Patriot Realm

My wife and I are rapt in long distance train travel. It is the only way to see another country in comfort. You live in a luxurious hotel on wheels in the company of other like-minded souls and do trips to the hinterland of wherever the train decides to stop for a sightseeing tour. No airports, no changing hotels.

In 2008 a mate of mine and our wives embarked on a trip to India run by the same English company that did the Trans-Siberian; GW Travel. The tour was called Viceroy of India Darjeeling Mail. The real attraction for me was the Darjeeling Mail part, the most famous steam train journey in the world and an item on my bucket list. The names of places we visited are all the old fashioned ones. I can’t come to grips with the more enlightened names of places I learned about in school and have stuck with me ever since.

India may seem a strange place to go as a tourist. At school we learned that India was a place of masses of, disease, poverty and pestilence. The text books were wrong. The bad parts are worse than that and the good parts are never mentioned apart from the Taj Mahal monument at Agra.

When I was starting out in real estate sales, I learned a lot.

The first thing was being given the listing of the unsellable house. It is something that happens when you are new on the job: you are given a listing that no one else wants.

My unsellable house was a cracker. It had lime green shag pile carpet; a bright orange kitchen and covered in wallpaper with bold patterns of mission brown and orange. The toilets were red. Outside, there was a huge collection of garden gnomes.

It had been on the market for years and as soon as people saw the large collection of garden gnomes, they would not venture inside. The few that did waded through the shag pile green carpet into the kitchen, shook their heads and said " Move on. " 

Life has become complicated of late, hasn't it? Simple things have become difficult and that which once was taken as a given, has suddenly become rather tainted by political intrigue and manipulation. 

Nothing is straightforward anymore. What we say, what we cook, how we cook,  what we drive, what we think. All have been brought under scrutiny and are weighed on the scales of left or right; not on the scales of justice. It has become so political. 

All around the world, we are being told to do the right thing. And it is subjective what this infinitely elusive " right thing " is.

To me, life is about having a life worth living. 

The ‘friends to all, enemies to none’ strategy is living its last days as the US and China press the island nations to take sides.

Papua New Guinea is a gateway between continents. The island, having been cut in half, demarcates an artificial boundary between Asia and Oceania. In the past several centuries, the broader island has been carved upon between almost every colonial power going, having been ruled at various points by the Dutch Empire, the Spanish Empire, the German Empire, the Empire of Japan, and the British Empire. Even after gaining its formal independence in 1975 from Australia, these legacies continue to scar the island, with half of it still belonging to Indonesia, known as West Papua, which is now a source of unrest and insurgency.

Once upon a time, in a land not too dissimilar from our own, there lived a young woman named Dorothy. She resided in a small town where common sense prevailed and people relied on reason and logic to navigate their lives. But little did this young girl know that a great storm was brewing on the horizon, ready to sweep her away into a world where sanity was a scarce commodity.

One fateful day, a tornado of absurdity descended upon her quiet town, ripping apart the very fabric of reality. Caught in the whirlwind, she found herself and her trusted dog Toto transported to a place known as the Land of Lunacy. The sky was a shade of perpetual confusion, and the ground was paved with illogical arguments and senseless ideas.