Wednesday 24^th October

From a cartoon someone sent me this week – very apt…

The computer says I need to upgrade my brain to be compatible with its new software

So very true!!

I have recently found, while mucking around on my home computer, a wholly unexpected new set of files on my gmail page.  All manner of notes and stories – bits about India, Vietnam, Ten Days on The Island.  How did they get there, I hear you cry?  I have no idea… I must have very cleverly saved them into these cyberspace files and then, just as cleverly, erased all knowledge of this from my memory.  These files must have resurfaced for a reason…so many travel stories waiting to be blogged!!  I will spend a bit of time sorting them out and including them from time to time.

The following is a description of our flight from Sydney to Mumbai in 2006.

Pete is very nice to be on a plane with because he is so cheery about it.  “Oh look!” He cries!  “All these movies to watch!  All these CDs to listen to!  Food! More food!  Beer!  Bloody Marys!  More food!  Wheehee!”  I am not quite so cheery, and I tend to wriggle around annoyingly and get up and down and then up and down again.  And again.  But I did happily watch movies with him.  The first one we watched was Thank You for Smoking, which is brilliant and which I can thoroughly recommend; a very clever, funny satire.  After this we watched – Pete’s choice not mine – Brokeback Mountain.  I knew he wouldn’t like it and I was right… Bloody gloomy, that’s what it is, although the scenery was beautiful.  The QANTAS censors had been at it quite extensively, so there were long periods of greyed-out screen with alarming noises; not sure if we would have preferred to see what they were doing or not…  On one of our last days in Mumbai, on Elephanta Island, I spoke to a nice Australian couple, from Sydney.  They had just flown in, and had also watched this movie.  I mentioned out the long greyed-out scenes and she said, “Oh is that what happened!  I thought the sun was shining on my screen and I kept trying to shade it so I could see what was happening!”  Her husband was very amused.  He had very sensibly not tried to watch it at all.