You might be...

You might be a Celt if you consider *Classical Civilization* inferior to *Celtic Culture*.

Today's lecture [lol] is about druidism because I get tired of the neo lot running round in white sheets making druidism look like...hm; first thought is actually unprintable, like...like...like a bunch of people running round in white sheets. I understand strange enthusiasms. I understand reaching back in time for religious roots but even a cursory investigation of the facts should acquaint you with a simple elucidating fact: druids were NOT priests.

Yes, I know that's what everyone calls them. It's misleading. The Romans, who provide the only eyewitness accounts of druids, actually don't call them priests, which to the modern mind has Christian overtones of religious practise. They were in fact the intelligentsia of the Celtic world: philosophers, historians, lawyers, musicians, poets & doctors. It amongst that lot you also get the occasional shamanistic figure practising *strange arts*. The Celts themselves generally distinguish a druid's role as file [poet], brehon [lawyer], scelaige [keeper of myths & epics], liaige [doctor], sencha, [historian].

A little reading will tell you we know almost nothing about druids & druidism & that is certainly true up to a point. There are no unbiased descriptions by outsiders. The druids themselves left no written records. However, despite remaining texts becoming corrupted by Christianity quite a lot of their beliefs & practises can be culled from sources such as the Mabigionin, the remaining Irish sagas, the law lists of Ireland & Wales & Roman commentators such as Diodorus who lists druids as educators, astronomers/astrologers, doctors, historians, bards & doctors.

They wielded quite a lot of power. In the end the bards were a right royal pain in the tush asking for things like a king's crown & as it was churlish to refuse what was asked you can imagine they became actively disliked. Among the things that are generally accepted are that there were certain places, like Mona, where the druids were particularly active or had a school, or congregated around a sacred site. They were certainly responsible for feast days & keeping track of the calendar which combined lunar & solar cycles ~ their math being considerably better than mine!

One of the things that amuses me is that the men often grew beards in an effort to look older & wiser! lol. Some vanities are common throughout the ages. They also had a special tonsure from ear to ear; I'm assuming to make the forehead look higher & more noble & intelligent. The remaining hair was caught back in a que. When I look at the panel on the Gundestrup Cauldron with a man dunking initiates in a pot by their heels I can't help wondering if it's not the remains of some druidic rite whose significance has long since been lost. Of course it could simply be a depiction of the rebirth of the soul, something that made Celtic warriors fearless in battle & happy to accept payment of a debt in the next life. Yes, well.....

And because I like obscure & meaningless information I like the etymology of the word druid. It's one of those funny words that got borrowed by the Romans from the proto~Celtic stem druwid & fed back into English via the Latin druides, a word usually translated *oak* & the druids were certainly known for having a thing for oak groves but the wider meaning may be *to see true*.

I think it would be correct to say they were a political entity, maybe like the IRA or Sein Feinn because the druids were the only semi~religious body the Romans set out to utterly destroy. After Boudicca's uprising they once again set out for Mona & completed annihilated the community on Mona before cutting down the sacred oak groves & burning them. It effectively broke British morale.

One of the things in all things that has frustrated historians is a lack of archaeological evidence. Then they opened a grave at Staneway near Colchester & have enough material evidence to quibble over for some time. Have a look, The medical instruments look almost modern ~ or alternatively medicine hasn't progressed all that much down the centuries.

Given enough time I'd dig up the whole of England after Celtic artifacts. It's all downhill after that!

Between two Warriors.

But the person who was chiefly instrumental in rousing the natives and persuading them to fight the Romans, the person who was thought worthy to be their leader and who directed the conduct of the entire war, was Buduica, a Briton woman of the royal family and possessed of greater intelligence than often belongs to women....In stature she was very tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh; a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace; and she wore a tunic of divers colours over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch. Cassius Dio
Britain in AD 60 was a Roman outpost. As such it should have been a another boring extension of the Roman Empire, given how the Romans imprinted their culture on every people they subjugated. Unfortunately for the Romans the British were ruled, not by their Ard~Ris but by the Druids who were both priests, bards & lawyers. They also seem to have had an innate ability for terrorism.

