Saturday morning saw me on the XPT train to Grafton to join the MyPOWER boys for my fourth leg of the journey with them, the first being on the south coast of NSW, then Albany to Perth in WA, the Atherton Tablelands in Qld, and now Grafton to Crescent Head. It is a ten hour train trip to Grafton so I brought plenty of reading material with me. One was an article I got off the internet written by one of my favourite columnists, the very acid Antonio Caballero from Colombia. This week he was saying what a great breath of fresh air it was to see Barack Obama elected in the United States. Not only, he wrote, was George Bush the worst president of the United States in living memory, he was the worst in its whole history. He tried to turn the clock back not just to before the American Revolution, but to before the French Revolution, to the time of the Sun King, Louis XIV who famously said, “The State is Mine”. The election of Obama, says Caballero, just proves how right Winston Churchill was when he said, “You can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
With that chuckle in my head, I got off the train at Grafton to be met by Peter Marr, about whom I had known for decades but had only met a few months before at a mutual friend’s 70th birthday bash. He is a solicitor in Grafton and he had sent me a finely crafted copperplate snail mail to say how we should get together sometime again. When I realized he lived in Grafton, the next leg of the MyPOWER journey provided a wonderful excuse, not only for me to catch up, but for the boys to meet some more interesting people who think along similar lines to them.
Peter and his wife, Linda live on a small acreage just out of Grafton city on a wonderful property where they grow bamboo. Yes, bamboo. Linda is an architect and has often been fascinated by the amazing qualities of this plant that out here many regard as a weed. They have planted all different species in patches on the property to see which one is best suited to the climate in Grafton, with the ultimate aim of using it for building houses. Needless to say this encounter was going to give Tom and Linda plenty of things to talk about in terms of sustainable architecture.
As the dusk was settling in over the green hills of Grafton, the familiar sight of three bikes and the Prius came slowly up the driveway, and three hot sweaty riders got off after coming up quite a steep hill to the property. They were just the same, trim, fit, happy and sweaty, and Anthony the same, but leave out the sweat.
We settled down in Peter and Linda’s house to some fine country hospitality, a swim in the pool, a roast dinner with fine wine and lots of good chat. It was dry but overcast, the perfect conditions for the trip to Coffs Harbour the next day.
Saying of the Day: “You can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.” – Winston Churchill.
Uncle Kieran