Year: 2024

When you board a flight you expect the screaming baby or a toddler tantrum but on our flight to Paris we saw no babies nor toddlers. Instead a very excited pup called Chanel, dressed to perfection and sporting what we in the Greek linguo call a “koukourikos” ( a very dubious hair fashion our mothers…

Getting excited and the bags are packed. Run a quick programme in the dishwasher to clean things up. More like snarled them up. Machine made gurgling noises, and would not turn off. Manual said consult a service agent. I rang various “on the day repair centres” and all of them said tomorrow. Stress levels simmering.…

Lessons in Chemistry is Bonnie Garmus’s bestselling and first novel. Bonnie Garmus is a copywriter and creative director. She is an open-water swimmer, a rower, and mother to two daughters. Born in California, she currently lives in London with her husband and her second dog, 99. Her first novel, Lessons in Chemistry is an international…

This is National Reconciliation Week in Australia which is a time for all Australians to learn about our shared histories, cultures, and achievements, and to explore how each of us can contribute to achieving reconciliation in Australia. Talks, conversations and artwork all aiming to show how this can be achieved against a backdrop of world…

This blog celebrates MEN – in their many forms. The first one is my bright, occasionally cranky, veggie growing, honey producing mostly kind and loving hubby who is 70 on the 27th of May. It seems almost unbelievable to say the word – seventy – out loud. My, my, we are reaching for that other…

Bit of an arty end of the week. One of my favourite galleries and workshop area. I pop in from time to time and this week was quite special as I came across the solo exhibitions of two artists Daniel Agdag, from Melbourne and the other one, Glen Skien, a Queensland Artist. Glen uses collected…

Today I had the joy of wandering around the Affordable Art show which is being held in Brisbane for the first time. I was eager to accept this invitation having been to some wonderful Affordable Art shows in Switzerland – they were called something different but you could put your art into a supermarket trolley…

I own up to not speaking up often enough and I am working on it but this is one speaking up I am happy to share – not just from me but a whole slew of the population who were appalled at the plans for Toondah Harbour in Cleveland. There were plans afoot to develop…

Not a bird or a turtle not even a ray or a shark but a human of note. She lurched towards the empty seat and asked if she could sit down. There was an open stretch of water to Heron which was a bit choppy and she was feeling it. We very quickly got chatting…

Starting with green and loggerhead turtles that come to Heron to nest. Their eggs are well protected but the chicks fall prey to silver gulls and reef sharks so while there may be hundreds coming out of the sand, very few survive to adulthood. The reef around the island is ideal for snorkelling and we…