Culturally the British could not have been more different to their Roman rulers. For one thing, perhaps the most distinguishing thing, the Britons recognized women as equals, able to acquire property, bear arms, initiate divorce & they were educated equally with males. Amongst the British nobility most had some education at a Druidic college.

The heart of Druidism was Ynys Mon ~ Mona/Anglesey. To reach the pinnacle of Druidic training took 20 years. I know the bardic training involved a phenomenal amount of verse & grammar, all learnt by heart, so I imagine training in other areas was also rigorous. Let's face it, legally the druids recognized 9 types of marriage with duties & penalties attached. Start multiplying that & you are looking at a very involved & complicated legal system that attached an *honour price* to most crimes ensuring a victim was compensated. While I know far less about the Celtic legal system than the bardic I know enough to know a lot of the English *common law* is more derivative of this system than of its Roman counterpart.

The Romans, who built in squares & straight lines never understood the Celts who thought in circles & curves. It is this difference that is at the heart of Boudicca's uprising. My opinion, of course.

Boudicca. Like so many other Celtic figures she is half mythical. Even her name, which means victory, was less likely to have been her given name than her name as an aspect of the war goddess. Druid trained, she may have served her clan as a priestess as well as a queen, the Celts generally not making clear distinctions that way.

Boudicca was married to a man known as Prasatagus who amassed considerable wealth & was a client king of Rome. They ruled a tribe called the Iceni in what is now Norfolk & Suffolk. The background is important for a true understanding of what took place after Prasatagus died. Prasatagus had accrued a debt to Rome & when he died he left half his kingdom to Rome & the other half to his 2 daughters in an effort to both appease Rome & take care of his daughters. Under Roman law women could not own property so the Romans moved in. Now while the Roman law enabled there was a far more altruistic reason behind the rush to overpower *poor defenceless* women. Anne Rice covers this very nicely in her discussion Death of a Druid Prince.

The Iceni were at the receiving end of the trail of gold that began in Ireland, travelled through Wales & the Wicklow hills east to the North Sea & into Europe. I did mention the Iceni were wealthy & the Romans dearly loved gold.

At this juncture the Romans behaved stupidly & whatever their faults they were rarely stupid rulers. In their greed & arrogance they heaped insult upon insult on the Celtic peoples. The Iceni had already suffered the confiscation of their weapons. The Celts had an unusual relationship with their weapons. They often named them for one thing. They attributed magical powers & human emotions to them. They valued them as important heirlooms to be passed down through the generations or offered in religious devotion. The stores of weaponry to be found at the bottom of lakes in the Celtic territories testifies to this.

After Prasatagus' death the Iceni became a subject people, & lost their independence. They were heavily taxed & then Bouddicas' daughters were ritually raped by legionaries & she herself was whipped. If you've seen The Passion you will realise this was both messy & painful. The Iceni rose up rallying other tribes to their cause & rampaged through Britain. They targeted Camulodunum [Colchester] & razed it to the ground. There were no survivors. Anyone unlucky enough to escape the initial onslaught was sacrificed to the gods. The Celts had several nasty & painfully slow ways of doing this to those they particularly disliked. When Boudicca made the call to arms she probably did so as Priestess & queen. There is a whole complicated Celtic relationship to do with the land & kingship & women as aspects of *Mother Earth* & already sacred.

The Iceni then turned south & burnt Londinium to the ground. The layer of ash is so thick & extensive archaeologists recognize it as Boudicca's revenge. And she is not, as some suggest, buried under platform 9 at Central Station. No idea how that one started.

At this point things get rather vague. The legions, which had headed towards Mona to deal with the druids & effectively returned to do that later, headed back to deal with Boudicca first. No~one agrees where this took place but they do agree the Romans had wisely burnt their food stores & the Britons were marching on empty stomachs. They also agree the battle took place on a hill, the Romans holding the high ground, & that Boudicca's army was hampered by its own wagons & chariots [the chariots may have had scythed wheels & would have needed room to manoeuvre], its women & children. The Romans claimed a huge number of Celts fell in the battle. Boudicca reportedly took poison & ended her own life to avoid the humiliation of being paraded through Rome as a captive & Rome's stranglehold on Britain was secure for the next 400 years.

