Bah Humbug, Dead Rat, Daylesford

I'm not one for making a big deal about Christmas; I certainly do not get into the spirit or festivities. Much of I suspect has much to do with being raised in the bottom 1% of society. Relative poverty is not, of course, the same as absolute poverty but even in a society that has mostly resolved the problem of the latter the former still has its effects. There was something utterly undignified in having to seek charity hampers at Christmas, a certain guilt in being in an impoverished state. Even a child could ascertain from the suspicious questions of the providers that somehow this was a moral failing on their part, something which guaranteed income (as advocated by Martin Luther King) does not carry. The expensive celebratory gifts that others made into a virtue stated clearly: This is not your day. I felt more at home with Andersen's The Little Match Girl, or more recently and appropriately Floyd Dell's Fool's Paradise. Despite not being particularly fond of the sound, and nor the band-aid approach, I found I could appreciate the efforts Live Aid in my teenaged years.

Well, this Christmas I received a dead rat. Poor Tricky (on the left) at the ripe old age of 31 months (77 in rat years) crawled under the sideboard on Christmas eve and didn't come out. The mother of ten or eleven little ratlings (the others by her sister Naughty, we were never too sure who exactly had how many as they shared parental duties), Tricky was friendly, happy, and very well-looked after little rodent. Naughty is still with us, as is cage-mate Lucky, and the remaining daughters in this household, Picador and Prankster.

caseopaya's mother is visiting from Perth. We took the opportunity of a couple day's break from work to take a trip to Daylesford-Hepburn Springs on the southern tip of the Great Dividing Range, a place which I haven't visited in around twenty years. It's a pleasant location, the greenery a reminder of what parts of Australia looked like prior to the mass clear-felling for agricultural and pastoral land. We stayed in a small cottage, took a short bush walk from the natural mineral springs to Jackson's Lookout, and dined at an local Indian restaurant, and had a "Christmas lunch" picnic at the Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens. During the day I worked my way through Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs. Just prior to departure visited Paradise Books and found myself a copy of Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization, McDermott's A Cultural Introduction to Philosophy (some excellent selections), and Niven's The Magic Goes Away.