The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

Today I spent most of the day at the Fremantle Cemetery. It was on Easter Tuesday 2018 that Petunia’s funeral was there. So I figured it would be the perfect way to spend the day.
The weather this time was just as gorgeous but unlike then, I had no Grinch or Dudley Dursley hanging around like a bad smell and today I wore my daggy green Crocs instead of the black shoes that were so ill fitting I had blisters just from walking to Privet Drive to the Dursleymobile.

( Plotting and planning )

It is hard to believe that it is exactly 25 years to the day when I left the green goodness of Germany to come to the wide brown sunburnt land of Oz.
So much has happened since and I never ever imagined in my wildest dreams that an Ossie could ever become Chanceller of a united Germany since they were definitely regarded as second class citizens while I lived there.
Especially memorable was the reply from one of them when asked why so many of East Germans were going to the Wild West rather than staying in their own country.
She said that she spent the first 40 years of her life in the poor house of Europe and she was damned if she was going to spend the next 40 renovating it.

( The Satanic City and other places )

It is almost that time of year when the serpent attends to one of many annual rituals. This one is the little 3.1.5 Black Book
It is basically an assortment of To Do lists and Grand plans and is the serpent alternative to New Year's Resolutions

It is a place for recording Wish Lists and To Do lists for the next 3 months, 1 year and 5 years. Yesss. Those good old fashioned 5 Year Plans more honoured in the breach than the observance.
But the mere act of making such lists in the first place gives the inner serpent something to do and sometimes boxes get ticked off almost inadvertently.

I used to knock off the latest list in an hour or so at some cafe but now the ritual can take more than a week to complete.
The solstices and equinoxes are the times for writing new ones and also looking back on the old ones to see how many items got completed.

Last March's 1 year plan most definitely did not include "Organize Petunia's funeral"

It is now exactly 6 months ago since she died and today she would have been 77. So glad that I took time off work last year so that I could spend the whole day with her. Guessing that the inner serpent had been busy whispering that the odds were not in favour of her being around to celebrate the next one

Meanwhile I would most definitely like to turn up to work on Wednesday 10th October but will have to switch to another day because the Grinch turns 80 that day so I will have to make some sort of effort to do something nice for him.

There are two many other nasty anniversaries around that time and Daisy's recent visit provided a welcome distraction from those. September was in fact the only month in 2012 where Dolores and her goblin trolls left me alone. Turned out to be the calm before the storm. Aside from the calendar year matching, there have been other reasons of late to be reminding of the minions of Megatherion.

But it is awful to think of the Grinch and his mission to cart Petunia's garden off to landfill one green bin at a time. I could always get him a tree for his birthday. That would definitely piss him off. So far I have a stash of $80 in coins which he can count all day long. That should keep him amused. Then there's a bright shiny copy of "The Snowball" a biography of Warren Buffet because nothing pisses off the Grinch more than reading about folks who are richer than he is.
Daisy suggested some tickets to visit The Convict Establishment That's definitely gloomy and doomy enough.

Normal mortals love stuff like lunches and luxury tours but not only does the Grinch not enjoy such stuff, he thinks it is a sin to waste money on them. Even if it's other people's money.

But Petunia has departed this mortal coil and he is still here and no wishful thinking can get them to change places. So the only thing this serpent could do to mark this day in the most meaningful way is to plant trees in her memory. So that is exactly what I did. I also bought a birthday cake and shared it with the folks at the day job.

In some strange way, these last few days have marked a return to the land of the living. I guess spring is in the air, the flowers are blooming, bees are buzzing and everything is beautiful. The sun is shining but not sizzling and stinking like in high summer. Along with the autumn equinox, it truly is one of the most beautiful times of the year.

Wednesday was a most magical day indeed.

The morning spent slinking and sniffing about in the garden, watering the weeds, planting the last cloves of garlic, and checking to see how the very precious saffron bulbs were getting along
The grand plans for this gorgeous sunny day included a visit to the Fremantle cemetery, especially the Lakes garden where Petunia has a little spot reserved for her ashes.

