Excerpts from my journal – September 2026
A keyboard writer of many years, I want to find out if handwriting inspires me differently, if different thoughts or ways of expressing thoughts spring up in my head. I’ve left my laptop at home and unwrapped a notebook I bought in Kunming earlier this year.
The Amex lounge works only because it is better than no lounge. A first-world obscenity, American Express is a symbol of western affluence. I feel soiled by my own deliberations about continuing with my Amex card now that airport lounge access is being discontinued from February 2027. Do I get an Amex card that allows access to this lounge in which I am breakfasting now? I need to wash my brain. The people of Nepal have a different set of matters to ponder. Not that I feel guilty, but it helps to keep their travails close enough to stop me getting carried away by the excesses of my privileged life.
Freedom and security are necessary for a relationship to prosper. Freedom to grow as an individual, security imparted by your partner’s and your common relationship values. You know that your relationship is sound when your partner and you are at home on a Friday evening, dinner eaten, dishes washed, you are seated together on a sofa, the television is switched on, he is tired at the end of a busy week and dozes off. You turn down the volume or switch off the telly, do some reading or writing or thinking, and there is no other place you’d rather be.
Cruising at 35,000 feet, I just watched, in-flight, The Final Quarter, for maybe the third time. I have always been, always will be outraged at the vilification of minorities. In any circumstances, but especially at the torrent of abuse directed at the vilified individual who dares to stand up, proud and defiant, and call out Australia’s appalling racism. And so the bigots came out in force to scream at Adam Goodes, at the footy, in the media, and anywhere else their voices could be heard. One of them went so far as to ask, ‘When is a white heterosexual Australian male going to have his day?’ White Australian males have had their day ever since the first fleet dumped them in Botany Bay, and they set about butchering the human residents whose ancestors arrived 60,000 years ago. They get offended when minorities don’t know their place. Which is acceptance of white superiority, dominance and calling the shots, and never attempting to shine a light on racism.
Barack Obama was allowed a toehold in a white enclave so dominated by western white culture that he had no choice but to ‘govern for all Americans’. It did not help to lift black lives. I read that racist members of Congress declared they’d rather allow the USA to plunge to a failed state than grant a successful presidency to a black man.
How I love Singapore mornings. Singapore is my home away from home. Resorting to handwriting it’s like embarking on a new project.
I love the morning music of my partner and his mum conversing. He lectures, she expresses a different opinion. I have no idea what they are saying. I don’t try to join the dots between odd English words or names. A symphony of mother and son. It warms my heart, this beautiful background music, as I trickle out thoughts, ideas, plans for the day, what I want for breakfast, what coffee I’ll have: I know it’s going to standard Singaporean hawker centre coffee sweetened with condensed milk.
Adam Goodes is still on my mind. Contemptible, racist media men ignored bare facts in their persecution of him. Unlike them, Adam, always polite, considered, articulate, showed up the rabble for what they really were. And, of course, they hated it and mercilessly booed him on the footy field. And, to Australia’s, and the Australian Football League’s, great shame, despite Adam’s palpable courage, there’s only so much a human being can take. The mob drove him out of footy. I hope the stain never fades.
What has happened in Nepal is an appalling natural disaster. Thousands bore the brunt of it, while others were lucky enough to be in places the calamity did not crash through. The lucky ones might have succumbed had they not vacated disaster areas, some of them only minutes earlier. When their loved ones thanked God for protecting them, I recoiled in disgust. Why didn’t they spare a thought for the thousands who died? The thousands he didn’t protect? It reinforces my utter aversion to, and contempt for, religion. It gives one the belief that, unlike others, he or she is special in the eyes of some divine power. That way of thinking is just wrong.
Singapore wet markets are more like Colombo than Melbourne markets. Even our beloved Dandenong market does not evoke the spirit of Asian markets. I’m biased, of course.
