In a time longer ago, there was plenty of space in the land for the giants to fight in the old-fashioned way.  The damage they exacted on the environment went mostly unnoticed.  With ever less wilderness left, such destruction was no longer tolerated.  The centaurs saw themselves as the custodians of the forests and the plains and they dealt fiercely with any giant who damaged them.  Consequently, the giants were no longer feared in the way they once were.

The giants were no longer the only ones seeking power over the land.  They centaurs were themselves asking others to officially recognise their importance in bringing balance to the land.  And, while the farmers used to have a strong voice, they had lost much of this to all the people who now lived in the ever-larger villages.

Wizards and witches, who used to be laughed at or ignored, now held some power.  They had successfully concocted potions that gave people a sense of being healthy and staying young.  They even had potions that the dwindling number of farmers could use to grow more crops more quickly.

There was one other group that had gained notoriety and power: the trolls.  They had discovered and were now mining shining minerals that the villagers were willing to pay a lot of money for.  They had also found a mineral that glowed by itself and which could keep the houses warm.  They called it glowium.  This meant that fewer trees had to be cut down for firewood.  The centaurs were divided about whether this was a good thing, because their control over the forests had traditionally given them much of their power.

The witches and wizards warned about using this new-fangled glowium.  They said it was unnatural and would make people sick, but these warnings were largely ignored or dismissed as self-interest; the trolls said that the witches and wizards were just being spiteful.

Instead of the giants fighting for power, they now held popularity contests.  They travelled through the land and in each village the inhabitants and the local farmers would gather and listen to what each giant promised he or she would do for the people if chosen as the most popular.  Yes, now that fighting was no longer the way to decide supremacy, female giants also entered the popularity contests.  And so did some of the centaurs, a few wizards and witches and one troll.

The giants were not used to being chosen on the basis of popularity, so they promised to do things that they imagined the people would want.  Therefore, each time one of them offered something, the other would offer more of it, or something better or shinier.  One of them even promised to ask the tooth fairy to double the amount paid for children’s teeth.  The other giant then promised to pay for the witches and wizards to make available some of their common potions.

The centaurs also wanted to be in the power game, but they didn’t have the same clout as the giants.  They urged people to consider a power-sharing arrangement, such that both giants would be voted as equally popular and that one of the centaurs would share all decision making.  The centaurs thought that this would help them protect the forests and the plains, because the chosen centaur could side with whichever giant made the best decision for those things the centaurs considered needed protecting.

The trolls, on learning of the centaurs’ plans, argued that they should also be in on this arrangement.  No-one liked the trolls and told them so.  To keep the trolls happy and out of the way, the giants decided to let them keep most of the proceeds from their digging and mining.  The trolls considered this briefly and accepted it as a fair deal.

Because the two giants were so similar in what they promised people, the people found it hard to choose.  It was finally decided that one of them could be most popular for three years and then the other would be most popular for the next three years and then they would swap again.  One of the centaurs was chosen by his own kind every three years to be with the giants and help them to make good decisions.

The witches and wizards continued to concoct ever more wonderful potions and the trolls kept right on digging and mining and growing rich.  Most of the people were happy, provided no-one demanded too much of them and they were by and large left to get on with their lives.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

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SAD, CFS, IBS, ADD, ADHD, ASD, CVD, BCC^*, DVT^*… some of the acronyms of modern health and its challenges.  Are they increasing in prevalence because of changing diets and changes in agricultural practices or are they a passing fad, a fashion?

Having worked for sixteen years for the acronymous ACNEM^*, dedicated to educating MDs^* and RNs^* on the prevention and treatment of many of these disorders, and now being associated with ACMN^*, I know that there is much that is real about them.

Some are probably the invention of drug companies looking for new markets.  Oppositional Defiant Disorder¹ used to be simply the propensity of teenagers to revolt against authority.  This should be considered a healthy thing, provided there are responsible adults around to keep the boundaries in good repair.  Also, some years ago, research was published that potentially fifty million USA women suffer from Female Sexual Dysfunction².  This was ‘discovered’ by a drug company that had just the drug for it, sitting on the shelf.

There are experiences which have been with us for as long as anyone can remember.  There have probably always been people whose moods changed with the seasons: up in summer and down in the cold, dark winter.  Having officially recognised Seasonal Affective Disorder and given it a name, has opened up the possibility of effective help for these people.