While it seems on the surface to be a most miserable and depressing thing to visit a graveyard, in fact they are the most precious sacred sites for this serpent. Petunia used to often remark on this peculiar obsession.
You will be long enough dead, so why lurk in such morbid places while still alive?

But graveyards are places full of trees, weeds, birds and other living things. They are also sites of memory and history and the perfect place for an old soul to lurk.

( A grave mistake )

Been so many anniversaries the last few weeks that it is almost impossible to keep up with them all.
It has been one never ending party
The 500th anniversary of the Reformation, The 100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution - that ended up a bit of a damp squib.
Then of course there was the first anniversary of a certain election from last year.
Forgotten in all this drama because there are no big fat 0s on the end is the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But 28 years is a very big deal indeed. Well it certainly is to this serpent. The inner calendar Nazi noticed a while ago that the western Gregorian calendar generally operates on cycles of 28 years (except those pesky non leap years in 1900, 2100 etc sort of trash the pattern) so that while it is sometimes 6 years, sometimes 5 and sometimes 11 years between dates and days corresponding, after 28 years they will always match. I am convinced that when they match, it is much easier to remember things that happened.

I was living in Germany back in 1989 and even had holidays at the time. Always had a soft spot for Halloween. Trouble was brewing and strange things were happening and when the first brick of the Wall came down, was sitting watching lots of it on TV but was too broke to be able to go over and join in the giant party. I think there was 6 hour traffic jams at the time because half the country wanted to join in
It was a Thursday, just like this year of course. The following year they had the official party on 3rd October. No idea if it was coincidence or some one in the Stasi with a sick and twisted sense of humour, but the original 911 (9th of November) had been long ago claimed by one Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. He had some beer brawl putsch in Munich on 9 November 1923 and of course the infamous Kristalnacht on the same day in 1938.
So it was just a bit too sensitive and too tasteless to proclaim the date as a national holiday after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Apparently the Berlin of these days bears no resemblance at all to the Berlin of 1989. The Dead Zone of Potsdamer Platz and the mysterious unmarked Fuhrer bunker in the area have no doubt long ago been turned into high rise towers and office blocks
I last visited the Satanic City in 1992. God knows when I will slink back there again

Been a strange week in Dursleyville. Lurked around the lair on my days off because it was too grey and rainy to do much else. Then there is a bit of decluttering and sorting to do to make the place look reasonably respectable for when the Izzie sister visits in a couple of weeks from now.
Thinking of her, could not help but be reminded of July 2014 when she came to visit. They had a choice of coming over here together or taking separate flights one week apart so that her husband wouldn’t use up so much of his annual leave. In the end, they chose to take the first flight and all come together which was just as well because the one they did not take never did make it to Kuala Lumpur and ended up in pieces somewhere in the Ukraine.

Of course for many people who took the flight on 17th July, there were also some who had been toying with a different date. The saddest case was the family where the parents stayed in Amsterdam for an extra week and the three children and their grandfather came back early so that they would be back for the new school term. They never did make it.

I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like for their surviving relatives to be watching the drama going on in Hamburg at the moment so close to the anniversary.
For me it is a giant stage where the players strut and do their stuff all in the pursuit of power, but for the Maslin family like the other 250 or so people on that flight, it is personal

Then there are other reasons for being curious about this particular G20 summit. Many years ago I was living on the outskirts of Hamburg as a sad house elf enslaved to a vile creature who I called Heil Hilde. A blond blue eyed Aryan bitch of bitches with an uncanny resemblance to one KerryAnne Conway and with an equally loose relationship with reality

But any grand plans of being glued to the screen to try figure out where the conferences are being held or to recognize landmarks or watch the hordes of zombies was quickly dashed by a very cranky, slow and sluggish Big Mac
This computer would now be regarded by the puffed up little popinjays in the Apple Store as ‘vintage’ as I got it in late 2009. Positively ancient.
It is very erratic and unpredictable. Some days things go smoothly and other times there are just endless spinning beachballs and it is a struggle to do anything. Typing feels like the keyboard is dripping in treacle as the time between hitting the letters and seeing them appear on the screen gets longer and longer until there is simply no point.
Tonight was one such night.

