Letter # 2

For today's joke

Dear All, Being saturated with all that war news from Iraq is almost like re-reading George Orwell's "1984", except that this one is for real. It's time to turn off the radio and the television and to turn the mind to other things! I have spent a few hours sitting on my little tractor to turn grass into lawn and we also drove the 20-odd kilometres to Shallow Crossing which is at the top of the Clyde River to dangle our feet in the crystal-clear mountain water. It was a perfect day and very far away from war! We visited friends at Cobargo who run a dairy farm of some 120 cows on 400 acres. We stayed for the weekend and while Padma helped inside the house, I gave Paul a hand with the rounding-up and the milking of the cows. Rounding up 120 cows twice a day, once at the crack of dawn and then again late in the afternoon, and then sterilising 480 teats with iodine and putting suction cups on them is not my preferred life style but I learned a lot in those two days and can now honestly say that I no longer believe that milk comes out of a bottle! Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN, a cautionary tale of Western involvement in Vietnam which was published in 1955 and proved to be prophetic, is one of my favourite books, and was made into a film in 1957. It's coming to the Batemans Bay cinema and we shall book tickets for one of the cheap showings on a Tuesday or Wednesday. With best wishes from the Riverbend Quartet! Peter & Padma & Malty & Rover Wednesday, 26 March 2003     PREVIOUS LETTER   NEXT LETTER