Friday 25th Janaury

Friday 25^th January

We have just moved offices – yet again.  This time only from the 4^th to the 2^nd floor, and no major furniture upheaval was required.  Moving is always slightly fraught with difficulty and confusion.  I have a nice new desk, a view of Victoria Street, and a second filing cabinet which is dear to my heart (I love filing things out of sight…).  I also have – no phone!  This is quite wonderful; if I have no phone NOBODY CAN RING ME.  They can still send me emails, but…no phone calls, which require to be answered NOW NOW NOW!!!

A lot of our office things are still upstairs, so I am living a confusing sort of work life, very similar to my confusing home life, where my things are divided between Pete’s house, Pete’s Unit #1, 2XS, and Katy and Jeff’s house.  So many possibilities for losing things, putting things in the wrong place, leaving important and valuable things behind.  I am sure all of this is very good for continuing exercise of my brain!  I don’t need to be doing crosswords or sudokus to keep the synapses synapsing…

India

         

I don’t think I have mentioned before how lots of the people we met on the trains, and around the traps generally, in India, couldn’t guess our ages accurately.  They were routinely amazed to discover, for instance, that Pete was sixty.  “No!” they would shout.  “You mean fifty!”  Pete found this perplexing; “This looks like sixty, doesn’t it?  What are they on about?”  But Raj…well at some stage while we were having our cup of tea with John, Raj asked how old Pete was.  “What would you guess, Raj?”  I asked, expecting the routine answer of “fifty.”  “Well, he is about seventy five.  And you,” staring at me appraisingly, “are a bit younger.”  I asked him why he thought this, and he said, “Well Pete has told me that he was here about forty years ago.  He must have been in his thirties, to be able to afford to travel.”  It made me realise, once again, how wealthy we are in Australia.  Pete was in fact in his very early twenties the first time he went to India… Young people in Australian just do this, go off around the world at the age of twenty two, without it being anything extraordinary, whereas Raj at the age of thirty four would get no closer to a plane than taking passengers to the airport.