I am just thinking aloud really, but I have always wondered????

Being a well adjusted nearly 62 year old woman I have spent the majority of my life without a partner.  I am not sure why this is, - maybe I am a difficult person to get on with - maybe I am too fussy - maybe I have never met the right person.  

People seem to like me well enough, I have always had a great interest in people and people seem to warm to me easily and that is because I have always been a better listener than a talker.  I am empathetic and considerate to others.  So I don't think that that I am difficult to get on with.   My man radar is a little unusual because I have never been interested in the ultra good looking one - I just know what has attracted me and it has was that indifinable 'something.'  In my relationships I thought I had met the 'right one.'  Unfortunately that was not to be the case.  However in saying that, they were extremely important parts of my life, and at the time I came into their lives for a reason and I theirs. 

I know I am a little short tempered and dismissive at times, usually when I am preoccupied with something - but aren't we all like that??  Maybe I am just a big pain in the bum - I would love to know.   What an interesting exercise that would be.

Actually I quite enjoy being on my own and  maybe therein lies the problem.  I enjoy the freedom to do as I please without having to worry about someone else.  If I want to I eat I do, if I want to have a rest I do, if I want to go and cook tea for my children I do, if I just want to sit and read a book I can, if I want to go on a holiday I can.  Every day I am busy and if I do have a day on my own I treasure every minute.

But there is a part of me that feels alone.  Why?

 

Well, I've been conspicuous by my absence again, and I'm even about to flee the country for seven weeks.  So before I go a few more curtiosities, and because I am off to Britain, a theme occurred to me, a theme inspired by tales brought back by those slightly older than me of what they encountered in post-war Britain.

The Poms might snigger about convicts, but we could always laugh at their baths, which according to legend, were used to store the coal in.  For all that, they must have cared about them, if Jane Austen is to be relied on.

Oh!  who can ever be tired of Bath?
  — Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Northanger Abbey, chapter 10.

Watching television, you'd think we lived at bay, in total jeopardy, surrounded on all sides by human-seeking germs, shielded against infection and death only by a chemical technology that enables us to keep killing them off.
  — Lewis Thomas, 'Germs' in The Lives of a Cell, Penguin, 1973.

Gather ye soap-suds while ye may
The smuts are still a-flying:
And this same hair so bright today
Tomorrow may need dyeing.

The glorious Lamp of Oil, the wick,
The higher he's a-getting
The sooner will the smuts fly quick
And on your hair be setting.

That hair is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer
But being spoilt, the worse, and worst
Hairs will succeed the former.

 Then be not mean, good soap go buy;
And with it be not chary:
For having lost its bloom, you'll sigh,
'My hair for ever tarry.'
  — Archibald Stoddart-Walker

On a framework of three sticks, meeting at the top, they stretch pieces of woollen cloth, taking care to get the joins as perfect as they can, and inside this little tent they put a dish with red-hot stones in it.  Then they take some hemp seed, creep into the tent, and throw the seed onto the hot stones.  At once it begins to smoke, giving off a vapour unsurpassed by any vapour-bath one could find in Greece.  The Scythians enjoy it so much that they howl with pleasure.  This is their substitute for an ordinary bath in water, which they never use.
  — Herodotus (c. 480 BC - 425 BC), The Histories, Book 4, Penguin Classics, p. 295.

Within a few years isotopes will turn up in many more expected or unexpected places — perhaps the slogan 'Gamma Washes Whiter', will become quite familiar to us when our ultra-sonic washing machines are equipped with some gamma source to sterilize shirts and socks and napkins.
  — Egon Larsen, Atomic Energy, Pan Books, 1958, p. 136-7.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Personally, if anybody makes any comments about convicts to me in England, I shall simply say what my grandmother used to say.

"England must be a terrible place: it's where the convicts came from."

I'm off in my own little world again, working on a book that I may or may not do, but I'm having fun scoping it.

Today, I have been trying to track down the earliest use of "billy", in the sense of what we brew tea in.  I found three independent uses of the word in September to November 1858, and in one of those from NSW, the writer feels that he needs to explain the meaning, while the other two are in Victoria and go unexplained.  I think that may indicate where the word was first used.

You can see all three articles by going to the Trove URL I gave in my last piece, and looking for pieces tagged "billy", but you won't find this one, which I think is a little sad:

"CAUTION.-The public are hereby cautioned not to employ a Chinese Boy, named BILLY BILLIN, aged eleven year, who has absconded from St. Leonard's Family Hotel. North Shore. RICHARD HAWKINS."

SMH 9/3/1858.

One side of me says "I hope Hawkins is roasting in Hell for that," but sadly, he was a creature of his times, and we shouldn't really blame him.

I did some digging, but I can find no later trace of Billy, so probably he changed his name, and hopefully, found a less horrid way of life.

