I used to love Christmas as a child. I loved the excitement of it all, the anticipation, the fulfillment of wishes. It was the one day of the year I felt loved and wanted and happy. Santa made sure of that, even if my mother couldn’t. Dear, kind, surrogate parent Santa. Kindness on this one day almost lasted me the year. Almost. My childhood Christmas memories are somewhat fragmented, though, like a slide show that keeps jumping slides. My memories, while lucid, don’t flow. I can only remember bits of Christmases, a jigsaw puzzle where most of the pieces of
Continue reading...Last week, I took a day trip up into the Adelaide Hills for work. I was there observing a training session being run by one of my colleagues. I left home early, hitting the road by 7.30ish. It was brisk; not exactly cold for a winter’s morning, but certainly not warm. As I drove up the freeway, the sun peeked bright and gold over eucalyptus-covered hills, and fog draped its wispy fingers low over scrub and housing estates. I followed the road through the tiny towns of Littlehampton and Nairne, and – managing to get only slightly lost along the
Continue reading...This post was first published on 24 July 2012. Seeing as we’ve just celebrated (?) international Single Awareness Day (iSAD – aka Valentine’s Day), I figured it’s a good time to republish this post. Oh, and I recently updated my relationship status to “runner”. Nostalgia is a wonderful gift. It causes us to view experiences through rose-colored glasses. Things seem to be always better in the past, way back when. Time fades the bad and somehow polishes it into a softer, more conducive and amenable version of the truth. Recently, I’ve been feeling quite nostalgic about the 80s (who am
Continue reading...I caught up with an old school chum the other day. He was someone I hadn’t seen for over 30 years and he contacted me via Facebook. While he has had his fair share of trials and tribulations, as we all have to greater or lesser degree, it occurred to me what a huge market nostalgia is. Facebook works because we are curious about people from our past, whether they be old school chums, past work colleagues, or ex-partners. We want to see what happened to the people who were in our lives. Have they fared better or worse than
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