Other acronymic conditions are increasing in prevalence and the cause is probably a mixture of changes in diet, lifestyle and medical practice.  Increases in such conditions as Attention Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder may be connected with increased vaccination of children at an increasingly lower age and are very likely connected with the huge increase in the consumption of wheat; highly refined wheat is used in most processed foods, along with sugar.  These days it is even hard to find cornflour that is made form maize instead of wheat.  Food additives can also play a role.  In some places, notably Western Australia, there is an over-reliance on drugs such as Ritalin, when changes in diet can often be effective and much safer. ³

There is a vigorous debate about the impact of Genetically Modified Organisms on our health, with more and more of what we eat containing them; especially processed foods, which often contain genetically modified rapeseed oil (canola), cottonseed oil, maize flour or corn syrup.  Like mass vaccination, there has been little good research done to show it is safe.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are other maladies which have a strong connection with the things we eat and the quantities in which we eat them.  There are indications that they may also arise from the overuse of antibiotics and the continuing failure of the majority of doctors to recognise the curative role of injected vitamins in megadoses.

I am not critical about the people who end up in a hospital ER^*; this is an area in which modern medicine excels.  However, many patients in ICUs^* may not have ended up there if they had had access to, and encouragement to use, NEM^*.  Many degenerative diseases, such as cancer, Cardio-Vascular Disease, diabetes, dementia and Rheumatoid Arthritis can be avoided by most people by paying attention to living a healthy lifestyle, including diet, sleep, exercise, nutritional supplementation when needed and dealing appropriately with stress.

Like in orthodox medicine, with its PPIs^* and NSAIDs^*, the non-orthodox medical field is awash with acronyms for its treatments: IVC^*, EDTA^*, DMSA^*, ALA^*.  All medicines legally available in Australia (including nutritional supplements) are controlled by the TGA^*.  Doctors may belong to the AMA^*, the RACGP^* or the ACRRM^* and keep up to date with their CPD^* by reading the JAMA^* the NEJM^* or the BMJ^*.  They may send you to a NATA^* member for an FBC^* or to the RMH^* for a GTT^* or a CAT^* scan.  Your doctor may carry out an EEG^* or an ECG^*.  You may augment the advice your doctor gives you with information from the WWW^* or rely on reports published by the HWT^* or in the SMH^*.

Anti-ageing ‘medicine’ is another area with spurious remedies and its own acronyms.  In Australia, the foremost body is A5M^*.  Many doctors use HGH^*, DHEA^* and other hormones, as well as a raft of cosmetic procedures, in a bid to keep their ‘patients’ younger-looking.  What we need is vigorous ageing, not anti-ageing.

I should be fine for some time, provided I keep my BMI^* and BP^* within healthy limits and eat plenty of FFV^* and avoid too much food with a high GI^*.  This way I won’t stress my GIT^* and should not have to concern myself with PSA^* levels.

1. see for instance: www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/Oppositional_defiant_disorder

   and:

   http://aacap.org/page.ww?name=Children+with+Oppositional+Defiant+Disorder&section=Facts+for+Families

2. see for instance: www.rnlb.tpius.com/downloads/nrd1636_fs%20(4).pdf
3. see for instance: www.upliftprogram.com/article_adhadd.html
   and: www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/12/1047431094426.html

*

• Basal Cell Carcinoma
• Deep Vein Thrombosis
• Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine
• Medical Doctors
• Registered Nurses
• Australasian College of Medical Nutrition
• Emergency Room
• Intensive Care Units
• Nutritional and Environmental Medicine
• Protein Pump Inhibitors
• Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs
• Intravenous Vitamin C
• EthyleneDiamineTetraacetic Acid
• DiMercaptoSuccinic Acid
• Alpha Lipoic Acid
• Therapeutic Goods Administration
• Australia Medical Association
• Royal Australian College of General Practitioners
• Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine
• Continuing Professional Development
• Journal of the Australian Medical Association
• New England Journal of Medicine
• British Medical Journal
• National Association of Testing Authorities
• Full Blood Count
• Royal Melbourne Hospital
• Glucose Tolerance Test
• Computed Axial Tomography
• Electro EncephaloGram
• Electro CardioGram
• World Wide Web
• Herald and Weekly Times
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Body Mass Index
• Blood Pressure
• Fresh Fruit and Vegetables
• Glycaemic Index
• Gastro-Intestinal Tract
• Prostate-Specific Antigens
• Austral-Asian Association of Anti-Aging Medicine
• Human Growth Hormone
• DeHydroEpiAndrosterone

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

Living in a community is a complex undertaking.  It involves a balancing of private and public concerns.  There are some issues that are of concern to the community as a whole and some that are purely private.

