Tasmania and 45 years

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Ships anchor – Narrinya

A very long time ago and seemingly a world ago, my favourite person and I had our honeymoon in Tasmania. A few months ago, we decided that as my favourite person hadn’t been back since, we would have a week in Hobart to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

We spent a few days in Melbourne on the way over as there are no direct flights from Adelaide to Hobart, and we had some family matters to attend to. I quite like Melbourne, but my favourite person isn’t so keen on the place. She finds it dreary and dark, however, she finds the shopping to her taste and the food good.

The former was a bonus, as when she opened her case in Melbourne she found she had left her more formal attire at home!

” Well played”, was the comment my daughter made.

It certainly opened up the opportunity for some new purchases in one of Australia’s best shopping locations. A dress from Scanlon and Theodore and another from Jac and Jack fixed the matter.

A bonus of one of the purchases was a complimentary pass to The LUME, a digital art experience around Van Gogh. It was magical. Set to music was a kaleidoscope of moving pictures telling the story of Van Gogh’s art. Just fabulous.

Van Gogh’s bedroom with a couple of additions, LUME

Melbourne’s food scene is also excellent and we had a couple of dinners. I’ll Barco was spectacular, and the Punch Lane Wine Bar was an opportunity to have great food and lovely wine.

Melbourne’s weather is famously changeable, as our experience once again confirmed. Fortunately, we had stopped for a drink on Southbank.

From Melbourne it was off to Hobart. Continue reading →

I’ll have another glass of Pinot Noir, please

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What is your favorite drink?

I have written more than once about my growing interest in wine. These days it’s somewhere between a passion and obsession.

As a young adult, I had friends who were wine lovers. One of my friends got his first job as a winemaker when visiting my home. My relationship with him has opened up many opportunities to sample some great wines as well as chat about wine more generally. Then through business living in South Australia, Australia’s largest wine producer, I had a number of clients in the wine industry. All of these contributed to an interest, but it really was my PhD that investigated the non-financial characteristics of family wine businesses that moved wine to the forefront.

Through my PhD, and before that my Honours project, I had the opportunity to visit a number of wineries, both in South Australia and Australia. I also took the opportunity to meet and discuss wine with families in Italy and the USA. Their stories were fascinating. Their connection to the land, a sense of place, a connection to their community, as well as an emotional connection, led to the title of my thesis – The story is in the bottle. The title was borrowed from an interview I conducted in my Honours project with the managing director of a multigenerational family business which sadly no longer exists.

My PhD gave me access to family stories as well as, the opportunity to go back stage at a number of Australia’s family wine businesses. Some of these family wine businesses are household names with generations of history, while others are early on their journey.

The result was a desire to learn more about wine itself.

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Renovating

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Write about your dream home.

View from back door

Just over 2 years ago sitting in a pub in Penola, in the Coonawarra wine region of South Australia, I mused with my favourite persona about sorting out the spiral staircase in our beach house.

Our spiral staircase has been the bane of our regular visits. All of us have fallen off the last step, with my mother needing stitches from her fall. My youngest daughter said all of her friends had stories about their falls; presumably after a couple of drinks. It has also been a safety hazard for our young grandchildren.

So we started planning.

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As time passes by our interest change – activities and hobbies I’ve outgrown or lost interest in

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Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?

– Jetpack prompt

As I reinvigorate my blog I’m experimenting with different approaches to posts. In my early stages I used regular prompts as an approach, so here I go.

Riding in Sicily

There are many activities and hobbies I’ve grown out of. No surprise there, I’m on the wrong side of 65.

The one that quickly came to mind was stamp collecting. As a primary school child and early teenager, I was an avid collector. I wasn’t the beneficiary of a parent or grand parent’s collection, so I started from scratch. I say that because I used to look on at envy at those who had old albums full of interesting stamps. Mine however was just ‘bog standard’. Aussie stamps collected from envelopes, swapped and bought over time. For a while my sister and I went to a local stamp club where we’d buy a few stamps, as my own swaps weren’t of much interest. I also built up a collection of First Day Covers. However, as I grew older I simply lost interest, and today I’m not sure I even know where my stamp collection is.

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I just want to enjoy their music – A reflection on Bob Dylan

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I recent times I have been reading a lot about AI and have been experimenting with it in various scenarios. I thought I would experiment with a blog post. I gave ChatGPT my draft of this post and asked for a suggested post. In finalising this post, I used a combination of both my original draft and that of the AI interpretation. 

I am very interested to see what readers think about the concept of AI as an aid to blogging. For me the jury is out. This post was very much an experiment. I used it here because this post is a departure from my normal subjects. 

Photo sourced from the official trailer, Searchlight Pictures.

Over the 10 years or so that I have had this blog I have adopted a strict policy of steering clear of three topics: politics, religion and s$x. Growing up, these were definitely taboo at the dinner table. It seems the times have changed with everyone from celebrities to everyday people more than willing to share their views on these topics. I’m not sure our society is the better for it, in fact, I’m sure we are not!

In this post I depart from my policy as I reflect on Bob Dylan, a cultural icon and his avoiding canvassing his political views other than through his music. The release of A Complete Unknown, a story about Bob Dylan’s early years, highlights this unwillingness, while at the same time being more than willing to engage in the public discourse.

This isn’t a movie review, although having seen it, I can recommend it to those who like Dylan.

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