Here's the URL again: http://trove.nla.gov.au/

My father was a very old-fashioned type, a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, a dour Calvinist in thought but not in action, but mostly, he was a very private man.  He died, 44 years ago, thinking he took his secret to the grave.

It seems that a couple of years before he married my mother, he was engaged to somebody else, and while the record was there in the newspapers, who would ever bother to poke around in the SMH for 1941?

The problem is that we have a fairly unusual spelling of our surname, and the National Library of Australia has been putting "historic" newspapers (that means 1803 to 1954 in their terms) online.

I'm a bit of a power user of the service, and I was idly searching on our surname when the engagement notice bobbed up.  It's not a highly interesting item: probably they just didn't hit it off, or she found a Yank or something.  The interesting thing to me is that even though he probably never even told my mother, I now know.

I just idly typed in my surname, which has an odd spelling, and flushed an amazing number of hits out of the papers: the funeral of a grandfather, the death of a great-aunt at two months who was, I think, unknown to anybody, the weddings of uncles and births of cousins--and that engagement.

I have also managed to trace the outline of my great-grandfather's insolvency, though there's more to learn there, and I won't be chasing it in a hurry, because family history isn't high on my list of things to do, but the option is there.

The interesting thing is that the National Library has the newspapers scanned by machine, but then allows registered users to correct the text. The top four contributors have corrected more than a million lines between them, while I'm just approaching the 2000 mark, but most of mine relate to the periods and topics I research for books.

Occasionally I need to really chase something down, and in those cases I add comments that will help other researchers that come after me.  In other words, it's one of those collaborative things that historians will look back on as the real heart of the internet.

Interestingly, it appears that everything I do is available if you know how to look for it.  Unlike my father, I have no illusion that I have that many secrets.  I just have to put the best spin on them that I can.

The link?  http://trove.nla.gov.au/  I recommend a day spent playing with it!

If nothing else, you will get some idea about what your descendants may be able to find out about you.

Oh, and sorry it's been so long between comments--now you know one of the things that was taking my attention.

ALMIGHTY IS THE UNKNOWN  CREATER OF THE COSMOS.

HE ONLY GIVES BUT DOES NOT ASK FOR ANYTHING.

Who created you - Of course your Parents

who created your Parents - Of course their Grand Parents

Who created youe Grand Parents - Of course your their parents.

This series probably ends at mythological Adam & Eve,

who created Adam & Eve- Probably as per the Darwin theory from various stages of Monkey & other small species.

Who created the world with Earth, Water, Heat, Air, Space where the smaller species where the smaller species & large Galaxies & Planets , meteorites could survive.

Probably he is that unknown CREATER, who has been always giving but asking for anything.

Scientists & common people alike talk of their achivements

Scientists/ Engineers say that he has made the computer/ Industrial developments are their creation, Doctors say that they have saved the life of person

but who has given them the Brain which exists in the Body which has been given by the Cosmos created by the ALMIGHTY -
Any Doubts Please write back
VISIT & EXPRESS YOUR VIEWS IN www.vastuengineer.com

I believe that our very concept of beauty, necessarily relative and cultural, has over the centuries patterned itself on them, as on the stars, the mountains, and the sea.  We have proof of this if we consider what happens when we examine the head of a butterfly under the microscope; for the greater part of observers, admiration is replaced by horror or revulsion.

— Primo Levi, 'Butterflies' in Other People's Trades, p. 7

Happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.

— Anna Pavlova (1881-1931), Russian ballerina.

It is said that the famous British biologist, J. B. S. Haldane ... asked by a churchman what his concept of God was, answered: 'He is inordinately fond of beetles'.

— Primo Levi, 'Beetles' in Other People's Trades, page 14

It appears, by the dung that they drop on the turf, that beetles are no inconsiderable part of their food.

— Gilbert White (1720 - 1793), The Natural History of Selborne, (1789), Letter XXVII, about hedgehogs.

March 28.  A neighbour complained to me that her house was over-run with a kind of black-beetle, or as she expressed herself, with a kind of black-bob, which swarmed in her kitchen when they get up in a morning before daybreak.  Soon after this account, I observed an unusual insect in one of my dark chimney-closets; & find since that in the night they swarm also in my kitchen.  On examination I soon ascertained the Species to be the Blatta orientalis of Linnaeus, & the Blatta molendinaria of Mouffet.  The male is winged, the female is not; but shows somewhat like the rudiments of wings, as if in the pupa state.  These insects belonged originally in the warmer parts of America, & were conveyed from thence by shipping to the East Indies; & by means of commerce begin to prevail in the more N. parts of Europe, as Russia, Sweden &c.  How long they have abounded in England I cannot say; but have never observed them in my house 'till lately. [They had probably been there since late in the 17th century]

— Gilbert White (1720 - 1793), Journal, (1790), MIT Press, 1970.

