Month: December 2018

It has been a gloriously sunny day, yet a little cool, with the maximum having settled upon twenty-two degrees Celsius. “Country Road” this evening was hosted by the Melburnian Johnny Chester. American actor, Richard Widmark, narrated the documentary, “Tiger, Tiger”, from half past seven. David “Shane”/”Kung Fu” Carradine and Barbara Hershey appear on Channel Ten from half past eight in the film, “Boxcar Bertha”. It was produced five years ago.

“Luskin Star” has been declared to be a certain starter in Saturday’s W.S. Cox Plate. The race is run over two thousand and forty metres at the tight Moonee Valley Racecourse, in Melbourne, and is regarded as Australia’s premier event under the scale of weight for age. “Luskin Star” is yet to finish unplaced in any of his twelve starts. Last year, at the age of two, he won Australia’s Triple Crown, in Sydney, having been victorious in the Golden Slipper Stakes at Rosehill, by a margin of seven lengths, and thence the A.J.C. Sires’ Produce Stakes and Champagne Stakes, which are both contested at Randwick.

“Mum” possesses the appearance of death warmed up or as a grossly obese landlady of mine, who once confided in me that she had been declared clinically dead on five separate occasions, used to say: “…has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin!” Another saying of hers was, “There’s nothing wrong with me that a sharp axe won’t fix!” All jokes aside, it really is quite depressing to witness “Mum” suffer as she is. There is really nothing that one can say to brighten her mood and nothing that we can do to ease her intense discomfort.

This evening, at six o’clock, we viewed the documentary series, “Wild, Wild World Of Animals”, on Channel Two. Entitled ‘Ostrich’, this edition stated that the world’s largest flightless bird has ‘the largest eyes of any land animal’, before going on to add that a baby of the species can grow at a rate of a centimetre per day or ‘a foot per month’. Afterwards, this led me to quip to Tiki, as we were walking, “… after two months it has two feet!”

We skylarked in the bathroom as Tiki continually tried to tread on my toes. At nine o’clock we viewed the corny film of 1973, “Guess Who’s Sleeping In My Bed”. It features Dean Jones and Barbara Eden. Unsurprisingly, I began to doze off towards its conclusion. Having awoken for the last time, I threw sheets on the mattress in the spare bedroom and exclaimed to Tiki, “I’m going to get a good night’s sleep for a change!” This marks the first time that we’ve slept apart since last December when she spent several days in hospital.

Sydney’s Cardinal, Sir Norman Thomas Gilroy, died today at the age of eighty-one.