As a general proposition, parents should be left to get on with the care and upbringing of their children.  If they experience difficulties with this, then there is a place for the community to offer support.  This was the norm when most people lived in smaller, rural communities than is the case now, when the majority of us in Australia live in a small number of huge and large cities.  In the past, if there was illness or injury in a family or a breadwinner was out of work, the neighbours and others would step in and help out in all manner of ways.  This might include children staying with relatives or friends for a while, until things at home were sorted out.

In such small communities, there was the possible downside of many people knowing much of your personal business; which was also part of the upside, because people were aware what was going on.

Much of the caring about and intervention in private affairs has now been institutionalised.  In theory, this should ensure that everyone who needs help receives it and that such help is of the highest standard.  Unfortunately, this is not the realty.  Many people receive no help and, among those who do, the help is often inadequate or ineffectual.  In the worst cases, the intervention is both unwanted and unnecessary.  There is too much heavy-handedness perpetrated by government agencies that have the responsibility and power to intervene.

As a society, we have a responsibility to look after our most vulnerable members.  This includes children.  However, this looking after should not amount to cosseting children to protect them from all the vicissitudes life has to offer.  Dealing with these vicissitudes offers important lessons to children.  Protecting them from all of them may be the worst thing we can do.  Learning to deal with adversity is an essential lesson for later life.  Striking a balance between exposure to such lessons and protection from really bad things is not easy.  The aim is to steer children through life in order that they survive, healthy, intact and relatively wise, into adulthood.

I have known people who appeared to have had ideal childhoods – loving, supportive parents, enough money, good schools – who as adults had problems such as alcoholism, depression and/or a tendency to violence.  Others, who had grown up in abject poverty, even with uncaring or violent parents, grew up to be well-adjusted adults who were able to form stable relationships and be good parents themselves.  There is so much that is not understood about what makes people who (and how) they are.

When it comes to children, it is very difficult to make rules about when they are mature enough to make choices about their lives.  They certainly do not have the knowledge, experience and life skills of adults but, when it comes to life-threatening illnesses, children often demonstrate great clarity and wisdom about what they want.  They are capable of understanding the implications of treatment options, if these are explained to them honestly and clearly.  The worst thing anyone can do to a child, teen or adult with a life-threatening illness, is to be patronising and withhold information.

Questions of whether to have treatment or not and whether to live or die are very personal and should not be answered by doctors or other professionals – in most instances their whole training has been to keep people alive at any cost.  For children too young to understand or to make such choices, the appropriate people to do that for them are parents.

It is my experience that we do not make effective decisions purely on the basis of what we know – the final choice of one side or the other of the fence is made on the basis of intuition and feeling.  This is especially the case the more the choices may be life-changing.  The more that hangs on the choice, the less the facts are ultimately taken into account.  It is this, more than anything else, that makes it wrong for professionals to make such choices for others.  The professionals themselves make choices on the basis of intuition and feeling, together with years of gathering data, information, statistics and training, which can skew their ability to choose wisely.   They are not the ones who have to live with choices they make for others.  They are not the ones who have to make ongoing adjustments as the consequences of those choices unfold.

Every human being on this earth lives his or her life based on a view of the world and of the cosmos.  For the majority, such views are based on a shared view of one flavour or another, with some holding views that are non-conforming or even unique.  We may have our own opinions about any of those views being right or wrong.  However the individual makes his or her choices in life, they are to be respected without judgement by others and, except in the most extreme cases, such choices should not be made for them.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

I lie on the damp earth under a multi-hued canopy.  Sunlight plays around and over me, as do the many insects.  My clothing, derived form earth-sucking plants, again soaks moisture from the ground, but I can draw no physical nourishment from this.

Like other animals, humans seem relatively inefficient in gathering what they need to survive, but they have the advantage over plants in being able to go to where the nourishment is. If the soil in which a plant finds itself runs out of water or an essential mineral, the plant generally cannot move to find replacements.

While animals will range to find food and water, humans often venture abroad to fill (arguably) less essential needs – adventure, power, spiritual fulfilment… Yet there are people who seem content to live their entire lives within cooee of the place they were born.  I have met people who never ventured more than ten kilometres from the bed where they were conceived.

Of course, we can now do our travelling in a virtual world.  We can use the Internet to simulate flying over almost any part of the world and, in many places, alight and explore at street level.  You can totally avoid the discomfort and expense of physical adventuring.  Also through the Internet, you can read foreign newspapers, browse in foreign libraries and visit museums and art galleries, watch sports events and even images from people’s gardens.

The opportunities for virtual experiences are burgeoning.  We can now not only ‘get a life’, we can get a Second Life.  For those not in the know, this latter phenomenon is an on-line facsimile of existence on Earth and in space, for which many people will pay with earth-bound money and through which some have become millionaires.  Thousands of people spend the majority of their ‘leisure’ time in this non-place: partying, adventuring, loving, ‘living’.

