of course, was 35-year-old Roger Federer defeating his long-time rival Rafael Nadal…
Baby Boomers / Health / Life / Retirement / Travel / Uncategorized
WE were leaving the Chinatown restaurant in New York and scanning the table for anything left behind when I suddenly realised that I had lost my glasses. Last seen sitting on the table. Tapped my pockets, scanned the table once more, looked on the floor. The helpful waiters moved the table and I searched the…
Life / Travel / Uncategorized
I WAS stepping back 400 years in time the other day when I boarded the Dutch trading ship which made the first European landfall in Australia. Well, it wasn’t the actual craft: it was a full-size replica, but one which has sailed the perilous journey from Australia to Holland and from Indonesia to Australia, tracing…
WE ALL know that hitting a little white ball around the golf course ruins a nice walk, but now there’s scientific evidence that it’s good for you. A regular game of golf can typically burn off 500 calories over 18 holes to improve help prevent and treat chronic diseases such as heart attacks, stroke, diabetes,…
SO AFTER a simply scrumdiddlyumptious time at my yogalates class where I was trying to get rid of my moobs, I walked straight into a real cheeseball – probably a member of the Westminster bubble – who demanded to know the way to the nearest dunny, biffy or toot. It was all very Dahlesque. Fuhgeddaboudit,…
ONE of the few joys of growing older is that you can remember the beginning of things half a century ago. Things like Star Trek, or The Prisoner, both of which series are celebrating 50 year anniversaries and both of which achieved cult status with the Boomer generation. In the days of the Cold War,…
THE death this week of Australian writer Richard Neville will sadden pre-Boomers and older Baby Boomers around the world. As founder of the satirical magazine Oz and later London Oz, Neville and his co-editors were the forerunners of the Baby Boomer anti-Establishment revolution which spawned Beyond The Fringe, That Was The Week That Was, the…
THE train was hurtling from Manhattan to Brooklyn when the man beside me suddenly addressed me: ‘Well, what do you think? Trump or Clinton?’ I was about to reply when he made it easier for me. ‘They’re both arseholes,’ he declared. ‘It’s a difficult choice,’ I ventured, ‘but it’s not one I have to make.…
THE AUSSIES are having a tough time in sport lately. The Rio Olympics have just finished with Australia crashing to 10th in the medal table while traditional rivals Great Britain enjoyed a record medal haul to finish 2nd in the table. The same weekend, the Wallabies were thrashed 42-8 on home soil by world rugby…
IT’S BEEN 49 years since I was last in New York and not much has changed. Sure, the Twin Towers are not there. But then they weren’t there in 1967. Apart from that, there’s the ever-present traffic chaos above ground while the subway works so efficiently below ground, the New Yorkers are as friendly and…
THERE’S not much to admire about the Olympics these days what with drug cheats and host countries diving into debt with unfinished stadia. But there is one bright spot. The Olympics offers a great opportunity to be jingoistic. It’s the ultimate sporting nationalism. And there’s nothing better for a Pom living in Australia for the…
THERE’S a certain vicarious pleasure in playing a round of golf with a man who gets a hole in one. It would be more pleasurable if it were me, of course, but the fact that a playing partner can do it means there is hope yet for my humble game. As a relative newcomer to…
THE FACT that exam markers in Western Australia have highlighted illegible handwriting as a problem comes as no surprise. My own handwriting, once a source of praise from my primary school teachers so long ago, has deteriorated to such an extent that I rarely put pen to paper. When I do, I have difficulty in…
Booming Marvellous 