It's ironic really. Having fought to hold this most far flung of its territories Rome eventually discarded it in a last ailing attempt to defend itself from the marauding barbarians that sensed Rome was overextended, unwieldy & vulnerable. Abandoned by Rome another Celtic warrior emerged to rally the scattered tribes under one banner against a different foreign invader. His name was Arthur.

Rabbiting on.

“Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.” Winnie~the~Pooh



The cat is good at doing nothing; Liddy not so much. Nothing is what we're doing ~ sort of.

The men in my life are watching the cricket tests, which I believe we're losing. It's been a while since that's happened. Liddy is actually going to work each day, where she stays for at least 8 hours. Ditz & I are taking turns on the computer & sleeping. That is because it is summer. The heat has pretty much killed off the garden & I don't want to replant until I will be around consistently to water & weed. In between doing nothing & sleeping I am bagging up all Ditz's outgrown clothing for the thrift shop & despairing over what's available in the shops to replace it. The way we're going she's going to be down to her singlet & boxers shortly.


This time every year 6 weeks always looks as long as it did when I was a kid, stretching into eternity, & every year it is over before I can blink & I haven't achieved anything much. Dearest insists I go slow at this time of the year; partly because he knows rushing about in the heat will make me ill & partly because he says I need to recharge my batteries before the Ditzy year kicks in again. So I pick away at the myriad of small jobs that always seem to be available to choose from until I become mightily bored. Housework does that to me. I mean seriously, the biggest excitement round here recently is Ditz's unexpected bedmate!


Yes, it's real. Yes, it was huge. Better than the frog she had last year but I'm starting to wonder why all the wildlife ends up in her room.



So I went to the library & got 2 books. One, sadly, is too boring for words. Utterly predictable. That was the fantasy one. Someone needs to get original in this genre. The other I picked up because I liked the cover, knew nothing about the content & hated the writing style. Lousy way to choose a book I know but hey, I'm still reading it. That would be Empress by Shan Sa. It is the story of the Empress Wu, China's first & only female emperor. How could I not read this? The writing style is growing on me as we are getting into the meat of the story but I do astonish me. I can't think why I enjoy novels full of political intrigue, plotting & people with nasty morals & a penchant for murder ~ all things that bore me. Oh, right. That would be because my life is boring right now.



Actually after the year we've had I'm just having trouble unwinding & staying focused & I'm waiting on a quote on all the new curriculum I ordered so I know if I need to panic yet or not. If my estimate is correct all's good! Even when I'm just doing theory Ditz's music is expensive. I ordered the Beautiful Feet music which has a time line [don't you just love time lines?], a dozen or so CDs [which Ditz will hate because it's all classical], & a book about the major classical composers. It's all information I think she needs to know & she thinks she doesn't but despite her best efforts I'm still in charge here. And this year I have managed not to confuse my science curriculum with my bible curriculum & once we get onto the Romans I expect Ditz will be enchanted. The Roman Empire according to mummy is nothing like the textbooks tell it, mostly because I do not like the Romans. My bias slants exactly the other way ~ which is only to be expected given I do know the story of Boudicca [which I really should post about] & I have a thing for the Celts.



O.K, that's it. I am going to go & practise doing nothing some more.

taigh dubh to taigh geal

...the whole country will become so utterly desolated and depopulated that the crow of cock shall not be heard north of Druim-Uachdair; the people will emigrate to islands now unknown, but which shall yet be discovered in the boundless oceans after which deer and other wild animals in the huge wilderness shall be exterminated and browned by horrid black rains. The people will then return and take undisturbed possession of the lands of their ancestors... the seer of Brahan

This is for sale. Half the walls seem to be down but the owner says not to worry; there is plenty of building stone available amongst what fell. Uh~huh. It is a *Black House*, Taigh Dubh. They seem to be popular as holiday cottages now. The mind boggles. For starters this is closer to the Ar tic circle than I care to get, especially in winter. For seconds, do you know how these things were built? They were usually built against the side of a hill, using the hillside as support with double dry stone walls packed with dirt. I imagine that would constantly dribble through the cracks in the dry stone. If you were lucky the floor was flagged. Mostly what you got was plain old dirt. You got to share with the animals too. They had the part on the other side of the partition. There was no chimney so the smoke curled all through the house until [hopefully] it found its way through the hole in the roof. The peat smoke contributed to the *black* description. The other part of black refers to the simple fact that many had no windows so were incredibly dark, winter & summer, in full daylight or moonless night.

