Author Archive

I picked up a little conch shell yesterday on the beach at Mooloolaba. Its inhabitant was gone, perhaps back to the sea, and all that was left was a beautiful work of art that now sits on my desk. It reminded me of the beautiful quilt that my mother had prepared for her own funeral,…

“Fortune favours the brave,” said Virgil. And the Bible does not disagree, apart from the word ‘fortune’, which does not fit hand-in-glove with its teaching on the sovereignty of God. But reward for the brave is a snug fit. In Jesus’ story about the man who knocked on his neighbour’s door at midnight (Luke 11:5-8),…

Explaining the comic construction of Fawlty Towers, John Cleese said, “The essence of farce is almost always that some kind of taboo has been transgressed and the protagonist has to cover up. So he does one lie to cover up the first. As he seems to get caught out in that lie, he has to…

Ever heard of a brake pedal grommet? Neither had I until I found that my brake lights would not turn off, even after I had turned off the engine and removed the ignition key. Apparently a little piece of plastic, costing about thirty cents, sits on the back of the brake pedal, and turns the…

Last October some friends introduced me to Big 2, a popular card game where the order of suits differs from that which I had learned from infancy. ‘Hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades’ had flowed into my psyche with my mother’s milk, and trying to unlearn the order was like trying to write with my left hand….

I watched with admiration some tugboats in action in Sydney harbour, working their magic on a big P&O cruise ship. At first, simply accompanying and navigating and fussing about on either side. But then the big ship reached a tight bend in the river. Suddenly the tugs gunned their engines, one at the side near…

How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb? One with a mate in the building industry who has the right size Allen key to open the casing. One with a degree in engineering who knows (a) which way to turn the Allen key, and (b) how the Allen key actually releases the…

A wedding anniversary is looming, and in my sentimentality – with emphasis on the word ‘mental’ – I scanned the local jewellers for some stones of the emerald kind. I was aware prior to my visit that gems came in both natural and synthetic varieties, but I didn’t know about a third category of stone…

At midnight on the 20th August 1857, in appalling weather, the Dunbar, a first class English-built vessel, crashed into Sydney Heads (southside), killing 121 passengers and crew, and leaving only one survivor. Apparently the captain thought he was north of the harbour opening, when he was actually south, and turned the ship further to the…

Had a good reason to love my gall bladder the other day. I was sitting on a jetty eating fish and chips, when a piece of batter fell into the water. Couldn’t believe the huge release of oil, and quickly looked around for one of those containment flotation devices to try to avert an ecological…