And then, not long after I finished posting about my visit to the airport, I was back in the car and I heard that there has been an alleged threat to explode bombs which have been carried onto planes in hand luggage. It is serious, and people in airports are not worried about which magazines they will buy.
Of course, the post is rendered pathetic. And I am thinking I’m glad I live in Adelaide in the most feeble and self-congratulatory way, and I almost let myself think I should stop listening to the news, and it is taking all my effort to remember that we must condemn terror, not our human rights.
I don’t think the post is rendered pathetic at all. I think it affirms the things we value most in life. Everything you said is still true.
Two days after 9/11, I flew to Sydney for a tryst. I was more focused on the Bloke than I was on post-9/11 fears, even after Security took away my nail file. And I still think I was right.
My grandparents lived near Keswick, so it was the lonesome, romantic train noises that we could hear. I won’t be able to hear Paul Simon singing Train in the Distance or Jane Siberry singing Something About Trains till the day I die without thinking of the patchwork quilt in my grandmother’s sleepout.
Hear, hear. The post is not rendered pathetic in the least. In fact if you’d posted it after this latest revelation instead of before it would be even more valuable as a counterbalance to the sort of nebulous globalised postmodern paranoia which accrues around air travel these days and which is exactly what attracts terrorists to planes. And anyway I really liked it, and the photos are great.
I think youse are right.
I guess it’s that thing we were talking about over at Sarsaparilla when Laura posted about the Helen Garner session.
And it’s just that constant thing that I’m thinking about: some of us live safe and simple lives and some of us do not. In all sorts of ways.
And of course you can be living a safe, simple life one day, but not the next. And sometimes people look to have safe, simple lives but they do not.