Our beautiful and very talented relative Melina who is Greek Australian painted this heartbreaking image.  It seems to have touched many people and her post is going viral.  She has given permission for the image to be shared but asks that a donation be made to one of the many charities set up to deal with the crisis.  Her website on face book is called Melina illustrates –  https://www.facebook.com/melanippeart/ if you would like to follow the thread and see the photo /comments/ links to donation sites.

Currently Mitch’s brother and his family, who were trapped on the beach in Malacoota, are still in their car trying to get out and back to Melbourne.  We have friends and family in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and the territories,   We are thinking of you all.  XXXXXXXX

N.B.  Please note the date on the picture should read 2020 not 2019 – already acknowledged by…

January is my least favourite month-cold, dark and seemingly interminable. Many like to begin the month with a party. Here’s a story I wrote years ago about a New Year’s party that did not go according to plan…

The Rescue Party
Brian Meadon peers out into the darkness and is forced to admit a grudging fascination for the way the snowflakes are looming out of the sky and settling in an ominous and ever growing heap on his car’s windscreen. His initial feelings of hot anger and frustration with the car’s failings have ebbed away to be replaced with somewhat colder resignation. There is still just enough light outside to make out the writing on a road sign beyond his lay-by. ‘Stoodley Interchange’, it asserts, taunting Brian with confident superiority, even though accumulations of snow are creeping up its legs.
Settling back into his driving seat once more, Brian decides…

today is the day
(for the moment
at least)
that they say
might bring the creature
to our doorsteps

it will start out cool
then boil up
later on
into searing

looking out the window
the smoky haze
is not too bad
today

though I can still taste
yesterday’s plastic
in the air
and the stench
of burning rubber

mostly
what I notice
making the ground
seem like
a carpet that has come alive
is the flits
and the flights
of a cloud
of small blue butterflies

and we will stay

it has been decided

that
is our plan

stay
in the township
though
we will not seek
to defend
at our door

there are places
to run
to be as safe
as anywhere else is

and we will do our best
to survive
along
with all our neighbours

I will go
to my workplace
in the afternoon
to undertake…

So 2019 is grinding towards an end, and what a complex, mangled year it has been for us, here in the UK.

On our small island with its natural water barrier between us and the world, a civil war of words has raged since 2016, over whether we should pull up the drawbridge to our sea moat and withdraw into our brittle little shell or continue to relate with our nearest neighbours in the same convivial way we’ve enjoyed for 50 years.

I’m disconsolate to say to my overseas readers, not only that the drawbridge fans have won the war of words, but that all of we ordinary citizens, those of us who don’t have huge investments squirrelled away or are not hedge fund managers, who are not the fabulously rich elite and right wing newspaper owners, we have all lost.

I can’t dwell for too long on an issue…

As we get closer to Christmas, William Price King shares more music to get us into the festive spirit.

“Carol of the bells” was composed by Mykola Leontovych in 1914, based on the Ukrainian folk chant “Shchedryk “,with lyrics by Peter J. Wilhousky. The song is based on a four-note ostinato and has been performed in many musical genres. Performed here by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir

“For unto us a child is born” -Sir Colin Davis conducts the London Symphony Orchestra, Susan Gritton, Sara Mingardo, Mark Padmore, Alastair Miles and the Tenebrae choir in “For Unto Us a Child is Born” from Handel’s Mesiah, composed in 1741.

William Price King is an American jazz singer, crooner, and composer.

His interest in music began at an early age when he studied piano and clarinet in high school. At Morehouse College in Atlanta where he grew up, he sang in the Glee…