Is it necessary for us to experience everything in the ‘real’ or physical world for our experience to count towards a fulfilled life?  Our current knowledge of how the brain works would suggest that it is not necessary to taste, smell, touch, see or hear physically – the brain cannot distinguish between what we experience and what we think we experience; so the scientists tell us.

I suspect that it may not be quite that cut and dried.  I feel that there is a qualitative difference between on-earth and on-line experiences.  My brain tells me that to pretend to trek through the wilderness mediated by a computer screen would not be the same as doing it rough in a ‘real’ jungle.

Mind you, I have been totally lost in places I have never been to with people I have never met while reading an excellent novel.  I felt I could smell the dank forest, hear the rustling in the undergrowth as the marauding beast came ever closer to the would-be victim.  My heart would beat faster as the hero galloped towards the scene to affect a rescue.  I’ve cried while reading a heart-wrenching passage in which someone’s loss was rendered in excruciating detail.

As a writer, I attempt to take the reader into a virtual reality and make it as ‘real’ as I can.  For writing to achieve this, it has to make the reader be willing to exclude outside stimuli that would get in the way.  This is much easier to achieve with film, where vision and hearing can be immersed in a dark space where the real-world is excluded – except when the person behind you keeps unwrapping lollies.

Something that intrigues me is the ability to not only take someone into a make-believe world, but to populate that world with computer-generated, animated toys or purely make-believe characters and have adults care about an unloved doll to the extent that they will cry over its plight.

We tend to impart meaning on almost everything we think we experience.  How does this help us obtain the physical and emotional nourishment we need for survival?  For instance, when it comes to choosing a mate, our propensity for responding to what we imagine, makes this area of human experience fraught with mistakes, wrong beginnings, lost opportunities, difficult endings and children who imagine they are the cause.  This then colours their imagination, to repeat the response to imagined reality.  Many mystics talk of needing to wake up from the dream we call life into the real world.  Are we dreaming that we are awake?  Do we create the reality around us, or does it create us?

No wonder most of us have such a skewed and wrong-headed attitude to almost everything around us.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

I love the changing seasons we experience in Melbourne.  I like change.  Change brings challenges and keeps me alert and alive.

The extremes in temperature are temporary, unlike in London (where I lived for some years), where there can be ice on the footpaths and roads for weeks on end.  Here we have the odd, short run of near-freezing nights and, in summer, short forays into the forties (Celsius).  You can anticipate a change within a few days.

What is a challenge, is the response to hot and cold weather by shop owners and business managers.  When it is 12°C outside and I am all rugged up, it makes no sense to have to strip down to shirtsleeves because the shop I have entered had the thermostat set to 22° or even 25°.  For people coming in and out, 18° would be less of a shock and jumpers or jackets would keep the staff inside comfortable.  And in summer, shops can be 15° cooler than it is outside, making me wish I’d been carrying an otherwise unnecessary jumper.

At home, kids may need to be educated to wear jumpers inside, instead of cranking their heaters up to sauna level while they sit around in t-shirts.  A greater willingness to endure the ups and downs of the weather would be healthier and would go some way to reducing our impact on the environment.  This could also lead to a greater ability to weather the ups and downs of life.  We could all be more resilient.

We seem less prepared to put up with the vicissitudes of life than I remember we were thirty or forty years ago.  Or is that just my failing memory?  Maybe it is a consequence of fewer people living in the country (relative to the number of city dwellers).  The city offers more resources for smoothing things out – temperature, inclemency, human waste – and supplies reliable electricity, TV, mobile phone coverage, Internet, etc.

Most of our cars offer ‘climate control’, which may explain why so many people seem to live in the fairytale where humans can control nature.  It is only a further short step to feeling something is wrong when we cannot control the rest of life.

A program now operating in over a hundred primary schools (the brainchild of cook and writer Stephanie Alexander) is a wonderful way of bringing children to a more accurate view of the world.  It teaches where food comes from as students grow their own vegetables and use them to prepare meals in class.  These children are no longer under the illusion that food comes from the supermarket.  It is a step towards re-appreciating our inseparability from our environment and better government support for the program would help improve overall health.

It brings me back to those societies in which inseparability from the environment is probably not even discussed, because everything about their lives honours the fact that they are part of everything in their world.  Thus, they naturally live the rhythms of everything around them.  Although we pay lip service to this in, for instance, our burial ritual when we intone, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, most of us live our lives believing the words in the first book of the Judeo-Christian Old Testament, which appear to encourage humankind to exercise dominion over the entire biosphere, as well as over the land and sea.  That the same ancient document appears to also exhort humans to look after it all, seems to be too often forgotten.

