Second Impression – Sound

    “People who have never had a broken heart will never understand dead roses, Tolstoy, airport lounges, Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, neat brandy, the moon and drizzle.” Wendy Harmer Upon that first, unforgettable hearing of ‘Adagio...

Swollen River

    The Mekong has swollen like a fat rolling python, writhing angrily in its muddy channel; creating the glistening illusion that it is about to burst over its banks and seethe through the city streets....

First Impressions – Sight

  Over twenty years ago, I was spending a pleasant Sunday afternoon at the National Gallery of Victoria, slowly meandering through an exhibition of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh. The exhibition also happened to feature...

The Cycle of the Vine

  The Northern Harvest Across Europe, the month of August signals the readying for the new wine grape harvest, which will commence sometime in the latter weeks of the sign of Leo and for some, continue...

Giaconda – Part Three – The Kinzbrunner Effect

    As a mechanical engineer, Rick Kinzbrunner was used to working with finite angles and calculating in minute degrees; then, sometime during the early 1970’s he decided the numbers were no longer stacking up; new,...

Giaconda – Part Two – Punchers, Monkeys & Lunatics

  Beechworth is a small Victorian town with a population of approximately 3,000 people. The township itself is picturesque and striking with its old settlement buildings made of local stone and granite, perched precariously on...

La Giaconda – Part One – The Fibonacci Sequence

    Leonardo Di Vinci, (1452 – 1519) is widely regarded as the quintessential renaissance man, a genius, a polymath, a master painter, sculpture, engineer, inventor and much, much more. He is considered to have possessed...

An Ode to Brunch

  Brunch noun a late morning meal eaten instead of breakfast and lunch. Origin late 19th century: blend of breakfast and lunch. The 1896 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary cites Punch magazine which wrote that the term was coined in Britain in 1895 to describe a...