Along with many others I enjoyed Mel Gibson's Braveheart ~ though every time I see that warpaint I begin a predictable rant: There is no evidence the Picts ever painted themselves like that, let alone the Scotti, & even if they did Gibson was waaaay out of period, but hey, it looks terrific. My kids think I'm a little weird. What eats at me in Braveheart is knowing the rest of the story: that eventually the English got so fed up with the Scots they banned the wearing of the tartan; they banned the playing of the bagpipes; they banned the speaking of the Gaelic, to say nothing of more obvious bans like the forfeit on bearing arms! They broke the honour contract between the Clan Chief & his people until, predictably, profit in the form of sheep, became far more important than the people themselves resulting in the clearances of the 1700's. If you live in one of the preferred countries [America, Canada, New Zealand. Australia] & bear a Scottish clan name the chances are you owe your family's migration to the clearances. I actually don't. My grandfather left Scotland of his own free will & had nothing good to say of any of it apart from her whisky!I don't drink whisky so I can't comment.

Lilian Beckwith made good use of her time in the Scottish Highlands by writing a series of hilarious books about her experiences & in recent times, like so much else, there has been a return in Scotland to the grass roots & people are once again taking up crofting which has always been a little fishing, a little livestock, a few crops. Mostly they seem to be English incomers which is ironic really given William Longshanks wanted his English soldiers to breed the Scots out.

It seems the Scots have had the final word. Many of the old Black Houses are being renovated, painted white [taigh geal] & rented out as summer cottages but as the Brahan Seer foresaw many years ago, & others with him, Scotland is reverting to the Scots & from the 4 corners of the earth Scots are returning to their homeland. Somehow I don't think they'll be wanting the old taigh dubh. They did that the first time round.

On being a history geek.

...after all, archeology is fun. Hell, I don't break the soil periodically to 'reaffirm my status'. I do it because archeology is still the most fun you can have with your pants on.
SourceKent V. Flannery. 1982. The golden Marshalltown. American Anthropologist 84:265-278.zSB(3,3)

image c- :http://www.thefab.net/topics/culture_history/hg06_german-stonehenge_02.htm

Archaeology is fun. Archaeology is one of the reasons we parted company with BSDE [Brisbane School of Distance Education] & began homeschooling choosing our own curriculum. The straw that broke the camel's back was the Nebra Sky Disc. It got worse after this but this was a pivotal moment.

Unless you are a complete history geek [which I am] you have probably never even heard of this but the Nebra Sky Disc is the most fascinating discovery of recent times & has forced Academia to re¬evaluate the way they think about Bronze Age man; more specifically European Bronze Age man.

I am biased. I have very little interest in Ancient Egypt or the Babylonians. The Romans are terrible, the Greeks immoral. What I like are the Goths & the Vandals, the Huns & the Celts ~ that marauding horde the *civilized* Romans referred to as Barbarians. The thinking stuck. These ancient peoples were somehow seen as less civilized, less intelligent, less able than their Mediterranean & Middle Eastern counterparts. I've seen Stonehenge so I sorta found that a little hard to believe. The Nebra Sky Disc proves it.

The 7'' wide disc could be as much as 3,600 years old & thus is the oldest visual representation of the cosmos in existence. It was found near Goseck in the Black Forest by grave robbers & the history of its theft & recovery is an interesting detective story all on its own.

From the hill near Goseck it is possible to see the sun behind the Bocken [the highest peak of the Harz Range] at every equinox. Thus the disc was from the first considered some sort of calendar.

Now I was watching this on one of the archaeological shows I like & doing my oooh & aaah thing when poor old Ditz, who was watching by default & not terribly interested [being only 8 or 9 at the time], piped up with, 'It works just like Stonehenge doesn't it?' I thought then & think now that was a very acute & correct observation from a little girl. We did our own study on the disc & sent it in with her regular work where it received a very frosty reception ~ mainly I suspect because her teacher had never heard of the thing & had no idea what Ditz was rabbiting on about, let alone whether or not she was correct.