Those people fortunate, or wise, enough to not consider themselves as superior to the rest of creation, find themselves expending less energy in an attempt to change what really is not theirs to change.  There are things that need to be let be.  Maybe the ‘Serenity Prayer’ should be extended to include the line, “… and grant me the humility to leave alone those things that are not mine to mess with.”

Much of the messing around we do comes form thinking that ­now­ we know how it all works; now we understand.  No we don’t!  What this hubris makes clear, is that we consistently forget that, historically, there has always been an attitude of finally understanding how the universe works.  We laugh at the naïvety of past generations and don’t realise that in a hundred years (or less) our own naïvety will be laughed at.

If we want there to be a good chance of there being anyone around in a hundred years to laugh at our naïvety or stupidity, it is incumbent on us to teach our children, our politicians and our business leaders what it would be wise not to mess with.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

Ken Crispin’s The Pursuit of Justice (reviewed) is stimulating and thought-provoking.  It reminded me of what I enjoyed about being in legal practice in the 1970s and why I have continued to care about how we live our lives and why we need to avoid going to sleep as successive governments pass ever more laws in response to the outrage expressed through the media about the ever-increasing lawlessness in our communities.  That lawlessness may not in fact be increasing seems irrelevant to the media and to most politicians.

More recently, I read Sarah’s Last Wish by Eve Hillary (reviewed).  Its subtitle (‘A chilling glimpse into forced medicine’) is a warning to the reader.  As CEO of the Australasian College of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine (ACNEM) I was peripherally involved in the closing events of this narrative in 2004.  Knowing much of what happened around the last 1½ years of Sarah’s life, I knew I was in for bouts of anger and feelings of frustration and grief.  The book is wonderfully written and is a tribute to Sarah’s courage and that of her family, in the face of overwhelming odds – standing up to the full might of a bureaucracy gone mad.  I also feel good about any contribution I may have made to the postgraduate training of doctors who are able to offer people more than the restricted orthodox ‘treatments’ available for many degenerative and life-threatening diseases.

It angers and saddens me that those things we take for granted – our privacy, our freedom to choose our medical care or to refuse medical care, and the honesty and openness of healthcare professionals – have still to be fought for, because governments and bureaucracies continue to want to curtail these and from time to time doctors, social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists choose to gang up on a hapless citizen.  Unfortunately, we cannot always rely on the Courts to protect us or to correct the wrongs which have been perpetrated.  As a lawyer, it also angers me that there are other lawyers who see their clients’ interests as being secondary to their own interests or who are too timid to stand up for their clients.

Set against this, it was a pleasure to recently watch a documentary about a government doing something right in a difficult area.  The Queensland government has been able to cut through a spaghetti bowl full of red tape in dealing with the problems of the largely Aboriginal community of Lockhart River in the far north of Cape York [map].  To see the positive results of an intelligent and compassionate approach to issues which are often labelled as intractable, helps to dispel my negative feelings after reading the books mentioned above.  Not that I regret reading the books.

There is some positive news to be found of the not-sickly-sweet variety, but one has to make an effort to find it or be lucky to stumble upon it (as I was with the Lockhart River story).  By the way, it is well worth watching it on-line at www.abc.net.au/messagestick.

While there is an overwhelming number of things that are wrong about our society and all of them need to be addressed and all of us should do something to help address them, no one person can take on all of them.  Thus, each of us must choose one or a small number of issues to work on and do so in such a manner as is appropriate for us.  Each of us has different strengths, different expertise and experience, our own level of tolerance, energy and courage.

Right now, I feel that my most powerful tool is my ability to write clearly and my most useful option is to put that writing to work to promote necessary change.  When I was in my twenties, my most useful and powerful tools were related to my legal training and I used these effectively for some years.  And I know what it is like to be threatened, including receiving serious death threats from a multinational company because I was helping people to resist its demands for unconscionably high (and illegal) rates of interest.

I have met other people who have taken action to right wrongs or alleviate suffering, often at great personal cost.  Yet they would do it again, despite the costs, because the reward is the feeling that comes with doing it – the sense of achievement in doing something that benefits many others.

What is it that you see needs changing and what are you going to do to make change possible?

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

When I installed the first dog flap, I had to teach them how to use it, coaxing them through with the promise of a treat on the other side.  They soon got the hang of it, but if one followed on the heels of the other, he got whacked on the nose by the return swing of the flap.  A few such mishaps and they both learned to wait for the first swing and dive through on the second.