When the servants are gone to bed, the kitchen-hearth swarms with minute crickets not so big as fleas.  The Blattae are almost subdued by the persevering assiduity of Mrs. J. W. who waged war with them for many months, & destroyed thousands: at first she killed some hundreds every night.

— Gilbert White (1720 - 1793), Journal, (1792), MIT Press, 1970.

And you should never own to a mosquito.  I once unfortunately stated to a Queensland gentleman that my coat had been bitten by cockroaches at his brother's house, which I had just left.  'You must have brought them with you then,' was the fraternal defence immediately set up.  I was compelled at once to antedate the cockroaches to my previous resting-place, owned by a friend, not by a brother.  'It is possible,' said the squatter, 'but I think you must have had them with you longer than that.'  I acquiesced in silence, and said no more about my coat till I could get it mended elsewhere.

— Trollope, Anthony, Australia and New Zealand, London: 1873 and Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1967 (edited by Edwards and Joyce), page 67.

In Australia, as everywhere, the mosquitoes sing their irritating 'perpetual melody', an imitation of Wagner.  Grasshoppers are numerous, but less to be feared than in Egypt and Algeria.  The flies are exceptionally obstinate, always wanting to take up residence on your face and hands.  By their bright and pleasing colours the butterflies make any non-land-owner forget what damage their grubs do to agriculture.

— Oscar Comettant, In the Land of Kangaroos and Gold Mines, translated by Judith Armstrong.  Adelaide: Rigby, 1980, originally published as Au Pays des Kangourous et des Mines d'or.  Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1890, page 78.

We had wandered too far from the camp to admit of our returning to it to sleep; we therefore commenced a search for water, and having found some, we tethered our horses near it for the night, and should have been tolerably comfortable, had not the mosquitoes been so extremely troublesome.  They defied the power of smoke, and annoyed me so much, that, hot as it was, I rolled myself in my boat cloak, and perspired in consequence to such a degree, that my clothes were wet through, and I had to stand at the fire in the morning to dry them.  Mr. Hume, who could not bear such confinement, suffered the penalty, and was most unmercifully bitten.

— Charles Sturt, Two expeditions into the interior of Southern Australia during the years 1828, 1829, 1830 and 1831.  2 vols: London: Smith Elder and Co., 1833.

Said Robert Bridges,
When bitten by midges:
'They're only doing their duty
As a testament to my beauty.'

— W. H. Auden (1907 -  ), 'Academic Graffiti', Collected Poems, p. 511.

Early in January, I certainly did find it very hot in Victoria, but the heat was intermittent, lasting only for a few days; and though I am told that the mercury rose occasionally to 90o in the shade, I was not seriously oppressed by it.  And I may add to this that Australian mosquitoes, of which I had heard much and which I feared greatly, were never so venomous to me as mosquitoes have been in other countries, nor are they in force for so large a proportion of the year.  The mosquito of Australia is a poor, impotent and contemptible creature as compared, for instance, with the mosquito of the United States.

— Trollope, Anthony, Australia and New Zealand, London: 1873 and Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1967 (edited by Edwards and Joyce), pages 207-208.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius begin by acknowledging his indebtedness to his grandfather, father, adopted father, various teachers, and the gods . . . He owes it to the gods . . . that when he took to philosophy he did not waste time on history, syllogism or astronomy.

— Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) A History of Western Philosophy, chapter XXVIII, p. 271.

Who were they, what lonely men,
Imposed on the fact of night
The fiction of constellations
And made commensurable
The distances between
Themselves, their loves, and their doubt
Of governments and nations?

— Patric Dickinson (1914-    ), 'Jodrell Bank' in The World I See (London 1960)

May I not be seen to have lived in vain.

— Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601), long-time astronomer on the island of Ven.  He actually died in Prague.

On the 7th day of January in the present year, 1610, the first hour of the following night, as I was viewing the constellations of the heavens through a telescope, the planet Jupiter presented itself to my view, and  . . . I noticed that three little stars, small but very bright, were near the planet, and although I believed them to belong to the number of the fixed stars, yet they made me somewhat wonder, because they seemed to be arranged exactly in a straight line, parallel to the ecliptic, and to be brighter than the rest of the stars.

— Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642), The Sidereal Messenger.

The mathematical professor at Padua hath discovered four new planets rolling about the sphere of Jupiter, besides many other unknown fixed stars [and] that the moon is not spherical but endowed with many prominences [he shall either be] exceeding famous or exceeding ridiculous.

— Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639), English ambassador to Venice, letter to England, 1610, in Reliquiae Wottoniae, quoted by Jacob Bronowski in The Ascent of Man.

They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.

— Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745), 'A Voyage to Laputa' in Gulliver's Travels.

Alas . . . Galileo, your devoted friend and servant, has been for a month totally and incurably blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which by my remarkable observations and clear demonstrations I have enlarged a hundred, nay a thousand fold beyond the limits universally accepted by learned men of all previous ages, are now shrivelled up for me into such a narrow compass as is filled by my own bodily sensations.

— Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), writing in about 1638.

When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

— William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar, II, ii, 30-31

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,
Without all hope of day!

— John Milton, (1608-1674), Samson Agonistes, l. 80  (Milton visited Galileo after Galileo lost his sight.)

Caroline Herschel
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

— Adrienne Rich (1929 - ).

CAROLINE, sister of William, was trained by him as a singer in the Bath days and had considerable success in Handel's oratorios under her brother's conductorship.  (The method of training adopted was for her to sing the violin parts of concertos with a gag in her mouth.)  It was with great reluctance that she dropped music to be trained as an assistant astronomer, yet she made discoveries — eight minor planets, one of them named after her.

— Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 9th edition, 1955, page 470.

Of Human Bondage

— W. Somerset Maugham, novel title.

Of Herman Bondiage

— Subtitle to Duncan Bain's Herschel Bars and Other Sweet Astronomers, Saccharistella Press, 1985.

More in Seurat than in Ingres.

— P. D. Q. Bach (1729 - 1648), Quoted by Duncan Bain in Against Contrapuntalism, a manifesto, Breek-Anathema Press, 1990.

What a delightful thing this perspective is!

— Paolo Uccello (1397 - 1475)

By viewing Nature, Nature's handmaid Art,

Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow

— John Dryden (1631 - 1700)

Our sight is the most perfect and delightful of our senses.  It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments.

— Joseph Addison (1672 - 1719), The Spectator, 411.

If computer art has a future as an art form in its own right, it is to be found in the dynamic, the animated, the interactive.  It should look not towards Rembrandt, but towards Verdi's 'Aïda'.  Not just the classical 'Aïda', but an 'Aïda' with the audience singing along and scrambling onto the backs of the elephants on stage.  Chaos?  No.  Total theatre.

— Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, Descartes' Dream, Penguin, 1990, p. 53.

I told a seemingly sane man that I got my artistic education on the Bowery, and he said 'Oh, really?  So they have a school of fine arts there?'

— Stephen Crane (1870 - 1900) to James Huneker, quoted in Alfred Kazin, An American Procession, Secker and Warburg, 1985.

'There is a pleasure in painting which none but painters know.'  In writing, you have to contend with the world; in painting you have only to carry on a friendly strife with Nature.

— William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830), On the Pleasure of Painting.

TEKEL: Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

— Holy Bible, Daniel, 5:27.

OK, so a few things got in the way.

A curious case has been given by Prof. Möbius, of a pike, separated by a plate of glass from an adjoining aquarium stocked with fish, and who often dashed himself with such violence against the glass in trying to catch the other fishes, that he was sometimes completely stunned.  The pike went on thus for three months, but at last learned caution, and ceased to do so.  The plate of glass was then removed, but the pike would not attack these particular fishes, though he would devour others which were afterwards introduced; so strongly was the idea of a violent shock associated in his feeble mind with the attempt on his former neighbours.

— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, second edition, John Murray, 1885.

There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock . . .

— Holy Bible, Proverbs, 30:18-19

Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of bustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance.  Animals studied by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness.

— Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

The writer found that certain freshwater crustaceans, namely Californian species of Daphnia, copepods, and Gammarus when indifferent to light can be made intensely positively heliotropic by adding some acid to the fresh water, especially the weak acid CO2.  When carbonated water (or beer) to the extent of about 5 c.c. or 10 c.c. is slowly and carefully added to 50 c.c. of fresh water containing these Daphnia, the animals will become intensely positive and will collect in a dense cluster on the window side of the dish.  Stronger acids act in the same way but the animals are likely to die quickly. . . Alcohols act in the same way.  In the case of Gammarus the positive heliotropism lasts only a few seconds, while in Daphnia it lasts from 10 to 50 minutes and can be renewed by the further careful addition of some CO2.

— Jacques Loeb (1859 - 1924), Forced Movements, Tropisms, & Animal Conduct, Dover edition of 1973, pp. 113 - 114.

Every family has a skeleton in the cupboard.

— Proverb

If I were a Queensland giant
With great big smelly feet,
I'd stomp on a Queensland cane-toad
And make my feet smell sweet.

— Duncan Bain (pseud.) (1944 -  )  'Cane toed', from Tad to Telegraph: a history of the Poles, Anura Books, 1983.

Social chaos is hell for the family and for those who have destroyed the family as well.

— Bhagavad Gita, 1:43, in the translation of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.