It was at this point I became disenchanted with BSDE. Seriously, this is a major historical discovery & a school didn't want to know about it! What's more, following up on the continuing investigation into this artifact, Ditz has been proved even more correct than she could possibly have been at the time because the astronomer, Hansen, consulted the 6th/7th century Babylonian Mul~Apin in an effort to throw more light on the disc. The Mul~Apin rule says a 13th month should be added to the year when the moon & the Pleiades look exactly as represented on the disc ~ which would occur every 2 ~ 3 years. The disc in effect co~ordinates the solar & lunar calendars. So hello. The Bronze Age Europeans had a much better grasp on maths, astronomy & time than was believed. They may also have had this knowledge before the Babylonians did.

I think that's pretty cool. So did Ditz. She may have reached the eye rolling stage of adolescent development but she can still tell you something about this disc [with appropriate eye~rolls] along with several fascinating tid~bits about Michelangelo. Did you know he began his career as an art faker? The materials he used to fake his sculptures included yogurt & human waste. It's not the sort of information Ditz is likely to ever forget. Why don't they teach this fascinating stuff in school?

Penny for your thoughts.

"Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within." — Dorothy L. Sayers

My brother, Mark, once confessed he never knew how to fly a plane unless he was physically sitting in the plane with the controls in front of him. Given how much flying he did that is something of a scary thought. He couldn't visualise people's faces either. Liddy is rather the same. She has had to explain to me, as I complained about her driving, that in fact she *becomes the car* when she drives. This seems to be the pattern with kinesthetic learners.

I, on the other hand, am extremely visual. I have no trouble seeing something that isn't there but it is impossible for me to use my body as an extension of what I'm thinking. My body is the contraption I keep my brains in. I lug it round because that's the way things work in this world but I would ditch it if I could.

So spacing out round my mother's dinner table I missed the beginning of the conversation wherein the Duchess was explaining she had one thought every half hour or so & it was never a very interesting thought. I don't think that can be true, but hey, I don't make a habit of paddling round in other people's head spaces. I did comment she must have a very boring inner life. I have a whole population living inside my head. Indeed I had terrible trouble on being unexpectedly pulled away from the book I was writing one day & traipsing to the mainland. Everywhere I looked Celts in their brechan & plaids were materializing through the modern people in the shopping centre. It was rather disconcerting given the size of the claidheamh mors they were carrying.

While my girls were still busily laughing but not prepared to share what terrible thoughts go on inside their grey matter the Duke offered that he only had two people inside his head but as they were always arguing he never listened to them. Oh~kaaay.

My mother was beside herself at this point wondering, I'm sure, what monsters she had spawned. So how about you? What strange things go on in your head where no~one can see?

Thank you to my family for being good sports about this one. :)

A Little Piccoult.

Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject. Dorothy L. Sayers

One of the things my mother & I have in common is a penchant for detective novels. It is an oddity. Generally she prefers fairly realistic reading while I am a long time fantasy reader & never the twain shall meet. Even when we agree our tastes often differ but we do agree on Jodi Piccoult. She is just a very, very good writer.

My degree is in English lit., [not history :)] & over the years I have become a very jaded reader. There is just an awful lot of really terrible reading matter out there & most of it is modern. Some writers should never have been given pen & ink to dabble in because they have no true idea of how to use their native language. Unfortunately the worst offenders often write the thickest books! What astounds me is that these terrible epistles sell!

My children think I am a terrible reader. I begin at the end, check out the middle & only then read from the beginning, though not necessarily in chronological order. I need to know before I begin if a book is going to be worth the time & effort I put into reading it. I have no time for suspense at all. Suspense is quite beside the point. Are the characters interesting & believable? Is the language handled well? Is there grace to the literary style? Does the author evoke strong images of time & place in my mind? If they don't do these things I will put a book aside & never touch it again.

And I love detective fiction! Before you all roll your eyes I need to clarify that I agree with Dorothy L. Sayers that the how is far more fascinating than the who. Read enough of this sort of stuff & picking the who becomes fairly predictable. The how then becomes extremely important & few people do it well, let alone really well.

