Celebrations, Research Project Progress

It has been a week since I completed another sunlap and it is only now that I have had the opportunity to put finger to keyboard in consideration. I feel blessed by the many friends who called, visited, or wrote to me on various social media. As for the day itself, I was determined to have a fairly quiet event. The day started well as Alison B., awoke me with her rather good French singing voice. For the day, I prepared a highly Pacific-themed lunch (my goodness, so much coconut and banana) for myself, Mel S., Liana F., and Julie A. which included ceremonial kava and accompanied by a ludicrous flashing disco ball I'd picked up a few days prior. Later in the week Liana also took me out to see "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Botanical Gardens. It was quite an excellent performance and the company did well to modernise and contextualise "the Mechanicals". Despite this, I honestly think the Mechanicals are a major flaw in the play. Comic relief in a faerie tale with confused relationships is already easy and the Mechanicals take up too much time from the magical story. Yes, I realise I'm editing Shakespeare. But that was not the only birthday gathering of the week; on Thursday night a sizeable number of old friends caught up with Simon S., who has just returned from a substantial trip throughout old Indochina and surrounds. We ended up at The Craftman's Corner in what turned out to be quite a late night. There was another birthday on the day as well; for them, I wrote a card and put it in a box, the best we humans often conduct little rituals in memory of absent friends.

Apart from all that I am now in the final stretch of my Master's research project, a 15000-word essay on impacts, adaption, and financing for developing Pacific small island states. It is, according to my style, painted with a broad brush across multiple disciplines and with a mountain of contemporary references across the subject matter. Calculating the impacts is a matter of scientific extrapolation, and whilst the developed world dithers on matters of mitigation, those impacts will only get worse. Chief among them are the storm surges and effects on coastal environments and especially potable water supply. Adaption to such impacts can involve major projects such as mangrove restoration, which has attracted some pretty big corporate sponsors. Suspicion of their motives is certainly warranted; after all, we are dealing with the systemic trajectories and vested interests of international political political economy. Ultimately, no matter what the moral justifications exist for torts, for reparations, the capacity for such states to receive the just compensation is limited by their capacity to wield international political power. The canary in the coalmine is a sacrificial bird.