Well shipmates, hi di hi and ho di ho! This has turned out to be the year of Sorrow and about blooming time too. Many simply dinna get it. I myself am still awaiting the bloody English to say Sorry! for the Highland Clearances and the Irish Potato Famine. Didn’t Tony Bleah say sorry for something? 
  I am sorry for a few things and herewith say, I am sorry! For whatever I have written about slum flats and bungling picaroons in Parliament and all that. There are many who do need a kick up the bum for vile corruption and the egregious incompetence that has mutilated Sinny Harbour, but my Marxist faith maintains it is The System and not the greedy, conscienceless, crass operators. 
  Like all faiths it is sometimes hard to keep the faith. Anyway … I am sorry! 
  I recall years ago a bloke wrote that ’Arry Driftwood was orright if he stuck to facts – and I salute his memory – but question whether the farce of life and Common Practice warrants “sticking to facts”? 
  I watched the massive pueblo-like flats being erected like a Leggo … set and the almost immediate repairs undertaken and still extant; for there has been a cherry-picker over fiddling with faults in the structures for a month now. It doth make one wonder. That’s a fact. Tiz the same around town as I peddle my velocipede to and fro on funny busyness. 
  Wait one … while I paddle ashore. No I’m not walking upon water this week alter ego! 
  I have recently acquired a sweet little telly and DVD player which I financed from my funeral fund (let the State bury me. Or not.) I don’t watch much, as you know that if you don’t listen to the bastards, or watch ’em, then they canna twist your brain. 
  However, there is a bit on the ABC now and then if one is selective. (Oi, ABC1, this is management at its best: “Orright chaps, let’s change the Logo and waste several millions of dollars.” “Ho, yairs Claude, what a bully idea!” And so on.) 
  So I was watching a bit the other night – for the novelty and the colour – and here are the perps, the miscreants, the paid villains, the snake oil merchants, the picaroons of Parliament and the mercenaries of the Class War loudly and vehemently proclaiming: “I have done nothing wrong!” Gawd! It would make a cat laugh wooden it? I have noted that this proclamation is universal and it ain’t confined to the silly-named place of New South Wales. I have done nothing wrong? And it is true … according to the rules of their game. They know the rules of the game, boyo. Don’t you worry about that, as another infamous picaroon was wont to say. Plus ca change. I am sorry! 
  Bad and awful as our Representatives are in their professional mendacity, it ain’t all their fault as most of the shite with hospltals, and failed this and bungled that, is down to the minions, the true untouchables, anonymous and, like koalas, protected. 
  The android at the front desk, the one who has lost your file, the inflexible donk who can’t turn a blind eye to smooth the bumps in the roadway of Life. The deniers and the dumbells are all part of the mess. Don’t forget the deliberate snipe, snipe, snipe of The Daily Liar fostering the myth that a swing to the Right will fix things. I laugh, Ha, Ha! 
  Not to despair lads and lassies, tiz only a game and we are all players as Will Shakespeare pointed out to us a while ago. “I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG!” I canna help laughing shipmates. 
  Back to the real world. It doesn’t do your mental health good to stay too long amongst the loonies. May all their chooks turn into emus and kick the chookhouse down! 
  Aaah, the kettle is whistling and the tea is in the wee blue teapot. 
  Lovely stuff is tea. Tis sort of more, like, Spiritual I think than coffee. Coffee is actually muck, but I do like my coffee beans too. Up early as always, from the Pavlova-habit of a lifetime of drudgery. Started work at 14 in a factory … after a brief runaway and spell in correction. I was a man and got my own brekkie and did for myself and off to toil for the next 60 bloody years. Ho hum! Life is a blooming con ain’t it? 
  However, there is much beauty if you look. Venus ablaze – if the clouds permit – a few weeks back in a relationship with Jupiter but they had a tiff and Jupe has bolted leaving the loving to sneaky little Mercury. Greg has rowed off to work like a good wage-slave and the day’s routine falls upon wee uns. Salt o’ the Earth, the little Aussie worker, in skirts or pants, I’ll back em against any. 
  Oi, Oi, Oi, ’Arry! Yer tea, yer tea! (“You’d forget yer own ’ead if it weren’t screwed on!” Me Mum used to say.) No good cutting a lemon as there ain’t no juice in ’em. How can they sell such shite. I grew a sugar loaf cabbage in a pot aft and harvested it a fortnight ago. Jeezuz, it was succulent … from the REAL world!