Unless otherwise indicated all photos © Richard McKie 2005 - 2015
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Travel
Ireland
In October 2018 we travelled to Ireland. Later we would go on to England (the south coast and London) before travelling overland (and underwater) by rail to Belgium and then on to Berlin to visit our grandchildren there.
The island of Ireland is not very big, about a quarter as large again as Tasmania, with a population not much bigger than Sydney (4.75 million in the Republic of Ireland with another 1.85 million in Northern Ireland). So it's mainly rural and not very densely populated.
It was unusually warm for October in Europe, including Germany, and Ireland is a very pleasant part of the world, not unlike Tasmania, and in many ways familiar, due to a shared language and culture.
Read more ...Fiction, Recollections & News
Merry Christmas
As Tim Minchin sings in White Wine in the Sun [turn on your sound...] Christmas is a time for family. Last year our family got bigger. Tilda Charlotte was born in Germany. This Christmas she is walking and sort of talking (a couple of German words at least). So the lyrics:
| And if my baby girl When you're twenty-one or thirty-one And Christmas comes around And you find yourself nine thousand miles from home You'll know what ever comes Your brothers and sisters and me and your mum Will be waiting for you in the sun When Christmas comes Your brothers and sisters, your aunts and your uncles Your grandparents, cousins and me and your mum We'll be waiting for you in the sun Drinking white wine in the sun Darling, whenever you come We'll be waiting for you in the sun Drinking white wine in the sun Waiting for you in the sun Darling, when Christmas comes We'll be waiting for you in the sun Waiting |
have a special meaning this year: I really like Christmas - It's sentimental, I know.
Read more ...Opinions and Philosophy
Jihad
In my novella The Cloud I have given one of the characters an opinion about 'goodness' in which he dismisses 'original sin' as a cause of evil and suffering and proposes instead 'original goodness'.
Most sane people want to 'do good', in other words to follow that ethical system they were taught at their proverbial 'mother's knee' (all those family and extended influences that form our childhood world view).
That's the reason we now have jihadists raging, seemingly out of control, across areas of Syria and Iraq and threatening the entire Middle East with their version of 'goodness'.
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