In a sad mood

I am in a strange mood today. Down in the dumps, as one of my old friends used to say. Maybe it is because it is eventually raining and the temperature dropped to the rather unpleasant levels. A quick change came almost overnight. I should welcome the change and I do, but for now it helps me to justify not the best mood I am in.

Coincidently this afternoon I caught an old interview of Kerry O’Brien with Clive James. So very depressing.  Clive James who in the past put me in a good mood, uplifted my spirits and made me laugh - today he brought my spirit so far down that I have problem to shake it off. He suffers two terminal illnesses and talks about it candidly. His tries to stay his own old upbeat self, I saw as a considerable effort. This saddened me a lot and the sadness lingers on.

So many books, wonderful.

                                     

I was always a reader and considered books the way to learn about life. Was I possibly misguided? In my first months in Australia I thought that it would be good to read something Australian to prepare me for what’s ahead.  Unreliable Memoirs were my choice of Australian education. I think it was a great choice, I really loved the book. I thought that if the natives have such sense of humour as Clive James, they are really OK and I will be fine in this country. This proved a correct assumption.

At the beginning I had great problems to understand what Australians were saying. The language seemed to be somewhat funny, with a lot of question marks implied and it was spoken sooo fast. I really got depressed listening to broadcasts of horse races. I could not understand a word! At that time I did not know that most of Australians did not understand that either, unless they knew names of the horses in a particular race. It was a puzzling time and I was learning to love the country.

Back to Unreliable Memoirs. Such a great book! So funny! I remember my 343 bus rides from Double Bay to IBM offices in Rosebery balancing with the book in hand, briefcase held between my feet, handbag on my shoulder and laughing out loud from time to time. I must have really read the book in the first two or three months since my arrival to the new country as it was only a very short time we were renting the flat in Double Bay before we moved to St Ives. Boy, there were the times!

This a new better version of 343 than the one i traveled in 1979

                                

Then Clive James was on television with his Japanese stories. My sense of humour was not all that well aligned with that and I lost interest.

Many years have passed between reading Unreliable Memoirs and finding Cultural Amnesia. I bought the book somewhere in Paddington few years ago, my Mosman suburb is not too good in this type of literature.  I was surprised that Clive James wrote so many essays about Polish people of culture, science and politics. I read the Polish parts, but I have lost the book in my life travels before I read it all. Now, that Clive James appeared on my radar again it is time to get another copy.

Thank you, Clive James, for paining my first literary pictures of Australia. Thank you also for showing me four Poles from a new perspective.