So I just had to go without. Because if Izzie wants pictures, it’s a poky little tweet stone phone, the Big Mac or nothing. Unlike most folks, there is no television in the house so all news and gossip has to be gotten online or from the radio
Did catch that the slimy Saudi Arabians trumped the Donald by snaffling the hotel room he wanted. That’s Schadenfreude on steroids. At least Merkel will not let him build one of his infernal towers in any German city. Some people at least still have standards



Found the motherlode of crazy creepy political cartoons and it has been so annoying trying to share them on Twitter. Maybe just as well. Because if Don the Con could see all the vile ‘picture in the attic’ portraits that David Rowe does of him, he would not hesitate to nuke Australia back to the stone age
Especially since we have also been taking the piss with the Confessions of a CNN reporter

So much sleaze and such a struggle to share it

Must be off now. Got to get the latest gossip on Donald Trump’s performance appraisal
Let’s hope there are TAPES

It's scary to think that it is exactly 14 years since the Serpent's 'birthday'. It seems like centuries ago but only yesterday.
The magic is long gone but the memories remain.

It was a stinking sizzling 37c today and oh so very tempting to be a lazy snoozy serpent and abandon the annual rituals. Sometimes I wonder if the whole purpose of festivals and rituals is to provide some sort of external structure or deadline to override the lazy lousy inner beast.
Well it certainly worked and it was worth the effort.

Of course there was an added incentive to visit certain sacred sites due to last year's unexpected interruptions to the scheduled program.
In some strange way, not so much the fact of not being at Cottesloe Beach to watch the last sunset of 2014 but simply being unable to watch the last sunset at all because the faint and sickly yellow blob of the northern winter was hiding behind a hundred grey clouds, it was as if the year had never really ended.

So the annual ritual consists of a visit to a certain old lunatic asylum which has been converted into an arts centre. It used to involve a picnic with a bottle of Wynns Cabernet, water crackers and camembert, a quill and bottle of emerald ink and most important of all - a bright shiny new green notebook.
The wine and cheese picnic got left at the Lair for later in the evening since it is a waste of good wine when the day is so hot as well as just being another heavy thing to haul around.

A bright shiny new book to read has also found its way onto the list. This year it is "Wake" from Elizabeth Knox which I managed to snaffle for 3 silver sickles at the charity shop a few months ago. It got rave reviews about six months ago.

So I got as far as one paragraph of this entry when the Keeper of the Keys came to do the lock up ritual at 5pm. But it was a good omen to start in such an auspicious location. That was the main point since hunting and pecking with a horrid tablet keyboard is too much hassle when there's the nice Big Mac serpent friendly keyboard lurking at the Lair. The Big Mac had its 6th birthday last Wednesday and the warranty has long ago run out. It's still doing well and had a much longer shelf life than the ibook got in 2005 with its pissy 256kb memory that was slow as a snail by 2009.

It was amazing how it was like another world within the walls. The plane trees had lost half their leaves but it was quite cool and breezy and not nasty and muggy like it had been when I had set out on the visit. This is largely due to the sea breeze which comes in the afternoon, removes the doom and gloom and lifts everyone's spirits immensely.

It is a day for indulging in nostalgia, for squiggling and doing all the plotting and planning for the new year and review of the old that most folks save for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

Last year's little black book also got switched over for the bright shiny recycled diary from 2011. January and February are one day out thanks to the pesky leap year but the rest is just fine. I had been using an old 2009 model for 2015 until I got tempted by the pretty Moleskine diaries reduced to the very tempting price of $3. I bought a couple of extras for 2020.

Tomorrow there is more sizzling weather forecast so the morning will be spent watering the weeds and devising devious means to keep them alive. There's also magic beans to be planted which will provide shade for some of the more sensitive baby trees.

2015 was a very productive year in the Serpent's Garden and 2016 is going to be even better.

It's that time of the year again.
It's been a rather more eventful year than usual due to certain overseas adventures.

( The Year of the Serpent )

The End of Days

It’s time once again for the annual nostalgia fest for the year.

( The Year of the Serpent )