You’ve got a friend

While resting and recovering from Covid (honestly, the virus I had at Christmas seemed worse), I started reflecting on friends and friendship. At this moment in time, my definition of friends are the ones who bring you groceries, chocolate and Panadol, walk your dog and check on your well-being every day (thanks, Sandra, Kaz and Dee). The deal with friendship is the unspoken agreement that one will reciprocate as and when appropriate. Research on this…

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Celebrating Multicultural Australia

Australia is more culturally diverse than ever, according to the first results from the 2021 Census. Almost half our population of 25.76 million people have at least one parent born overseas. Almost a quarter of Australians (24.8%) speak a language other than English at home. Just over a quarter (27.6%) report being born overseas (Ed: and that includes him and me – Scotland and Canada’s loss is our gain, we modestly reckon). In the five…

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After the floods, the clean-up

I had no sooner finished writing about floods in Warwick when it started raining again. I’d written the lead article for our local U3A newsletter last week, recounting the times since 2000 the Condamine River had closed the main bridge into town. The answer (so far) is four – October 2010, January 2011, January 2013 and May 2022, when the river rose above 6.5m. Closing the bridge effectively cleaves the town in two,as alternative routes…

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Purple haze – the jacaranda story

On Remembrance Day (November 11), we met a Year 12 student who had been singing in our community choir but had taken time out to concentrate on her studies. She told us (with some excitement), that school was set to finish the following week. That reminded me of the old Queensland maxim about flowering jacarandas and exam times. The story goes that if the jacarandas are flowering and you are behind on your studies, it…

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