I first read Piccoult's Plain Truth years ago & enjoyed it so much I scavenged the library shelves for every title they held. When that well ran dry I sent off inter~library loan requests but I have never bought one of her books. In my stocking from mum this year I found The Tenth Circle. I was delighted. When the rain set in I began to read. [Yes, I read the end first; I knew where it was going & could concentrate on how it was going to get there.] I read late into the night. I read in bed early in the morning. I finished the whole thing in a little over 24 hours. Piccoult is compulsive reading but all the time something was niggling at me as it has with every book I've read of hers since that first one so long ago.

The underlying theme in The Tenth Circle is the tenth circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno where hell has frozen over & the ability to act is taken away. I finally recognized what it is in these books, that despite being excellent reads, have always left a faint trace of unpleasantness & depression behind them. Piccoult's is a completely secular, humanistic world. To misquote Sayers again, detective fiction is the purest form of fiction ~ good against evil where good always triumphs. This distinction is never clear in Piccoult's books & frankly I find her characters pretty unpleasant people but at least I now know why. Piccoult has shown me a world without God & it is not a very nice place.

Will that stop me reading her books? Not on your nellie! There are too few well written books around to give up on an author because you don't like their world view.

I have been trying to get up my courage to attempt Nineteen Minutes but I find the subject matter so distressing I'm not sure I can manage it. I don't think anyone wants to hear my views on America's gun laws so I won't rant but I can't imagine sending a child to school one morning & having them come home in a body bag. No need to rant at me. I don't come from a gun culture & I just don't understand. The trouble is I know if I start this book I will have to read to the very end. Piccoult is like that.

Meet the Duchess & the Duke.

“The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers!” Lewis Carroll.

My sis in law keeps a blog over at Duchess & the Duke & because I am a dork & can't tell one car from another [big blue car/little red car, you know], let alone one bike from another, I assumed that the duke in question was her son & my nephew. I was wrong. Apparently there are bikes called ducaties [which I don't think I can spell either] & nicknamed *dukes*. In my world the Duchess remains herself but there are no bikes so the duke is my nephew who has grown into a tall gangly young man who sometimes looks quite frighteningly like his father.

The Duchess lives in an even smaller community than I do, out west in a different state where the land is flat & the skies are big. It is a difficult trip to fit into my time deprived schedule so we invariably catch up when we do at my mother's & they are short catch~ups in order to try & minimise the amount of havoc we wreck in my mother's quiet & ordered life.

The Duchess is an incredibly strong woman. When my brother died she had half Sydney arrive & camp out in her backyard. I know the locals brought more food than we could possibly eat but the Duchess still had to feed & accommodate us all, make the arrangements, talk to people & she did an amazing job. If it had been me I'd have been out there with a shot gun picking them off as they arrived [joke!]

Liddy, who got to spend a week with Mark & the Duchess the year before Mark died got to know the Duchess quite well & although my kids still refer to her as *scary Aunt Duchess*, it is now an ingrained family joke [sorry Duchess] because they are over the scary part. Visit her blog sometime. She is an amazing photographer & has some wonderful pics up that she's taken herself. She did a calendar for mum of her own shots for Christmas & a small book of photographs of Mark ~ a very talented woman! Her blog has never crashed. She is far more techno savvy than I am. She knows more about cars & bikes than I would ever want to know & keeps quarter horses for fun.

The Duke did quite well. He is an only child & although he has been at boarding school for some time he still gets a bemused look on his face on occasions as we invariably operate in *large, noisy household* mode. Besides I brought girls with me & left my boys behind [they were working] though Liddy is pretty good. She enjoys most of the same activities as most boys. Ditz is another story but then she was enchanted with the wii & has hopes of wheedling her brother's off them...which is why I have all this junk in my house no~one admits to owning.

And talking of the boys: Dino was here when we arrived home, strapped & bandaged & looking very sorry for himself. He dislocated his shoulder yet again hopping into his boat. Ouch. I guess that means he'll be cluttering up my couch this week. The cat is pleased to have us home too. Poor Dearest isn't game to go out in the car while we are gone as he gets these sulky cat looks when he goes out & then returns without us.

“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach” -Henry Beston We got one day, one, when being on the beach wasn't utter madness though Liddy & the Duchess swam in the mill pond in the rain the next day too. It had been terribly hot all day & the walk to the beach was exhausting but the beach itself was wonderful. The cirrus clouds meant there was wind high up & wind high up meant the guys on their funny hang glider thingies were out.I actually have no idea what these are really called [Ditz says *kite surfing* but who knows] but they look like huge brightly coloured kites with a human being dangling & surfing on the end of them. As usual the space between the flags was pretty small. The red & yellow flags are for body surfers; the blue to the yellow is for any kind of board.