The cat and her personal flap in the high bathroom window were a different matter.  I have yet to be able to teach a cat anything, with or without a treat.  With her it was a case of pushing her through a number of times until she got the idea.  When we’re home, she still prefers to have the front door opened for her, rather than make the effort of jumping up on the window sill and pushing through the flap.

The younger, larger dog (Willow) has a trait I’ve not seen in a dog before.  He invents games for himself and then tests himself.  For instance, he will drop a ball in front of the couch and watch it roll underneath.  At the last moment he will lunge and retrieve it.  He experiments with dropping it at different distances from the couch and at different places along the couch and watches how it rolls and tries to lunge and retrieve it at the last moment.  Occasionally he leaves it too late and asks me to move the couch.  He’s getting better at it.

The other, older dog (Murphy) finds this behaviour frustrating, because he would like to have the ball to bring it to me and have me throw it into the next room for him to chase and bring back to me, if Willow doesn’t get to it first, to continue his drop-it-in-front-of-the-couch game.

Willow doesn’t understand giving me the ball so I can throw it again.  Actually, he does understand but doesn’t want to relinquish possession.  He’ll stand in front of me, chewing the ball and occasionally he will drop it in front of me and catch it before it hits the floor.  He has, however, found a solution.  He’ll drop the ball near the couch and step back to allow Murphy to get it and bring it to me to throw.  It works.

Willow wants to have everything that’s going.  If there are two balls available, he’ll put them both in his mouth and try to play his usual game.  If I give the dogs one ball each, he’ll want the one that Murphy has.  So like children and their toys – some are happy with whatever they have while others want what someone else has.  So like adults and their toys – cars, houses, boats …

While the dogs are tearing up and down the house, the cat sits on her favourite chair, watching them.  She’s black with huge round eyes.  Sometimes all you see are the two eyes, like those enormous eyes on an owl.  The only thing that gets her running around the house is the pursuit of a mouse.  This time of the year these rodents come inside for warmth and the food scraps under the teenager’s bed.  The cat (Paris) tends to catch them and bring them to us alive, if terrified, to be held by the tail and released into the jungle of the creek reserve next to the house.

There are other unwanted wild visitors, including at least one possum in the roof.  This cheeky squatter occasionally pokes its nose down between the stationary blades of the ceiling fan in the kitchen to see what’s cooking.  Yes, we need to get up soon in the middle of the night to seal the hole it uses and trust it will decide to use one of the possum boxes we have provided, rather than have it pull another tile off the roof.

Some spiders we let stay for a while in the odd corner, where they help to keep down the mosquito population.  The larger, hairy, hunting types we catch with a glass and a sheet of paper and release them where the mice are freed.  Flies are dealt with by employment of a swat (or, as one four-year-old called it, a splat), if they are not eaten first by Willow.  Moths tend to be dispatched by Paris.  Murphy ignores the indoor wildlife, but goes crazy outside if he sees ducks on the ground or catches a whiff of a rabbit or fox.

It’s a constant job, keeping some distinction between the inside and outside of the house.  Sometimes it seems less crowded and more peaceful on the outside.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

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Breastfeeding welcomed here.  A simple, small sticker on the door of a café, letting mothers know that they are not going to be harassed if they show a bit of flesh.  Across the road, at another café, four young women are sitting around a table in intimate discussion.  They are leaning forward, their breasts almost falling out of their tops.  And, by the way, breastfeeding is not welcome in this café.

This is all very confusing for a clear-thinker.  Why is it even necessary for a café to announce that mothers may feed their infants here, naturally?  They should naturally be able to feed them anywhere.

As a society, we tolerate the public display of naked and almost naked breasts on television and on magazine covers, at gala events and in newspapers.  What is it about breastfeeding that has people protest?  Could it be that a breastfeeding mother is presumably in a committed relationship and, therefore, her breasts are not available to the men who might get a glimpse of them?  Could it be that we have been convinced that bottle-feeding is better, cleaner and more convenient and that, therefore, breastfeeding is weird?  Are we in the thrall of businesses that make a buck out of replacing breast milk with a formula?

We could be excused for coming to such a conclusion, as we see business pitted against common sense in medicine, power generation, farming and food production, and many other aspects of our lives.  We seem to be circumscribed by what is best for businesses.  If money can be made by controlling an activity or an aspect of life, then it more easily receives support from legislators and regulators.

In Australia, many medicines are made available at heavily discounted prices through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), a part of Medicare Australia.  This costs the taxpayer billions of dollars each year.  Most medicines available through the PBS are patented drugs.  Doctors can allow ‘generic’ drugs to be dispensed – drugs on which patents have lapsed – but relatively few do.  Very few preparations of ‘natural’ substances receive PBS subsidy, even though doing so could save taxpayers millions of dollars.  However, they would make less money for the pharmaceutical industry.  On the other hand, they are often more effective and they would kill fewer people – people who die from known and statistically expected side effects when taking prescribed pharmaceutical medicines as directed.

