Blogging Category
China 2025 – April 17
Posted on May 12, 2025 Leave a Comment
Good morning Xiamen. It’s early, very early. Heeding the stern advice of yesterday’s bus driver, we are catching the 4:40am bus to the airport for our 7:15am flight to Changsha. I feel fresh even though I couldn’t have slept for more than three hours. The Goldilocks weather is neither hot nor cold. We reach the […]
China 2025 – April 16
Posted on May 11, 2025 Leave a Comment
Waiting to board my flight, I reflect that six weeks earlier I had never heard of Xiamen Airlines. Or our first destination Xiamen either, a port city on China’s south-eastern coast just across from Taiwan. Friends wondered aloud if we were wise to entrust our lives to a provincial airline. But Xiamen Airlines ticked a […]
Thought for the day
Posted on December 29, 2024 Leave a Comment
I heard this utterance From a rarefied height of eloquence A true thing badly expressed is a lie. Instantly I liked it Instantly I wanted to improve the way I expressed things I believe to be true And then reflex gave way to reflection The utterance smacked of elitism A true thing will always be […]
Confronting violence
Posted on June 7, 2024 Leave a Comment
I walked along a footpath on the side of a suburban road in the heart of Colombo. I glanced at my watch and looked up at the sky, splashed with vivid red, orange and yellow, the colours of sunset. At six-thirty, night had begun to elbow out dusk. It wouldn’t take long to complete the […]
Thyroid wars
Posted on April 28, 2024 Leave a Comment
Are our bodies a microcosm of nature? Let’s see. Evolution, that is natural selection, is happening in every handful of soil you might happen to pick up. Is it happening in our bodies too? Our bodies are full of living creatures, mostly good bacteria beavering away in our guts and other places. Some refer collectively […]
Baring my soul
Posted on April 20, 2024 Leave a Comment
I harbour a self-perception that I have no dark, subterranean forces simmering within me. You know the sort of forces, buried deep most of the time, but, triggered by a provocation, manifesting in a sudden, hot, volcanic eruption or a cold act of revenge. I once mentioned at work that my darkest forces were no […]
A Voice
Posted on November 7, 2022 Leave a Comment
My thoughts flowing from Noel Pearson’s opening 2022 Boyer lecture. Constitutional recognition of Australia’s first nation peoples is a vital missing component, which as long as it stays missing keeps Australia immature, racist, in denial, and unable to face the truth. Conservative Australia fears recognition because it assumes that what follows recognition is repudiation, and […]
Gerry Roberts 
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