Ditz had no intention of being constantly dumped though the surf was kinder than usual. She's not too big yet to enjoy playing in the sand.

Out beyond the breakers is the shark net. Wishful thinking in my opinion but I've seen sharks attack for real & I never ever want to share space with one. Mum's beaches are part of a huge tourist attraction & every year tourists drown on one or other of the many beaches. The surf boats are kept primed & ready so long as the beaches are patrolled but our lifeguards are all volunteers & pack up for home about 4.00pm. I guess they've had enough by then. It was terribly hot & the wind was picking up sending sand skittering all along the beach. Liddy & the Duke body surfed until the very last moment before we hiked the kilometre back to the house.It's good walking; flat & paved with bush on both sides of the road & the Duchess was walking every day until the rain set in with our arrival. It always happens & a houseful of kinesthetic kids who like to twiddle & fiddle is no fun when they start getting bored. We were going to do the headland walk at Noosa & had packed a lovely picnic lunch but half way through lunch we were bolting our food to try & beat the rain. The weather deteriorated from that point on. We got downpours. We got mizzling. We got showers. We did not get dry. The Duke got out his wii & the kids disappeared upstairs.

We left after lunch on Saturday expecting to have a pretty quick trip home but there had been an accident & for the first hour & a half the traffic crawled at under 20KPH. Liddy was not happy. She likes to get a bit of speed up on the open highway. Worse things happen in war & that's extra time towards her driving hours. We will head back up to mum's at the end of the month for our annual visit ~ if mum will have us back! lol. I can't think when was the last time she had so many teenagers at one time in her house.

...& a Happy New Year...

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.....Bill Vaughan

The new year arrived while we weren't looking. Ditz, Liddy & I managed to abandon the island in good time on New Year's Eve & had good travelling up the coast. Liddy's driving has certainly improved! When I think how she used to aim for anything else that moved on the road I am plain astonished at how well she does now ~ & that despite her concerted efforts she never managed to hit anything! We need to work on her not getting agitated every time she makes a mistake with her directions & be a bit more laid back about taking *the scenic route*!

Poor ma, who lives quietly with her cat, suddenly found her house invaded by the hordes, who are used to lots of people & lots of noise cluttering up the kitchen, busily trying to catch up with the cousin they see once every year or so. We did all eventually calm down for ma's dinner which was festive in honour of our arrival with crackers & lots of pickings. Liddy & the Duke share the family failing of being chronic fiddlers & we had to constantly remove cutlery & other dangerous objects from their twiddling fingers but the family chat went quite late & only ended when I finally remembered to ring Dearest to say we had arrived safely & found him in need of computer help. Trying to visualize my computer in my mind's eye & issue intelligible instructions down the phone was time consuming but though we were all in bed well before midnight the revellers across the canal ensured no~one slept well. It wasn't the noise, which was to be expected, but the bad language & escalating argument that had us cringing under our bed covers. When there was still no activity from over the water by breakfast the next morning I mentioned it was a pity Ditz had left her flute at home or she could have serenaded them from our jetty. Yes, I know. It was a very wicked thought but I did enjoy it!

It is as hot up here as it is at home so yesterday the kids & I played cards all morning & ma put the air con on low to take the edge of the heat. It's bad if ma puts on the air con. A whole day of inactivity was going to make Liddy & the Duke impossible to live with so mid afternoon we walked to the beach so the kids could swim. It's only a kilometer but in the heat I'd have rather driven. I can swim but I don't. I have issues with what lives in the water round here & both Liddy & the Duke got stung by bluebottles. Despite the shark nets I'm not convinced they'd keep any determined shark out & the surf tended to be short dumpers anyway. There was a bit of drag to the south but no rip so we left the kids in the water as the lifeguards packed up. Ditz tried the water briefly, decided she didn't like it & promptly clambered out again & spent her time happily trying her hand at a sand sculpture. Sorry people. No piccies until I can access my own computer again.

Wishing you all a very HAPPY NEW YEAR from the Sunshine Coast.