There are so many ways that we harm ourselves by believing that we can do better than the nature of which we are a part; and, like many people with gambling problems, we convince ourselves that a solution or breakthrough (the jackpot) is just around the corner, if we could try that little bit harder and persevere just a little longer.  We have been doing this for over forty years in the ‘war’ against cancer and we are no closer to a ‘victory’, yet ever more people are employed in this endeavour.  Cancer has become an industry within the general disease industry and it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

We display the same infantile faith in our future ability to sequester CO₂ in the ground or to develop ‘clean coal’, in order that we can continue doing what we know to be wrong.  It reminds me of me as a child, trusting that my misdemeanours wouldn’t be discovered, yet at some level hoping that they would, because that would have been a relief.  Oh for that relief.

By law, corporations have an obligation to maximise the return to shareholders, but this needs to be (and is) tempered with regulation of behaviour.  Unfortunately, the regulating bodies seem to be progressively losing their teeth or less willing to bite, or both.  This is partly due to the increasing tendency to appoint to these regulating bodies ‘experts’ who were once (often very recently) employed by the companies which are subject to the regulation.  When all this is married with ex-politicians (including ex-ministers) and ex-public servants moving into ‘advisory’ positions in industry, we have a situation where regulation and ethical behaviour can easily disappear.

I know, from personal experience, that separating knowledge gained in one job from the needs of a new job can be extremely difficult, which is why it is common to prohibit senior ex-employees from moving to a competitor in less than a certain number of years.  It should also be illegal for someone who has held a senior position in government to move into an advisory role in business before some years have elapsed.  It is impossible to forget things one has been privy to and only a period of ‘cooling down’ will make enough of that privileged knowledge irrelevant.

As for breastfeeding … I recently overheard two suited men complaining about a crying baby in a café, before they both commenced separate, loud conversations on their mobile phones.  The baby was soon quieted by the offer of a breast, but seemed a little disturbed by the loud, almost argumentative voices of the two businessmen.  They, in turn, complained to a waitress that the breastfeeding mother was distracting them from their meeting.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

Happy Birthday to this blog.  One year ago tomorrow I wrote the first ‘From the Kitchen’ and this blog was born.

It started with a crazy idea of becoming a writer in residence at a Mount Eliza café, to write, drink coffee, talk to people about writing, eat cakes and talk to people about writing.  The café changed owners on 1^st July last year, but I’m still there.  I’m in the process of collecting the first 52 columns into a book and launching it at the café in July.  I’ll let you know when and where and send you an invitation.

It has been an interesting journey for me.  I enjoy the freedom to write what grabs me in the moment while, at the same time, making it interesting for others.  I’ve indulged in deep personal reflection; shallower reflection; satire; social commentary and criticism; commentary on books, film and theatre; fantasy; and descriptions of the natural and invented worlds.  I’ve enjoyed the comments – both those fit for publishing on the blog and those that weren’t, and I’ve received much encouragement from readers.

I have also enjoyed reviewing books and it is my hope that the reviews, interspersed with the weekly Kitchen offerings, will have prompted some of you to take a book to bed, or somewhere else comfortable.  There will be two new reviews posted before the end of May.

This week I am putting the finishing touches to a book for young teens, in time to submit it to a publisher early next month.  I am still writing short stories and poetry and submitting works to competitions (with continuing success).  My one exploration of horror, in the form of a short story ‘The Candle Suicides’, was recently published in the anthology Shades of Sentience.  Two other stories (‘Diversity’ and ‘Dust Storm’) are to be published in an anthology by Smink Works Books.  ‘Dead’ was published in Award Winning Australian Writing 2008.

Last year I completed a short story (‘Escape from Austranita’) which is a ‘pilot’ for my next big project: a novel set in a near-future Australia which has fallen apart and is at war with itself.  I see warning signs of this actually happening and I hope to encourage people to take note and take appropriate positive action.  Social changes tend to creep up on us slowly, as do advances in political madness and the erosion of rights and freedoms.  I am heartened that others are also sounding such warnings, such as retired judge Ken Crispin in his book The Quest for Justice, which is about to be released.

Writing plays also still turns me on and I’ve had two ten-minute plays ‘performed’ (by Crash Test Drama in Fitzroy) in moved readings – professional actors look at the script for half an hour and then perform with script in hand and with minimal set and props.  It was a wonderful way of seeing what I’ve written put to the test.

I feel that this is my year for forging into more public recognition.  However, like most luck in life, it is wise to give it a helping hand.  The July launch of A Year From the Kitchen is part of that helping hand – lots of promotion and invitations to get out there into publicity land.  So watch for me on Sunrise, listen to me on ABC Radio and read about me in the newspapers and on-line forums.  After decades of writing and honing my skills, I will eventually be an overnight success.  Don’t misunderstand me – I write to write, but getting published and paid for it will allow me to do just that (writing) if it’s what I choose.  The time is also right for me to put more energy into getting my photos out there – framed prints in restaurants, prints for sale through a dedicated website and elsewhere.  I feel I’m on a roll.

So how will my world look on 27^th May 2011?  I’ll have a novel published as well as a collection of short stories, a syndicated column in newspapers and a regular gig in a journal.  I’ll have a full-length play in rehearsal and a radio play broadcast.  If success is achieving what I set out to achieve, then I already feel successful.  After all, success is not something static, but an ongoing adventure.  Each time I reach one of my goals, I am already looking towards the horizon to pinpoint my next one.  However, none of this would be as much fun without the companionship and support of my wife and family.  I am surrounded by riches.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

The earth is cloud-hidden and the sky a range of blues.  Yes, I’m flying again.  It seems to be a new habit, writing while travelling.

Certainly, viewing the earth from the perspective of 35 000 feet makes a difference when thinking about things.  This may be why people sit on top of mountains to meditate.  Of course, one can meditate anywhere, but being able to sit with eyes open and see a large part of the earth’s surface spread out below automatically gives a different quality to the meditation.
Hurtling through the air in a closed container is also not the same as floating and gliding suspended from a paraglider.  Paragliding, or hang-gliding, forces a more intimate relationship with the atmosphere – the air currents and thermals.  There is immediacy, as there is with sailing.

When I do something that requires awareness outside the norm, my focus is not that of the day-to-day.  When sailing, I sense the wind and the currents, my brain processing nuances in speed and direction, my hands feeling and responding to the changing tugs on the mainsail and tiller.  When I’m merely out and about, I don’t have the same keen awareness of the wind, because it isn’t necessary.

When I listen to music, I pick up so many changes in the layered sounds, indentifying instruments, recognising harmonies and cadences.  I can do the same when in the bush, if I decide to really listen to the birdsong and the sounds of the wind in the vegetation.

As I’ve written before, when I have a camera in my hands, I see things very differently and see things I otherwise may not.  I assume that people who are single and wanting to be in a relationship will look at other people around them and notice things about them that I would not, as I’m not looking.

I am a storyteller.  I thus weave things I hear and see into possible scenarios.  When reading others’ work, I’m aware of their use of language, the way they create characters and how what they’ve included in and omitted from their story makes it a pleasure to read, or not.  These are the winds and ocean currents of the story.

Outside all these, how much am I aware of the winds and currents of life?  If I trained myself better to be aware of them more keenly, I would probably sail through life more easily and less often hit rocks or get stuck in shallows, or get tossed around in storms I did not see coming.

All this musing as I watch the changing shapes of clouds and the changing light playing on them.  I can see the roads below and tiny moving dust clouds caused by cars.  The drivers cannot see what conditions are like at their destination, but I can.  There are very local rain showers in places, moving areas of intense sunlight, larger areas of dust where the wind is scouring the earth and small and large patches of things burning.  I can see all this but can do nothing to influence it and I’m not affected by it.  If I were potentially at the mercy of all this, I would not have the vast overview – it’s one or the other.  The one thing this lofty overview gives me, is an appreciation of how local and ephemeral it all is.  I would be wise to remember that when I’m grounded again.

There are also the internal currents, tides, zephyrs and maelstroms to be aware of and respond to.  Failure to do so may cause winds to escape.  I learned in England in the 1970s that my body can tell me whether something I am about to ingest will have positive or negative effects on me or be neutral.  Much of this I learned through trial and error and through having to endure the consequences of ignoring the messages.  The most obvious thing I learned with this training was that my body expresses the negative signs of having that extra cake or that third cup of coffee, before I actually indulge.  Thus I am spared the clear consequences.

The plane commences its glide path down to Melbourne airport.  Its autopilot receives a stream of information which it uses to make continual corrections.  It has to respond to wind speed and direction, air temperature changes (affecting lift), turbulence, etc.  When I’m back on terra firma I will again have to do my own navigating through the vicissitudes of life, responding to the currents and winds.  That is, after all, what makes life exciting.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

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See more of Daan Spijer’s writing and his photos at Seventh House Communications